Exploring the Relationship with Practice

Probably about next Monday, or this coming Monday, rather, I'm going to introduce a practice that, for many people, will kind of evolve organically, will be an organic evolution out of what of we're doing already. And it's a very simple practice in a lot of ways, and just a kind of next step a little bit. Very simple, very non-conceptual. Probably on Monday. Tomorrow night, I'm going to introduce what, for many people, will feel like quite an alien practice that involves quite a lot of conceptuality, quite a lot of thinking, and will feel a little bit complicated.

Padding that on either side, tonight I want to talk about the general relationship and attitude to practice, okay? In general. And the night after tomorrow night's talk, talk about our relationship with conceptuality, because actually I think it's quite, quite key, and the relationship to knowing and not knowing, and what that means to us as human beings.

So I'm just kind of partly saying that because I was debating a lot, you know, amongst myself -- within myself. [laughter] It would be ideal if I could give kind of the next three talks all in one go. So I hope that you can bear in mind tonight's talk for the next while -- actually, until the end of the retreat, because a lot of what I will say is relevant in terms of attitude for the rest of the retreat. And similarly, as I'm giving tomorrow night's talk I would wish that you could hear the one following. Anyway. This is the order I've come to.

Okay. So, meeting with a lot of people, a lot of practitioners, what's very clear to me is that there are a lot of different personalities in terms of how people relate to practice. It's very clear -- there's a wide range in terms of what people's attitudes and their relationship with practice is. So how am I, how are you relating to this whole thing, this whole endeavour? Not just formal sitting practice, but the whole thing, the whole show.

Particularly, what I want to explore tonight and in the other talk, particularly, how am I relating to effort? Okay? Big one. How am I relating to effort? How am I relating to the notion of goals? How am I relating to the notion of the path or a path? How am I relating to learning new approaches in practice? How am I relating to not understanding something? If, in this case, John or I say something, or another teacher, or you read something that you don't understand, what's the relationship with not understanding? What's the relationship with the whole concept and notion and sort of feeling of doing stuff in practice, as opposed to not doing stuff in practice? And then in that other talk, what's the whole relationship with concepts and with knowing and with not knowing? So quite a lot, but I just kind of want to weave this all in. I actually think this is all really, really crucial stuff. It's crucial to be aware of how we're approaching all this stuff. And I'm not going to land, actually, in this talk, and say, "It has to be like this," or "It has to be like that." It's more that the questioning and the consciousness is alive, that one's actually aware of what one's bringing in terms of one's predispositions, pre-decisions, etc., to all this.

[4:26] Given all that, and that range of questions that I just threw out there, just what is my general tendency? What are the patterns that I tend to see myself falling into with these things? And what is the tendency in this moment? Or what is the relationship with those things in this moment? Because that will change. You know, all this is impermanent. It changes from time to time, though I might recognize a general tendency with all this. I've already thrown this out there, but just one distinction, for example, is, am I, are you, seeing, are you regularly in contact with the sense of the beauty and the nobility of what you're doing? I see that as really, really important, because the opposite is a sense of self-criticism. How easy that creeps into practice or is thrust into, thrusts itself into practice. Or a sense of impatience. That's just one domain.

This whole area of effort, I mean, I really feel that a wise relationship with effort is absolutely crucial for the development of practice. It's absolutely crucial that we've explored, we are exploring this. What is a wise and a healthy and a helpful relationship to effort and efforting? Śāntideva, one of the great, great Mahāyāna teachers in, I think, the eighth century, eighth or ninth century -- he said right effort, or wise effort, has actually four components.^[1]

(1) And we can talk about the necessity of aspiration. Aspiration has to be there to make the effort kind of helpful and wise and healthy, meaning I have a sense of where I want to go. I have a sense of direction with this. There is something that I'm aspiring to, and I'm at least reasonably clear what that is.

(2) Second one is confidence that the goals that I have are realistic. They're realistic for me. This is really important. People, again, tend to fall into two spectra, either setting themselves or kind of going along with a completely unrealistic notion of goal -- you know, completely unrealistic. It's not even in the ballpark of what's possible. And then, after a little while, you just run out of steam. It just completely runs out of steam. Or, and what's more common to the Insight Meditation tradition, is not enough sense of confidence that one can actually aspire higher, you know, to a high level of awakening, realization, whatever, and that that's actually something realistic. Dharma scenes tend to be one way or another. Insight Meditation, oftentimes people are not actually aspiring. It's almost like we don't believe we can. So is there a sense of possibility that I can actually do this, whatever, wherever I've set 'this'?

(3) The third one that Śāntideva points to is very interesting as well: joy. The joy has to be a part of wise and helpful effort. Joy -- there's a sense of joyfulness in the effort. I'll talk more about these during the talk.

