Embodied Mind Day 3: Working with Micro-Aversion | Maitreyabandhu

good so welcome again to the nature of mind and to these five explorations into the nature of mind so one of the things i was really emphasizing yesterday was that you could say very simply that the buddhist vision of the nature of mind is that the mind is infinite um [Music] that the mind has unfathomable depth one of the things that's been striking me more and more is that that what is three things about the mind firstly we don't know what the mind is we know we can see where neurons fire and so on but we don't we still don't know how this is possible how it's possible to walk in a field and listen to a black bird nobody knows how this wonderful panorama of world appears it's the big problem in philosophy the second thing um about the mind is that we don't know how broad it can be how how ingenious and creative it can be we haven't got to the edges of that we i believe we've center a spacecraft outside of our solar system we've got photographs of mercury um you know we still don't know how much we can do um and wallace stevens talks about hi how high that highest candle lights the dark and what he means by that is that the human mind can light up that as it were the dark of the universe to a degree that we still don't know how much we can light up you know the inventions of the human mind have been quite remarkable and we don't know how deep the human mind can go and buddhism would say it includes the potential for buddhahood um includes the potential for a whole new kind of mind but yes buddhism you very simply you might say that buddhism is saying that the mind is infinite uh but we get stuck to the surface of our mind um that's not that that's a for most of us we don't have metaphysical questions about the mind um even philosophical questions what we've got is practical problems with our mind um we haven't got metaphysical problems usually with our mind some people like to think they have but it all feels a bit high for looting to me um i come from warwickshire and you don't you don't have you know philosophical problems with mind in warwickshire um yeah so most of us the real issues of mind is that we get stuck to the surface of our mind um like a fly to fly paper um and um the simple buddhist way of ex of saying what we're getting stuck to is those five nirvana's um or coverings of the mind and that are those are uh craving or wanting something other than what's in your experience now i'm craving a bit it means neurotic craving it doesn't mean longing for the transcendental or something it doesn't mean a genuine longing for transcendence it means craving after things that can never really satisfy and we're stuck in that a lot of our time aren't we wanting things that when you get them they don't work a holiday love of your life a promotion a prize when you get them you get a little high and then you go back to your mind as usual and then the opposite to that of course we're often enough stuck in a version sometimes just mildly so sometimes our lives can be ruined by feeling aversion to someone um [Music] you know our career in life can be feeling indignant um feeling uh got it put upon and so on so we can easily be stuck in that level of aversion and we can then easily be stuck in sloth and and um yes of mental torpidity so you know where you can't really get your energy moving do you remember what it was like when you were a teenager and you just terminally bored and you you just couldn't get interested in it i remember trying one saturday rainy saturday trying to get to do something i just was so bored you know like you have this bone aching boredom at about 15 don't you um and if you're not careful you can live a life where you never really get interested in anything you never really get your energy is going so you end up with this kind of mental torpidity and physical sloth or you get the sort of opposite of that where you're sort of stuck in restless worry and anxiety and so on and that can become a fixed state of mind can't do where you're always signed and slightly set off to worry and be anxious one of the one of the things you we're seeing from the pandemic you know it's had lots of consequences one of them is to to create a spike in anxiety and fear um and it you know if we're not careful we'll just live in a mild state of anxiety and fear and then as we're doing that our life ticks away um such a it's such a one of the great tragedies of life that we can live like that and then finally we're we're often doubting the value of our mind you could say to put it that way um that we don't really think that our mind is infinite we just think that we're condemned to the nevada knows we're condemned to the best we can hope for as a question and a cuddle as it were actually that's not so bad when you come to think about um that chance here i'm afraid um there you go but those are yeah that the the buddhist tradition those are the that's the surface of our mind that we get stuck to yeah but below that surface we've no idea how deep the mind can go we may not we may still not have plumbed it but certainly from a buddhist point of view um the mind has within its depth the treasurer of buddhahood itself which is an entirely new awareness an entire entirely new kind of mind that's that's personified by being awake so the the area i want to sort of close in on on that rather grand um discussion of mind is this this question of aversion yeah um so yesterday we talked about we could imagine the state of mind we want to create um wanted you know we talked about cultivating the opposite uh in terms of the nirvana's in terms of the hindrances today i want to say a little bit about aversion and especially aversion in meditation and um what i want us to do this morning is really look out for a diversive subtly aversive habit that we easily get into um there's not quite to wind into this but very often when you meditate when i meditate