Posts by Bodhipaksa

Love isn’t what you look for; it’s how you look

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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In one of my early experiences of lovingkindness meditation (metta bhavana), a teacher told me to look for feelings of love in my heart, and then to spread that love to other people. I duly searched my heart, seeking feelings of love. But I couldn’t find any! There was nothing there. Zilch. Nada!

This experience was very distressing. Since I couldn’t find love in my heart, I wasn’t able to do the rest of the practice. After all, how can you share something with other people if you don’t have it to give?

And because I couldn’t do the practice, I had plenty of time to reflect on what it meant that I couldn’t find any love in my heart. Presumably, since this was how the practice was done, there was something wrong with me. I must be defective. This thought was very unpleasant. I found it rather upsetting, in fact.

The Downward Spiral

Now I had some strongly unpleasant feelings to be aware of during this practice that (apparently) I couldn’t do. I took those feelings as confirmation that there was something wrong with me, and began to sink into despair and depression.

Fortunately the teacher eventually rang the bell. I started to feel better once the meditation was over.

I thought it was just me who had had this experience, but a few months later a friend was talking about the problems of doing lovingkindness meditation, and he described exactly the same thing that I’ve just talked about — a downward spiral of negativity triggered by the suggestion that he look for love in his heart.

Even by the time my friend shared his own experience, I’d figured out that what worked best for me was to observe my heart, accept whatever was there, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant, or even if there were no feelings there at all, and then to wish myself (and then others) well.

Love Is Not a Feeling

Later still I realized that the practice was simply about kindness. It’s about being kind to ourselves, and then extending that kindness to others. And kindness is not a feeling. Kindness is an intention. It starts with empathetically recognizing that we are feeling beings who desire happiness, peace, and wellbeing. Having seen that truth, kindness wishes that those beings be well.

Just think about that right now. Consider that you yourself are a feeling being, and recognize that your feelings are important to you. You’d rather be happy than suffer. You’d rather be at peace than troubled. You’d rather have a sense of wellbeing than be sick or sad.

And then call one other person to mind — someone you know. They, too, feel.  Their feelings are as real and vivid to them as yours are to you. They, just like you, feel happy. Just like you they suffer. and, just like you, they prefer happiness over suffering.

When you consider the reality of someone’s feelings in that way, you probably don’t want to do anything that would harm them. You probably want to support their wellbeing and act in ways that make them feel valued. In other words you want to be kind to them.

So that’s what kindness is: a desire to actively support someone’s wellbeing.

Now there may be feelings associated with your kindness. Sometimes you’ll experience a sense of warmth, openness, or tenderness in the heart, for example. But those feelings just accompany your kindness. They aren’t themselves kindness.

Love Is in How You Look…

Some years back I picked up a practice from the American Zen teacher teacher Jan Chozen Bays. She called it “Loving Eyes.”

She reminds us that we all know how to look with love. It’s easy to recall or imagine looking lovingly at a cute kitten or puppy, a beloved child, or even a romantic partner. When we do this an attitude of care, openness, tenderness, and love easily arises. Kindness arises. And accompanying those attitudes there are usually feelings as well. We find that we can turn our attention to the world or to ourselves, and continue to experience that kindness in relation to the new object.

So we’re looking with love or kindness, whether that’s a literal looking involving the eyes, or a metaphorical looking in involving our inner gaze as we bring our kindly attention toward our own being or to people we think about.

This act of looking is, as I’ve mentioned, accompanied by feelings — the pleasant feelings of kindness. It happens quite naturally and easily, and just in case you find it doesn’t work for you, don’t worry, for it gets easier with practice.

…Not What You’re Looking For

So it seems that for me and for most people, lovingkindness practice works best if we don’t look for feelings down in the heart, but if we look with kindness. Whatever feelings may be present in the heart, we can regard them kindly. If we’re feeling sad, we can regard the sadness with kindness and love. If we’re feeling neutral, we can regard the blankness with love. It really doesn’t matter what’s in the heart.

So I’d like to leave you with this simple suggestion: Love isn’t what you look for; it’s how you look.

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“All people and all circumstances are my allies.”

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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All people and all circumstances are my allies

In an interview, Lynn Jurich, the founder and CEO of the solar energy company, Sunrun, said:

Every morning my meditation is: “All people and all circumstances are my allies.” I repeat it every morning: “All people and all circumstances are my allies.”

This struck me as a deeply wise and self-compassionate saying. It also struck me as being one that’s very much in line with key teachings from the Buddhist tradition.

Normally we don’t think of all people and all circumstances as being our allies. Often we experience ourselves as being in opposition to others, and see circumstances as being against us, or at least not being as we would want them to be.

The interviewer asked Jurich whether she’d see even her business competitor, Elon Musk, as an ally. She said he would, citing the fact that he runs his own solar electric company out of a concern for the climate.

Perhaps the interview was curtailed, or perhaps Jurich thought one example was enough, but there are of course plenty of other ways that she could see Musk as an ally. For example, if he comes out with an improved solar project or a great advertising campaign, then that encourages Jurich’s own company to do better. If she feels jealous of Musk for his successes, then there’s something to learn there about the painful nature of jealousy and the need for patience.

An Old Teaching

Jurich’s “All people and all circumstances are my allies” may even have come from the Buddhist tradition. Certain Buddhist teachings emphasize the practice of meeting adversity as an opportunity to learn.

For example, the 8th century Indian teacher Shantideva wrote:

…just like treasure appearing in my house
Without any effort on my behalf to obtain it,
I should be happy to have an enemy
For he assists me in my conduct of Awakening.

And because I am able to practice (patience) with him,
He is worthy of being given
The very first fruits of my patience,
For in this way he is the cause of it.

Shantideva’s view is that without adversity it’s impossible to develop patience. You should therefore be grateful to have an enemy.

A later formulation of this principle, this one from Tibet, says, “transform all mishaps into the path of awakening.”

But Jurich’s form of this teaching is more appealing to me because it encapsulates so much, so neatly, in just eight words. It’s perfect, in fact, for memorizing and using as a “mantra.”

Creating a Meditation Practice

Jurich is a meditator, and she’s said that she’s brought “All people and all circumstances are my allies” into her morning meditation practice. This is a vital step, because we can read advice like this and get a pleasant glow from encountering the idea, but not put it into practice. To take a teaching like this on board we really have to etch it into our brains through focus and repetition.

