Transcription
Happy to be here today, and just want to say thank you to Jackie and to John for inviting me again. And lovely to see so many people here, and so many unfamiliar faces. How many people feel like they're pretty new to meditation and Dharma? Just one? Really? Okay. Well, later on in the morning, for anyone who feels like they would like to, I'll do a group, if you want some support, if you feel like you have any questions about meditation practice. And that will be in there, and I'll announce it later on. So feel free to come to that if you feel like you'd like a bit of support. And I will be giving meditation instructions as the day goes anyway.
Okay, so a little while ago, John asked me what theme I would like to speak about. It's always difficult in advance, but the theme I want to explore today is working with the inner critic, or in some traditions, the superego. And I want to go into that a little bit through the day. I want to start now, and then, really, the bulk of it this afternoon, after lunch.
So the inner critic, the self-judge, that constellation, almost like a character inside, a voice, voices inside, of negativity, judging oneself, putting oneself down, harshness to oneself, belittling oneself, blaming oneself, the voices of self-blame, nagging, nagging at oneself, the whole kind of inner structure of shame, shame in one's being, that whole movement inside of aversion, and aversion to oneself and what one discovers in oneself, contempt, even, sometimes -- this has a whole range. And I know, as I throw that out, most people -- not everyone, but most people -- are familiar with this to some degree, and usually to quite a large degree: the feeling of feeling or believing ourselves to be inadequate in some way, unworthy. Perhaps this can be a lifelong current, or it comes up at times, or in different situations: inadequacy and unworthiness. And we believe, somehow, in the core, that that's who we are or how we are.
Sometimes -- in fact, often -- I meet lots and lots of people in the course of my work, lots of people, so I hear about this all the time. One of the reasons I decided to talk about it today was because of its prevalence. It's so, so common. Sometimes it's so prevalent in a person's life, it's almost, it feels, it seems as if it's uninterrupted, and a person cannot even imagine it not being there, cannot imagine this whole structure and constellation of inner criticism, self-contempt, self-judgment, cannot imagine that not being there, cannot imagine a time in their life where it won't be there, or some period, even. It's extremely common. So I really want to emphasize that, how common it is. Partly why I'm saying that is, sometimes, sometimes a person who has this suffering with this feels like they're alone in it. Very common. It tends towards a feeling of isolation, or it can tend towards a feeling of isolation. So one of the first things I want to say is just how common it is, and that actually, we are not alone in it. One is not alone in it. So that's very important, to really realize this is something -- I'll explain more as we go on -- it's something that's very shared nowadays. It's very, very shared.
A person can also have the opposite assumption about it, which is not that I'm alone in it, but that everyone has it. And one just assumes that everyone has this kind of almost self-loathing or self-hatred. And actually, that's not true either. Some people just don't struggle with this, never have. It's not in their make-up. It's not in the causes and conditions from their life, perhaps earlier, that brought that together. But either one, whether I assume, "I'm the only one with this. I'm the only one with this weird thing going on," or "Everyone has it" -- either way, it can tend to a conclusion of despair. So whether I think, "Everyone must have it. No one can get over it. It's just part of how everyone is," or "I'm the only one with this big problem in my make-up. I'm the only one kind of built wrong. I'm the only one suffering with this" -- either one of those conclusions would lead to despair, probably. And despair -- and I'll talk about this later on -- despair is one of the prime fruits, not very nice fruits, that comes out of this whole inner critic. Despair.
Now, that whole structure, this inner critic, superego, whatever we want to call it, the self-judge, I think it's very understandable if it's there. It's understandable that it's there, given when you hear -- one thinks back on one's upbringing and the way the family was, or the way the education was, and the kind of messages that were getting fed in, sometimes before we even understood language. This kind of input affects the self-belief, and then perhaps in education, and then in the culture. So it's understandable, given the history, that we might have, individually or collectively -- it's understandable if it's there.
