Contrary to popular belief, yoga has little to do with escaping disturbance—though admittedly one look through the latest Yoga Journal may convince you otherwise. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that yoga doesn’t mitigate disturbances both physical and mental to some extent (and in some cases to a large extent). But what I am saying is that eliminating disturbances as a strategy for creating a life permeated with peace and fulfillment is a non-starter.

Why? Well, because if you haven’t noticed somewhere on the measure of 50% of life is comprised of disturbances and discomfort of all shapes and sizes (percentage based upon personal observation and interactions with others, your actual mileage may vary). And by the way, this number holds true no matter how much wealth, status, and power you happen to accumulate. If you have any doubt, turn west to Hollywood and you’ll see.

Making matters worse, we humans are masters at cultivating disturbance—even in the midst of great comfort. Given a situation in which 10,000 things are to our liking, within five minutes we will have picked out the one miniscule detail that bothers us and clamp onto it like a Pit Bull on a Chihuahua (sorry Hanuman):

A gourmet candle-lit dinner in a stunning five-star restaurant; fine wine, your favorite appetizers, a sumptuous and elegant main course, topped by a mind-blowing dessert. All enjoyed together with someone you care deeply about. It’s a night of new tastes, refined experiences, and shared laughs; it’s one for the record books. BUT… the waiter was kind of snotty, right?

Truth be told, we are experts at wringing disturbance out of virtually any experience. We’re so good that we can even become uncomfortable being comfortable—we have a special word for it, it’s called boredom.

No, achieving peace and fulfillment by eliminating disturbances simply won’t work. Again, this is not to say that eliminating disturbances can’t help, but to find a deep and abiding peace, our strategy must take another tack. Instead of attempting to eliminate disturbance, we must learn to relax with disturbance, to cultivate what I call peaceful coexistence.

The practice of peaceful coexistence invites us to make peace with that which we would normally resist. Instead of going to war with the disturbance, we instead make a kind of space for it, we allow it to be. As counter-intuitive is it may sound, peaceful coexistence is a simple and surprisingly effective strategy.

Even so, there’s no doubt that it seems to present an intractable problem: the idea that the key to finding peace and happiness is to merely relax with everything on the planet that you can’t relax with seems like no solution at all. To relax with traffic, a difficult coworker, an uncooperative child, or angry spouse seems a daunting, nigh impossible task—and this is to say nothing of the prospect for peacefully coexisting with war and famine and injustice. So then is our road to freedom just another dead end?

Thankfully no. Although it may at first blush seem to be a kind of yogic mission impossible, the seeming impossibility of the task is an illusion created by a fundamental misunderstanding and it’s this: when it comes to understanding what it is that disturbs us, most of us are startlingly off base. It’s a confusion that is shared by most people on the planet, and one that keeps us stuck in a monumental struggle.

Put the question to most people—“what is it that disturbs you”—and you’ll likely get a long list of people and circumstances that predictably elicit ire and annoyance. But, and this is the grand daddy of buts, none of these things is the real source of disturbance. For here’s the thing: nothing outside of you has ever disturbed your peace—ever.

Now, I’m fully aware that this proclamation is likely to be met with suspicion or maybe even dismissed all together as what we in the business call spiritual hogwash. In fact, if this statement resonates as true for nearly anyone, I’d be more than a mite bit surprised. After all, when we look to our lives, it seems a helluvalot more accurate to say: Everything outside of you disturbs your peace—sometimes.

But my friends, things are not as they seem.

The hypothesis is this: When the gum-snapping teen two rows back is irritating you, when the slow-poke driver is frustrating you, when the searing 112 degree heat is giving you fits of annoyance, your irritation, frustration, and annoyance aren’t really derived from the teen, the driver, or the heat. Not really. No, it’s something else, something unnoticed, and believe it or not, it’s something much more innocuous that has gotten your goat. And I can prove it with one simple question: “how do you know when you are disturbed?”

I recently put this very question to a student and was met, predictably, with a look that was one part are-you-kidding-me? and one part are-you-off-your-rocker? It seems a simple question with an obvious response—so obvious perhaps that it barely seems worth asking. Nevertheless it’s a question that can be deceptively difficult to answer with any kind of specificity or clarity—at least at first. In this case, the best this student could muster was: “I know I’m disturbed because, well, I’m disturbed.” Unfortunately, this kind of vague and ill-defined perspective won’t help us much.

Picture yourself sitting in a restaurant waiting for a friend to join you for lunch. You’re relaxing in a comfortable booth, the air is cool, the environment is pleasant. You are calm and undisturbed. The clock ticks away and though your friend promised to meet you at noon, it is now five past the hour. Although you remain relaxed, you begin to glance at your watch more often, and every time the door opens you find yourself craning your neck to peer at the entrance to see if your friend has arrived. It’s now twelve fifteen and still no friend. You order a soda and find your gaze drawn to your watch every 22 seconds or so. You reach for your cell phone to call your friend, but you discover that you left it at the office. You wonder if you got the time right, the restaurant, or if your friend got into an accident.

