When in Doubt, Do Nothing

Perhaps you can tell by now that one of my struggles in general is getting myself to do things.  One of my main strategies in life has been to just wait things out—whatever the feeling, desire, inclination, if I just wait long enough it will go away.  So last week, I was in a little bit of a state of inner turmoil about a certain situation.  Everyone knows this place—getting tossed back and forth with all the questions that don’t really have simple kinds of answers but mostly serve just to get a person upset and confused.  Pretty soon I’m feeling bad and thinking that I need to FIGURE THIS OUT so I can DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.  Now, while I’m sort of paralyzed by urgency, I get hit with the “you never do anything about anything, you just wait around” finger pointing.  Why is that voice in my head so mean?

This is what we call in yoga “chitta vrtti,” the movements or fluctuations of the mindstuff.  According to Patanjali, yoga is the restraining, directing or stilling of these chitta vrttis.  When this happens, we can see things clearly, including our own true nature.  (This is all in the first couple verses of the Yoga Sutra).  It’s often compared to a lake and since the image works so well, I’ll use it here.  When the surface of the lake is full of waves, it is hard to see the bottom—the waves stir up sand and sediment and make things muddy.  But when the lake is still, the water is clear and we can see the bottom easily.

So in the midst of my storm of chitta vrttis, I heard someone say, “When in doubt, do nothing.”  I am sure I have heard this before and it just went right past me with an “of course” (because it fits so nicely with my habitual behavior patterns).  But this time, I heard it differently.  It doesn’t mean that doing nothing is preferable, it means that WHEN YOU ARE IN DOUBT, it’s not a good time to do something.  I really could feel the truth of how when I am all confused or panicked, I’m just guessing at what to do and trying to use the very mind that is creating the confusion to figure out the answer to the confusion.  This is going to add another whole mess of chitta vrttis to ripple out across the lake and stir up more trouble.  This is the time to sit still.  By sitting still, I can allow all the muck to settle and eventually begin to see more clearly. 

The real kicker is that while my mind is getting me all riled up about doing something about a situation, the main thing I really need to do something about is my mind.  The confusion and doubt is an entirely separate thing from the actual situation—it’s just what my mind is doing.  Oh mind, just stick to the things you are useful for, like adding numbers, reading words, remembering how to drive a car and so many other harmless and beneficial things—you don’t need another job.  You’re fired.

Structure and Fluidity

So it’s really been a whole month since I posted!  So many potential topics have come and gone—long-distance skype kirtaning, broken guitar strings, jiffy lube, educational standards, group process, airplane rides, holidays, the new year, focusing, etc.  So what’s happening now?  Well, in some ways, I am still thinking about the same things I was a month ago—I was just telling some friends last night that I am more convinced than ever that commitments are the secret to life.

I took the last week off from working at The Samarya Center so I could work at home on my book, which has been taking a back seat for quite a while.  It was awesome.  I created a structure and stuck to it and was pleased with how much I got done.  So I made a list of things I wanted to do over the weekend, and though it was quite long, I felt optimistic about being able to do it because I was feeling so productive.  When I just decide to do something and don’t have all the internal discussion about it (do I want to do it, am I going to do it, etc.), I have so much more energy to actually do stuff.  It went great yesterday—I did a number of things on my list and still had time for my nephew’s basketball game and some relaxation (which, of course, is often one of the other discussion topics—if I do this, will I have time for this other thing?).

So today, I woke up with appreciation for my re-discovered appreciation for structure and no doubt that I would complete my weekend’s tasks.  I am master of my own fate, a task-completing machine, yes!  What I didn’t take into account is that other people exist in my universe and life is out of my control.  So I spent most of the afternoon helping my husband fix our leaky kitchen faucet and grocery shopping.  While we were out and about at Lowe’s and Trader Joe’s, I could feel my inner control freak doing what she does best—freaking out.  She was not enjoying the fact that her plans were being so callously ignored. 

I managed to keep my cool (sort of).  I don’t want to live my life feeling incompetent and not accomplishing the things I want to do because I never get around to them.  And I also don’t want to be so attached to my plans and lists and schedules that I can’t go with the flow of life.  Somewhere in the middle, there’s a balance.  So I think two of my words for 2011 are going to be structure and fluidity.  It’s sort of like abhyasa (practice) and vairagya (non-attachment).  Discipline and commitment to practice create the structure that gets things done, but non-attachment allows me not to get stuck, which happens to be something I am very good at.  I’m sure we’ll have more coming down the pike on these subjects.

So, now that I have written this blog post, I can cross off 2 out the 5 things I had left on my list today.  I’m sure I can do the rest in the next couple days.  Not too bad.