Using Politics to Unhook from Struggle

If you are like me, this election season in the US brought up all sorts of things – everything from happiness and sadness, to anger and frustration and even fear and despair.  Whether you live here or in another part of the world, it seems like we are getting more and more polarized for we all have a tendency to like our position and dislike the other person’s. Also, for time immemorial, we have struggled with whatever system governs us.

I invite you to take a step back and simply recognize that the kind of mind most people live in loves to like and dislike.  It judges and compares; at one moment it decides that everything is going in the wrong direction and becomes angry or afraid and then shifts to being happy because the powers to be are doing it ‘right’ and you have ‘bettered’ the people who have opposite views.

Can you hear the suffering of that? We all pay a heavy price for struggling with life in this way. Even when you get what you want, things always change. For a time, the government is run by people who share your views, and then the opposite views take over as new people are voted in. We live on a roller coaster of our mind’s liking and disliking, wanting and resisting, being happy and being afraid.

Imagine what your life would look like if you weren’t run by your addiction to struggling with life in this way.  How would your view of life be different if you saw that this is not the pathway to peace and that trying to hold on to what you like and resist what you don’t like is the pathway to suffering?

It is possible to mature enough so you respond to the challenges in your life rather than react.  How do you do that?  It is through what I call ‘look to unhook’. What do I mean by that? As we have explored before, most of us identify with the storyteller in our heads that talks all day long, always trying to do life and make ourselves and our lives better or different, so that we will finally know peace we long for.  In other words, it is conditioned to struggle with life!

’Look to unhook’ is about getting to know the storyteller in your head. It’s getting to know its liking and disliking and its wanting and resisting that is fueled by wanting yourself and life to be different than what it is. It’s learning how to relate to it rather than from it so you are no longer run by its stories. Then you can use your mind rather than having it use you.

Politics is one of the most clearly defined places where you can begin to see what your storyteller is doing. Instead of being caught in the seemingly endless stories in your head, ‘look to unhook’ is about becoming fascinated. It is about taking a moment to become curious about what your mind is doing, especially when you are reacting.

The more you ‘look’, the more you see that you don’t have to be run by your stories, and rather than following them down the rabbit hole of reaction, you unhook and they pass right on through you.  Why is this so powerful?  Because now you can respond to situations in your life rather than reacting. And every time you do, humanity takes one more step out of the kind of mind that creates so much heartache in the world.

If this intrigues you, I invite you to spend one whole day just noticing when your mind likes something and when it dislikes something, and you will be amazed.  Please, as you do this, don’t take it personally.  It is just the kind of mind we all crawled into when we were young – the kind of mind that more and more people are ready to unhook from.