Eradicating the Causes of Suffering: Walk the Path and Take Action
There is no path, but only the fool doesn't walk it
This is yet another guest post by my friend Ben, whom I met during my time at Zen monastery in Vermont, US. Ben and his sister Maxi founded Samana, an organization offering an online curriculum for inner work to help people grow emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. You can find out more about their organization by checking out their website www.samana.quest. Ben also writes a regular newsletter around inner work – you can sign up for it via his website.
In my previous entry I wrote about the value of inner work, what makes it important and touched upon two of the four facets of inner work: growing up and cleaning up.
Doing inner work allows us to polish the tool that we use to experience the world: ourselves. Engaging in it thus allows us to deepen our experience of the world and make it more pleasant. It’s also fundamentally the only element we can work with: we cannot control what happens in the world, but we can work on how we relate to what happens differently.
The second part of the article on the value of inner work looks at waking up and showing up. Waking up refers to expanding one’s awareness or put differently, getting rid of Self (with a capital letter). Showing up is embodying responsibility and bringing forth positive change – in whatever way one feels called to. Deepening in all four facets brings one thus closer to living and embodying one’s truth.
👣Your experience of the world is arbitrary, yet path dependent
The statement that "your experience of the world is arbitrary, yet path dependent" has a powerful realization coming with it, so let's dissect it. It’ll also highlight the benefits of engaging systematically in “Waking Up”.
Arbitrary: Where you currently are and what you are currently experiencing is entirely random - you could swap positions with any other person on this planet and you'd simply have their experience, circumstances, and life.
Path dependent: yet, where you currently are, is path dependent. Think back to all the big and small decisions and things happening (and not happening!) that led you to where you are right now, what you experience and how you feel.
If both of these statements hold true, you can work on eradicating the causes of what's bothering you right now. Before we go there, why would you do that though?
The "IFs" all of us cling to
Most of us live our lives with capital letter IFs:
"IF I get that promotion, I will be happy"
"IF I find a partner, I will stop being lonely"
"IF I travel to that place, I will have a wonderful time"
"IF ..."
This leads to us constantly chasing after something out there in a never-ending quest to attain that something - in short, to have a specific experience we long for. Looking at your life, you can clearly see that pattern unfolding over and over again.
Waking up offers an alternative to this: rather than saying "keep chasing after your dreams", it says "let go of them and be free (of suffering)". Nothing in the external world is permanent: holding onto anything that's changing, will inevitably result in suffering, such as, losing a job, not getting a promotion, losing a loved one, being stuck in a place, not being stuck in a place, etc.
Eradicating the "causes of what's bothering you" equals "freedom from suffering" which equals "happiness". This is something that persistent observation, e.g., via contemplative practice such as meditation, hammers home.
Waking up, e.g,. meditation, allows one to look at their experience right now and to let go of any attachment to it. You'll begin to realize that your experience is arbitrary (if the circumstances would have been different, your life right now would be different and so the experience you'd be having), yet path dependent (all the elements that came into play resulted in you having the experience you have right now). That results in you taking it less and less personal. Things simply are, they appear and disappear. You become less and less attached to what's happening to you and instead begin to enjoy the fleeting nature of everything more.
Learning meditation
Meditation is a wonderful growth modality for "waking up". The practice of meditation can be classified into two broad categories:
concentration practice, such as focusing on one's breath and returning to it when distracted with increasingly deeper concentration states
insight practice, such as working with questions or a focusing on a certain flavor of experience, e.g., the aforementioned impermanence
In order to do decent insight practice, one needs to have a certain baseline level of concentration.
As one faces themselves when meditating, it can be one of the most difficult and rewarding activities one can engage in! Ultimately, one embarks on a path to realize what's worthwhile doing for themselves: in order to know what's worthwhile doing, one needs to sit still and observe.
Often, when meditating, we realize we’re hung up on something: the same persistent thought pops into our head, a strong emotion washes over us – whatever it is, these challenges can get in the way of meditating. Although it’s recommended to keep on meditating for as long as possible, at times it’s helpful to shoehorn in a technique to deal with emotions to figure out what’s happening, resolve that and then go back to “waking up”. Below is one of the techniques I’ve discovered and applied.
💔A 30-minute technique to deal with emotional discomfort
We all go through the ups and downs of life: losing a job, not getting a promotion, losing a friend or partner, something turning out different than we expected or hoped it would, ... The list is endless.
One of the techniques that can help with dealing with this emotional turmoil is Gendlin's Focusing technique. I've written some brief instructions below, feel free to reach out to me should you run into any issues or have any questions.
Focusing is a method of self-exploration and problem-solving developed by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin. The goal of focusing is to access one's "felt sense," a bodily sensation or intuition that can provide insight into one's thoughts and feelings. Focusing can be used to gain a deeper understanding of oneself, to solve problems, and to make decisions.
The steps are as follows:
Preparation: Begin by taking a moment to relax into your body and focus on being positive and content in the moment.
