41 - Psychology and Buddhism. Part 2: My own Mindset

Day 6

Yes, it’s still Day 6. But when you can’t talk to anyone, can’t use your phone, and can’t do anything but meditate 10 hours a day, the dimension of time shifts a little. Many things happen and at the same time, nothing happens—so memories, your inner conversations, and the insights become the center of your minutes. The learning becomes intense. Very intense.

During the first six days, we had learned to stabilize the waters of our mind, to concentrate, to meditate on our body, and to become more neutral, stable, and observant. From now on, the challenge wouldn’t just be to meditate, but to develop strong determination—yes, even stronger—because we had to start practicing not moving from our position for the one or two hours the sessions would last. Even if the body hurt, even if your ear itched, even if your feet fell asleep. We had to learn to control the impulse, to begin training in exactly what we would naturally never do: TRY NOT TO REACT. To develop the witness position. To learn to look without stepping into the scene. Pure observation and Strong determination.

The practice now consisted of observing without acting, focusing on the cycle of sensations that might arise: discomfort, pain, calm, peace, irritation, anger, frustration. All of them were valid, equally important, and equally part of ourselves. To observe how they arise, how they grow, how they seem to become unbearable, how they reach a peak, and how—if we manage to maintain our strong determination at that exact breaking point when everything seems to be going to hell—we also see them decrease and dissolve, until they slowly disappear. Like every cycle, they just require time to unfold and be heard.

It all made sense—and even more sense. In psychology we spoke of the same thing. Addictions. My favorite branch within psychoanalysis. Probably because I’ve felt many of the things that fall under that category in my own skin.]

Who hasn’t? Aren’t most of us addicted to something? Substances, people, relationship statuses, material things, pleasures, sensations, work, productivity, activities, emotions, ……………………, and go ahead—fill in the blank with whatever fits you best. Have you ever thought about how this plays out in you?

If we truly observe ourselves deeply, I believe this is foreign to no one.

Have you ever lived through those moments of desperation, of losing yourself, where you realize how little control you have and how a situation exposes your hungriest side? That craving to grab a beer, to call your ex, to eat the forbidden thing or light a cigarette when you’ve deliberately decided to quit… That key moment when, for a second, you decide to send it all to hell: all your efforts, your promises to yourself, and—most importantly—your dignity. Nothing seems to matter when that thought installs itself in your mind: just one cigarette, just one glass, just one last time...

You give in to that impulse. You become an object, pure reaction. The craving seems unbearable, you “decide” (do you decide?) to break the abstinence and with it, your own credibility. You’re capable of anything to get what you’re craving—and I’m not speaking theoretically, I speak from experience. Nothing matters more in that moment than that thought, that idea so deep and yet so unbearable. That ferocious impulse and that crucial moment when maybe—if you’re lucky, very lucky—you can’t get what you’re craving so badly... You panic, and even though you think you’ll die of anxiety, restraint, and despair, and even if you’d sell your soul to get it, if you’re lucky—really lucky—and you don’t get it, then in THAT dark, wild, defining moment, the sensation passes... IT PASSES... It seems unbelievable but it really does, and without even trying or looking for it intentionally: you’ve survived.

We were meditating in a gompa with our eyes closed, but at the same time watching those automatic responses that explode inside us minute by minute like a volcano. We just had to learn to take the right distance and see everything as if behind a glass, a Gesell chamber. Less as protagonists and more as witnesses. As if our mind and thoughts were an old cassette we could take out of the player and disconnect for a while. To feel the body—but in a different way, without the weight of all the associated stories and the tales of "without this, I couldn’t survive", or "the pain is too unbearable to endure". To become conscious of those primitive automatisms, as if we dared to suddenly turn on the flashlight and shine it on those monsters that scare us. They seem completely terrifying, but with a bit of light, we realize they’re just an old sweater taking on a strange shape and casting a spooky shadow. To experience them without clinging to them or to the stories they awaken in us. Let them pass, let them complete their cycle while we watch from the observation room of calm and awareness.

Interesting exercise, isn’t it?

To let the new seeds-behaviors slowly grow with wisdom, patience, and the time they require. We were physically on a retreat in India, but we were also, in a way, planting in the garden of our own mind.

Pain is one of the most primal sensations linked to survival. Like all other sensations, it is also temporary, and if it manages to be heard—and integrated as well—, it tends to disappear. Once again, the secret was non-attachment, but also not aversion or escape. To remain, to go through it—but with distance and equanimity.

• ATTACHMENT / AVERSION – UNCONTROLLED REACTIONS – MULTIPLICATION OF UNCONSCIOUS KARMA: PATH OF THE WHEEL OF SAMSARA = SUFFERING.
  

