Does this feel familiar?

Things often begin with something genuinely beautiful: you want to live more truthfully, you long for clarity so the outside world no longer drags you around, so your mind can stop clinging to petty worries and minor griefs.

You begin by building discipline, strengthening endurance, experimenting with countless approaches. Eventually someone introduces you to aware/notice and observe—inviting you to witness body and mind directly, to recognize how the structure of ego takes shape, and to step out of the conditioning loops that once kept pulling you in.

The more you listen to talks, the more it seems reasonable. You become determined to train.

And then, without knowing when it happened, that honest wish to awaken gets replaced by something… strangely off.

From the outside, you may still look composed: measured speech, quick reactions, explanations that sound tidy, and a steady confidence that you are “in control” of yourself.

But the people closest to you begin to sense a different “taste”: little by little, you lose your natural innocence, your softness, your clean brightness.

You become easily irritable, and strangely confident when criticizing others, because you are not only being demanding with them. At some point you turned your whole life into an endless exam.

It is sad, and also deeply pitiable, because this usually does not come from bad intent. It comes from something that sounds “so reasonable”: you care too much about doing the practice of observing body and mind correctly.

In truth, that craving to be “correct” is the key of the problem.

It yanks you into a path of subtle control: you stalk your mental movements, scan for sensations in the body, monitor every ripple; you keep naming things, silently repeating “notice… notice… notice…” like a machine; you fumble around for an attention anchor, trying to keep a “clear” baseline exactly according to a formula; you quietly compare yourself to descriptions you once heard, then score yourself from moment to moment.

That approach can sound serious, methodical, even “scientific.” You may even feel less alone when you realize that most people, given a choice, would grit their teeth and choose it, because their reasoning tells them it sounds more impressive and more effective.

But if you dare to look straight at the truth, you will see yourself sweating and straining to build a massive inner control apparatus.

That apparatus produces a new SELF—far more refined and cunning than the ordinary worldly self: the self of a “practitioner.”

This self does not boast loudly, but it quietly manages, supervises, demands precision, and constantly fears being wrong—fears missing something, being insufficient, seeing incorrectly, forgetting, getting careless, being late; fears failing to identify what is happening in body and mind; fears losing what it just “discovered”; fears dropping out of a state; fears the balance it just gained will fade.

It becomes intoxicated with the feeling, “I’m practicing correctly,” and it turns that into its only source of life.

The issue is not that you use an anchor point. The issue begins at the moment your mind learns this reflex: whenever discomfort appears, you press a button and operate a technique to avoid it, instead of looking directly at the mechanism of clinging that is running.

So exhaustion becomes inevitable. Tension feels normal. You becoming increasingly rigid and less alive makes perfect sense. Because right from the starting point, you made a dangerous confusion between “seeing” and “doing.”

“Seeing” is an event that happens naturally in an instant.

“Doing” is a chain of technical operations: pick a point, place the mind, hold it there, repeat a cue, label, check, pull back, then score yourself again.

The moment you switch into “doing,” you are no longer standing in front of raw truth. You are standing in front of a central control panel. You believe you are gazing into a vast sky, but in reality you are staring at a tiny radar screen that your control habit has drawn with its own hands.

And it doesn’t stop there. You can easily fall into another sweet trap: confusing the smoothness of language with the direct knowing of lived evidence. It is very easy to memorize a few keywords and turn them into conditioned reflexes.

A sensation appears: label it. A thought appears: label it. A sound, a twitch, a disturbance: label it.

Your mind begins to operate like an industrial labeling machine. And yes—while you are busy labeling, the mind wanders less into other random activities.

You get the illusion that you are seeing “more clearly,” because the symbols from labels create a feeling of meaning, and identification with those labels makes the practitioner-self feel safer.

But the clarity created by symbols is completely different from the clarity that comes from seeing the truth. It is like how a person who speaks very smoothly can confuse the feeling of coherence in speech with proof that what they are saying accurately reflects reality.

Some people go even further and construct a permanent “observer” character in the mind. This character keeps whispering: “noticing now,” “seeing now,” “awake now,” “not clinging now,” “notice this notice this,” “just seeing is enough,” “see, see, see,” “you don’t need to do anything, just see!”

What needs training is honesty, and the ability to stay with the data that is present. What should not be trained as a technical manipulation is the habit of creating a controller who constantly monitors “right–wrong.” Because then you think you have escaped the self, but you are actually feeding a managerial self—a “proctor” that must keep its role alive. That is not pure aware/notice. That is a voice, an activity of self-affirmation. And as long as a “role” still needs to be preserved, you are fattening exactly the thing you keep claiming you want to see through and “end.”

