November 15, 2014 Stone House, NC retreat; Aaron on right effort and practicing with difficult mind and body states.

November 15, 2014 Saturday Night, Stone House, NC Retreat

This is a very clear and beautiful Dharma talk from Aaron on right effort and working with the heavy emotions or 'hindrances.'

Aaron: Good evening. My blessings and love to you all. I am Aaron. Barbara said she hoped you had a good day. And yet we also know, as mentioned in the small groups, there was a lot of drowsiness. Doubt came up, anger came up, and other heavy emotions. People were not exactly comfortable. Barbara's blessed mother used to ask her, after each retreat that she led, "Did people have a good time, dear?" Barbara did not try to educate her about the true nature of these retreats, that they were hard work! Her mother had no foundation to understand that. For her mother, Barbara was off to take people on a delightful journey into the rural countryside, relaxing and experiencing blissful and loving states of mind and heart. Is that what you expected when you signed up for a retreat? It's not what you get. Yet attending a retreat, sitting through a retreat, is such a loving and courageous act.

People ask me, "Why am I experiencing all these hindrances, Aaron?" Hindrances is the classical Buddhist term for these challenging states. I don't really like the label "hindrance." I won't go against 2,500 years of Buddhist tradition, but I don't see them as hindrances. Challenges, yes, but also stimulation to inner growth. If you didn't experience any of these, if you just drifted through two days of bliss, you wouldn't learn anything. You would have had a nice vacation, but it would be very hard to re-enter the real world. And you wouldn't learn anything. The hard things that surface are your teachers.

Your practice is about relationship. When the conditions are present, objects will arise. They arise as the result of conditions. We don't try to fix the result, but we attend to the result to make sure that its outflow does no harm. So if strong anger comes up, you attend to the experience of anger in the mind and body so you don't lash out at people or start throwing rocks at them. We're responsible to what has arisen. But we remember it's a result. "Ah, certain conditions are present out of which anger has arisen. I will take care of my anger. And I will "–two parts to this. "I will find the heart's capacity to hold space for even these strong bursts of emotion. And I will develop the wisdom to know it has arisen from conditions, it is impermanent, and it is not of the nature of a separate self."

What do I mean by that? This chair is not made of wood, so it's not going to cooperate perfectly with me, but we'll pretend it's wood. Is the seat the chair? Without the seat, would it be a chair? Are the legs the chair? If it had a seat and back and no legs, would it be a chair? Is the back the chair? Legs and seat but no back, is it a chair? A stool, maybe, but not a chair. You have a specific idea of what a chair is: it has legs, a seat, and a back.

So we say that this chair is composed of non-chair elements. There are legs. There is a seat, there's a back. Now, if this chair were wood, we would notice that the chair is also made of a tree. Can you see the tree? You've got to imagine this is a wooden chair. Can you see the tree in the chair? If the tree is in the chair, the earth in which the tree grew, the rain, the seas that evaporated to provide the rain, the clouds, the wind that blew the clouds, the sunshine, they all are an essential part of the chair. Lacking any of these ingredients, the chair cannot exist. So the chair is comprised of non-chair elements.

The logger who cut down the tree is in the chair. The cow his mother milked each morning to nourish him so he would grow up strong to be a logger, she's in the chair. The grass the cow ate; the carpenter who cut the boards from the tree and shaped the chair; the person who trained the carpenter. It's all part of the chair. There's nothing you can point to and say, "This is the chair." This is the result of innumerable conditions giving rise to a concept we call chair. And if it's built correctly, we can sit on it. But it's made of non-chair elements.

What is the self? Are you your bodies? The body is part of what you are. You're comprised of non-self elements such as the physical body. The physical body is comprised of many elements: the genetic structure inherited from the parents; the food that you eat; the health of the physical body.

The mind is part of the self. Are you your minds? Are your thoughts the same today that they were yesterday? Everything changes. Is the body the same today as it was last week? Ten years ago, twenty years ago? It's changing on a moment-by-moment basis, just as is the chair. Everything is impermanent. Here is this chair; a beaver comes in and begins to gnaw on the legs of the chair. Pretty soon when you sit on it, the leg snaps. The beaver is part of the chair. The ability to collapse is part of the chair.