at least it's very easy to without and it's quite difficult to express it's quite subtle but it's very easy to as it were see your experience including your experience of meditation and your experience of yourself through an aversive lens um in a subtle but habitual way so you know you can be subtly thinking already this meditation is not as good as yesterday or i'd like my meditation to be better why isn't there more in my meditation and even that thought it's quite difficult to express because that desire for your meditation to go deeper and richer and fuller is good very often a riding on that desire is a kind of a version for what is so instead of you know trying to diligently do what you need to do for your meditation to go deeper when you're saying i'd like it to go deeper it's actually a self-criticism that this isn't deep enough but not in again self-criticism is a good thing human beings that can't criticize themselves are psychotic um so you do need to be able to criticize yourself but you don't want to criticize yourself in a in a kind of neurotic self-condemning self-thoughting kind of way yeah genuine criticism sort of shows up what's good and shows that what could be changed yeah um so you you but you see how a genuine self-criticism in this best sense of trying to bring out more of ourselves can have riding on it without our us being quite close aware of it a kind of subtle negation of what's happening what's happening isn't good enough it needs to be more than this it was what's happening isn't as good as it was yesterday or a year before or five years ago or what's happening is not as good as i've read in things in books or what's happening is not as good as um what i think i should be doing um this it's like a habit of what we you could call kind of micro aversions yeah that it's like you're sprinkling your meditation with little kind of ice cubes of micro aversion yeah and what you're trying to do um in meditation is warm up and and enrich your whole experience you're trying to first of all have this lovely sense of calm and settledness um and embodiedness and wholeness and that that's experienced emotionally as it were as an experience of well-being of peace of contentment of being a home in yourself yeah you're wanting those in a way you could say that's the basis of meditation whether you where as i said i'm not teaching a particular meditation uh this week because i want to make sure that anyone can join at any time and we can just explore these great matters of working with our mind perhaps at the end i will say a little bit about particular practices but i'm not particularly concerned with that this week i'm wanting to look at more fundamental approaches to your experience so yeah you're looking for this sense of unity and wholeness which is a sort of cool way of putting it but if you talked about it in a warm way you'd say a state of radiant well-being that lovely state where you just feel okay it's not you know in an opera in love with yourself in some sort of sentimental way you just feel sort of warmly okay and a sense of well-being those are kind of fundamental ways of being in meditation that you're you're trying to nurture you know um and you see if we keep on saying that's not good enough um oh dear i got distracted again how long have i been distracted for how come my mind doesn't can't quiet down um how come i'm not as good as this person at meditation how come it's going wrong again what you're doing to that attempt to create this warm unified state is adding an ice cube each time yeah and each time you do that um you're you're pushing the meditation away from you yeah that's what you're doing and it's not easy to spot because these they're kind of micro aversions they're not kind of not necessarily kind of in a big aversive state even a versus state to your own mind although that can happen as well it's a little kind of micro aversions and you can have a habit of doing that yeah that you habitually even when you're thinking as it were positively there could be so much more to my experience your mind is actually pointing to and there's not at the moment just it's just what i mean it can look like a positive um but actually you're seeing it through a negative you've got that kind of aversive sense of yourself yeah i mean i've had this very very strongly in my life uh and you would say unconsciously but that's actually an exaggeration when people say things are unconscious otherwise you wouldn't know they exist um you know i unconsciously think i'm brad pitt but i wouldn't know because it's unconscious you know um um that was a joke i don't actually unconsciously think about it um you know a bit what we mean when we say that we mean habitually and habits habits are people even say this is a deep habit there's no such thing as deep habits there's only superficial habits it's just the habits of they flow through you without you realizing that that's what they are yeah so i had just a habit in meditation of easily thinking i probably can't do it um as soon as you think you can't meditate or you're not very good at this or you get distracted what will happen is you'll get lots of evidence to confirm your your thought you know because every time you're bound to get distracted in meditation and every time you get distracted it'll be more evident that your belief that you can't meditate is right yeah so you know you you get distracted say oh no there i go again as soon as you get into there i go again this meditation isn't going as well as usual again or here i go again and getting distracted you're actually in a version yeah it doesn't show up like a version but that is an aversive state of mind as soon as you're getting irritated with the fact that you've got a sore back or um i don't know a recurring uh argument in your mind you're actually slipping into a version as soon as you're slipping into a version you're moving away from that sense of unified well-being that is