Let Go

A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits

Martine Batchelor

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780861718924
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

When we break free from the habits that limit us, a new world of possibilities opens up. In Let Go, Martine Batchelor leads the way there.Negative patterns of mind may manifest as fear, avoidance, depression, addiction, judgment of self or other, and any of a host of other physical, mental, or psychological forms. Let Go aims at understanding what really lies at the root of these behaviors so we can reclaim control. Each chapter concludes with an exercise or guided meditation as a tool for the reader to work with negative habits in new and creative ways. You don't have to be a Buddhist for them to work. You just need to want to move on.Helpful exercises and guided meditations - designed to build understanding of our negative habits, as well as the confidence and skill needed to instead embrace our greatest qualities - appear throughout the book.Batchelor also looks at Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for depression, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz's use of meditation to deal with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), successful combinations of meditation and Twelve-Step programs, and offers her own innovations.

1 Patterns

Repetition and Adaptability

I once saw a four-million-year-old ant inside a piece of amber. It looked exactly like any ant I would find in my garden today. In spite of having had to adapt to changing environments for millions of years, modern ants have remained more or less identical in appearance to that ant in amber. Ants are both extremely resilient and adaptive, which explains why they have been able to survive for so long in almost exactly the same form.

Everything alive has evolved though replication. Repeated patterns in conjunction with occasional mutations are what make the emergence and transformation of life possible. If there were no stable patterns that repeated themselves, it would be impossible for any creature to continue in a consistent form. But were there only repetition and no possibility of variation, the living system would be unable to adapt to change. Thus repeated patterns ensure stability while random mutations allow the possibility of adaptation to new circumstances. Repetition and adaptability are equally essential for life to continue and evolve.

Robert Wright, in his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, argues that cultures evolve due to the spreading of information and the development of commerce, enabled by self-interested co-operation. He points out that authoritarianism, which seeks to protect the interests of those in power, often tries to stop change. By suppressing variation, the result is either stagnation or regression, which in the end only breakdown and chaos will change. Likewise, when we too are stuck in a fixed pattern of behavior and resist change, it too can cause us to stagnate or regress. We have a choice. Do we want change to be the result of a chaotic breakdown, or do we want to be a responsible agent, creatively involved in the flux and transformation of our own lives?

Neuroscientists argue that novelty in solving problems is linked to the right hemisphere of the brain, while cognitive routines are linked to the left. Both novelty and familiarity are essential for learning. Learning begins in finding a response to changing situations, which then gives rise to habitual patterns of response once we have been repeatedly exposed to similar situations. As human beings we are constantly moving from novelty to rote behavior.

As a child grows and develops, it is through establishing patterns of behavior that he or she learns how to eat, walk, go to the toilet, read, and write. We are surrounded by patterns; we are made of them and live by them. Some patterns, like eating, are necessary for our survival. Others, like driving a car, are learned activities that make our life easier. Both can simply remain as abilities that we possess or have learned. But they can also develop in positive and negative directions. You can eat wisely and appropriately or greedily and inappropriately. You can be a responsible driver or a dangerous one. What patterns of behavior do you want to cultivate? Are you conscious of how a pattern can start to have a negative effect? And do you want to do something about it?

Afraid of the Dark?

I used to be terrified of the dark. When I was a Buddhist nun in Korea, amenities were basic and the toilets were outside. I was so frightened of going to the toilet at night that I would have heart palpitations from imagining that a man with a knife was going to creep up from behind and attack me. One winter, my companion nuns and I decided to sit in meditation all night without sleeping for five days. I was very worried. How would I manage to go to the toilet throughout the night? So I went to my Zen master, Kusan Sunim, to ask his advice. He told me that whenever I felt afraid, I should return to my object of meditation, which, in the Korean Zen tradition, was the question “What is this?”

