The Substitute Life

“Our emotional reactions are always tied to our substitute life and to our core decisions about what life is supposed to be” (Bayda 2002).

We all have expectations and requirements of ourselves and others.  When they are not met we experience disappointment and sometimes anger.  In our substitute life we have strategies that are based on our reactions.  Our reactions are based on our expectations.  All of these things make up the fabric of our substitute life.  Our decisions, strategies, expectations and reactions are our substitute life.

For example, a strategy might be “My mate should entertain me.” The disappointment comes from the basic setup of the expectation. When we take ten minutes to sit down in a quiet place and focus on our normal breathing, we can practice with our expectations and reactions.  We welcome our thoughts and label each as a decision, expectation or memory.  We can label each one as “believed thought” to keep things simple.

When we expect our mate to entertain us but they don’t, we are disappointed and might get angry.  By not expressing our anger, we do no harm to others.  By not suppressing our anger we do no harm to ourselves.  We use our practice life to experience our anger, welcome anger, feel the peak and let anger dissipate. By practicing with memories of anger, we can let go of the past.

When we practice with anger, we might find below that grief, loss or sadness.  Staying with our feelings we might be able to touch on the fear under all of these.  Much of our emotional experience is based on fear.  Being afraid is a strategy that keeps us in our substitute life.  Practice every day by finding a quiet place to sit for ten minutes and welcome fear, let fear rise up, peak and release. Label your believed thoughts about fear and being afraid.

Practice is not some romantic way to become silent like a monk.  Practice is about experiencing. Practice is taking action to experience our suffering.  When we realize that our path in life is to experience life then we can stop wasting our energy on the substitute life.  When we experience our most negative thoughts about ourselves and realize that they are not us then we come to experience life.

We are not broken and we were never broken.  We don’t need to be fixed! We just need to practice every day by finding a quiet place to sit for ten minutes and experience our thoughts and emotions.  Our practice will help us see through the boundaries we maintain that keep us a prisoner in our substitute life.


Next blog post in this series.: "Do No Harm"

Return here after reviewing the first blog in this series “What is the basic human problem?”

Source: Bayda, Ezra. Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life. Boston.: Shambhala, 2002. Print.