(4) And the last one is rest: knowing when to rest. That means actually stopping practice at times, but it also means knowing how to take your foot off the gas pedal, off the accelerator pedal, and just have it be more easeful in the moment.

[8:30] On this retreat so far (I've already said this, but I'm going to say it again), we're not, I hope, just doing our regular sort of 'being' -- if this is what we do -- 'just being' with experience, just being mindful, just being present. We want to play and experiment and find new ways of working, new ways of looking and seeing and working in practice. And as I said at least once, if not twice, then we want to consolidate those ways of working so they really become like skills and tools that we are developing. We feel that development. And in so doing, we feel them begin to unfold and deepen. We feel that process going on.

In relation to what we've done so far, where are we going to get this confidence from? Okay, we get it from a number of pieces.

(1) But one is that it actually needs to make sense to us, why we're doing what we're doing. In other words, so far we've introduced the three characteristics practice. That actually needs to make sense. Why are we doing this? I mean, why not just hang out and be with things as they are? It needs to make sense why we're actually doing this. I'll come back to that.

(2) And the second one, second place that confidence comes from, is actually feeling, even just a little bit, a sense of (I'm going to use the word) progress -- sense of progress, a sense of deepening, a sense of growing subtlety, you could say.

Again, so far, in what we've done, why are we doing this three characteristics practice? Well, part of what I want you to do very much is to notice what happens when you do it. Okay? Notice what happens when you do it. And do you notice that when you contemplate in this way, when it feels like it's going well, that suffering gets less, even a little bit? [laughs] Yeah? Good. [laughs] Okay. We want to notice that. We want to make that really clear: this is a way of looking that brings a decrease in suffering. Do you also notice (and we've actually talked about this) that when you contemplate in this way, the sense of self gets quieter, gets more light, more refined? Good. Okay, great. Do you also notice that when those two things happen, that it feeds back on itself, and then it's easier to see the three characteristics? Yeah? So there's a natural kind of -- what do you call it? -- a positive feedback loop or something.

Later -- and quite soon, actually -- we'll talk about other things that are coming out of this very practice. So I'm going to throw this out now. Keep paying attention to what happens when you contemplate the three characteristics, because there's other stuff that happens that's actually very significant in terms of the practice unfolding, and understanding emptiness, and the realization of emptiness. I'm not going to go into it now, but just to say: we want to be really interested. When I do this, what's the feeling? What happens? What happens to experience? What happens to the sense of things?

[12:03] In terms of the second aspect that gives me confidence, a sense of progress -- I'm hunting for a different word, but let's actually use that: a sense of progress. When I talked about the practice of say, anattā, I talked about a person, usually, almost without exception, slowly expanding their range of what they can disidentify with. That's important, because if I -- I'm just repeating what I said before -- but if I try and disidentify with everything all in one go, it ain't going to happen. It's not going to happen. It's very, very unlikely that a person would be able to do that. I might also have lots of blind spots, so things that I'm still identifying with without realizing it. This sense of just consciously expanding the range of what I'm disidentifying with, if I'm doing the anattā practice -- that gives me a sense of progress: "Oh, this much I can do, and then, you know, two days later, or a week later, or whatever it is, a month later, I can do this much." And that's important.

And if you're doing the practice that's relaxing the relationship with the experience, the push, the pull, the aversion, the clinging, I'll also put this out there: do you notice that when one lets go, a calming can sometimes come into the inner environment? Yeah? Good. And in that calming, it can sometimes enable the consciousness to pick up on more subtle levels of clinging, of aversion and grasping. Do you notice that? Yeah? And then there's the possibility of letting that go. So you get the sense how the practice can progress, and that gives confidence, okay? That gives confidence.

What is the relationship to all this? I think it's quite an important question. Just in terms of learning new approaches, I remember learning to drive when I was a teenager. And I postponed it for, you know -- I think I was just having a prolonged teenage crisis, so I postponed learning to drive. And when I came to it -- all my friends could drive -- I was actually really quite overwhelmed by it. It felt like really challenging to learn to drive. But now I just don't think about it. You know, it's completely effortless, driving. And can be completely having a conversation or listening to music or something else, you know?

What's the relationship to all this? Is it overwhelm? And/or am I -- the other extreme -- kind of rushing through the practices? Sometimes that's my tendency in a Dharma setting, is actually to rush through, to be impatient. Do I get bored easily? Am I taking the time to let a practice really develop in these ways? Or, and unfortunately one sees this quite a lot in some circles, am I just doing the same old thing, year in, year out in my practice, same old thing? Same thing that I learnt maybe on the first couple of retreats, just about being present, etc.? I'm just carrying that same old thing. And in a way, underneath that and supporting that is a kind of not really expecting anything from practice. I don't really expect anything, any big deal, any big experience, anything. With all that, as I've been saying, just to notice: where am I leaning? Typically, where do I lean with it? What's my tendency?

