Transcription
Through the development of various skillful means, we can unlock the innately liberating dynamism at the heart of our emotional life, allowing deep healing, freedom, and the natural unfolding of our full potential.
Welcome to everyone that's joined us this week. Last week I gave a talk about beginning to explore different approaches to working with our emotional life. Different also in the sense that many of them were, in some ways, not the kind of things that perhaps we tend to think of first, as a first resort, in this kind of tradition. So a little bit slightly different approaches than we might be used to in this tradition. This is a continuation of that. It should make sense if you didn't have the first half. It should be fine, stand alone.
Let's just spend a couple of minutes reviewing what was said last time. I actually started with a kind of premise that I just threw out there, along the lines of that our emotional life has a kind of inherent dynamism to it. In the way that a plant will naturally move towards the sun, naturally that's the movement of our emotional life. It naturally moves to want to unfold, to unlock itself, to unfurl itself deeper into the being, into more expansiveness, more discovery, more lightness. In that dynamism is a kind of lightness. What happens as human beings is that we block that dynamism in different ways, and the emotional life gets either stagnant or stuck in tight, difficult orbits, etc. So the question, partly, being explored is: how do we block that beautiful, wonderful, healthy dynamism of our emotional life? How do we do that? What are the ways that we do that? And what are the ways that we can perhaps unblock it?
I suggested that -- that's a huge subject, obviously -- but I just wanted to offer eight possible approaches or principles, and saying that that's a part of what's on offer. But just to go through that. We went through, I think, five of them. But just to sum up again. Before I list them, a lot of them had to do with this idea that when there's an emotion around, it has a certain amount of energy wrapped up in it. To be in the grips of any emotion, difficult or lovely emotion, energy is locked in that cycle, in that kind of vortex. Some of these approaches and principles are for the sake of raising the energy level of attention. When the energy level of attention is more than the energy of the emotion, then that starts liberating things. When the energy of the emotion is more than the energy of the attention, we are sunk. We are literally underneath, and cramped by -- we don't have the energy to sort of free ourselves from something. So a lot of this, and a lot of meditative work in relationship to the emotions, it's crucial that somehow we energize the attentiveness. There are different ways of doing that. So some of them had to do with that. That's a very important principle.
(1) The first one on this list, we talked about 'differentiation.' That's the word I used. And the idea that our capacity to see, when there's an emotion going on -- and I'm going through this very briefly just to review -- it's usually not just one emotion. It's usually the case that there's more than one thing going on, or even what looks, at first, like one emotion -- "It's just anger," "It's just depression," "It's just sadness," it's just whatever it is -- actually when I look closely at it, it begins to reveal that it's almost like it's made up of strands, woven like a rope. Strands woven together. That differentiation, if I can highlight and open, if I can reveal those different strands, then there's a kind of precision in the awareness and a sensitivity. Really, really helpful. I'm less overwhelmed by what's going on. I begin to engage the factor of curiosity, etc. So differentiation is one.
(2) The second one was learning to really sustain our attention on what's going on for us. Can I really just hold the attention on the experience, particularly the bodily experience of an emotion?
(3) The third one had to do with broadening the attentiveness, so that -- again, when there's something going on, oftentimes the attention gets sucked into that. But, so to speak, in the background of the awareness, we can make the mindfulness larger. We can even call that 'mindfulness.' Something gets larger. I notice what else is around in the field of my experience. I really want to see the totality of the field of experience, and not kind of be myopically sucked into this central experience. Because if I don't, I tend to overlook a lot of stuff that could be very, very important, very significant, that could be really helpful for me that I then don't have access to. It could also be that I begin to notice factors that are supporting this difficulty. So I need to see what's in the field, especially in terms of my reactions, my responses, etc., and what might be perpetuating it.
(4) Number four was the whole realm of engaging our wonderful capacity as human beings to question, to question our experience and question, particularly, our assumptions. That's a big part of what will be revealed when we open up the field -- what else is going on? We begin to see, "Oh, there are these reactions. There are these beliefs operating. Goodness me, I didn't even notice these beliefs were operating. They're supporting the whole structure of this tight loop of difficult emotion." And then once having witnessed them -- it's not enough, usually, just to witness that some assumption is there. I need to question it. I need to engage my questioning capacity.
