Transcription
This series of guided meditations and instructions presents a set of tools and approaches for working skilfully with emotions and mind states in practice.
Okay. Let's review just a little bit what we introduced yesterday with the opening out of the awareness into kind of vast awareness. Remember, please remember, it's just one option. Different people, as I keep saying, different people will kind of find different pieces of the jigsaw work better for them, easier, more fluidity, etc., more access. That's all completely fine. So it's just one option. It's one possibility.
Just to, again, describe what that would involve, that direction, that approach. Starting, anchoring the awareness, the mindfulness, in the body -- really important. So that's the kind of root, the centre of the awareness, so to speak. And then, from there, when you're ready, opening it out further. You could start with what's going on in the central axis, you could, or just the body generally, but opening out further, still including the body but starting to include listening. The reason we include listening partly is because sounds usually arise from all different directions and all different distances. So when I'm opening to listening, just by virtue of where the sounds are coming from, one can't help but open out the awareness. The awareness opens out there. So it's almost like the sounds are a support for this expansiveness of the awareness.
And then within that one is just, so to speak, resting in that openness. The awareness is open and receiving the sounds, but still also the body sensations. And really just resting in the sense of letting everything be. So letting a sound arise, letting a body sensation, or the contraction of an emotion, or whatever it is, letting it be. Letting it arise, letting it live, letting it pass. And in a way, as one does that, one can also support the attitude or even have a sense that all these phenomena that are arising and passing, they kind of belong to the space. So we tend to always -- it's always 'me' and 'mine.' We appropriate things. They belong to the space. It belongs to the silence. So that's a kind of attitude within this space that's really, really helpful. Let everything, everything belong to the silence, belong to the space. Whatever it is, and whatever it is that's coming up -- beautiful, ugly, or indifferent -- belongs there. We can let it belong there.
So that includes, eventually, as we stabilize in that space, includes thoughts. And includes even the sense of contraction when we don't let things belong to the space and we go, "Oh, I need to get rid of this thing," or "It's mine," or "It's me," and you can feel the body, and feel the being, and the heart, and the central line contracting. Well, that contraction, too, is just an experience happening in the space. It's just an experience, a kind of impression that arises and then will dissolve again. No problem. Let it belong to the space.
So in this attitude, then, the attention is not so much going to this sound over there, and then a bird calls over there, and the sound goes over there, and then someone shuffles and the attention goes over there, and then it goes to the body, and then it goes to the thought. It's not so much darting from this to that. That's one mode of attention: we sort of target something with the attention -- very helpful -- and focus the attention on something. This is more the totality, the totality of sounds, the totality of experience. And it's more, we could say, 'receiving' -- the awareness is receiving phenomena, receiving experience. And there's a sense that the space can kind of hold everything. It does hold everything. It embraces everything. Maybe this silence, this space, permeates everything, as well.
So that, again, is one option, one approach that some people find very useful, and others less so. Maybe if you don't find it useful now there will be another time, or another retreat, or another period in your practice life when it does feel very useful. It's all fine. But in a way, it's one more resource. It's potentially a very profound resource for us as human beings in relationship certainly to our emotions, but also just to life and our experience.
I want to talk a little bit more about resources and resourcing. We've touched on it in lots of different ways, but just to pull it out a little bit. So last night in the talk, I was mentioning that our friends are a resource. So we have external resources. And this is really important, to have a sense of being supported and supporting each other, and a sense of being able to share, being able to feel heard and listened to. Hugely significant. And at the same time, we're also on the journey towards an independence, towards really being able to hold our experience, our emotions, certainly, ourselves, and hold them well ourselves.
Chris is going to talk about compassion tonight. We're talking about developing beautiful qualities of the heart -- loving-kindness, compassion, generosity, equanimity, concentration, what we call samādhi in the Pali, calmness. All these qualities, it's like they go into the being and then they're part of my well of resources, and I can use them in my life. I have access to them, especially when things are difficult. So there's a whole part of resourcing that's about developing beautiful qualities of the heart and practices that do that.
I've already said this twice, but it's worth saying it again: what happens when we have a calm mind state, a calm heart state? Oftentimes, we just want to dismiss it, or not even notice it. But if I can sustain the attention on it, and actually give it some interest, what happens through the attention on it? Seems like it's not worth paying attention to. It will start deepening and growing, generally speaking, and may even deepen into peace, or into joy, even. That habituation of the consciousness to peace, to joy, that, again, becomes part of the well, part of the pool that we can draw on. Peace, joy, become the grooves of the consciousness more and more, the habitual grooves, and become accessible to us in life. That's massive.
Many times, as we've already alluded to, there are resources that are there, and we don't notice them. For some reason, we don't notice them, and so we can't use them and draw on them. So they're present, but we just have no access to them, because we're kind of blinkering them out. We just don't register that they're there. So, for example, the silence and the space. With a bit of practice with this, one realizes, actually, in some senses, it's always there, and it's always available as a resource. Always there, like we were saying with the music last night. It's always holding things. It's just that we might not realize that it's holding things.