I already said, we're going to throw out a lot of practices. Partly, as I said, this talk, you'll hear it where you are now in terms of what we've done. You'll also hear it in the mood you are in now and in the relationship you are this evening with practice. You'll notice all this changes, but hopefully you can take at least, carry at least some of what I'm saying tonight through the rest of the weeks here, because it will come up. It will definitely come up. We'll be offering a lot of practices. And as I said in the opening talk, people are just going to choose one or two, maybe three. And you can do it. You can do it.

What about this word, 'progress'? Sometimes it's a kind of taboo word in meditation circles. It's almost like we can't talk about that. We can't even mention the idea that it may be around. Again, different spiritual traditions relate very, very differently to this. But I wonder, you know, without a certain sense of direction, of intentness -- so doing these practices, there's a real kind of intentness. We're clear about what we're trying to do. We're clear and specific and sustained in what we're trying to do. We're sustaining trying to do a certain thing in a very specific and intent way, a certain approach or a certain line of inquiry. And I wonder if progress is really possible without that, without that sustained intentness of application.

It's not just, I don't think, that we let go. We kind of want to jettison the word 'progress,' oftentimes because it's painful. It pushes all the buttons of potential tightness, potential self-judgment, etc. And it's a painful notion to come into a relationship with, oftentimes, for people in terms of practice. But if I just let it go, maybe I'm losing something else. Maybe I'm losing quite a lot else. Is it possible to hold on to a sense of progress, a notion of progress, a relationship with that, but without the suffering? And the answer is yes, it's totally possible. It's really about, how can we learn to do that?

So is it even good, is it even helpful never to expect anything from practice? Now, we as teachers, and oftentimes Insight Meditation teachers, we put this out quite a lot: "Don't expect anything. Let go of expectations," you know, etc. And that's good. That's actually really helpful. But like everything, it has a downside. It has a potential pitfall. And one of the potential pitfalls is that people will expect too little from practice, expect too little. This is a question to ask myself: "Am I actually expecting too little from practice?"

Sometimes in teachings, and in talks or readings, or even listening to a Dharma talk on CD or tape or whatever, and we hear something, or in here or whatever, another retreat, we hear the teacher talk about an insight or a realization or a level of practice that's beyond where we are. To me, that's a very interesting point. It's a very interesting point in teaching, when I know that I'm speaking a little bit beyond or a lot beyond where most people are in the room. But it's a very interesting point for the listener. It's extremely interesting. What happens to the heart and the mind at that point? What happens? Now, this will differ from time to time, of course, but is there a general tendency here? And even in the moments, in the specific moments when you're hearing some of that -- "I don't get it," or "Whoa, I'm really not there" -- what happens here? What happens to the heart? What happens to the mind?

So easy for that to get just routed straight away into the inner critic: "Oh, I'm rubbish. I'm a failure. I'm not good enough." Or to look at our sense of where we are in practice and just dismiss that: "It's just not good enough." And we kind of forget where we are, and we sort of launch ourselves into some fantasy about the future. Or a sense of impatience with where we are. Or a sense sometimes of just giving up, like it's all pointless, or overwhelm. Of course, it can have beautiful -- you know, it's not all negative. A person can be inspired, can appreciate the clarity of a sense of direction or a bit of a roadmap. There can be joy hearing about the potentials on the path. There can be just curiosity. All this can be there, but the thing, again, that I want to highlight is, am I aware of it in that moment? Because oftentimes it's a very potent moment for people, very potent moment when that happens.

Generally speaking, on our path, not just in formal meditation but just our path in our life, is it possible to keep our (again, I'll use the words; some people won't like them) spiritual hunger, our thirsting for understanding, our thirsting for depth, our longing, our yearning, or our just wanting to know, our desire, our desire to understand and to be free. Can we keep that, but with a sense of evenness? With a sense of steadiness flowing through the practice, with a sense of patience, especially when practice feels difficult, especially when progress feels slow, or when there doesn't seem to be any progress at all -- it doesn't seem like I'm getting anywhere. Really, really important, and not necessarily easy.

It's interesting. Śāntideva said that wise effort needs -- what did he say? -- aspiration, confidence, joy, and rest. A lot of things are mutually dependent. We'll talk a lot about this on this retreat. But might it be the case that actually I need some effort, some aspiration, and some confidence, as well as some rest, for joy to be present in my life? In other words, do I need a kind of sense of meaningful challenge? Oftentimes as human beings we have periods in our life when we're not connected with a sense of meaningful challenge, and I don't know if those are really joyful times. I think there are times when it's easy to lose one's bearings and one's sense of joy. And maybe there's a kind of happiness in feeling stretched a little bit -- as long as it's, again, not interpreted through the inner critic or through the self, there's a kind of happiness in just feeling like, "Ah, I'm growing because I'm feeling stretched." It all depends on how much the sort of unhealthy sense of self has got hold of it or not.

