Transcription
I will try and repeat the question so that anyone who is listening can hear it better. And if you'd rather your question isn't recorded, then just let us know and we'll press pause. Anyone, please? Yeah? Is that Tom? Yeah.
Q1: energy body contracted with images
Yogi: [inaudible] My question is just often it's contracted, especially with images and things. Is there anything that you might recommend?
Rob: Often it's contracted, and especially the images are -- what, contracted? Or what?
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Ah. Yeah, yeah, sure. So Tom's saying, if I understand, that there are times working with the energy body when it's relatively spacious, and very nice, comfortable, pleasant, and really yummy, yeah? And there are other times, especially when an image comes, that the attention contracts towards or around the image, and with that the energy body contracts as well. Yeah.
This is partly why Catherine was doing the twoness exercise and what we did on the first day. It's like, can I have that and this, you know? We need to develop that, that ability to have both. A lot of this stuff is supported by not just one thing, many different things. One of them is just the more you hang out in that energy body space, and the more you take that with you -- if you split life into formal meditation and the rest of life, that's a mistake, for a start. In the sitting or the walking or the standing is maybe where you get your first tastes of this nice energy body thing. When you end the meditation, take that with you. In other words, end it slowly, and see if you can get up off the cushion or wherever it is and walk away with that energy body feeling. Standing in the lunch queue, can I just get it back? Walking meditation in the energy body is really helpful, obviously because it's mobile, and that's more like life. So the more you can kind of get a taste, what the energy body becomes is just it becomes eventually the default hangout, this kind of "this is nice," you know? And we want to be here, and it feels good. There are little micro-adjustments and things. The more you do it, and the more you spread that doing into different activities, that will help. That's one thing.
And then you can begin doing more of the thing Catherine introduced, I think it was on the first day or the second day, this doing it in relationship. Now, it's hard with a human other. Most people find it hard with a human other. A human other is a whole other world, and they're looking at you, and maybe they're judging you, and maybe who-knows-what. It's probably easier with something like a tree. Does this make sense? You practise extending it like that. And then also with images. It might work the other way round, though, in the sense that when an image becomes alive as an image -- in other words, not just a mental picture, and not just a fixation; when it kind of comes alive in that imaginal way -- then you might find that your energy body is quite expanded. It's not just the fact of an object and the mind doing that; it's actually the nature of the object and the relationship with it. Does that make sense? So I would wonder whether it's not quite a uniform experience that you're having. There are differences. When there's a different relationship with the image, there will also be that. So look out for that as well. How does this sound?
Yogi: It makes a lot of sense. [inaudible]
Rob: Yeah, and it's not that you need to try and do something with the energy body with the image. First of all, it might not be really a soul-image. It might just be a, you know, whatever. That's fine, okay. Or it might be as you hang out more with a certain image, it kind of becomes more infused with the imaginal, and that changes the energy body relationship. I think it was yesterday in the group we were saying everything that's involved in the imaginal or in a soulmaking dynamic kind of feeds everything else. It's connected with everything else. So where you see the problem -- like I feel like my energy body is contracted -- is not always the place where you need to go and try to fix it. You can kind of give attention to other aspects of the whole constellation, and that will just naturally fix itself. So there are a lot of different ways you can work with that. Does that sound okay? Yeah? Okay, good.
Yeah, Ramiro.
Q2: ways eros gets blocked
Yogi: Today the practice was to open to the current of desire. I would like to know your thoughts whether lack of desire, whether it's depression or some lack of vitality, if you think there is the lack of an image that can ignite eros, that can draw eros like a flame that is not fuelled, or if it is rather the case that eros is always alive but part of it [inaudible] led by an idea or an image has turned against itself and is counteracting a part of this current of desire. [inaudible] Blocking somehow. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, and how to work with that lack of desire.
