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Guided Meditation: Don't Let Greed And Aversion Lurk Behind the Technique

So good morning. It's good to be with you, just watching the chat on the side of my screen. Yeah, welcome, welcome to you all.

Generally, I've practiced in a very technique-oriented way, and that's been of profound benefit, and I lean on meditation technique often. It strikes me that sometimes the urge to reach for technique means that greed or aversion has already taken hold in the background.

The urge to find technique sometimes is an expression of our reticence to meet the clinging already present. Now, sometimes technique is the best way of meeting it, but we want to be a little wary, I feel, about using technique to defend against the wildness of our heart and mind.

And so I just plant this seed as how I will proceed to teach technique, but I plant this seed so that we have some appreciation of the subtleties of the movement towards technique. We are careful, in a way, not to recapitulate the clinging in our practice. A little subtle, but just to consider.

So let's practice.

Just all at once, the awareness can arrive. Just affirming your aspirations for practice, summoning some measure of courage, actually. It takes a lot of courage to truly meet the intensity of the human condition.

Bringing attention to the sensations of breathing, wherever they're felt most clearly. Wherever that is, just rest the attention in a simple way there.

Feeling some precision when the inhale begins, and when the exhale begins and ends.

The attentional spotlight on your breathing becomes steadier and brighter. As we settle, there's less and less light that escapes to other phenomena.

The breath is illuminated, and everything else is enveloped in darkness.

But that's not how it usually is.

The throb of worry and concern, of preoccupation and strategizing—all of this wants to share the attentional light.

Our thinking is the top geological stratum, but beneath it is affect, feeling. The body under conditions of threat, opportunity. And so when the attention moves away, when that light begins to leak away from the sensations of breathing, see if you can make a perfect peace with affect, with feeling.

In some ways, attending to the breathing in this gentle, precise way is shelter from the storm. But in order to feel like shelter, we need to have made peace with the storm.

To attend to the breathing is to release the grip on the rest of phenomena. To put down covetousness and displeasure with respect to the world.

Affect and the Interpersonal Realm (5 of 5)

So, thank you. It's good to sit with you. We'll continue with our theme for the week.

A group of prominent emotion scientists and neuroscientists wrote a piece recently in a prominent journal titled The Rise of Affectivism. What they said was there was behaviorism, which was oriented around conditioning, reinforcement, reward, and punishment. Then there was a cognitive phase, where a lot of the attention was around memory, attention, and perception. Now they suggest maybe we're in a phase in this cognitive science realm of affectivism: valence, emotion, empathy, mood, motivation, stress, and well-being.

They write:

"The behavioral and cognitive sciences have faced perennial challenges of incorporating emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes into models of human behavior and the human mind. Such processes have long been marginalized or ignored, typically on the basis that they were irrational, unmeasurable, or simply unenlightening. However, it's become increasingly difficult to deny that these processes are not only linked to well-being, but also shape our behavior and drive key cognitive mechanisms such as attention, learning, memory, decision making. Emotions do not just shape how we interpret the world, but also shape which aspects of the world need our attention and which can be safely ignored. Emotions are not just about what is, but also about what matters."

So much hinges on feeling. In this interpersonal realm that has been our focus, it's so vital that we become deeply acquainted. There are, of course, thoughts, perception, sights, sounds, tastes, and other sensations, but feeling is the linchpin.

Ajahn Sucitto^[1] says, "All dhammas^[2] converge on feeling." All dhammas—all phenomena in this context—converge on feeling.

Experience largely becomes meaningful because of feeling. Motivation depends on feeling. The sense of urgency depends on feeling. Each feeling state announces a kind of command: do something, say something, think something. And so we have to develop a wise, clear, loving relationship with our feeling life, and nowhere is this more apparent than in enjoying and navigating the interpersonal realm.

Evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse^[3] says:

"Emotions are specialized modes of operation shaped by natural selection to adjust the physiological, psychological, and behavioral parameters in ways that increase our capacity and tendency to respond adaptively to threats and opportunities."

And there are always threats and opportunities. Being with others entails some threat and opportunity.

Remember that line we started with from Lisa Feldman Barrett: the best thing for a human nervous system is another human, and the worst thing for a human nervous system is another human. We are navigating subtle or more demonstrable threat and opportunity, and this means that our feeling life is very prominent in the interpersonal realm.