[23:16] Sometimes with this word, 'progress,' it's very easy, especially around practice, to have a kind of black or white sense of it, a black or white image of it. In other words, "When am I going to get it? I don't get it," or "I will get it," like it's a moment in time and you either have it or you don't, okay? Very easy, and again, this might be conscious, and it might be unconscious. It might be unconsciously present in the way we're relating to the idea of progress. "Someone else I know has got it; when will I get it?" But wherever we are, unless one's a totally, what they call perfectly enlightened Buddha, there's always more to develop. There's always a deeper understanding of things. One can always grow in one's capacities, what one's cultivating.

That's not to say that there aren't significant points and moments in practice when the understanding or the realization does take a kind of quantum shift. There are those, as well as a very gradual movement. But even after a time when it does take a quantum shift -- and people talk about stream-entry, or having a direct cognition of emptiness, whatever language one uses -- there's still a growing after that, there's absolutely still a growing and a deepening of one's understanding of, in this case, emptiness. The view gets, the view of emptiness, the understanding gets more subtle. It grows. Partly it's to do with not swinging so much, in terms of emptiness, not swinging so much between a kind of reifying everything, believing everything to be real, and a kind of nihilism, believing nothing exists. That gets a lot more subtle, that part.

Remember, it's a gradual understanding and not a black and white sort of on/off switch. And remember that quote -- I think it was from the opening talk, from Āryadeva, from his Four Hundred Verses:

Those with little merit do not even entertain questions regarding this Dharma [this teaching of emptiness]. Even entertaining a question about it tears saṃsāra to shreds.^[2]

And he says:

When one sees reality one achieves the supreme abode. [But] even by seeing the slightest bit, one is better off. Therefore the wise should always cultivate such wisdom in contemplating phenomena.

I said this as well in the opening talk -- really to realize that we're planting seeds here. That's not the only thing we're doing at all, but it's a big part of what we're doing. If you get interested in this -- and I hope, I hope you all will, but maybe you won't -- if you get interested in this, and if you kind of fall in love with this, you will be exploring emptiness for the rest of certainly this lifetime. You will be doing that for the rest of this lifetime, absolutely. And so, sure, there can be -- and I know for some there are already -- some fruits of this exploration right now, right here, on the retreat, in your practice. But still, a lot of it is fruit of seeds being planted, and they will come up. And I've seen this with the three-week retreat that we did. Oftentimes we'd talk about something, and people don't really get it there, about emptiness, and then later they start to get it.

And as I said, one needs to repeat the ways of working and the insights over and over and over and over, and just really sow those seeds over and over. Remember -- I can't remember when I put it out. It maybe was a question and answer period. But there are three kind of levels of insight. (1) One is the understanding, the intellectual. (2) One is being able to make it work in practice, that you actually get that sense of freedom in practice to whatever degree. (3) And the other is in the life, and grappling with the difficulties, and bringing it in over and over and over. And all that is kind of tilling the earth in terms of planting these seeds.

So, what happens? Again, going into this a little bit -- and I'm aware of the kind of things we're going to start talking about in this retreat, especially as the retreat goes on -- what are some of the possible reactions and attitudes when we don't understand, when something in a talk is said that we don't understand?

Very common: "I'm stupid." Just immediately the inner critic comes in, and the comparing, measuring, judging mind comes in: "I can't." Again, especially if it's something that involves a little bit of conceptuality or a lot of conceptuality: "Maybe I'm stupid." And maybe old school traumas resurface and ... you know. But the comparing, measuring, judging mind comes in.

Or something else happens. "I don't understand something. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter." And there's a kind of non-engagement. We just kind of -- we lose interest, and we stop grappling and questioning with the thing that we don't understand. Okay, now, that may be a defence. It may be all kinds of things.

Third possibility. Someone says something. You don't understand it -- "Ugh, it's so intellectual. It's so intellectual. This can't be right. That can't be right. The truth must be simple. It must be simple and non-conceptual." And then we dismiss what's being said.

Again, these are all -- talking to people, listening to people, I've come across all of these. All of these go on. And again, not judging anything here, but just to be aware in that moment of what's happening.

Or again, it's not so much "This is intellectual." It's more like the teacher gets judged: "He" -- in this case John or I, or some other teacher -- "He/she is so intellectual, da-da-da-da-da," and a dismissal again.

Or, and this is very common, when we don't understand something, when there's a little bit of thinking involved in it, the heart closes. This is really, really crucial, okay? Why does the heart need to close when the mind is grappling with something? Does it? And if it does, really to be aware of it, and is there something one can do to keep it open? Actually, it's possible that this and this are open at the same time, the head and the heart are open at the same time.