the foundation of meditation and which will actually in its own way in its own time and open up for you if you can keep on just nurturing that in a patient respectful kind of way yeah um just to go back to um ian mcgill chris for a moment you know this wonderful uh bought the master in his emissary he um he quotes heidegger the german philosopher and he talks heidegger talks on wake to talks in terms of waiting on your experience which is rather lovely he and he contrasts it with waiting for something so if you're not careful in meditation you're waiting for something whilst you're waiting for something you're not actually kind of there it's like waiting for a bus except you're waiting for meditation and a meditation to arise or something yeah um [Music] so instead of heidegger talks about instead of waiting for something you're waiting on your experience yeah and he talks in he says it's a patient respectful nurturing of something into disclosure a lovely way of putting it a patient respectful nurturing of something into disclosure and that's what you're trying to do with meditation that you're waiting on your experience in a patient respectful and nurturing kind of way and those deeper experiences will start to disclose themselves to you um mcgill chris talks about a highly active passivity which i rather liked um a highly active passivity yeah but in that highly active passivity in this meditation what i want us to do is really look out for um a micro habit of micro aversions yeah where you're without noticing you you just very very in in a very small way but in a habitual way finding your experience lacking yeah um not being satisfied with it comparing it with your experience you had or would like to have or comparing it with experiences you read about or experiences that other people seem to have yeah and you can do that in a very subtly habitual way and be pushing your meditation further and further away from you without noticing it like adding a little ice cube to the cup of hot coffee that you wanted to enjoy you're just making it more and more cold and therefore you're not you're actually moving away from where we're where we're trying to get to so i want to say a little bit more about that tomorrow um but i think that that's what i want us to do today well again we're taking it very very slowly as i said some of you i know have meditated for a long time but we can never get beyond these very deep fundamentals i'm not beyond them and you're not beyond them um so you might feel that we're going a bit slowly but i just want to keep on going back to this whole body sense and we can include into that list hearing sounds around us um so the body isn't something that you're wrapped in it's not a thing that moves you around it's a kind of living spirit that we live through we don't even inhabit because even when you say you inhabit it's like somebody inhabiting a house and the house can be dispensed with or could be moved into another house it's it's our body i mean shopping i believe that the body is a sort of concrete element of the mind he said that when you you know when you feel something in your mind it shows in your bodies it's not that it's not one and then the other yeah so you're trying to get you're trying to experience the body as a living a cloud of sensation um and that extends somewhat beyond the body um as we usually literally think of it so we'll carry on doing that we'll carry on imagining uh you know moving between this sort of open awareness open body and you can nurture that again by um you know if your body's feeling quite tense or quite that there's anxiety in your experience where you just you can just configure the breath that the breath is coming in in a very soothing and comforting kind of way settling and smoothing out and soothing out the whole body and then just imagine for a while feeling happy imagine well-being either bring to mind time when you felt a sense of well-being in meditation or out of meditation um a time when you felt warmly connected to yourself and to other people try and bring it to mind as vividly as you can remember what you were doing what you were wearing how you felt in the body but don't ponder over it don't you know it's just like reading the novel of your life and let it just be you know read through as it were and you're looking and you're keeping in touch with the body and you're doing those two things and you you're particularly in this meditation you've got an eye out for a kind of micro habit a subtle habit of finding fault you know of um of aversive attitudes to your own body or aversive attitudes to your own mind aversive attitudes to how you think you're doing with this meditation in a way it's a bit of an extension of what i said yesterday about monitoring how you're relating to your experience now um perhaps even using that instead of this idea of effort which has got this metaphorically can be can be sort of confusing just monitoring your how you're getting on just now and as usual i'll read a poem at the end starting at the end no i don't normally talk about the poem but this is worth knowing that this um poem called ecclesiastes by the american poet richard wilbur he wrote this i think he wasn't he died very fairly recently in the last year or two he actually started as a war poet as a second world world world war poet and he wrote a poem in his very very late collect last collection which has only got a few poems and he was in his 90s he was about 93 or 94 when he died so this is one of his last mars poems and that and if you know that about him it adds to the weight of this really quite miraculous okay enough already so let's um get ourselves set up for meditation you might want to turn the light of your screen down and put flux on and then when you're just taking time to set up taking all the time you need and then when you're ready closing your eyes as soon as you close your eyes see if you can once again just open up to