Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (8 page)

When I look back at my reasons for becoming a monk, I can’t pick out the exact moment when I started to feel unhappy, but there was a series of events that undoubtedly ‘tipped me over the edge’. By my late teens my mum had remarried and, along with a step-dad, my sister and I gained a step-sister and step-brother. Not long after, our step-sister, Joanne, was killed while out riding her bike, run over by a man in a van who was unable to stay awake at the wheel. The impact it had on the family is indescribable and yet I didn’t really stop for long enough to take it in. Unable and unwilling to look at the amount of sadness around me, I just kept going. In fact, I even went away physically, as though that might somehow remove me from the feeling. Whilst the feeling didn’t go away as such, it did at least allow me to live in ignorance for a little longer.

Then, a few months later I heard that an ex-girlfriend of mine had died while having heart surgery. I remember receiving the news and almost brushing it off as if it didn’t matter. I thought that part of growing into a man was being able to deal with things in a detached kind of way. Unable to be with the feeling, I did the only thing I knew how and rammed it down inside.

They say these things come in threes, and sure enough soon afterwards number three arrived. I went to a party with a group of friends on Christmas Eve. After midnight we left in varying states of inebriation. It was a happy time, and everyone stood around hugging goodbye and wishing each other a merry Christmas. As I wandered off with a couple of friends I heard the sound of a car coming over the top of the hill. I remember looking and wondering why it didn’t have its lights on. The car got faster and faster, speeding down the hill. Halfway down the man behind the wheel, who was later discovered to be more than four times over the limit, lost control of the car. Narrowly missing the three of us, the car veered on to the pavement and ploughed straight into the middle of the group of friends. It was a scene of utter devastation. The whole thing seemed to slow down to a frame-by-frame series of events, as if a camera were taking one shot after the next. In one shot there was the point of impact, the bodies of friends flung into the air like rag dolls. In another shot a body, lying slumped against the wall. Several people died that night and many more were seriously injured. Never in my life have I felt more helpless.

Whether it was through sheer grit and will-power, or the fear of what might happen if I lifted the lid of the pressure cooker, I managed to keep down the feelings that came after these events for quite some time. But after a year or so they started to come out in other ways, colouring the world around me. When it comes to emotions it’s the case that whatever goes down, must come up. It might come to the surface as the emotion itself, or it might start to affect our behaviour in some way. Sometimes it can even affect our physical health. Stress-related health symptoms are increasingly common and widely acknowledged to be a result of our inability to deal with challenging feelings presented by a stressful situation or environment.

By the time I got to the monastery these emotions were most definitely coming to the surface. Sometimes the feeling would be more obvious and the thoughts accompanying the feeling made it very clear what it was about, but more often it was just a feeling that arose. When I started to become aware of this sadness I felt a little hard done by. This wasn’t what I’d signed up for. I’d signed up for peace and tranquillity in the mountains. For quite some time I continued to ‘do battle’ with these feelings, trying to ignore or resist them. The irony that I was doing this at the same time as trying to let go of ignorance and resistance escaped me altogether. Not being able to control the feeling I became frustrated, thinking it must be a lack of progress in my meditation. I started to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for meditation. I also became increasingly anxious whenever I sat down to meditate.

One day I decided I’d had enough and went to see the teacher. I explained what had been going on in my practice and he listened very patiently. Now I fully expected him to give me some secret technique developed especially to deal with difficult emotions, but instead he asked me a question.

‘Do you like it when someone makes you laugh?’ he asked. ‘Of course,’ I replied smiling. ‘What about when someone makes you cry? Do you like that?’ ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘OK,’ he continued, ‘so let’s say that I could show you how to never experience sadness again, would you like that?’ ‘Of course,’ I nodded eagerly. ‘The only condition is that you would also lose the ability to laugh as well,’ he said, suddenly looking very serious. He seemed to read my thoughts. ‘They are a package,’ he said, ‘you can’t have one without the other. They are like two sides of the same coin.’ I thought about it. ‘Stop thinking about it,’ he said, now laughing. ‘It’s impossible, I couldn’t show you how to do it even if you wanted me to.’

‘So what am I supposed to do?’ I asked, ‘if I can’t get rid of this feeling of being sad all the time, how am I ever going to be happy?’ His demeanour became more serious. ‘You’re looking for the wrong kind of happiness,’ he said. ‘True happiness doesn’t distinguish between the kind of happiness you get from having fun and the sadness you feel when something goes wrong. Meditation is not about finding this kind of happiness. If you want to find this kind of happiness then go to a party. The kind of happiness that I’m talking about is the ability to feel comfortable no matter
what
emotion arises.’ ‘But how can I feel comfortable with feeling unhappy?’ I shot back.

‘Try looking at it this way,’ he went on, ‘these feelings are part of being human. Now maybe you know some people who seem a bit happier than you, and other people who are a bit more unhappy than you.’ I nodded. ‘So sometimes we’re predisposed to feel a certain way,’ he continued, ‘some people a bit happier and some people a bit unhappier. But it’s what’s underneath that matters. Because neither person can control their feelings. The happy person cannot “keep hold” of his or her happiness and the unhappy person cannot “push away” his or her unhappiness.’ While this wasn’t the concise magic answer I’d gone to the teacher hoping for, it at least made sense.

He continued. ‘Tell me what emotion is causing you most trouble right now?’ ‘Mostly it’s feeling sad,’ I replied, ‘but that makes me feel worried about my meditation, and then I get angry because I can’t stop feeling sad or worried.’ ‘OK, forget about the worry and the anger for a moment,’ he said, ‘we can deal with those later. Besides, these are just your reactions to the sadness. Let’s look at the original emotion, sadness. How does it make you feel?’ I thought the answer was fairly obvious. ‘It makes me feel sad.’ ‘No,’ he shot back, ‘this is your
idea
of how it makes you feel, how you
think
it makes you feel, rather than how it
actually
feels.’