And again, of course, one can be inspired when one doesn't understand something. It's just like we sense the perfume, the whisper, the promise of something, the intimation of something, and "I want to know that." We sense the possibility, and there's inspiration. And there's this will, this seeking to understand. It's beautiful: "I want to understand."

Another very wholesome and skilful response is, "I don't understand right now, but I'm going to file it for later." Okay? And that "later" might be hours after the talk's done, and you ponder through it -- "And what did ... what? Let me go through that again." It may be days later, months later, years later. But a sense of not dismissing it, really filing it for later.

Some stuff in the Dharma is really, really deep, really, really subtle, and really, really difficult to understand. It's just, there's no two ways around that. The Buddha was really in two minds about whether to teach or not. So here was a guy who, five minutes after he was completely free of all suffering, wanted to teach, and then thought, "This is really hard to understand. What if people don't understand?" Then said -- a guy free of suffering said, "If they don't understand, it will be wearying and vexing for me."^[3] Strange attitude for someone who's completely free of suffering! [laughter] Something about how difficult the teachings of emptiness and dependent arising are to actually understand and communicate.

So it's not that we get it all at once. We don't get it all at once. Sometimes you hear, you hear a lot of stories, and there's a lot of hype about getting it at once. When anything in life happens at once, it's very dramatic. It makes a big impact. You know, the day that those two planes hit the World Trade Center, how many children died of malnourishment and diarrhoea, etc., in the world? Just children, more people than died in the terrorist attacks. But because it's spread out and over time, it's like something in the consciousness of suddenness grasps the attention in a very dramatic way. Same with spirituality. Someone says, "Yeah, I was just hanging out, and then suddenly, boom! And now everything's different." It's really dramatic, versus someone saying, "Yeah, well, I just kind of trudged along, and I did it, and little by little, and ..." [laughter] And, you know, it's not dramatic. We're not interested. Personalities are different with this, but there's something about suddenness that the mind latches on to and gets kind of obsessed by. It's glaring. It's bright. It's like flashing neon.

[33:03] With it being difficult and taking time, etc., we will feel uncomfortable at times. I said this in the opening talk. There's a lovely quote from Sakya Paṇḍita, one of the great Tibetan teachers:

Wise people suffer while they learn. If you want to be comfortable, forget about becoming wise. [He goes on to say:] People who are attached to small pleasures don't get big ones.^[4]

People who are attached to small pleasures don't get big ones -- that applies to a lot of stuff, but there's a lot in that, you know?

Sometimes, if we're really honest -- you know, probably most of you have listened to many, many Dharma talks in your life up to now. Sometimes, if one is honest, one notices that we kind of like it when a Dharma talk says something that we already know. [laughter] And for some reason, we want that. [laughter] And we enjoy that. Now, sometimes it's just the ego of wanting to feel like, "I know. I know." I remember Tsoknyi Rinpoche saying -- I can't remember his exact words, but it was something like, "Are you a judging a talk as good or bad based on whether it basically agrees with your views and predispositions and what you've already decided is right?" And that's what makes a good talk, that it fits in nicely with your ... you know. This is really, really important. I mean, it's funny -- it is funny -- but it's actually really important too.

Or again, sometimes it's the inner critic, and it's that the inner critic is so beleaguered and battered by feeling like, "I don't understand. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough," that when someone actually says something that we do understand, it's like, "I know that! Hey, I'm not feeling crappy!" And there's a kind of relief from that: "Oh, I get it. It's not that I don't know." But sometimes when we feel uncomfortable, it's actually that we're being stretched, that we're learning, that we're growing, that we are being challenged. So there's something about that.

Now, in these teachings of emptiness -- I can't remember if I've said this before -- but there is, we can talk about a sort of continuum or a depth, a spectrum of depth of understanding. In other words, you can understand it at this level, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper. We can really, really talk about that, and that's quite commonly agreed upon with people who spend a lot of time working in this area. And again, what's the attitude to the fact of this spectrum of depth of understanding? And as I was talking about, I could feel overwhelmed by that: "Oh, I understand at this level. Apparently that's not the real, you know, apparently that's not deep enough." I could get impatient. I could get self-critical. I could be confused by it all, you know? None of those are helpful.