Here’s a test: if you close your eyes right now, can you remember Jurich’s mantra, word for word? Or do you just remember the general idea? The problem is that our attention moves on, and we forget not just the form of the words, but even the message they encapsulate.

If you don’t make an effort to remember this phrase by repeating it in a focused way, you’ll forget all about it.

So first try memorizing the words. See if you can get it exact. Then leave it a few minutes and try again. Test to make sure that the phrase is actually stored in your long-term memory. You may have to do this many times before they stick.

Next, find five minutes in which you can close your eyes and turn this teaching into a meditation. Just drop the phrase “All people and all circumstances are my allies” into your mind. Let the words just sink in. Then say them again. Sometimes, as you’re doing this, briefly remember people and circumstances that try your patience. Don’t go into the whole background, justifying to yourself why you’re angry. Just remind yourself of some challenge, and remind yourself, “All people and all circumstances are my allies.” This person is not an enemy, but an ally. This circumstance is challenging, but it can help me learn and become a better person.

Making This Your Life

Let’s say you keep doing this practice for days, weeks, even years. Probably a lot of the time you’ll still get angry with people or things, and then catch yourself. “Oh, yeah. ‘All people and all circumstances are my allies.’ ” Perhaps sometimes you’ll be aware that you’re getting into a situation that’s likely to be challenging, and you’ll be able to go into it with your heart open, knowing that it’s an opportunity to learn.

I’ve only just begun working with this mantra. I’ve been memorizing it, turning it into a meditation practice, and putting it into practice. But already it’s helping me to feel more at peace with the challenges of my life. Even as I’m writing this article I’m being interrupted repeatedly by my son’s near-constant questioning. And I remember that these interruptions are my ally. They give me an opportunity to maintain love rather than express irritation. They give me an opportunity to communicate more skillfully, and to learn from my mistakes when I fail to do so. They give me an opportunity to be a better person.

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Look at the Drawbacks (The Social Media Sutra, Part 2)

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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In a series of posts I explain, using teachings from the early Buddhist scriptures, how we can free ourselves from addiction to social media. You can find these teachings in the Vitakkasanthana Sutta. This is an ancient teaching which outlines five strategies for overcoming our compelling urges. (Here are links to the Introduction, Part 1, Part 3,  Part 4, and Part 5.)

The Image

This week we’re going to look at the second tool, or strategy. This is where we examine the drawbacks of having a mind that is out of control.

I love this particular description because it contains a truly graphic and visceral image.

The discourse says:

They should examine the drawbacks of those thoughts: ‘So these thoughts are unskillful, they’re blameworthy, and they result in suffering.’ As they do so, those bad thoughts are given up and come to an end. Suppose there was a woman or man who was young, youthful, and fond of adornments. If the corpse of a snake or a dog or a human were hung around their neck, they’d be horrified, repelled, and disgusted.

Isn’t that a great image? I’ll come back to say more about it later.

The application of this tool to social media is quite obvious. We need to look at the disadvantages of social media, and of our addiction to it.

We need to do this to counteract the way that Facebook, Twitter, and so on, steal our attention.

Now it’s important that we learn to recognize that these technologies are actually designed to be addictive. Social media have been carefully engineered to hook into our brains’ reward circuits. They do this so that we will keep coming back for more stimulation.  They demand that we keep coming back to see if anyone has liked, forwarded, or commented on our posts. They hook us by making their streams endless, by autoplaying videos so that you have to take action to disengage, and by showing us when someone is composing a reply to something we’ve written.

The Drawbacks Effects of Social Media

There’s now lots of evidence of the negative effects of social media. We’re not just talking about a few people who become serious addicts and have their lives completely ruined. There are of course people for whom this does happen.

According to a 2019 study on social media addiction, carried out by researchers at Michigan State University and Monash University in Australia, people who use Facebook heavily have impaired decision-making skills to the point where they perform as poorly in psychological tests as people who are addicted to cocaine or heroin.

We Waste Time

But we are virtually all hooked. According to one study, the average person now spends four hours a day on their phone.

We Become Depressed and Lonely

Social media make us anxious and depressed They make us feel lonely.

They con us into thinking that we’re doing poorly in comparison to others, because other people tend to show a falsely upbeat view of their own lives on social media.

Research shows that the more time we spend on social media, the more our sense of happiness and life satisfaction drop.

We Allow Ourselves to be Manipulated

And of course, bad actors are using social media for social engineering. They’ve become propaganda tools designed to influence our political decision-making. These propaganda tools are so carefully designed that we don’t even realize we’re being manipulated and sometimes will deny it when it’s pointed out to us. In perhaps the ultimate irony, Facebook discovered that a Russian internet agency had set up a page on mindfulness, of all things, as part of an attempt to influence elections in the US.

The main drawback for me, personally, was the sheer amount of time that I used to waste on social media. If I wasn’t careful I could pick up my phone in the morning and easily spend an hour or more reading news stories and browsing Twitter. That’s time that I could use going for a walk, or meditating, or working. Social media has an opportunity cost.

So these are some of the disadvantages of social media. But there are many others: there’s the way we stay up too late, staring at screens. There’s the way we reduce our productivity by constantly interrupting our work to check for new updates. There’s the way we get so absorbed in our devices that we don’t pay attention to our loved ones (I see so many parents ignoring their children!). There’s the way we get into online conflicts and the way we find it hard to stay focused the way we used to. Presumably all this is very familiar to you.

Suffering Masquerading as Happiness

The thing about an addiction is that even though it has a negative influence on our lives it promises to be a source of happiness. This is a phenomenon that the Buddha included in his teachings of the vipallasas (or viparyasas in Sanskrit if you’re more familiar with that language).

Vipallasa is a word that we could translate as “cognitive distortion.” These distorted ways of seeing things classically include assuming that impermanent things will last forever, seeing things that are ethically unattractive as attractive, and seeing things that are not who we are as being intrinsic to our sense of self.

The cognitive distortion here is our assumption that things that cause unhappiness can make us happy. It’s our assumption that  happiness comes from participating in social media, playing online games, reading the news, and so on. It’s our fear that we’ll be deprived and suffer if we don’t do these things.

