Free The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman Page B

this avoidance. The unconscious is the repository of everything that we’re avoiding.’
    The founding myth of Buddhism is practically a mirror-image of all this. The Buddha becomes psychologically free – enlightened– by confronting negativity, suffering and impermanence, rather than struggling to avoid it. According to legend, the historical Buddha was born Siddharta Gautama, the son of a king, in a palace in the foothills of the Himalayas. Like Oedipus, his destiny had been foretold: it was prophesied that he would become either a powerful king or a holy man. In common with parents throughout history, Siddharta’s preferred the job description that came with good pay and security, and so they dedicated themselves to making sure their son would grow to love privilege. They made his life a luxurious prison, pampering him with fine foods and armies of servants; he even managed to marry and have a son without once leaving his bubble of entitlement. It was only at the age of twenty-nine that he managed to venture outside the compound. There, he saw what have become enshrined in Buddhist lore as the ‘Four Sights’: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic monk. The first three symbolised the inevitability of impermanence, and the three fates awaiting us all. Siddharta was shocked into abandoning his comfortable life, and his family, to become an itinerant monk. It was in India, some years later, that he is supposed to have achieved enlightenment after spending the night sitting beneath a fig tree, thereby becoming the Buddha, ‘the one who woke up’. But it was those initial sights, according to the myth, that first awoke his understanding of impermanence. Buddhism’s path to serenity began with a confrontation with the negative.
    From Barry Magid’s Buddhist–Freudian point of view, then, most people who thought they were ‘seeking happiness’ were really running away from things of which they were barely aware. Meditation, the way he described it, was a way to stop running. You sat still, and watched your thoughts and emotions and desires and aversions come and go, and you resisted the urge to try toflee from them, to fix them, or to cling to them. You practised non-attachment, in other words. Whatever came up, negative or positive, you stayed present and observed it. It wasn’t about escaping into ecstasy – or even into calmness, as the word is normally understood; and it certainly wasn’t about positive thinking. It was about the significantly greater challenge of declining to do any of that.
    It was shortly after meeting Magid that I took the rash decision to spend a week with forty strangers, meditating for about nine hours a day, in the middle of a forest, in the depths of winter, many miles from the nearest town, in almost unbroken silence.
    Which proved interesting.

    â€˜The basic meditation instruction is really incredibly simple,’ said Howard, one of the two teachers charged with running the retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, a converted turn-of-the-century mansion in the remote pine forests of central Massachusetts. It was early evening, and all forty of us were seated on cushions filled with buckwheat hulls in the building’s austere main hall, listening to a man with a voice so calming it was impossible to imagine an instruction he might give that you wouldn’t be lulled into following. ‘Sit comfortably, gently close your eyes, and notice the breath as it flows in and out. You can focus on this sensation at the nostrils, or at the abdomen. Just follow one breath in, and one breath out. And then do it again.’ There were nervous chuckles; surely it wasn’t going to be that simple, or that boring? ‘Other things will come up,’ Howard continued. ‘Physical sensations, feelings and thoughts will carry us away into distraction. In meditation, when we notice that happening, we don’t