A devout Tamil Brahmin once came to Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi in real torment. He loved to eat meat – – which, in his community and his own strict tradition, was forbidden, shameful, unthinkable. He had struggled against the craving for years. He had scolded himself, denied himself, promised himself and failed himself, over and over, and the war inside him was tearing him apart.
You might expect the sage to have told him to try harder – to summon more discipline and conquer this shameful appetite once and for all. Ramana had a different approach. Go ahead and eat the meat, he told the astonished man. But each time you do, first pause and reflect: this is causing turmoil in my life, and I wish I did not have this craving. That is all. Eat, but be aware.
The man did as he was told. He ate, and each time he watched himself eat and quietly acknowledged the turmoil and the wish to be free of it. He did not fight. He did not suppress. He simply ate, and watched, and was honest. And about a year later, without a single battle ever having been fought, the craving fell away of its own accord. It did not need to be defeated. Awareness revealed its real nature.
I cannot tell you how much needless suffering people pour into the project of fixing themselves. It is, in truth, the great enterprise of the second half of most thoughtful lives. In the first half we try to fix everyone else – our spouse, our children, our colleagues – and eventually, exhausted, we discover that we cannot. So, we turn the machinery upon ourselves, and set about correcting our flaws and our anger and our cravings with the same grim determination – and it works no better on us than it did on them. Suppress a thing and it goes underground and gathers strength. Wrestle it and you feed it your attention and your struggle and this energy makes it stronger.
There is another way, and it is almost embarrassingly simple. Do not try to fix the fault. Simply become aware of it. If you hold a bitter aversion toward someone, do not flog yourself for being unspiritual, and do not pretend the aversion away – you cannot; it will persist no matter what you tell yourself. Just be aware of it. Watch it, without judgement, each time it arises. And as you watch – not all at once, but over time – it loosens, and one day you notice that it has quietly gone, the way the Brahmin’s craving went. Awareness accomplishes what force never could.
The Lesson. You cannot fix yourself by force. Suppression strengthens what it fights, and self-criticism only deepens the wound. The thing that troubles you – a craving, an aversion, a fault – does not need to be conquered. It needs to be seen. Bring steady, honest, non-judging awareness to it, and it dissolves on its own.
Peace!
