I have a problem the moment I lose awareness the fears and negative emotions are attacking me It's impossible to maintain constant awareness all the time.
Can you give me some advice?
Thanks What do you think
I think that it's impossible to maintain constant awareness all the time.
You do the best you can, and then the fears and negative emotions will slowly start going away.
But you can't expect to maintain awareness all the time.
You just do the best you can.
You can be also aware of what is attacking you, actually.
Very good.
I'm with you on that one.
Kapila?
Just listening.
Well, the biggest thing that I would point out is you have a problem, and that is that you're trying to maintain awareness.
As soon as you say, the moment I lose X, something bad, Y happens.
I understand, I hear you where you're coming from.
You're saying Y is the problem.
You have X and you have Y. As soon as I lose X, Y happens.
The problem is that you're trying to maintain X. That's the real problem.
If your stability of mind depends on something, that is the crutch for you.
That thing that you depend on is the problem.
That's how Buddhism works.
That's how the meditation practice works.
You have to start by examining this need to be what you call aware all the time.
It's not actually being aware.
Awareness, if...
If awareness were the problem, then why can't you be aware of the fears and negative emotions?
If it were true that you're losing awareness, are you not aware of the fears and negative emotions?
The point is that you're not concentrated, or your mind is not stable, satisfying and controllable, right?
You're having the problem that you can't control your mind.
Now guess what the Buddha taught about the mind?
It's not subject to control.
So guess what you're learning?
Vipassana.
Wonderful, isn't it?
You're starting to see things as they are.
Isn't it scary?
That the only way out of fears and negative emotions is through them, to see them as they are.
Your attachment to what you call awareness, which is probably just concentration or focus or even peace and quiet and so on and so on,
is the real problem, because you can see that it's not sustainable.
It's not the real problem, it's the first problem that you have to deal with before you can deal with the fears and negative emotions.
I think that labeling them
It helps you become the watcher of them, and it removes you from that.
Like you say, if you have anger, instead of getting absorbed into the anger, if you can label the anger and see it's there, that process will remove you from the anger.
And then the anger or whatever emotion will go away on its own.
Okay.
So that's one thing, but again, we talked about this before and Alfred gave a great answer, that they go away on their own.
You don't worry about, you don't have a problem.
Let's go even deeper, you don't have a problem.
You've got emotions, you've got fears, all of these things you have.
Seeing them as a problem is not helping you.
Seeing them as a problem is making it worse for you.
So start looking at them and start looking at everything and just look at what comes.
Don't think to yourself, oh, this is no good because I'm going to get afraid again or this is no good.
What about those negative emotions that I had yesterday?
What if they come back or so on?
What about my problem?
When you could be focusing on what's right here and now.
Awareness is right here and now.
You can create awareness at any moment.
You can't lose it, because you didn't have it.
You created in one moment.
That's the moment that you have awareness.
Or, it's not exactly the word I would use, recognition.
We're trying for something a little more specific.
We're trying for a specific type of awareness, and that's objective, fixed awareness.
exact awareness, or I guess objective is another way of explaining it, where you simply know the object as it is.
And that you can create at any moment.
So the labeling is a recognition.
It reaffirms the recognition of the object.
You recognize something, you reaffirm that, and you keep the mind at bare recognition without getting caught up in it.
All negative emotions disappear in a moment.
What's left is the physical manifestations that are a result.
This is the answer, the panic one.
Anger lasts for a moment, and all negative emotions, all emotions last for a moment, but they affect the body.
And so you think you're still angry because you have a headache, or because you are tense in the body, because there's adrenaline running, because your heart is beating.
None of those are anger.
All of those are physical manifestations caused by the anger.
So then you can focus on them and you can deal with them.
The anger only lasts for a moment and it returns again and again and again to affect the body.
Fear as well.
fear not all of what we call fear is actually fear fear is a momentary mental state that causes changes in the body and then these changes we associate with fear become upset about them and get more afraid and it snowballs if you focus on the physical manifestations focus on the fear and moment to moment focus on whatever comes up no matter what it may be and it may be totally unrelated to your quote unquote problem
Slowly they will work their way out.
They will work themselves out.
Be patient.
Be realistic.
Don't expect anything.
And consider that you're here to learn.
That's why they call it practice, not perfect.
You're not here to perfect.
You're here to practice.
And more importantly, you're here to learn.
It's not a magic trick where you sit and meditate and poof, you become enlightened.
It's not like pulling a rabbit out of your hat.
It's learning.
Learning more about yourself, more about reality, and that's what you're doing.
You really learned something.
You're learning something that you don't want to accept, but you're learning the hard truth that you can't control the mind.
and remember that it starts off hard and it gets easier and so you just have to keep
going at it and when you get absorbed into one of the emotions after the fact you look at what happened and see the way you got absorbed into it and see the way it affected your body and learn from it and don't beat yourself up over it just you know continue and the next time maybe you can not become absorbed in it and become the watcher of it you know it's a learning process
Trying not to feel guilty, not to beat yourself up is a very important part.
In Asian societies it's not such a problem.
They don't beat themselves up so much.
They go the opposite way in terms of maybe indulging themselves a little too much.
But Westerners are very good at beating themselves up and it's a real problem.
So the guilt and the anger at yourself for not being a perfect meditator.
just like everything we got to be perfect at everything and So we spend most of our lives beating ourselves up because we're not perfect.
It's quite sad Okay Is that it that was our last question