[8:48] Similarly, the energy body. Sometimes we get so caught up in what's going on that we forget that if I just expand a little bit, maybe there's some resource in the field of the body that can be really helpful. So I might feel a difficulty in the heart, or the throat, or something along the central line, something contracted and difficult. And I can feel that, and the perhaps peace, or softness, or calm of the energy body around it, and something is held there, or the difficulty and the sense of it being held in the space together -- the context. That, again, that's huge. It's really, really huge.
So we could put out a question: what else is there? What else is going on? Particularly when I'm having a difficulty, what else is there? We talked about thoughts and assumptions that can be there, and how the mind wants to make judgments and assessments. Well, there's also a more subtle level of what's there, which is what we could call the 'energetic relationship' with what's going on. It could be that there's really not much thought or judgment or anything like that, but energetically one is pushing away what's happening, as Chris talked about the other night in a talk. There's aversion there or grasping: I want to hang onto something. Either one is a kind of energetic struggling with experience. A tension comes into the relationship, just a little bit of impatience with what's going on, or wanting to force it in some way. So we can also expand the sensitivity not just to notice the thoughts in relationship to what's happening, but the energetic relationship with what's happening. Oftentimes it's more subtle.
So in terms of what else is there that I might not be noticing, oftentimes, as I said, there's really good stuff there that we're just not using. We're just not using it because we don't notice it's there, or we're sucked into the difficulty. So let's say there's some kind of difficulty going on. Maybe there's judgment, and I judge someone, and then I feel the difficulty of judging. I don't feel good about judging, or whatever it is (could be anything -- sadness, whatever). It sounds funny to say, but sometimes we don't let ourselves feel the pain of something so directly. We know it's painful, and we're registering it, but we're not kind of letting the awareness really touch the dukkha, the pain of what's going on, and really registering, "This is suffering." It's like the hand touches the heart and knows, "This is suffering," and actually feels it as suffering, as pain. It sounds really obvious, but sometimes we hold back from that.
What's the point of that? The point is that if, very simply, the hand can just touch pain like that, very directly, very nakedly, very gently, oftentimes -- it might take a little time to get going -- but oftentimes what happens is an organic response of compassion comes. There's pain, and naturally the being gives rise to compassion, can be. But then that's a very interesting moment, if that's what happens. Because again, what I see working with people is oftentimes a person doesn't do that, a person doesn't notice the compassion if it's there, and then if they notice it, they move on too quickly from it. So what would it be, if compassion arises, to actually really sit in the feeling of compassion, really linger in it, let the body soak and be bathed in this feeling of compassion? We're too quick to move on from the gifts and resources that are actually present in us. It's a response of the being that we need to kind of just wrap ourselves in for a while. If we don't, it won't soak in and do the heart work for us.
Sometimes I say to people, particularly when there's a difficult emotion going on, "Is it possible to put some warmth around that difficulty? This heartache, or this grief, or this knot there, or whatever it is, is it possible to put some warmth around it, to kind of hold it, to cradle it, so there's something around what's going on?" That's really important. All this is talking about what's around a difficulty. I used an image in a group the other day of it's like a dark, jagged rock, but it's surrounded perhaps by water, perhaps cool water or warm water, just lapping onto the rock, lapping onto this pain. And that makes all the difference, what's around it. It's in a pool of soothing water. So sometimes is that possible? For some people, just the image or just the question, it's possible that that opens up and they can somehow -- they're not even sure how they're doing it -- they're putting warmth around something or holding it.
And for some, like all of this, for some that's not possible. The suggestion, the question, the image, doesn't move it to that place, open to that place. So then there's an inquiry that's possible, a very gentle inquiry, nothing to do with the inner critic. This is not the inner critic's business. We can keep it somewhere else. But what might be preventing, what might be preventing or in the way of putting warmth around this difficulty, this difficult emotion? And usually it's our old -- I was going to say 'friend' or 'foe' or something -- judging. We're judging, and that very judging, and being caught up in the judging, is preventing that capacity to naturally let the waters of warmth flow around something. Or the meaning that we've given something, in terms of what we were talking about a couple of days ago, with assumptions and thoughts. Or the belief that this is going to go on forever. Or the belief in what it means about me. All this acts as a kind of rigid calcification or rigid structure around the difficulty that prevents the waters flowing there. Shame, forcing it in one way or another, wanting more catharsis, or wanting it to go away, or whatever it is, fear -- all this will prevent. So good to see that, good to explore, gentle inquiry into that.
And then the flip side of that inquiry: how might we be able to open that flow? So this is quite interesting. And just to offer a few possibilities. (1) We're going to talk more about this in the next couple of days: something really interesting happens if I can really allow something to be there. If I really allow a pain to be there, a difficulty in the heart, that quality of allowing that's coming into the relationship with this phenomenon, something starts to happen. It starts to naturally open up space around what's going on. The allowing itself does a kind of work. It opens up a space, and first thing you notice, "Ah, I tried to allow, I worked on the allowing, and there's more space around something." And then, naturally, as the next movement, just through the allowing, the waters, the warmth and the holding, begin to fill that space. The space, even if it's just a little space around something, begins naturally -- I'm not doing anything -- to be filled with warmth and with this sense of holding. All I've done is allow a bit more -- a bit more emphasis on the allowing.
