Next question.
When I experience a situation where I feel angry and try to be mindful, I feel that I'm repressing it by saying, angry, angry, and trying to investigate it.
After, I feel frustrated.
Am I doing something wrong in the practice?
Am I catching the thought too late?
Or is it because I'm still not advanced enough?
I think or yeah I guess that the problem here is in the try to repressing in the try to investigate no no
I'm not sure if I do understand the question correctly.
Well, the first part, I feel I'm repressing it by saying angry, angry.
Yeah, it's not repressing.
When you repress by saying angry, angry, and when you then try to investigate, you are not really with the present moment when you say angry.
angry then you should do so because you because you experience that anger in that present moment when you are repressing then you should arm say repressing repressing and when you are trying to investigate you should say to yourself investigating investigating and you should try to
very clearly separate these things because they are different moments and in that time when you investigate the anger is not there anymore and when you are repressing the investigation is not there anymore and when you don't separate this clearly everything gets mixed up
And that might lead to frustration in the end because you try to be mindful and cannot.
Make your understanding of the present moment maybe a little bit shorter.
Don't say I'm angry for hours, but see the anger in that second and know that when you say angry,
It can't be there anymore.
It can't be the same anger anymore.
There might be another moment of anger, but there are all these other things in between.
So my advice is to just go a little bit deeper and be a little bit more separating.
I think from what I've seen, the reason why people feel like they're repressing it by acknowledging anything, especially anger.
Anger is a very good example.
Because anger is a painful feeling.
Anger is associated with a painful feeling.
So anger will often create a headache or will create a stress in the body, generally in the head.
But it can also create tension and suffering throughout the body.
And so when you say angry, angry, the anger disappears, and you're left with the unpleasant feeling, which is actually a result of the anger, not a result of the mindfulness.
The other example is when you're thinking a lot.
When a person thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks...
And then finally they realize and they say, thinking, thinking, then they have this big headache.
And so they think, oh, being mindful causes a headache, but it's so not true.
All that thinking for 10 minutes, that's what caused you the headache.
But when you say thinking, thinking, the thinking disappears and you're left with just a headache.
So you think, well, that's useless.
What did that do for me?
That just gave me a headache.
And this is in regards to repressing.
It's actually, it's certainly not true.
It can happen that at the moment when you say angry, angry, you're saying it with anger or you're saying it with frustration.
And so instead of being mindful and having a good quality of mind, you're trying to push it away.
You're trying to get rid of it or you're trying to repress it.
It can also happen that you don't have faith in the practice, so you're doing it with doubt.
You're saying, is this going to work?
And you're saying, angry, angry.
But you don't really mean it.
You're not really clearly aware this is anger.
You're thinking, okay, I'll just throw something at it and see if it works.
Because you don't really believe in the meditation practice.
So this can happen where people practice without full appreciation or full intention to see the object for what it is.
Finally, it can also happen that you're practicing correctly and your mind isn't working correctly.
You're doing everything right and your mind isn't cooperating and your body isn't cooperating.
Which means you try to be mindful, you can't be mindful.
You try to catch something, you catch it too late.
You try to clearly see something and it's already gone.
And so on and so on.
And so you get frustrated.
The truth is, all of that is perfectly fine.
You're seeing impermanence, that even your own mind is impermanent.
Sometimes you can be mindful, sometimes you can't.
You're seeing suffering, that it's not the way you want it to be.
And you're seeing non-self, that you can't control it.
This leads to frustration, and that's the problem.
This is reality, but reality is something we don't like, something we cannot bear with.
We can't bear with impermanence, we can't bear with suffering, we can't bear with non-self.
Even just watching the stomach will make you frustrated, right?
Oh, it's so wonderful, smooth, and then it changes.
And then it's not smooth, it's rough anymore.
You think, what am I doing wrong?
What's wrong?
And then you try again and again, and you become frustrated.
You think, I can't do this, this is useless.
But the truth is you're doing it.
The problem is not the way the practice is going.
The problem is the frustration.
Now you have frustration in your mind and you're forgetting to continue with the frustration.
So at the moment that you have frustration, you should say to yourself, frustrated, frustrated, and focus on it.
And you'll see that just like everything else, it disappears as well.
Every time you get frustrated, it's a chance for you to build patience.
And patience is what we're trying to cultivate.
Patience is involved with wisdom.
They're associated.
True patience means just seeing things as they are and not getting upset about them.
However your meditation is, the frustration about that meditation is the real problem.
It's stopping you from digging out whatever problems are going on in your meditation.
It's stopping you from adjusting your mind.
Once you get frustrated about it, your object of meditation should be the frustration.
Get rid of that.
and develop patience and the ability, as Palaneni said, to see the moment-to-moment experiences.
The frustration will stop that.
Frustration will stop it.
Desire will stop it.
Liking will stop it.
All of our judgments of our practice will stop us from cultivating our practice.
If people think they're stuck in the practice, they're not getting anywhere with the practice,
This is just wrong view, it's wrong thought.
When you think that you're not getting anywhere.
I've heard people tell me that they've been stuck in meditation for five years or ten years.
Well, someone told me something ridiculous like that.
They've been spending the past five years feeling like they're stuck.
And really that's the first thing to get rid of is the idea that you could possibly be stuck because there's no you and there's no stuck.
There's only an experience.
It's amazing that people could waste five years thinking that they're stuck
when in fact any moment you can become enlightened if you're clearly aware of the moment.
All we're trying to do is cultivate that clear awareness.
So frustration and any kind of judgment about your practice will stop you from doing that.
So be careful of the frustration because you can become frustrated about reality.
We do become frustrated about the truth.
You're seeing the truth.
You're seeing impermanence.
You're seeing suffering on self.
May I add something?
It sounded a little bit that you are upset that when you say anger, anger, that the anger is kind of subdued, you call it repress it, but it's not you repressing it willingly, probably, or possibly.
It is happening that your anger goes away because you say angry, angry and you should be happy about it.
Probably you are accustomed or have that habit and a liking for being angry and explode kind of.
and and feel a relief because of that because it is nice when you are so angry and then you yell at somebody or you bang doors or something like that that is a relief and when you say anger anger or angry angry that just don't happen anymore so we're left with just a bunch of suffering
And then this might feel for you frustrating because you can't get that relief that you are used to.
So if this works for you, this saying, angry, angry, be very happy about it that you don't have to react on your anger anymore.
and in that case you should acknowledge happy happy of course