I’m a reactive fool. When stressed or underslept, my nervous system is on a hair trigger. I get edgy, and am more likely to lash out and upset the people around me. Annoyance builds. Relationships suffer.

My old teacher Shinzen Young has a great phrase for this dynamic: he calls it “waxy buildup.” Every time we react to a person or situation – we say a harsh word, or act out some behavior – the buildup grows. And grows. Until one day, we pass an invisible point of no return, and suddenly we’re positive we can no longer be around this person, or this place, or this job, or this life. They’re now hidden behind a wall of waxy buildup.
Relationships may offer the clearest example. We meet a new person, and think they're sensational. We enter the honeymoon phase, when they can say or do no wrong. Then – say, six months in – we notice the way they noisily slurp their soup. Who does that? We hold our first grudge, our first bit of waxy buildup.
Over time, we get more impatient with their blind spots, their perceived faults, their same predictable behaviors. The soup-slurping gets … repellent.
One day our person suggests ramen for dinner – ramen! with you?! – and we explode in vitriolic condemnation of their character and history and general failings as a human being. Except they're fed up with us as well, because, frankly, we’ve been acting like an asshole, and they have their own waxy buildup. The result: acrimony, divorce, end of days.
Waxy buildup isn’t fixed. It’s cumulative. It escalates into bigger and bigger annoyances, and bigger and bigger disagreements, with ever-more outrage and rigidity and righteousness. This dynamic is a fair description of so much of what happens around the world between people, between groups, between countries. Tit for tat, impatience and anger and aggression all grow, an unconscious acting out from our conditioning, a narrowing of options, a void of creativity and possibility.
It's just robots fighting now. What a tragedy.
This is where meditation shines. If we can notice the beginning of our reactivity, and take a deep breath, and let the impulse to react pass through us ... then there will be less waxy buildup. Maybe no waxy buildup. “No karma,” say the yogis.
The more fully we allow ourselves to experience our reactivity, the more even old waxy buildup can diminish. I still find this astounding: our baseline level of reactivity can shrink. It may be the most important thing I’ve experienced from years of meditation. Meditation makes space. Our patterns may always be here, but they can happen inside an ever-larger container of awareness, and thus pose less of a problem.
This way lies forgiveness and connection and freedom. It’s the heart of contemplative healing.
So let's do a meditation about that.
Jeff
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