Practitioner reflection: Giving Fixation the Slip
Paul Buckingham, a regular meditator at our Centre, offers this reflection….
Meditation is both a personal trainer and a sage. Personal trainer, because it trains us to be able to return our attention to a neutral focus, such as our breath. That’s the backbone of meditation. And sage, because by allowing us to observe the activity of our minds, it teaches us that our thoughts come and go.
Even alone these two facets of meditation are powerful, the centring and the passing-of-thoughts awareness. But coupled, they work together in beautiful harmony to help those of us with that unfortunate tendency to fixate.
The fixating mind is a special animal. It plays a clever little game with painful thoughts. (I say this as a card-carrying fixator.) When something painful comes along, you believe that it renders life unbearable. So what do you do? You don’t want life to be unbearable, so you keep thinking about the problem to try to solve it. You truly believe that life will never be bearable until you do solve the problem. Yet the more you think about it, the worse it seems. And the worse it seems, the more it takes over your outlook—until nothing else in your life, no matter how objectively good, has value for you.
I’ve let myself get caught up in this game time and time again, allowing thoughts to outgrow themselves and become grotesque. I shudder to think about all the occasions when this fixating has thrown me into despair, strained my relationships.
But meditation offers a way out, through the centring and the passing-of-thoughts awareness that it teaches. As we meditate and observe the continual roiling of the stream of thoughts, we become familiar with this aspect of the mind, the coming and going—so familiar that in moments of pain we’re still able to believe in the transience of thoughts. Even in the midst of a thought so potently charged as to be debilitating, we can believe that the thought will pass.
And what’s the mechanism that actually allows it to pass? Of course, it’s the centring that we learn through meditation, the gentle returning of our attention to our breath, or whatever neutral focus we choose. However long it takes for the intensity to subside—a few minutes, a day, a week—the value of the good things in our lives eventually starts to shine through. And if we’re paying attention, we notice islands of respite when we’re simply getting on with our day, the pain momentarily forgotten which just before had seemed so engulfing. Who knows, viewed from one of those islands of respite, perhaps the thought that triggered the cascade won’t seem so catastrophic after all.