When that proctor-machine runs smoothly, you begin hunting states that you treat as achievements. You do the labeling procedure “correctly” (as you believe), you feel “successful,” and then a pleasant state appears. That pleasantness comes from self-satisfaction, not from a release that follows the end of clinging. Pleasantness produces belief. Belief strengthens the procedure. Strengthening the procedure increases fear of losing it. Fear tightens the monitoring. Monitoring increases tension. Tension hardens you. Hardness removes your naturalness. Finally it forms a “fake aware/notice / fake practice”—a life manipulated by fear of deviating from a standard and thirst for the feeling “I’m going in the right direction.”

Another common confusion: believing that “less thinking” or “no thinking” equals awakening. Techniques that cultivate stillness—focusing on breath, concentrating force on a point in the body, and so on—can quiet the stream of thought. But many people miss the crucial point: they assume that for “stillness produces wisdom,” something must be pressed down. They become quiet by holding their breath, clenching the jaw, tightening the belly, forcing the eyes, suppressing emotion, ordering the mind to “stay still.” The outside looks like calm, but inside the nervous system is stretched taut, resisting and trembling like an over-pulled string. That is not samadhi (stillness). That is a struggle disguised as serenity.

Because when you pour attention into a very specific signal—breath rhythm, a bodily point—you reduce the resources the brain uses to build and maintain chains of thought. As thoughts thin out, you feel lighter, wider, brighter, steadier. You might quickly call that wisdom, clarity, progress. No, my friend—this is “effective” in the same way that grinding your teeth can hold back anger. It is temporary suppression. Thinking gets reduced temporarily, that’s all.

Interestingly, later when I read the suttas, I found a similar idea: right stillness begins when the mind withdraws from desire and unskillful states. Let’s try to use that standard as a mirror: If the moment we “enter stillness” is full of desire to attain and resistance toward what is present, then that “quiet” is certainly not the quiet the suttas are pointing to.

Meaning: if you cultivate “stillness” by clenching and pressing down, then in that very moment you already have the two things the texts say must be left behind (withdrawn from sensual desire, withdrawn from unskillful states):

You have desire: the craving to attain, to be calm, to be correct, to make everything “shut up now.” It is thirst for a state “according to my will.”

You have unskillful states: at least aversion (against thoughts, against sensations) and delusion (mistaking forced silence for samadhi). Many people get a bonus dose of unskillful states too: restlessness-and-remorse, because they constantly fear “losing stillness,” fear “ruining the session,” fear “not knowing whether this is correct.”

So stillness achieved by forcing thoughts down is not right stillness. It is simply a struggle, with the desire to attain intact, and resistance intact.

If you believe you are going the right way because at least, when you brace and squeeze like this, thinking reduces, then the consequence of that belief becomes quite cruel. It creates a kind of “fake progress” that grows harder and harder to detect from the inside.

First, you begin to equate practice with control. You stop learning to see the mechanism of clinging; you learn to grip and tighten. The SELF’s habit of “wanting safety through control” gets trained deeper—exactly the root of suffering you thought you wanted to see.

Second, you easily become addicted to quietness. You start measuring success by how “silent” the mind and body become. When life pulls you out of sitting—forcing interaction and friction in a multi-dimensional world—thoughts jump up again, you panic and conclude you are “regressing,” then you practice harder, tightening discipline and suppression even more.

This loop makes you dependent on ritual and favorable conditions in a very literal way: you only feel “okay” when the procedure is complete (enough silence, enough solitude, enough time, correct posture, correct breath rhythm, etc.). When one condition is missing, the mind immediately switches to alert mode.

The more you train the mind through force, the less you can live within the vividness of life; you only maintain and restore a state that has become familiar—like someone dependent on sedatives needing a usual dose to feel normal.

And when you repeatedly practice based on tightening and pressing down, the mind does not become strong in the sense of clarity. It becomes strong in the sense of hardening: you train the control reflex, train chronic tone, train tolerance for internal pressure. Each time life pulls you out of the quiet cocoon, you treat it as failure, then return to squeeze harder. Gradually the baseline tension rises without your noticing, because you have become used to increasing the dosage.

Not everyone falls into extremes, but for people with a high-tension baseline, or those who misunderstand practice as prolonged clench–press, some consequences can appear: chronic insomnia, rapid heartbeat, panic, a sense of disconnection from the body, thoughts racing wildly or becoming numb, or unusual excitement followed by a crash. These are consequences of pushing the nervous system past its limits by mistaking right samadhi for suppression, mistaking aware/notice for surveillance, mistaking clarity for hypervigilance.

Third, you strengthen the hindrance of restlessness-and-remorse: the mind both monitors and fears being wrong. Outside you might maintain a peaceful demeanor, soft speech, an upright sitting posture. Inside the nervous system is stretched tight like a string, because you must keep control-force running. This calm is not calm from understanding; it is calm from constraint.

Fourth, the “I practice well” identity grows very fast, because this kind of constraining gives you something easy to misread: you press thoughts down, the body quiets for a while, so you feel relief and a subtle high. You mistake that pleasantness for wisdom.

