How to stop doing stuff

A different and longer version of this meditation is available to paid subscribers here.A lot of my formal practice time is spent watching my mind grapple with things it doesn’t want to be happening, watching myself pry my own white-knuckled fingers off of myself. I’ve found lots of different ways to stop doing stuff in practice and in life, including (but not limited to): having compassion for the doing, noticing the emotion that’s driving the doing, looking directly at what exactly it is that I’m trying so hard to do something about, exaggerating the doing, ignoring the doing entirely and just feeling my feet on the ground, directing all my energy into cleaning the s**t out of the bathroom, and spending all day watching Netflix.It could be argued that the entirety of this path can be boiled down to moving from doing to receiving. To finding more balance of yin and yang, in a world that is severely addicted to yang. Your generosity matters a lot. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I’m not saying we should just stop doing everything and turn into useless, TV-watching blobs. The kind of non-doing I'm talking about goes deeper than that. We stop doing stuff on a really, really deep level. This kind of non-doing calls upon us to fully face the things that we fidget around and to confront them. We get to put down all the ways we avoid the things we don’t want to feel, and just feel it all. THAT is radical non-doing.Engaged. Not abandoning yourself though something difficult. Not trying to fix it, but simply listening, curious, wanting to understand, caring, willing to stay, willing to help, but not helping from a place of fear or aversion. The only doing that happens comes from a place of love, compassion, and wisdom. Before you read the rest of this, the disclaimer is that it’s important to allow yourself to move away from something if it feels intuitively wrong or like a violence to yourself to hold your attention there. We’re not trying to re-live or reinforce our trauma. That being said:I want you to know that you can drop into your body and identify that thing that is so unsettling, the thing you think you can’t tolerate, and gently hold your attention there until something clicks and your realize that you can actually handle it. That you don’t have to operate from a place of busyness, of doing and trying and becoming. That contentment is here if we are willing to turn towards ourselves and sit with what we once thought was un-sitwithable. Because then something starts to shift. Because up until this point we’ve either been avoiding, running away, acting out from our anxiety, or grappling with it. We start to see that it was a subtle violence to ourselves to be with ourselves in order to change ourselves. And we start to see that we don’t have to abandon ourselves either. We can just stop. Put down all the doing - and doing comes in the form of distraction, of trying to fix what’s wrong, and even having strong views and opinions about things. What if we stop wasting our energy? Fold it in, so that it all goes towards our staying power. We simply stand, holding our hearts, in the moment, and watch what happens. We gain confidence. We see that we can handle it, that we can simply watch as the mind tries, and we can hold our own hand as we tear up and feel the helplessness, the hopelessness, the fear as it comes in waves, and then it fades. And what’s left? Sensation. Thought. That feeling we were trying to get rid of, we see that it was so dependent on the grip we had around it. And suddenly it starts to shift and move. Because as we loosen the grip, it is free to finally move as it wanted to move, to express what it wanted to express, to get tighter and bigger or shrink into a tiny ball - it had something to say and we weren’t letting it, because we were so afraid. But it turns out, it just needed to be seen, to be felt, and that was enough. And confidence grows. We were not given anything in this world that we are not capable of meeting, that we weren’t capable of using for our path, for our growth, for our freedom. You can do this.You will never find out how powerful you are if you keep running away from yourself. You will never find out how capable you are if you keep fidgeting away from the moment. You will never be fully alive if you spend your whole life fidgeting. Stop. Stay still. You can. You will be set free. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe