快乐的秘密

Last summer I picked up The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle for the first time, and at once something clicked. With incredibly lucid¹（明晰的）, unadorned（朴素的） prose, he describes exactly how we perpetuate² our own suffering in our minds, keeping our pain and worry alive with our repetitive thoughts about past and future. We expend³ a great deal of energy this way creating problems for ourselves, and making ourselves a problem, when what would actually free us is a return to awareness⁴ of the present moment (the only moment that truly exists). Although I'd read something like this before in other books — usually by prominent Buddhist⁵ teachers — it hadn't sunk in on more than an intellectual level. And I had certainly never known how to apply it in my day-to-day life.

 

The key word he used was nonresistance. Which meant neither running away from discomfort⁶ nor fighting it. Instead of immediately commencing the usual struggle, he recommended that we allow the feeling, and give it no more attention than nonjudgmental observation. I honestly didn't know if I could I sit still and just be with an experience, even when the experience was wholly unpleasant, but it was worth a try. Could I refrain from jumping on the thought train and turning everything into a major issue? Could I break a lifelong, ingrained, unconscious habit?

 

The answer turned out to be yes — when I'm paying attention! I'm a lot more conscious of my unconscious reactions now than I was, so when the intense anxiety possesses me, as it did when I was in the midst of packing for my latest move, I can sometimes catch myself in the act of resistance.

 

I was in the car with an old and dear friend, on the way to what I had hoped would be a lovely Sunday brunch⁷, when it seized me, violently, like a blindsided hostage. I was seasick⁸ with dread⁹; my stomach knotted and my heart raced. The downtown streets looked ugly, squalid, and hostile. At first I tried to fight the feeling, then despaired at the thought that our outing was ruined.

 

Suddenly I remembered Tolle's words: resist nothing.

 

I relaxed into my discomfort. As if it were the most normal thing in the world. Okay, I decided¹⁰, so I'm going to feel like this right now. I neither battled nor ignored the sensations, but simply allowed them to blow through my system like a minor¹¹ typhoon, as my friend continued to tell me about her new house. By the time we were parking, they were already ebbing¹² away. When we sat down at a table, it was hard for me to believe how I had felt only minutes before, and we did have a lovely brunch, after all.

 

Who woulda thought it? Certainly not me. But that's the beauty of not thinking.

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