Rob: The lack of desire? Okay. [says something to Catherine]
Catherine: I was just going to agree with Ramiro about if you look at it in terms of life force. Certainly if our life force [inaudible] with the inner critic for example, that's a lot of life force in there. It's not necessarily eros, but it's a lot of life force to hold us down. I was just agreeing with that point.
Rob: So let me see if I can summarize, if I understood. I'm a little tired today. So what happens when there's a kind of depression, really? Is it that there's a lack of desire, or is it that somehow the desire has got kind of stuck or worked back on itself in a way that's stifling and closing down something, or something like what Catherine just said? Yeah. I don't know. I'm interested. To me, it's a really interesting question. I certainly think -- and just relating to what Catherine said -- let's take something like the inner critic: imagination is involved in the inner critic. It's got this voice or this character or whatever. What the inner critic is not is imaginal, generally speaking. So what's happened there is something's got reified. Actually, more than one thing has got reified. The inner critic has got reified, and I've got reified.
So if we go back to this self/other/world business, both self and other are reified. They're concretized. I really believe what the inner critic is saying about me. Even if I don't believe the inner critic is a real person or thing or character, I believe what they say. That kind of object is saying something real about a real subject, me. So the problem is in the reification. There's a lot to your question. But what happens when there's a reification is it's like the push of the eros -- this eros wants to push, it wants to expand, it wants to penetrate, it wants to open. It wants more, this pothos with the eros. It has this dynamic quality. When it meets some kind of block -- and there can be all kinds of blocks, but one kind of block is reification, concretization -- that push meets the block, something's going to happen. Either the push of the eros, the life force, is strong enough to break the block, and then it can go through that reification block into the realm of the imaginal, and the imaginal has the capacity to expand deeper, get richer, feed back on the eros, make the whole thing really fertile.
If the block is stronger than the eros, or just really entrenched, then something can happen that the eros cannot move into depth, cannot move into dimensionality, into the imaginal. It has to do something. It could get tied up in a negativity. Could just have to go horizontally. All kinds of things. So there's that possibility, and I guess it could happen in many ways. There might also be, and you also mentioned, what can happen is -- I'm certainly not an expert on depression, but I wonder whether depression is actually, like so many things, many different kinds, and one kind of depression is actually the absence of fantasy, the absence of any kind of image, specifically around the self or around one's activity in life or expression. It's not alive as an image. It's not permitted, or hasn't found its way. And then there's nothing for the waters of eros or the fire of eros to flow into and galvanize and give life to, which then feeds back into the whole libidinal energy and the whole life. So yeah, sometimes I think depression is an absence of image. Or it's an image that's a fixation, to borrow Catherine's word from this morning, and there's a stuckness. Does that make sense?
So there are all kinds of possibilities. To me, it's just really interesting. If we go back to basic principles, and say, let's just make a postulate: left to itself, not interfered with, the soul loves soulmaking, and that's what it will do, and it will involve the whole being in that process, this whole eros-psyche-logos, every facet of my being, every dimension, even facets of my being that haven't even occurred to me yet. They're to be born, to be created, to be discovered. And yet, there are many ways we can block that. So it's interesting to me: how does it get blocked? Does it get blocked in terms of ideas, beliefs, assumptions? Does it get blocked because, similar to what Catherine was talking about with the passionate love, somehow that's not allowed, that current of desire? In other words, it's an energetic thing. Does it get blocked because we're repressing certain images, because we think they might mean that we're weird or whatever? Countless ways that the whole movement of soulmaking, from different directions, can be blocked. And when it's blocked, something will feel problematic in different ways, and then you have to see. It manifests like this or like that or whatever. Is this answering? Yeah? It's okay?
Q3: opening to suffering, and the place of compassion practice
Yogi: [inaudible] this morning in terms of opening awareness. I felt a great fear then that all the images, everything I've seen, everything I've read all my life about torture, cruelty, and suffering -- which I am incredibly good at repressing by numbing out -- that I would suddenly be completely at the mercy of all that. I don't know whether I've got the courage to go there.
