The Subtle Ways We Control (And Why It Hurts)

In our daily lives, we often find ourselves caught between two fundamental approaches to navigating the world around us. One approach seeks to control, fix, and manipulate our circumstances to create a sense of safety and predictability. The other invites us to cultivate curiosity, openness, and a genuine desire to understand the deeper patterns and causes that shape our experience. While both impulses are natural human responses, the question arises: which path leads to greater peace, compassion, and genuine well-being?

The Habit of Control

I've been reflecting lately on how habituated I am to using control as a way to find safety, understand myself or others, or create circumstances that feel good to me. This could be as simple as controlling the temperature in a room—it doesn't have to be some big deal—but I've noticed this pattern bleeds into many other areas: politics, ideas about what's good for society and others, what's good for my family, and so on.

This tendency seems especially pronounced in our modern world, where we're constantly connected to information and current events. I've been hearing people struggling with various forms of social and political unrest, and I notice that when I consume a lot of media on a certain topic, it feels like the world is ending and there's this sense of urgency. In reality, what's happening is often quite small compared to the rest of the world. That's not to diminish any particular issue or conflict—it's just to recognize that sometimes the control part of our mind gets really narrow and focused.

I've been thinking about what I want to feed in my life—what ways of being, what ways of relating to myself, to others, to my place in the world. The phrase "seeking to understand" has really started to resonate with me because I've noticed that in the past five to ten years, I've been putting more energy into this way of being. I'm not very good at it, but admitting that is helpful because then I can get better at it.

The Difference Understanding Makes

When I put energy into seeking to understand rather than react and try to solve, fix, or control, I notice it makes me not only a happier person, but it allows me to have more kindness toward myself and others. Most importantly, it's helped me a lot in my practice of developing compassion on the Buddhist path. But I would say, whether you're Buddhist or not, this applies to the development of compassion.

Let me share a simple example. I currently live outside the United States and have for several years. Many things got challenged for me in a good way being outside the US, and one of them was what I call the "social bubble"—the physical space I need to feel safe. If someone gets too close into my field of physical comfort, I start to feel anxious and unsafe.

This really got challenged living outside the United States because often other cultures live with much less physical space, and culturally, their bodies, emotions, and minds don't necessarily require a lot of physical distance. Based on conversations I've had with people from other places, they actually like that lack of physical distance. They like the closeness; it makes them feel at home or makes them feel safe.

This is just one example of how we get stuck in our views and beliefs—they even become embodied in how we sit in our body and how we use our body. I found it really useful to open that up and examine these patterns.

The Cost of Control

When we're seeking to dominate or control a situation, we often think of this in terms of people with power or money, but it's actually a way of being that can happen no matter our location or circumstances. If we're feeling unsafe and then seek to control in order to find safety, we can end up dominating others without realizing it.

My question is: does that make you more peaceful? When I watch the news and get really worked up about something, it just doesn't help. I notice the anger is often coming from a lack of control, a lack of being able to do something about the situation.

When I focus on compassion, this way of being where I seek to understand starts to emerge. I might research something more, try to hear different viewpoints, try to understand multiple sides, because there's always at least two sides to any situation. It's not to find out who's right or wrong; it's to seek to understand what the underlying causes are. This not only helps release the need for control but actually brings more ability to see a situation clearly.

Practical Steps for Cultivating Understanding

If you find merit in this perspective—that seeking understanding is more valuable than control or fixing—here are some practices I use, usually on a daily basis, to foster this habit of seeking understanding.

1. Mindful Awareness of Control Patterns

The first practice is using mindful awareness to become more conscious throughout the day when you're entering habits of control and fixing. I call them solution-based mentalities, where we're seeking to solve rather than be curious or open.

I often find that when my mind is more anxious, when my body is more anxious, I'm constantly seeking solutions for things that don't actually need a solution. That's when I know I'm in that controlling, solving, fixing mentality. It might manifest as something like spilling a little water and feeling this immediate push to clean it up right now—that kind of anxious "fix it" mode.

The first practical step is making this distinction—having awareness and mindfulness of when we're entering that "fix it" mode. Then we notice that and release it, asking instead: "What do I need to understand here? What can I seek to understand?"