From FOMO to JOMO

One way people talk about this is in terms of the acronym FOMO. This stands for the Fear of Missing Out. When I first thought about deleting my Facebook account I worried that I might lose contact with distant relatives. I worried that I might not learn about significant events in my friends’ lives. That I might miss breaking news, and so on.

Surely, I thought, giving up my Facebook and Instagram accounts would reduce my sense of well-being. But I found that the opposite was the case. The less I used social media, the more content I was. I was far more productive. I spent more time meditating. I could once more focus on reading a book with full attention, undistractedly. And I enjoyed it. This was a huge blessing!

Cutting my ties with social media, or most of them at least, was joyful and liberating. Instead of experiencing FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, I experienced JOMO — the Joy of Missing Out.

Treating Our Urges With Skepticism

So this second tool from the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, examining the drawbacks of our immersion in social media, is a way of undermining our addiction. It helps us to look more clearly at our desire to go onto social media, or to stay hooked on it. It helps us to regard those desires with a bit more skepticism.

We can start to see thoughts of quickly checking our Facebook or Twitter accounts as false promises. These thoughts are saying “This will make you happy. This will give your life meaning. You need this.” And we can see more starkly that in reality, our addictive use of social media makes us unhappy. We can see that it takes us away from things that are truly meaningful.

Recognizing What Is Not Fitting

I’d like to come back to the image that the Buddha uses: It’s like “a woman or man who was young, youthful, and fond of adornments. If the corpse of a snake or a dog or a human were hung around their neck, they’d be horrified, repelled, and disgusted.”

That’s a powerful image! Imagine you’re all dressed up in your finest clothes ready to go out somewhere, and someone were to drape the stinking corpse of some animal around your neck! How gross! So this image encourages us to recognize the unwholesomeness of our addictions. We can learn to see that social media addiction is this gross thing in our lives, like a rotting corpse.

But let’s not ignore the finery. The images makes no sense unless the person with the dead animal draped around their shoulders is conscious of what’s good and wholesome in their lives. That’s there too. It’s important to recognize that fact.

So we should not just see the presence of the unskillful in our lives, but also recognize the things we do that bring us a sense of peace and joy.

Honoring What’s Skillful In Our Lives

It’s only when we recognize and honor the skillful in our lives that the unskillful looks out of place.

If we were just to reflect on the drawbacks of online addiction, we’d probably just feel bad about ourselves.  Ironically, that might prompt us to spend even more time online, because that’s where we go to escape things we don’t like. So as we reflect on the drawbacks of online addiction, we need also to turn our attention to more wholesome activities. These include things like being more fully present with ourselves and with anything we happen to be doing, meditating, being present for others, focusing on meaningful work, attending to the simple pleasures of life, and so on.

One thing I’ve found as I’ve disengaged from social media is that I’ve rediscovered the joys of immersing myself deeply in a good book — something that at one point I worried that I might no longer be able to do. I’ve also rediscovered the joys of listening to classical music, and of going for walks. I’m rediscovering the delights of simplicity and presence.

Two Things to Do

So I’d suggest that you do two things.

  1. First, spend some time listing what, for you, are the biggest drawbacks of addiction to social media.
  2. Second, also make a list of the simple things in life that you find most nourishing. Make a list of the good things that social media takes you away from.

And then when you find yourself caught up in addictive behaviors online, call those two lists to mind.

Create a sense of — it’s strong word but a good one — “disgust” with addictive behavior, but balance that by creating an attraction to what’s wholesome and nourishing in your life — things that make you truly happy and that bring you a sense of peace and meaning.

Summary

So what have we learned today? We’ve learned that:

  • We can replace the fear of missing out with the joy of missing out.
  • One way we can weaken our addictions is to reflect on their negative influence on our lives.
  • Social media have many such negative effects.
  • We need to consciously reflect on those negative effects. This is because the addictive circuits in our brains rely on cognitive distortions, or vipallasas. These tell us that we need the object of our addiction in order to be happy.
  • We also need to turn to what is positive in life. We need to recognize what brings us joy, and peace, and a sense that we’re living in a meaningful way.

These reflections help us to see our addictive behavior as something gross. They give us a clearer sense of who we are and how we want to live our lives. They help us to see addiction as something that just doesn’t fit with who we are and who we want to be. They help us to recognize and undermine our addictive tendencies, so that we can become freer, and happier, and more in control of our minds.

To read Part 3 of the Social Media Sutra, click here: Just Turn Away.

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Join Wildmind’s Community-Supported Meditation Initiative

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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Thank you for your interest in Wildmind’s Community-Supported Meditation Initiative!

Our supporters get access to:

  • All of Wildmind’s existing meditation courses (of which there are more than 30).
  • An online community where we can discuss our practice
  • A monthly newsletter with meditation downloads, and articles that are only for sponsors.
  • Daily online meditations on Zoom.

You can choose any number of shares to sponsor. The average person sponsors two shares. There are no extra benefits (besides good karma) for sponsoring more shares, but that’s an option open to you if you want to show extra appreciation and if you can afford it. I’d certainly be very grateful if you sponsor more than one share.

If you have more questions, I’ve created an FAQ page here.

Love,
Bodhipaksa


Choose your number of shares
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If you’d prefer to use a credit or debit card, you can download a credit card billing authorization form. You can complete this on-screen, then print, sign, and return it to us by mail or email.

Please note that this initiative does not include access to Bodhipaksa’s Bodhi Mind app for iPhone, which requires a separate subscription.

You can cancel your membership at any time.

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Finding your way to simplicity

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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I’d heard there were trails in the woods next to the apartment I’d just moved into, but exactly where they were wasn’t at all obvious to me when I first took my dog for walks there. When I did find what looked to be pathways, they were in places very faint and it was easy to wander off them. And the more distinct trails had many branches, leading who knew where. Simple walks in the woods could become very complicated!

So as I explored the woods I went cautiously, not going too far. Sometimes, as I began to extend my walks, I lost my way, and wandered randomly until I found my way home again.

Three months later I know the trails pretty well. I always know where I am, and where all the various branches lead. I know how to get from point A to point B. What was once confusing and sometimes a bit scary is now familiar. I enjoy knowing my way around.

Lost in complexity

There’s something like that happens in our practice as well.