Rob: Yeah. What were you actually doing? You were opening up the awareness very wide? Okay.
Yogi: It sort of seems to go with opening the energy body. If I am to be open to or receptive to energies rather than me choosing one, I have to be [inaudible].
Rob: Yeah. Hmm.
Yogi: Or does that not happen?
Rob: I don't think there's a danger of it, to be honest. So the question is: if I'm open, if I open the awareness and be really wide and receptive, is there a danger I'll be flooded by images, and particularly the painful images of the world?
Yogi: Yeah, it's not my personal ...
Rob: Yeah, the images of world pain that are there, horrific brutality and things like that, and are we not making ourselves more vulnerable to being flooded by that? Is there a danger?
Yogi: And if so, if that is part of it, is there a way -- it feels like a lot to manage.
Rob: Yeah. If that's part of it, how do you manage it, etc., without numbing? Yeah, sure. I don't think that kind of flooding is an issue. I think flooding happens when there's repression. In other words, going back to this pressure cooker image, the thing you're describing is opening the awareness really wide. That, almost by definition, is an easing of the pressure. There's more space, so less pressure. Jung had this period, I think it was around 1913 or something, and it was kind of like going into a psychosis. He wrote this Red Book, and it's all this really florid imagery. He viewed it like going into a psychosis. I wonder how much that was a product of the time, where the whole thing was 'the unconscious' and -- this is not quite what you're saying, but there was almost that fear of that. This was before the First World War, and heaven knows what was brewing in the kind of general repression that was around. We live in a different time now that I don't think there's that same kind of pressure of that flooding for most people.
If you're really open like that, actually the tendency would be a little bit of kind of liquidity so more images can come. If you really open, it will actually quieten the imagery. It goes more the direction of non-fabrication rather than flooding. It might be that dark images, painful images, torturous images arise, absolutely. I think the imaginal is kind of a certain set of ways of relating. So I can turn on the news and be flooded with really difficult imagery these days, you know? And that's a reality, let's say; I don't take it imaginally. I still have to navigate that in my heart, in my soul, and how am I going to work with this, and with my sensitivity, and the way I'm impacted, and the pain in the world, and try and respond to that, and take care of it, and balance my compassion. So all that's got to do with compassion practice. That's really, really important, yeah?
When we're talking about the imaginal realm, we're talking about, to some extent, a different kind of relationship with that imagery. Already people are starting to report -- and this is very common with imaginal practice -- an image that the mind at first goes like, "Oh, that's horrific. That's violent," or "That's dark," or "That's weird" or whatever. And in the realm of imaginal practice, it's like, just stay with that. Can I just have a little bit of trust in that image? It's not a flat, reified image of something that's going on in the world. It's imaginal. What looks dark and disturbing has got its own kind of beauty, and if I can stay with it and trust it, it opens up in a different way. It's almost like mixing camps a little bit in your question. Does that make sense? So what's the real pain in the world, and what's kind of more imaginal things that come up? They're different. Is this making sense?
Yogi: Yes. The imaginal feels different somehow. [inaudible] But I think maybe what you said about a different practice is needed -- if I'm numbing memories, history, then I don't think I can necessarily just switch that off and decide to do imaginal practice.
Rob: No, absolutely. So this, like I said at some point, what we're doing here is asking a lot. It's kind of saying, you know, to do this kind of practice that we're talking about requires that we have a skill with our emotions, which means knowing when we're numbing, taking care of it, learning how to soften the heart, open it, take care of it, balance it, be sensitive. It's a lot. Already that's a lot, in relationship to our personal history, in relationship to present relationships, in relationship to the world, pain. We're not talking that much about that on this retreat, partly because we're just kind of saying let's build on that as if it's already there, but we know this is difficult stuff. I'm not sure what I'll say about that piece right now. Yeah, we could talk about it another time, perhaps, if that's okay. But it's a really, really important question. Yeah.