the body sense so feeling the weight and the warmth of your body once again softening your face so you're not using your face anymore anymore [Music] not using your eyes so your brow can soften all those small muscles around the eyes see if you can just soften them because notice if you're gripping in your jaw [Music] or if you're puckering your mouth you don't need to do that just now [Music] and then bringing your awareness into your shoulders just play with ways of softening your shoulders so you can imagine your shoulders releasing relaxing you could just imagine the breath breathing into your shoulders feeling the breath in your shoulders perhaps tuning into the out breath and letting your shoulders go if there's discomfort in your shoulders just imagine that the breath is soothing smoothing out those discomforts uh and if you're coming over your belly can you tell if you're gripping in your belly [Music] again we tend to do that habitually automatically so can we find ways of just encouraging the belly to soften breathing into any discomfort imagining belly softening calming the body calming the mind and then feeling the thighs very often we're gripping in our thighs without really meaning to without noticing it just imagining your whole body calming down winding down ecclesiastes we must cast our bread upon the waters as the ancient preacher said trusting that it may amply be restored to us after many a day that old metaphor drawn from rice farming on the rivers flooded shore helps us to believe there's no great sin to give hoping to receive therefore i shall throw broken bread this solemn day out across the snow betting crust and crumb the birds will gather and that one more spring will come so first of all opening your awareness to inhabit the whole body body is nothing it's a cloud of changing sensations see if you can open out of that and keep coming back to that when your mind narrows to a thought or to a particular area of the body and doing that in a patient respectful and nurturing so okay um c okay if your body is feels tight or uncomfortable you can tune into the breath in the body particularly since feeling a sense of breath nurturing and softening and soothing and smoothing the body just that thought will help a little so okay is oh foreign and your mind goes off that's okay just see if you can stretch out your mind again [Music] to include the whole sensations of the body the energy of the body it's the kind of cherishing of that you're looking for the valuing of them sometimes we it's helpful to listen to the sounds around you denying bodied way in the whole body way as if your whole body is listening okay foreign and then spend some time cultivating or imagining well-being might bring to mind a time where you felt happy and content just imagine what i would feel like now [Music] but doing that in a very embodied connected way not in a broken half way not being too ponderous about it just lightly imagining the state of mind you'd like to be in as if that's happening now bye foreign c so so you're not trying to force anything [Music] just marrying in an embodied way [Music] okay and as we meditate you're keeping an eye out for any kind of habit of micro aversion seeing if you can just step aside from the habit nurture imaginatively this sense of well-being [Music] of happiness of unity these c foreign and opening out again to the whole body sense through looking this sense of awareness and whole body unified and this unification feels like well-being you keep noticing any tendency towards a kind of aversion to your own experience i'm just setting that aside so okay going back to this whole sense of the body [Music] keep noticing any tendency to find fault so you're trying to nurture a whole body sense sense of well-being uh and if you find it useful you can imagine the breath calming and soothing the whole body whole mind so you're settling down more and more deeply this is into this very human sense of well-being um foreign ecclesiastes we must cast our bread upon the waters as the ancient preacher said trusting that it may amply be restored to us after many a day that old metaphor drawn from rice farming on the flood river's flooded shore helps us to believe that it's no great sin to give hoping to receive therefore i shall throw broken bread this southern day out across the snow [Music] betting crust and crumb the birds will gather and then one more spring will come uh [Music] hmm [Music] when you're already opening your mind [Music] so once again we've got some time for questions if you've got any questions as i say we'll explore explore a bit more about that tomorrow but let's see what questions there are today so nick wilson says when i'm meditating i can get into a thinly thinly mode about the meditation itself trying to cultivate the antidotes i get busy are we trying to trying to think are we not trying to think at all i think he think he mowed he says i think you think he made our humanity is pretty much a thinky thinking mode at the moment isn't it um quite a nice way of putting it um thank you because um yeah it's a common common misconception about meditation that um you know that you you're not supposed to you're trying to stop thought um you know sometimes people's idea of meditation is like a computer screen whether when the plug has been pulled out you know just blank which to my mind doesn't sound very gray you know i remember being on this interfaith panel and um [Music] someone was trying to ask this question about you know should we stop thinking are we trying to stop thinking when we meditate and somebody was saying yes and then somebody else was saying oh no what you need is a holy thought um and everybody's rather cooed over the idea of holy thought but nobody actually knew what it meant um and i i i was you know saying what really um anthony sangranchester the founder of our movement said he said he would say look there's two kinds of thought there's