This month, we’re embarking on an adventurous study of examining our likes and dislikes. It may sound simple, but the more we look, the deeper this initially playful theme goes.
We’ll explore this theme using a passage by Saint Augustine, “Entering Into Joy”. We’ll use the passage itself, but also Easwaran’s practical commentary from Love Never Faileth.
This theme is also a focus of the weeklong retreats in Tomales this year. If you aren’t able to make it to a weeklong, you’ll get some of the benefit of the workshops right here. If you have attended or will attend a weeklong, here’s your chance to be reminded or prepared of your intentions.
Throughout the book Love Never Faileth, Easwaran describes how our biggest obstacle to evenness of mind is our long list of treasured likes and dislikes, which can interfere with our relationships.
- Have you been able to loosen the clutch of a like or dislike?
- Has this had an impact on a personal relationship?
- Is there something you are working on to build your willpower muscles? We’d love to hear from you!
The excerpt below is from Love Never Faileth, by Eknath Easwaran.
Through meditation and the enthusiastic observance of its allied disciplines, such as slowing down and keeping the mind one-pointed through the day, we can learn to do something that sounds impossible: when thoughts are tailgating each other, we can slip into the flow of mental traffic, separate thoughts that have locked bumpers, and slowly squeeze ourselves in between. It sounds terribly daring – the kind of stunt for which professionals in the movies are paid fortunes. Yet most of us critically underestimate our strength. We can learn to step right in front of onrushing emotional impulses such as fury and little by little, inch by hard-won inch, start pushing them apart. This takes a lot of solid muscle, in the form of willpower; but just as with muscles, we can build up willpower with good, old-fashioned practice.
As you learn to do this, you will find to your immense surprise that there is not the slightest connection between another person’s provocation and your response. There seemed to be a connection because of the rush of the mind: your perceptions were crowding and pushing on angry thoughts of response. Now that those thoughts have been separated your perception of the other person’s behavior has lost its compulsive force.
We all believe there is a causal connection between perception and response; that is why virtually everyone reacts to the provocation of others. But from my own hard-won experience, I can tell you that it is possible, by strengthening the muscles of the will, to push thoughts and impulses so far apart that if someone gets annoyed with you, you can be even more considerate than before; if someone speaks rudely, you can answer with kindness.
This is what living in freedom means, and it is essentially a matter of getting over rigid likes and dislikes. When this freedom is won, a good deal of the mind’s rush-hour traffic subsides. There will be an occasional car on your internal freeways, running a useful errand. Now and then there may even be a well-tuned Harley-Davidson. But by and large, the freeways of body and mind will be amazingly quiet.
Before we can experience this kind of peace of mind, however, a lot of hard work needs to be done. We must find a “middle place,” as Augustine puts it, between likes and dislikes: in practical language, a new vital track within the nervous system on which our energy can travel.