Yeah, Mei-Wah?
Q4: staying with the energy of desire or leaning toward images; sexual energy, pīti, jhāna
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Spending time opening to that desire?
Yogi: [inaudible] It's just that it's different to what both of you described. It's not exactly the image. It's not exactly the desire. But it kind of created a realm of, like, happy.
Rob: Let me check with you. Mei-Wah's asking, picking up on Catherine's talk last night and the instructions this morning with opening to desire. And the desire was just to see people happy and flourish, yeah? And then what happened seemed to be neither just opening to the energy and having that manifest, nor something imaginal. It was more like an opening to a realm of happiness or realm of ...
Yogi: Not an individual image, but [?] that world.
Rob: Okay. So my question is: why is that not imaginal? It's an imaginal realm, an imaginal world of that. Yeah?
Yogi: I suppose I was just checking in about the practice instructions, and do I just hang out and enjoy that world.
Rob: Yeah! [laughter] So yes, absolutely. There are a couple of things there. It's an imaginal realm, an imaginal world. Yes, linger there, enjoy it. When an image opens up, it's asking us for sensitivity. It's asking us to resonate with it. It's asking us to be with it, and in it, and relate to it. It might be that then it unfolds some other -- it might be that it feeds back on this world and the way you see this world, so to speak. That would be one of the ways that it could kind of infuse or mix with the perception of this world, and then that would be an interesting thing. But there are all kinds of possibilities. It sounds like that's what's opening there. Yeah? So in terms of the instructions, I think I said this morning: once you open to that, it could go into an image, which sounds like what you're describing, or it could just stay with the energy, free of image, and you just have that. They're fine. I don't want to overstate this, but it's like, all practice -- we could be talking about emptiness practice; we could be talking about samādhi practice; we could be talking about imaginal practice, or working with desire -- it's like, every not-very-long, the road forks. You can kind of just, you learn, "I'm going to go that way or that way," or it just happens one way.
So, for example, and someone wrote a note today, yeah, "Here I'm daydreaming." It was actually a sexual fantasy. "And then what I find is I'm staying with this sexual fantasy, and then somehow I'm in a jhāna." [laughter] This is not at all uncommon, actually. I'm serious! There are a lot of reasons for that. Actually, let's just dwell on this a little bit. Some has to do with the energy. Sexual energy is potentially quite similar to pīti. You know this word, pīti? Rapture. What happens with most sexual fantasies is we fixate, to borrow Catherine's word again, we fixate on the image, and we're not that connected with the body -- maybe a certain area in the body, but we're not opening to the energy body and letting the sexual energy spread. If I do that -- okay, here's a daydream, there's a sexual fantasy, okay, fine, and I let the energy spread, the enjoyment of the sexual energy, and then I just open to that, open to that sexual energy, it will move towards a nice energy body and samādhi. So that's one possibility.
When you're working with images, any time an image comes alive imaginally, that will be reflected, manifest, echoed in the energy body, and some kind of harmonization or opening or something that feels good. That's your indicator, it's one of the indicators, that you're on the right track with an image. Even if your mind is going, "This is so weird," or "This is really dark," or "This is kind of violent," or this or that, the energy body is a good indicator that you're on the right track. So that's happening with any image, whether it's sexual or not sexual. At any time, you can peel off, if you want, into just resting with the energy body, and letting the image go if you want. Or you can play with the image with the energy body, and have the two of them together. Do you understand? But the general principle is more like these forks keep happening in practice. You learn to look out for these different things, and then you can just learn to navigate a little bit. Is this making sense? [silence] This side is nodding, and that side is just looking at me. [laughter] Okay, good. Yeah.
As we go deeper, for me, a lot of it's about the sensitivity and the responsiveness and the delicacy of navigating, like hang-gliding (which I've never done) or something like that. I imagine. [laughter] Maybe you're just pulled by the wind. I'm not sure. But in my imagination, you know, you can kind of ride these currents very delicately, and you pick up on what's there. Sometimes it's extremely subtle. You pick up on this possibility, and then you can just incline that way. Sometimes it more feels like the soul has its own intelligence, and it's pouring you or offering the unfolding in a certain way.
