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.
[00:00, guided meditation begins]
... Start today with a guided meditation together. Just taking those moments of care at the beginning of the sitting to really find your way into your posture, your meditation posture, and the sense of the posture itself as resource. The unfolding of our experience, if you like, within the posture, framed, contained, held. So finding that balanced sense, openness, uprightness, softness, presence, groundedness, connection.
And as always, you can acknowledge this movement of kindness that practice is, this offering of kindness to oneself. Whatever other agendas might be lurking -- the inner critic, the measuring, comparing of self, the proving of self-worth -- just letting go of all that. This is simply kindness. It's simply a gift, simply caring for ourselves, and through that, that care flows into the world, and caring for the world.
Whenever you feel ready, beginning to receive with the awareness whatever is prominent, to notice whatever is prominent in the body -- whatever feelings or sensations, or whatever is going on there in terms of experience. Just noticing what's prominent. It might be strongly prominent, or just whatever is the most prominent. There might not be a lot going on. Whatever it is, anywhere in the body, anywhere. Could be along this central axis. Might be anywhere else.
And just connecting with it with the awareness, touching it with the attention, intimate with it. Just knowing it with the mindfulness, with awareness.
And then this sensation, or area of sensation, this experience, this perception, this feeling -- how fully can it be allowed? So really allowing it, allowing it to be there. Really putting the emphasis on completely welcoming it and letting it be there. Opening to it as fully as possible. Full allowing.
Is it possible to keep allowing, to draw close to whatever is prominent and keep allowing it? Really emphasizing above everything else -- more important than the clarity of awareness -- allowing whatever it is. Over and over, 100 per cent welcoming.
So this is kindness as allowing, kindness to the phenomena of experience. Being kind to the experience by completely welcoming it, completely allowing it to be, giving it space, softening around it.
So now we're not so much opening up the big space as before, not so much that. Rather, whatever is prominent in this moment, drawing close, and then really emphasizing the allowing, making it all about the allowing. Over and over, touching the experience, and fullness of allowing. Something in the relationship with this experience melts, melts.
[10:13] So just over and over again, this movement of kindness towards experience, kindness melting, softening around experience. To welcome, welcome. Even to invite, to invite this experience, these feelings, these sensations.
So just as fully as possible in this moment, opening, opening to this experience, whatever it is. How total, how complete can the acceptance of this moment of whatever experience is, how total can that be? How complete? Just this moment, again and again.
For now, we're not so interested in how clearly we can observe something. We're not so interested in the clarity of awareness right now. Just this allowing, this softening to allow, again and again.
Staying connected with the feeling, the sense, the sensations in the body, but whatever phenomena arise, whatever phenomena, drawing close with the attention and then fully welcoming them. Energetically softening to really receive as totally as possible, to allow as fully as possible. Just melting any rigidity (as much as you can) that comes in relationship to experience, allowing, fully letting be.
Whatever is there in the moment, softening, opening, melting to allow, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant or not particularly either. Whatever it is, a feeling of contraction, a feeling of ease, allowing it. Touching and fully allowing. Whether it's a state, a feeling of happiness, or unhappiness, or neither. Whether it's gross or subtle. Over and over, softening, softening to allow, to welcome.
[21:10] All the emphasis is on the allowing, the softening, the welcoming. We don't care about the precision of the perception right now, of the awareness. So if an experience seems to blur a little bit, or get fuzzy, or indistinct, or to fade somewhat, completely not a problem. Completely not a problem. Just keep allowing whatever is there, welcoming, softening.
[23:50, guided meditation ends]
Rob: What did you notice? Anybody? Someone here? Yeah?
Yogi 1: I found I could connect to fear without getting fearful.
Rob: Yeah, yeah.
Yogi 1: Like it just was different. I didn't get any emotions around that, and by the end or somewhere along the line, it simply felt human.
Rob: Human, yeah.
Yogi 1: I just stood there upright -- I felt like I was standing. And I was just human.
