I can’t stop staring at my hand

In his talk, Already Free, Adyashanti highlights the way we fixate through an amusing example.

It’s like you got mesmerised by the movement of one of your hands in front of your face. And now you can’t stop following it wherever it goes.

So you go to the doctor and say, “Doc, I’m confined to my hand! It’s hard to see anything else and I’m tired of having to follow it around.”

You wish the hand would stop moving. If only the hand would stop moving, you could relax.

It’s a ludicrous example, but it’s not far from how we relate to most of our thoughts and emotions.

We follow them around incessantly, letting them fill our entire view. We feel trapped and small. We get exhausted and lament: “If only they’d stop moving, I’d be free.”

But the problem is not the movement. The problem is the fixation.

You can choose to focus and you can choose to release.

When you release the fixation and stop following the hand, you’re delivered into spaciousness.

But the openness which makes this inner space so freeing is also makes it so difficult to adjust to. We’re used to labels, edges and boundaries. Things to get our teeth stuck into. But in this place, there’s nothing to hold on to. Experience is boundless and unresolvable. It feels unnerving. Either that, or we just skip right over it into the next narrative.

But we can acclimate to this open space, with practice and patience. The more you return, the more it feels like home.

Stop waiting for conditions to be right—when you don’t fixate, you realise you’re already free.