I’ve been studying Buddhism for over forty years now. I started exploring this tradition for the very simple reason that I wanted to suffer less, and I understood meditation in particular as being a way of bringing that about. And meditation, at least initially, seemed very simple: just keep returning your awareness to the breathing. And be kind.

Of course Buddhism turned out to be rather complex. Even just in the early teachings there is a plethora of lists: the three trainings, the four efforts, the five spiritual faculties, the six sense-bases, the seven factors of awakening, the eightfold path, the ten fetters, the 12 links of conditionality, and so on. If you want to make this even more complicated, you can learn the Pali and Sanskrit for all these terms.

It seems that you need to have an encyclopedic mind to keep all this straight in your mind. If you can do it, this can lead to a sense of unhelpful pride. You think that because you know lots of stuff, you understand the Dharma. And not being able to learn all of this stuff can leave people feeling inadequate. It’s easy to get lost in all the complexity.

See also:

Awakening to simplicity

When the process of Awakening begins (the technical term is “Entering the Stream”), you see three things:

  1. The kind of separate, static self you always thought you had is an illusion.
  2. There is no doubt that Awakening is real. It’s begun to unfold within you, and will keep on doing so until it’s complete.
  3. The evidence for all this has been in front of you the whole time. It’s just that you’ve been ignoring it.

It’s the third of those things I’d like to talk about. I certainly don’t want to talk — at least not now — about self and non-self. After all, I’m talking about simplicity, so I want to keep things simple.

So as we practice, we get to this point where we have an awareness of the radical simplicity of practice itself. We realize that until that point we’ve been over-complicating things and failing to see what’s right in front of us. We’ve even been using Dharma teachings as a way of avoiding really looking at our experience — approaching practice intellectually rather than looking directly at our experience and seeing what’s really there.

But now, it’s clearer what is and what isn’t the path.

It’s a bit like me walking into the woods three months ago, not sure what was a trail and what wasn’t, and walking there now, when the trails seem obvious.

But then you get to that point where you realize that all that knowledge was just a complication and a distraction. It was even a hindrance, since it led either to a sense of inadequacy if you didn’t know it, or a sense of superiority if you did. And in any event, it was largely a distraction.

Let peace happen

Practice is very simple: just let yourself be at peace. That’s the path. Whatever is going on within you that is inhibiting you from being at peace, let go of it. If anger makes you unhappy, drop it. If trying to be perfect makes you unhappy, drop it. Just keep letting go of whatever is holding you back from being at peace.

And whatever happens within you that brings you real peace and joy, appreciate it and let it flow. If observing the flow of the breathing brings calmness, let that happen. If kindness makes your life sweeter, let it happen. Notice it. Value it. Call it to mind.

It really doesn’t have to be any more complex than that. It’s back to what I originally thought practice to be: just keep returning your awareness to the breathing. And be kind.

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Pivot toward the skillful (The Social Media Sutra, Part 1)

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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Background

In a series of six posts (here are links to the Introduction,  Part 2,  Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5) I explain, using teachings from the early Buddhist scriptures, how we can free ourselves from our addiction to social media. These teachings are found in the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, which outlines five strategies for overcoming compelling trains of thought and the urges that accompany them.

“Vitakkasanthana Sutta” literally means “the Discourse on Quieting Thinking,” but I’m going to call it “the Social Media Sutra.” I do this mainly because it’s a more convenient and catchy monicker than a literal translation is, but also because it reminds us that these teachings can be directly applied in this important aspect of our lives.

What is Social Media Addiction?

By our being “addicted” to social media, I mean that we use social compulsively despite their having harmful consequences for ourselves and others. That’s the classic definition of an addiction. When we’re addicted we repeatedly do something that harms us, but feel out of control and have great difficulty stopping ourselves from giving in to our urges.

Often there are secondary consequences of addictions: for example, we may feel ashamed of our “weakness” and become secretive about our activities. Attempting to cut back on social media use may lead to strong anxiety. And we might, in indulging in social media, also become addicted to anger and outrage. This can, for many people, be the most important and troubling part of social media addiction.

The first tool

The Social Media Sutra offers us five tools to overcome compelling urges. This first of these is described in the following way:

Take a practitioner who is focusing on some object that gives rise to bad, unskillful thoughts connected with desire, hate, and delusion. That practitioner should focus on some other object connected with the skillful. As they do so, those bad thoughts — imbued with desire, aversion, or delusion — are given up and come to an end.

And then the Buddha offers an illustration: “It’s like a deft carpenter or their apprentice who’d knock out or extract a large peg with a finer peg.”

The Buddha doesn’t explicitly talk about meditation here. He may have had meditation in mind, but what he says can be applied in any area of life, including our online activities.

It’s not that social media and so on are inherently bad, but that our minds often turn to them in an addictive way. And we could include here not just Facebook, Twitter, and so on, but other online activities that can be compelling, from reading news articles to playing games.

Mindfulness gives us choices

What’s being suggested is that we switch from an unhelpful (“unskillful”) urge to some more helpful (“skillful”) way of behaving. This is based on a basic principle of Dharma practice, which is that mindfulness gives us choice. Mindfulness allows us stand back and observe what’s going on within us. It allows us to see that some choices we make will make us happier and others unhappier.

It isn’t always comfortable when we become mindful. We see things going on — like addiction or anger — that make our lives miserable. And we can end up blaming ourselves. But one of the first things we need to do is to stop blaming ourselves in response to our addictions. Blaming ourselves is just us responding to unskillfulness with further unskillfulness.

Having a tendency to be addicted isn’t something to take personally. It’s not weakness. It’s just causes and conditions unfolding in our lives. So we drop the blame. That’s a choice we can make.

To apply the teaching of pivoting to the skillful, first, with mindfulness, recognize that you’re doing something that’s making you unhappy. Notice that you’re causing yourself to suffer.

Now, become aware of what kind of unhelpful mental habit has arisen. What’s the unskillful activity that you need to switch from?

The Image

Just a word about the image the Buddha used to illustrate this tool or pivoting to the skillful. He said that switching our focus to a skillful object is like using a small peg to knock out a larger peg. I remember doing this to remove a pedal from my bike, using a hammer and a nail punch to remove the cotter pin holding the pedal onto the crankshaft.