So we were giving lots and lots of examples with all this to kind of flesh it out and make it not abstract. I felt like I rushed a little bit through a part of this questioning piece, so I just want to fill it out a little bit before moving on.
I can question the assumptions I'm having. I can question the self-views that are operating -- really important -- and I can look into both of these. So, often, a difficult emotion comes up, and a self-view is operating with it. "I am like such-and-such." Or even -- oftentimes we don't realize this is going on -- we say, "This emotion is around, this depression or this anger or whatever it is," and almost below the radar of consciousness, "It's because I'm like dot-dot-dot. It's because I'm this type of person. That's why it's here. It's just more evidence that I'm a rageful loser, a grumpy old miser," whatever it is.
Someone a while ago was sitting in meditation, and there was some pain in the ankle. Just being with the pain, noticing there's aversion to pain. Noticing it, and noticing the aversion actually get stronger and stronger until it was rage. They were sitting in a rage. And reporting this. So easily, it trips out of the mouth if you're talking with someone, but it will trip through the mind if it's just internally, "It's because I'm da-da-da." In this case it was, "It's because I've got all this rage in me. That's how I am. I've got all this rage in me." With that, there was a judgment: "Because I am this kind of person, I'm rageful and I hold on to things" and whatever. Very easy for something like that to trip out of the mouth, go through the mind, just about conscious, without really, "Hold on, hold on, hold on. Is it true? Is that true?" And what effect is such a self-view having? Devastating. It's an enormous effect that it's having. I really need to notice what the self-views are and really question them. Is it true that I have all this rage in me, that I am a rageful person? Is that true, really?
Oftentimes we don't, unfortunately, engage the fullness of this questioning capacity. So one is exploring something, for instance in the emotional realm, and things start to shift. Maybe fear comes up. Oftentimes a person will just notice, "Oh, there's fear." And not say, "What exactly am I afraid of? What is it, precisely, in the inner aspect of experience or the outer aspect of experience, that I'm really afraid of?" It's almost like, it's just there's fear, and the questioning doesn't probe further. The questioning has to really be penetrative, strong. It has to have some chutzpah. Do you know what chutzpah is? [laughs] [yogi in background] Courage, thank you. Courage. [laughs]
The other day I was talking with a friend, and we were talking, and I said, "What is your image of what a liberated being looks like?" She threw out these images and said, "Oh, it's like so-and-so" -- this monk who's quite well-known -- "and they've got a bald head and a kind of halo and they move very slowly and they're very radiant and da-da-da." What was quite interesting to me, I just wondered, "Can you see that there's some kind of childlike idealization, projection going on there, in this image of what liberation is supposed to look like?" I can't remember if I brought it up or she brought it up or what, but she did become aware of that. And we didn't pursue it, because we had other things that we needed to talk about. [laughs] But my wondering was, "Okay, so you've seen that. You've seen that there's this almost childlike, almost infantile kind of projection of something onto an image of something, which is quite a centrally important issue -- liberation and what is that. You've seen that. Is it going to stop there? Or has the questioning got more of this courage, more of this push to it? Is it okay if I'm just kind of, a little bit, I don't know, wallowing in this kind of childlike sense of idealization and comfort? Is that an okay place to build a house?" Maybe it's scary to let go of that. I don't know. There was a kind of happiness in it. But comforts that are not based on truth come at a cost. Comforts that are not based on truth come at a cost.
Sometimes in interviews with people or whatever, or a person to oneself, something is going on, and it's a difficulty, or you notice a certain behaviour. The question comes up, "Why do I do that?" Or a person notices that they keep selfing, keep creating a self in certain situations, and say, "Why do I keep selfing?" Or, "Why am I feeling this way? Why do I still have this feeling?" Sometimes in an interview a person will say that to me, and I can tell -- it sounds like a question: "Why do I da-da-da?", "Why does da-da-da?", but it's not a question. It's a judgment dressed up as a question. "Why do I keep selfing?" It's actually a judgment. There isn't an openness, a softness, a kind of love that's behind wanting to find something out.