You now find yourself officially disturbed.

In one moment you sit comfortably in a booth in a pleasant restaurant. You are relaxed. In another moment, although you sit comfortably in the same booth in the same pleasant restaurant, you are now disturbed. What changed? Conventionally we would say that your friend’s tardiness disturbed you. Conventionally. But here we are more interested in truth than convention, so I’m going to suggest we employ our question—how do you know that you are disturbed?—and see if that doesn’t yield some clarity.

The answer to the question of course is that you feel disturbed. And this is true whether that disturbance is annoyance or fear. You know you are disturbed because you feel it. And so the question is this: what exactly is it that you feel? While most of us would say that we are feeling an emotion, let’s table that idea for a moment and instead just look at the experience—the raw experience without labels or ideas or analysis.

If we look at this situation with fresh eyes we’ll see that at some point while we you were waiting, a pattern of sensations began to emerge; sensations that most likely were felt in the belly and chest. Maybe a heaviness in the stomach, perhaps a tightness in the chest, or even both. And it’s important to recognize that it’s these sensations—the same ones we typically label as anxiety or impatience or generically, as emotions—that are the real cause of our disturbance. Not our friend’s tardiness. These sensations are the feeling of ugh, the tyrant within.

“Yes, but if my friend wasn’t late, then I wouldn’t have experienced the anxiety, the feeling of ugh,” many would argue, “so it’s my friend that is the cause of the disturbance.” And at first, this seems a sound enough argument, but let me ask this: If your friend was late, but you didn’t experience the anxiety, would you have been disturbed? And of course, if we’re honest, the answer is no.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all suggesting that things outside of you can’t trigger uncomfortable and disturbing emotions, what I am saying however, is that without the disturbing emotion, you don’t perceive yourself to be disturbed—no matter what is happening in your surrounds. This means that what’s truly disturbing you is the emotion, or again, the feeling of ugh. No ugh = no disturbance. Period. You can be horribly uncomfortable and be okay with it (no ugh); or you can be perfectly comfortable and be irritated as hell (ugh). It all comes down to ugh.

What’s more, this feeling of ugh has many faces, each of a slightly different pattern and intensity, a difference that we use to distinguish one so-called emotion from another. Sadness has a slightly different shape and quality from anger; worry is felt in a different way from impatience. But irrespective of its specific parameters, make no mistake, they are all different variations of the feeling of ugh. To take it a step further, we could even say that there is no such thing as an emotion (at least experientially), just varied simple patterns of sensations in our bodies for which we have different labels: frustration, anxiety, anger, fear, worry. What we call emotions are simply the many faces of ugh.

Now for the good news (finally!): if the feeling of ugh is really at the heart of all your disturbances, then your work of finding a deep and abiding sense of peace and ease in your life has been greatly simplified. No longer do you need to struggle to get everyone and everything around you to cooperate with your personal preferences and agendas. All of this effort to control and manipulate those around you is part of an entirely unnecessary battle. Instead, all that is required is for you to alter your relationship to this feeling of ugh. Learn how to peacefully coexist with this rather innocuous pattern of sensations and your whole life will be transformed.

Our first steps in this regard invite us to experientially validate this theory in our own experience. You can to this in three easy steps: verify, identify, and inquire.

Verify - The first step is to verify in your own experience how the feeling of ugh is at the heart of all your disturbance. Throughout your day, notice when you are feeling upset, impatient, angry and then ask yourself: how do I know I am disturbed? Look for the telltale pattern of sensations that has alerted you to your disdain, and see how whenever you are disturbed the sensations, the feeling of ugh, is present; when you are content, they are not.

Identify - Notice the size, shape, and location of the feeling of ugh. Notice its different faces (anger vs. worry vs. fear) and tune into the intensity of the experience. Try to do this free from the labels we usually give to the feeling (e.g. emotion, anger, frustration, etc.). Simply and objectively investigate into the nature of the experience.

Inquire - Ask yourself: how is it that this mild pattern of sensations has such power over my life? How did I allow this feeling of ugh become such a tyrant? How would my life, my decisions, my well being be different if this feeling of ugh didn’t have such potency over my actions and thoughts?

These steps will put you well on your way to living in harmony with the natural arising and passing of these internal states, the same ones that have been disturbing you for your entire life. Next time we’ll look at specific techniques you can employ to further your capacity for peaceful coexistence. Until then, stay curious and pay attention.

Love & Blessings,

E

Copyright 2010, Eric Walrabenstein, all rights reserved.