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Guided Meditation: Aliveness, Not Aboutness

Hello everyone, from everywhere. Now here we come at the end of the week, and I believe that these days that I've been sitting down here, I've been feeling fairly empty in a very nice way. I hope that it comes across okay in this YouTube world.

What if we study our thinking? One of the ways to understand this is that thoughts are usually about something: about the meal I'm going to have, the meal that I just had that wasn't quite right, work, a conversation, an event that happened, some self-concern, plans we're making, or a fantasy we have. We think about things.

The world of "aboutness" is at least one step removed from the world of aliveness. In some ways, the world of aboutness is maybe a one-dimensional or two-dimensional world. It's a kind of a virtual reality world, that world of thoughts. I love my thoughts, mostly. At least, I have a very positive relationship to them, so I don't feel like I need to be critical of them. But I am aware that they are about something. And if I spend too much time in that world of aboutness, then I become separated from the world of aliveness.

One way of understanding this meditation is that it's a switch from aboutness to aliveness. We're not so focused on the world of aboutness, but we're focused on the living world that we can experience, feel, see, touch, and know directly, here and now.

So, this distinction—thoughts being the world of aboutness—maybe helps you to break the enchantment with them, or break the allure or the strong pull into the world of thoughts. And this idea that the alternative in meditation is the world of aliveness, maybe that is a welcoming idea to show up here for your lived experience of the moment.

So, assuming a meditation posture and gently closing your eyes.

Gently, slowly, as if you're entering into a beautiful place, a forest, or a sacred grove, gently, slowly take some deeper breaths. Just deep enough that it remains comfortable for you. And maybe in a way that's comfortable, taking these deep breaths and then a slow, long exhale, maybe exhaling more than usual. As you exhale, let the shoulders relax, let the belly relax. Let your body settle here.

Letting your breathing return to normal. To begin meditation with relaxing is also a way of settling into the lived body, the experience of aliveness in the body.

So, as you exhale, you might relax the muscles of your face. Maybe the character of aliveness in the face changes as the face relaxes. On the exhale, softening the shoulders. And as you do so, perhaps the shoulders expand in their aliveness, the range of feelings.

Softening the belly, settling in. Letting your belly hang forward and down. Maybe the belly relaxes, and the center of gravity settles in the body. And then to have a global awareness of the body, meaning a wide, broad experience of the body as is available for you. And on the exhale, softening the whole body, and softening into the sense of aliveness in the body.

And then relaxing into the body breathing. In many ways, breathing is an animating force for our lived life. Feeling how the body experiences breathing, settling in.

If your mind goes into the world of thoughts, maybe think of it as the world of aboutness. Maybe even noticing that you're thinking about something, of course. But that's a bit removed from the world of aliveness here and now in the body. For these minutes, choose aliveness instead of aboutness.

It makes a difference if we live in the world of aboutness or the world of aliveness. It makes a difference for the emotions that can be present for us. Some emotions are born from aboutness, the thoughts, the stories. And some emotions arise out of the aliveness. Aliveness has a quality of freedom in it, openness, allowing.

Notice at this point what arises from your aliveness, not your aboutness.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, see if you can touch into a place of tender love, goodwill, or kindness that doesn't arise out of aboutness—that you're not thinking yourself into it—but maybe someplace deeper, embodied in your heart, an aliveness that comes from being relaxed, open, and available for this world.

And imagine going into the world now, this way. Maybe imagine going into the world with the equivalent of Midas's touch: that whatever you touch, you meet, you touch it with goodwill, with kindness, with care.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Respecting Anger (5 of 5) MADLESS

Good morning, good day. Here we are in the last talk about anger.

Anger might arise out of a particular incident in the moment. Even if it does, if it lasts, it has moved from the world of immediacy and aliveness into the world of our memory, thoughts, ideas, and story-making in the mind. It turns out that a lot of anger, anything that's chronic resentment and irritation, has a lot to do with the world of aboutness—the world of thinking about things, the story-making that we do.

The more intense and involved we are with anger, the more there's a diminishment or a loss that we experience. There is a kind of suffering, pain, and stress that comes with being angry. Also, the stronger it is, the more there's a preoccupation with something, about something. That preoccupation means that we're not available for a wider range of our emotional, spiritual, inner life. By not being caught up in anything, we're available for a range of responses, a range of empathy, and a range of perception of what's happening. That gets diminished the more we get preoccupied.

