on, come on! Give yourself a break. Get to know this
stuff. Drop the story line.” “Forget it!” you say. Boy are
you stubborn.
That’s what I find about myself. Even when we’re
given the methods for how to give ourselves a break,
we are so stubborn. If you think smoking is hard to
give up, try giving up your habitual patterns. It leaves
you with the same kind of queasy feeling that you
have when giving up any other addiction.
So instead of “liberating yourself by examining and
analyzing,” the habitual response to seeing yourself
clearly is to take the wrong medicine: you inflame the
jealousy, you wallow more in self-pity, you speed up
the frivolity. Usually we do this by talking to our-
selves. It’s like a bellows fanning a fire. We just sit
there, and we have fantasies about our boyfriend
leaving the party with our friend, or we talk to our-
selves about how it’s hopeless and how we always feel
like this and how it’s never going to get better.
Do something different, such as tonglen. Anything
different would help, anything that’s not habitual.
For example, you could go up and take a cold shower
and sing at the top of your lungs, or drink a glass of
water from the wrong side, like you do when you are
trying to get rid of hiccups.
Continuing that way. But even if you see what you do
and even if you do something different, the third dif-
ficulty is that it’s difficult to continue that way, to cut
The Big Squeeze 187