Dave, yeah?
Q5: opening to desire, working with physical pain and perfectionism
Yogi: It's about the following desire thing, finding the stream of desire. I find there's quite a range just now -- sometimes it's quite strong, and sometimes it's very, very subtle. But sometimes as well, it feels like something small. When I go on retreat, I usually get pain in my back, and I work with that for the first few days. I have this pain [inaudible] things that I'm trying to [inaudible], "What is it that I want? What is this pointing to? What does it want?" It feels like there are lots of different levels that I can answer that. One of them was like a sort of perfectionist thing, like I just have this very strong desire for -- well, pretty much everything to be perfect sometimes. I feel that very strong, and then there are kind of levels of opening to it. That's very intense, and quite enjoyable at times as well. There's a lot of energy in that. But then it's like ... it's still there. [laughter] The aversion that's supporting it is really still maintained.
Rob: What's the actual question? "How do I get rid of it?" [laughter]
Yogi: I guess that it's like I can switch to different practices if that's not good.
Rob: Yeah, yeah.
Yogi: Or is there something deeper that's pointing to?
Rob: When you say that it's pointing to, do you mean the desire or the pain itself?
Yogi: If I play with the idea that the pain or the difficulty is pointing to something that I really want, is it just that I haven't -- maybe there's a different answer to that [inaudible].
Rob: Right. So Dave is asking, oftentimes when he comes on retreat there's pain in the shoulders or neck or back, and so he picked up the instructions of asking what the deeper wanting is here, and what came was a whole series of answers that seemed to be at different levels, one of which, or the deepest, was a perfection?
Yogi: It feels like it could keep going.
Rob: You could keep going? Yeah. One of the answers was to do with perfectionism, so you followed that, and it became quite intense. What became intense -- the desire?
Yogi: Yeah, and the opening. I could feel this opening.
Rob: Okay, so there was a lot of opening, but then the pain came back, and ... yeah. [laughter] Okay, so, I don't know the answer. I would be interested in a couple of things. The most common or obvious answer would be: if there's pain, what do I want? Well, I want ease or well-being or something like that. Was that one of the answers there?
Yogi: Yeah, and then I kind of disregarded it, because it's like, "Of course ..."
Rob: Yeah, okay. But we can say ease -- the meaning of the word 'ease' or 'well-being' is the absence of this pain in my shoulder, or it has a more general term. If you say 'ease,' 'well-being,' there's something quite general there, right? What does it mean? They're big words, ease and well-being. Do you see what I mean? So maybe you disregarded that too quickly. There could be something at that level that's really worth going into. Maybe also the perfectionism thing, because, again, we tend to think, "Oh, perfection. You shouldn't be perfectionistic." I don't mind saying that I'm a perfectionist. [laughs] But, you know, so many of these things, it's like they have a shadow side and a beautiful side. There's something, to me, definitely problematic or difficult about being a perfectionist. There's something really beautiful in it. It doesn't get a lot of esteem, especially in certain worlds where people talk about acceptance a lot, and it's like the opposite. So maybe there's something beautiful in perfectionism. It may be that perfectionism constellates as an image. What's the image? There's something beautiful in that image, and you could follow that. But you could try the well-being.
I'll say one more thing. You'll have to see how this lands with you, but to me, there's something more interesting about the whole principle here of what's happening in this desire practice that we introduced this morning, that's more worth it than the absence of this shoulder pain. Do you understand? Now you're dealing with that, but there's a principle here that's like, "Wow, what's going on? And how is this working? And what does it imply for my understanding and my relationship with life?" So it might be that getting as interested in that, rather than just trying to get rid of this, understandable as that is, and it can be difficult, it might be also kind of fruitful. Does that make sense. And last thing is, everything is a dependent arising. Everything is dependent on conditions. Maybe what you did worked, so to speak, from the point of view of dissolving this, but then there are other conditions feeding back in which just constellate it again, which is that I'm sitting a lot in a certain posture without moving, and I don't usually do that every day. So those conditions are just feeding in to re-constellate it, yeah? There are many things, but does that give you a little bit to ...? Yeah? Okay.
