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Guided Meditation: Being Changed by Experience Rather than Changing it

Welcome. Welcome, all. I'm just seeing the names stream through, and welcome to all of you. So, here we are again together, and let us practice together.

Finding your posture. Even if it's very familiar, finding it again. Taking a posture that's both supple but strong. Noting a kind of openness to phenomena.

We relax whatever tension can be relaxed. Whatever tension remains, we allow to remain.

Our practice is to release some of the tendencies we have around pushing and pulling. Pushing and pulling on phenomena.

So rather than trying to shape our experience, we just let ourselves be softened by it. Let the heart be softened by experience.

All phenomena converge on feeling. Centrality of feeling.

The urge to fix, to adjust the shape. The limits of our equanimity are felt in the realm of feeling.

So we permit phenomena, sights and sounds, thought and sensation; we permit them access to our heart, to feeling.

We're willing to be impacted. We're willing to be still. We're willing to be changed by experience, rather than change it.

It's agitating to try to cobble together a life, to cobble together solutions, to cobble together an identity, to get our papers in order.

So we stand down. Settle back. Willing to feel our way through the flood of urges. Urges to shape experience, to shape ourselves, to shape our life.

Equanimity (4 of 5): Skillfully Meeting Feelings Associated with Self

When the astronauts first walked on the moon, they planted an American flag. I've always thought that they really should have planted a flag with an image of the moon, right? They planted an American flag, and we plant flags too. We plant flags all over the place, and our flag has two letters on it: m-e. Me.

And we plant flags to feel safe, to feel good, to have reference points. But any claimed territory entails territoriality. And as social animals with social needs, we do a lot of flag planting.

As social animals with social needs, this can turn the world into a kind of stage. There are many dimensions of the self that are performative. Not all dimensions of the self are a performance, but many are, and performance is tiring. Actors rehearse and summon energy, confront doubts, are concerned about breaking character, concerned about being found out. Stressful.

Sociologist Erving Goffman^[1], from almost 70 years ago, said, "The world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify." He goes on to say, choose your self-presentation carefully, for what starts out as a mask becomes your face.

In a sense, our performances are an argument. In the legal sense, they're an argument. We're making a case. We're making a case for me as valuable in some way. That makes sense, but we want to be careful, because we confuse a mask, an argument, for ourselves.

And then Buddhism takes us deeper, and it's not just the mask that's not you, but you are not your face either.

This deep, deep assumption—"I am me, this moment fits into who I was, who I will be, my autobiography"—is deeply felt and experienced. Yet we're directed to the understanding that clinging to a particular view of self is very fertile ground for pain, for ourselves and others.

Many painful emotional experiences serve to illuminate the architecture of self-view. The structures, the edifice of self-view, are illuminated by afflictive emotion, by shame, by arrogance, by self-righteousness. This illuminates the architecture of self-view. Rather than devote ourselves to endlessly making our arguments, to curating ourselves, we investigate.

And we maybe find that the hallmark of ego is defensiveness. It is that territoriality. We claim territory, we become territorial, and wherever there is self-identification, there can also be shame.

So we look, how does this self congeal? How do we make our arguments? At some point in practice, we become unconvinced by our autobiography. Unconvinced by our autobiography and all the familiar stories, the familiar milieu of me—the arrogance, the sense of unworthiness, the self-hatred, all of the all-too-familiar tropes in our autobiography. We become alienated from all of it.

It's not that we dispute the conclusions and say no; it's other than that. We just become alienated from the whole realm of self-view and are born into something like wonder and openness.

Equanimity, of course, is vital in this. It's vital in the process of developing a fluid sense of self. It's vital in the process of developing this insight into not-self.

Our points of identification, the arguments we make, wanting to be this, resisting that, making the case to ourselves, to others—this arises as feeling. Feeling seen, feeling too seen, not feeling seen, feeling misconstrued; all of this is acutely painful.

Our practice is to slowly drain the charge from every egoic definition. So notions of self arise. The cases we want to make, they arise in formal practice. We meet them. We meet those arisings with equanimity.

To know the emptiness of our identifications is to feel them. To feel the impact of this urge to be this, to be that, to prove this, to prove that. To decorate one's mask, to decorate one's face, to curate the self.

We greet all of these flows and urges with equanimity, and slowly begin to drain the electrical charge from them. So the solidity of identity begins to soften, to melt.

We grieve anattā^[2], this teaching on not-self. We grieve anattā before it becomes liberating. In a sense, we have to grieve the three characteristics^[3] before they become freeing.

No one gets to become the person they think they are. There's just no place to rest, no refuge to be found, no identity that provides shelter, a sense of the heart resting on steady ground.

None of this is to turn the ego into a kind of inner enemy, right? With this practice, the theme of equanimity is not making an enemy of any experience.

So we don't turn a kind of aggression inwards, or go hunting down the sense of self, or something like this. The self, these egoic processes, are a kind of sensitivity. Childlike, desperate. So desperate, and it needs love. It needs love, not aggression.

So we give love. We offer ourselves love, we receive love, and we start to be less congealed, to have less and less of an impulse to make our cases. We're really no longer guarding something that is both precious and incredibly fragile.

No longer guarding the inherent fragility of self that also feels, at moments, priceless. We're no longer safeguarding something that is totally fragile and totally precious, and this puts us at ease. This opens our heart to many forms of love, because ownership generates anxiety.

So I offer this for your consideration as we practice with this theme, equanimity. Allowing life to touch us, rather than to shape life.

Reflections

So it's good to be with you all. All I have is my little webcam, but my practice is to shower it with mettā^[4].

Okay, I wish you all well. Have a good day, and we'll return tomorrow.