The Loop

Here is the loop most men are living inside without knowing it.

The mind chases what it has labelled as 'good' pleasure, validation, certainty, excitement and runs from what it has labelled as 'bad' pain, shame, grief, fear, boredom. All day. Every day. Automatically.

You might know this if you meditate or have general understanding of Buddhist teachings. So let's go deeper.

The attachments and the aversions are two sides of the same trap. Both keep a man enslaved to the fluctuation of his states. His mood becomes his master. His story becomes his reality. His likes and dislikes become the architecture of his prison.

And from inside the loop, it doesn't feel like a loop. It feels like life. It feels like who you are.

Here is what I want you to notice, right now, as you read.

There is probably a state present in your body. Maybe tension. Maybe restlessness. Maybe a quiet heaviness. Maybe the urge to check something else, a tab, a message, the time.

Don't do anything about it. Just notice it's there.

That noticing, that's the gap. And that gap is influential moving forward.

The thing most men want to avoid is usually the thing they most need to move through. Some brothers reading my articles might mistake that I find suffering as noble. While in all honesty, I am allergic to the energy of avoidance, the wall it builds between us and the world, the deception of it and how it paralyses good men from taking action.

The feeling itself, met and felt directly, with the body open and the breath steady, would eventually pass. Grief, fully felt, completes itself. Fear, fully met, softens. Shame, held in honest awareness, begins to lose its grip.

But the avoidance, the turning away, the numbing, the scrolling, the drink, the rationalisation, the reaching for the phone, builds the wall thicker every time. And now the man isn't just carrying the original pain. He's carrying the weight of years of not feeling it.

This is why so many men describe themselves as numb. They're not broken. They're fortified against further potential harm. The walls work exactly as designed. The problem is that the walls also keep out everything worth living for, depth, connection, intimacy, purpose that is felt rather than performed.

Pause here. Put your attention on your chest. Not a thought about your chest ,the actual sensation. Tightness? Openness? Warmth? Nothing? Whatever is there, meet it. Don't narrate it. Don't fix it. Just let your attention land there for three breaths.

That is the practice. As simple as this.

The way out of the loop is not to fix the emotions. Not to eliminate the difficult ones or manufacture more of the pleasant ones.

The way out is to find the part of you that was never touched by any of it.

The observer.

The part that has always been there, before the mood and temperament arrived, through the storm, after it passed. Watching. Non-thinking. Non-reactive. Always present. Always in stillness.

That part is not something you build. It is something you return to. It has always been there. You forgot because your inner noise got loud.

Through continuous cultivation of the observer, we experience a richness always available to us. You are the observer and the observed.

We are either observing our states with curiosity, surfing our glorious waves or we are being drowned by them. if you judge the state, you become the state.

The moment the observer says "I shouldn't feel this" — he has collapsed into the very thing he was watching. He has become the mood. He has become the story. He has lost the gap.

So when you catch yourself judging, notice the judger. Who is that voice? Where did it learn to speak like that? What is it protecting?

Because the judger is just another programme. Just another automatic response. It can be witnessed too.

And who is watching the judger?

That one, quiet, unmoving, behind every storm you've ever lived through, that is who you actually are. You don't find him by seeking. You find him by pausing.

I'll leave you with a practice, if you're willing.

Stop reading after this paragraph. Close your eyes. Sit with whatever is present, the thoughts, the sensations, the mood, the restlessness. Don't manage any of it. When something arises, name it silently. "This is anxiety." "This is boredom." "This is the urge to move." Then return to watching.

When you catch yourself judging "I can't do this," "this is pointless," "I'm not doing it right" notice the judger. Name him too.

Then ask: who noticed the judger?

Stay there. That's your inner ground.

Stay rooted.

— Mahmoud

Stay open. Stay rooted.