• OBSERVATION – EQUANIMITY – KARMA FROM CONSCIOUS ACTIONS OR REDUCTION OF UNCONSCIOUS KARMA: BREAKING OR REDUCING THE UNCONSCIOUS CIRCUIT OF SUFFERING = LIBERATION.
  

To stop generating more mental patterns conditioned by past automatic actions and begin creating new patterns.

It’s Buddhism, but it sounds like psychology, doesn’t it? (Did you know there’s such a thing as Buddhist psychology?)

Everything was starting to make sense.

Probably the common ground between psychology and Buddhism is that both, from different origins, aim to understand the human mind in order to figure out how to eliminate human suffering.What we all want—psychologists and “regular people” (LOL).

Have you noticed that most of the time when we think we’re “acting,” we’re just responding to stimuli?

And we still innocently believe we’re choosing our behaviors...

The invitation was to remove the personal miseries that torment our minds from the most basic level. To start getting our hands dirty in the mud. Not through rationalization, but through non-reaction: the cutting of the automatic circuit, taken into practice and action. To begin cutting the branches of a tree so it doesn’t keep growing endlessly and uncontrollably. And for that, we had to start observing from the root.

—Do you really want to settle down somewhere? —A voice inside my head asked Buy a house, build a permanent space? Do you really feel like you want to stop? Do you really believe that in order to have something “yours” and “secure,” it has to be fixed, static, and permanent? Would “building” a “house” make you happy?

I hadn’t realized it, because it was something I’d been repeating without questioning for many years. It seemed I was searching for happiness precisely there, in something solid, with rooted foundations, static, impossible to move or destroy: almost permanent. Almost...It made sense. A house—one of the most grounded things we can imagine, right? I was looking for security, like we all do. A kind of security that would prevent me from flying away, falling apart, dissolving, getting lost, losing everything. As if, just because the house had those characteristics, it would automatically and symbolically provide me with everything I was projecting onto it…

—And what if the house you built catches fire? What if the love of your life leaves you? Are you going to tie your happiness to something material?—said the men who speak with souls...

And even though it might sound obvious or stupid, the truth is that in my automaton, conclusion-spitting mindset, that possibility had never even occurred to me —you see how blind our mind can be sometimes—. But when I heard it from someone else, it sounded completely logical and made me think. It made sense. The blind spots of one’s own Matrix.

Even a house can be completely destroyed, even a marriage can end. All promises of love can break—even those flawless, radiant relationships that seem idyllic, frozen in time. Even the person you trust the most can betray you, and we’ve all heard those unbelievably shitty stories that leave our mouths hanging open from the shock of such an unexpected cold shower…So in the end, there are no real promises of safety that hold up, there’s simply no salvation in the idea that nothing will ever change.

There are simply no guarantees.

My therapist’s voice echoed back to me like an old memory.

—The safety you're looking for doesn’t exist. You have to take the risk—she used to say, dressed formally, sitting on a couch in her office, while I cried, hoping for better answers than that one.

Six years after those conversations, walking through the dust of Bodh Gaya, I was able to see them differently. And like those sudden insights that freeze you into a statue, I had understood it all. My own mindset, what those men who speak with souls told me, and what Buddhism taught. Everything was pointing to the same thing: that desire, the one that lived in my mind as the solution to everything, wasn’t a real or valid desire—it was a story my brain kept telling me, looping like a promised land, proclaiming that once I reached that thing I so deeply longed for, I would finally be happy. The future, always in the future… but deconstructing it a little, all of that was just an illusion. And once I started to poke it a bit, it began to fade away for what it truly was: pure smoke.The crystal castle I had held up for so long had vanished—and had left my hands completely empty. Well, not exactly empty, but full of fear. The path to happiness had to be something else.

—Do you really still see yourself in that movie?—said a voice inside me with a sarcastic grin.

—It’s the only movie available—another voice replied, scanning the video library, without much imagination.

—Going to the same job every day, working at the hospital like you dreamed, dealing with bureaucracy, doing errands, paying bills, always coming back to the same house and going to bed just to repeat it all the next day? Multiply that by five years. Is that really what you want?

Yes, I describe it a bit dramatically, but not out of judgment—some people make it work, and that’s perfectly okay.I wish it had worked for me too, only that in my mind, it had always been a little hard to sustain. I was always looking for something more—some greater purpose beyond that, some deeper meaning, someone else to be there with me, sharing that reality. Maybe that way it would’ve worked. But someone else was the core of the dream—the rest was decoration.The problem was, that someone else also carried the unbearable weight of my happiness.

The last time, in one of all my lives, I had already taken a bite of all that and UNFORTUNATELY, it hadn’t worked. And that unfortunately is in all caps and written with more tears than I’ve ever seen fall from me in my life. So now, the situation was even worse, because I already knew that it didn’t make me as happy as I’d imagined in my mind.I was running out of options— and with them, hope. And then I started to discover something obvious—something we often don’t want to see because it’s not easy to accept—but the truth was that my own happiness had never been truly rooted in myself: it had always depended on someone else, and that was one of the hardest things I had to work on.

