Everyone has had the experience of feeling discontented with a life situation and then having it become so much worse, that the set-up you were unhappy with starts to seem like a pretty good deal in hindsight.
You think to yourself, geez, I didn't know how good I had it until the little I had was taken away. This is the way things tend to happen to us humans, because we tend to fixate and dwell on what's wrong with a situation—or what seems to be wrong with it. And by now, you've probably figured out that as you fixate on what is wrong, you attract to yourself more of the same. It's an entirely neutral law, this business of "that which is like unto itself is drawn" and yet even when we can see that because we are focusing on the negative more negative things are happening, we find it difficult to just stop.
We become obsessed with pointing at the problem, and through the magic of our divine attention, the problem grows.
This is the runaway horse aspect of the mind. Just as it requires some effort to tame a horse or train a dog, it requires some effort to get the human mind under control. Or let's put it a different way because the word "control" is not a politically correct spiritual word right now—it takes some effort to tame the mind and get it to be workable, instead of a nuisance. It take some effort to turn the mind into more of a friend than an enemy.
Most of us have an adversarial relationship with our minds. The last thing we want to do is to be present in the moment—to be mind-full. We prefer to be entertained—taken out of the moment—to be mind-less. Because we spend so much time being mind-less, we lose the ability to focus and control the mind. We don't even know, really, that such an ability exists!
Focusing attention in the present moment begins to feel at best like a chore and at worst, frightening. In between being a chore and being frightening there seems to be a vast field of boredom. We look at children who can't sit still or focus and say that they have attention deficit disorder, but the truth is that we all have a deficit in the area of attention. We really don't want to look inward at the mind, learn how it works, and get in shape.
Yet the mind itself is not to blame. It's just mind-stuff. Undisciplined and conditioned by the culture in which it finds itself, it prefers to wander and be entertained. Deep within, however, the mind is a working dog. The mind is a border collie waiting for orders and training. Kept inside with no real job to do, it just tears the house apart. With training comes a sense of upliftedness. It's the same dog either way, but with training, there is less suffering.
One simple trick you can teach your mind is to be aware of the fault-finding mind. The fault-finding mind is the dog that the second you close the door of attention behind you, begins to shred everything in site. Just noticing this mind at work—pointing at the negative, complaining about what is, considering how this will not do, this is not good enough—just noticing this mind, robs it of its power. Without the fault-finding mind yammering in the foreground, there is a quiet feeling of natural contentment, of peaceful observation in the background.
Noticing the fault-finding mind exercises the muscles of attention. This produces the same kind of feeling of contentment that exercising the body does. You're not just going along, allowing the mind to gorge on the junk food of complaint. You're stopping that addiction by shining the light of attention on it. It can only carry on in the dark of mindlessness.
Yes, there's a momentary feeling of deprivation as you lose the sensations of solidity created by opposing what is happening in the now. But sticking it out past that sense of deprivation returns to you all the energy that had been consumed by opposition, and that energy returns to its natural state, which is mindfulness, contentment, peace, awareness.