I thought the Zen master’s question would work as a kind of talisman and thus protect me from any danger. It worked well. My fear vanished when I went to the toilet and I survived the all-night meditation sessions. Some time later, though, it struck me that it was not a magical trick at all. My teacher had given me the gift of paying attention to the present moment. As soon as I came back to the question “What is this?” on my way to the toilet, instead of feeling anxious, I would find myself standing with my feet on the ground, deep in the mountains, in a large monastery in Korea. Who on earth would even know I was there, let alone plan to attack me in the middle of the night?

We often find ourselves in the grip of such emotional patterns, which we then reinforce with habitual patterns of thought. It is entirely natural to be afraid in the dark. It is a good survival mechanism, a valuable adaptive strategy. Because we cannot see well in the dark, our autonomic nervous system is activated and we are primed, ready to move fast at the slightest sign of danger. For a woman walking alone at night in an unknown part of a city, this mechanism is just as important today. But in rural Korea, I would have been far safer at night than during the day, when all sorts of people were coming in and out of the monastery grounds. Some patterns of behavior may be instinctive reactions that no longer make much sense, but once in their grip we still suffer the stress and fear that they provoke.

Who Is Going to Change?

My nephew and my grandmother did not get on at all well. So when the two of them were obliged to stay alone together for four weeks at my mother’s house, I was called in to serve as a peacemaker. By the time I arrived, war had been declared and the two of them were not even speaking to each other. Since my grandmother was eighty-five and my nephew twenty-four, I realized that there would be a better chance of getting my nephew to change his ways than my grandmother. I took him aside and asked him why he was so upset with grandma. He said he had trouble with the way she did things—even when they discussed something, he said, they could never see eye to eye.

I asked him if he thought it realistic to expect grandma at her age to change her ways of doing things just to please him. He thought about this for a while, then agreed that, yes, grandma was too old and set in her ways to change. He accepted that the only thing to do was for him to adapt to her and behave differently. A truce was declared and a peace was established that promised to remain in place for the duration of their time together. And I was able to leave with a light heart. A few months later I overheard my nephew explaining to my mother, who was also having troubles with grandma, that she could not really expect her mother to change at her age and she should learn to be more flexible!

If people’s patterns are compatible, then they tend to live harmoniously. If they are incompatible, there will tend to be tension and strife. This is one of the reasons that social and cultural patterns develop in the first place. In general, people do not like their patterns to be disrupted. They prefer things to keep happening in a way that is familiar to them. This makes them comfortable, but can also lead to the kind of stagnation and fixity against which a younger generation wants to rebel in order to forge its own identity. Nonetheless, even a rebellious teenager will retain some of her parents’ old patterns while at the same time developing new habits and ways of doing things. Over time, old and new come to co-exist and even enrich each other. Again, stability and change are equally necessary for a person and a society to evolve and grow. Likewise, when it comes to considering one’s own patterns of behavior, some will be found to be perfectly functional, while others might need to be radically transformed.

I often observe the painful effects caused by someone’s negative patterns and long for them to see what they are doing and then change. The pain they create for themselves and others seems so self-evident, that one wonders why they persist in saying or doing the same thing again and again. No matter how beneficial it would be for someone to behave differently, entrenched habits are not so easy to overcome. The first problem we face is that it can be very hard for us to see these habits clearly for ourselves. We may be aware of some but remain blind to others until they are pointed out to us.

Blinded by Habits

As a young nun in Korea, one of my responsibilities was to take care of the occasional Western visitors who came to the monastery and answer their questions about Buddhism. Unfortunately, I have always found it difficult to remember all the many lists of terms and doctrines of which Buddhists are often so fond. One afternoon I found myself trying to explain (and remember!) the four noble truths, the most fundamental of all Buddhist lists. I was relieved that I could at least remember the first two: the truth of suffering; that of craving, its origin. But I could not recall the third one—then, just as it was on the tip of my tongue, I noticed from the corner of my eye a monk taking a bucket of persimmons which I had spent most of the afternoon picking. I leapt up, ran over to the monk, wrenched the bucket from his hand and told him in no uncertain terms to whom the persimmons belonged. By the time I returned to our guests, I had remembered the last two truths: that there can be a cessation of craving; and the cultivation of the noble eightfold path.

