The Habit of Observing
My strong belief is that the most transformational thing we can do is to see our own thoughts and behaviour clearly, at finer and finer levels of detail, and with as much compassion as possible. This sounds simple, but it’s not. Over the years our conditioning has created many ways in which what is actually happening is blocked from our conscious awareness, fully or partially; or if we are able to see it, we berate ourselves and want to skip right over seeing into ‘fixing’ it.
Most of the writing on this website is about this path of observing our own minds. How do we get in the habit of doing that? What are some of the ways we can increase our ability to observe? What are some of the ‘side effects’ or challenges we can expect to come up as we increase our ability to observe?
Observing means seeing the “what” of right now – not getting all tangled up in the “why”, or caught up in the past and future. Here is an example of observing my own mind that occurred just last week:
There was something that might or might not happen in my life, but was out of my control regardless. The last time I noticed, it seemed like I didn’t care whether it happened or not.
When I meditated last Sunday, I noticed that a subtle but pervasive feeling was coming up repeatedly – I was noticing that I did want a certain outcome. My first reaction was to push away that ‘seeing’ – wanting that particular outcome seemed uncomfortably egotistical. There was a little bit of revulsion that was felt physically. I wanted to ‘manage’ the feeling by reminding myself that it was out of my control anyway, in hope that the feeling would go away.
So, the observing was: seeing that the feeling was there in the background; seeing that I didn’t want it to be there, and feeling that rejection in my body; seeing that a desire and a way to ‘manage’ it arose spontaneously; seeing that I could simply see all of that without doing anything about it. Just letting the discomfort and the awareness be there.
“We awaken to self-knowledge through the relentless practice of self-observation. Self-observation is not analysis; it is simply noticing what we think, how we think, what we fear, how we react, and what our strategies of behaviour are. Notice, notice, notice. In observing ourselves objectively – that is, without judgement – we can begin to see clearly our fear-based ideas of how we’re supposed to be, how others are supposed to be, how life is supposed to be. In seeing through our beliefs, we penetrate the countless layers of illusion that silently run our lives.”
Ezra Bayda, Saying Yes to Life
Next: Through the Thorns
