Life Dancing

If all your actions are based on the pursuit of happiness, why is it that so many things you do yield anything but happiness?

By Phillip Moffitt

Letting Go of Clinging

"He who understands clinging and non-clinging understands all the Dharma," said the Buddha. This is the Dharma of happiness. The alternative to the tyranny of clinging is to fully receive the experiences that arise in your life, knowing them to be pleasant when they are pleasant and unpleasant when they are unpleasant. Certainly you act to avoid the unpleasant and to have the pleasant, but you consciously practice not judging your life by the outcome of your preferences. Instead, you organize and measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values. This is the essence of living the inner life.

The result of living in this manner is a strong sense of inner peace and spontaneity that allows you to better experience the good things in your life and makes the difficult experiences more bearable and meaningful. It's quite a paradox, which is why in so many traditions it's taught in parable, koan, or spiritual poetry. Imagine having this attitude in your job. So much of the tension in work comes from being fixated on an outcome, which in and of itself does not help you achieve that outcome, because your fixation makes you so tense you don't do your best. The same is true in your personal life with your partner or your family. Clinging to your desires to have things a certain way causes endless petty fights, disappointments, and withdrawals.

The woman sitting across from me in the interview reports that her mind seldom stops planning, and when it does, she is overcome with difficult emotions. Her struggle to meditate makes her very irritable, and she finds herself having many negative reactions to others in the room. She feels like a failure. I tell her that she is doing good practice because she is allowing herself to be present for what is true in the moment even though it is unpleasant for her. It is the beginning—the first step toward freedom from clinging. I give her specific instructions for working with the judging that is arising, but mostly I reflect back to her the clinging that is going on in her mind. She is clinging to ideas about how her meditation experience and emotional state should be. In her moments of clinging, she is lost to the actual experience of being on the cushion. She is also exhausting herself making judgments and comparisons to the point that she considers leaving the retreat. I assure her that the judging is just coming from a reactive mind-state and that it is impersonal, which is why she is able to witness that something is wrong. There is a greater awareness within her which sees things as they are. "Try my suggestions about freeing yourself from judging," I tell her, "but what matters is that you trust yourself and persevere."

At the end of the retreat she stops by to report that she'd had a breakthrough. She finally realized that it was okay to be just as she was, even if she would have preferred to be in a different frame of mind. Eventually her agitation had calmed, and for the last part of the retreat she experienced a peacefulness she had not felt since she took her current job three years ago. She was lucky. Inner conflicts don't always reconcile so quickly when you commit to showing up for yourself; many times it requires a prolonged period of living in turmoil.

Page 1 2 3 4 5

See All Philosophy Articles »