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Introduction

Hi, welcome, folks. Welcome to you all.

Last week I wore what I consider my nicest shirt. It was a gift; it's made in Italy. And Debbie asked if I was wearing my pajamas. And no, I was not. But today I've worn a very non-pajama shirt, for the people, you know. [Laughter] So, that's how I'm doing.

I got a message today. Interesting things come into my voicemail sometimes. There's a friend, a long-time meditator, who kind of lives inside a Dharma talk—that would be how I would characterize it. He just lives inside a Dharma talk, either giving it to himself, some imagined audience, or a real person. This is what came in on the voicemail:

"I was actually sitting here meditating, and I had this profound experience. I was suddenly like, 'I could talk to Matthew about this.' So, give me a call. I'll just tell you my thing real quick, okay?

It's this: It's when you're present. I've noticed how much, on a deep level, my mind is future-based. And of course, all humans think about the future. Sure, definitely. But relating to what's happening now and truly not relating to that vis-a-vis any way towards the future. Meaning, even if I'm sitting, there's a part of me that's like, 'This is a good sit. This will serve me in the future. It's a good thing. If I'm liberated, I'll be happier in the future. This is good for me.' You know what I mean? Even the most benevolent, non-egotistical ways of trying to hold on to the future, it's still very much in relationship to the future.

I've been hitting this state recently, once in a while, where it's like, 'No, really. There's no future. Really. There's no future as far as how this moment is experienced.' And it's just crazy after 30, 35 years of practice to be kind of coming up with, 'Hey, yeah. It's really just about being here now.' Anyway, man, thought you'd get a kick out of that. Alright, love you, miss you. Hope to talk to you soon."

So, let us sit.

Guided Meditation: here, now

It is good for you. But good for you is not here, not now. What is actually here now?

The idea this is good for me—that might be here. But good for me at some point is not here, but here. We can only live one moment at a time.

Love takes us here. Hatred takes us there.

Just opening our heart to what's here. Just this breath, this body, this constellation of sensations called this body.

How long is now?

Here. It feels like it's here. It feels like it's bound up in the potential energy of what is here. Bound up in thought and expectation, prediction, and imagination. Bound up in the ways we try to track the trajectory of what is here in terms of what will be here. But all of that is just happening now. Creating the illusion that we might ever be anywhere else.

How much courage, or love, skill, or something might it take to renounce becoming, just for now?

And just because the future keeps coming doesn't mean that in this moment it's not an illusion. After all these years, here, now. Opening to the bottomless present.

And the perverse logic of this whole realm is that there's only freedom for those who aren't trying to get free.

Dharmette: Rumination and Intrusive Thought

Thank you. So, I got a question about working with rumination and intrusive thinking.

A friend of mine taught a retreat with Byron Katie^[1] and described how steadfast she was in locating the cause and the expression of our suffering in our thinking. You know, the famous line, "Who would you be without your story?" That question stops at least some suffering in its tracks. Suffering kind of needs a name and form to be truly suffering.

But the Dharma is also transmitted through language. It celebrates contemplation, wise thoughts, insight, and learning. Much of what we do in our Dharma practice is actually to give ourselves highly tailored, precise pep talks and reminders. We call in certain moments, certain signs, or a certain phrase to remind us what we need to remember. Michelle McDonald^[2] said, sort of teasing about our antagonistic relationship to thought, "You wouldn't plug your ears with cotton to get enlightened. So why would you try to do that with your mind?"

So perhaps we can say that thinking is a double-edged sword. We ask our thoughts to do a lot—some reasonable, maybe some too much. To game out and protect us from uncertainty. We ask our thoughts to help us digest painful experience, to make us feel good about ourselves, to provide us meaning.

But rumination gives thinking a bad name. In rumination, we're truly asking too much from our thoughts. Rumination is that particular species of thinking that tries to accomplish with words what can only be done with action, wisdom, and silence.

We should first know and appreciate that a practice like lavishing this Dharma attention will tend to amplify the noise of our mind, including rumination. We want the signal, but we hear the noise. But actually listening to the noise is the signal. Deeply listening to the noise is the signal. We start to hear the Dharma. And the Dharma is in the contour of our thought, not its content, as Shinzen^[3] would often say.