In buddhadharma we talk about the aggregates, or the Pali word, skandhas: the aggregate of form, the body; the aggregate of thought, the mental aggregate, constantly changing and dependent on conditions; the aggregate of feelings:  pleasant feelings, unpleasant feelings; the aggregate of perception, how you perceive things. The object you're looking at can look totally different from one day to another. You look at your beloved child sleeping. "Oh, what a dear. Oh, I love this child more than life itself." And then at 3am the child wakes you up screaming and cries the rest of the night. Has your perception of the child changed a little? You still love the child, but they're not quite the angel you saw them as at 7pm.

Form, the body aggregate; the mental aggregate; the feeling aggregate; the perception aggregate; and consciousness. These are all what we consider the various parts of the self. There's nothing you can point to and say, "This is the self." It's constantly in flux.

We expect with the body that there will be physical sensations, sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant. If you walk across the room here, barefoot with your shoes left by the door, and there is a thumbtack on the floor, you may step on it. There would be a bit of pain, a drop of blood. Is there anybody here who would say, "I shouldn't feel pain."? You stepped on a tack--of course the result is a bit of pain. "There shouldn't be blood." Well, you're human, of course there's going to be blood if a tack punctures your foot. You open your heart to that experience. You might say, "I don't like the pain. I don't want the tack in my foot." But this is the way it is right now. There's a tack in my foot. It somehow found its way onto the floor. I stepped on it. Now I'm experiencing the results of those conditions. So I sit down and very kindly hold the foot and remove the tack, and wash it off. It's only a little puncture. It will heal. You don't rush off to the ER with it. You don't rant and rave and run around the room screaming, "Who left the tack on the floor?!" Somehow it fell from somewhere and there it was, under-foot; the result of conditions.

Let's go on to the mental body. Within the mental body I'm including emotions although they are not exactly the same but inter-realted. No need for the detail here. You walk across the room. For some reason the person on the far side of the room looks up and scowls at you, a very angry expression. Immediately the thought comes up, "What did I do wrong?" Now maybe this person is scowling because he just had a gas pain, or while sitting he had a very unpleasant memory. Why do you leap to the idea, "It has something to do with me."? It simply has arisen from conditions. As long as the conditions are still present, it will arise. If you have not attended to the conditions, then every time you walk across the room and somebody scowls, you're going to leap to the same conclusion, "Something's wrong with me."

Some of you grew up in homes where there was a lot of scolding, or simply a lack of loving attention. People scowled at you, saying, "Clumsy" or whatever, and you grew to believe in those myths. Now they've become ironclad in you. When somebody scowls, there's the immediate reaction, "I did something wrong." We have our chair. The beavers have been chewing the legs. You sit in the chair and the legs break. Instead of saying, "Oh, the beavers have gnawed through the chair legs," you say, "Oh, I broke the chair! See how bad I am! I can't do anything right! I sit down on a chair and I break it!" But the beavers have been busy. It's all the result of conditions.

Some of you were raised in very loving homes, nurtured with love, felt deeply heard and seen, but even there it's not always easy, because when your parents see you as so radiant and perfect, that's a lot to live up to. If you have an angry thought, then,  "Oh, I'm supposed to be the perfect one. How can I have an angry thought?" And so you shut yourself off. These are simply the various conditions with which you have grown up.

A number of people who attend retreats report having had deep experiences of unworthiness. I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but I'm guessing if I did, there's no one in this room who would not put up their hand if I asked, "Is there anybody here who sometimes feels unworthiness?" It is a common human feeling.

