Breaking Free: A Journey of Self Discovery Read online

  By closely observing my mind for all the months that I had been doing my spiritual practices, I had now reached a stage in my life in which I was absolutely convinced that both happiness and suffering were within me. Whenever my mind was calm and free of restless thought, which was starting to happen more often these days, I’d feel peace and joy for no real reason. Suffering was the opposite. Whenever my mind was filled with negative thought, it would cause a degree of agitation within me, so my mind was the problem. Real joy and real peace all came down to the state of my own mind. It seemed so blatantly obvious that I couldn’t help but wonder why I’d never seen this before. All my life I’d wanted to be happy - just like everybody else - but I had been searching for happiness in the wrong places. I’d been looking to find happiness outside of myself in the world around me. My next girlfriend would make me happy. More money would make me happy. My next adventure would make me happy. Buying new clothes would make me happy. Sure, satisfying these desires did give me a degree of pleasure and made me feel happy for a while, but only for a while. No sooner had the thrill of the desire passed than my monkey mind wanted to chase after the next thing. On and on it went. Never once had my mind said, Okay, Jed! I’ve had enough now. I don’t need anything else as I’ve found lasting joy. Chasing after desires, I could now so clearly see, was a bottomless pit. It was like an itch. Scratching the itch made you feel better for a while, but then it would come back even worse than before. I guess this is why all spiritual masters make it very clear that you have to be very careful of desire. Desire is a double-edged sword. If you don’t get that which you desire you feel upset, sad or angry, and even if you do get that which you desire, it leads to attachment, which ultimately causes suffering in the end when whatever it is that you have is taken away from you. For me to enjoy lasting joy and real peace, I was sure, lay not in me conquering my outer world, but rather in me conquering my inner world. The truth of this seemed so unbelievably clear to me that I felt as if there could be no turning back now. Just as a person starting a new business would want to put all their energy into making their business a success, so too did I want to focus all my energy within. I read a passage in one of Amma’s books that summed it up perfectly.

  One day a lady went to ask Amma what real happiness was. Amma turned the question back to her and asked the lady if any material thing she’d owned had ever given her lasting happiness. The lady said no, that the happiness she felt was always temporary. It would make her feel good for a while but would soon fade away.

  “So what gives you lasting happiness?” Amma asked again. The lady shook her head and said that she didn’t know. “Well, let me ask you another question,” said Amma, smiling back at her. “Have you ever felt a deep feeling of joy and peace for no apparent reason?”

  The lady thought about it for a while and then told Amma that once she was sitting on her veranda watching the sunset. At that moment, quite unexpectedly, she felt this intense feeling of joy and burst into tears.

  “What were you thinking of at the time?” Amma asked.

  “Nothing,” the lady replied. “I was thinking of nothing.”

  “There’s your answer,” smiled Amma. “Real happiness and real peace is absence of thought. Real peace and real happiness is having a quiet mind.”

  ***

  In the initial stages of my spiritual journey, I had thought that the only thing I had to do was to meditate, to sit for hours on end with my eyes closed and legs crossed. I had imagined that my spiritual development would be directly proportional to how many hours I sat locked in meditation. More meditation would mean more spiritual growth. My next breakthrough came when I realised that there were many different ways to meditate and many different kinds of spiritual practice, and that I didn’t have to keep plugging away at the candle flame meditation. However, at this stage of my spiritual journey I was still under the impression that I had to designate a certain part of my day towards spiritual practice, and the rest of the day to normal daily activities. An hour meditation in the morning and a walking meditation in the evening, and that would be my spiritual practices done with for the day. It had now dawned on me that even if I meditated all day long until I was blue in the face, real peace wouldn’t come my way until I’d overcome all my fears, insecurities, and all the other baggage that I was carrying around with me. Of course meditation played a very important part in that it would help me to gain concentration, and concentration was absolutely necessary to become more aware of the thoughts and the feelings passing through me, but developing concentration was only a part of it. The other part was to overcome all the negative mental habits that were within me.

  I now no longer saw a separation between my spiritual practices and my daily life. They were one and the same thing. Even when I wasn’t meditating, or doing some other form of spiritual practice, I was forever trying to pay attention to my thoughts and feelings at the time. When I caught myself thinking something negative, for example a feeling of anger or jealousy towards someone else, there were a number of different techniques that I’d use. The first and most important thing for me was to become aware of what I was thinking and to stop the negative train of thought from carrying on. Depending on how much negativity had built up within me, I would sometimes change the negative thought into a positive one, or I would imagine sending the person who I was feeling angry at a whole lot of love and happiness. At other times, I would even mentally imagine bowing down at their feet and thanking them for showing me what was inside me, and what I still had to work on. This was the mirror technique that Jenny had taught me. By doing this it very often put an end to my negativity as it reminded me that the problem was within me, and not the other person.

