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Dharmette: Sensitivity Grows (4 of 5) Stories and Views

So, in the early days of our practice, often what mindfulness begins to reveal is the many ways that we get in our own way. How much thinking is going on seemingly without our permission. Often people will say, "Oh, the meditation isn't working," thinking that it's the practice that's actually triggering the thinking, or they believe all this thinking means they just aren't cut out for meditation. It's sometimes hard to convince people that thinking is nothing new. It's just that they're finally noticing it, and that noticing it is actually really good practice. What we don't see, we can't relate to in a skillful way.

As we continue practicing after those early attempts, we typically begin to see patterns in our thinking, in our attitudes, habitual ways of reacting in certain situations or with certain people, habitual moods, or patterns of reactivity.

And what we begin to see, I think, is that a lot of our mental activity is the product of a long history, often oriented around protecting ourselves, protecting our bodies, our sense of self, our sense of control over our lives, our conditioning. We might begin to see that we have unseen, unacknowledged views like, "The world is dangerous and I need to be vigilant," or "People will only like me if I'm..."—choose your adjective: smart, good-looking, agreeable, submissive, assertive, rich, accomplished, highly educated, loyal.

We begin to notice how much our thinking is about me. [Laughter] About how our views of the world are centered around me: keeping me safe, keeping me happy, keeping me comfortable, keeping me young and healthy, maybe keeping others happy so that I can be happy.

Something someone once said, and no one really knows who said it first, is: "Self-knowledge is rarely good news." And I think that's a very unfair generalization. But often that is the way we feel as we start to discover unskillful mental attitudes and views that have been limiting us, obstructing our wisdom, not leading toward freedom.

As the Buddha said in the Vitakkasaṇṭhāna Sutta^[5]... we call this Western tradition of Buddhism, based in the Theravada^[6]—we call it the insight tradition. And I think that our first insights tend to be psychological. They're not the liberating insights that free us that the tradition is named for, but I really think they're a step on the way. And they come as a result of strengthening mindfulness, increasing the sensitivity I've been talking about this week.

We begin to see the conditioning behind our habits of mind, our habits of body as well. We see patterns that were established in childhood, ways we've limited ourselves, built up views of self that we then feel a need to defend. Maybe there's a sense of not measuring up to some external standard, and maybe a bravado, a kind of superficial arrogance has developed, and it's really masking a sense of self-doubt. All kinds of patterns like that can be seen.

Maybe a need to always be helpful, to be the one who others can always depend on, even when it really depletes us; when we start resenting being the dependable one. Or the smart one, the one who knows, always needing to defend our views of things. So many ways people have been conditioned to inhabit a particular kind of self, to put ourselves into a kind of costume which actually is more like a straitjacket. And it can masquerade as reasonable, as praiseworthy.

I'll give an example about myself. In the first ten years of my practice in this tradition, I sat a lot of retreats at Spirit Rock^[7]. If you aren't familiar with it, it's situated in a really beautiful, steep little valley about ten miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, north of San Francisco. And it's surrounded by hills just full of wildlife. It's a beautiful, beautiful place, and there are many hiking trails there. For many years, I took a hike every single day on lunchtime if I was on retreat there.

And when I took that hike, I took a little fanny pack and I had a protein bar, a bottle of water, a notebook in case I had some amazing thought I needed to write down, a pair of binoculars because I love to watch the birds, an emergency blanket—you know, one of those things you take on camping trips just in case something happens—some ibuprofen in case something happens, a bear whistle in case of, you know, bears, a rain jacket, a windbreaker, a hat. And once cell phones became common, I even took my phone in case I needed to dial 911, the emergency services, for something. And this was all for a hike that generally took about an hour: a couple miles up to the top of the hills and back down again.

And it wasn't an isolated kind of trail. I often saw other people. And for a long time, I didn't question my preparations. They seemed very sensible. But at some point, as a result of mindfulness growing more sensitive in the way that I've been talking about, I became aware of a sense of a kind of neediness in the preparation, a contraction in my chest, a sense of a really minor compulsion, just very subtle.

