One of the important things to understand as you come to practice the Dhamma is that you’re not running away from anything.

"One of the important things to understand as you come to practice the Dhamma is that you’re not running away from anything. If you want to run away from the human race: You come out here and what have you got? You’re sitting here under a tree, you’re sitting with a member of the human race. You want to run away from your body: You’re sitting there with your body. You want to run away from the issues of the mind: You find that when things are quiet, the issues have more space to come and confront you.

So once you realize there’s no place to run away, what do you do? You have to turn around and learn how to deal with these things. If it’s something unskillful in the mind, you have to learn how to reason with it. You can’t just push it away and pretend it’s not there. You have to enter into a dialogue.

As for the body, before you drop attachment to the body, you’re got to learn that the body has its good side. We were discussing today: We sit with the body, sit with the breath and things get out of balance: The properties that can help bring it back into balance are right there in the body as well. If things feel too heavy, too dense, that’s the earth element. The earth element is balanced out by the wind or breath element. If things get too hot, you’ve got the water element to cool things off. If you feel dizzy and light-headed, the earth element can help get you grounded. You want to learn how to get in touch with these things and bring them into balance. You can’t run away from them, so learn how to actually more intimately involved with them — but with the right understanding, that it’s only when you sort things out in this way that you can finally let go. Not out of aversion, but out of dispassion. You’ve seen how far these properties can go and you get on good terms with them before you say goodbye. That way, your letting go is not neurotic, not based on unskillful motivation. It comes from understanding. The body has its good points but they go only so far. And you’ve found something that goes farther.

The same with issues in the mind: Some people come to meditation hoping they can just shut everything down in the mind. They won’t have to think, they won’t have to deal with anything, just push things out. Well, the more you push things out, the more they come rebounding back to you. You’ve got to learn how to sit down and talk things through, enter into a dialogue."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No Running Away"

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