Dancing to songs stuck in your head

I wondered what songs were stuck in the head of the Russian officer who ordered warning shots and bombs to be dropped in the path of the Royal Navy Destroyer that wandered close to Russian territorial waters on June 23rd. What was his self-talk? Which songs played in his head?

According to different Buddhist traditions, attachment, ignorance and aversion are the three primary poisons, unwholesome roots, or kleshas that underpin the source of suffering and inhibit our ability to be happy and gain enlightenment. Kleshas include destructive emotions like anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, and selfishness. As we know, destructive emotions exist. By themselves they are not “good” or “bad”, but what we do with them is going to guide the cause/effect and karmic consequence. Life is, after all, essentially summed up in cause/effect.

We “spiritual people” are not supposed to be seduced by those damn kleshas. We should be above getting angry, but we do, and rightly so. This morning I got a note from a friend about the lockdown in Uganda, who in the last two weeks lost three family members to COVID-19. She said, “My heart bled when I watched the police chase women selling fruit along the street to fend for their families because of the lockdown directives.” I think about the dictator, Museveni, his henchmen and the way they have stolen the aid sent to help feed the people and provide medical care. I think about the dozens of notes I have gotten from friends in East Africa about death, hunger, sickness and injustice, and I feel angry inside. My internal song or feedback loop takes that anger and sings, “Whatcha’ going to do about this, Paul? Whatcha think the right action is? Don’t be indifferent! Whatcha’ going to do about it, Paul?” I do know I must let the anger flow through me, examine it and its source, see why it is pushing my buttons. For me, my goal is to have the negative emotion push me to the right action.

 I can send my friends in Uganda some money so they can disperse it to those in need. I can connect them with others that might be able to provide food, shelter or help. I can ask our government, charities, and businesses to lobby for better governance in East Africa. I can support character education that champions values, literacy, communication skills, problem solving, happiness, grit, resilience, values, and virtue to help build a society that works well for everyone. The feedback loop plays in my head, and I think about some time I spent with the Indian sage Sadhguru a few years ago learning about what he called “inner engineering”. He was talking about the response choice we have, and about our responsibility to what we discover through our senses. He said, as we choose our response, we should respond to our ability. Sadhguru then put the words together as response-ability. While I might not be doing Sadhguru justice with how his song plays in my head, I do know that event + response = outcome. So, what we do with this anger and poison is what we must think about. Like dynamite, it can do good or evil.

 Seems our human emotional system, at times, is wired to lead us to embrace the three poisons without thinking of the consequences.

 We are wired to be reactive. Someone hits us – we hit them back, or at least react to it. The brain, to retain energy, likes to create habits, causing a reaction that feels comfortable, and even right, in response to stimuli. I kiss my wife and she kisses me back. Someone yells, we yell back. Why think about it? The problem is attachment, ignorance, and aversion push us to a mindless, rather than mindful, reaction that can ruin lives and ruin relationships. When I read about those in jail, going through divorce, or losing jobs, I think to myself, “Yes, those five minutes where anger or passion ruled out over mindful contemplation in response to the bar fight, spouse coming home late, constant negative news feed, or annoying coworker.” It is in the reaction that our auto responses step in, and those must be reprogramed to stop the wheel of habitual cause and effect. So, how do we do this? We can start by identifying the three poisons in our lives: attachment, ignorance and aversion. And then we can acknowledge these poisons exist, deal with them, and move on.

 Our brains live in the comfort of wallowing in the past which can impede our klesha work, sprouting paralysis. As Buddha said to the man who got shot with a poisoned arrow, “Stop wondering why you go shot. Pull the arrow out and move on.”

 After we have been through hell it can really hurt when someone says, “Oh just wait a few years and you will be fine!” Adding a few dance steps later, “You will look back on this grasping and clinging experience as a positive step forward in your life.” But if the arrow does not kill us, we need to move on with gratitude that we survived. One of the prayers I was asked to read before some Buddhist ceremonies ended with the sentence “How fortunate I am not to have taken rebirth as a hungry ghost, experiencing constant hunger and thirst!” So gratitude for our life, and this moment where we can read a Spirituality& Health column, and reflect can help release us from the poisons.

 Moving through gratitude can lead us to using the power of awareness, meditation and reflection to move past the negative influences of attachment, ignorance and aversion. We can do this by avoiding the parts of our lives that feed the negative emotions and influences like alcohol, violent movies, unhealthy food, toxic friends, petty gossip, indifference and the list goes on.

Positive characteristics

We should focus our minds on being alert to find the best in ourselves and others by identifying positive character strengths. In our parenting work at STEPi we teach parents, caregivers and teachers to help their learners find their superpower character strengths. The postcard we use is reprinted (placement). You can do this too, but as an adult, throw in a dose of radical acceptance and loving mindfulness. It is as simple as saying, “Wow, I showed compassion to that young man who was trying to comfort his little girl by pointing out how he was patient, loving and accepting as she had a meltdown at the Walmart checkout lane.”

 We get more of what we put our attention on. Always being mindfully on the lookout for positive character attributes in ourselves and others is one way to help reprogram the songs stuck in our heads so we dance a bit happier through life.

By Paul H. Sutherland
STEPi Founder and CEO

Paul Sutherland was dancing through western USA with his wife and four young sons on a quest to visit all 48 states in their RV in 2021 when this article was written.