Rob: Lovely, good.
Yogi 2: [inaudible]
Rob: I just want to repeat what [yogi 2] said -- she found the word 'soften' very helpful, because she realized that there's a kind of trying to keep experience away or at bay, at arm's length, so to speak, and softening allows them to kind of melt into her. That's what would happen: they would melt, and then something else would come up. With each softening, the experience would melt like that.
Yogi 3: I noticed that, too, but it was the idea of not focusing on the awareness but on the allowing that really seemed to help in the dissolving of the experience.
Rob: Okay, good. Could everyone hear that? Yeah?
Okay, well. Hum-de-hum. Did it feel at least a little bit helpful? And do you understand what we're getting at here? When we say 'mindfulness,' it's a big word, mindfulness. It's got a lot of stuff in it, a lot of aspects to it. If we pick up -- what's your name? Jen? Jen's comment just now. You know, mindfulness has the capacity, obviously, to pay attention and to be precise in what it's noticing, and that's what it does. But it also has this quality of allowing and accepting. So what is it to practise really emphasizing that quality of allowing, and forgetting about the other half? We tend to think, "Well, if I'm being mindful, I must be allowing." We've used 'allowing' from day one on this retreat. But something else begins to open up if we really emphasize the allowing aspect of mindfulness.
Okay, so how are we going to go about this now ... Let me say a little bit about anger and fear, and then come back to what we've just done. It's all connected, but I'm just trying to navigate through the material here. Anger and fear, very common human experiences, difficult human emotions. They have quite a lot in common. When there's anger or fear, we're usually aversive to the experience of anger or fear. We're usually afraid of fear, and we usually have anxiety about getting anxious. That's a movement of aversion -- we want to get rid of this unpleasant churning of fear, etc. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. We want to get rid of it. When there's anger, as well, it's a heat. It's a pressure. It feels uncomfortable. We want to get rid of it. That's why sometimes people just shout, because I feel like I want to get it out of here and out there. So there's a pressure that feels uncomfortable, and towards that discomfort there is aversion. We push it away.
[28:50] But the more we push anger and fear away, it's like the more they burn. That pushing away is part of the whole mechanism of anger and fear. It's not a secondary reaction. It's part of the whole show. We could say aversion to the experience of anger or fear is a necessary ingredient for anger or fear. It's not like something that's kind of optional on the side. It's a necessary ingredient.
And one way of practising with anger and fear is to really emphasize the kind of allowing that we just did. The physical sensations, the agitation, the pressure, the churning that's there -- really, really allow that discomfort to be there on the physical level. Allowing is a quietening, a softening of aversion, right? So allowing is the opposite of aversion. What will happen eventually is that the anger or the fear will quieten, subside, because we're not feeding it with what it needs, which is aversion.
Another common property between anger and fear is contractedness of mind. I'm just throwing this out now. It's a bit like (I think there's a law from basic physics) when you put pressure on something, when you contract it, like a gas, it actually heats up. Same thing with fear and anger. They're contracted states of mind, and that very contraction causes more agitation, more heat. So another possibility is opening up space like we've been doing with anger and fear, and really letting it bubble away uncomfortably in that space. Then we're taking off the pressure and the temperature goes down. So spaciousness and allowing, really, really helpful.
One more thing about anger. Oftentimes with anger, it's almost like there's more to it than meets the eye at first. Especially if something has happened, we might be full of this kind of very agitated feeling. It's like the waves on the ocean, very frothing and turbulent. And underneath, if I can just stay with that difficulty, that frothing on the surface, the very agitated feeling, if I can just stay with it and allow it, sometimes what happens is it begins to kind of trace a path down to quieter feelings underneath -- perhaps hurt, or grief, or sadness, something which the anger is resting upon. Those are the feelings that, as much as the froth, need the attention. They need care, and drawing close to, and kind of finding out what that's about and what they need. And it's at that level, at connecting with the hurt, that the anger -- and the woundedness, perhaps -- that the anger can heal and the froth settle.
