How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [45]
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Notice Dislike
The Exercise: Become aware of aversion, the arising of negative feelings toward something or someone. These could be mild feelings, such as irritation, or strong feelings, such as anger and hatred. Try to see what happened just before the aversion arose. What sense impressions occurred—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, or thought? When does aversion first arise during the day?
REMINDING YOURSELF
Post the words “Notice Dislike” in places where aversion might arise, such as on your mirror, TV, computer monitor, and car dashboard. You could also use small pictures of someone frowning.
DISCOVERIES
When we do this exercise, we find that aversion is more common in our mental/emotional landscape than we realized. It may begin our day, arising when the alarm rings, or as we get out of bed and find that our back hurts. It can be triggered by events on the morning news, by a long line at the subway or gas station, or by an encounter with family, coworkers, or clients.
Once, I was waiting in the car for my husband to come out of the house. I looked idly out the window and noticed that near the fence many long dandelions had grown up and they were going to seed. Instantaneously an impulse arose to jump out of the car, grab some pruning shears, and whack them back into submission. This was accompanied by the thought, “Off with their heads!” I realized that this was the seed of anger, the seed of all the wars waged on this earth, lying dormant within me. It’s not that I hate dandelions. Their bright golden faces are a wonderful thing to meditate upon. Close up, they can change a negative mind-state quite quickly. It’s not that I intend to let them flourish, but if I trim that part of the lawn, I will wait until I am not doing it from aversion. I might ride the mower practicing appreciation for the life of the dandelions and loving-kindness for all the beings who make their home in the grass and weeds.
DEEPER LESSONS
It may be dismaying to discover how pervasive aversion is in even a single day in a life that we might describe as happy. It is, however, very important to become aware that feelings of dislike are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Aversion is one of the three afflictive mind-states described in the Buddhist tradition—greed (or clinging), aversion (or pushing away), and delusion (or ignoring). They are called afflictive because they afflict us the way a virus afflicts us, causing distress and pain not only to ourselves but to those around us.
Aversion is the hidden source of anger and aggression. It arises from the notion that if we could just manage to get rid of something or someone, then we would be happy. What we humans wish to get rid of in order to become happy could be as trivial as a mosquito or as large as a nation.
There are few ideas more absurd than the notion, “If I could arrange things—and people—to be just as I want them, then I would be happy.” It is absurd for at least two reasons. First of all, even if we had the power to make everything in the world perfect for us, that perfection could only last a second because all the other people in the world have different ideas of how they would like things to be and are working to get them their way. Our “perfect” is not perfect to anyone else. Secondly, forcing perfection on the world is bound to fail because of the truth of impermanence—nothing lasts forever.
Sometimes as I am walking around the monastery, I notice a subtle flavor in my mind. It is a faint but pervasive sense of aversion. It comes from what I consider to be part of my job, noticing things that need to be fixed or changed. It comes from noticing imperfection. When this necessary noticing makes my mind-state go sour, I have to switch for a while to “appreciating things as they are.”
Mindfulness practice helps us to become at ease no matter what conditions exist, and