Tricycle | Awake in the World

It hadn’t occurred to me to step back and look at what might be holding my panic in place. I was too wrapped up in the symptoms to see how very deeply I was afraid of the overwhelming emotion. But as I took Saljay Rinpoche’s advice and looked at the underlying fear of panic, I began to find that panic became more manageable.

Over the years, I’ve found this approach effective in counseling other people. If an emotion or a disturbing state of mind is too painful to look at directly, seek the underlying condition that holds it in place. You may be surprised at what you discover.

You may find fear of the emotion, as I did. You may find some other type of resistance, such as a lack of confidence in even trying to work with emotions. You may find small events, triggers that signal or reinforce a broader emotional response. Fatigue, for example, can often signal a depressive episode. An argument with a coworker, spouse, or family member can often trigger thoughts of worthlessness or isolation, reinforcing a sense of low self-esteem. When we work with the feelings behind the feelings, we begin to work more directly with the entrenched beliefs that perpetuate emotional difficulties.

Step Four: Take a Break

An important part of any practice involves learning when to just stop practicing altogether. Stopping gives you more space, which allows you to accept the ups and downs, the possible turbulence of the experience that may be generated by your practice. If you don’t give yourself an opportunity to stop, you may be carried away by the turbulence—and by a sense of guilt because you’re not “doing it right” or not understanding the exercise. How come even though I have these very clear instructions, you may ask yourself, they don’t seem to work? It must be my fault.

In general, when you engage in attention practice, you’ll encounter two extreme points at which you know when to stop. One extreme is when your practice begins to deteriorate. Maybe you lose your focus or feel disgusted with the exercise. Perhaps the method becomes unclear. Even if you step back, looking at the triggers or boosters of anxiety, loneliness, and so on, or try something different, your practice doesn’t work. You may think, I’m so tired of practicing. I can’t see the benefit of going on.

The idea of stopping meditation when the focus becomes too intense or your mind becomes dull or confused is actually an important and often overlooked part of practice. An analogy is often drawn from “dry channel” or “empty reservoir” irrigation practices implemented by Tibetan farmers who would plant their fields around a natural reservoir, such as a small pond or lake, around which they’d dig channels that would run through the crops. Sometimes, even if the channels were well dug, there wasn’t much water flowing through them, because the reservoir itself was empty.

Similarly, when you practice, even though you have clear instructions and you understand the importance of effort and intention, you can experience fatigue, irritation, dullness, or hopelessness because your mental, emotional, and physical “reservoir” is empty. The likely cause is that you’ve applied too much effort, too eagerly, and haven’t built up a sufficiently abundant reservoir of inner strength. The instructions I received from my father and other teachers urging short practice periods can’t be emphasized enough. In dealing with intense or long-term emotional states, we need to fill our reservoirs. Even the Buddha didn’t become the Buddha overnight!

The second extreme at which it’s important to take a break occurs when your experience of the practice feels absolutely fantastic. There may come a point at which you feel extraordinarily light and comfortable in your body or an intense state of happiness or joy. You may experience a boundless sense of clarity—a mental experience like a brilliant sun shining in a cloudless blue sky. Everything appears so fresh and precise. Or perhaps thoughts, feelings, and sensations cease and your mind becomes completely still. At this point, you stop.

Sometimes people say, “It’s not fair! I’m having such a wonderful experience. Why should I stop?”

I sympathize with their frustration, since I, too, have enjoyed such blissful experiences. I felt such greed, such desire to hold on to them. But my teachers explained to me that if I held on, I would eventually grow disappointed. Because the nature of experience is impermanent, sooner or later the bliss, the clarity, the stillness, and so on, would vanish, and then I would feel really horrible. I’d end up feeling like I did something wrong or that the practices don’t work. While the real goal is to develop a stability of awareness that allows one to look with equanimity at any experience, there is also the danger of becoming attached to blissful, clear, or still experiences as the result of attention practice.

They further explained that taking a break at a high point cultivates an eagerness to continue practicing, encouraging us to stabilize awareness and “build up our reservoirs.”

Strange as it may seem, stopping is as much an important aspect of practice as starting.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a teacher in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. This article has been excerpted from Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom, © 2009 by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. Reprinted with permission from Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

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