In a language class one day, a practitioner found herself frustrated. Her teacher and classmates strayed from the course material to discuss a recent field trip. This particular trip was one in which she had not attended. She felt that their discussion was a waste of time and off point.
What was the cause of her irritation?
Was it her attachment to self and self-belongings, such as her time, her tuition money? This approach didn’t quite seem to do the trick.
Was it that she felt left out? She didn’t get to go on the trip, so she may have felt like the odd one out. If she had gone on the trip and was part of the discussion, would she feel the same irritation?
Or was it that she felt she wasn’t getting her money’s worth? Sort of. But it was more along the lines of the way she thought the class should be run. To really learn the language, they should go through the coursework and do the language exercises. They definitely should not go off-script and discuss a field trip that excluded some students, like herself, from participating.
Looking back, it was discovered that this person had a pattern of being frustrated whenever things didn’t stick to her script. There was to be a methodical approach for every single thing. Once she found that she was holding tight to these rules that others didn’t necessarily subscribe to, she realized this was the cause of her suffering. Thus to eradicate this permanent perception, she had to realize that there are two camps out there- the camp that subscribes to her rules, and the other camp that sees things differently. If her rules are aligned with others, she is happy. If she finds herself in conflict with other people’s rules, she is unhappy. It is natural for this dichotomy to exist in the world. It is unnatural for us to hope otherwise.
It’s interested how we get stuck in our permanence. I need structure, but if I don’t agree with the structure (or in this case the type of exercises being utilized to teach me language), I won’t be happy. I need to be “engaged”, if I can relate to what they are doing (non-structured), like illustrating a point by talking about a movie I love, then I’d be engaged and speak highly about their way of teaching, but if they illustrate it by talking about sports (which I find booooooring), I’d complain about how it is a waste of time.
It’s amazing how we are controlled by our wants and needs which vary from day to day, week to week, situation to situation.
Last week, I attended a Jiu Jitsu class for beginners, it was taught by one of my juniors. Though I am a higher belt that her, she had been teaching kids for a while and just recently started teach adults (which is who I will be teaching). I did the class just like all the other beginning students and saw how she ran the class and saw how she taught the techniques. I felt like she missed a lot of the finer points of the techniques and it bothered me, but I was a student that evening and didn’t say anything. I also realized that there is a reason for why she did what she did, it’s just that I’m not understanding it just yet (I needed to contemplate). By the end of the class, I realized that she was a good teacher because she understood that her students were beginners and just needed to learn the basic moves. The finer points of the techniques would come later when they moved to the regular adult class. When I realized what she was doing, I gained a whole new level of respected for this teacher and based on her example, am now better equipped to teach my beginning class. If I didn’t understand impermanence, I probably would have gotten nothing out of her class other than being frustrated.
When I spoke about wants and needs, in hindsight, I think it’s more “expectations” than “wants and needs”