Note that you’re using a small pin to knock out a larger one. Although you might think that the forces of addiction and anger are powerful, and your mindfulness and compassion are weak, it’s good to remember that your mindfulness or compassion, even though they may seem feeble, just need to be used in a directed way.

And remember that when a carpenter uses one pin to remove another, it doesn’t take just one blow of the hammer. It takes repetition. So don’t be discouraged if it takes time to change your habits. Just keep working at it.

Three forms of unskillful activity (and how to overcome them)

In my experience the three most common forms are: craving stimulation, craving attention, and becoming angry. Let’s deal with those one at a time.

1. Craving Stimulation

Our addiction might take the form of craving continual input. We just don’t want to stop browsing. We feel anxious if there isn’t a constant flow of information coming at us.

Overcoming Cravings for Stimulation: Trust This Moment Is Enough

If you’re craving stimulation, take a mindful break. Notice physical sensations in the body, feelings, sensory reality of your surroundings. This is a different kind of stimulation — a more wholesome and grounding kind of input for the mind. And while online stimulation can never truly satisfy us, being mindfully aware of the richness of our experience does leave us feeling more fulfilled.

So here you’re switching your mind from mindless stimulation to mindful appreciation of your direct experience.

You can learn to trust that this moment is enough. You can be content right now.

2. Craving Attention

Another component of addiction is the craving for acknowledgement. We might crave the reassurance we get when people “like” or comment on our posts. If people don’t do those things, we’re hurt or disappointed.

Overcoming Cravings for Attention: Trust You Are Enough

Now, if you’re craving attention, then you probably aren’t feeling good about yourself. There’s probably an underlying sense that you don’t matter, which is why you’re dependent on seeking reassurance from other people. You’re probably not valuing yourself, or giving yourself appreciation. You may even be putting yourself down.

So to switch to a skillful alternative to craving attention, you can give yourself some love, compassion, and appreciation. You can place your hand on your heart and say to yourself, “It’s OK. I’m here for you. You matter, and I care about you. I will take care of you. Let yourself feel this love.”

You can learn to trust that you are enough.

3. Getting Angry

And yet another common form of unskillfulness bound up with social media is “outrage addiction.” We become dependent on the feelings we get from being self-righteously angry.

We might, out of anger, say things calculated to hurt people, or block them so that we don’t have to face up to our own reactions to them.

Overcoming Anger: Trust In the Power of Kindness

When you get angry,  you probably don’t have enough kindness and empathy toward others. When you’re seeing others acting or speaking in ways that disturb you, you react with ill will. Maybe you speak or write unkindly. Maybe you hurl insults.

Switching to a more skillful way of relating means bringing more empathy and compassion into the present moment. So, first, recognize that if you’re angry or outraged, you’re suffering. So once again, place a hand on your heart and offer yourself some kindness. “May you be well. May you be happy. May you be at peace.” Breathe.

And then remind yourself that the person you’re angry with is a feeling being, just as you are. They feel happiness, just as you do. They suffer, just as you do. They prefer happiness rather than suffering, just as you do. And then, having connected empathetically in this way, perhaps you’ll find that you naturally relate and communicate in a more empathetic, kinder way.

You can learn to trust the power of connection, empathy, and kindness.

Trust the Dharma

Another thing you can trust is the Dharma: trust your practice. Sometimes when I catch myself tempted to mindlessly pick up my phone so that I can check Twitter or read some news articles online, I say to myself “Trust the Dharma.”

So I’ll pick up my phone in order to mindlessly go online, I’ll remind myself, “Trust the Dharma,” and then I can gently put the phone back down again.

This phrase is just a reminder to myself of everything I’ve said above about the potential and the power of making mindful choices. “Trust the Dharma” means trust that there is a something better than craving. It means trusting in your ability to let go of painful habits. It means trusting that true contentment is possible, and that we don’t need any special conditions for contentment to arise: just be present with your experience, and everything will sort itself out.

Summary

So what we’ve learned here is that the first tool for dealing with unhelpful behaviors and mental habits around social media is to switch our attention to an object connected with the skillful — bringing skillfulness into our present moment experience.

When you’re craving stimulation, you can learn to trust the present moment.

When you’re craving attention, you can learn to trust that you are enough. That you matter. That you can support yourself.

When you’re angry, you can learn to trust in the power of connecting empathetically first with yourself, and then with others.

And in this kind of way, you can switch from unhealthy ways of relating to social media, to having a healthier relationship with them.

One last thing. I’ve said a lot about trust. Trusting the present moment. Trusting that you matter. Trusting in the power of empathetic connection.

Trust the Dharma. It works.

Click here to read Part 2 of The Social Media Sutra: Look at the Drawbacks.

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How I learned to love (but not like) Donald Trump

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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We live in a time where it’s common to have unbridled admiration for your chosen political leader, who can do no wrong, and equally unbridled hatred toward opposing political leaders, who can do no right.

The common wisdom is that this hyper-partisan situation is worse now than it used to be, and I suspect that that’s true.

I don’t think this highly polarized state of affairs is at all healthy. In fact I think we need to find ways to reverse this trend. We need to do this as a society, which means that we need to do so as individuals. The individual I have most influence over is myself, so that’s where I have to start.

Now, I have to confess that over the last few years I’ve harbored ill will toward Donald Trump. There’s been plenty of dislike, and even loathing — I find him to be a morally repellant individual on many levels — but dislike isn’t the same as ill will. My understanding of Buddhist ethics is that disliking someone is morally neutral.

Having ill will or hatred goes further. It means, at the very least, wishing for someone to suffer or taking pleasure in their suffering. It may even mean wishing to see them harmed. Often it means being prepared to believe the worst about their motivations and automatically believing any negative stories about them. If those stories turn out to be untrue perhaps we don’t care. All that’s important to us is that the story is harmful to our opponent. Ill will tends to make us casual with the truth.

But I have to confess, that I’ve not just disliked Donald Trump, but have had ill will for him. I’ve taken pleasure in his discomfort. I’ve even wished him harm. From the point of view of Buddhist ethics, this is of course not OK. It’s unskillful, and will cause harm not just for others but will be a source of suffering for me as well.

Perhaps some of you reading this support Donald Trump and are displeased to hear that I’ve disliked and had ill will for him. Perhaps some of you dislike Trump even more than I do and are alarmed by the title I’ve chosen, thinking that it means I’ve gone all “MAGA.” I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people cancel their subscriptions without even reading the article.