[36:17] Or I could go to the other extreme, and this is, in a way, even worse because it's more insidious. I could get to a certain understanding, a certain depth, and stop looking further, stop my looking further into this question of what it really means that things are empty. I stop the questioning. The practice that I'm going to introduce on Monday is a very, very popular practice at the moment in the Dharma world in all kinds of different traditions. It's probably one of the most popular ways of going about things, and the most popular kind of understanding of emptiness. But it's not the full monty. It's not the full depth of it. Or again, a person who perhaps comes from a strict Theravāda background, and the idea is that it's just that you have to understand that there's no personal inherently existing self, just the emptiness of this self, and the emptiness of other phenomena is kind of not relevant. Or one has an experience of something inside, and it seems to fit what people talk about when they say "Buddha-nature," etc. Certain experiences that can happen in meditation, that can open up, that are very beautiful and very rewarding and very freeing, very freeing, but not quite the whole journey yet. And I can even find, for those different experiences, a lot of support in different texts and different teachings and teachers, etc. But it's more like, it's something about keeping the questioning, keeping the integrity alive.

So there is this spectrum. And it's actually really, really fine to kind of station oneself at a certain plateau for a while. That's actually really fine and probably really necessary for most people. And I remember one of my teachers, Ajaan Geoff, said to me, "Slow down, Rob. Slow down. You've got to get attached to these different states. You've got to get attached. Spend some time in this or that, and really get attached there." We'll talk more about this, but it's really okay to station yourself at a certain level, at a certain understanding of emptiness. It's really, really fine. Just know that there is further to go, if you're not completely at the depth yet. And that's partly why there is so much on this course. I want you, a little bit -- we want you, a little bit, to understand the depth of what's possible.

In the Dzogchen tradition they have a lovely, lovely phrase that's so useful over and over in practice. And it says, "Trust your experience, but keep refining your view." In other words, as practitioners, we do open up to certain experiences and certain understandings of things, and it's saying, "Trust that. Absolutely trust that. But keep refining your view." In other words, keep questioning it, keep probing it: "Is this the final arriving point?"

There are some ways of understanding emptiness in the world right now that are, as I said, very popular. And sometimes it's almost impossible to budge someone from that. There's just a kind of refusal to keep questioning. Partly, it's to do with a little bit what I said before, because to question that level, which feels so beautiful and so open and so lovely, to actually question that may mean getting a little bit picky, getting a little bit conceptual, getting a little bit kind of pedantic, or complex even. And so sometimes teachings may sound that way, like they're a bit picky or complex or whatever, pedantic. But if we are practising, if a person's practising and inquiring really with care and integrity, those kind of subtleties that may seem picky at first actually become really, really, really important. They're not just like intellectual curiosities for the scholars or something. They actually become really important. A person of integrity will actually find themselves, at times, yearning for a kind of clarity about direction, or ways to practise, or subtle distinctions of understanding, actually really yearning for that because it is really important.

Okay, so all that was about attitudes in general. But we can also talk about the ways our attitudes shift, and our relationship with practice shifts in the moment. And it does -- it's moving all the time, our relationship with practice. And this is something we want to keep an eye on. So in a way, a skilful practitioner has one eye on the relationship with practice all the time, meaning right now in this moment, what is my relationship to practice? Am I too tight, am I too pushy? Have I lost interest? Am I not caring? Am I criticizing myself? All this -- one is conscious of that in the background of awareness, in an ongoing way.

And as I said (and I will repeat it again; I know I've said it before), really important, in terms of taking care of the relationship with practice, to nourish a sense of joy, a sort of base level of happiness, as much as possible. To nourish that sense of warmth, of juiciness. Remember I said in the opening talk, you guys are responsible for the juiciness here. Okay? Reflecting on gratitude and appreciation, really taking care of those qualities. They're a lot more important than most people tend to think. A sense of beauty -- is that coming into the sense of things? Is that coming into the days here -- a sense of beauty, in different ways? Devotion -- now that means very different things to different people, but is a sense of devotion coming in? What would that mean? And I let it mean whatever it means to you. Kindness to oneself, that's really, really crucial. Love of the Dharma, love of practice, love of teachings. And again, the importance of a sense of possibility. So without a sense of possibility, everything's just going to crack up and dry up sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, if I don't really have a sense of real possibility for myself, for little old me, that I can actually do something.

And all those qualities, you know, how do we nourish them? This is an ongoing part of the art of being on retreat especially, and just practising in one's life. But partly they're nourished by the silence, in the silence, through the silence, listening to the embrace of silence. By a sense of simplicity -- so as much as some of the teachings are quite complex, there can be a real sense of simplicity running through the days, a beautiful sense of simplicity. Sometimes just a simple sense of presence, just back to humble old mindfulness, and just simply being present. Curiosity -- when we're engaged with curiosity, it's very, very nourishing. And again, that sense of possibility.

What we see as practitioners is that our interest in practice goes up and down all the time. And if you track this over a day, it's actually impossible to maintain a kind of passionate, connected interest with practice through however many hours you're awake for during the day. It's not possible. It's going to go up and down. It goes up with the biorhythms and the bodily energy and all different factors. The important thing is responsiveness, that we're actually responding to the currents and the movements of interest and aspiration and whatever else.

