Escaping?

 

I made a promise to myself, to live a life I don't have to escape from.

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I find it very hard to escape this escapist tendency I have lol...I try but there it is so often coming into my awareness, bubbling to the surface in my body with a tightness in my gut and an urgency in my movement.  I observe it in the thoughts that spring to mind , "What do I got to do now so I don't feel this?  Where do I got to go? What changes do I gotta make?  I have got to fill my moment with some distracting activity just so I am not absorbed in that internal restlessness. I have to do something 'productive'." I see it in my "seeking" for some way to "fix" the moment where this escape tendency emerges  by partaking in something that will "fix" me and this Life I am living. I so easily slip back into the "I will be free of this feeling when,,, peaceful when..." mantra of the unevolved existence. 

This escape tendency is much less intense than it was...because I am much more "aware" than I was but it is still there. One example, is the feeling and thought stream centered around, "I must find some paying work" or "I have to try writing for publication again." Those thoughts are there to help me escape this feeling of "unproductivity" I have and this belief that my'discontent with the moment'is partially a result of not having enough money.  I have to sternly remind my "self" ( but I am trying to be more gentle in my approach) that there is no escaping this moment...that this moment is all there is...that some time up there in a future that never comes is not the answer or the solution for finding samtusta...This, that is going on right here and right now, that may or may not be triggering that escaping samskara, is the solution.  It is a tool I can use for purification.  My noticing it is a doorway to my observing it. Observing it is a doorway to allowing and accepting it rather than running from it...Allowing will lead to a looking deeply at it and the moment , despite the squirming away tendency, and that will lead to this human making peace with it, honoring it, and embracing it... before slowly allowing it to be released. (We do not have to consciously release these things ...we just have to move out of the way.) 

So, I notice the escape tendency in me. I think the Buddha may have grouped this tendency under the fourth hindrance to awakening: restlessness and worry. It is a hindrance only when we resist the esperience of it...but when we allow it, observe it, look deeply into it and move out of the way of it...it can be a doorway that takes us higher. 

I don't know ...something to think about.