In reality all I want to do is to share how I’ve learned to drop my ill will. I’ve found that I’m able to love Donald Trump. I still think that morally speaking he’s a horrible individual, and I don’t think he should have power over any kind of organization — certainly not an entire country — but my emotions around him have softened. Bringing this about wasn’t particularly hard. It just required a shift in the way I thought about my relationship to him. Perhaps, if you have ill will for him, what I did will help you too.

So what did I do? Simply, what I did was to imagine that Donald Trump was my wayward older brother. I think most families have a black sheep — someone who, for example, doesn’t respect the normal “rules” of reciprocity and who is prone to exploiting others, or who perhaps lies, cheats, or steals. Perhaps they’re an outright criminal. I know that my own family has (or had) someone like that.

It’s not invariably the case, but often ties of family soften our attitudes. So when I imagine Donald Trump as my wayward elder brother, out there breaking norms, breaking the law, and creating havoc, even if I believe he deserves to go to prison I’m no longer gleeful about that. I now have mixed feelings. If he’s my wayward older brother I can imagine visiting him in prison, not to gloat but to see if he’s going OK, and to be a support. I imagine hearing him protesting about being framed, and instead of being angry I feel compassion for him in his denial and delusion.

This approach has certainly been working for me. I feel much softer around Trump. My heart’s more open. Reading the news is less scary. I’m suffering less.

Perhaps this will help you, too. I’ve had to keep reminding myself to adopt this perspective, because emotional habits such ill will are strong and persistent. But every time I think of Donald Trump as my wayward elder brother, I feel compassion for him rather than hatred.

Perhaps this approach has been influenced by the Buddhist teaching that all beings have, at various times in the endless cycle of samsara, been one’s mother and father, brother, sister, sone, and daughter. That’s certainly not a teaching I take literally, but I imagine its purpose was to stimulate the same kind of attitude-shift that I’ve been talking about.

Let me be clear that I don’t approve of many of Donald Trump’s actions. He’s done many, many things that I consider to be unethical or illegal. But I no longer have ill will toward him.

Sometimes people cling to their hatred because they think that they need to hate their enemies in order to oppose them. But that’s not the case. You not hate and still tell right from wrong. You can not hate and still want to see your wayward elder brother prevented from causing further harm. You can not hate and still believe it’s right that they face the legal and moral consequences of their actions.

We don’t need hate. In fact we’re better off without it. I know I am.

As the Dhammapada says, “In this world, hatred is never appeased by hatred. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal truth.”

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Mindful tools for overcoming social media addiction (The Social Media Sutra, Introduction)

Bodhipaksa
on practice
4 Comments

Photo by Marc Schaefer on Unsplash

Introduction

In late 2019 I recorded a series of talks for “Tricycle” magazine. These discussed how tools from the Buddhist tradition can help us to overcome social media addiction and internet addiction. The talks didn’t appear online until January of the following year but in the meantime I thought I’d turn my notes into a series of articles. There are six in total — this introduction plus one article for each of the five tools.

I’ve expanded a little on what I said in those talks. Because of course as soon as you give a talk you realize all the things you could have said but didn’t!

Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

My name is Bodhipaksa, and I am an addict

I put my hand up as being a social media addict. Because of the way I teach, I spend a lot of time online. And because of that I’ve had to deal with getting sucked into social media. Like most people I carry a so-called “phone” around with me, although it’s a device that I hardly ever use for making phone calls on. Instead it’s a kind of glass portal that leads to a world of endless distraction.

So, spending a lot of time online, and carrying around a device that allowed me to do that any time I wanted, I’d often find myself spending way too much time on the internet. My work would suffer, and sometimes I’d stay up too late, reading fascinating articles, usually about science and psychology. What I was reading was good, but I just couldn’t stop, and I’d end up depriving myself of sleep.

Sometimes there were “bonus” problems—for example when I’d get involved in online disputes. Those would not only give rise to anger, but would sometimes leave me feeling quite anxious, so that my heart would pound when I was logging in to my social media accounts. Or I’d find that I would crave attention. I found myself logging in, anxious about whether my posts had been “liked” or shared. All of these are, of course, forms of suffering.

Using the Buddha’s teachings to overcome addiction

I don’t much like suffering, so the question naturally arose for me, “How can my Buddhist practice help me with addiction to online activities?”

I’m going to share some of the tools I’ve found useful, in case you have similar patterns of getting hooked online.

At the time I wrote these six articles, I had mostly got the better of my addictions, although I struggled sometimes with spending too much time on Twitter, which had a bad effect on my mental states. I’m happy to say that as I continued to practice the techniques you’ll learn about here, I managed to disengage from Twitter as well.

What Is Social Media Addiction?

First, though, what do I mean by social media addiction? I don’t mean simply enjoying using social media. I mean addiction in the sense of the compulsive use of social media despite it having harmful consequences for ourselves and others. Compulsion means that we feel out of control: have great difficulty stopping ourselves. Compulsion means that the thought of quitting may lead to powerfully unpleasant feelings. Usually compulsion leads to shame, and we become dishonest about just how addicted we are.

I’m going to use the term “social media” in a rather broad way. I don’t just mean social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. What I say may well have relevance for those who find themselves hooked on online games, or even who find themselves compulsively checking the news.

About the Social Media Sutra

The Buddha of course didn’t say anything about the internet or social media. But he did have a lot to say about dealing with and overcoming compelling patterns of thought and behavior. There’s one discourse, or sutta, in particular that I think gives a good overview of the richness of the tools that he offered us. It’s the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, which I would translate as the “Discourse on Quieting Thinking.”

Vitakka means “thinking” and santhana literally means a resting place, and by extension means “end, stopping, cessation.”

“Thinking” here doesn’t mean just the inner sound of us talking to ourselves, or even imagined imagery. Thinking includes the urges that are entangled with those thoughts. In fact, sometimes you’ll act on an urge without having any verbal thought at all. You just find yourself picking up your phone and opening a social media app. There isn’t necessarily any inner talk accompanying those actions. But the urge that makes you pick up your phone is, in Buddhist terms, a “thought.”

So, fundamentally, this discourse is about letting go of unhelpful urges, or unhelpful habits.