Very, very easily, the judging comes in, dresses up as a kind of inquiry -- not very good dress, because it's quite obvious -- and it's not moving the whole thing at all. It's just another way of judging ourselves. We might ask, "Why am I not questioning? Why is the questioning not real?" Again, the questioning has to have love in it. It really has to have love in it. It might be because I assume that this thing shouldn't be happening, and I'm judging it. It's like, "Okay, why am I assuming that? Is that a helpful assumption?" Somehow love has to come into the questioning. When it does, and when the questioning is alive, when our questioning is alive as human beings, it is very, very powerful, to unlock this beautiful dynamism of our emotional life.
If it's not there -- it's not the only aspect, but if it's not there, when the mindfulness is kind of passive too much of the time, and we're just kind of being with it, it may not have the energy, like we said earlier. That passivity of the awareness, it won't -- it's almost like the very passivity locks an emotion in an orbit, if we're stuck with something. It locks the status quo of our being. In questioning, it's like those -- what are those things called that you pry something with? Something to wedge -- it's like it wedges something out. [yogi in background] Crowbar, thank you! It's a crowbar kind of. [laughs] It has the capacity to move something that's otherwise very kind of stuck. Okay. That was just filling in number four, questioning, a bit more.
(5) Number five, we talked about this really exploring the different aspects of what gets revealed in this process. I gave a very full example with a lot of specificity. Once we start inquiring, things start to shift. One really needs to kind of inhabit and look at very carefully each experience, each dimension and aspect of the experience, as it's shifting, to really allow the whole thing to flower and unlock. Okay. So let's move on.
(6) Number six I'm calling resourcing. Resourcing. I'll break this down into three. This is really, really important. By the way, these eight principles, they're not separate. They overlap and blend into each other, but I just want to make them separate to highlight different aspects.
(i) Oftentimes, we have difficulties, we experience difficulties, and in this case we're talking about difficult emotions, and what can really be helpful is the cultivation of other qualities of heart that will really help, that will soothe, or open, or give a different perspective.
So this is a huge part of the path, and I would say the Buddha probably talked more about cultivating beautiful qualities than he did about, say, mindfulness, or even insight, in fact. A lot, a lot of emphasis in the teachings on cultivating what's beautiful. Sometimes we forget this. "I'm just trying to be with it, just trying to be with it." It might be that I need to come away from this emotion, from being with it, and actually invest a little bit in, say, the development of mettā or compassion or whatever it is. So actually engage another meditation practice for a while.
This cultivation doesn't even have to be restricted to the cushion. I cultivate things also through my actions and my attitudes. A person could be stuck in believing some very -- again, it's a very childlike kind of emotion that's got stuck in this orbit; can go on for years and years -- "The world owes me. I should be being taken care of. I need more than I have." Very painful, tight constriction. In that, of course, it's all, "Me, me, me. Get, get, get." Very painful. What would it be to just flip that and start practising generosity in one's life?
Something miraculous happens when we practise generosity. Generosity is a movement out, and an opening of the heart, and a letting go of the self. That unlocks a huge amount of dynamism. It changes the whole inner climate. Very different space inside when we start practising generosity. In that space, in the belief and in the tightness of that orbit, it doesn't occur to one that maybe part of the problem is that I'm just thinking about myself and what I can get.
That emphasis on cultivation is very much there in the teachings. That's what would typically -- and I've, in other talks, talked about it a lot, so I'm not going to say much about it here. I want to highlight a couple of different possibilities for resourcing.
(ii) One of them comes out of this question of, "What else is here now?" That comes from the mindfulness -- we were talking about allowing the field of attention to get a little bit bigger. Noticing, noticing what else is there. So I'll give an example. Actually, sometimes, as we do that, what else is there is immediately obvious. We're feeling hassled and oppressed by something; I open the field of mindfulness to include more of the whole realm of my experience; and immediately one might feel a sense of strength. One can almost just shrug off the emotion or what's been oppressing us. It was right there, and it just needed a little bit more openness. Other times, it's a little bit more hidden, and needs kind of teasing out. It comes from this kind of opening of the awareness.