I dug my heels in a little further. ‘No, it
actually
feels sad,’ I said. ‘OK,’ he replied, ‘so where is it?’ ‘Where’s what?’ I asked, now a little confused. ‘Where’s the sadness?’ he replied. ‘Is it in your mind or is it in your body?’ ‘It’s everywhere,’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’ he persisted. ‘Have you looked to try and find this feeling, to try and find where it lives?’ I’d been so caught up thinking about it that the idea of studying it had never occurred to me. I shook my head a little sheepishly. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘so this is the first job. Go and find this feeling of sadness for me and then we can talk about it some more.’ The meeting was clearly over.

Over the next few weeks I spent a lot of time trying to find this feeling of sadness. Although it seemed to colour the thoughts in my mind, I couldn’t say that the sadness was the thoughts themselves. Besides, the thoughts were so intangible, I couldn’t even really get a sense of them living anywhere permanently anyway. It did seem to be the case that when I thought about certain things it seemed to intensify the feeling of sadness, but that’s not what he’d asked me to find. So I started to examine the body during my meditation (mentally that is), scanning up and down through the body and trying to find this thing called sadness. It was illusive, that’s for sure. But there was definitely a certain quality about the physical sensations that gave me enough confidence to go back and say that the emotion of sadness lived in the body.

‘So,’ my teacher said chuckling, as he invited me into his office. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ ‘Well, yes and no,’ I replied. ‘I couldn’t find sadness in my mind, in the thoughts, although the sadness did seem to colour and influence my thinking.’ He nodded. ‘But I felt that there were certain places in the body where I could feel it more strongly, where it felt like something a little more tangible.’ Again, he nodded. ‘The problem,’ I continued, ‘was that every time I thought I’d found it, it seemed to shift to a different part of the body.’ He smiled and nodded in agreement. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to study something when it keeps changing like that. Where did you decide this sadness was?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows. ‘I guess I felt it mostly here,’ I said, pointing to my chest. ‘Anywhere else?’ he asked. ‘Well, maybe here a bit too,’ I said, this time pointing to the area around my diaphragm. ‘What about your ears?’ he asked laughing, ‘And what about your toes? Did you find any sadness there?’ He was clearly having some fun, but he was right, I’d not found any sadness in my ears or my toes. In fact, I think I may have even neglected to look there. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘you say this sadness lives around here,’ he said, gesturing to my chest, ‘but where
exactly
? You need to be more specific. And if it
does
live there, what size is it, what shape is it? Study it some more and then we can talk about it.’

Once again I went away and tried to pin down the sadness. One thing that I’d noticed during this time of watching the feeling was that the intensity of it seemed to have decreased. I wasn’t sure if this was coincidental or not, but there was a definite change. Anyway, I went back to looking for sadness as instructed. It was tricky, because it didn’t really seem to have any obvious shape or size. Sometimes it felt quite spacious, whereas at other times it felt more constricted. Sometimes it seemed to have quite a heavy quality about it and at other times it seemed to feel a bit lighter. Even when I thought I’d located a very clear and definite feeling, it was very hard to locate a central point. And as soon as I found a central point and focused on that, I realised that there must be a central point to that too. It felt endless. The one thing I couldn’t ignore was that the intensity of emotion was continuing to diminish. There was now no question in my mind that by replacing the thoughts with simple awareness, something had happened, something had changed. I wondered if it was just a trick, if all along he’d known that I wasn’t going to find anything. I intended to ask him next time we met.

I’m not sure if I looked different, but he seemed to recognise I was feeling less sad as soon as I opened the door. I explained what had happened as he listened patiently. When I suggested that it might have been a trick to get me to stop thinking about it all the time he laughed loudly and rocked back and forwards on his cushion. ‘Very funny trick,’ he said. ‘No, it was no trick. When you came here I said that meditation would teach you to be more aware, I never said it would get rid of unpleasant emotions. It just so happens that when you’re more aware there is very little room for these unpleasant emotions to operate. When you’re thinking about them all the time, then of course you give them lots of room, you keep them active. But if you don’t think about them, then they tend to lose their momentum.’

‘So, it
was
a trick,’ I replied. ‘No trick!’ he exclaimed, ‘did you find the sadness you were looking for?’ ‘Well, no, not really,’ I replied. ‘Exactly,’ he said, with a smile on his face, ‘I’m not saying that these feelings do or do not exist, but you’ve found for yourself that when you study the emotion very closely, it’s actually very hard to find. This is something to remember when you find yourself reacting strongly to an emotion. When you came you said that not only did you feel sad, but you also felt frustrated and worried about your meditation. But these emotions were nothing but your reaction to the original emotion, making the whole situation that much worse. What about now, did you experience anger or worry when you were simply watching the sadness with awareness?’ I shook my head in reply. He was right, I’d not experienced any. I’d felt frustrated at times at not being able to find what I was supposedly looking for, but certainly not worried. In fact, I’d started to look forward to the meditation again and even found myself laughing a few times at the fact that I couldn’t seem to find this thing that was supposedly causing me so much trouble. ‘Exactly,’ he said again, this time with an even bigger smile on his face, ‘why would you react very strongly when you can’t even find a feeling there to react to? In order to resist something you need to have an idea of what it is. Often our “idea” of a feeling is just that, an idea. When we look a little more closely, we see that the idea is actually not what we thought it was. This makes it very difficult to resist. And with no resistance, there is simply acceptance of the emotion.’