Your Bananas (R.E. Najemy)

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Your Bananas - By Elias Najemy Here is how they catch monkeys in India and South America. They tie a narrow neck bottle to a tree. In the bottle they place a banana. The monkey passes by, perceives the banana and very smartly manages to squeeze his hand into the bottle and slips his fingers around the banana in the larger inner area of the bottle. Now it tries to pull its hand out in order to eat the banana, but it won't come out because its hand, which is now holding the banana and is in the form of a fist, cannot pass through the neck of the bottle. It pulls and pulls, but cannot get its hand out. It sees the trapper approaching it and tries to get away, but cannot, because its hand is wrapped around the banana and thus unable to be removed from the bottle. Although it is obviously going to suffer under the hands of trapper, and although the bottle and the banana are the cause

of its demise, it never thinks of letting go of the banana so that it can extract its hand and be free. It is literally attached to the banana, and the banana, which was previously a potential source of happiness, has become a source of his suffering. We are all like those monkeys. We have a variety of "bananas" in our lives to which we are attached, and although they create much suffering for us, we cannot let go of them. Some are physical or material attachments such as cigarettes, coffee, tranquilizers, alcohol, denatured foods, money or material possessions. Not that these are inherently bad, but they might be in some cases ruining our health or happiness. And, although we are aware of this, we are unable to get free from them, because we are attached to them. Our attachments may also be emotional, such as acceptance, approval or love from specific persons or from all persons. Or we might be attached to professional

success, or recognition, or to having things done the way we believe that they should be done, or to being the smartest or prettiest, or to having perfect order and cleanliness. None of these are wrong or bad, but our attachment to them just might be creating suffering for us at this time, because we are not able to have what we are attached to. When we are attached in this way, we have two choices.

We can suffer because we cannot get the banana out of the bottle and, thus, get trapped in vicious circle of suffering and unhappiness. Or, we can let our attachment become a preference for the "banana" and let go of it when we see that we are only creating unhappiness for ourselves (and probably for others), and thus we can all stop suffering. It often happens that we get so caught up in trying to force that specific banana out of a specific bottle, that we are blind to the fact that there are hundreds of bananas lying all around that bottle free for our taking, if we could just master up the intelligence to let go of that, which we are trying to force life into giving us. A good example of that is when we become attached to acceptance, approval or love from specific persons such as a parent, spouse or child. When we cannot get the affirmation of those feelings from them, we feel hurt and angry and try to

force them in various ways to give us the recognition we are looking for. In our obsession for recognition from these specific persons, we loose sight of the fact that we have love, acceptance and approval from so many other persons. We are so focused on what we cannot get, that we are blind to what is offered so abundantly to us from other sources. Are you aware of your bananas? Are you aware that you are creating your own suffering, because you refuse to let go of them? What do you want to do about it? What do you plan to do about it? Be Well.http://www.freespiritcentre.info/robertnajemi.html