Meaningfulness, Wobbly Wheels, and The Heart-Mind

I’ve been thinking about meaning and meaning making lately, especially the process of how we make or bring meaning to our lives and how important a feeling of meaningfulness is to our experience. Meaning is important because it can cultivate a sense of place, structure, purpose, direction, and motivation in our lives. It can be the framework of our narrative that makes life seem less chaotic, hollow, lonely, and daunting.

Meaning making can often be presented as a form of external getting. Like we accumulate meaning from our work, relationships, creative activities, spiritual practices, etc. We can see meaningfulness as something we need to gain and add to ourselves from outside sources, as if we start with little to none. It can feel like either we have it or we don’t. And if we feel like we don’t have meaning in our lives, we better go get some in a hurry.

I’d like to offer a different perspective that considers the idea that all of us are already inherently and fully meaningful just by the fact of our existence and thus there is no meaningfulness to gain or add to ourselves. This preexisting meaningfulness can be understood as complete and natural goodness, connection, and belonging. In Buddhism, this is known as Buddha Nature. From this perspective, meaning making can be understood as a process of engaging in thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs that resonate and attune with that inherent meaningfulness. We don’t actually make meaning. Instead, we align with the meaningfulness that we already have. When this meaningfulness is positively engaged, we can recognize it through pleasant emotions or reactions (somatic, behavioral, cognitive, etc) and we “feel good”. Conversely, if we engage in thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs that do not align with this meaningfulness we experience more unpleasant emotions and reactions and we “feel bad”. We have a built-in feedback loop that informs us when we are either in alignment or out of alignment with the reality of our meaningfulness. This could be described as being either in harmony (accord) or discord. I am sure we all have felt out of tune at one time or another.

The first written account of the Buddha’s teachings is known as the Pali Canon, which used the ancient language of Pali. In the teaching, the Pali word dukkha is often translated into English as “suffering” or “dissatisfaction”. The etymology of the word dukkha has been described as a compound of du meaning “wrong” or “imbalanced” and akha meaning “the axle hole of a wheel”, where the wheel engages with the axle and ideally is perfectly centered (Amaro, 2017). Taking this metaphor of dukkha as an imbalanced wheel, we can understand suffering and dissatisfaction as a wheel that is not turning smoothly because something is off. Something is out of alignment, and I suggest that we feel this because we are not engaging in a life that aligns with our inherent meaningfulness. You know what this feels like if you have ever driven a car or ridden a bike with a wobbly wheel. If our own internal wheel is wobbly, we can feel out of balance. It can require a lot of effort and even feel dangerous to continue on.

Therapy could be understood as a process of realigning or rebalancing our wheel and getting it turning more smoothly and freely. This requires intention, attention, and ongoing effort. It requires looking squarely and honestly at all the wobbly feelings that we often just want to deny or get away from. You can see this in bicycles left abandoned on the streets around New York City. Anything left ignored or unmaintained will eventually fall into disrepair.

Aligning with and reinforcing the reality of our inherent meaningfulness requires taking an ecological view of our lives. By ecological, I am referring to multiple ways of understanding interconnectedness within larger systems, which can include, biological, social, metaphysical, spiritual, etc. I believe that meaningfulness is interwoven with a sense of belonging and connection. We are all part of a web of being and we naturally belong because we are components of ecologies.

Recognizing our meaningfulness is an engaged practice that often takes place at the level of being in relationships. Because we are ecological beings, cultivating positive relationships reinforces the interdependent reality of our existence, which is at the root of our meaningfulness. It is our natural state to be positively engaged with others (others can be people, animals, plants, the earth, spiritual others, etc). Our meaningfulness is most activated, attuned, and apparent when we engage in positive relationships through various forms of prosocial behavior. When that engagement happens, we feel more fulfilled, a greater sense of belonging and connection, peaceful, and energetic. When we feel this way, our wheel turns smoothly. When we don’t engage, we often feel isolated, empty, embattled, and weary, and the wheel can become quite wobbly.

In contemporary Western psychology, we (still) borrow a lot of language from a medical worldview and use the word “symptoms'' to describe the manifestations of an underlying condition. From my perspective, symptoms are simply messengers that may be telling us that we are either in accord, discord, or somewhere in between with our meaningfulness. This can often boil down to letting us know either “more of this” or “less of that” as we modulate away from wobbliness and towards alignment. The challenge is to be able to appropriately “hear” and “translate” the messages and discern what is being asked for.

In Buddhism, there is the concept of citta (pronounced cheh-ta) which is a Pali word often translated as “heart-mind”. I have heard the heart-mind described as a “sense organ” that acts as a bridge between the body and the mind and is the place of emotion and intuition, where

wisdom and compassion can be integrated (Sucitto, 2020). I’ve also heard it described as our “center” and perhaps it could be understood as the axle hole of our wheel, the akha. The heart- mind is resonant and can be quite subtle, but will make itself known one way or another, often through the messages of “symptoms”. It will resonate harmonically or discordantly based on what is happening and has happened in our lives and how we condition it through our thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs. It can contract and become closed and tight, and it also has the capacity to be open, receptive, and expansive. We can take responsibility to actively engage and be curious towards the heart-mind through various practices, therapy, and most importantly within relationships, because this is where our interconnectedness and inherent meaningfulness becomes the most felt and alive. An aim of therapy is to learn to access, attend to, and maintain the heart-mind, as this is where the guiding wisdom of our inherent goodness, belonging, connection, and meaningfulness ultimately makes itself known. If you allow yourself to fearlessly and compassionately tune into your own experience, your heart-mind will let you know if your wheel is out of balance and thankfully, how to get it running smoothly again. Doing this work of tuning in and rebalancing is sometimes a leap of faith, requiring trust, patience, and is often done with the support of others. And we all naturally have this capacity. When we acknowledge, engage, and align with our inherent meaningfulness, our heart-mind will resonate in harmony, thus allowing our wheel to be balanced and turn steadily.

References:

Amaro, A. (2017). The Breakthrough. Amaravati Publications.

Sucitto, A. (2020). Citta: Mind, Heart, Spirit. Dharma seed - dharma talks from retreats. Retrieved April 9, 2023, from https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/4675/