In this excerpt from Wake Up To Your Life, the author is speaking about the reason people come to meditation. However, swap out the word ‘meditation’ for ‘self-development work’ as a more broad way to consider the message.

Imagine that you are in a wooden boat in the middle of the ocean. The boat is sinking, and sharks are circling around you. You realize that you have to build a new boat out of the old, leaky boat, and you have to do it without sinking. How do you do it?

We come to meditation for many reasons. Fundamentally, however, we come because the boat is sinking-we can’t go on living as we have before. The sharks, the habituated patterns, are circling.

Perhaps stress in your life has reached the breaking point and you know that you have to change or die. Perhaps, in the face of a major change-divorce, illness, a career shift, retirement-you realize that you can’t function the way you used to. You may have been touched by an experience that dropped the bottom out of your life. Perhaps you wake up one day feeling no connection to your life and realize that you are one of the walking dead. No matter what brings us to meditation, we start to practice because we want to change the way we live.

Change comes about in one of two ways: by force or by choice.

An attorney, for instance, is pressured to take on more cases to increase his billable hours. He spends more time in case preparation and settlement negotiations, less time relaxing with his wife and family. He disregards the growing tension and rigidity in his body, relying on muscle relaxants to keep him functioning at work and sleeping pills to put him to sleep at night. The drugs are increasingly ineffective, however, and the attorney’s health deteriorates until he collapses and can no longer function. This scenario is an example of forced change. Forced change happens when we are not present in our lives. We dismiss signs that something is wrong and push forward until established structures break down. In the case of the attorney, he ignored. the tension in his body until he collapsed and could no longer work. Of course, he can continue to ignore his body and keep working until he dies. Either way, he changes.

Forced change is the consequence of being locked into a set view of who and what we are, regardless of circumstances. As conflict between actual circumstances and our set view of things intensifies, something has to give. Change takes place, often violently and tragically. Ignoring symptoms causes health to deteriorate, obsession with work causes marriages to fail, and ruthless competitiveness leads to ineffective action, causing careers to be lost.

When change takes place by force, we have no say in which part of our life collapses. That is determined by forces outside our intention. We are stuck in habituated patterns and cannot see the needed changes or the inevitable consequences of our behaviour. We are, in effect, victims of our own patterned behaviour, and we remain so until we wake up to what is happening and take responsibility for making changes in our lives. Forced change, even when the stakes are a matter of life and death, does not, by its nature, lead to heightened awareness or any sort of internal transformation. Health, relationships, careers, businesses, and countries may fall apart, and the same blind patterns keep operating in the ruins.

Change by choice, however, is transformation. As long as patterned behaviours consume our energy and attention, change is impossible. Habituated patterns remain intact and bring back, again and again, the discomfort and problems we experienced before. Change by choice becomes possible only when we have free attention, a level of attention that is not completely absorbed by conditioning. The ability to act and respond (rather than react) depends on the ability to maintain such a level of attention.

Internal transformative work is primarily destructive. Those parts of our lives that result from and depend on habituated patterns will fall apart. In other words, to do this work, we must be willing to die to the life we have known. The essence of the dismantling process is the ability to maintain attention in the face of habituated reactions and not be consumed by them. Therefore, the initial work of internal transformation is cultivating attention, and meditation practice is one of the oldest and most reliable methods.

The essence of all internal transformative work is original mind the open, natural awareness that is our human heritage. Conditioned patterns of perception and behaviour prevent this natural awareness from manifesting in our lives. Internal transformative work consists of dismantling habituated patterns that cause us to ignore what is taking place inside and around us.

Attention is the primary tool.

As the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “The practice of meditation is the study of what is going on. What’s going on is very important.”

• Excerpt from Wake Up To Your Life by Ken McLeod, Chapter 3, Page 49-51

Commentary:

Depending on where you’re at in your life, this excerpt can come across with a varying degree of intensity. On the one hand, the author is clearly sharing a warning. On the other hand, he’s presenting an opportunity. Even if you feel like you’re in a tough place at this moment in your life, the exciting thing is that change is absolutely within your reach. It’s easy to believe that the change we seek is external to us, however, this is always an illusion. We create our reality in front of us in every moment