The first of the four steps of Right Effort is to prevent the unwholesome. If you remember the metaphor of the living room and basement, we prevent the unwholesome things in the basement from taking up space upstairs. We keep them sleeping, so to speak. It’s important for us not to assign too much shame to our unwholesome states. We all have them. And if we don’t know what they are, they will come up to bite us. But when we see them, we lovingly set them back to sleep in their little boxes in the basement. It’s better for everyone when they stay there.
But how? How practically do we do this? As you certainly know, every day we think of a million unwholesome things. We pass through countless unwholesome waves of feeling and emotion and reaction. This is all normal and fine. The key here is to restrain them. When the anger rises up your neck, restrain it before it comes out of your mouth. When greed fills your eyes, restrain it before it turns into action.
The most common culprit of these unwholesome frames of mind arise out of our five senses. (That seems obvious, right?) So that’s where we begin. When we sense something, we recognize it first. If we stay with that recognition, we start to particularize it. In other words, we start to consider doing something about it. (Sometimes, we just move straight to doing something about it.) In this first step, we choose instead to take an almighty pause. We do not hold tightly to the recognition. We don’t grasp the sense until it crystallizes into particulars. Instead, we pause, examine it, and let it go.
If this sounds too abstract, just put it into practice. Once you begin to sense something, note how you fixate on it and it becomes more central. Notice how, if you stay with it, it becomes detailed. It’s like a picture that goes from fuzzy to full color. Here, we want to keep it fuzzy and in our peripheral vision.
Another way to prevent the unwholesome is to learn from our past mistakes. Before doing anything, especially a bad habit, stop and ask, “How did this work for me last time?” Hopefully, when we recognize how these patterns don’t serve us, we will find the energy and effort to stick to the Path. (If not, we learn, and try again next time.)
Bhante Gunaratana offers what may be the most helpful insight. He says “prevention is always easier than the cure.” As difficult as it may feel to practice this first step, it’s actually far easier than having to move a bad habit back down to the basement. Bad habits are like houseguests who never leave. We make life so much more difficult for ourselves because we create bad habits and then have to use all this energy to break them. Better not to start in the first place. Prevention is the easy road.
Where can you practice restraint this week? How can you pause before reacting? Ask yourself what your unwholesome habits did for you last time, and see if that helps you keep from repeating it.
This post belongs to my series on the Eightfold Path. Read all my posts on practicing Right Effort here.
