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Guided Meditation: Clinging Complicates Everything

So, let's sit together here.

I had a yoga teacher sometimes say, "What does light make heavy? What does heavy make light?" Yeah, in a posture, in an asana: "What does light make heavy? What does heavy make light?" Pointing to this gesture of smoothing out, smoothing out body and mind. Evening out the energies of body and mind.

We can use the breath as a way of unifying, smoothing energies of the moment. So what is hyped up, hyperactive? Bring the soothing breath to, "Ah, that constellation of feeling in my chest. Let me breathe into that. Soothe that."

Maybe there are places of numbness, or fatigue, sloth, and we breathe life into it. Spine reaching upwards to the sky, the rest of the body hanging loosely. Just unifying the field with the breathing, feeling the breath in your whole body.

What would we do if we weren't busy clinging? Clinging is inherently agitating, complicating. It's so easy to repeat our habits of greed and aversion, as we said. And yet, practice is practicing non-clinging. I use that word "practicing" in the same sense that one might practice a free throw playing basketball.

Or clinging was like a little whirlpool of energy somewhere in body and mind. What does light make heavy? What does heavy make light? We smooth out the energy, especially of our body.

And rather than acting out greed, we practice equanimity with longing. Rather than act out aversion, we practice equanimity with imperfection. This way, our moment starts to get very simple. Clinging is complicated. Letting go feels very simple. It simplifies.

The moment can get very simple. Sacred, really. A sense of the dharma coursing through it, and just to rest. There is no "my."

The Pain of the Other Spins Our Mind (3 of 5)

Sometimes I'd say that it feels like the First Noble Truth contains the other three. That somehow, if we can open to dukkha^[1], there's no joke. It's easy to get familiar with suffering in a way and say, "Oh yeah, I get the truth of dukkha." But do we realize it in the sense that Sedgwick talked about realization—of making something real?

A friend who recently finished a long retreat said during this time, sometimes the memory of the suffering of a pet from decades ago would just pierce her heart. There's a bumper sticker that says, "I brake for suffering." But the question is like, would we ever hit the accelerator, right?

It's a major project to open to one's own suffering. Major. But sometimes the suffering of the other is even more evocative. It can be evocative in ways that open us to deep compassion. We see the suffering of a loved one and the heart just naturally opens. And sometimes, of course, our care gets tangled up with our clinging, and our control, and with our preferences or our needs.

We have entrusted our heart to another by choice or by birth. What that means is that in a sense, all of their suffering feels like our business. As a child, the suffering or imperfection of a parent has huge implications for our sense of safety, of protection. So their pain, their confusion, their greed, their hate is itself destabilizing for the child, right? For ourselves as children. There's a deep wobble that can happen in our own heart when we see loved ones in pain, or we see loved ones acting out their own defilements.

In a sense, their neurosis could be just a kind of opportunity for our own care and compassion, but their neurosis usually interacts with our neurosis. It's like their clinging tangles with our clinging.

A friend and teacher was telling me that at a pre-COVID family gathering with his family and his wife's family, he says to his wife, "Can you believe how my mom's acting? I'm sorry." And his wife says, "No, no, no, your mom is fine. Can you believe how my mom's acting?" [Laughter] Right? Sort of like, "Oh yeah." Something particular gets evoked in us along these lines of connection, of love, of clinging.

Researchers have done brain imaging when one person is seeing a loved one suffer, do a pain task, actually. Some way of knowing that a loved one is uncomfortable. Actually, part of the research is for the other one too to be in some pain. A lot of our brain lights up—regions associated with understanding the state of the other, but also a kind of affective resonance. Some of the same things happen in our brain as if we were in pain.

Kittisaro and Thanissara^[2], beloved teachers in this lineage, were monastics for many years and then left the monastic lineage. They have been a couple for a long time now, and still very obviously serious practitioners and teachers. They were asked at one point, "What's it like to be in relationship?" And Kittisaro said, "It's like two people under one robe." Referring to the monastic experience—two people under one robe. Their goodness, their suffering, all under one robe.

When we see suffering in our own life, it can get us just naturally scrambling to reorder circumstances. And when we see suffering of someone close to us, it kind of does the same thing. We habitually move into this mode of trying to reorder circumstances. But that often means we're trying to reorder who they are. And so the compassion, the care becomes entangled. It's no longer free, and our aversion or our fear is what's driving the show. We get frustrated, we get controlling, and then we try to change them through our own frustration.

When I think about what I want in all my relationships, well, really I want them all to be arahants^[3]. [Laughter] Yeah, to be fully enlightened. I get to be a basket of defilements, but they better be deeply enlightened, right?

The greed, the aversion, the delusion, the non-enlightenment I perceive in loved ones is especially evocative for me. It spins me. On the one hand, I know if I respond to my own suffering in that way, it's totally unproductive, but it's somehow harder to resist interpersonally. For their greed, aversion, and delusion not to spin me in a way I know is unproductive. So yeah, may they all be enlightened, right? But then again, in the end, even if I lived with the Buddha, I know I would get irritated by something. "Honey, you know, Lord Buddha, can't you see I'm angry? Why are you so calm?" [Laughter]

There was an interview with a writer who was asked if literature changes people. The writer said, "I don't think people change very much. To the extent that people change at all, it's because of some encounter that has love in it."

It's hard to grow, we know that. Sometimes it happens in a flash, but a lot of times it's very incremental. It's hard to grow. It's hard to change. And if we're going to do it, for sure love will be involved. The irony is the people we most want to change are the ones we tend to be most enraged by. Even if that frustration is subtle. And yet, we know anger and aversion is the single worst way to support someone in their change, in their evolution.

So we're going to have to tolerate some ambivalence, and we're going to have to open our heart to the imperfection of the other, just in the same way we open our heart to the imperfection of ourselves. Compassion is not an insistence that someone change. Deep, deep acceptance, forgiveness—it doesn't mean condoning harm, but forgiveness. And what is forgiveness other than really just understanding? Understanding their inner life.

So we investigate: what does the pain or the neurosis of the other do to your mind? What happens in your heart? What is evoked in perceiving their own dukkha? In what way does our care and our dependence express itself as compassion, as a kind of generosity of heart, and in what ways do the impulses of control get born?

On the last album of his life, Leonard Cohen sang, "I wish there was a treaty we could sign. I do not care who takes this bloody hill. I'm angry and I'm tired all the time. I wish there was a treaty. I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine."

So may we practice well. See you tomorrow.