One way to get preoccupied is around anger. At times, it gets quite intense, and it really diminishes our capacity to feel, to sense, to experience, and to perceive the world and ourselves. The world of anger tends to get reduced more and more, and it gets reduced off into a world of aboutness. Even if there's a mood that's kind of angry, irritated, or hostile, it's probably being fueled by some background story, belief, or idea that's going on. It takes courage to drop the beliefs, the preoccupations, and the stories in order to be present more fully for the aliveness of our life.

This week, one of the things I hope I've conveyed is that anger is a worthwhile subject for attention, mindfulness, and study. Rather than having some blanket policy that anger is bad and we shouldn't be angry, we don't need to have that policy because we have a mindfulness practice that can help us find a way through the anger. We can understand what is dysfunctional about anger, what is causing stress for ourselves with anger, what is unnecessary, and what diminishes us. We can use it as an object of mindfulness to reclaim our freedom, our independence, and our ability not to be caught by it. In the process of that, we learn a lot.

Using anger as a medium for learning about our grievance, the difficulty that's happening, or the challenge that's represented by the anger, we get to distinguish the essential part of our study. Sometimes we have to study what's happening externally and understand the situation better. Sometimes we have to understand ourselves better because that's really the genesis or the active center of the anger, and that's where it's productive to bring our attention.

As I bring this topic of anger to a conclusion, I would like to offer you an acronym. It's a bit long, maybe, and the acronym is MADLESS. To be without mad, without anger—coming to madlessness. If you are looking at this on YouTube now, in the information section below, I have written out the acronym.

• M is motivation.
• A is attention.
• D is to diffuse.
• L is to learn.
• E is empathy.
• S is for story substitution—change the story.
• The second S is to speak.

We don't want to be mindful and resolve our anger, and then become silent when the world needs us to speak. The situation needs us to speak about what's going on. We sometimes diffuse anger so that we can address a real-world need.

So, Motivation. Think of anger itself as a motivational feeling. What does it want? What is it trying to do? What's really happening there? Are we trying to get rid of something? Are we trying to change something? Are we trying to get away from something? Are we trying to attack someone? Is there hostility, which is a kind of motivation? Are we trying to harm someone, hurt someone with our words, or maybe get back at them? Or are we trying to change a situation that needs to be changed? What change are we trying to evoke with anger, trying to make happen? Study what the anger is about and what its purpose is. Is it really a purpose we stand behind? Do we have another motivation that's more valuable for us, more important, that comes to the surface if we spend time looking at the purpose—the motivation of the anger?

Attention is to really bring a lot of attention to this experience of anger. One of the fundamental aspects of mindfulness meditation is mindfulness of the body. If we really feel our body when we're angry, the anger tends to dissipate. It tends to create some space for it. It also teaches us a lot about how we're involved with the anger—that we're contracted and tight, leaning forward or pulling back, whatever we're doing. Maybe we notice our fist is clenched. So, keep coming back to the body. Many years ago, I was really angry with someone, and I didn't know what was going on with my body. There was a pause—the person had to go away to do something—and then I noticed my body. I noticed that I was leaning forward and tight. So then I came back into myself, and it made a huge difference. We use attention to notice what's happening here for us, and all these different practices of MADLESS all require some use of attention.

Then to Diffuse^[1] it. To diffuse means—not so much to take the fuse away (defuse)—but to dissipate or reduce the tension that's there. The less tension there is in anger, the wiser we'll become, and the less we're under the influence of the anger. So, develop and learn skills of diffusion, of relaxation, of calming. Breathing deeply, relaxing the body, and taking a posture that's stable and strong allows a different kind of attention where we're more present in a way that we are in charge. We become more capable of making wise choices.

And then to Learn. I think this is one of the great principles around anger: always, when we're angry, there's something to learn. Take the time to learn it. What's the lesson that's here? For many of us, I think there's a huge lesson to be learned within ourselves. What is the attachment that triggered the anger? What's the place inside—the belief, the sense of self, the history we have, the wound we have that's been touched by the incident around us? The unattended, unresolved wounds we carry with us. So to learn what's going on, sometimes we will learn outside. One of the things to learn outside is to learn what's going on with the other people—what's really happening there.