thought that takes you out of meditation and then thought that takes you into meditation the settle is the second is more responsive it's more integral it's more integrated it's less broken off from your whole experience it's more curious it's more helpful yeah so you're trying to move from the kind of thought that's just think you think he thought which is you know what would be a nice translation of this word for puncture mental proliferation mental chatter um and then you can mentally chatter about your mental chatter i can't believe i got so much mental chatter and what was that word again for puncture you know we just have like onion skins of thought thoughts surrounding thought um so you're looking for thought that every time you you know i say something like bring yourself back to the whole body experience you see how basically i'm using thought to do that um you're just remembering oh hang on i'm trying to do that whole body thing let me listen to sounds at the moment let me just imagine something at the moment they're all thoughts we're trying to keep them quite sort of light and not ponderous as i've said before you're not pondering over thought um but nearly always it's um it's um unhelpful to think of well it's pretty much always helpful to think of not thinking as soon as you think about not thinking you're just thinking more yeah actually as you get deeply absorbed in meditation your thoughts do quieten down to a remarkable degree because so much of so-called it's interesting we only have this word thought um actually most of what is we call thought is propunction which is just mental proliferation it's not really thought thought is what philosophers do you know thought is a wonderful creative capacity in human consciousness a unified creative magical thing that human beings can do we don't really mean that we don't mean the thought of i don't know marilyn robinson writing her wonderful novel gilead novel serious we don't mean that kind of thought um we mean a kind of um rubbishy you know you know that kind of thought in a chit chat um like a youtube channel going on constantly in your mind and as you settle into meditation as you become more embodied that kind of thought will quieten down but it needs to quiet down as a as a consequence of of engaging with the meditation as i've been teaching it not it doesn't work if you try and quiet it down if you try and quieten down your mind you get what's called an ironic response in in other words your mind gets noisier um so usually it's not valuable to try and think of quietening down your mind it tends to make it noisier it will just happen as you cultivate well-being and whole body sense or other senses in meditation such as focusing on the breath or um i won't be teaching you but the metabolic practice of some of you know that loving kindness practice um but yes think think of it primarily as a can we move from thought that just takes us out of meditation into fantasy very often into rumination into planning into worrying into arguing can we move from that kind of thought into thought that's taking you into your experience guiding you back to the body back to direct experience yeah it's better to think like that i think it's simpler to think like that i don't know whether that answers your question chris but i rather like the thinky thinky thing i mean that's what human beings are becoming if we're not careful of just thinking thinking machines so amy's asking would you say that we are blending sucker and ducker in this meditation um i don't know um so sukkah means happiness dukkha means well docker is usually trans is that they're they're partly words for anyone becoming new to the meditation um and okay really the rather grand words but they really really means that sense of um dissatisfaction that ongoing sense of dissatisfaction that all human beings at least human beings are honest with themselves um can see you know if you look at your experience it's never quite right you know and that can be at deeper and deeper levels and that's in a certain sense why you practice any kind of so-called spiritual life that awful term spiritual which i'm slightly allergic to um you know a life committed to meaning and value is because um ordinary life going on holiday getting you know um getting a promotion um having lots of sex um etc it doesn't do what it's what it says it will do it doesn't make you feel completely happy and unified and fabulous all the time it just doesn't do that can't do that um uh sucker is a happiness i think probably i'd i'd put it more simply i'd just say at the moment we're looking to cultivate what yeah buddhism would call sukkah which means basically just sort of happiness well-being um we need to find ways of even this word cultivate i mean the metaphor calls which should suggest that something's already there doesn't it you know um and unfortunately weirdly has this sense as if you have to make it happen but the actual metaphor is saying you need to cultivate something it's it's sort of there and potential you just need to you know put water you know if there's a seed there you need to water it you need to you know get sunlight onto and so on so somehow we need to remember that all of these things are kind of there um the sense of well-being you you do experience that even when you're listening to a novel or just drinking a cup of tea there's a bit of well-being um might not be very strong um but you're trying to just sort of sort of fan the flames of that a bit and you can do that as i said imaginatively and you can do that um you know remembering times when you feel like that or you can do that um by sort of cultivating these whole body sense because this sense of whole body and well-being are sort of two sides of the same coin thing so it's more sense at first of just cultivating this this very simple ordinary sense of well-being it's nothing dramatic um you've already got the seeds of it in your experience now but