I'll give you an example. A little while ago, I was working with someone, and she was experiencing, at work, a lot of self-doubt. A lot of doubting of her ability to do her job well. With the doubt, it then cramped her freedom at work, cramped her ability to make choices and professional choices, etc. A vicious cycle kicked in: there was self-doubt, it inhibited her ability and capacity, that gave rise to more doubt, and so it went on. Vicious cycle. There was actually quite a lot of pain in this and judgment and everything.
Intellectually, she could see that this wasn't true. It's not totally true that she was incapable. Definitely not totally true. Sometimes, just that -- "Is this true?" We see it's not true, and that's enough to take away the power of something. In this case, it wasn't enough. It didn't help. She could see intellectually that it wasn't true. We were working, and I said, "Can you actually feel the pain of what's going on?" This is really important. Oftentimes we feel pain, and because it's painful, we actually don't want to fully feel it. Very understandable. So I'm aware that there's pain going on, I'm aware of the dynamic that's going on, but I don't -- I almost have a reaction inside, "I just want to get away from it," so I don't let myself actually become really intimate, really touch that pain and be touched by that pain. So just stop, go to the centre of it, and can you feel that pain? Take a while with that.
Then asking her, "Now, when you let yourself do that, what else is there in response to it?" What else is there in response to the pain? Because she had let herself really touch the pain and be touched by it, the natural heart's response was compassion. Compassion was allowed to manifest, to flow forth. That's interesting. Compassion came. And again, can you feel that? Can you kind of linger in the sense of the compassion? Because that, if we go back to the first principle, actually is more than one thing. Compassion is more than one thing; it brings with it more than one quality. As she did, she began to see, "Oh, yes, this compassion is quite rich. It has spaciousness in it. That's interesting. It has peace in it. It has an ease that it brings. It has a capacity (which it did) to dissolve some of the self-doubt."
So we've gone from the compassion to four other qualities. And with each of those, can you really feel and linger in each? Really need the lingering; it's really important. We really need to linger in each and explore and feel each of these -- space, peace, ease, and this dissolving of some of the doubt. In this case, it's like, "Wow, look at that. Very surprising. Wow."
But even then, not to stop there. What's the reaction to that? What's the reaction? The implication is that inner resources are much more available than was thought. But very easy to miss and overlook. We really need to explore the kind of nooks and crannies of our experience, the little tributaries in the streams. The implication is the inner resources are there, and I have them. Little old me has them; they're in me, and they're available to me.
With that, again, tracing that through, what came was confidence. A feeling of confidence began to emerge. Again, can I really feel that? Can I linger in that? So easy that we can be too quick in the emotional process, missing a lot of what we actually need to stay with. We overlook it, or we dismiss it. We just don't think that it could be significant. Linger and feel the confidence, and really see its aspects. What are the aspects of confidence? We began going into that. There was strength there, there was a particular kind of peace, a sense of lightness, spaciousness, happiness -- that was very surprising, that something had gone from quite a lot of pain to happiness in quite a short space of time. We need to linger, need to acknowledge.
Eventually, that confidence, and all these other qualities, they will replace the self-doubt. We, unfortunately, most of us, have a habit of basking and dwelling in unhelpful stuff. For example, in self-doubt rather than in confidence. To dwell in confidence is not something egoistic; it's something very important to do, very lovely. It's not egoistic.
So I was aware last week, sometimes I give these examples, and they're sort of examples where everything goes completely tickety-boo and hunky-dory and very smooth. A person is in a lot of contraction and pain, and boom, boom, boom [laughs], they go, "Hey presto," and you've got this thing. It's not always that easy. It's not always that easy, and even when we do begin to unlock some of this dynamism, it's not like all the time we necessarily get put in a place of ease and clarity and freedom. It might be a process that unfolds, and that unfolds at its own pace. It's not always so smooth and so easy.
