The development of skilful means in relationship with our psychological and emotional lives can offer self and story a meaningful place on the path while supporting practices in other arenas, including emptiness. With wisdom and sensitivity, we can work with views of the self at times and of no-self at other times, bringing balance to the journey of meditation.
Vital to Rob’s teachings in this arena are learning to differentiate and care for difficult emotions, using inquiry and questioning assumptions, and cultivating helpful qualities of heart like mettā and generosity. Also of particular significance is learning to work with the inner critic – a harsh, self-judging pattern that may arise in relation to practice and more pervasively in daily life. Rob held that the inner critic can be not only liberated, but ended, and offered detailed teachings to facilitate this.
Equipped with a wide range of ways of looking at, and skilfully working with both challenging and lovely emotions, important subtleties and personal insights are revealed. Opening to self and story, kinds of healing and freedom are discovered that might have remained untouched through basic mindfulness and ‘being with’ sensations. And recognizing that what unfolds in experience is, to a great extent, dependent on the relationship with questioning, wide-ranging investigations are encouraged into self, world, conceptual frameworks, and the Dharma itself.