There is something, I think, particular about our culture right now in the West. This structure, this self-judge, etc., this self-loathing if it's extreme, it does seem to be characteristic or more common in modern Western culture. Now, it would be interesting to sort of explore. That's not particularly what I want to go into today, but just to say, if you go back a few hundred years, the time of the Renaissance, for instance, there was a movement in Western culture, bringing with it huge freedoms and beauty and insights, etc. But it tended to highlight the individual over the community, bringing lots of great stuff, but bringing also with it a kind of overemphasis on the individual, the individual personality, 'how we are doing.' A few hundred years later -- that started a stream, and just kept being built on. In a way, we live now in the culture of the individual and the individual personality, and 'my individual struggle,' all the Romanticism, everything. A lot of beautiful stuff came out of that, but also brought with it some problems. And one of them is this over-tendency on the individual, and an over-tendency on measuring the individual: "How do I measure up? How are others seeing me? Am I good enough?", etc.
And then recently, I've been reading a few books on the modern economic structure, and kind of consumerist society. And it's not obvious, but a consumerist society, and also an economic structure that's bent towards continual growth (as most economies are, nowadays), also has a tendency of highlighting the individual, and the individual in competition with other individuals. And then that just sets up this whole thing. So perhaps in the family, perhaps in the education, perhaps in the culture -- all these reasons, all these influences are operating together. It's very understandable that there is now a gross epidemic, almost, of this painful scenario inside. So there's a lot, a lot of pain wrapped up with this, enormous pain.
It's interesting. Five, six -- I can't remember when -- six or so years ago, I went to India for a month or so to work at a leprosy community, and was with a couple of Western friends. And we were talking, before, during, and after, and it was interesting, because we had imagined that the suffering there of these people suffering from leprosy, in big suffering, that would be unimaginably great. And actually, there was a lot of joy there. It was quite an interesting phenomenon to witness. There was quite a lot of joy there, and kind of just comparing it with a lot of the suffering in affluent Western societies, where it's not kind of on the surface in terms of -- so much, so much -- in terms of healthcare and affording to live, etc., the living conditions. But the inner suffering, and particularly around this not being okay with oneself, not feeling comfortable in oneself, with who one is and how one is -- that seems endemic.
[6:22] And it was just interesting. It's like, sometimes one feels that a person has so much, and yet that particular suffering goes so deep, so much to the core of their sense of existence, their sense of self-worth -- huge pain. And on the surface, it's not that obvious. So that was quite interesting for me.
When this structure is there and operating, and has energy, and has a kind of looping mechanism, feedback-looping mechanism in it, it wreaks havoc, wreaks havoc in our life -- huge consequences from it. And some of these consequences bear directly on our meditation practice and our Dharma practice, and our path, our spiritual path, our psychotherapeutic path, whatever it is. One of the outcomes of this kind of structure is should, should, should. Where there's this inner critic, this self-judge, very easily there's should: "I should. I should. I should be doing ... I should be doing this. I should be better. It should be like this."
And that should comes hugely and with great, pervasive force into our spiritual practice, bringing with it, of course, a pressure. Should is the voice of pressure. When there's that pressure, it can have a number of effects. One of them is, it drains, it squeezes the juice and joy out of our life, but also out of our practice, out of our journey. When we're coming from should and pressure, the joyfulness, the juiciness of our journey kind of gets wrung out.
And it can have a kind of opposite effect, that when we feel something, even if it's just within us, pushing, very easily it encounters another inner character: the inner rebel. And so you get these two structures kind of swearing at each other. [laughs] It's like fighting each other. It's very, very common. Again, not always. There are no rules with this. I may touch on this later; I feel like I have quite a lot to say today, so we'll see what we get to, but it's common that this structure, the inner critic, then gives rise to the inner rebel, and there's a kind of stalling in practice: "Should!" "No!" "Should!" "No!" "I should!" "I'm not going to! Forget about it! Dream on!" And it just keeps banging together with a lot of pain. So maybe come back to that.
At the moment, I'm just outlining what it is, how this structure operates. And what I really want to do today, and I'll go into most this afternoon, is I really, really want to highlight the possibility of freeing ourselves from this. So I just don't want to describe. And I really want to hopefully point some ways that one -- we can become free of this. And that is absolutely a possibility, and that is what I want to really focus on.
But just a little bit more about how its tentacles seem to reach into all these corners and create problems. In our practice, another possible consequence here is that the kind of capacity for deep questioning, beautiful, precious capacity for deep questioning that human beings have, questioning ourselves, questioning our existence, questioning our direction and choices in life -- so precious -- that that gets strangled too.