For some of you as children, if you were treated poorly or just not heard or seen by the adults in your life, there's a deep drive to be loved, for the human. The adult says, "Look at you. You're clumsy. You're always in the way." Part of you wants to say, "I am not. All I'm doing is sitting here reading a book," or whatever. But to confront the parent puts you further outside that possibility of love so you begin to agree. "You're right, I'm clumsy. I'm no good. I'm unworthy." You build it into your belief system, because at some level that agreement is the way that the child tried to be loved, by agreeing with the parent and saying, "Okay, if that's who you need me to be, that's who I'll be." Unfortunately it doesn't work. The child just grows up feeling unworthy, and the adult continues with their anger, dumping it on the child.

How could anybody ever truly be unworthy? There's no such thing as unworthiness. You may not be as bright as somebody else. You may not be as agile and able to climb up a tree fast. You may not be as dexterous with your hands. But unworthy? It's just a meaningless word. But you've come to believe in it.

Then you come to a retreat, or you come into meditation, and you say, "I want to overcome my unworthiness." You phrase it in that way. I've heard it said this way so many times. "I want to overcome my unworthiness." Not, "I want to move past the beliefs that I am unworthy," but "I want to overcome my unworthiness." Nobody was every unworthy to start with. The idea of unworthy is one of the results of many conditions. It's a result. We attend to the result so it does no harm. That is, we begin to explore the idea, "I am unworthy," because that belief is harming you.. But you don't have to fix unworthiness by becoming worthy. You were never unworthy in the first place.

So you open your heart to this human who is feeling unworthy in this moment, and you begin to investigate, what are the conditions out of which this arose? We see the learned skills and the myths. Just as we see all the elements that make up the chair we can begin to see inside the self; Oh, my mother always said, "Clumsy' any time I dropped something, instead of, "Oh, your milk spilled. Let's clean it up."  I heard, "You're clumsy," and I ingested that into my self-image.

Was there ever anybody who was clumsy? Now, to be fair, once you've decided, "Okay, I'm going to be clumsy," you're not really thinking this intellectually, but there's an agreement, "I'll be clumsy in order to please the parent, so she can keep calling me clumsy." Then you start to spill things more frequently. You're getting attention out of it. "Clumsy" is better than being ignored completely. So you start to recreate, deepen the self image, and enact it. But nobody was ever clumsy. Nobody was ever unworthy. Nobody was ever stupid. They're just myths that you have learned to believe in.

So we have the aggregate of the physical body, the aggregate of the mental and emotional body, mind aggregate. We have the feelings of feelings;  unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral. We have perception, including the erroneous perception, "I'm the clumsy one. I'm the unworthy one." Then you walk into the room and see the chair falling down on the floor, you immediately think, "Oh, did I break that? I wasn't even aware of it! I must have done that. Nobody else here would have broken the chair, it must have been me." So we jump into erroneous perceptions about ourselves. Nobody will love me. I'm not good enough.

The last aggregate is the aggregate of consciousness itself, the multiple levels of consciousness. The base levels of seeing, feeling, touching, tasting, hearing, and mind consciousness. Consciousness is a huge subject. We could spend all week on it, not just one night. So I'm only touching on this lightly and coming back to some of the others.

For those of you who are here at a retreat like this, you are what I call old souls. That is, you care about how you relate to the world and about learning to relate in a loving way. It has nothing to do with your chronological age, whether you're 25 or 75. It has to do with the deeper maturation of the spirit body, that some essence of you has been around enough times that there's a deep intention to do no harm to others or the self, to live your life in kindness.

Younger souls, they want to get there and if people are sitting on the floor, they just walk over them. They don't think much about it. "Everybody does it," that's the excuse. But the older soul, let's use the example, "the building's on fire." Everybody is trying to get out. In this room, I think all of you would work with your panic and fear and just move patiently. But you can imagine the situation if we had a broader spectrum of people. When the word "Fire!" was said, people would push and walk over other people to get out. So you as old souls, you're different than that. You're deeply committed to do no harm.