Sometimes when we don't feel interested, it's actually necessary to (how to put this?) restoke up, reignite the conviction that it's actually ignorance that leads to suffering. Okay? Sometimes when we're on retreat, we just kind of get used to it. Something happens, and this or that goes a little bit difficult, whatever, or in our life, and we see the problem in the thing, and we don't see the problem in the delusion. So actually understanding that the suffering comes in our life through not understanding emptiness -- that's the bottom-line reason why we suffer. And you know, it's very easy to kind of nod our heads at that and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, right, obvious." But when it comes down to actually some suffering there, that's at the bottom of why we're suffering, okay? And sometimes when we do lose interest in practice, actually to remind oneself, "I need to understand emptiness, because if I don't, or to the degree that I don't, I suffer." It's just that simple. And not only that -- I put out things into the world which probably cause other people to suffer. And I'm not as able to help other suffering beings as I would be if I understood emptiness more deeply.

And with all that, and kind of in all that, is it possible to keep a sense of freshness and aliveness in the practice, over the days here and in one's life outside of retreat? Freshness and aliveness. I think one of the biggest supports for that sense is actually taking risks, taking risks in our practice and around our practice. So, for example, sitting longer. Or it can be all kinds of risks -- in relationship to food, in relationship to sitting, in relationship to walking practice, whatever it is. Or staying up late at night to practise, getting up early to practise -- these are all risks. It's very easy for the heart to kind of get a little bit boxed in by, "This is what time I go to bed, because this is how much sleep I need." And there's actually fear underlying -- it's just a not really conscious, strained current of fear running underneath it. And what that does is it constricts the heart. The heart is actually boxed in by that unconscious fear around things like sleep and food -- just really mundane things. We don't even notice it. It actually closes the heart, funnily enough. It closes the heart, and can make the practice feel stale.

So I don't know what that means to you. Again, you have to translate a lot of this for yourself. What does it mean to take risks? What would it mean to take risks? Small risks, little risks -- what would that mean? What would it mean to shake up the habits -- again, not just on the retreat, but in one's life? What does it mean to shake up the habits, to be doing that in order to shake up the heart and shake up the energies? And to be willing to play one's edges, to play at one's edges.

Every day, whether it's on retreat or off retreat, there are actually a thousand small, little choices that can kind of go either way in terms of closing the heart back into its little area of security, or opening it, that can actually kind of stifle a sense of energy coming into the being, or can actually stimulate and open up the flow of energy -- thousands of tiny, little choices every day. And what are the mental and physical habits that bring energy and the ones that stifle it? I mean, off retreat, you see a lot around food, around TV, or exercise, or speech, or the general intentions in little moments in one's life. All this is really, really crucial. It's, again, to play with -- not to bring an attitude of judgment to this, but an attitude of playfulness and experimentation, and just to see what's possible.

[49:39] Somewhere -- I can't remember where it is; I think it's in one of the Tibetan traditions -- they talk about different kinds of effort.^[5]

(1) And there's the effort of non-inferiority. It's a type of effort. What that actually means is not getting discouraged by the kind of thought, like, "How could someone like me possibly do something like this? How could little old me do this?" So actually taking care with that, taking care with that. And that non-feeling of inferiority allows effort. It allows effort.

(2) There's also what's called the effort of irreversibility, which is an interesting one. It's when circumstances, conditions, can't divert you from effort in meditation, or from the emptiness meditation, or effort in life towards practice. And that's what I was just saying, in terms of practising with one's difficulties and practising at one's edges. Okay? It's so easy to hear this, and much more difficult to even just be checking, checking in an alive way that it's really happening in our life. Very easy when conditions are just like this or like that, that we don't view it as practice. We stop. I've said this before, I know, but it's important.

(3) There's also what's called the effort of application, which is enjoying practice and enjoying engaging in practice even when it feels difficult and something doesn't feel good. Can be something that enjoys that, something that enjoys the way we're relating to the difficulty. Even with mindfulness, you might have had a sense of this. You can have a sense of some sadness or grief or pain, and yet the mindful space around it -- it feels good to be in connection with the difficulty. It feels like what we're bringing to it with the mindfulness actually eases it, actually helps it. So can be something, even when there's a difficulty, that feels good to practise with what's difficult.

In a way, all those kind of make us a -- I don't know what the word is -- they make us a kind of diehard practitioner. [laughs] They give you some muscle.

