A Million Thoughts: Learn All About Meditation from a Himalayan Mystic

This creates a baggage of a different kind. It’s the heaviest load but an invisible one. We remain unaware of its weight as well as oblivious to its continuous build up.

From the moment you can recall to the present one, it has been on your consciousness. You have accepted it implicitly like a citizen accepts the laws of the country of residence. It is an unequivocal, silent and unconditional acceptance. If you haven’t guessed it already, I am referring to the huge weight of expectations. You may believe that you don’t have any or that you have only the basic and realistic ones. Think again, I urge you, after going through the following section.

When a lingering thought is not abandoned, it becomes a desire. When we contemplate on the fulfillment of desire and feel that it is our right to see it fulfilled, that somehow we deserve it – it becomes an expectation. For example, it’s 4 PM and you are sitting at work, partly bored and partly engaged in your assignment. Out of nowhere, an image of a nice meal crosses your mind. Rather than dropping the thought of food, you pursue it and soon find yourself craving for a good dinner when you get home. This is desire. Let’s say your wife is a homemaker and a good cook. Since she’s your wife and looking after the home, you ‘expect’ to be served a good meal for dinner. Or maybe you expect this way because you saw your mother or grandmother doing it when you were growing up. Or perhaps you expect it because you feel it’s the basic right of a husband. That’s what expectations are: desires with rights attached to them.

You get home and announce at the door, “Honey, I’m home!” You are ‘expecting’ a warm welcome, a hot meal. But Honey is not exactly sweet and welcoming today. Maybe she just found out that the dress she bought for Rs. 5,000 last week is on sale today for Rs. 2,700. You announce again but she tells you to stop shouting. What happens next is better left to your imagination.

Expectations are those desires you believe you have the right to see fulfilled. Due to our own conditioning by numerous factors, we develop expectations. They are the primary cause of all grief and stress. When we expect, we place a burden on ourselves as well as the one we expect from.

Different Kinds of Expectations

Lingering thoughts that we pursue and contemplate on become the building blocks of our world. Cemented in attachment, we keep erecting the walls of desires around us eventually finding ourselves completely trapped with no escape doors. Expectations are not just what we have from others or what they have from us. They are of three types in fact, and all three arise when we fail to drop the thought that seeded it at the first place.

From Self

The expectations we have from ourselves are at the root of our grief. We expect ourselves to be disciplined, calm, together, always caring and so on. But when we procrastinate, get angry, indulge immorally or act selfishly, somewhere we feel guilty. Even if no one was hurt or harmed in the process, we still feel bad. Primarily because we have certain expectations from ourselves and we failed to fulfill them. The troubling thing is that not all these expectations are right. Most of these have been handed down to us by our society, teachers, parents, peers, religion and so on.

Based on your education, samskara, upbringing, your social circle and your professional life – all of which play an important role in your conditioning – you expect yourself to be a certain way before others. You have set for yourself certain benchmarks and standards derived out of information passed onto you in many forms; normally based on the religion you practice and the company you keep in addition to other social and personal factors.

When these expectations, the ones you have from yourself, are not met, they give birth to shame and guilt. You feel low and tormented. In a state of as much denial as disbelief, you feel miserable and lost. You eternally stay buried under these expectations, majority of which is a big load of rubbish. With mindfulness you can filter them, keeping the ones that strengthen your consciousness and make you a more compassionate person.

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