Exploring “Alert Aimlessness” with Jane this Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,  

From Jane:  Last week I really resonated with Alex’s reflection on the part of himself that can feel driven to “do more.” I know how that familiar feeling that this is not enough, or good enough can haunt me.  Since then, I have been reflecting on this tendency and in my efforts to find some wisdom regarding this, I stumbled upon Ajahn Sucitto’s article Unseating the Inner Tyrant. In the article he talks about his own struggle with this phenomenon and offers a practice that he calls “Alert Aimlessness” as a way to help us let go of our strongly conditioned propensity to create a self that then needs to “do something” so that it can feel OK.   

Here is Ajahn Sucitto’s description of “alert aimlessness” from Unseating the Inner Tyrant: 

“I recommend…… having a period of alert aimlessness……Try five minutes of it as an experiment – and feel the sense of: ‘What am I supposed to do right now? I don’t feel very good. This is wasting my time. I should be…’ It doesn’t take long for the Inner Tyrant to get going; action is its primary domain. The Tyrant gets upset with aimlessness: ‘What’s the point of all this? Are you going to spend the rest of your life wasting your time?’ But we’re not doing aimlessness for the rest of our lives; we’re doing it for five or maybe ten minutes, just to feel the urge to do and question how valid it is.

The mind doesn’t always have to move into ‘Do that’ or ‘Don’t do that’; it can experience contact and learn to pause, widen and feel what’s going on right now. And with that shift of intention, the actions that form self are curtailed. Then there isn’t the creation of an ‘I’ that has to hurry, or worry about being inadequate. Of course thoughts and emotions can still occur, but they’re not knee-jerk reactions that repeat the same old habits. Instead there is freedom to choose, and to disengage. This letting go is therefore an important aspect of the awakening process.

Try it. Just allow whatever thought is there, whatever feeling is there to be felt, to be fully sensed as it is, as a visitor….While staying attentive and embodied, let yourself loosen. Attune to the watchful space that opens in your mind. Trust it. Notice, but don’t act upon or react to any impulse. Allow a more intuitive sense of direction to arise. When I do this, I don’t go crazy. Instead there’s a gentling of intention that takes me from moving onwards in time and space to deepening into the present moment, to where thinking slows down or stops. 

It’s a homecoming to the base of right intent. And it’s only from here that we can offer our basic sanity to the world.

Then, even when going somewhere, you have a centre that isn’t going anywhere. Even when the hands and mind are busy, you have a heart that is at ease.”

I look forward to exploring together how this phenomenon of creating a self that then needs to do something can activate our inner tyrant and what are ways that we can be in wholesome relationship to it. I hope you will join us!  Registration and Zoom information available here.

With mettā,
Minneapolis Insight