Ensō: see through the stories which hold you back.
By: Jay Vidyarthi
Tags: Mindfulness, Psychology, Toronto, Meditation, Life

8 months ago, when we decided to leave Toronto for a monastery, it felt like a renunciation of sorts. We were trying to slow down. By backing away from the lifestyle and opportunities of the city, it would seem that we wanted less. The exact opposite was true: we wanted more. More than money, a house, a job, a reputation. More than Netflix, social media, craft beers, and fancy brunch. Something deeper, something more meaningful, something else.

This week, we moved back to Toronto. If you’ve been following along, you might be surprised to hear that. After detaching completely from our urban lives, we spent a little while practicing intensive mindfulness with modern monks, enjoyed some long-overdue quality time with family, and even road-tripped to the Atlantic ocean through Montreal, Halifax, and many stops in the Maritime countryside. All the while we were considering alternative ways of life, yet in the end, we’ve decided to come back to Toronto. Why?

Zen calligraphers draw this shape, called an Ensō. It’s an exercise in natural expression. It captures our situation quite well. On the surface, we’ve come full circle. After abandoning our lives in Toronto and heading off on a search, here we are, back in Toronto. Looks like we didn’t find anything at all, doesn’t it? But looks can be deceiving — there’s a much subtler story here. Things feel very different on the inside.

This city was never the problem. It was just a scapegoat for our desire to explore deeper questions about our lives. Toronto is such a huge concept anyway. How could we — living in one particular apartment, in one neighborhood, working a certain job, with one narrow perspective — judge the entire city? Something felt off last year, and my wife and I were sure that the city was causing of all our problems. Here’s what I wrote then:

But that was just a story. We all tell stories to distract ourselves from uncomfortable truths. This pattern pervades every area of life. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no need to antagonize these stories; thinking is who we are. Yet at the same time, there’s no use in letting them run our lives either. If anything was sabotaging our personal interests, it was our own broken perspectives.

The middle ground is in awareness. It’s a subtle truth I’ve experienced this year. By working to be fully aware of the stories I tell myself, those which don’t actually serve anyone start to somehow dissolve.

The stories want to be seen as truth.

At the beginning of 2018, we left Toronto because we felt disconnected, unsatisfied, and we were desperately searching for some kind of answer. Almost a year later, here I am — back in the same living situation — yet I feel connected, satisfied, and comfortable knowing there is no answer to be found. What has changed? It’s hard to say for sure, but the incessant thoughts seem to be losing their hold on me. There’s a sense of freedom in letting my stories go. They aren’t shaping my decisions nearly as much as they used to. Last week, my wife and I were chatting about this, and we came up with a list:

Stories we once held as true, but now seem to be dissolving:

Toronto doesn’t align with our values

Living in the country will improve our quality of life

Happiness is out there

Mindfulness will make me happy all the time

We need stable full-time jobs to survive

We could never raise a kid in an apartment

Everything needs to make sense

We are in full control of our lives

I’m sure your stories are very different than ours, but the pattern might be familiar. These thoughts can be so deep and repetitive. Even if you know a thought is false in one moment, it will show up again and again. It won’t stop until it relentlessly wears you down and you submit. The stories don’t want to be seen as stories, they want to be seen as truth.

Only through constant vigilance have these stories begun to loosen their hold on my mind and life. As I watch these stories come and go without getting stuck on them, I’m surprising myself by what’s possible. I find myself fearlessly stepping into situations which would have been unimaginable to me less than a year ago. Moving back to Toronto, for one. But there’s more.

Instead of the stability of a full-time job, I am starting my own consulting business aimed at impacting a wider range of people through meaningful projects. Instead of renting (as we have for the past decade), my wife and I chose to buy this apartment — we’re committing to Toronto this time. Oh, and the biggest one of all, we’re pregnant with our first child! All this dramatic change would have sent me reeling a year ago, for no reason other than nonsense stories I was telling myself in a desperate bid to be in control of, well, everything.

The stories we tell ourselves are like mosquito bites. To ruminate on them is to scratch an itch. Mm… the sweet kiss of temporary relief. The mosquito is long gone, but here I am, scratching away. I almost can’t help it, and by scratching and scratching and scratching, all I’m really doing is digging deeper into my own skin and eventually drawing blood. I taste a similar relief when I regurgitate these stories over and over in my mind. It’s a dangerous game. Loop through the same old story for long enough, and it calcifies as truth. As a result, I end up with very flawed and unhealthy perspectives. If I try to actively resist the story, it only gets stronger.

This is where intensive mindfulness training has helped immensely. Meditation directly explores happiness from first principles. We practice maintaining a balanced internal state while making skillful choices on when to adjust external conditions. A practice as useful for every breath as it is for making major life decisions. Eventually, we see through the clever strategies our mind has developed to avoid discomfort and seek pleasure. The stories appear flimsy and biased. They arise from nothing only to dissolve back into nothing. It becomes a lot easier to take them less seriously.