So for instance, I sometimes talk with people, and they report the whole -- and I know for myself; everything I'm talking about, I know from experience in the past. The relationship, for instance, with ethics and ethical choices becomes, again, a matter of should and not a matter of the heart actually feeling its way into a response and an outlook of care in relationship to others. That gets strangled, compacted too, and the whole domain of ethics and how we are with each other in the world becomes a matter of should.
Even more, though, in terms of questioning, there's a sutta, a discourse of the Buddha from the original teachings, the Pali Canon teachings, and he talks about ten questions that a practitioner, a meditator, or someone on the journey should ask themselves regularly. And it's quite a striking list. And one of the questions is a reflection. Time is going by. I'm moving towards death, relentlessly moving towards death, inexorably moving towards death. Days go by. And the reflection is: "What am I becoming as the days and nights fly past?"[1] The days and nights are flying past towards death. What am I becoming?
That's a powerful, powerful question. Packs a punch, that question. It takes quite a lot to be able to ask that in a way that's helpful. Takes quite a lot. If this inner critic is there, that kind of questioning, the self-questioning about our journey becomes completely impossible. It will only create much more problems and kind of sink the whole boat.
There's another, again, from the original teaching, where the Buddha's talking about someone who hears about someone else who, through their practice and their dedication, has reached enlightenment or awakening or a deep realization. And what's the reaction of someone hearing about so-and-so, who's really gone far and deep in their practice? And the Buddha says the reaction should be, "Why not me? Why not me? If they can do it, why not me?"[2] And when the inner critic and the self-judge are there, that's not where it goes. It goes to the opposite. It goes, "I bet I could do ... Don't even think, I just ..." A sense of hopelessness and despair, as I said, in terms of 'me and my possibilities.' And so in this sutta that the Buddha's talking about, the Buddha says, "Relying on conceit, I will abandon conceit." In other words, the conceit, "Yeah, if they can do it, why can't I do it?" But for someone, when we are mired in this inner critic, that kind of thinking becomes -- the mind just won't go there. It completely cannot conceive in that way. It will just find a different pathway, a self-critical, self-destructive pathway, a pathway of despair.
In terms of our practice, and whether it's watching the breath or whatever, oftentimes it becomes, "Am I doing it right?" And that becomes the dominant, pervasive question in relationship to our practice, and maybe in relation to our life, our work, etc. "Am I doing it right? Will they think I'm stupid? Am I good enough?" There's so much pain wrapped up in that question, so much imprisonment wrapped up in those questions, almost that they go with every sitting, every in-breath and out-breath. "Is this right? Am I doing it right? Am I good enough?" It may be conscious; it may be subconscious.
I was, a little while ago, working with someone at Gaia House, and was investigating this in their formal practice, and beginning to notice these were the questions that came up in relationship to -- they were actually working with the breath. And then noticing it, and actually, through the noticing and reflecting and being able to change it, the questions became transformed very beautifully to, "How am I doing?" It's a very different question than, "Am I doing it well enough?" "How am I doing? How am I? And what might be helpful here?" Much, much more helpful. Those are the golden questions in practice: "How am I? And what might be helpful here?" Much, much more helpful as questions.
So questioning and the thread of questioning is actually very important in practice. And it's important where that questioning is coming from. There's a kind of questioning that will lead to despair and stagnation and unhappiness, and there's a kind of questioning that leads to liberation, to freeing, to opening.
So it's interesting. In the original discourses, there's very little that the Buddha says about this structure, and it might be, as I said, partly because, in that culture, at that time, it just didn't exist. It just wasn't a thing that commonly people struggled with. And yet today, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western cultures, absolutely endemic. Not everyone, but very, very common. So rather, in the original discourses, what you get very much is a language of striving. That word, 'strive' -- don't know what the Pali is, but that word, 'strive, strive, strive, strive', is very strong.[3] And we today as teachers have to be very careful. We usually cannot use such language, because what happens? It goes straight into the basket of the inner critic, interpreted that way, and just causes a jamming in the works. It's like a -- what do you call -- spoke in the bicycle? [laughter, yogis respond] Spanner in the works! Thank you. It's such a powerful force.
