Getting Stuck
Ajahn Sucitto
From time to time we come to a stuck place in our dhamma practice, sometimes for long periods.
This happens to everybody because it is a stuck place in our life process, a place of holding on based on false assumptions of how the mind is supported and how it is released. That is, we tend to come from the mode of self-orientation, in which we determine, struggle, learn, adapt and get results.
This is natural enough – we want results, right? And to an extent, a necessary extent, this strategy works. Meditation, service, renunciation arouse ardor, faith, commitment, and energy. They establish the context of goodness; and it is that foundation which stays with us beneath the personality level when our efforts break down and we feel we’re not getting anywhere. Because only a certain degree of awakening comes from that personality vehicle. After a while the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish; then it becomes the problem rather than the solution.
So we get stuck. Then the sense of stuckness spins out onto blaming our apparent self, our system of practice, or the people we live with. It triggers a compulsive activity – a saṅkhāra accompanied by ignorance – that diffuses and disperses its distress outwardly onto the manifold rights and wrongs of people and things: from the Buddha (why did he have to make all this so difficult!) on down. Or inwardly: onto assessing our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws and virtues.
We fidget, get busy and distracted and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation—“I can’t practice here with these people,” or “I must have a lot of bad kamma that’s an insurmountable obstacle,” or some other piece of Buddhist jargon.
This is the time to start waking up, because the very compulsion to judge, compare, ruminate and speculate over oneself and thereby create suffering – and believe this process is true and necessary – shows that something more primary is going on here. Compulsion is not a process that supports awakening.
However, reviewing the experience just as an experience is conducive.
We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an “edge.” We are taken to a place of uncertainty, of not being anything that solid, but still with a hankering to be something. We want to stick to some identity or to a conviction in our practice-tradition, but we can’t quite make it.
So instead we stick to uncertainty. This is the edge. It’s not a comfortable place, but it is a piece of the journey. This is supposed to happen; the edge is a place where the self-vehicle gets overhauled. And because of that, the wheels have to come off.
There’s a vital opening and fruition that can occur for anyone who gets to their edge and manages to feel their way past it: it’s only there that the holding on to one’s “self” at the level of personality unravels.
This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the article, “Beyond the Edge.”