But that pleasantness only says one thing: for a few minutes, your willpower just “won” over chaos—like someone holding their breath to avoid crying, or grinding their teeth to avoid exploding. The brain rewards you for “having control,” so you feel good, feel bright, feel like you are on track.

Yes, there are many skillful means that can guide the mind toward release, but you must be guided in a way that prevents dependency on the means. The mind is naturally addicted to control because control feels like safety. When you bring control into practice as a tool, you must be genuinely skillful and flexible. Otherwise control becomes “pain medication,” and instead of gently seeing the mechanism of clinging, you learn to cover it with increasingly refined control techniques.

So how can the mind become simple and ordinary in practice?

Try approaching spiritual practice—the movement toward awakening and enlightenment—as you would a long, unhurried walk, or a game you step into with interest and openness. Let it be light in your hands. Do not turn it into something burdensome.

This is the paradox many people can’t tolerate. If someone tells you to be gentle with yourself, to see the journey as a walk, they are not being careless or shallow. When you tense up and turn practice into a “life-or-death project” for the self, you are feeding energy into the very mechanism that creates suffering.

Turning practice into something grave and urgent is often a refined form of craving. Look closely: are you using fear to generate urgency, anxiety, a sense that you must practice immediately no matter what? It can look like diligence, but it is actually adding fuel to craving. Enthusiasm can be wholesome, but you must distinguish genuine ardor from ambition. Watch that distinction in yourself with precision.

When you enter observation with curiosity and a childlike innocence of exploration, your aware/notice and your insight process function very differently:

You do not need to construct a “practitioner” to control. When you are relaxed, the mind is calmer and still; when the mind is still, you see more clearly. That innocence creates something extremely rare: openness and brightness when facing your own “ugly” and “wrong.” That openness allows the mind to reveal the raw data fully: what is dragging you, what is making you cling, what is weaving stories, what is trying to “feel safe.” That attitude creates absolute honesty in observing. When you see clearly, you interfere less. When you interfere less, the operating structure of mind reveals itself. And once the structure reveals itself clearly enough, what needs to drop will drop on its own.

On the other hand, if you practice out of fear (fear of wrongness, fear of no results, fear of mistakes, fear of missing something) or out of grasping (grasping for correctness, for bliss, for “aware/notice”), you have placed KPIs above the objective reality of your mind’s natural functioning. Then seeing is no longer light illuminating truth; it becomes a greedy hand searching for whatever fits your beliefs.

Some practice systems are presented in a way that sounds very coherent. For example: choose a clear sensation point in the body, usually strong enough to pull attention; hold tightly to it; pair it with a short internal cue; keep an even rhythm; whenever the mind shifts, return to the anchor; whenever thoughts arise, repeat the cue; when the mind becomes less noisy, call it progress.

When you try it, it can create the feeling of “less noise,” gathering into “one-pointedness,” sometimes producing joy, and you may be able to sit longer, get distracted less, feel the mind become “neater.”

But you must be able to answer: what is this training, exactly? When discomfort appears, do you reflexively tighten the anchor and repeat the internal cue? If it has become an unbreakable rule, then the mind is learning and being programmed into something obvious: escape the truth of what is happening through anchoring and muttering.

If every time a thought pops up, you must use an internal command to block it, then you are quietly reinforcing a control-center. If every time you reach a pleasant state, you are taught that this means you are “on the right track,” then you are training the mind to use pleasant feeling as the measure of practice—even though pleasant or unpleasant is not the sign that wisdom has arisen.

Look again: if you must maintain a special bodily maneuver to keep the mind “right,” then that “right” depends on conditions. If you must mutter reminders to ensure you are “seeing,” then that “seeing” cannot stand on its own yet. It requires “someone” behind it to guard it. And that “guard” is the biggest blind spot.

In everyday life—caring for children, working, communicating, being criticized, being misunderstood—do you need to keep tightening, anchoring, repeating cues? Or can you gently witness what the mind is doing, and see its natural mechanisms without relying on techniques as if they were mandatory programming?

If what you are doing strengthens a central adjuster—even if that adjuster argues using “correct doctrine”—then it is moving against the aim. Remember: correct reasoning and correct practice are different. To know whether it is truly “right,” look at results: do you see and release the mechanisms of dependence and bondage in the mind, or do you need more and more supports?

A practice that increasingly depends on manipulation—more monitoring, more holding, more muttering reminders—feeds a refined ego.

Whatever means you use, if you find yourself needing to do less and less, interfering less and less, protecting states less and less, carrying less and less of the burden of “having to become someone” or “having to not become someone,” and you become increasingly flexible and effortless in seeing and releasing distorted, binding mechanisms right in real life—then you are going in the right direction.

Phan Ý Ly
27.02.2026