Later, in some Mahāyāna teachings, which come later, there is a list -- I came across it the other day -- and it's a list of unhelpful qualities that don't tend to deepening in the path and the unfolding of wisdom. One of them is the thought, or believing the thought, "How could someone like me possibly do this? How could I do that? How could I possibly understand the depth of the Dharma?" And that's out there, very clear, classified: don't go down this route. If that's there, find a way to disempower it because, as I said earlier, what happens is, it sinks our aspiration. To me, one of the most precious things that we have as human beings is our capacity to aspire. What do I want for myself? What do I want from this life? So we have -- I don't know how many years. Not long, not long at all. What do I want? What might be possible for me? When this mechanism of the self-judge and the superego, whatever you want to call it -- when that's there, it castrates our aspiration. It truncates it. And to me, that's one of the saddest things. And sometimes, when we're in the middle of it, we don't realize that that's what's going on. Sometimes the person who's moved through this afterwards looks back, and looks back with grief. In that period, it's like, how much my sense of possibility was just totally stalled, shut down. Very, very sad.
So if I say, or if another teacher says, this inner critic business -- it needs challenging. We need to challenge it. And I would say that's really true. It's so powerful in the suffering it causes and the damage that it causes, and the consequences it has, that it needs challenging. We need to challenge it. However, if I say that or if someone else says that, how do we hear that? Is it the inner critic hearing that? "You need to challenge it. Challenge it. You need to challenge it." That again just goes straight into that basket. The inner critic has a tendency to see and hear everything through that very lens of the inner critic. And it has a tendency, because of what it is, the self-judge, to actually feel judged. I'm looking at the world and my relationships and everything I hear and read and -- I'm looking at that through a lens of judgment, and I will feel judged. And again, one of the very painful and tragic consequences of all this is that, sometimes, that interpretation of being judged finds its way even into our most intimate relationships. Even with the person that actually they're closest to and loves them the most, there is a projection of feeling judged by that very person.
So when I say, or when we hear, "It needs to be challenged," challenging it -- that doesn't mean being hard on it or unloving or judgmental of the judge. (Hi there, come on in.) Rather, to judge this character inside, to judge this mechanism, is a movement of kindness. It's absolutely a movement of kindness. And it matters how we do that, and that's what I want to get into today.
So it's interesting how we respond to hearing about this. Sometimes when you hear it described, etc., one feels a lot better. It's like, "Ahh! Yeah, someone understands exactly what I'm going through." Or it can actually make one feel just depressed, more in that. I said this before but in different words. What I want to say is, it's practice that's going to change things, practices that's going to change. So sometimes, a person hears a talk on this subject or in a group interview or a one-to-one with the teacher, and feels so relieved, almost, to be hearing about it that it's air, that this structure is being given some airplay and kind of out in the open. And my teacher, I, or someone else, might say something, and you feel like, "That's exactly it," and I feel, "Exactly!", and I feel better that it's out in the open. Or someone else in a group says something, and you know exactly what they're talking about. That's helpful in the sense that there can be this isolation and the pain of isolation with it.
But that, on its own -- so I might tell you a story or this or that, and you might feel touched by it -- that's helpful, but the thing that will help is practice. The thing that will help, in terms of really cutting this and really eroding it, is practice. And that's what I want to go into, particularly this afternoon: the ways that we can really practise with this, how I can approach it differently, so that it really makes a difference. That is possible. It's really possible.
I'm going to just sneak a little more in right now. [laughter] If that's okay with you! And I was going to start, because it's not the main thing that I'm going to talk about today, but I'll just throw it out right now, in terms of practice. So what I'm really interested in is, what are the ways of practising that I can bring to bear on this mechanism that make a big difference, that will make a big difference?
(1) The first one -- and I'm not going to go into it too much, so I'm just throwing it out now -- is the practice of loving-kindness, mettā. Are people familiar with this practice? Is it ...? Yeah? Is anyone not? Okay, it's fine. So there's this word mettā, and it's usually translated as 'loving-kindness.' And it's the practice of cultivating a kind of deep friendliness and well-wishing and caring towards oneself and all beings. And there are different ways of doing that meditatively. So it's a meditation practice. That is enormously, enormously powerful in the long run, with this structure. It makes such a big difference.