  CHAPTER 26

  Taming the monkey mind, as I was finding out, was no easy thing to do. It certainly wasn’t something that was going to happen overnight. Instead, to bring the mind under control required a great deal of both patience and perseverance. The way I liked to think of it was to compare the monkey mind to a naughty child. Imagine that you had let your child do whatever they liked for the first few years of their life. Then one day you made the decision that enough is enough and that from now on you are going to discipline the child. However, when you start trying to do this, the child thinks, what the hell’s going on here? I’ve had free reign to do what I like for all these years… and now you’re trying to discipline me. So the struggle begins between the child and the parents; the parents are trying to enforce the rules and the child is trying to keep the power. In the same way, my mind had been calling the shots for all these years and now, suddenly, I was trying to pull in the reins and get control. Just as the child would put up a fight, so too was my mind going to try every trick in the book to keep the power. The mind, however, is a lot more cunning than a disobedient child. It knows just where to push your buttons, where your weaknesses are, and how to keep control. My own mind would prove to be by far the most formidable of all opponents that I had ever faced up against.

  ***

  In one of the spiritual books that I had read, it said that there are six main inner enemies that agitate the mind and prevent the feeling of peace. These are: lust, attachment, greed, pride, jealousy and anger. Of these enemies that I’d have to do battle with, the one that seemed to be slapping me in the face the most in the beginning was lust. At the school I taught at, there were a good handful of mighty fine-looking female teachers. This didn’t make things any easier for me to control my roving eye. A good-looking lady would walk past and I’d automatically give her the up and down. The up and down would then be followed up by a thought about how hot she was. The thought of how hot she was would then, very often, lead to a sexual fantasy that would play out in my mind. Boy, if the female staff at my school knew what was really going through my mind when I was sitting opposite them in the dining hall at lunch, I’m sure that they would have told me to go and sit in the corner and eat lunch by myself.

  So now that I’d become painfully awa
re of all these lustful thoughts that were passing through me, and how much agitation they actually were causing, action was needed. I had to somehow put on the breaks and control these wayward senses of mine. I decided that from now on, whenever a good-looking lady passed by, I’d try to resist the urge to turn around and give her a second look, and to not play along with the thoughts that would start going through my mind. What torture it was to resist. It was as if there was an invisible force in me that would literally make me turn around and have another look. To go against these deeply ingrained mental habits of mine caused so much tension within. Doing battle against my own mental habits, such as greed and pride seemed manageable, do-able, but how the hell was I going to control all this lust bundled up inside me? That was an entirely different story. I guess it all came down to taking one small step at a time, but this wasn’t to say that it was easy for me taking even the smallest of baby steps. On the good days I’d feel strong and would be able to look at a good-looking woman and keep my wayward senses at bay, but during the bad days – which were far more often than I would have liked - I’d feel absolutely powerless! A good-looking woman would walk past and it would be game over. The thoughts... the fantasy... the sex we were going to have that evening on my sofa... it would all play out in my mind and I would be dragged along like a helpless leaf being swept along in the gutter.

  I had once heard that when you are under the guidance of an enlightened spiritual master, a master such as Amma, that they will keep working on you the entire time. The master wants to lead you to a deeper and more lasting state of peace and happiness, and in order for this to happen your mind has to be purified of its bad habits. The master is therefore going to use whoever they can to bring out and show you all the bad qualities, anger, greed, pride, and so on, that are within you. This person could be your husband, your wife, perhaps a work colleague, or even your boss. It could be anyone. This is exactly what it felt like was happening to me. Now that I’d made the firm decision of wanting to purify my mind and to get rid of all my bad habits, it felt as if someone was constantly prodding me, saying, ‘Look here. This needs fixing. What about that anger and jealousy over there, Jed? You need to get rid of that too.’ Spiders were coming out the woodwork that I didn’t even know where there. What did help me a lot was to know that this was all just part of the purification process. You had to first see your bad qualities. You had to first feel the heavy weight of what you were carrying around with you, and only then would you want to do something to get rid of them.

  ***

  At school each day I started noticing how my moods would often change according to how things went in the classroom. When my lesson went well, I’d feel good, and when the lesson didn’t go well, my good mood would quickly swing the other way. This meant that things that were often happening outside of my control were, to a large degree, determining my feelings. If I thought about it logically, it seemed ridiculous that I was letting things that were happening around me affect my own happiness. Why should I let a class that didn’t go as well as I hoped put me in a bad mood? That seemed like complete madness! So how could I become more even minded and less influenced by the things that were happening around me, outside of my control? I found the answer in one of my most prized spiritual books, the Bhagavad Gita.

