The Hooker

Do you ever feel like you are hooked by something? One of the things people notice when they start practicing mindfulness and meditation is the contrast between the glimpses of being or being present and the experience of a lot of mental activity or even inner turmoil. This is actually a really good sign of practice when we start to notice what is going on in our mind and our thoughts.

One of the key experiences here, and a sign of practice, is noticing when you are hooked. When you are caught in a thought process or emotional story in your mind and cannot seem to remain present to the situation around you, or to the person you are talking with, it is often because we are mentally hooked by something. If mindfulness is our intention yet we are struggling with what we often call "distraction" then observing that contrast and being able to see it should be regarded as a sign of practice. Not noticing when we are doing this is a form of ignorance.

I saw my yoga teacher Don Stapleton demonstrate his practice of this recently at Kripalu Centre. He was giving a talk on Self Awakening Yoga and started off by saying that he felt behind in the course curriculum and that he felt he needed to "unhook" from the expectation of getting everything done. He kindly asked us all if it was ok for him to do that so he could present from a place of experience. We all gladly accepted. What I observed there was very encouraging. We might think of our teachers as people who don't get hooked but that would an unrealistic and unfair expectation to make of any human being. What Don demonstrated, however, was mindfulness in action. He was able to identify what was grabbing him internally and see it, communicate it, and release it. That's a skilled way of dealing with being hooked by an expectation and very brave on his part to communicate that with the students. I learned a lot about practice in that moment.

So if we if we tend to get hooked, then what is causing this? What is "the hooker" that is preventing us from living in the now and acting from a place of authentic being? I would say that if you are seeing it and responding to it in the way that Don was then there is no hook preventing you from being present. I think it's an important point. How we deal with our minds and what we consider "distraction" will determine the results.

In the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism, the master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa “You are not bound by appearances, but by clinging; So cut your clinging, Naropa!” So what gets us hooked is not what we often blame it on. We often have all sorts of things to blame our discomfort on which appear to be outside of us or sometimes it's what we think of ourselves. Yet what is the real 'hooker" in this situation? Is it some kind of clinging in the mind? It helps us to see how we attach or grab on to thoughts and expectations around what we see and experience.

So when we can see our minds then we can see when we are being hooked. Once we see that we can relax. We can take a breath see the thoughts and emotions that are grabbing us, and let them go. Like Don demonstrated, what is grabbing us and preventing us from moving forward is also an important stepping stone. In this way, what is grabbing us is also our path to freedom from this. The ability to free ourselves in this way comes from a familiarity with what is going on in our minds. So mindfulness of mind can lead to a greater mindfulness of the our entire inner and outer world, right in this very moment.