If the Buddha Got Stuck_ A Handbook for Change on a Spiritual Path - Charlotte Sophia Kasl [15]
It’s our attachment to something being different rather than the situation itself that causes suffering. Imagine two people who both lose their jobs. One is rageful, can’t sleep, is angry at the company, and feels worthless as a result of not having work. The other person, while not happy with the situation, looks around for volunteer work, considers downsizing his lifestyle, and starts exploring all the possibilities. He is able to enjoy his free time and has no sense of failure because he doesn’t equate having a job with who he is. Same situation, different reactions based on levels of attachment or non-attachment.
On the path of getting unstuck we become responsible for our own emotional turbulence.
As a starting place for recognizing attachments, simply notice your physical and emotional reactions when something doesn’t go your way. If you get irritated, afraid, upset, or hurt, it signals that you are demanding that a person or situation be different than it is. It is your attachment that creates your suffering, not the actual event.
Any time you feel upset, angry, judgmental, hurt, and so on, if you’ll notice your emotions (how you are suffering) and what you want to be different, you will tap into your ego-judging mind.
The concept of attachment also relates to your emotional experience. To push away natural expressions of grief, sorrow, anger, and hurt is to shut down against one’s humanness, or you could say it becomes an attachment to not feeling. As a result, you become habituated to holding back, avoiding, or disowning parts of yourself, which creates holding patterns in the body. These manifest as repetitive responses to life situations—automatically becoming afraid, defensive, resisting change, or tightening up throughout the body. These patterns are conveyed through your body language, movement, and voice—there is an incongruence or sense of being off center. This leads to what Buddhism refers to as samsara—the wheel of suffering—having unconscious, repetitive emotional responses to life’s situations . . . a.k.a. being stuck.
The Third Noble Truth: Ease and peace of mind are possible. The Third Noble Truth is the step of hope—there is a way out. Peace of mind is possible. If we allow ourselves to be exactly where we are in the moment—fully present, noticing whatever is happening inside us and outside us—we can trade in judgment, fear, and shame for curiosity and fascination. Through awareness we start easing our demands, expectations, rituals, and self-grasping. We go about our lives, give it our best, and let go of the outcome. Even if it’s momentarily uncomfortable we learn to drop down into our body where we are closer to experience, thus our real self. We become more of an observer to life’s dramas; we are no longer embroiled in them.
The Fourth Noble Truth: The path toward greater ease and peace is found in the Eightfold Path. The Buddha created eight steps to be used as a guide to living an enlightened life. This path encompasses the categories of wisdom (right view, right intentions), ethics (right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort), and meditation (right mindfulness, right concentration). They are circular stepping stones to help lead us away from attachments and external trappings, into the heart of our existence. They are about living from a place of truth, mindfulness, understanding, and acceptance in all aspects of our lives.
Impermanence
If the Four Noble Truths help us to see how we create suffering by clinging to our thoughts, the concept of impermanence reminds us that nothing is static. Everything is dynamic, alive, interacting, and in motion—the cells, molecules, atmosphere, thoughts, plants, animals.