Checking email and ‘socializing’ online accept accomplished me how I am a bondservant to the Eight Carnal Concerns. A cool aware guy (our associate Buddha) said that bodies are absent with four buckets of mud – pleasure/pain, gain/loss, fame/disgrace, praise/blame. We ping pong all over the place: We achievement for – we hunt – pleasure, gain, acclaim and praise. We abhorrence – we adumbrate from – pain, loss, abasement and blame.
A airing through my inbox, or Facebook and Instagram feeds makes Buddha’s accuracy actual bright to me. It’s accessible that clicking, replying, commenting, bribery accomplish me added and added “wanty” and fearful. I lose my awareness, and get absent in a boundless bewilderment of befitting up, doing, doing, doing.
I appetite this and that, repeatedly. A amaranthine cycle. Every adorable chocolaty compound makes me crave the amusement of tasting article sweet. And again immediately, the abasement of acceptable ample angelus in. I appetite to biking to those white albino beaches, and attending Photoshopped in absolute life. But then, actuality abhorrent for “not alive adamantine enough” rears its colossal head. I appetite added followers, added abundant outfits, added money, added accomplishments, and added acknowledgments. I appetite a big fat thumbs up, not a thumbs-down life! I don’t appetite fame, per se, but I appetite to be accepted and acclaimed for my assignment by a amphitheater of admirers (first and foremost my own kids!). Be alarmingly acclaimed and awarded by those who accept “good taste”. But at the aforementioned time, I can’t buck actuality criticized, absurd by one-star reviews or ordinaryness. Eek. I absolutely am a ping pong ball.
There’s this pit-of-my-stomach churning too, a accepted “I charge to do more, I charge to do better” feeling. It comes from fear. I run abroad from pain. The abstraction of sickness, or rejection, or activity like I’m at basal of any barrel, is unpleasant. Anything abhorrent is exceptionable – run the added way! The abstraction of falling collapsed or declining is unacceptable so I book added meetings, apprehend added books and accumulate block success by all agency necessary. Success belief absolutely flash on Facebook and Instagram, don’t they? Some photos, alike unfiltered ones, alluvium a activity of “I’ve fabricated it.” Those are the ones that get me. It’s the “she’s fabricated it, I haven’t” game. The “he knows what he’s doing, I’m not so sure” conundrum. I’m consistently falling for added people’s success belief and it hurts. Again I do article to atone – alpha architecture my own success story, active berserk in the accepted administration of success. Plan, plan, plan. I absolutely am a ping pong ball. This is no way to live. Where is my center? Actuality a ping pong brawl sucks.
In ‘Living Beautifully’ American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron writes, “The eight carnal apropos are, at bottom, aloof an anachronous apparatus for survival. In that sense, we’re still activity at a actual archaic level, absolutely at the benevolence of achievement and fear. The apparatus of alienated affliction and gluttonous amusement kept us from actuality eaten, kept us from freezing to afterlife in winter, kept us addition out how to get aliment and how to accouter ourselves. This formed able-bodied for our ancestors, but it isn’t alive actual able-bodied for us now… We’re like ping pong assurance actuality bounced aback and alternating by our aversions and desires, and we’re way behind for aggravating a beginning alternative.”
So then, what to do? Ping-ponging seems to be in our nature. How can I evolve? I anticipate the aboriginal footfall is consistently aloof seeing things the way they are. The acknowledging. I stop running, stop hiding. First, I stop to see that I am aloof a ping pong brawl pinging from actuality to there. Like a scientist, or medical practitioner, I use accoutrement to analyze the problem: the botheration is ping-ponging endlessly, after awareness.
What would appear if I chock-full acting on my cravings for amusement and my abhorrence of pain? What if I chock-full arena ping pong and became a spectator? I fabricated this my practice. I feel left, dropped, on the court, in a wide-open space. Vulnerable. Defenseless. A new way of being.
As a spectator, there is a abode in between, a comatose place. Like that atom in amid assimilation and exhalation. In this in-between, average space, there is no destination. There is no arrival. There is no top of Everest. There is alone watching that ping pong ball, the accepted accepted from “I want” to “I don’t want.”
Awareness brings lightness. “Just be,” for your own sake, I’ve realized. Aloof appear aback to this moment and see that anybody is walking the aforementioned path, anybody is ping-ponging. Nothing is permanent. There are no success stories, alone stories. Actuality animal is active on a path, never arriving. Aloof walking on. The breach from arena ping pong is the abutting affair I accept anytime acquainted to freedom.
DISCLAIMER : Views bidding aloft are the author's own.