Some time ago, I was working with someone, and they were really feeling their sense of imprisonment in certain patterns, and really feeling a lack of freedom. Feeling into that, and the idea of freedom, the possibility of freedom, and with that kind of two distinct emotions came up, going back and forth. There was this yearning, this longing, with the sense of possibility for freedom. Very beautiful and powerful. And there was a kind of despair: "I'll never -- I just don't think it's possible for me." Heaviness, despair, contraction. Yearning and despair. Again, can you actually go into each, and feel the texture, explore in all the ways that we've been talking about over the talks, feel into each? They began to see that part of the yearning had a kind of excitement in it, a kind of sub-quality of the yearning. It had a kind of excitement. It was kind of up, with the sense of possibility, of freedom. Maybe even a kind of giddiness with that. Very important, again, over and over, to say, "Feel it in the body." Feel it in the body. Where is that in the body? She was saying, "And then what happens is I feel this and the despair comes in and just trashes it. It just trashes any sense of possibility. It trashes even the sense of yearning. It smashes it."
At that point, at that juncture in the process, there are a lot of different directions one could go in. I could explore the feeling -- what's it like to feel smashed? What's it like to feel under the boot of this despair? What's that like? What's the experience of that? Could be an option. We were talking, so I actually chose another option. I'm not sure if it was right, and partly I'm sharing it to say sometimes it's difficult to know what's right, what's the right way forward.
I said to her, "Is there something in the yearning, within that movement of yearning, within that kind of movement of faith and devotion and longing and the beauty of that, is there a quality that is not smashed? It feels like it's smashed, but is there a quality that is not smashed?" It seemed to me that there was that quality there; I could see it, it seemed to me. And it seemed to me that it was in the lower part of the body, where the attention was not going. "How does the lower part of the body feel?" And she began to see, "Oh, yes, there is a quality there that doesn't feel smashed. But it feels kind of shaky." I was just curious, "Does it have a quality of strength in it? Is there strength there?" Strength is the quality that won't be smashed. Is there strength there? She looked. "Yes, there is strength there." But it wasn't something that would have been noticed.
In other words, just the habitual pathways -- this is really, really common -- we have habitual tendencies not to notice certain qualities. They'll be different for each of us. But habitually not to notice that, that was the habit of the noticing, or the un-noticing. Why? That's really interesting. Why do we tend not to notice certain qualities? Exploring it, oftentimes it's because something is unfamiliar. In this case, strength, a feeling of strength -- this is really, really common; I see this a lot -- that we are, many of us, are not used to, familiar with and comfortable with, feeling a feeling of strength in us, feeling our own strength. Something that's quite scary to hang out in, scary to inhabit, scary to let have its fullness. Scary to let be embodied, and let that strength permeate the self and permeate the body.
So partly that implies it may be a gradual process of familiarizing myself with that, of learning that I can kind of expand into the strength, and feel what it is to inhabit it. That may be gradual, and that's fine. But a person might see, for instance, might see something and, "Oh, now I'm seeing something really interesting. Why is there resistance to the strength? I'm seeing, and looking at it. Okay, so I'm seeing that now. It's a whole interpersonal dynamic that's part of this structure." But when I feel the beauty and the expansion of inhabiting my strength, as I let myself get more familiar with that, I'll basically be ready to let go of that other pattern. I see that it doesn't give me anywhere near as much as the feeling of strength and independence, autonomy. It doesn't give me nearly as much good feeling, nearly as much freedom, nearly as much in what we could call a beautiful, positive sense of self. That might be gradual.
But it might be even more complicated. A person might look and say, "Why am I resisting this strength coming in and feeling this strength?" It could be that deep down, I don't trust myself. "I shouldn't, therefore, be strong." It can be knotted in other ways. So when I give sometimes these stories, I don't want to necessarily just say, "Da-da-da, boom," and it's all very glib. It's a process.
Let me give you another example. I was working with someone who was exploring a process, and then there was a lot of rage towards themself come up, really strong rage towards the self. Self-hatred, basically. But they were looking at it. It was contained in the awareness. It didn't have more energy than the mindfulness or the attention. Right then, in the mix, there was softness and there was compassion there, at least it seemed to me; I could see it. In the example I just gave, I felt like I was kind of guiding someone, because I felt I could see something and it was like, "It would be really good if you saw this."