Q6: eros dying down after opening to the current of desire
Yogi: More about following the current of desire practice. I'm doing it, and it's kind of working as you describe, but after the kind of basking in the sense of already having what I desire, then it kind of dies down and dissipates, and it's nice, but there's not a lot of eros coming; it's not feeding that dynamic.
Rob: Yeah, thank you. If I understand Sampo's question, again, playing with the practice that we introduced this morning, opening to the current of desire, and it (quote) 'works,' which is a terrible ...[laughter] But there's an opening. There's the shift of consciousness and felt sense and well-being, and then that's nice, and you kind of bask in that for a while, and then it dies down. Then there doesn't seem to be much eros. Yeah? Okay.
I would more prefer to connect the word 'eros' with the imaginal, okay? So it's like, it comes and goes. It's not that it's sort of there all the time or whatever. Where an image re-constellates, then the eros will come back in relation with the image. It's not something to worry about, or some state that we're trying to sustain, or something like that, yeah? So what you've done in the opening to the current of desire practice is, if you've done it the sort of classical way, then you've let go of images. If you like, there's, you could say, this fullness of libidinal energy, which kind of transforms into something that's not eros and not imaginal. Then you're in that state, and it's totally understandable and not a problem. Does that make sense? How does that land?
Yogi: Yeah. I'm wondering how to feed the eros.
Rob: Eros is connected with image and fantasy, or there's craving and then I can transform that into eros, yeah? So you don't have to worry about, like, all the time there needs to be this eros or whatever.
Yogi: Well, I'm not worried about it not being there all the time, but a little more would be ... [laughter]
Rob: Okay, well, knowing you as much as I do, I don't think you have a problem [laughter] with the eros thing. You know, and like everything, there are waves, and certain conditions feed it. I'd say two things. Again, if you get back into the imaginal -- so it's a matter of loosening again, perhaps loosening with the energy body or some emptiness practice or something, liquefying the psyche, if you like, and images will be reborn. Or some problem comes or whatever, yeah? So that will re-constellate the whole imaginal thing and, with that, eros. But also we can look for eros. Eros is present where we love, where something is meaningful to us. I don't have to look always for an intrapsychic image. You could look around you on this retreat, and the meaningfulness it has to you, or the appreciation or whatever, or the love or the dedication, and there will be eros connected with all that, here, in the environment, in the world. Do you understand? So then you can pick up on that. Third thing, and I think I said this already, is eros can be extremely subtle. It might be that rather than say, "I want more eros," and then we worry that it's something I don't have or whatever, it might be that it's asking for a little more sensitivity in noticing the much more subtle manifestations of eros. So eros can be raging, you know, or really, really subtle, and it might be that that's quite an interesting exploration. Does that ...? Yeah?
To me -- I don't know that there's an order -- a lot of practice is about opening, you know, and being able to handle more than we thought we could. Whether we talk about Linda's question [Q3], just in terms of the world and compassion and that kind of sensitivity, or our own emotions or energies or whatever, a lot of practice is doing that work. It's kind of expanding our capacity and our skills and our ability to handle a lot, for a lot to move through us, and to touch us deeply in a way that's really okay, you know? But there's also like a whole evolution, or part of the evolution of practice is things getting a lot more subtle, less fireworks. It might be that's asking for more sensitivity and more kind of picking up on the subtleties. We often learn a lot there, rather than the more 'wow' experiences. So it might be that that's part of it as well. Yeah? Good.
Okay. Thank you. Let's have a bit of quiet.