Many years ago, I read that in the New York bus system, they gave a kind of training for bus drivers. They showed them a video of people who get on the bus who are very annoying to bus drivers, who just have behavior which is troublesome and difficult. They interviewed or talked to these people and found out that they had all kinds of difficult personal circumstances—maybe learning disabilities, or all kinds of personal challenges that were not obvious on the surface. As soon as the bus drivers began looking at the personal challenges these people had, their anger and annoyance toward the people who were difficult on the bus decreased dramatically. If we take time to learn about who people are, maybe there's much less reason to be angry, though there might be reasons for compassion, care, and having a strong conversation.

And then to have Empathy. To care about others, to have love, to have kindness. Following up on what I just said about learning—really get to know people and understand more deeply what's going on with them when they behave with difficulty. But not so much because they deserve it, but because it's actually better medicine for each of us, for ourselves, to have degrees of compassion, love, kindness, and empathy, than it is to do the opposite and to be closed.

Much of our anger has to do with some story we're telling ourselves. I've had anger with people where I had the wrong story. I had made up a story, an interpretation that wasn't really what happened. So be very careful with the stories you tell yourself. The fish gets bigger the more they tell the story, as they say. What stories are you telling, and are they really accurate? Check out the story. Find out. Say, "This is what I understand happened," and maybe it didn't happen that way. Or maybe there's more to it than meets the eye. Change the story.

And then Speak. We talked about this yesterday. As I said earlier, mindfulness meditation—this Buddhist approach to anger—is not meant to make us passive, mute, silent, uninterested, and uninvolved with the world and other people. Most anger is social. Most anger has to do with people around us, especially if it's really intense, simmers, and lasts. The anger we have for technology or the weather doesn't have the same power as the anger we have with people in social circumstances. So it implies that sometimes it's very important in the social world to speak. What do we speak? How do we speak? How do we speak with kindness, clarity, and purpose for bringing the welfare of everyone involved?

I think that is one of the principles I'd like to end this discussion on anger with: the principle that we live a life that looks for what's best for everyone involved in a situation. We don't look at just what's best for ourselves. We look at what's best for everyone—surprisingly, even for the people who've harmed us. What's best for ourselves and what's best for others fits into what's best overall as we create a better society.

I'd like to end with a quote from Maha Ghosananda^[2]. He was kind of like the Mahatma Gandhi of Cambodia. After the Khmer Rouge genocide there, he was the Buddhist leader of Cambodia. He was a Buddhist monk. I met him; he was a lovely man, very peaceful, very loving, and full of smiles. And he wrote:

"I do not question that loving one's oppressors—Cambodians loving the Khmer Rouge—may be the most difficult attitude to achieve. But it is a law of the universe that retaliation, hatred, and revenge only continue the cycle and never stop it. Reconciliation does not mean that we surrender rights and conditions, but rather that we use love in all our negotiations. It means that we see ourselves in the opponent—for what is the opponent but a being in ignorance? And we ourselves are also ignorant of many things. Therefore, only loving-kindness and right mindfulness can free us."

So to practice, bring anger under the purview of our practice, our mindfulness, and maybe we can negotiate with our enemies with love. So speak. Thank you.

Announcements

I have a few announcements. One is that I'll be away on vacation next week, and so my friend and wonderful Zen teacher Paul Haller will come and teach this 7:00 a.m. sitting starting Monday. Some of you remember Paul; he came and did a week back last April and May when I did the Zen-Vipassana retreat. I'm very happy he's coming.

Tomorrow, IMC's Earth Care group has a wonderful teacher named Thanissara^[3] coming to give a dharma talk. You have to go onto IMC's website, I think it's listed under "What's New".

Finally, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm doing a day-long online retreat on July 9th. I think it was not so easy to find where to register or the information about it. It should be easier now because it's in the "What's New" section of IMC's website much more clearly. Eventually, it will be clearly on the calendar as well, but for now, it's in the "What's New" on the homepage.

Thank you, and I look forward to coming back in a couple of weeks. I'll be here on the 4th of July. Thank you.