Clearing a Space: Start by asking yourself "How do I feel?" and "Why don't I feel great right now?" Then, make a mental list of the problems that are currently affecting you, both long-term and immediate. Focus on being mindful of these problems in your awareness for a minute, but don't delve into them further.
Finding the Felt Sense: Ask yourself which problem is the biggest, heaviest, or worst, or choose one to focus on. Hold that problem in mind and pay attention to the sensations in your body. Try to get a holistic sense of the problem and your body's response to it. Look for a vague, fuzzy, unclear feeling that corresponds to the whole problem. This feeling is called the "felt sense." Stay with the felt sense for a minute, but don't try to break it down or think about it intellectually.
Finding a Handle: Try to find a word or short phrase that captures the entire feeling of the problem. This should arise naturally from observing the felt sense and is not something you should generate intellectually. Keep trying different words until you find one that feels accurate and clicks with the entire felt sense. When you have found the right handle, observe the felt sense through the lens of this handle until it stabilizes.
Asking: Directly ask the felt sense "What is this?" "What is it about this whole thing that makes me so [handle]?" "What is the worst of this?" "What does this felt sense need?" Use the handle to keep the felt sense present in the moment and wait for an answer. Ignore any intellectual answers that come to mind and wait for a response from your body. Repeat the question if necessary.
Receiving: When an answer comes, you may get a word or phrase that captures the new handle. Don't worry about believing the answer or thinking about its implications, just focus on the new handle. Sit with the new handle and the felt sense together for a minute.
Stopping or Continuing: Imagine stopping the process and see how it feels or imagine continuing and see how that feels. Do what feels right to you. If you stop, remember the previous handle and how it shifted to the new one for later recall. If you continue, start again at "Finding the Felt Sense," but use the current handle to interact with the felt sense.
Some emotions are pleasant, some neutral, some unpleasant
This process takes practice to be effective and may involve several shifts in the felt sense to reach resolution for a given problem. It is important to maintain a positive, curious, and objective attitude throughout the process. The book "Focusing" provides more information on common obstacles and challenges at each step, as well as helpful techniques for addressing them and examples to guide you.
It's important to be open and non-judgmental when focusing, and to avoid trying to push away or suppress any sensations or feelings that come up. Instead, allow yourself to be with them and explore them.
As you can see from Gendlin’s Focusing technique, engaging in “waking up” and “cleaning up” (the emotional healing part) is often interlinked. The other facet, “growing up” is the cognitive and conceptual element in this triad: it’s enhancing our mental models and relating to others. Engaging in this trinity of inner work is complemented by “showing up”: embodying responsibility. Sooner or later one needs to act in accordance with one’s inner world to keep making further progress! Showing up does exactly this: it offers a way to bring forth positive change in the world.
🔨If you want to change, act
One of the central questions of my life is to find an answer to the question "what's worthwhile doing?". For me, that question has been a reliable companion for the past couple of years, leading me to interesting insights and helping me "do more of the things I deem important" (relationships, presence, being in nature, engaging in ways to protect our environment ...) and less of the things I deem unimportant (having a career, making serious money, being liked, ...).
Most of us just "do" things. We're patterns unfolding over and over again. Even when we intend on not doing anything, we make a choice to "do nothing" and "not do something else".
In order to figure out what's worthwhile doing, one needs to:
have harmonious relationships with others and learn from them by growing up
have ways and means to skillfully deal with emotions by cleaning up
be still to see what comes up via waking up
Lastly, once one has gone through multiple cycles of all three of the above, one has to embody that change.
As so many things in life, positive feedback loops take time to build:
after having found to oneself a bit more ...
... one can start embodying more responsibility in the world ...
... with each action one takes, that sense of meaningful responsibility and real-life enacted change grows ...
... and so on.
Act to effect change
“If you want to change, act.” - Heinz von Foerster
Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian physicist, systems theorist, radical constructivist, and philosopher. He was a polymath, traversing different disciplines seamlessly and effortlessly.
Right after I had finished my Abitur (the German A-levels), I spent a fair bit of time branching out, reading up on topics I didn't have the time or energy to read up on when I was a high-school student. It was a wonderful time that brought me in touch with a lot of different perspectives and ideas, one of them being Heinz von Foerster's way of thinking.
To me, his work is characterized by a deep sense of responsibility and playfulness. His research had brought him to the conclusion, that perception is not independent of us acting in the world: in order to see, we need to interact with the world. Our actions affect our way to see the world, which in turn affects our actions. Perception and action are thus intricately linked, something that is scientifically shown via Molyneux's problem.
Hey, Ethan here. The work that Ben is doing is transformative, I highly recommend checking out his Samana program if you’re interested.
I hope you enjoyed this guest post and found it as helpful as I have.
Ever since Ben wrote this I’ve been doing the Gendelin processing and it’s had a huge impact on my life. Sometimes I go with the traditional Internal Family Systems (IFS) route, but gendelin is a nice alternative that feels a little gentler and easier to access at times.
I highly recommend you try out the process for yourself.
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