Rumination is this repetitive, often intrusive, prolonged, negative thinking about oneself, feelings, concerns, upsetting experiences, or memories. It's prominent in depression and some anxiety disorders, but it's generally considered a transdiagnostic construct, meaning that rumination is elevated across a wide range of psychological suffering conditions.

Rumination sort of feels like looking for the last missing puzzle piece, except you're playing chess. It's that fantasy of, "If I could just find that last piece, I complete this, solve the riddle." That's not the game. Sometimes rumination masquerades as a sincere existential curiosity, but it's not that. It sounds like we're asking important questions about meaning, love, and connection, but it's not that.

Rumination magnifies and prolongs existing negative moods. It interferes with effective problem solving, even though it's chewing, chewing, chewing, trying to solve. Research finds it reduces sensitivity to changing conditions and context.

Maybe we can say that rumination is the truest kind of thinking. It's complete identification with thought. In other words, it's the least amount of metacognitive awareness where we know thinking as thinking. In rumination, the thoughts are the realest thing in the world. It feels almost like the words can move the world, change the conditions of past and future. In obsessional intrusive thinking, the content of the thought is often the difference between terribleness and okayness.

Sometimes we have an intrusive memory rumination about the past. Rumination is often how we try to digest egoically stimulating events. The affect is so heightened that we're trying to soothe the feeling with words. But the words don't usually work so well. The wounds of the past are not so much healed by language, but by love, patience, and tolerance of feeling. The mind that's in pain desperately wants to come to conclusions, but we try to stay wordless. We try, at least for this moment, to renounce words as our primary coping method.

Yes, there are liberating stories. A liberating narrative is the endpoint, but it's not the starting point of feeling better. We have to feel our way into a liberating story, into liberating words, into an empowered way of understanding. But we can't write that story until we've renounced words and felt our way through the past.

We tend to think compulsively about the undigested past because we're afraid of what the past means about us, about our future. There is a sense that there are secrets bound up in that pain: "They mean something about me, they mean something about the future." But the secrets bound up in pain cannot be coaxed out by words, but by silence. So we sit still.

Rumination seems like entanglement; it seems like the opposite of avoidance. We're chewing, chewing, chewing—that seems like the opposite of avoidance, but there's usually a thread of avoidance. Even though rumination is so painful, it's less painful than something else. What is it less painful than? Can we be awake to that? Open our heart to that?

Other times rumination is about the future, trying sometimes to outsmart the First Noble Truth^[4], you know, that there is suffering. It's like, "Okay, we can see options A, B, and C. Oh, yeah, those include suffering. What about D? Is D on the list?" And no.

Anxiety is often described as the intolerance of uncertainty. When we meet uncertainty, we're desperate for information that might reduce the uncertainty. And so we burrow into our thinking: "I want this uncertainty reduced. Information reduces uncertainty. Can I go forage for some information in my thinking?" But that's not actually information. That's not data; it's noise. Our ruminative thinking is so thin, the story emerging out of it so concocted. We kind of know that. And so we're dissatisfied. We can sense the dissatisfaction, and doubt becomes a disease.

Equanimity makes us less afraid. Part of the desperation to find a way out with our thinking is the sense that certain futures cannot be handled. Equanimity is a kind of confidence that it may hurt, but it will not harm my heart.

There's a scientific finding that in rumination, the salience network of the brain—sort of detecting motivationally important internal and external stimuli—is over-engaged. Maybe we could say things that don't matter so much register as really mattering. We're mistaking the noise for the signal, caring about the wrong things. We don't have to cease caring, but we want to refine what we care about, what is worth wanting.

And so, as we get activated by things that don't matter as much as they feel like they do in that moment, we practice developing tranquility. In tranquility, the stickiness of thought is reduced. Hyperarousal demands potent storytelling and meaning-making. But when we get still, thought has less value. It's less salient.

Maybe a last thing to say: sometimes rumination is how we punish ourselves while delaying action. We know we need to act, we don't want to do it, and we buy ourselves some time by stewing. But sometimes mind states can only be broken by clear action. Sometimes we have to act even though we don't feel ready. It is actually some wise action that breaks the cycle of internal spin.

So, I offer this for whatever it may be worth. Thank you for your attention, and I'll be back next week. Good to deal with you.