That was one of the most important things I had come to try to resolve.

—Is that really what you want NOW?—suddenly the voice wouldn’t shut up.

I hadn’t asked myself that question in a while—only the same answer appeared flashing in the middle of my forehead, even though I didn’t want to repeat it. It was stuck in my mind like an obstacle, like an old desktop wallpaper, that sometimes just became an excuse for suffering.A lament for what “wasn’t achieved,” a subtle victimhood, a role like a well-worn costume that was familiar—and therefore, comfortable. A phrase that crushed me, that left me inert, defeated, and unsatisfied.

But was that phrase still valid? A “former me” had created it, but now that repetitive thought bothered my present self. But how was that even possible? It was already obsolete… How had I not realized it sooner?

Maybe both had become outdated: the question and the answer.

Why was I still allowing a moth-eaten, musty old thought to affect me?

Yes, it would have been beautiful—I won’t deny that. That version of “me” fresh out of university would have loved nothing more than for that plan to actually happen, because it had been her dream for years: to live in a small mountain town, work in a public hospital, help the most vulnerable, and feel “fulfilled” by it, for that to become a purpose strong enough to bring me the contentment I was searching for. But that train had already passed—at least that one, with those details and in that way.

It simply hadn’t happened. And time only moves forward, and it’s not easy to split it—not that it’s impossible, but at least I hadn’t yet figured out how to do it. And under those specific coordinates of conventional time, “that dream” and “that me” never crossed paths. And even though I kept clinging to it like a life vest, an anchor, or a rope showing me the way forward—logically and physically—it just wasn’t possible anymore. That old me cried, but at that same moment, the current me was somehow setting herself free.

—Just let it go... There’s nothing left for you there. Wash your feet and keep walking...—my father would say in one of his signature wise phrases.

Dharamshala, India.

I would’ve liked to remain the psychologist I once was. The one who had a dream office in Copenhagen, several striped shirts that held up her professionalism, a “relatively normal” life with everything under control.

Would I have liked that? Did I really have things so under control?

The same things that wouldn’t let me sleep at night, that tortured my brain nonstop, that triggered anxiety attacks I had to manage like the professional I was—and that I drowned in several glasses of beer just to finally quiet my mind? That control?

We were in a mental debate—all of my “selves”—but deep down, I knew that even if I had an enormous strength to charge forward like a centaur, control was not something I truly had.

Had happiness been left somewhere back in time?

Maybe in that teenager who went to her beloved university in Argentina, full of ideals and highlighted notes. The one who did her hospital internships dreaming that one day she’d wear that white lab coat she now practiced with. For a long time, my dream had been to do the residency and work at the public hospital in a small beatifull town in the south of my country —San Martín de los Andes—, in the Mental Health addictions department, and as I write this, several tears fall. Those who know me, know this.I had planned it in my mind for so long, and waking up every morning to a view of the lake, or the mountains, or something green… it was the only thing I had in my head.It was my poster taped to Homer Simpson’s windshield, and also my favorite mental movie… but none of that was possible anymore. And not because I couldn’t do it, but because that would probably make my past self happy—and I’m no longer sure it would make my current self happy.

I’d love to have my home again, like I did for several years, a grounded home that doesn’t move. To have my plants, my little garden, my cat, all my personal belongings—and for those things to stay with me and not have to disappear with each of my moves or transitions in this nomadic life. To dress like a “normal” person and have “normal” things: events, family birthday parties, watching my little cousins grow up, chatting about everyday things…But that reality no longer existed—and neither did that woman. And after all, what is normal?

I hadn’t intentionally searched for it, but that person had changed.

Most of the time, I didn’t even remember her anymore. I couldn’t inhabit her mind—only saw her in photos now and then, as if she were someone else. A life that felt far too distant, as if it belonged to another person, because so much had happened in between.I don’t know if I truly chose this new path or if it just unfolded naturally, like the wind slowly shaping sand dunes, almost imperceptibly. Maybe it was a bit of both. Maybe it was my own karma, but that story and identity had been left behind a long time ago. And even if it sounded perfect, I was starting to realize there was no turning back.

That dream wasn’t going to work anymore. Whether I agreed or not… I had already expanded.

And through these lines in some way, I mourn her again.

"When the mind expands through a new experienceit never returns to the same place."

As I sat on my step watching my neighbor do her daily laundry, I saw an ant carrying a feather almost 2.5 cm long. Thirty times her size? How many ants could fit inside a feather?

The ground was checkered, with grooves… that made it even harder. For the poor ant, they must have felt like hills—I thought—but that didn’t stop her. The ant kept going… The feather swayed deeply from side to side as if it were dancing. It seemed like it was going to fall at any moment and hit the ground… but it didn’t. And the ant—stubborn—continued. —Everything is possible in India,— I thought.