2. Asking Open Questions

Sometimes we can shift into seeking to understand by asking open questions. For some people, very specific questions work best—getting very specific about the topic at hand. Using the spilled water example, questions might be: "Does the water belong there? Does it need to be cleaned up right now? What's going to happen if it's not cleaned up?"

For me, I actually use more general, open questions like "What is this?" or "What's happening here?" Through mindful awareness, I give myself a moment to feel the feelings in my body, the emotions, to recognize the thought patterns, to notice the environment around me—what's happening physically, what's happening in relationship to other people in the space. I give some room to take it all in.

When we're constantly remedying and controlling, we're not living. So I notice in that space when I ask "What's this all about? What's happening here?" and then I look, I live life. Even if I decide to clean up the water, I learn something.

3. Embodiment Practices

When I ask a question, it's not a question I'm asking my conceptual mind to figure out. It's more of a prompt—a prompt to feel the body, to feel the emotion, to be more aware of what my senses are perceiving in the environment around me, to be aware of my thinking patterns, behaviors, and actions.

This embodiment work involves awareness of the subtle sensations, the movement of sensations in the body, what kinds of emotions are arising. Is there tension? Is there ease? We're spiraling to understand, and a big part of that understanding happens through the body. It happens through being aware and sitting with and being open to sensations, emotions, and the intelligence that doesn't have to come from the thinking mind.

4. Understanding Different Perspectives

Another important practice is being open to seeking understanding of different sides of a conflict—whether it's a conflict in our community, with family, or within ourselves. This requires the ability to pause, to not immediately react or emotionally knee-jerk react to someone or something.

This practice requires awareness, meditation, and mindfulness, but it also requires a sort of interest in others, a compassion for their dissatisfaction and suffering, and love—a wish for their happiness. These become vital auxiliary practices, adjacent to this work with dropping control and seeking to understand.

The Rewards of Understanding

What I find is that when I have a little bit more understanding around an emotion, a behavior pattern, a thinking pattern, something going on in a relationship, or my relationship to external events, when I seek to understand and when a little bit of insight comes, usually there's a release that happens. I don't necessarily need to find what's right or wrong, what's absolute, or get into the black and whites of it.

In the malleability of something, in the openness of it, there's more ease. I can usually drop it, especially if it's something internal. There's more space, and that's such a rewarding result of this kind of work. It also really helps with our experience of compassion.

When we seek to understand, we start to see there's so much gray area in life. In that gray area, there can be a lot of joy. We're also better able to discern what helps and what harms, which is crucial for developing wisdom and compassion.

Beyond Black and White

This seeking to understand requires us to come out of rigid right and wrong thinking—not completely, but initially. Eventually, we do need to find what we need to shed or disregard in the way of harm, and what we need to adopt in the way of help or benefit for ourselves and others. We do need to discern that.

But if we just follow moral rules blindly, we're missing out on so much richness because we're not developing our own insight, our own mechanism of understanding. The understanding I'm talking about isn't just conceptual—it's an understanding of seeing more and more of the truth.

A Path Forward

The journey from control to understanding is not about abandoning all practical action or becoming passive observers of life. Rather, it's about cultivating a different quality of engagement—one rooted in curiosity rather than anxiety, in openness rather than rigidity.

Through mindful awareness, embodiment practices, and the willingness to see multiple perspectives, we can discover that the gray areas of existence hold far more richness than the black-and-white certainties we often crave. This path requires patience with ourselves and compassion for the very human tendency to seek safety through control.

Yet in learning to meet our experience with understanding rather than management, we open to a way of being that is not only more peaceful for ourselves but also more beneficial for all those whose lives we touch.

Questions for Reflection

I want to leave you with some questions for reflection. If you find this topic interesting, pose these questions to yourself:

• Where am I functioning from control and fixing and solving, and where am I functioning from seeking to understand something?

• Are the control mechanisms I adopt helping me or hurting me?

• What can help foster more seeking of understanding in my life, both toward myself and others?

• What can help me shed more of the control mechanisms?

If you feel there's some merit to this reflection, and you feel it's a little more peaceful to seek to understand, then the question becomes: how to do that? The journey from control to understanding is not a destination we arrive at once, but rather an ongoing practice that requires patience, humility, and gentle persistence.

The invitation is simple: in this moment, what might you seek to understand rather than control?