I partly say that about anger and fear because oftentimes they're not experiences that constrain themselves to the central line. They can take up the whole body, it feels like, or a lot of the body feels like it's involved in that. So that's why this allowing and this spaciousness is really helpful.
Okay, let's go back to what we just did. It felt helpful maybe for a lot of people, and if it didn't just then, it's just a matter of practising with it. What does it mean to say it's helpful? Well, if there's difficulty, if there's suffering, if there's dukkha, allowing tends to ease the suffering of what's going on, or any suffering. The more we allow, the more suffering is eased. There's an insight right there: the suffering that I have in relationship to an experience depends on the presence of aversion or grasping. It's that that's making most of the suffering. It's not the thing itself. It's the relationship with it. When we practise allowing, we're relaxing the relationship. We're relaxing aversion and grasping. And the suffering begins to drain out of the experience. Really significant. We need to see this thousands of times until we really get it: the suffering is in the relationship. It's not in the thing. The more I allow, the more I'm relaxing the relationship, and with that the suffering can relax out of it.
But there's more here. Yes? Please?
Yogi 4: Why would one want the suffering to diminish other than if one was averse to it?
Rob: Because that's what we're in the business of doing. We're in the business of easing suffering. That's really important. That's everything that practice is about. It's about easing suffering.
Yogi 4: I'm confused, though: which arrow is which?
Rob: Ah, okay. The whole arrow thing is a provisional teaching, so maybe it will make more sense after what I've said. What's confusing you right now?
Yogi 4: What's confusing me is the allowing of suffering, just let it be as it is, painful. Then you say by doing that the pain will diminish.
Rob: Okay. So then, just in terms of what I've said so far, what we're saying is this second arrow ... [aside to Chris] Did you use the story of the arrow? You did? Yeah. The second arrow is diminishing because I'm not reacting to it. The second arrow is about reactivity. So when we're allowing suffering, we're ducking out of the way of the second arrow, in a very gradual way. So I'm just allowing it to be whatever it is, and the second arrow of what's painful goes out. One actually sees that most of the pain with things is from second arrows, is from reactivity. Does that make sense? Okay.
But I'm going to add something else, which is a little bit more involved. Already on the retreat, right from the beginning we've talked about -- the way of looking at something affects what the experience is. So, you know, when we did that exercise of "Can I just see this thing, whatever is going on, as perfect?", some people reported, "Oh, actually, a whole different experience unfolds when I regard it as perfect rather than when I'm judging it, or when I put things in a different context, or give them more space," etc.
When I allow phenomena, when there's an allowing of phenomena, as I said, what's happening is there's a quietening of aversion and grasping. That's just another way of saying what allowing is. It's quite interesting, and I'm aware of introducing something quite early -- it's something I'd usually only introduce on a much longer retreat, but I'm throwing it out now because it might be helpful: some people reported, "When I allow this thing," as we were saying, "the second arrow of reactivity, that level of suffering quietens." But something else might happen, which is the experience itself might melt. It might melt, and kind of blur, and fade, and grow indistinct. Several people were reporting that: "My feet disappeared. This thing melted," etc.
So here was this pain, whatever it was -- emotional, physical, whatever. One's looking at it. One allows. And the pain of the reactivity, that level, drains. Then, if I keep allowing and keep allowing, sometimes what happens is the experience itself dissolves right there. Okay? Does this make sense, what I'm saying? Yeah?
Yogi 5: What's the difference between allowing and repressing?
Rob: They're opposites. Oh, you mean how can you tell whether you're allowing or whether you're repressing? It's a sense of really letting something be there is allowing. And then no matter what happens, it's fine. I think in this practice, if you're really emphasizing practising allowing and something disappears, you don't have to guess that you've repressed it. You can be clear what you're doing. It's clear: I look inside, there's no repression going on. Repression is a very different attitude and feeling. So I can sometimes make something disappear through trying to repress it. Oftentimes, I try to repress it and it comes up even stronger, because the exact opposite of what I'm talking about is happening -- I have aversion to something and I feed it, like I said with the anger and fear. But this is allowing, and it disappears. A person might think, "Oh, I must be repressing it." But if you're really honest and look inside, that's not what's going on. A person might think, "Well, things are impermanent, and so they fade," which is true, but they fade for a reason. They fade because we're not feeding them through the aversion.