Most people understand the Vitakkasanthana to be talking about quieting unhelpful urges in the context of meditation, but the discourse itself doesn’t mention meditation, and the principles it outlines can be used in any context in our lives, including when we’re on social media. In a way you could think of the Vitakkasanthana Sutta as the Social Media Sutra.

Five Tools

The discourse offers five tools. The sutta itself suggests that you start with the first one. If that doesn’t work you give the next one a try, and so on.

To give you an overview of the five tools:

  1. We switch our attention from unskillful or unhelpful patterns or activity to more skillful or helpful patterns.
  2. We examine the drawbacks of your unhealthy urges, especially as contrasted with healthier ones.
  3. We simply ignore or turning away from our unskillful urges. We don’t make any effort to get rid of them, but also we don’t act on them or allow our attention to be drawn into them. I’ve framed this mostly in terms of keeping the triggers for our addictions out of site and out of mind.
  4. We become aware of the causes and conditions that are bringing our unhelpful urges into being, so that we can prevent them arising in the first place.
  5. We use sheer willpower to overcome our addictive urges. This can actually be much more subtle than it sounds! The best use of willpower is when it doesn’t feel like we’re using willpower.

For each tool there’s an illustration. Some of those are engaging and instructive, although some others aren’t so immediately helpful.

Summary

The five approaches above provide us with an impressive collection of tools for overcoming addictive behaviors, as well as the anger, anxiety, and so on that accompany them. I’ll be going through each in turn, telling you what the Buddha said (including the illustrations he gave), and making the tools practical.

That’s it for today. I hope you’ll enjoy this series of blog posts.

Click here to read about the first tool, Pivoting Toward the Skillful.

Exercise

Notice any addictive patterns of behavior around your social media use. What suffering does it lead to? In what ways does your compulsion manifest?  Is giving up social media something you can experiment with, even for a day or two? If you can’t do that, notice what’s preventing you. What is your experience like if you do give up social media for a short period? Do you experience joy? Relief? Craving? Anxiety?

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Anchor your attention in the good

Bodhipaksa
on practice
8 Comments

Recently I’ve been finding my life to be overly complex, and sometimes overwhelming. Moving house took weeks of preparation and packing, followed by the intense work of unpacking and arranging everything. My partner and I moved in together, and so there are a whole load of adjustments to work through as the nature of our relationship changes. My kids are now attending two separate schools that are two towns over, so that I sometimes spend more than two hours a day driving back and forth. I agreed to give four video talks for Tricycle magazine that involved an insane amount of work. And soon after moving we decided to adopt an abandoned puppy, which adds a whole level of complexity, from runs to the vet to having to replace the phone and laptop cables she’s chewed her way through.

Because of all this my mind is very stirred up. There’s a kind of background anxiety about whether I’m forgetting something, such as whether it’s my turn to take the kids to school today, and how I’m going to fit things like writing articles, recording meditations, and helping online course participants with their tech-support problems into my schedule. There’s always some new complication cropping up.

In the face of these challenges, my meditation practice is a relief. It’s not that there’s some kind of magic happens where all my problems, or my reactions to them, suddenly vanish. Of course what’s going on in my head and in my body outside of meditation get brought into my meditation practice. That’s kind of the point, actually. Meditation is an opportunity to work with that stuff.

Thoughts about work or about family schedules or communication difficulties come up. I notice those, and I let go of them, returning my attention to the body, and to the breathing that takes place within it. And then there’s the experience of not-thinking. It may be a brief experience, but it happens, if just for two or three breaths.

I become more aware that my body is tense. I have an opportunity to soften the body and to allow it to relax, even if just a little.

I notice sensations of anxiety. They’re unpleasant, but I allow myself to be present with them, not reacting but allowing there to be a sense of space around them.

So there are thoughts that I let go of, feelings I accept, and tensions in the body that I notice and allow to relax. Doing these things helps.

I find it’s important to notice how the texture of my experience changes as I let go of thoughts, accept uncomfortable feelings, and soften the body. This texture moves from feeling bumpy and tight to feeling more harmonious and easeful. The shift isn’t always major, but it’s real. There’s movement away from suffering and toward more of a sense of well-being.

I’m stressing the word “texture” here. The experience of having a lot of thinking going on, of feeling stressed, of being tense, have a texture of sorts. And that texture is unpleasant. The experience of calmness, the experience of accepting an unpleasant feeling, the experience of the body softening — each of these has a texture. And that texture is easeful and pleasant. As the shifts I’m talking about take place, there’s a change in the texture of my experience.

Here’s why it’s important to notice this. The thoughts that generate stress in the first place are compelling, and so we get pulled back into them over and over again. We need a counterbalancing force to keep us anchored in calmness and ease. What I’m suggesting is that an interest in, even a fascination with, the the texture of our experience as we practice mindfulness helps to keep us anchored and stop us from immediately moving back toward being distracted and stressed. So I suggest that you really notice the pleasant, spacious, and easeful nature of letting go. Really appreciate it.

If you don’t notice and appreciate these changes, then your mind will tend to move back toward mental business, conflicted feelings, and physical tension. You won’t have an anchor.

The changes I’m talking about, and that I’m encouraging you to notice and appreciate, don’t have to be huge. After you let go of one stress-filled train of thought, there might be only a few seconds of relative calm before another stress-filled thought arises to take its place. But if you look at the texture of those few seconds you’ll find that it’s more pleasant and easeful than it was while you were thinking. And that makes you want to stay there.

With a little practice you’ll also start to notice that compulsive thinking is unpleasant while you’re still caught up in it. And this helps you to let go of it. It’s natural to want to stop doing something that’s making you miserable.

Of course as you do what I’m suggesting you might find yourself grasping after pleasure. You have those few moments of calm, you notice their easeful and pleasant texture, and something in you yearns to hold on to this experience. That of course isn’t helpful. But once you get into the habit of noticing the texture of your experience you’ll start to recognize that grasping after pleasant experiences is just another unpleasant thing the mind does, and you’ll be more inclined to let go and just accept what’s going on.

Appreciation is an anchor. Remember to use it.

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“Love your enemies” as a calling

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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This summer I read a book by Arthur C. Brooks, who until recently was president of a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The book is called “Love Your Enemies,” and it calls on us to change the way we relate to one another in the field of politics. I don’t intend to write a book review but mainly want to talk about the impact the book had on me.