you see how we need to attend to those seeds because you've also got seeds of non-well-being and not you've got seeds of aversion and you've got seeds of anxiety and you've got seeds of doubt and if you're not careful you're cultivating those oh i'm not sure this is i shouldn't have tuned in today i should have laid lay in bed actually i really sure have a bit you're actually cultivating the seed of doubt yeah or um you know you know there's a little argument that you've been having and you start to give that attention you start to cultivate that seed before you know it the whole meditation is full of what you should have said to that person in that argument five days ago or what you should say in the future when you talk to them you know that time that you keep going over what you're going to say to somebody when you see them again and often enough you never say it but you compulsively go around it so when we're doing that we're cultivating uh aversion yeah it's as simple as that the buddha is very pragmatic in this way it just says well okay what do you want to cultivate you've got all these seeds in consciousness including seeds that can flourish into buddhahood what do you want to do you know what you're going to give your attention to what you're going to cultivate if you're not cultivating a sense of well-being a sense of value and meaning and all of these things that we're trying to do in meditation you'll be cultivating something else um as i said you know at the moment it seems i'm at the moment reading a long poem by w.h orden called the age of anxiety which was his um has become a kind of synonym for the 20th century the age of anxiety we i think we now have the age of indignation where either we're feeling indignant or we're feeling indignant about people feeling indignant you know um and it's easy to just cultivate that you know if if you want to you can sit down here in the morning and think of something you're indignant about and off you go [Music] you can fill your mind with a sense of righteous indignation and it's weirdly intoxicating and toxic here so what we're trying to do is think look let's park that at least yeah i know you want to do that and not even being sort of empathic with that you know yeah i know you're feeling a bit grumpy and a bit bit indignant to this morning we all do but let's try and cultivate something a bit more valuable than that yeah um because that we just just don't realize how deep the mind can go and how much there is we could cultivate it we just don't realize it we um uh reading marilyn robinson she says we allow an astonishing fertility to go to seed so that's a beautiful way of putting it we are and she thinks she by an astonishing fertility that's her her description of the human mind we allow her an astonishing fertility to to go to seed um and what you're doing in meditation is you're trying not to do that not to allow an astonishing fertility to go to seed trying to actually nurture that astonishing fertility that is your mind anyway i've talked so long i can't remember what the question was yes so we've gone somewhere away from that but i think that's a sort of answer pete asks if aversion and thoughts in general are also another form of sensation can we also approach them like we would a sore shoulder i don't know [Laughter] did it early in the morning um yeah so what that touches into is this this very important insight that the buddha has and which buddhism has if we could remember it which is uh the all experience has vedna yeah so vader is another buddhist word a pali word and not easy to translate it it means means um due to translation is feeling sensation if you hyphenate that it doesn't actually mean emotion that's more complex that's actually chittor but um retinol means that everything you experience a memory um my feet on the carpet in this connected shrine room um the the the the warmth or corners of the room uh a theory an ideology um everything you experience through your mind sense or your body sense has a hedonic tinge is a technical way of putting it it will feel somewhere on the pleasant spectrum or somewhere on the unpleasant spectrum or you don't know yet it's kind of in between yeah that's and everything you experience has varied in our and so even though radnod doesn't mean emotion to go to your question emotions themselves have vader now so if you're in a bad mood and if you're having negative thoughts um that if you that no those negative thoughts have an unpleasant vain enough and you know that you know as soon as you get into that bad mood you feel unhappy if you don't believe me just notice your time when you're feeling hatred or aversion to someone and you actually feel very your body is physically tense um your guts are tense your brow is furrowed and you feel a kind of uh you feel unpleasant vader knife sounds terribly technical but you you the the the taste of your experience that's a good way of thinking about vader not the kind of taste of your experience is bitter yeah uh it's poisonous yeah uh and just as you if you're in the you know just as when you've been generous to someone and connected with someone the taste of that is good and generally speaking um it's actually a bit more complex than that because you can have bitter tastes that are good and pleasant tastes that are bad but you know for instance you you can take pleasure in feeling indignant for instance people do they i say people we all do you know you can rather like that horrible thing state of mind you're in it's actually thoroughly negative but it feels like sort of toxically pleasurable juicy to me um and on the other side you can feel ashamed of something that you've done you don't mean guilty in that neurotic sense guiltism is a neurotic um unhealthy unhealthy emotion um it's at least but if you feel that you know if you've lied and you realize you've lied you feel that twinge of even more than 200 pang of shame in buddhism that's a very