Dukkha, vedana, and tanha

I don’t have to hold onto old resentments just because that is who I was five minutes ago or five years ago. I don’t have to define myself by what I used to be, by the pain of the past, by the mistakes I made and learned from, by the old ways I learned to construct meaning in the world that may not serve me. Change or letting myself just organically become something different than I was before is really hard; there is a fear that it means the way I was was wrong or bad and I there is a habitual tendency to keep being the person I was even if it might be possible to start over again in a lot of ways and not be weighed down so much from so much baggage picked up with time.

Maybe I want to save face and so not acknowledge when change is necessary. It is not always comfortable. It can feel like a bad thing that breaks me down into a sorry sad thing, as Dar Williams sings. Qué tal si podría soltar todo que no me beneficia? (What if I could let go of what doesn’t serve me?) What if I could just let go of a desire to prove myself? What if I could let go of all the conceptual constructions that don’t serve me or reflect reality?

This week’s meditation class is about dukkha, vedana, and tanha. Dukkha is unsatisfactoriness or suffering that is inherent in life, vedana is the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sense experiences that we tend to cling to or have aversion towards and that clinging or aversion, not the pleasant and unpleasant feelings themselves, produce dukkha beyond the dukkha inherent in life. Tanha is desire, thirst, clinging, and greed and as in so much of Buddhism there is a systematic structure to it and tanha can be broken down into kama-tanha (desire for sense pleasure), bhava-tanha (desire to be or become something), vibhava-tanha is the desire to get rid of something, like parts of ourselves that we don’t like, or even a desire for non-existence itself.

I have a lot of buava-tanha and vibhava-tanha right now. I don’t want to be who I was. I have an aversion to it. It is too exhausting to be who I was and even who I am, it seems, and yet I cling to the way I have always done things. It is so hard to let go. Maybe I could let go of some of the pain, anyway, pain I hold onto often simply because of thoughts and ideas of what other people must be thinking or feeling about me and expectations they have of me based on their observations and past experiences of me. It is uncomfortable to show someone I am not what they thought I was even if what they thought I was is a terrible person. Partly that is because it is uncomfortable to ‘show’ them who I am at all. If I do that with any effort or clinging to them seeing me in a different way I tend to only confirm what they were thinking about me to begin with or add to the not so nice things they must be thinking. I have to remember I have freedom to be as I am and I do not need to show anybody anything. No tengo la obligación de ser la misma persona que eras hace cinco minutos. Nobody can define who I am, not even me, apparently.

I don’t know why there would be a habitual tendency to want to confirm what I think they think but that is certainly dukkha. I think this could be my ‘father issues’ whatever that is, I never figured it out: if you think something is wrong with me I will prove you’re wrong by confirming it to you even more but deep down I know you’re wrong so I am vindicated. A part of me must get something out of others thinking there is something wrong with me or I wouldn’t do it…

What if I just let go of all of that? Don’t force myself to be someone else, of course, but just make space for this old construction that made up my identity to release, if it wants to? There is so much dukkha in identity. I am so full of ideas of who I am and who I don’t want to be and who I want to become and I don’t let myself organically just be. I know I will never be satisfied with my clinging and aversion to identity but I do it anyway.

I am noticing that I have a desire, which produces dukkha, to be a teacher of sorts. I tense up when I don’t know everything about everything or have gaps in my knowledge because I want to pass on all the knowledge and help the world. It would be so much better for me to relax because I am never going to love into the archetype of a teacher by clinging and grasping to being someone who can teach and benefit others. Sometimes I think dukkha is Apple and the iPhone and maybe bhava-tanha is the desire to get rid of all these unnecessary apps. The only way I can remember my Apple password, anyway, is if it has something to do with my aversion to Apple. Let’s just say I hate Apple was not a strong enough password but I finally found something I remember.

I had a wave of unpleasant vedana come up during the class meditation when I thought about someone in my old life, who I asked to please remove me from her social media if she could not understand and did not support me. She did not, but then when I reached out to her in a difficult time, she did not respond to me, and I sense that she has no desire to ever respond to me, and yet she still sticks around, perhaps to wait for me to say some other ridiculous thing. I do not know what is happening but I feel that she did not respect my desire and that she had and has negative thoughts and feelings about me but she did not leave when I asked her to just the same. I did not realise that she probably ignored my rewuest until recently but it makes me angry. I will just feel it and let it go, though, I have already spent way too much time being angry at her and giving away my energy when my intuition told me something was not right. I experience so much dukkha when I avoid my intuition. I doubt my intuition. I need to stop giving myself away to that which my intuition is waging resistance against in this way.