And I have, for myself and for others, seen what I can only describe as miracles with this. Sometimes, earlier, a few years ago, I remember not being so experienced, meeting so many people, but sometimes -- you know, my tendency is to really believe that people can transform, and I really have faith in that. But occasionally, one meets someone who, there's such a degree of sort of self-hatred that seems so constant, that it feels like, "Wow, I don't know if they can." They seem so stuck in this thing. And there's someone I'm just thinking of particularly now, because we talked, and I didn't say that, but I'm just saying it now. That was my thought, just like, "Wow, I don't know. It's so, so strong." She was so painfully contracted. And she began working with the mettā practice, and then I saw her, and I helped with that, and I saw her a while later, and couldn't -- it was unbelievable. She had just opened a door and turned a corner. And even I was surprised. And it just -- unbelievable, what is possible with patience and dedication.
So with this mettā practice, one is planting seeds, so to speak, seeds of the intention of kindness. And you put them in, and it can feel like nothing is happening; it's completely not making any difference. Hopefully, though, one finds a way of working meditatively that one can actually feel a little bit of like, "Ah, yeah, this does feel a little bit better." It's finding some of way of working and planting those seeds. And those seeds rise when they do. And it might not be in the moment, but when they come, they're actually -- they can have a huge effect.
I was reading something a while ago from -- maybe John knows more about this -- the Compassionate Mind Foundation. You familiar with that? No? Okay. It's psychoneurological research -- they do stuff about mind, and in much the same way as there's all this interest now in mindfulness and psychotherapy, it's just compassion and psychology, and that interface, and the sort of neurology of compassion. And in the mettā practice, in this loving-kindness practice -- it's worth googling, if you're interested, the Compassionate Mind Foundation. I've forgotten the name of the ... [yogi responds] Yes, thank you. John Gilbert. [another yogi responds] Paul Gilbert. Anyway, Gilbert. Someone Gilbert. [laughter] Very interesting.
And one of the things it was saying -- and this is similar to what happens in meditation practice. In the mettā practice, we're sort of, you could look at it that, one way of looking at it is, what we're doing is kind of developing an alternative personality inside. So just as we have this inner critic personality, the inner rebel, and all this other stuff, you create a kind of a good guy, a friend inside. One of the things, interestingly, that it said, is that the brain, to a certain extent -- I don't know enough about this, but the brain, to a certain extent, responds to mental imagery in much the same way as it responds to what is real. So we see this with fear. I can be afraid of something in my imagination. You see it with food, if I'm hungry and I start thinking of whatever my favourite meal is, and then start salivating, etc.
Well, it's the same thing with kindness inside. It's the same thing with kindness inside, and actually using that capacity to have an effect very deeply. Does it matter that I'm imagining it? Some of you know of visualization practices or deity practices in Tibetan Buddhism, etc. There's something very, very powerful here, potentially. To some extent, the brain doesn't know the difference between what is so-called 'real' and what's 'imaginary.' But what I'm really trying to get at is the power of loving-kindness practice. With the power of practice, just consistently planting those seeds, it will have an effect. Mettā to oneself, loving-kindness to oneself, but also to others, will have a huge effect. It just begins to soften and change the inner landscape, the inner climate, to pervade it with softness, gradually, gradually, to moisten it -- makes a big, big difference.
Interestingly, when the inner critic is operating in terms of me and my relationship to practice, it's very much about measuring myself, improving myself in my practice. So one is measuring how one's doing in practice, or wanting to prove oneself to oneself or to others in practice. And what would it be if, again, the view of practice, as early as possible, became practising for the sake of all beings? They talk about that a lot in Mahāyāna traditions: actually, it's not just about me. It's not just about me. And actually opening things out. When the inner critic is there, that's not what's there. It's contracted, and it's not open. So every day, what is it to think, "I'm doing this for other beings"? It's not just about me and the self-pressure of measuring me and how I'm doing. So easy that that strangles the practice. Actually, it's for everyone, opens it out.
And of course -- last thing -- of course, we're hugely helped by the loving-kindness of others, how much it helps when others are kind towards and express their faith in us. Sometimes with practice, we feel like, "I should be doing this all on my own. Mindfulness and practice and letting go -- it should all happen here." And actually, there's a place for community, and there's a place for friendship, and there's a place for mentors and teachers to actually express faith in us. And we take that, and we absorb that somehow: "Someone else believes in me." And that also can go a long way.
I have to cut somewhere, so I'm going to cut there and go into much more detail about practices this afternoon. Okay, we've been sitting a while, so if you want to stay in the room and stretch your legs ...