But because of this commitment, there's a strong contraction in the self, a feeling of wrongness when negative thoughts arise. So if anger, impatience, judgment and other such negative thoughts arise, there's a feeling, "I don't want this thought. I should not have this thought." This is what makes a retreat so hard, because at retreat you're opening some doors and letting in what's lurking below the surface, which are myriad judgments, fears, opinions, beliefs, and stories. And then the idea, "I should be past this. I've been meditating for 11 years. I shouldn't have anger anymore." Are you human? If the foot bleeds when you step on a tack, you are human,. That means the conditions probably are not yet purified out of which anger arises. It's just the outflow of conditions. You are not bad to have an angry thought. You are conditioned.

We talked in a small group in a class in which many of the people were parents. People were trying hard to be good parents, and we were talking in class about parenting and dealing with difficult things with our children. A couple came in late to the class. The man told the class the 2 or 3 year old, not a baby, wouldn't stop screaming, wouldn't let them leave him with the babysitter. "I just felt like chucking him out the window!" he admitted with some shame.  There was such a laugh of relief from the class, because there was not a parent there in the class who had not at some time thought, "I just want to toss the kid out the window." Now, these were not abusive parents, these were deeply loving parents. They would never toss a child out the window. They would never hit or harm a child. But the thought arose, "I can't stand this! I just want to toss the kid out the window!" The man's saying gave everybody permission to feel it, and to acknowledge, "Yeah, I felt that way too." A wonderful and honest discussion followed.

Well, is there anyone in this room who has not felt anger? No one? Is there anyone in this room who has not today had a judgmental thought? No one? Okay, we're normalizing this. When the conditions are present, judgment will arise, anger will arise, greed will arise, impatience will arise, grasping will arise. Don't make a problem out of it. It arose because the conditions are present. You don't need to be self-identified with it, just to watch the outflow and make sure you don't do harm with it.

And also please know, the conditions have not yet been purified, so this arises. And then, in your practice, you have the opportunity–I don't want to make this sound too intellectual, but if the judging mind has been very busy all day, you may gently ask the question, "If I were not judging, what might I be experiencing?" It won't be the same for everybody. For one person, you might be experiencing the parent's judgment of you and the anger about it. For another person, you might be experiencing a lack of safety, needing to feel better than others because you feel so bad about yourself at the moment. So judgment arises.

We start to see, "Ah, the judgment arose out of these different conditions. It's impermanent, it's not self. I don't have to make it so personal. Therefore I don't have to be afraid of it. I will take care of it." And the wonderful thing is, when you watch these states of mind with such an open heart, you are doing the work that does purify the conditions, and cause these more negative states to recede. They recede in power and they literally eventually cease to arise, because you're not feeding energy into them anymore. The more you look at them and say, "No anger! No anger! No anger!", that's just more anger, isn't it? "Ahh, breathing in, I am aware of the anger. Breathing out, I hold space for the anger." No anger there, just an open heart acknowledging the presence of anger.

When we relate to what has arisen with this kind presence, we're no longer giving it fuel. It fades away. It would be like having a roaring bonfire and it's time to let it die out, but you see logs still lying there. So, on the one hand you're saying, "We need to let the fire die out," and then you're chucking logs on the fire. If you want the fire to die out, you've got to watch the impulse to chuck the logs on the fire. Why is it so hard to just let the logs sit there? Does every one have to be burned? "But we spent hours cutting all this wood for a bonfire. How can we leave them unburned?" What have you been accumulating in this inner log pile that you believe has to be burned? Can you just leave it alone?

Another experience that many of you reported today is what in Buddhadharma is called sloth and torpor. This is just a fancy term for sleepiness. Is there anybody who has not been sleepy at some time today? She took two naps!(pointing to Barbara) Sleepiness. Well, sometimes you take a nap because you're exerting a lot of energy doing hard work, and then it's good to sleep. Or maybe you didn't sleep well last night. Sometimes sleepiness is part of resistance. We don't want to be present with the judging or angry mind that we see coming up. We don't want to acknowledge how much pain there is inside, so we fall asleep. It's a good way to get away from it.