In this instance, I felt like I saw something, and for some reason it felt like, "I don't know if it's right." I didn't say anything. And the person didn't notice it. I don't know, I'm just sharing, I don't know sometimes, does one point it out? Does one not? You get different schools. Who is an expert on this? You get people who maybe declare themselves experts. I don't know. It's hard to say. Sometimes a person just isn't ready to see something. Or, and/or, sometimes it's the case that something is going on, we are doing something -- to go right back to the core premise of these whole talks -- sometimes we are doing something that's locking the dynamism, that's locking something into place. Not questioning so much. I'm not accessing resource, whatever it is, all these lists. Maybe it's a mixture. I don't know. Just to say, it can be more complicated.
So (i) resourcing through cultivation, (ii) resourcing through what else is there. (iii) There's also resourcing through -- I don't know quite what to call it -- resourcing through integrating. This is the third possibility in terms of resourcing: resourcing through integrating. I had a friend who's more of an acquaintance. I see him very rarely, literally every ten years or something. One of those times, maybe twenty years ago, I don't know [laughs], one of those times, he had started meditating. He had joined an order, a sort of semi-monastic order, and he'd changed his name as part of that process. So he had a kind of Indian name, a spiritual name. They had certain rules and stuff, and he was meditating.
He was saying to me, "You know, something's started happening. When I meditated, I kept getting this face come up in meditation, this snarling, rageful face, right there in front of me." Sort of on the inner visual screen, and contorted in rage, and looked really scary, demon-like. He said it was really, really scary, and this was going on and on and on. Finally, it occurred to him, or he plucked up the courage, to ask this apparition, "Who are you?" Immediately the face responded, "I'm John Smith" -- not his real name, but basically his old name, his pre-monastic name.
He was just telling me that, and I think at the time it wasn't appropriate to say anything, but it's obvious -- well, I don't know if it's obvious, but what jumped out to me -- is it obvious to you? Something's been split off from in an image, hasn't it? Would you ...? Something's, there's a split. It's coming back. I've changed my name, now I'm all spiritual, I'm like this, but something inside says, "Uhhh ..." [laughter] "No, no, no, no, no. Hellooo?" And it comes up in a very, very forceful way. I didn't say that; it wasn't appropriate at the time. I don't know how he pursued it or if he did or what. But oftentimes qualities, aspects of ourselves, aspects of our inner world that we need to integrate will present themselves to us in meditation, or in a moment of quietness, or in dreams, or whatever it is. So I just offer this as another possibility. Again, it doesn't fall usually in the kind of things that certainly I would usually talk about in teaching this kind of meditation, but I just offer it.
Sometimes there's a sense of difficulty in the meditation or somewhere, there's an emotion that's coming up that's difficult, or sense of something unsettled. And sometimes you can kind of go into a mode where you have access. It will present itself in certain imagery. An image will come up, or an inner character, even, will manifest. Or even a scene, a representation from -- if you're in the language of psychodynamics, psychotherapies -- a representation from the unconscious. And it's possible to work, creatively and skilfully, with that image or those images. I would say, like all of this, it's really important to keep the body awareness. We're not getting lost in daydreaming. I know when I'm working well with something because of what happens in the body, and because of the way the body comes into alignment and strength and opening when I'm on track. So whatever I do, the body is central. It takes a certain amount of mindfulness, and perhaps rootedness in mindfulness practice, but if you're familiar with some other traditions where the kind of shamanic journeying, or if you know Jungian psychodynamics, it's called active imagination, where you're actually working directly with images, to reveal something and to integrate something and to access resources that otherwise may be unintegrated, unacknowledged, inaccessible.
So it's possible to actually dialogue, even, with an image. "What are you wanting? What do you need? What's going on? What am I missing here? What am I missing out?" It's possible to strike a deal with this inner character, come to an agreement. And through that, actually accessing another quality within, that when it's allowed -- ethically; it might want you to do something in the world, but it has to be ethical -- when it's allowed, gives us a strength, reclaims our power, reclaims peace, etc. Basically it's another aspect of unlocking the dynamism.
I'll give you a small example, because I've been experimenting a little bit with this myself recently. So just a small example, briefly. This is part of a much larger, ongoing thread of investigation that I'm inquiring into, that feels very alive and rich for me. I only want to give you a bit that's relevant now. I was sitting in meditation, or sitting or something, and felt, "Something's not right." And went inside, and there was an image. It was a kind of big bird of prey, I don't know exactly, maybe like an eagle or something. Very powerful, flapping its wings and agitated. There was quite a lot of agitation wrapped up in it.