While watching the scene, I felt the urge to help her. To hold the feather from the side and lighten her load a bit — when one becomes truly present in the here and now, one begins to take part in other universes that didn’t exist before.

—Poor ant, that feather is too heavy for her… what if I gently hold it for her to ease the difficulty? I thought. But would that really be helping her?

I took a few seconds to answer myself… Probably, truly helping her would mean letting her do it on her own, not interfering with my fears and my “superior thoughts” about how things should be done—mainly because I don’t really know, and probably because they’re not even true. They’re just my own versions, and even so, with all her difficulties, she was doing it wonderfully. Steady, focused, and disciplined.

It’s hard to put myself in the tiny shoes of an ant, but I’m sure that after all that, she must’ve felt super powerful. Surely after that big challenge, she could take on another, and another, and one more, until she felt unstoppable… because she did it.

For a moment, I actually heard my own reflection—sometimes we are our own best teachers. Was I talking about the ant or about myself? Was it a sign or just deeper awareness? Either way, I identified with the ant. Little by little, I too was starting to feel that way: super powerful, even if only for fleeting, ephemeral, momentary instants.

Somehow, I had been walking through the worst storm of my life, one that had left me more broken than anything ever had. I was walking a blind path, terribly scared, completely alone—and I’m talking about an inner feeling. I hadn’t realized it until a couple of years later, but maybe it was the aftermath of my father’s death. That event left me without my confidant, my friend, my most beloved person, my support, and my teacher. I was learning to make my own decisions—some louder and more extreme than I ever imagined I could make—but without realizing it, I was also learning to live without that strong, unconditional love. A very long road, one I wouldn’t realize just how long it was until 8 or 9 years after his body left. His soul never would.

I had moved to Copenhagen, thinking once again that I might find happiness there. I had fallen deeply in love, lived in a movie, and had my heart broken even harder—and after 4 years, my questions about my life and happiness remained almost the same. Now I was also left without a sense of direction, without plans or escape, without answers, or path, or ideas, or energy, or hope. I was completely devastated, alone, and in a country I didn’t belong to. I had chosen to keep walking—because the other option was to surrender and die, and I was never going to give up. And even though I was more scared of myself than I’d ever been, I kept going. I walked in the darkness, carrying a huge stone of frustration, sadness, guilt, and heartbreak, all at once and multiplied by a thousand, and by the many times I had tried to solve it and failed.I was reaching the limits of my own fear, but little by little, within an inner panic I can’t even describe, I had made some progress.

I was here, doing a silent retreat in a remote village in India, alone and desperate, reflecting with an ant—but I was alive, and somehow I was surviving the storm. And not just surviving—I had taken the hardest possible path to do so: the most serious and most committed one of my entire life.

I was giving it my all like never before, and little by little, I was starting to feel proud of my bravery and all that inner strength I didn’t even know I had. Between that and the occasional sudden insight, I could begin to perceive a fleeting crack of peace, a small fracture in the wall that imprisoned me—and in the condition of my soul, that was almost like a nectar of life.

—Keep going, ant! I don’t know where you’re headed, I don’t know how far you’ve come, I don’t know how much you have left… The feather is huge, I know, I see it too, but maybe it only looks worse than it is. Maybe its actual weight is less than what its image suggests. Maybe it’s just imaginary, maybe it’s an illusion, a mental barrier to break through—after all, it’s just a feather… Don’t lose faith, just keep going… you can do it. And in that act of love, I was speaking to both of us.

–Why do we fall?– Detective Gordon asked that Batman who wasn’t Batman yet, just a scared and suffering little boy.–So we can learn to get back up—he answered himself.

Buddhists say that the only way we can truly know whether we’ve learned a lesson or not is through the obstacles that appear in our path, and the way we overcome them—or fall into them again. There is no other way. How could we possibly know that we’ve learned something if we don’t put it to the test?

There’s no way to verify the effectiveness of a lesson except through practice. To try facing the obstacle again, and doing it differently—ideally, in a better, more evolved way. There’s no other path. So, each problem, each difficult situation, is a gift of personal learning that allows us to test ourselves, to rediscover who we are so we can keep learning. That way, life becomes a path of growth, understanding, and evolution, which on top of that moves us away from constant complaining, suffering, and that feeling of not understanding why we’re here in this world.

What is life trying to show me? What am I supposed to learn from this situation? What’s the pattern I’m repeating?

Reality wasn’t going to change just because I threw a tantrum, was it? Not if I screamed, or complained, or dissociated, or pretended that what was happening wasn’t happening. At least this new way of seeing things felt a bit more hopeful—and when you find yourself alone, it also becomes the only real option you have to move forward.

At the very least, the most effective one.