Sometimes the sleepiness is simply giving yourself permission to stop, because so many of you drive yourselves so hard, day after day after day, and you may get a decent night's sleep but then you're up again at the crack of dawn doing another double-day's work. Some of you who have children hold down jobs, so it's really two jobs that you're doing. Some of you are in jobs that ask you to work 12 hours a day. Some of you are at home, caring for a home, but the work is never done. There are always more dishes in the sink, more laundry, someone that needs something. And because you have this belief, "I have to get it all done, and I have to do it right," you keep driving yourself. Then you arrive at a retreat. You don't have to take care of your homes, your job, your children. You close your eyes to meditate. Ahhh, it's quiet. You fall asleep.

None of this is a problem. Of course, you can't meditate if you're sleeping. Eventually you've got to wake up. And a weekend is a short period, believe it or not, for those of you who are new, first retreat. It may seem interminable, but a weekend is really a short period, and it often takes 24 to 36 hours to get past that initial sleepiness, for the body not to respond to closed eyes as a cue to take a nap.

Eventually the energy comes up. There are numerous ways that we can support that energy. One is just the power of intention. Begin to think about, what is my intention in being here this weekend? If your answer is, "To fix my unworthiness," that's not going to do it. What is your intention? Would it be accurate to say of all of you, "To live with more compassion and wisdom."? Does anybody with an argument with that? I'm not saying it's your only purpose, but it's a real purpose, to live with more compassion and more wisdom.

So we keep asking ourselves, is what I'm about to do suitable to this higher purpose? My highest purpose is not to fix myself, because I'm not broken. My highest purpose is to live with more wisdom and compassion.

Is enhancing these stories of self-judgment,  anger, fear or doubt, suitable to the highest purpose? No. We can't just then say, "So I won't do it." We just begin to watch with real interest. Well, every time I leave the door open, the beaver comes in and chews the chair legs. It's the result of conditions. What if I close the door? What if I put a chair with metal legs in here instead? How can I respond skillfully to this outflow of conditions?

So we watch the judging mind or the mind that says, "I'm unworthy," and we begin to ask ourselves, "Ah, this story again. How can I respond more lovingly to this? Can I begin to see that this is just a myth? Can I begin to consider even the remote possibility that I was never unworthy? That I never had need to feel shame or guilt? Of course you didn't do it perfectly. You're human. Nobody does it perfectly. What is perfect?

You did the best you could, and your intention is to live with more and more love and compassion. That's enough. As long as you keep pushing yourself against the walls, saying, "I've got two days to become enlightened. I must fix this in myself, these unwholesome patterns. If I walk out of here tomorrow and I still have anger, I've failed," well, that's impossible. Can I be just a little bit kinder when anger arises, by the time I leave tomorrow? Just a little more insightful about the fact that it simply has arisen from conditions and that I am capable to be responsible to it and not do harm? Just that.

So as long as you keep pushing yourself against that wall, saying, "I have to fix this. I have to fix that," it's exhausting. Here we have sloth and torpor again. If you keep getting pushed like that, and you keep pushing back and eventually you're exhausted, you could fall asleep. It's the only escape. Stop pushing yourselves. Invite yourself gently. Stop pushing yourselves.

We're talking about the hindrances, grasping and anger, sloth and torpor. Another one is doubt. Doubt is a big one for people. "Why am I here? I doubt if this is the right practice for me. Everybody else is sitting peacefully and meditating, because I keep opening my eyes and looking. (laughter, inaudible) What's wrong with me?"

Doubt. "I'm not smart enough, good enough, kind enough, loving enough, to learn meditation. I'll never break free of these old patterns." Well, if you believe that, you won't. But if you understand, "Of course I can move beyond these old patterns. They just are the result of conditions. And as I attend to the conditions, the patterns will change."

So we continue to work in this way with our practice. Your practice gives you everything you need. If you did not experience anger, grasping, sleepiness, doubt, and more, if you came in here and sat and had a totally blissful two days, never encountering these, some people call them demons but I don't really want to call them demons, just little triggers, little beavers that are scurrying around inside gnawing at you, if you didn't experience these, how could you learn?