  When Mahatma Gandhi died a photo was taken of all his possessions. It’s said that all he owned was a piece of white cotton clothing, sandals, his spectacles, and a worn out copy of the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita, which consists of the teachings of India’s most well known prophet, Lord Krishna, is read by millions of people around the world. A few weeks after my first encounter with Amma in India, I had been lucky to get my hands on a condensed version of the Bhagavad Gita that had been written as a walk through for Westerners. I’d read the book several times by now and could completely understand why Gandhi had valued it so much. It was a book that greatly inspired me and one that I could read repeatedly without ever becoming bored. In the Gita, as the Bhagavad Gita is more commonly known, it says that all work should be done without selfish motive and without attachment. Working without a selfish motive means doing your work without being constantly driven by the thought, what’s in it for me? What am I going to get out of it? Working without attachment means doing your work without being attached to the end result. In the Gita, it says that this is very important as attachment to a certain outcome means that you will feel frustrated, angry or sad when the outcome is not as you had wished it to be. For me this explained my situation perfectly. My moods were forever changing at school because I was far too attached to the end result. Whenever my lesson didn’t go as well as I had hoped my mood would turn. So what I needed now was a change of attitude and to go about my daily work in a different way to how I had been doing it before.

  On my way to work each morning I then started to get into the habit of imagining that my job at the school was my duty in life, and that I was doing it for the benefit of the world at large, instead of doing it for my own selfish reasons. During my classes I would try to be as fully present as I could, to do my absolute best in each lesson, but as soon as the class was over I tried to forget about it straight away and to not play along with my mind, which was now wanting to evaluate whether the lesson had been good or bad. What a difference this made. The benefit was immediate. By focussing on the lesson itself, and not on the end result, I was amazed at how much more constant my moods were. In fact, the spin off was that my teaching was probably even better as well. However, such was the nature of these deep habits of mine that as soon as I got lazy and forgot to use this technique, I’d quickly slip back into my old ways of going up and down like a yo-yo.

  ***

  As I became more aware of my changing moods at school, I also started to observe how much time and energy I wasted thinking about what others thought of me. If my co-teacher wasn’t in her normal, happy mood, perhaps a little slightly off in the morning, then my mind would immediately interpret her bad mood as though it were because of me. Why’s she upset with me? What did I do? These were the thoughts that would invariably spring up in my mind, but who said that it had anything to do with me? Maybe she’d had a fight with her husband that morning. Maybe she had a headache and wasn’t feeling well, or maybe it was just one of those days when she’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed and was feeling pissed off with life. I bet nine out of ten times it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Yet my mind immediately took it personally. Her bad mood is because of me! What’s worse, it didn’t only apply to when my co-teacher was being slightly off. It could have been with anyone. I’d once heard that 99 % of our problems in life are in our mind and are therefore self created. I wouldn’t have believed this before, but now that I was observing myself more closely I was starting to see the truth behind this. This was yet another reminder for me that what I needed was to put all my energy into improving my inner world. As Amma so nicely put it: “Your own treasure lies not in your material wealth and comforts, but in the condition of your own mind.”

  For so many years my greatest wish had been for my skin condition to be healed. I wanted the spots on my body to be gone more than anything else, but even if my wish did come true, even if the pigmentation on my skin did miraculously heal, then without a doubt my mind would find something else to fret over. It could be my job, a bad relationship, money problems, or more health problems. The list went on and on. It could be anything. So my deepest and grandest wish now was not for my skin condition to heal, but for inner peace. I desperately wanted to have real peace and real freedom in my life. Externally I had all the freedom in the world in that I could come and go as I pleased, but internally I wasn’t free at all. I was a slave to my mind’s conditioning. This inner freedom was what I now longed for more than anything.

  CHAPTER 27

  After breaking up the year before, Kim and I had still kept in contact from time to time. Now that I was back in Korea it wasn’t long before we gravitated back towards each other
again. I was a little unsure of what it would be like between us after so many months apart, but within a matter of minutes of seeing her I realised that the chemistry between us was still there. It was clearly obvious that our time together wasn’t meant to be over just yet. The only tricky thing now was that we were living three hours apart. However, in time I’d come to realise that this was a blessing in disguise. During the week I could put all my energy and focus into my spiritual practices, and then on the weekends I could lighten up a little and enjoy our time together.

  Things between the two of us went well for a while, but it wasn’t long before doubt started to creep in as to whether Kim and I being together was such a good idea. For one thing, I didn’t want to leave Kim with a broken heart when I left. I was only Kim’s second boyfriend and I knew full well that she took relationships a lot more seriously than I did. At this stage I couldn’t see myself living in Korea for much longer, which meant that it would only be a matter of time before we’d have to go our separate ways again. When I spoke to Kim about how I was feeling, my worry of hurting her, she told me not to think about the future as she would rather have one year together than have nothing at all. Yet, still, this did little to ease my conscience, which continued to nag at me. Kim may have put on a brave face when she was with me, but I knew that this wouldn’t be the case when I left Korea after my contract was up.