"Just Be with It"

 

                “Just be with it.”  The first time I heard this I thought “What in the world does that mean? “  The answer I was given was that I should sit with my anger or my cold symptoms or my discomfort and “experience it fully.”  This idea went against a lifetime of habit and social conditioning that tells us to respond to unpleasant experiences by finding a way to make them go away as quickly as possible.  If I don’t like what I am presently experiencing, I should distract myself with food or a movie, take a pill, move to another city.   We say “I don’t want to be with my anger or fear or sadness, I just want to make it go away.”  Upset stomach?  Take an antacid pill. Feeling sad?  Go watch a movie comedy.  Feeling discouraged?  Go out to eat at your favorite restaurant.  It never occurs to us to move closer to what we are experiencing.  Why would we want to go deeper into something that feels miserable?               

                It was a long time before I understood this statement that was made to me by someone who was further along the path of wisdom than I was.  But I learned that there is great power in this practice of learning to “be with it.”  So what does the actual practice look like?

                Learning to be with my own experiences is a central part of what Buddhist meditation is all about.  Suppose I am feeling discouraged about the lack of effort to do something about climate change at the national or global level.  Instead of trying to make this feeling go away, I can decide to just sit with my feeling of discouragement.  I find a place to be alone and assume my usual meditation posture.  I take several deep mindful breaths and then allow my breathing to become natural (whatever it wants to be) and rest my attention gently on the physical sensations of breathing. 

                When my mind begins to slow down and settle into the present moment, I then turn my attention to the feeling of discouragement in me.  I remind myself to get curious about the feeling.  I ask myself “What does discouragement actually feel like?  Where do I feel it in the body?”  I then just continue to sit and be aware of the sensations of discouragement that are present. 

                This practice can create many benefits.  For example, maybe if I spend some time just hanging out with a feeling of resentment, I will actually see that the underlying cause of the resentment lies in my mind’s response to events, rather than the events themselves.  I learn that I may not be able to change my external situation, but I can change how I respond to it and be more at peace.

                Also, maybe when I can open to the feeling of resentment and I find out that the feeling can just be there and that it is ok for it to be there.  I don’t have to do anything about it—It’s just a feeling, a sort of vibration in the body, and it’s ok.  It’s not a problem.

                In meditation—whether formal sitting practice or a micro meditation during your day—you can develop the skill of learning to open, to be present for, more and more of the richness of experience in life.  It can begin with very simple things:  learning to be with an itch, an unpleasant sound, a leg pain.  Once you have learned to relax into and experience fully (without mental “pushing away”) small and simple things, as that skill gets stronger,  it may be turned to use with strong feelings of unhappiness, confusion, frustration, and more.  Whether you are being with the breath or an itch or feelings of discouragement—it is exactly the same skill.

                Here is a personal example that taught me much about the benefits of learning to just be with something.  My situation had to do with hunger.  Whenever I would get extremely hungry I got very agitated.  My mind said:  “This is awful, I am so hungry, I’m starving, I’ve got to find something to eat right now, I just can’t concentrate on anything and I don’t know anywhere where I can get some food that’s ok; I should have eaten something earlier when I had the chance, that was really stupid, I can’t believe I did that…” 

                Then one day I decided to try the practice of just being with the sensations of hunger.  I got curious about it.  What does it actually feel like in the body?  Where do I actually feel it, and what are the actual sensations?  When I sat with it, it was a real revelation to me.  Hunger was a very small sort of hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach and a sort of slight vibration low in my throat in the general vicinity of my collar bone.  It was not painful.  I discovered it could just be there and was not a problem.  There was no need to do anything about.   And, I discovered, none of these sensations were there constantly—they came and they went and then came again.

                The other thing I discovered during this meditation was that these tiny sensations in the body were accompanied by a huge thought stream:  “This is awful, I’m so hungry, etc.”  I saw that there were really two things going on.  First, there were the actual physical sensations of hunger.  And second, and at the same time, there was a mind created story about the hunger—and that both of those things could just be there.  I also noticed that it was the story of hunger that the mind was churning out that produced all the suffering—and not the actual reality of the hunger itself.  I did similar experiments with sitting with the sensations of having a cold, and with tired muscles.  I just sat with them and allowed them to be there.  No problem!  This was a real life changer for me!

              It is worth pointing out that learning how to just be with your experiences does not mean that there won’t be many times when you can and should take action to improve your situation.  If you have lost your job it makes sense to open to the experience and just peacefully be with it. AND at the same time assess your present situation and then, if you can, take appropriate action to improve things.   Being in a non-panicked state of acceptance of your situation will help you to see clearly what, if anything needs to be done.  In some cases—such as changes in climate that cannot be reversed or the death of a friend—there may absolutely nothing that can be done other than learning to be with it.

                Learning to open to experiences, especially the difficult ones, allows us to see that the actual experience of something (stripped of the accompanying mind created fictional story) is not as horrible as we thought.  Once we can “make friends with” our experience and just be with it, much of the suffering drops away.  We also find that difficult feelings can then naturally and effortlessly wash through us more quickly.

 

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            If you have questions, comments, or ideas for new Blog topics please contact Dale at ahimsaacres@gmail.com.