First of all, however, a word about Brooks. He seems like a thoughtful, reasonable person. He has a background as a classical musician, having performed professionally for something like 22 years. He then moved into economics and policy analysis. His most notable early writing was on charitable giving. He’s a friend of the Dalai Lama and the two even wrote a New York Times article together. Although he’s been a Catholic since he was 16, Brooks has been deeply influenced by the Dalai Lama’s teachings on love. He was at one time registered as a Democrat, then as a Republican. Now he’s an Independent. Although he’s a conservative, he’s in no way a Trumpian conservative.

I’d deliberately set myself the challenge of reading something by a conservative, since these days we’re very quick to dismiss those who hold views that are different from our own, and most of the political views I have are those that liberals hold, meaning that Brooks and I wouldn’t agree on much politically. I looked forward to this challenge.

And the book did challenge me, in a number of ways. Sometimes, I confess, I had to work hard to remain patient. Because he’s writing a book about loving your enemies, he tries to maintain a sense of balance. If he says something critical about Donald Trump, he has to say something critical about Hilary Clinton as well, even though to my mind those two politicians’ failings aren’t remotely comparable. And although he talks about the need for all participants in a democracy to observe “rules,” he studiously ignores the most egregious bending and breaking of those rules. So he has nothing to say about gerrymandered districts, voter purges, or the refusal to let a sitting president fill a Supreme Court seat. This is presumably because most of those abuses (currently) take place on the right, and for Brooks to mention them would require Brooks to set aside his rather strained “both sides are the same” impartiality. I found myself craving for Brooks to admit that, sometimes, one side is worse than the other. But I kept letting go of that desire, since I was suspicious that it was partly my own bias showing.

But the main challenge was a positive one: how can we love our enemies? I felt challenged to relate more lovingly, to communicate more compassionately, to practice empathy more deeply, to let go of tribalism. This will all, I’m sure, be a lifelong—and difficult—task.

The single thing that struck home most for me was Brooks dismissal of “civility” and “tolerance” as adequate goals. It’s not that we shouldn’t try to be civil or to tolerate differences, but that those goals are not enough. Imagine, Brooks asks us, if someone described their relationship with their spouse as “civil” or said that they “tolerate” each other. What would that tell you about the health of their marriage? Are either of those partners likely to be happy? Being civil to our political opponents is not enough. Being tolerant of our political opponents is not enough. We need to learn to love our enemies.

This of course is deeply challenging. Even meeting the low bars of being civil and tolerant is hard. Civility and tolerance can be beyond us at times because we feel compelled to be harsh and judgmental towards those we disagree with. And if actually loving our enemies is even harder than those things, then how can I even begin to move in that direction?

The most fundamental thing, I think, is to recognize the common humanity of people I disagree with. We all want similar things, but want to achieve those aims in different ways, or understand them differently. We all value fairness, freedom, and security, for example. Those things unite us. But the fact that we think about those things differently brings us into opposition. And when we’re in opposition we tend to clash, and to turn into enemies. We fail to think that we have anything at all in common. We hold each other in contempt. We call each other names. We distort each others’ positions.

Think for example about one person who accepts that climate change is being driven by human activities and that it may potentially bring about catastrophic disruption to the world. Motivated by a desire for security, then want to see a massive change in the way we use energy — a magnitude of change that cannot possibly be brought about by individual action alone, but which requires intense government action.

Then there’s another person who wants to feel secure. But they are perhaps afraid of some kinds of change, or are suspicious about government playing a larger role in their lives and limiting their freedom. Hearing the policies of the first person may make them dig their heels in, to the extent that they’re unwilling to accept that there’s even a problem.

These two people might well see each other as existential enemies. They may demonize each other, and call each other names. They treat each other as punching bags. They are unlikely ever to move each other’s opinions by a hair’s-width. In fact most exchanges between them are not even intended to change the other’s opinion. Instead they’re intended to demonstrate contempt, and to demonstrate their membership of the particular political group they belong to. Their communication is intended to separate.

If we look below the insults and the policies, we see two human beings who are afraid, and who want to feel secure. If we’re prepared to do that with each other, then our communication naturally changes. We treat each other with more sensitivity and respect. We perhaps can now aim to learn from each other and to persuade, rather than lecturing and insulting each other. Our aim is to bring us closer together rather than to drive a wedge between us.

Brooks offers as an example an unlikely friendship between two professors at Princeton. Cornel West is black, and a socialist. Robert George is white, and a conservative. They disagree on absolutely everything! And yet they clearly love each other as brothers. There’s no “civility” in the sense of people being artificially polite. There’s no tolerance, in the sense of people simply enduring each other. There’s love. There’s respect. There’s an openness to learning. And the corollary of this is the lesson that it’s possible to relate lovingly and to disagree and to challenge the other person’s views.

One danger is that we try being friendly to an opponent, it doesn’t work, and then we get mad. But the point isn’t that acting empathetically is something we do in order to get people to agree with us. Empathy is not a “trick” we do to get people to do what we want. Ultimately, acting out of empathy is something we do because it’s a better way to be. As Brooks says, “My point is simple: Love and warmheartedness might not change every heart and mind, but they are always worth trying, and they will always make you better off.” In trying to find our opponents’ humanity, we connect more deeply with our own.

So I’m trying to put this into practice. The first step is to move away from what Brooks called the “outrage industrial complex,” which can be found on social media and much “debate” that goes on in television studios. That’s something I’ve been working on for a while. My social media usage is much less than it used to be. I avoid following people who are popular because they are good at insulting others.

A step I’m only just learning is to see the common concerns that lie beneath our different understandings of the world, and the humanity that lies beneath our contempt.

Actually communicating in an empathetic way with people I completely disagree with? That actually scares me!

I feel I’m only just beginning with this as a life-long task. As someone who has been practicing and teaching lovingkindness meditation for a couple of decades this is humbling. But the aim of loving my enemies feels like a calling — although, by the time you actually love your enemies, you find they are not enemies, but are brothers and sisters.

“Love Your Enemies” isn’t a perfect book by any means. But I do think it’s worth reading because of its central challenge, which is to abandon the temptations of relating with contempt, and to undertake the hard, although rewarding, work of becoming a more loving human being.

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