I just want to throw out a few -- these are little titbits now about working with balancing practice. I came across an interesting passage of the Buddha the other day, talking about balancing **(1) *samādhi ***with (2) insight practice, which we've already talked about, and with (3) uplifting the energy, uplifting.^[6] So these three things need to be balanced. The uplifting the energy means taking care of this sense of beauty, of nourishment, of joy, of wonder, etc., as much as possible, of appreciation, of gratitude. That's uplifting the heart and the energy. He said these three things are necessary ingredients for one who wants awakening. And again, to see, where's the balance drifting? Am I drifting just into the samādhi? Because, as the Buddha says in the same passage, if I do, it just goes towards a kind of laziness in terms of investigation. I just kind of like sitting there in this sort of pleasant fog of samādhi, and I don't probe so much. If I'm just probing, with not enough samādhi -- we've talked about this -- it can be agitating. It doesn't go so deep. If I'm just walking around Gaia House in a state of beatitude at the flowers and the overabundant kindness of the managers and whatever, then that will lead towards restlessness. Okay? So think about these three qualities, that they're actually really necessary ingredients -- really, really necessary.

Okay. Now, a couple of people said -- and I think it was the last question and answer that I did -- a little bit of coldness or distance coming in. And again, this all has to do with balancing the practice and balancing our relationship with practice. So if that's the case -- when one's contemplating the three characteristics, it feels like things are a bit distant or a bit not really warm, a bit cold -- again, trust the samādhi, and deepening in samādhi will bring a warmth. Trust the mettā practice, because that also brings a warmth and a connection.

But it's also possible -- I remembered, many years ago, an interaction I had with my teacher when I actually said the same thing, many, many years ago, and she just said, "Just keep doing the practice you're doing towards the sense of coldness or distance." In other words, regard that, too, as not-self, or relax the relationship with that. So keep going, because in a way that's just another phenomenon. Do you understand? It's just another phenomenon.

Just to pull a few points out, which I've already said: most people need to trust the samādhi. Most people, it's really good to trust the mettā, really trust its place in what we're doing here, most people. But don't get into this -- this is all repeat now, but it's worth it -- don't get into this thing where all the practices kind of mesh into one: it's samādhi, and it's mettā, and it's the three characteristics, and it's mindfulness, kind of one thing. Won't be that helpful in that respect. But see if you can have a real clarity of approach. And as I said, how specific can you be about noticing what happens? Because that will be important.

Okay, and the last piece, little piece. Have you noticed, either with samādhi or mettā practice or with the three characteristics practice, that oftentimes when you actually stop meditating, or after you've kind of zoned out and kind of got lost on a track of thought, after you've stopped, or when you come back after being lost, it actually seems to go deeper? Has anyone noticed that?

Yogi 2: Not always.

Rob: No, not always. [laughter] Definitely not always. But sometimes that happens, and one notices it. And it could be an indication that one's gripping the practice a little bit too tight. The relationship is a bit too tight. Because you see, by actually loosening, when one's lost it for a bit and gone off on a thought for a few seconds, or whatever, in that time you've actually loosened it. When I've been doing formal meditation and someone rings the bell, it's finished, I loosen it by getting up from sitting. And if I suddenly stop meditating, and then it's suddenly like, "Oh, wow, everything seems like it's 'not me or mine,'" you know, it's very clear. Or when I come back from getting lost, the samādhi seems like, "Oh, it just got a little bit deeper," or the mettā feels a little more full, or whatever. Could be an indication that it's just a little bit too tight. Do you understand?

Yogi 3: Not really.

Rob: No?

Yogi 3: I don't understand. I have to ask -- I thought you were going to say, "If you come back and it's a bit deeper," it sounds like it's a good thing, not it's too tight. I don't understand.

Rob: No. It is a good thing, and you would go with that depth. But it might be saying that in the time up to that, before you lost it, it might be a bit tight. And that's why you had to kind of relax it a little bit to get that sense of deepening. Do you understand?

So I know very, very little about sailing, but I have a sense that meditation is just like -- sailing is just like meditation. [laughs] Sometimes in the samatha and the mettā practice, you really get the sense that it's as if the wind captures the sail. It's as if something's full, and you're kind of riding a current. So if you're doing the mettā practice and you're using the phrases, for instance, you might get the sense with one phrase, like, "May you be peaceful" or "happy" -- it's almost as if just that phrase takes on a bit of resonance. And then you want to ride that current, ride that a little bit. You feel it in the body, and it's almost like it can fill out, and just ride that a little bit. Go on that wave. Surf that wave. We want to be sensitive to that, when it feels like the wind has caught the sail, and actually respond to it.

In a way, the whole of the practice is actually responding to conditions, inner and outer, that exist at any time -- responding to them, and at the same time, keeping the sense of long-term direction and goal. So like, you know, a sailing boat might go like this, might tack. You're responding to the conditions -- the wind, and the currents, and the water, etc. I have a sense of where I want to go. And there's a lot about that responsiveness and sensitivity that's a big part of the art of practice.

Okay, so that's all I wanted to say tonight. As I said, there's a lot in there that will maybe feel more applicable as we go on. I don't know. But hopefully you can keep some of that in mind as we go, because it probably will be important.