I began to explore it and get a feel for its character, a feel for where it was coming from and what it wanted. There was a kind of dialogue -- it was more like kind of intuiting something. Basically, what it wanted -- it was part of this ongoing exploration, just that I happen to be going through right now -- it was wanting complete freedom of inquiry. Complete freedom of inquiry. No constraints on the inquiry at all. It's part of this other thing that I've been going through, and I hadn't realized -- I would have felt myself very free to inquire. No one tells me to think this or that, or to inquire this way, or to limit my inquiry in any way. But, subtly, I was beginning to realize that actually the inquiry has been limited. It has certain edges to it, or certain assumptions. I'm not going to go into that; the point is more about the imagery.
It was very subtle, beginning to notice that actually I really want more, much more, a complete freedom to inquire. Working with this image, it's like this powerful eagle, so wanting to soar in the free spaces of the sky. Freely, like an eagle would fly, unhindered, unperturbed. Free to soar where it wants. In a way, what I really took from it was it had something to tell me. It's about how you see yourself. Because this was part of an ongoing inquiry, it was just a slight piece that was there this time. It was, "You just need to see yourself a certain way every day." It's quite a subtle shift. You just need to see and acknowledge that you are completely free to inquire, that you have that freedom, and take that freedom and acknowledge it -- that that's my right, and feel that. That's just a small example, but it's possible that that may be helpful, that we can reaccess some qualities. If we don't, what happens is difficult emotions or difficult dynamics will tend to keep emerging, difficult energies. Sometimes if it's really strong it manifests in destructive or self-destructive behaviour.
Why am I saying that? Why am I sharing that in particular? Because partly I've noticed that -- a person might say, "Well, that's not Buddhism. That's not mindfulness." I actually don't care, frankly.
Sometimes I've noticed that a person can be meditating a long time, and the very meditation, in the way that one is meditating, one is going into a space where one loses access to certain qualities. I was working with someone who was feeling himself access his power at times, very new, and it had been inhibited in his childhood. He was reaccessing it, and it felt good. So he was in and out of accessing it, and we were talking about it. I was saying, "Can you get it right now?" And then he went into his meditation posture and went inside, and looking inside to get his power in a meditative way. I could see that it was not accessing, it was going completely away from the power. There's something in the way of meditating. And this is a long-term meditator. Something in the habit of what meditation has become actually locked certain qualities out.
Okay. So we need to, perhaps, reveal what's in us, and integrate that, if we're not allowing or acknowledging or integrating something.
(7) The seventh one is using the story. Oftentimes, in insight meditation, again, we say, "Drop the story. Let the story go. Don't get embroiled in the story." And redirecting a person back to the body and the sensations in the body -- just the sensations, drop the story. But it's possible that relating, opening, to the story -- my story, my journey -- actually does, again, allow certain resources and certain healing that wouldn't come just by being with the sensations.
Recently, or some months ago, a person was working and trying to be with something just in terms of the sensations. But there was quite a powerful, complex, long story underneath, that had to do with the emotion that was going on. In this case, the story, just a précis of the story, a very summarized example of the story: when his mum met his biological dad, and after a brief affair, she got pregnant with him, and he left. He didn't want anything to do with it. So his mum was left on her own with the pregnancy. A degree of unsureness, whether it was right to go through with this on her own. The biological father had wanted her to have an abortion, and then basically just split when she said no.
Later in life, at some age, a stepfather came in. The mum got together with another man. This man was his stepfather. In a letter, I think while he was even on retreat, a letter to his stepfather, for the first time in his life, in his relationship with his stepfather, he signed the letter, "Your son." The first time he'd called him that. That was quite a courageous thing to do. Some time later, the letter comes back, signed, from his stepfather, "Your father."
