The Biggest Problem Ever

Did you have a problem today? Did it seem to fill your mind, even if, stepping back from it, you could see that it was not a huge big deal?

If the answer is yes, it would not be surprising.  This is because we have problems every day! Maybe every hour.

Another question: can you remember what your problem was this time yesterday? The one that filled your mind?! Or this time last week? Or this time last year? Or when you were ten?

All these problems that felt like a very big deal at the time, now we can’t even remember what they were! Might that be telling us something?

Such as, nothing in life is as important as we think it is while we are thinking about it.

Some days, or weeks, it just seems like our mind has nothing better to do than sit around creating anxiety and misery – we want this, we’re annoyed about that, we’re worried about that – the list never ends. We are moody, we take everything so seriously, we find it hard to happy. Everything is The Biggest Problem Ever.

As a friend of mine just wrote on Facebook:

So…  for the past few weeks I have been feeling very sad – oh for many reasons, mostly private ones. And I have been working on being very still and quiet – not running away, just watching as these feelings wash over me, coming and going, intense and then fading, sad and then sort of dull. And last night I just said to myself – this is my self-grasping, my self-cherishing at work. I am holding onto these feelings as if they are real… and they are not! They are just thoughts, wind in my mind, figments of my imagination. Let them go… drop the story line… just drop it!

This morning, the sun started to filter in … and a soft breeze fills the space of my mind, my heart.

This is meditation in action. Throughout each day there are thoughts streaming through our minds but one of our issues is that we don’t recognize that thoughts are just thoughts, fleeting, insubstantial. We take our thoughts to heart, believe them at face value, pay attention to them, give them more food, build entire storylines around them. We rewind, thinking, “I feel bad today and, come to think of it, I always feel a bit depressed.” We fast-forward, thinking, “I feel bad today and this is the only thing I’ll ever feel.” Or “I feel lonely. I am going to be alone for the rest of my life.” We get caught up in our fleeting thoughts, and identify with them, even taking them to be who we are. “I’m an anxious person, that’s just who I am, I always will be, I better just get used to it.” This identification is part of our ignorance, and a deep habit we have. Luckily we can get past it.

Patience accepting suffering

I want to share some thoughts in this and future articles on how we can practice the patience of accepting suffering, so here is a working definition of patience for starters:

Patience is a mind that is able to accept, fully and happily, whatever occurs. It is much more than just gritting our teeth and putting up with things. Being patient means to welcome wholeheartedly whatever arises, having given up the idea that things should be other than what they are. ~ How to Solve our Human Problems

This doesn’t just mean accepting bad circumstances such as unexpected bills and broken relationships, but also welcoming the actual suffering arising in our minds, ie, our unpleasant feelings, indeed our delusions themselves! We need to accept fully that they are there without panicking, because only then can we let them go and transform our way of looking at ourselves and the world.

It is very important that we all learn to do this, I think, which means we need to train in mindfulness and introspection. Recently I was in NYC and my friend Julian took me along for several workouts with her trainer at the local gym. She got me all the Active Wear so I could get in the mood and look hot, and her 6 foot 4 magnificently brawny trainer pushed us mercilessly until all I could do was fantasize about getting out of there and into a hot bath. Even his stretching my limbs at the end, the part that was supposed to be fun (I thought), had me banging my hand on the mat begging him to stop.

Of course it feels good to get fit if we can, which is why I went back; and a lot of New Year’s resolutions are about our bodies – we want to eat better, exercise more, have more massages, ideally look better if we can. We pay a huge amount of attention to our bodies. It is good to be physically healthy, I’m a great believer in that, but it is even more important to pay attention to the state of our mind. What thoughts are we exercising or failing to exercise? Are we exercising our love, our insight, our patience regularly, or even at all?

It takes ages to get our body ready to go out in the morning, all washed and clothed and beautified, as we may not dream of inflicting a smelly unwashed body on others; but we seem perfectly prepared to go out and inflict our hideous mood on them. Then we expect to have a good day.

We love feeding our body – we’d spend all day feeding it if we could get away with it – but how much time do we spend nourishing our mind? Again, we may not dream of leaving the house without breakfast, but we might well leave the house without nourishing our mind with good energy and kind thoughts that enrich our own minds and help us enrich the lives of those around us.

Our exercise, eating, and self-beatification often seem to positively reinforce one another — if we exercise properly we are often more mindful of what we eat, for example. One evening I offered a big slice of yummy chocolate cake to Ken, a friend, when he got back from a heavy workout, and he was able to resist, “That kind of defeats the point.” It is the same with our minds — once we get going on a good mental workout routine we tend to become naturally more mindful to avoid bad habits that undermine it, we tend to stay more in charge of ourselves.

I know for a fact that I can only train this body so much … I’ll never be as pumped as Julian’s personal trainer, I just don’t have those muscles, and I’ll probably never compete in the Olympics either. But the same is not the true for our minds, which have infinite potential for improvement – we can all become Olympic athletes of the mind.

So I did enjoy my workouts, very much considering the agony; but could not help thinking that if we could put even a fraction of the time we put into our bodies, even ten percent, into meditating — purifying, feeding, and exercising our mind — we’d be incredibly happy by now, maybe even Buddhas.

Learning to meditate

So if, perchance, you made a new year’s resolution last month to meditate more, I hope, unlike the average gym membership, this has lasted longer than January. For if our mind is peaceful, our mind is happy, and our life is good.

Click here for a starter meditation on feeling peaceful and relaxed, if you’re new to this site.

Up next, exploring our potential for peace (and omniscience).