(2) Second possibility: now, I'm sure you've noticed that when the heart has closed and become hard and rigid, in response to what's going on or just in itself, that the body mirrors that. If you check in when the heart is rigid, oftentimes the belly is also tight, and the rest of the musculature in the body. Tightness comes into the whole system. So hard heart leads to hardening of body in that moment. Soft heart, softening of the heart -- how does the body feel when the heart softens? Well, the belly tends to soften, and the body softens. So soft heart leads to soft body, soft belly. Very interesting thing with causality in this kind of work -- it works both ways. So softening the body and softening the belly can soften the heart. Sometimes it's just, well, work on gently, gently softening the belly, making the belly very soft, making the body as soft as possible, and sometimes it can have an effect on the heart.
[19:02] (3) We already said about feeling it as suffering. That's a third possibility. (4) A fourth possibility is an interesting one. When there's difficulty going on, we often contract. We said this before. We contract also into a kind of self-view: "Ugh, I bet no one else is going through this. I bet I'm the only one who has this kind of emotion or who struggles with this," etc. All this is a kind of tightening illusion of self-belief. So it's quite an interesting exercise, if you ever try this. It's really worth trying. In that moment of difficulty, actually consciously contemplate, "Someone, somewhere, maybe even right now, at this moment, is going through pretty much exactly the same thing that I am." What happens there is the sense of contraction of self, and me alone -- the isolation that comes -- so when it's just, "I bet no one else has this," we feel so isolated in our suffering, and that's what they call double dukkha, double suffering: I have this pain, and I have the pain of the isolation around it. So just opening up the contemplation, the consciousness, to realize, "Yeah, I'm not alone in this. I share this with brothers and sisters in humanity. We share this together." Very interesting if you want to play with that.
I'll leave a little bit out. I'll say one more possibility. (5) Sometimes I'm working with someone and they're very stuck in a difficulty, they feel very stuck, and it's interesting sometimes to ask them or a person to ask oneself, "How would I respond to a little child who comes in the room, and comes up to me right now, and says exactly what I've said about the difficulty that I'm going through -- that I feel this, this, this, and all the pain of that, and just blurts it out to you?" You can actually use the imagination and notice: what's the heart's response? Sometimes it's sort of externalizing this difficulty and putting it in the heart of a child, if you like -- can really be helpful.
So in general, we get sucked in and seduced by what's going on, particularly when it's difficult, and we don't realize what else might be accessible to us. Let me throw one more thing out right now. I'm going to talk about anger and fear at some point -- I'm not sure when -- because they're a particular case of difficult emotions to work with. But one of the qualities that can be a real resource for us in our life that we often don't let ourselves access, and tap into, and recognize, and feel, is a sense of strength and a sense of power. This is very interesting, and I think it's particularly common with the kinds of people who would show up on retreat, where we talk a lot about softness, and kindness, and accepting, and things like that. One of the shadow sides of that is that we don't let ourselves -- it's, like, not okay to feel our strength and our power.
This is, as always, a double-edged sword, and kind of interesting. Do we notice and do we allow, can we notice and can we allow, when there is a feeling of strength in the being and in the body, and a feeling of power? That's not the same as anger. It's not at all the same as anger. It's just pure power. And I don't mean power over someone, and making someone submit. I mean power in oneself, in one's being, in one's body; strength, fullness. Oftentimes, people, I notice, have a lot of resistance -- we have a lot of resistance to letting ourselves feel that strength, and that energy, and that fullness. There are all kinds of reasons for this, and sometimes it's that we don't trust ourselves.
But how does it feel? How might it feel, physically, and to inhabit that and let that fill out the being, and the sense of the body, and the sense of the self? To me, that's really, really a crucial piece in the jigsaw. Where does that come from, that feeling of power? Well, it might come in relationship to some anger or something, and I realize, "Oh, it's not really about anger. There's a strand of my own strength and power here that's manifesting," and one can begin feeling that and letting that expand. But actually it could come from anything. It could even come from sadness. What it comes from, this feeling of, this owning of our own strength and power, it comes from -- I think -- allowing one's life force to manifest and express. That's what it is, really -- allowing the life force to be full, to flow, to do that.
And that includes desire, interestingly, as long as I'm not hooked on the object of desire. So desire is a rising up, a welling up, a flowing of the deep life force, and has in it this strength and this power. The problem is we get hooked, hooked onto this or that that I think I need or want, as Chris was saying the other night. There's something hidden in all that that's a total gift to ourselves, but we completely prevent it by not allowing it and by getting sucked into the object that we think we want to get rid of or want to get.
