Unlearning Helplessness
November 24, 2023

There’s an experiment they did one time with dogs. They put them in a room, and the floor on which they would lie down had an electric current running through it so that no matter where they lay down, they would get a shock. They would move around trying to find a spot where there was no electric current, and finally they gave up, and would just lie down anywhere. Then the researchers moved them to another room where half the floor would give them a shock and the other half wouldn’t. The researchers would drag the dogs from one side to the other of the room to show them they didn’t have to lie down in the part that was giving them the shock. But by that time the dogs had given up. They figured there was nothing they could do—they just put up with whatever they had to put up with. It’s called learned helplessness.

The creepy part about this experiment was that they did it as part of an experiment to show what torture can do. The fact that there’s somebody thinking of these things is pretty creepy.

But it does point out an important psychological lesson: that if you give up your sense of agency, life is pretty hopeless. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha said that conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is a strength, because the whole message of the awakening is that it is possible to follow a path of practice that can lead to the end of suffering through our own efforts. We can make a difference by our decisions.

And you live in a world where somebody’s done that. If you can make that part of your identity, then it’s the beginning of a healthy sense of self. You want to nurture that.

It’s one of the things we assume as we sit down to meditate—that we can make a difference. The fact that we’re sitting here with our eyes closed watching our breath is a choice that we made.

We’re trying to see if it’s a good choice. Because that’s a lot of what agency is: You make a choice, and then you test it, and then you learn from your choices. But it has to start with that assumption—that you do have the power of choice, and you do have the power to gauge the results of your actions.

So, try to apply that principle here.

This conviction is not only a strength, the Buddha also lists it as an internal treasure—a form of wealth. And when he compares the practice to a fortress, where all the different elements of the practice are forms of protection, conviction comes right at the beginning. It’s the foundation post for the fortress.

So, think about that, the implications of the fact that the Buddha gained awakening. To have conviction in this principle is a strength, a treasure, and a protection, because it applies direction to your own actions. As he said, his awakening didn’t come from any special divine powers. It came from powers within his mind that everybody has in potential form. It’s simply that he developed those powers to the ultimate degree.

This is one of the reasons why we chant about taking refuge in the Buddha. It means that we see his awakening as an important event, one of the events that shapes world history. It’s not just simply a list of things that happened in the past that you can remember or forget and doesn’t make much of a difference. This is one of those events that has huge implications for what you can do.

When you think about the Buddha, and he seems a little too super-human for you, then you can think about the Sangha. In the Theragatha and the Therigatha there are lots of verses about monks and nuns who got really discouraged in the practice. Some of them were even suicidal, but they managed to pull themselves together. The response that’s encouraged when you read about that is that if they can do it, you can do it, too.

This may be one of the reasons why those verses were included in the Canon to begin with—to make clear that this is not a path only for super-human beings, it’s a path for beings that are very human. So try to think about the implications of that, and then apply them to what you’re doing: that it does make a difference when the mind is wandering off that you bring it right back. And even though it wanders off again, that doesn’t mean that you’ve failed—just bring it back again. Learn to develop this as a new habit.

You’re developing good qualities in the mind: Mindfulness—the ability to keep your breath in mind. Alertness—the ability to watch what you’re doing while you’re doing it, and see what results you’re getting. And then ardency—the ability to put in the effort to do this well.

You’re going to have your ups and downs, but you learn how to talk to yourself to get through them. Think of the Buddha himself, all the discouraging things that happened in his practice: six years of austerities, and then the realization that it was a wrong path. A lot of people would’ve given up. That, or they would have just stuck with the austerities and taken pride in the fact that they could be more austere than other people.

But the Buddha was wiser than that. He said, “Okay, this was a mistake. Is there another path?” And his willingness to learn from his mistakes was what made him Buddha.

This is an interesting religion. It’s unlike other religions that are supposedly founded by divine beings who’ve never known imperfection. The Buddha started out imperfect, made mistakes, and he admitted his mistakes.

Can you imagine Genesis: After seven days, God makes the world, and he looks at it, and he says, “Whoops! Beings eating other beings. What kind of world is this?”

The Buddha recognized his mistakes, and looked for ways not to repeat them. This is what it means to assume agency—that your actions really do make a difference. You can unlearn your helplessness. This form of conviction is a strength; it’s a protection; it’s a form of wealth.

So apply these principles right now. The Buddha says it’s possible to breathe in ways that give rise to a sense of fullness, rapture even, a sense of ease and pleasure in the body. Well, explore that.

I know in my own case, after having tried different types of meditation where I was forced to just be with the breath whatever it was going to do, and to limit my awareness only to the tip of my nose or the upper lip: Coming across Ajaan Lee’s instructions where you’re allowed to focus anywhere in the body, and to breathe in any way that you like so long as it’s comfortable, felt good for the body, good for the mind.

“Comfortable” sometimes means energizing; sometimes it means relaxing. Sometimes it means having a sense that the body is being very solid. Sometimes it has the meaning of thinking of the body as very porous.

What would feel good right now? What way of breathing would actually induce feelings that would feel good? You’ve got a whole hour here to explore and experiment. That’s the essence of developing meditation as a skill: that you explore. You take the basic principles and see what you can do with them.

When you read in Method 2, the text says to breathe, starting with the breath coming in from the back of the neck, going down the spine. And it talks about other ways of thinking of the breath energy going through the body. But it turns out that Ajaan Lee would also recommend still other ways in some of his Dhamma talks. In other words, he gives you some ideas to start with, and then you can run with them. And then you can try running in the opposite direction. See what happens.

This is how you learn. This is how you develop your sense of agency and responsibility, seeing that, Yes, you can make a difference, and if you’re really observant, you can make a good difference. If things aren’t going well, you can use your ingenuity to figure out what might be a better way to breathe, a better way to focus.

It’s all allowed. In fact, it’s encouraged. The Buddha didn’t want us simply to recite his teachings and accept them. He meant for us to use them as tools for exploring our own minds, to see what potentials are there.

As he said, we all have within us the potential to find something that’s deathless. Think about that: deathless, something outside of space and time, and it can be found right here—if you look carefully. You start out by looking carefully at what you’re doing and the results you’re getting, and then refining what you’re doing as a result, on the basis of what you’ve learned.

So, as we go for total liberation, it doesn’t mean that we beat down the mind, put it through a meat grinder or squeezed into straight jacket, restricting its activities. You’re going to be using your total heart and your total mind if you want to find total release. And it starts with the strength of conviction.

Think about the implications of what it means that you’re in a world where someone has gained awakening and has taught the way—what it means about your potentials, the potentials in the world, and see how it makes you a stronger person, a better person, a happier person. Because these changes can be made.