[38:13] So something very, very curious is going on. This is maybe not that easy to follow. But the experience itself is being constructed through my relationship with it. It's being fabricated through my relationship with it. Do you understand what I mean if I say that? The experience itself, if I see this over and over, the more I allow, the more things fade. It's a very curious thing to notice in practice. The more I allow, the more things dissolve and fade. This is going deeper into this practice now, apart from the second arrow dissolving a little bit. What that means, the insight there, is the experience itself is being constructed by the relationship. Do you remember what we were talking about, quantum mechanics, the other day? Something in the relationship is making the experience.
Without aversion and grasping, an emotion, or a sensation, or this perception of whatever it is, it can't constellate. It's as if the aversion and the grasping are making it something solid and distinct, making it into a thing. So we tend to intuitively believe, "I have this emotion first, and then later comes my relationship to it. It could be a relationship of allowing, or dislike, or judging, or whatever, but the thing, the emotion or whatever, that's there first. That's a given. And then later comes this relationship. And that's fine. It does what it does." But actually, the more we see this, something else is going on. It doesn't exist independently of my relationship with it.
A thing, an experience, a perception, doesn't exist independent of my relationship with it, independent of the way of looking at it, independent of the mind. Something very, very curious is going on here. And this is part, this is one way in, to the teachings of emptiness. When we say something is empty, it's empty of existing independently of my way of looking at it. My way of looking at something is partly what constellates something -- in fact, it is what constellates something.
So it's quite a different way of understanding. I'm just introducing that, and as I said, I'm aware of very much introducing something way earlier than I would usually. But it's partly an experiment. And today, in the practice, if you want to, you can move into this gear. What we're really doing is emphasizing allowing. All the emphasis in the practice is on allowing when you're doing what we've just introduced. Not so much about the precision, and the noticing, and the clarity of awareness. Allowing, allowing, 150 per cent on allowing. Just doing that, coming closer to something, doing that over and over. Maybe something gets a little softer, and then just keep allowing, and keep allowing. See what happens with this experience, and then maybe another experience, or you stay with one experience.
So it's just another possibility that you might find helpful. So there are two levels of this, if we go back to the arrow analogy. One level is just that the suffering that's bound up in the reactivity to what's going on, that eases. That's the second arrow that Chris was talking about. That much eases when we allow, because we're relaxing the reactivity. That much is great, absolutely great. And to see that over and over again is really crucial, really crucial.
And I'm saying (because some people already noticed it) there's another level which is even more mysterious, about the nature of perception itself, and the nature of emotion itself, and all this. So there are possibilities to explore here and discover. Does that make enough sense to play with at least?
Yogi 6: [inaudible]
Rob: Yeah, very good. So [yogi 6] is asking if you focus on an experience -- let's say it's difficult, but it could be also lovely, or neither here nor there, so whatever it is -- focus on it, and you allow it, allow it, and it fades. The question is, should you then keep focusing on that thing as it's fading, or go to some other thing? Both, either. It's very interesting what happens if you stay with something that's become a little bit less intense, more blurred, less in your face and problematic, and stay with allowing that, see where that goes. So that's one possibility, really interesting to do. Or, yeah, this fades a little bit, and then something else comes and becomes prominent. You can do that. So both are good.
Yogi 7: I know the answer; I just want to be really sure. It's a tempting prospect that by allowing, the first arrow will go away ...
Rob: [laughs] Yeah.
Yogi 7: But my intention should not be on that.