positive state of mind but it feels unpleasant so you've got an unpleasant invader not there but an actual positive off but it all gets a bit technical sounding but yes so the answer to your question is yes your your thoughts have vague not and you can tune into the vagina of your thoughts in fact one of the good ways of working with meditation is dropping beneath the narrative of what you're thinking about um a meeting i've got later on a difficult conversation i've got a cuddle um i'd like to have uh or a bit more you drop underneath that to how it feels to think that in your body it will have a vague knot yeah and you can you can work there directly with the vedano it's really the vaid another is the so-called distraction not the thought um thoughts are kind of the icing on top of emotion and intuition and um uh you invade nothing so yeah another way of working is simply to notice the vasana that the thoughts are coming out of yeah you know what it's like yeah i noticed this when i cycled across town in london you know when i started you know when i go through that when i used to go and babysit for the girls i cycled back from south london and um you know it was a lovely being with alex or ria and then you know i'd be cycling back at night it'd be cold there'd be all this traffic and what you've got is your body is sort of on alert a lot when you're cycling you you feel the vulnerability of cycling through traffic um it's unpleasant and then from that unpleasant vedinar i notice it's very very easy for my mind to get angry with either um from you know sort of drivers or with it's like my mind is now in unpleasant my mind stays in this kind of unpleasant room and then that makes me think of other things that are unpleasant so i go to that argument i'm have i'd like to have with someone i go to this thing i feel critical about and it's coming out of just a sense of of unpleasant vedanyl yeah of a kind of the taste of my experiences is threatening and then as soon as you get into that taste of threatening it makes you want to think of other tastes that are threatening yeah and similarly in positive states of mind that you have a taste that's you know if you start to feel grateful for instance and that's an absolute um crucial to buddhism i think is a sense of gratitude if you want to know whether you're growing humanly and spiritually at all you'll know because you feel more grateful if you don't feel more grateful and you don't feel more generous then you're not growing no um you just got some sort of spiritual idea that you're rather pleased with if you as you feel grateful to someone you start to notice that you feel grateful for more and more things uh you you start to live in that world of of feeling grateful and this you know there's so much isn't there to feel grateful for it's just that we don't easily feel it so we're all experience has value to have vader now we're trying to keep working with our experience so we're nourishing those seeds of well even buddhahood itself yeah even this new awareness itself and that's holy doable every time we're sitting to meditation every time in our life when we choose not to react but to respond we're reshaping our life every time we're generous every time we're grateful every every time we help someone anytime we tell the truth we're actually shaping our life so that our life is more of the nature of value and meaning and truth and love and so on and meditation is the deepening of that it's not something else than that anyway i think that might be nearly as much as we can do so once again if we can be really helpful if you know the moment nick is amazingly putting up these um uh lead meditations and meditations every day i think so you know it would be great if you could share them with your friends just you know you know it's so easy now just to share youtube and you know if you've got friends that you haven't meditated before say well why don't you try doing these you can play them back on on youtube and then once again if you can give i'm sure you can give do give well i was thinking the first thing we need to do is support nick um so this is a new project the nature of mind is a new project and we couldn't do it without uh nick working on it full time i'm i'm just doing it when i can nick is always in front of his screen it seems to me having to do something with the website about which i know nothing he was even looking at coding the other day that's beyond my ken um so we need to support him so you know we know we we we're looking to sort of rate something about 20 000 or something like that in this first six months of the project and i'm hoping that if we can do that then we can continue the project so yeah do do give i'll ask nick to put the um oh you put it already there again he's so good um so yeah you can donate there that'd be that'd be great and then that just means that we can support nick and then carry on you know all the things that we need to do for the project and hopefully have season two you know it's like a box they will have season two and you can say that you were there at nature of mine season one um so that's what you you were there you know like the first barbra streisand concert or something i don't know how she came into my mind [Laughter] okay so that's probably enough so really good to see you all again this morning so we'll do the traditional and unmute and say bye-bye and uh yeah i hope to see you all again tomorrow and and we'll carry on meditating together and exploring the mind together this mixture of mine project so you can unmute i think now thanks thank you have a good day have a good evening if it's your evening today if it's your day thank you see you later see ya see you claire see you everybody

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 893

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Id: qzllwtFWyOc

Length: 87min 9sec (5229 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 09 2022