After the visitors had left, a nun who had been sitting nearby and observed the whole scene asked me if I had noticed anything strange. “Strange?” I said.

“Yes, in your behavior,” she replied.

“My behavior?”

“Well, you became very angry with that monk who picked up your bucket of persimmons while you were in the middle of explaining the four noble truths. It was very strange.”

Only when she mentioned it did I become aware of what I had done. I had reacted unthinkingly and blindly to the “theft” of “my” persimmons.

A pattern of behavior can become so habitual that one barely notices any more what it prompts one to do. One feels automatically, thinks automatically, and acts automatically. Feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations are so entangled that it is hard to see clearly which one triggers the automatic behavior. At such times, it may be that all we can know for certain is that we were in the grip of a habitual pattern, which created painful results for oneself and others. We tend to reinforce these patterns by repeatedly thinking and feeling a certain way, and in so doing we come to believe that we have no choice in being the way we are. How often do we think or say in justification of something we have done: “This is just the way I am. I can’t help it.” But are we really as stuck in our habits as we sometimes assume?

When something unexpected happens, what do we do? Often we are caught in familiar scripts and have a tendency to identify with what they tell us, but this need not be so. Small changes can make an interesting and crucial difference. I recently spent a number of hours correcting a manuscript and then went and deleted all the corrections through misunderstanding an operation of the word processing program. The word “stupid” came to mind. But although it was a stupid thing to have done, that did not mean that I had to agree with the little voice in my head that was telling me what a stupid person I was. Things like this happen because of numerous causes and conditions that come into play at a given time. But it would be a mistake to identify oneself with any one of these circumstances. It is easy and even tempting to say to oneself: “I really am stupid.” But as soon as we grasp at something like stupidity and identify ourselves with it, we become fixated on a narrow and incomplete perception of ourselves.

Gripped by Fear

“There is fear in my mind” describes an experience. “I am afraid” starts the process of identification with this experience. “I am a fearful person” goes on to create a solidification of the experience. At different times we may use these phrases as ways of describing much the same experience. But each one registers a discrete perception we have of ourselves and makes us feel differently. The more we repeat them, the more we entrench that perception and feeling.

“What am I afraid of?” “Where does the fear come from?” “Who is afraid?” As long as we can ask these questions, we keep open the possibility of looking at the origin and conditions of the fear, perceiving things otherwise and diminishing the identification and the solidification. We can live more lightly with ourselves and thus be less stuck in a fixed view of who we are. As soon as we have convinced ourselves that we are a fearful person by nature, we are stuck. Then even the most trifling thing can make us afraid. It seems that fear is our natural state.

Every few years I go to South Africa to teach meditation. Through pictures and stories in the media, one could easily have the impression that this is a very dangerous place. And indeed, for some people living in certain places it is. But on all of my trips, which have taken me extensively throughout the land, I have never once been hurt or in any danger at all. Nonetheless, I have felt deeply afraid in South Africa. Why?

After a while I realized that what made me afraid was not the presence of any real danger, but other people’s fears. Whenever I found myself with South Africans who were nervous and afraid, then I would start being nervous and afraid too. It was a contagious pattern of feeling. But if I was with strong, optimistic people who had fought hard to overthrow the apartheid system, I would experience no fear at all. Since then I have aspired to such fearlessness that can be transmitted to others. What greater gift can there be than to give peace of mind to oneself and others?

South Africa is an excellent place to work with fear. As long as I cover myself well and do not wear or carry anything ostentatious or expensive, I can be assured I have done my duty to my survival instincts. Then I can start enjoying life as it comes. I learn a great deal from visiting social projects in townships or meeting people in their smoky village huts. I can encounter them as individuals leading their own lives, suffering and rejoicing just as I do. A threatening, one-dimensional image of...