Rob: Yeah. Exactly. Very good. And you know the answer, yeah. And it a little bit relates to what Catherine was saying. So once you begin to see this, you go, [rubs hands together] "Aha! Now I've got a trick!" [laughter] So you have to be very careful. I think what's being shown here is so counterintuitive and kind of radical that it's like, can I let my curiosity be the intention in my relationship with what's going on, rather than this sneaking "if I allow it, it will go away," which is basically aversion dressed up in a spiritual guise? So yeah, it will creep in; no question about it. You just have to be vigilant, and let that go, and see -- can I really come back to this, what I would call 'authentic allowing'? Oftentimes, with the words 'letting go' and 'letting be,' 'letting be' is sometimes more helpful, because it means letting it be, and if it wants to stay exactly as it is, fine. If it wants to get stronger, also fine, because I'm letting it be. I'm allowing it. And if it wants to fade, fine. So we have to be really sure that we're letting it be completely, however it appears. That's the secret. And yeah, it will drift from that, for sure. But that's okay. You bring it back.
Yogi 8: I was about to say, the word 'allow' ... it doesn't quite give the meaning to the experience that something like 'welcoming' or even 'embracing' ...
Rob: Very good. So that's actually quite important. What I've noticed is words actually do have quite a big effect. 'Allowing' obviously is not working for you, so 'welcoming,' 'softening,' 'inviting,' 'embracing' -- great. 'Opening.' Loads of things -- 'letting be.' Just throwing out lots of words, and there are probably more, but just find, as always with practice, find what works with you. You can sense when something is just giving you that sense of, "Ah, yes, it's working now." Then that's your ticket, different from someone else. Totally, totally fine.
Yogi 9: When you have that, "If I accept this, it'll go away," might one then allow that feeling, that you want it to go away?
Rob: Yeah. Very good, yeah. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. You actually find, if you get into this particular practice, that there are all kinds of things that you would never even have thought that you could even have a relationship of allowing with. So something like allowing the desire for something to go away, allowing aversion, allowing resistance, allowing allowing. [laughter] It's quite interesting. It gets subtle. But you have to go play with it and see what works for you. And as always, some people will find, "This isn't very interesting or helpful for me." You have choices.
Yogi 10:** [inaudible] ... instead of allowing, holding it?
Rob: Yeah. I mean, the thing about holding is also -- it can work; sometimes it might mean holding something in place, but if it works for you, yeah. We started with that, as well. Play with it and see.
Yogi 11: This is probably leading back to the doer -- maybe you can remove that, as well? This thing about 'doing,' maybe that could dissolve in time, as well? [inaudible]
Rob: You're talking about in the practice we just did? Yes, yes. That's a really important point. Short of being here all day, I'm not sure, because there's another whole angle to go in at this, which is the doer and the self that's in relationship with things. So it's the self that doesn't want to allow things; it's always reacting. Letting that die down, there's automatic allowing, you know? So less self, things are allowed, because there's no one for it to be a problem to. So that's a whole other way in. Yeah, thank you.
So I was also going to throw out today -- because really the weather looks very uncertain what it's going to be doing: there's blue sky, and there it looks like it's going to rain again -- go for a walk, especially if it's raining today. There's something quite key about this. Rain, grey sky, etc. -- aversion: "I don't want. I don't want to get cold." It's hard to be aversive to something like that, purely physical, without that actually closing the heart. We think we can get away with this in life, that I'll just be a little bit pushing away of discomfort, but it actually has an effect on the heart, interestingly. To go out, and go kind of through that aversion a little bit, it has an effect to actually open the heart, keep it open, if I'm not reacting to this unpleasantness that might be there. The heart is influenced by all kinds of things that we might not actually realize are significant.
So we've got a walking period now. Do we need a group now? Okay, I'm going to be in the lounge. The groups are at the same time, and there are interviews and stuff, as well. Otherwise, sitting and walking through the day. You've got a lot of stuff to play with now. Don't get overwhelmed. Find what works for you, and give it a shot, and work with it. See what opens. Okay?