We can learn to say thank you, literally, when anger comes up. "Thank you, anger. Thank you for reminding me to be present and opening my heart." Judging mind. "I don't like that person's purple hair. Why do they have purple hair? That looks stupid." "Oh, look at this car. This car is too big, it uses too much gas. Why are people driving that kind of car?" Etc., etc., etc. Ah, here's judging mind. "Thank you, judging mind. It reminds me to come home to my heart, to be present. I don't have to be afraid of judging mind."

I'll tell you a story that many of you have heard numerous times. But I want to tell it for the newcomers. It's about the Tibetan saint Milarepa. He's meditating in his cave when the demons of fear and greed and hatred appear. They're hideous. The flesh hangs in shreds from the bones. Gore drips out. They have a foul stench. The bones rattle underneath. They have long fangs and big bulging eyes. Very fierce looking.

Does Milarepa get up and run, screaming, from his cave? No. Does he get a stick and try to chase them away? No. He says to them, "Ah, I've been expecting you. Come, sit by my fire, have tea." One of them says to him, "Aren't you afraid of us?" He says, "No. Your hideous appearance only reminds me to be present, to be aware, to have mercy. Sit by my fire, have tea."

We are all inviting our demons in for tea. Each of you has a different team of demons. The unworthiness, judging mind, a lot of anger, fear, feelings of helplessness, feeling unloved, invite it in for tea. There's one special rule here, though, once you're seated by your fire. You give it a cup of tea. "No talking, shhh. You're not going to engage me in your stories." So Unworthiness is sitting there drinking tea and saying, "You should be ashamed of yourself, sitting here thinking you could get rid of me by giving me tea."

"Shhh, we're not going to talk."

"But youare unworthy. Your mother told you so a thousand times before you were 5."

"Shhh, we're not going to talk."

So we don't get caught up in the stories that these guests want to tell. We just keep saying, "No, I am not engaging in that story." With mindfulness we note, ah, this one is a story. It's one of those ten thousand myths that I've stored inside. I'm not going to get caught in it. The fact is that it arose, because, the conditions are still not purified. The conditions are present so it will arise. I don't purify the conditions by chasing it away with a stick, or by giving in to it. I simply give it tea and let it sit there. Eventually it will get bored and leave. How long can you entertain these stories of unworthiness before you finally see through them?

I'm going to share here a story of Barbara's. Some of you have also heard this one. Ideally Barbara would tell it but I don't want to pull her back into the body and then back out.

So she grew up with a lot of feelings of unworthiness from an unintentional abandonment by a primary caregiver, who was sick and could no longer care for her. She felt, "I'm poisonous. Something about me makes the people I love become sick. They have to leave." So she had a strong feeling of unworthiness.

With the help of a very compassionate therapist, she began to look at this in her teens and her early twenties. She saw, these are just myths. I don't have to enact them. I can go out and connect with people in the world. I can have friends. I can consider myself not better or worse than any other human, capable of loving and being loved." But when she came into a party, for example, a strong feeling of unworthiness would still come up. She'd see all the people there talking to each other. "Oh! I can't go in and talk to these people." She'd shrink back. She'd find some corner to hide in. She might approach one person and try to talk to them, but fear to try to enter in a group of people.

She was doing a meditation practice. She did not know it as vipassana, but it was essentially vipassana. She learned to note fear, hardening, drawing back. She was able then to ask herself, "Okay, just go over and talk to this one person with a loving heart, and expect that the person is going to want to talk to me instead of turn around and run away. And if they do turn around and leave, I don't have to believe that it's because of me. Maybe they just saw the hors d'oeuvres being passed. They've gone over that way. Why take it personally?" So she learned how to do that.

Then years passed. She met me formally. She began to meditate with a more conscious vipassana practice. This is perhaps over 20 years ago. She attended a month-long retreat. The instructions were much what you have: no talking, no eye contact, no hugging. Giving each person space. She began to notice that when she walked down a hall, if she looked into a person's eyes for eye contact, they turned away, and it brought up these feelings of, "I'm unworthy. They don't love me."

