Tricky Mind

The mind plays a lot of tricks.

When you are living a life in which you can’t simply fulfill your wishes and do what you want, strange feelings and incredible forms of obsessive greed can arise over things that had never really seemed a problem before.

When I had been a layman, my greed was spread over a wide range of things, but in monastic life it was all focused on sugar and sweets. Here I was, an ordained monk trying to lead a spiritual life, acting like a hungry ghost, dreaming about sugar. Another American monk even had his mother send big boxes of sweets and chocolate cakes.

Because the greed was so focused, I could easily contemplate it. Learning to reflect on these desires, these obsessions of the mind, is very important.

It’s here that we often need the precepts to stop us from following our habits or whatever is easiest to do. Precepts help us to see our impulses, how we follow them, and the results. The restraint and restriction of the precepts give us a sense of stopping.

With reflective awareness, we begin to notice how strong the mind’s impulses and compulsions can be. We see them as mental objects rather than as needs we must fulfill.

Even though the mind sometimes screams, "I can’t take any more of this," the truth of the matter is that we can take more. Human beings have amazing powers of endurance. If we learn to endure and not just be caught in the momentum of impulsivity, then we begin to find a strength in our practice.

We don’t have to be a slave to habits and impulses.


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We can’t control what arises in the mind, but we can reflect on what we are feeling and learn from it rather than simply being caught helplessly in our impulses and habits.

Even though there is a lot in life that we can’t change, we can change our attitude towards it. That’s what so much of meditation is really about—changing our attitude from a self-centered, "get rid of this or get more of that" to one of welcoming life as it is.

Welcoming the opportunity to eat food that we don’t like. Welcoming wearing three robes on a hot morning. Welcoming discomfort, feeling fed up, wanting to run away. This way of welcoming life reflects a deeper understanding.

Life is like this.

Sometimes it’s very nice, sometimes it’s horrible, and much of the time it’s neither one way nor the other. Life is like this.


Extract from: Life Is Like This, by Venerable Ajahn Sumedho