Stop Fixing, Start Practicing

There is a sutta where the Buddha talks about what it was like in his lifetime before he started practicing. And I don’t want to be the one to have to tell you this, but we’ve been doing the same things over and over and over since human beings have been walking this earth. We have been hurting one another. It is the nature of samsara, the world we live in, which is the cyclical dukkha realm. It is the nature of this realm to fall into greed, hatred, and delusion. 

We live in these very difficult times, and everything in us says, “I should be fixing this, changing this. I should do something to make it different from what it is, because there’s no way I could accept things as they are. Even the idea of some teacher sitting up here trying to imply that I should accept things the way they are, I’ve got a problem with that too.”

I know that feeling. But then I think about who I was when I stumbled into the dharma. Oh my God, I was so volatile. I could be nice, and I have always had a way of being funny, but if you did not do what I wanted, I was a hair short of knocking you down, pushing you, guilting you, shaming you. It didn’t matter if it got you to do what I wanted you to do. It seemed appropriate. For people like me that are so aversive, we try to get our way by pushing, pushing, pushing. And when we get our way, we think everything’s good.

There’s a Tibetan text called The 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas. One of the practices says that getting your way when you’re angry just creates more enemies. Winning the battle might feel like you won, but it is the opposite. You are just creating more enemies. Because every time you win something, this is what you begin to learn: “I have to win all the time.” And for an aversive mind, there’s never a shortage of enemies that need to be fought.

I had to learn how to stop fighting.

In our world right now, fighting is the thing. If we’re not winning, that means we’re losing. That’s the only alternative we have, we either win or we lose. That constant fighting toward winning is killing us. It is absolutely, 100 percent killing us, and as soon as we win, we feel all easy, but it never lasts.

Somehow, we must learn the difference between the ease of getting our way and the ease that comes with wisdom. There is a distinction between ease that comes from wisdom—which is the third ennobling truth that cessation of dukkha comes from wisdom—and the ease that comes from getting our way. Until we see the difference between those two, we will just keep spinning around samsara in the same way: ease, tension, ease, tension, ease, tension. 

This is what Buddha was going through. He had all this intoxication with youth, life, beauty, happiness. And then, when he started leaving the castle and seeing the world, he saw the mess of it all. He even talked about drawing back when he would see these dead bodies, or old people, or people who were sick. He would draw back and physically shade his eyes. He asked himself, “How come I can’t look at that? It’s going to happen to me too.”

So he left. And, of course, as all practitioners do, he found some great teachers who could teach him deep concentration. He could get very concentrated, very deep, very beautiful, very blissful, but it’s short-lived. Concentration comes and goes. It’s a conditioned experience. It wasn’t going to help him understand dukkha. So he left. 

There’s something fundamental here. Think about what the Buddha was saying. He did not want to fix all the problems or get still and peaceful. He wanted to understand the difficulty he was having in the first place. “How come I’m having so much difficulty with things in life that are normal?”

After reaching enlightenment, he went out in the world and he did a lot. He spent forty-five years teaching all over India, helping governments and all different kinds of people. His fundamental practice was mindfulness. It was not the mindfulness that we see on TV, not the mindfulness with the little stream going by and a little breeze keeping you awake. It was the kind of mindfulness that you cultivate, an ability to stay with something difficult not out of force but out of kindness. There is something to be understood if you stay with difficulty without fixing it.

I did not know that when I came into the practice. Most of my life as a Black woman was spent fighting with the system to try to get something. When I came into this practice, the last thing I wanted to do is stay with anything. I figured, sort of like when you go to therapy for the first time, it takes about twenty sessions, and then you move on, right? That’s all we need. I was just going to come in, learn that mindfulness, and move on.

It’s not like that. There’s something else happening here. There’s something happening to you that is beyond the idea that you can fix a problem. If you keep relying on your ability to fix a problem, all you get in life is the fixing of problems and the return of problems. You can get very good at fixing problems, but you’re not going to be free. There’s something else that the Buddha saw, and I do not believe it’s hard for us to see too. 

When we stay long enough to see what is on the other side of our problems, we’re cultivating mindfulness.

When we stay long enough to see what is on the other side of our problems, we’re cultivating mindfulness. We’re cultivating an ability to stay with dukkha in a soft way and see what it actually is, to see the profound liberation that can come when we stay. That’s what I learned to do. I learned to stay with difficulty. 

Our thinking minds can convince us that if we stay with that difficulty, if we stay with that anger, if we stay with the pain we feel about what’s going on in the world, if we stay there and not do anything, we are giving up. We’re weak, we’re not going to make it. But the mind is lying to you. There is a capacity beyond fixing problems, and the only way to access that is through mindfulness. It doesn’t seem like mindfulness should be that powerful, but it is. And the reason that it’s powerful is laid out in the Satipatthana Sutra with the thirteen different practices that the Buddha taught. Breath doesn’t work for you? That’s OK, try the elements. The elements don’t work for you? That’s OK, try any kind of movement. That doesn’t work for you? Try contemplation. That doesn’t work for you? That’s OK. You have an aversive mind like me? That’s OK. Let’s try noticing thinking, noticing what is happening inside. There are all these things that the Buddha kept pointing out in the Satipatthana. Try this, try this, try this, try this, try this.

After trying all thirteen of them, you could think, “I’m just too averse. I just have an angry mind right now.” OK, let’s sit with that. Let’s see what it’s like. Sit with an angry mind. What does that mean?

All these different practices do one thing: They take you out of it. And if you are not in it, then what you are experiencing is the human condition. If you are experiencing the human condition, you begin to see that this is not about you. This is human. 

There is a serenity prayer that people say in addiction recovery: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This is what begins to happen when you practice. You begin to know the difference between what you can influence and what you can’t. Some things you have influence over right now, and some things you don’t. You begin to see that some things are just requiring us to bear it right now, until something inevitably changes. 

You develop the ability to bear things. And your eyes will open to all of it: the brahmaviharas, the joy in the world, the sadness in the world, and the balance in the world.

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Adapted from a 2025 dharma talk given at Common Ground Meditation Center entitled “The Importance of Mindfulness in Difficult Times.”