While emotion is designed to promote evolutionary fitness, that's very different from saying that it's designed for enlightenment. There are some things where we flow with the stream of our own biological conditioning, and other things where we go against the stream. So we need deep emotional wisdom to tolerate the dependence of love. The surrender that I was speaking about yesterday—the increasing riskiness of entrusting our heart to another—can torque our mind in a lot of different ways.

To open our heart to another entails a willingness and courage to grieve. All that is precious and dear to me is of the nature to change.

My colleague, Giselle Jones, defines intimacy as the ability and willingness to see and be seen. We need profound emotional skill to be undisguised in our strength and our poverty.

Wisdom and equanimity are required to fully enjoy pleasure. Not to pinch our pleasure because it feels wild, exposed, or somehow cuts against our notion of restraint. We often talk about equanimity with craving, and that's one thing that's vital. But what is equanimity with pleasure itself? It does not mean to squash it, it does not mean to not enjoy it, and it does not mean to be worried about getting attached.

How do we bring this kind of skill with feeling so as not to suppress or get entangled? We need wisdom to navigate the inevitable challenges, frustrations, and disappointments. The cycles of idealization, disillusionment, and reconnecting to some warmth. The tolerance of ambivalence. One way of thinking about dukkha^[4], about suffering, is about ambivalence.

We need emotional skill to recognize that the other can never be the end of your seeking. Other people in our lives can do so much—some things that only another can do—but the other cannot be the end of seeking. Wanting, in other words, is always different from getting.

We need emotional skill to be wrong. There's so much shame about being wrong, and we're wrong so much. Sometimes you know those moments, you kind of know you're wrong. Maybe you're having a conversation with somebody important to you, and there's that subtle little voice of, "Yeah, I kind of know I'm wrong," right? But the prospect of the shame of acknowledging it is just too much, so we double down. Even though we know we're bluffing, we just dig in.

I was always inspired by something Sylvia Boorstein^[5] said. She said, "When I realize I'm wrong, I'll just pull up right out of the moment, just mid-sentence, and say, 'Yeah, I'm wrong. I'm sorry, this doesn't feel right.'" You know, it's like you can feel that you're about to redouble, dig back into your emotional stance, and the courage of just stopping mid-sentence and saying, "Wait a second," takes skill. Emotional skill. We need skill amidst all of these realms of feeling in the interpersonal realm.

Ajahn Sucitto^[6] says, if it's properly cultivated, the body can provide a mooring post. It's the ground, the stabilizer. It knows how to discharge energy. All that push of the mind sends a lot of energy into the system. Sometimes you can get quite heated or feel very heavy, tense, tight, disoriented. That's what's happening. What's happening is all that vedanā^[7] and saṅkhāras^[8] are pushing and driving, churning up energy.

The body knows how to discharge; the mind doesn't, not by itself. This is how you allow the discharge to happen: relax, open the palms of the hands, open the soles of the feet, relax the jaw. Open the temples of the head, sockets of the eyes, and the forehead. Drop your shoulders, loosen your belly. Breathing out, releasing. You begin to see that those mental, emotional, psychological patterns have a body correlate, a correlation, and you work on their bodily aspect. It may not give you clear solutions as to why you feel this way, what you're going to do with the rest of your life, or how you're going to sort out this person, and so forth, but it will tell you how to stop suffering.

So as we develop more wisdom, patience, and equanimity around feeling, this also deepens our empathic capacity. When we bring a higher resolution to our inner feeling life, we can perceive in much richer detail the inner life of others. And this, of course, is helpful too.

So I offer this for consideration.

Announcements and Wrap Up

Yeah, thank you. So, we'll complete this intensive tomorrow. A daylong at 9:30 Pacific, and we'll sit and practice, have some time in silence, and some time for reflections. We can have some dialogue, and sort of open some of the threads that began here.

I realize I might need some help because I can't disable the waiting room. So if you want to take a shift for an hour or something, letting people in from the waiting room, just chat me tomorrow morning. That's appreciated. I look forward to actually seeing some of you. I appreciate the chats I see going, and it will be nice to see your faces tomorrow if you join. Thank you, Phil, for DJing in the background, and I wish you a good day.