I asked her to ask herself, "Is that so? What's really happening here? Is it true they don't love me because they turn their eyes away, or are they simply following the retreat instructions?"  She began to see how strong the habit was to take it personally when somebody averted his or her eyes. She asked me, "If I'm not unworthy, I must be worthy." I said no, that's just another myth. No worthiness or unworthiness. Just be present with the feeling that's so deeply conditioned in you, of shame, of feeling unlovable, when somebody looks away.

So she had a month to practice this, many times a day. By the end of the month, when she looked in somebody's eyes when they approached and they looked away, it was just somebody looking away. She needed the month, but by the end of the month, the stories had simply ceased to arise, because she had purified the conditions by offering kindness to this human being who was feeling unworthy and unlovable. Open to the emotion, acknowledging that there was fear and pain, not having to run from it, but also not having to fix it. Just resting in the spaciousness of the open heart, watching somebody turn away.

There were many teachers at this retreat. There was a man who was a senior teacher in the Theravada tradition, who seemed to sit across from her at the table every meal. She often was seated first. He would sit down and she would look up and smile, look in his eyes, and he would immediately look away. He was somebody she wanted to have like her. So it was three times day, a good catalyst.

At the end of the retreat he sought here out and said, "I so much enjoyed sitting across from you at the table every day." He gave her a big hug. How could she hold onto any myth, "I'm unworthy."? He was simply following the retreat instruction.

But if you're not at a retreat and you're walking down the street and you look at somebody and they look away, perhaps they're preoccupied. Maybe their spouse is sick, or maybe they just found a flat tire in their car and they're going to try to get it repaired. They're somewhere else. Why take it personally? Can you let go of that? So we can use the retreat time to begin to investigate this kind of thing.

All of these catalysts–anger, judging mind, sleepiness, low energy, grasping, all of it-- they are not hindrances but simply opportunities for growth. I'm fond of the idea, there are no problems, only situations that ask your loving attention. If anger arises, ah, here is a situation that asks my loving attention. Mind churning, won't stay settled. Busy, jumping, all over. Ah, here is a mind that wants some loving attention. That which is aware of the tumultuous mind is not tumultuous. You can begin to find that place of quiet in yourself right there with jumping-around mind. It arose from conditions.

I enjoy the image of a big bowl filled to the brim with water. Water has the nature of fluidity. It also has the nature of stillness. If you jostle the table on which the bowl is placed, water is going to slosh over the top. The water is sloshing because of conditions. "Oh, the water is spilling! Put your hand on the surface; stop it!" It's obviously not going to stop it; it's just going to make it spill more. If you want it to stop spilling you need to just step back and let it settle.

The mind has fluidity  and nature of the mind is that same stillness. When your mind is jumping all over the place, the more you attack it trying to make it still, the further away stillness is. But when you just step back and watch the mind jumping, that which is watching is still, is centered. Gradually come to rest in that stillness. There's nothing to fix. Anger;  judgment, the same way. Judgments popping up like popcorn. Ah, here's judging mind again. Let it be. It will settle itself.

We can use certain of the heart practices like compassion, loving kindness, patience, gratitude, as ways of coming back to this still, openhearted space. So that can be helpful. If you're feeling a lot of agitation, just to come into the heart. Think of something you're grateful for and bring attention to it. Let the heart center in that beautiful experience, and you start to find the stillness. At first you're focusing, so you're subtly pushing away the agitation. But then you come back to whatever created the agitation, but from this core of stillness, of gratitude, of ease, and you start to regain confidence, "this is also part of me and Ican access it. Regardless of what I've been told my whole life, Ican come into this place of loving kindness, of stillness, and I can live from there."

So I've been talking for an hour and it's time to stop. Thank you for hearing me. Cherish yourselves, and cherish this practice, because it will lead, number one, to a reduction in suffering, and number two, truly to liberation in every sense. Thank you.

(session ends)