Our trouble is we wait till it’s too late to deal with our attachment and anger and jealousy and the rest. We wait till the wheels fall off before we even notice what’s going on in our mind. And that’s because all our focus is on the outside – the person, the event, the thing that we’re convinced is the cause of our problem. We don’t even think to pay attention to our mind.
It’s like you’ve never heard of car mechanics. You’ve got a brand new car and you drive it and drive it and drive it, never even thinking to pay attention to what’s going on, to the wheels when they just begin to wobble. And there you are, at 100 miles an hour on the freeway, and you notice that your wheels are falling off. “Oh, what will I do?”
Well, it’s a bit late, isn’t it? Damage control is the best you can do! That’s how we are with our minds. We don’t even notice the thousand moments a day when things go a little bit wrong, when we get annoyed, upset, or frustrated. That’s the wheels wobbling. But we think it’s normal. Your therapist would laugh at you if you went to see her because you got annoyed today!
But that’s exactly when we should be applying our various tools. But we wait till we want to kill our boyfriend or ourselves before we do anything about it.
This is the key job of a Buddhist: paying attention to what goes on in our mind, moment by moment, recognizing what’s there: the annoyance, the upset, the hurt, the jealousy. Slowly slowly we become conscious of our thoughts well before they become emotional. And that’s the key to success.
Our trouble is we only notice the problems when they’re emotional – that’s the wheels falling off. The key point that Buddhist psychology makes is that what underpins all those emotions, which is when our body feels things, are conceptual stories, thoughts: anger, attachment, jealousy and the rest are rooted in being thoughts.
That’s a difficult thing to see. But it’s the point. We need to learn to pay attention before the thoughts rise to the surface and become emotional.
Frankly, it’s quite advanced, but that’s the job we need to do. It takes time. Even with a few minutes of practice every day of simple concentration meditation – in addition, of course, to our usual practice of prostrations, visualization, mantras, which work at a much deeper level – we develop the habit once we get off our cushion to not just pay attention to what the kids are doing, what the other cars on the road are doing, what the boyfriend is saying, we also have the skill to notice our thoughts, what’s going in our head, and we can grab hold of the thoughts, argue with them, turn them around, before the they come vomiting out the mouth.
Being our own therapists, in other words, as Lama Yeshe. It’s a doable job. One step at a time.