And sitting with that feeling, it became clear to me that the elaborate preparations for this really quick lunch-hour hike were in service of a deeply ingrained habit of very careful planning and anticipating problems. That had characterized a lot of my orientation to life, that I came to call after a while "keeping disaster at bay." And it was very easy for me to defend it as sensible. But at its heart, I knew it was rooted in fear, in a compulsion, very subtle, to remain safe. A sense that if I didn't plan carefully, disaster was bound to follow.

So as a result, I began to deliberately challenge that unseen belief. To leave most of those things in my room, to challenge that neediness, to see what would happen. And what happened was that I felt much freer and much more at ease.

If you want to take a trip somewhere, I'm the person to find the best route and the best value accommodations and the best food available, the best season to travel. That's been useful, really, a lot in my life. But sometimes the motivation is this compulsion to make things perfect, to control the conditions just so nothing bad will happen. What happens when there is that compulsion is that the preparations are actually controlling me. I'm not controlling what's going on. It is like a straitjacket.

And I think it's fairly common that we discover aspects of our personalities that are beneficial, skillful, that can sometimes be motivated by an unskillful motivation, an akusala motivation. A mind state that is unskillful is driving the actions. We might be generous with our time and energy, really helpful to others, but feel overwhelmed and resentful at times. And then tuning into what's under that sense of overwhelm, we might begin to see a whole chain of conditioning that began in childhood, where being helpful was the only way to be accepted. And then maybe we can see the same fear of rejection is what's giving rise to being more generous, maybe giving more than is actually healthy for us.

I've always been a curious person, especially about the natural world, fascinated by animals and plants and geology. I love rocks and weather. Wanting to know how things work, how they came to be, how the systems are organized. Great things to be interested in. Not a problem. And long ago, on the very first retreat that I sat with Gil as my teacher, I was sharing my appreciation for a kind of wild grass that I'd never seen before, how beautiful the seed head was, how unusual the shape. And Gil asked me very kindly, "What was it that drew me to look at this grass?"

And I said, "Well, it was interesting."

And he said to me, "Interest can be a form of clinging."

Well, that was news to me. And my immediate reaction was to reject the idea. Interest is good. That's how we learn. We encourage people, of course, in this practice, to develop interest in what they're attending to. It's a way of building continuity. It gives energy to our practice. Obviously, it's healthy. It's skillful.

But over the years, I've become keenly aware of how for me, given my conditioning, being interested sometimes acts as a distraction from something difficult that maybe I need to look at. A way of avoiding being present to what's going on, of distracting myself. And when I'm on retreat, it can be a strategy for alleviating boredom. Interest on its own, of course, isn't clinging, but if it's motivated by craving, it can be a form of clinging for sure.

Now, as my practice has evolved, that craving—subtle as it is, the craving to know, just as a way of getting away from what's going on in life (I think maybe you can relate to the idea of scrolling through websites and stuff)—that craving has become palpable to me as this slight tightness in my chest, in my throat, and this neediness in the mind. My sensations alert me to the unskillful motivation behind them. I can feel the unskillfulness of the motivation. And that's what Gil was trying to get me to see. I wasn't ready to see it at the time.

So, becoming more sensitive in the way that I've been suggesting, I believe it happens naturally if we're practicing sincerely. We notice that what looks on the surface like a skillful, sensible way to approach our lives sometimes, not always of course, is motivated by some subtle craving or aversion. And we can feel that unskillful motivation. The sensitivity of our mindfulness allows us to feel these subtle things going on that we didn't notice for a long time.

And we come to know this not so that we can judge ourselves: "Oh, I'm only generous so that people will like me." That's just piling on; it's just adding aversion into the mix. We simply want to know because it teaches us where we are obstructing our path to freedom. Where we are blocking wisdom, creating harm for ourselves. We want to develop skill in discerning exactly where the path to freedom lies.

And this is the way, I think, just keeping practicing. What did Bhikkhu Bodhi^[8] say? Someone asked him, "What's the secret? What do you do with mindfulness? What's the path of Dharma?" And he said, "Well, first you begin, and then you continue." That's it. You just keep practicing.

So thank you for your attention. I'll see you tomorrow and give my last little dharmette for the week. I hope the week has been useful so far. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.