Really needed to allow in that. Something quite momentous had happened, very, very beautiful. Needed to allow that in, open to the story. It's not just about the sensations. Have to open to that. There's a lot in there to open to, feeling the grief and the absence of the biological father from a very early age, feeling that. And in this case, there are resources there, the resource of the stepfather's love -- tapping into that through the story. That love is there. "Your father." If I don't go to the story, I won't get that resource. And my love, his love for the stepfather, is also a resource. That's also a resource for me -- it's my love for him, but it's my resource. Part of the story was also his mum telling him much later in his life that she had been unsure about having him or not. And yet, in the hospital, when the doctors gave her the baby, and there he was suckling at the breast, and the mum said, "I knew it was the right thing." Really, really powerful. Really powerful. To keep that out of the meditative process, one will not be accessing the fullness of the healing and the fullness of what resource is there.
It's not, again, not to pretend that any of this is always easy. The key with stories is -- if we're going to use them -- is to not be defined by them. Not to be locked into the story, a prisoner or a victim of the story. This is really important. If I'm using the story, I have to be careful and sensitive and responsive. The story has some degree of movement in it. Am I using the story in a helpful way? I need to be using the story, the story of my life, my journey, to unlock the emotional life, not to lock it in an orbit, in a cycle. Is it possible to see the story differently? Not to ignore it, but to see it differently.
I was talking with a friend the other day, the other night, and we were talking a little bit about this. She's actually a teacher as well. One possibility I think many people find is that once one begins to work through some of the really difficult old emotional patterns and constructs, once one begins to get the strength and one's fullness back, one may look back at one's journey and the story of one's journey and see that the very difficulties that one experienced turn out to have been the conditions that almost exercised or gave muscles to what was to become our greatest strength. It's a very curious thing. They almost become the muscles behind the source of our greatest and most beautiful gifts to the world. You might have had a father who squashed your self-expression, who squashed your expression of the truth, or your creativity, or whatever. You were living and felt in reaction and stamped on through that. It might turn out that going through that, and working through that, what emerges from that is a fearlessness, more and more -- and this may take years and even decades -- a fearlessness of expression. Fearlessness of self-expression, of creative expression. It comes because the muscles were trained.
How I see the story is dependent. Like everything in this world, how I see it is dependent. It's dependent on a lot of things, and it's dependent on a lot of inner qualities. In other words, what's in the inner mix at this time, that will determine how I see anything and everything. Anything and everything is determined by what qualities of mind and heart are present. When I feel like I have enough, from cultivation in practice, from building up the beautiful qualities over time, from accessing my resources, from other aspects of the path, I begin to see the story differently because I'm looking at it from a different inner place.
My own story, my own journey, looks different to me when there's enough in the heart, when the heart has enough. Hopefully we get to a place where we don't need our parents, if it's about our parents, we don't need our parents to parent us any more. Unfortunately, it's relatively common that a person goes through their whole life and the relationship with the parents is still -- even though they might be in their fifties and sixties or something -- the relationship with the parents is still -- the parents might be 90 or whatever -- still wanting the parents at some level to parent us, or wanting someone else, in some ways, to parent us.
As I begin to have enough inside and begin to see the story differently, feel the whole thing differently, you can really say, "I'm grown up now. I don't need my parents. It doesn't matter how my parents are." Something is much more free. I'm not looking for parenting in the world. You can look back and see, sometimes -- and again, I'm not saying necessarily that this is always easy -- seeing perhaps the limitations that my parents had, if that's what it's about, the parents. The incompleteness of their love and the manifestations of their love. Somehow that was all okay. That was all okay, really fundamentally very okay, in some way. In seeing it, actually can begin to see love more. We see love more, through that -- in the present, but also even in the past.
Okay, I'm going to stop there. [laughs] This is all taking much longer than I thought! There is one more, which is the flexibility one. I'll leave it for another time, maybe on this retreat, maybe another time. To me, there's also a whole load of -- all this, woven into it, there's a whole load of very fundamental questions about what the path is, come to my attention. I don't know if it's obvious to you or not. Perhaps another part, I'd like to actually explore that, what the implications of a lot of what's being said here -- they're woven in.
Okay. So it's all about practice. It's all about taking things and making them your own through experimentation, through trying this and trying that, and seeing this dynamism unfold, and it will. Once I start toying with things, experimenting, playing, shifting things, it does unlock that. The healing comes and the being unfolds in the way that is its natural way.
Let's have a quiet moment or two together.
