We humans get stuck in emotional patterns where we automatically, without thinking, do the same thing over and over again. One of the things we can do to help ourselves is to commit to the Three Difficult Practices: Seeing where we are hooked, doing something different, making it a lifetime practice.
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 8:00 to 10:30 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Note: You are also welcome to join us on Sunday mornings at 10:00AM for the Dkos Sangha Open Threads which are hosted by davehouck.
When we begin the practice of observing how our mind works we notice how we respond to certain stimuli, automatically, the same way over and over again. It is like there are emotional grooves worn deep within us, and we need to learn how to pave new neurological pathways for different emotional responses.
To simplify the discussion for our purposes this evening, let’s consider our habit to respond to certain inducements with automatic sarcasm. Sarcasm is a reaction of a cynical, closed heart and it is also a common reaction for many of us. If we are serious about Buddhist practice, or even if we are simply serious about learning to be more peaceful and joyful, we will want to find an alternative response to our impulse for sarcasm.
First we need to understand our emotional habits are developed over a long time, perhaps the best we can do immediately is simply recognize when we are responding with sarcasm, and make a promise to ourselves that we will do better in the future. As we continue with our practice we begin to notice our hook to respond with sarcasm sooner, in time to stop ourselves from the actual act of responding with sarcasm. The impulse is still there, but we are catching ourselves soon enough to keep ourselves from acting out.
Perhaps concurrent with our commitment to discontinue responding with sarcasm, we are also doing practices to open our hearts…it is a part of our commitment to do something different. As time goes on we notice the impulse to respond in sarcasm is still there, it still arises within us, but now we also begin to feel some compassion for ourselves as we start to understand how deep those grooves of our conditioning are, and just how we have been controlled by these automatic, mindless impulses. We see how the impulse for sarcasm and the actual sarcastic reaction happened so fast, there was no time to think about it, there was only the stimulus and the immediate, mindless sarcastic reaction. We may not like the label “mindless reaction,” but we can see there truly was no time to think between stimulus and reaction…the word “mindless” is an apt description here.
It would be nice if we could expect this to be a one time learning experience, but it simply doesn’t work that way. Our conditioning has been built up through many years of repetition and it will require repetition to retrain ourselves. So we need to commit to making it a lifetime practice. As time goes on, and we learn through repeated experience of not giving in to the sarcastic impulse, we get better and better at not acting our sarcasm out. And over time the impulse will weaken, and perhaps some day it will abate completely. But this can only happen after we have honored our commitment to find an alternative to our sarcastic response again, and again and again….and still more again and again and again.
So using sarcasm as an example, this is how we work with the Three Difficult Practices, which are:
1: Noticing where we are hooked
2: Do something different
3: Making this a practice for our lifetime.
We can apply the The Three Difficult Practices to help us overcome our impulse for mindless reactions and encourage appropriate, mindful responses to life. It isn’t easy, they are called difficult for a reason, but when we begin to understand how finding alternatives to our knee jerk emotional responses brings us more peace and joy, it is becomes easy to commit to doing the work.