When anxiety and emotional dramas arise, because we can’t stand the pain of it, our main wish is that it will all go away. Then we hear about something called meditation and we have this bizarre idea that meditation is an alternative to a pill, that it’s a method to make all the thoughts go away, that it’s a method to make all the pain go away. No, it’s not!
In fact, when you start to meditate properly, it actually makes the pain more clear to you, but because you can begin to understand it now, what happens is you get braver and you learn to live with it.
We can’t stand the pain right now. We try to do everything in our power to make it all go away, because we can’t stand the pain of these thoughts: the jealousy, the worry, the fears, the anxiety, the anger, the hurt, you name it.
But there’s an added problem: bad enough having all the anxiety and worries, but then we have anger about it or worry about it – we keep adding more roommates!
I always use the analogy, always, it’s such a good one, of all these roommates in our head. If you have these wacky roommates next door who shout and yell and get drunk and play loud music, of course all you’re thinking of day and night is these wretched people: they loom large.
And then when we worry about the anxiety, or have anger about it, we’re just adding more wretched roommates!
We need to learn to know this is very typical: it’s old, old habits. We haven’t got the ability yet to concentrate, we haven’t accomplished shamatha, we can’t get it overnight, but at least we can learn to have more courage, to know that there’s an explanation for all these things, and to know that we have the power to unpack and unravel all this stuff.
This is the job of being a Buddhist – I’m not joking. It’s a long-term job, but once you know there are methods, and once you know there are explanations, already you can calm down a bit.
If you really believe there are no explanations, of course you’ll have a panic attack. But there are explanations – and this is what’s amazing about Buddhist psychology.
The real one is we have to learn to live with the negative thoughts. Anxiety is a thought. It’s worried about what is happening, what will happen, what might happen, what won’t happen, what did happen: it’s all this kind of chewing a bone like a dog, you know, and it’s a function of attachment. We’re constantly just chewing it, constantly, constantly, never stopping these conceptual stories, you know?
We have to hear these thoughts. You can’t force them away – they’re old habits, they’ve been living here a long time, your crazy roommates. It’s difficult to hear them: you can be doing this for forty years and it’s still difficult, but we’re capable.
Everything in our mind is an interpretation – anxiety is an interpretation, attachment is an interpretation, anger is an interpretation, jealousy is an interpretation – but because they’re so habitual, they’re very emotional, and they’re so quick.
As Lama Zopa says, bad enough that we’ve got these habits of seeing things a certain way, bad enough that we’ve got these wrong interpretations about the world, me, events, and things, but the killer is – that’s my word – that we believe they are true, and this is the tragedy.
So what’s our saving grace? The part of us that makes us capable and sane and counteracts the crazy thoughts is the good thoughts – but we don’t bring them up. The good thoughts are there, but we take them for granted.
We can start to learn to, first, hear all the crazy thoughts, and then you bring your good roommates out – you bring out your wisdom and your intelligence – and you argue. You’ve got these two little parts of you – your positive thoughts and your negative ones – and you bring your positive ones out and you give them power, and they argue kindly, gently with the crazies.
You talk to yourself, in other words, in an intelligent way. This actually is daily practice. It sounds almost silly: talk to yourself. We are normally talking to ourselves, but it’s only the crazy roommates all having an argument, you know, and the good roommates are quiet or asleep or we don’t bring them out.
We have to consciously bring out the positive thoughts: about impermanence, about how attachment’s not at the core of my being, about how this is not my true nature, about how I can change my mind – and there are methods.
This confident way of talking to ourselves, calming the poor anxiety down, that’s the daily job: you’re managing your crazy thoughts.
It’s like you’re a parent with seven crazy children in the house: you’re the wise part, you’re the wise one, and you interpret what’s happening properly – you understand these kids and you steady them. This is the job of being our own therapist every single day.
So what do you think?
It’s one step at a time, one step at a time, with confidence, because life brings garbage stuff to us, there’s no doubt. We have to have confidence, we have to have confidence. The result is not going to come immediately. It’s like you’ve got a huge headache, and someone tells you what pill to take, but it might take several days for the headache to go away.
We’ve got to learn to live with the pain while we’re applying the antidotes. Don’t expect immediate results – that’s the point. We’ve got to be skillful, you know?