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The Long Road

Welcome to Monday night. I am here for Diana, who is conducting a retreat. I have all kinds of things hanging off my ear here; just a moment while I make sure it's all secure.

What I'd like to talk to you about has to do with the experience of being at ease in practice. However, as I was considering that, I realized there was a tendency on my part to jump right into the middle of the discussion, and that maybe it would be useful to have some place to start from. Since I'm going to be here two Monday nights in a row, I'm going to start not talking about that. What I would like to do is talk about the importance of how we understand mindfulness, what it means in the practice, and the value of long-term practice—the value of not giving up on practice.

First, I'm going to tell you a story. Recently, I watched a film called The Way Back. It's not the latest one by Ben Affleck about a sports team; this is the one made a number of years ago about a group of prisoners in a gulag in Siberia who escaped and walked four thousand miles to India.

When the movie comes up, the first thing it says is, "This is based on a real-life experience." It turns out that not everything in the movie is entirely true or defensible; nevertheless, the movie really impressed me with what it took to get those prisoners—who were starving, sick, and in the dead of winter—to leave a gulag in Siberia and make their way all the way to India.

In the process, there were six of them, and not all of them made it to India. There were only three that made it to India. It turns out one of the characters was entirely made up, but the movie was based on a real-life experience and a memoir that maybe this person had, or maybe he was talking about someone else's experience. What's interesting to me is how the movie impacted me with the one characteristic that was most important, which was: you just did not stop. You kept walking. No matter what happened, you just kept going.

There was one particular leader who was a Polish engineer, and he had been accused of spying. He was in Poland—this is in 1939—and the Russians were occupying Poland at that time. He had said some inflammatory things against Stalin, so he was arrested. He never agreed that he had done any of these horrible things, but they tortured his wife, who testified against him. So he got a sentence of 25 years in this gulag, and off he went.

Through all the trials and tribulations of being in this gulag, they set out on the road. He said, "The one thing I have to do is I have to get back to Poland. I have to get back so that I can tell my wife not to feel guilty about doing this." That was his primary motivation. Obviously, he wanted to escape, he wanted out, but mostly he worried that his wife was going to be carrying this burden, and that was the thing that kept him going. So he was constantly encouraging people as he went along: "You've got to keep going. You've got to keep going." They left with a hatchet, a knife, and a week's worth of food.

This character was the leader of the group because he believed they could do it. Everybody else said, "Okay, it's worth a try; I'm just going to die here otherwise." And so they followed him religiously. "What do you think? Are we going the right way? I don't think we're going the right way. Are you sure we're going the right way?" They were constantly wanting reassurance.

We do that in our practice. We say, "Am I getting to where I need to go? How am I doing? You have the answer, you have to tell me how this happens. How do I make this happen? What am I doing wrong? Why can't I concentrate? Why am I not there? How come I can't measure that I am better on the path, that I'm the person that I want to be? What's happening?" They were constantly asking him, and he would go on ahead and come back and get them.

All of the characters changed over the course of this trek. They changed in ways they didn't expect. Mostly, they tended to be very distrustful of one another, totally isolationist. What they discovered is it took all of them to survive. It took all of their skills, whether they particularly valued those skills or not; it took everyone to make that happen. They began to feel the lines between them disappear. Totally unintentionally, of course. They set out with, "Yeah, we all have to be together, but I'm keeping mine to me," and then discovered that didn't work. They had to keep going, they had to depend on one another. This one could cook, that one could hunt, that one could fish, and that one knew how to make the directions work. It took all of them.

They took the guy who was willing to risk being found to go ask people, "Why are the mosquitoes so bad, and why aren't you affected by the mosquitoes?" "Oh, well, you have to use this particular mosquito repellent. You just go over here and pick it." "Oh, okay." And all of a sudden, all that misery went away.

They thought they knew what the obstacles were going to be, but they actually didn't know. On the path that we set out on, we don't know the outcome. We don't know what's going to come up, what's going to be an obstacle for us, or what's not going to fit the vision we have. And then what happens when that obstacle arises? "Okay, I guess I wasn't meant to..." Or can we say, "Well, that's interesting, now what?" What we learn along the way is how the idea we have about what the path is—how we're going to get where we're going—maybe it's just an idea. It may be something that gets us started or gets us moving, but what truly has value is what's actually true. Where am I on the path? Have I found the lake? Have I not found the lake?

Mostly, they trekked across Siberia. They went to Mongolia, and they thought, "Okay, when we get to Mongolia, we'll be safe, we'll be out of Russia." But then the first thing they saw when they got to Mongolia was a picture of Stalin, and they said, "Whoops, it seems that this country is also not safe for us." So they decided to go on to Tibet, which meant crossing the Gobi Desert. They lost a couple of people in the desert. That was hard; that was difficult; that was terminal for some. And they kept going.

At the beginning of the trip, one of the characters who was an American told the leader, "I'm going to go with you because you have a fatal flaw that will work in my favor." He said, "What's the flaw?" And he said, "Kindness. I've watched you; you're kind. When I am really failing, I'm going to count on you to carry me." And that actually happened. He didn't actually have to physically carry him, but he literally had to drag him along and say, "No, we're not going to leave you. Yes, we can do this."

What we think of as our flaws or our gifts are not necessarily so. Very often, we get caught in the trap in our practice of how we think it ought to look, how we think we ought to be.

There were two major things that happened to this man as they went along. They eventually got to Tibet, and the American went off and joined an American group somewhere out of Tibet. Three people went on over the Himalayas, and when they got there, the first thing they were asked was, "Where are your passports?" The man said, "Well..." "How did you get here from Siberia?" And they said, "We walked." I think it was the repetition of that phrase: "We walked. We just did it. We just kept going, and we didn't stop."

The rest of the story is that the Pole eventually got back to Poland. He was arrested in '39, he arrived in India in '42. He didn't get to go to Poland until 1989, when the communists left Poland after the Berlin Wall fell and the Solidarity movement took over. Then, in 1989, he went to Poland, found his wife, and told her it was okay.

It was the determination and the willingness to say, "I don't want you to have to carry this." There were kind of two tracks: the determination to keep going, and the issue of what you are carrying on your journey. What is it that you're carrying? Mostly, what we carry on our journey is memories. We carry memories. We carry our beliefs on how things should be, locked up in the process that we call memory. Part of what we do on our path is we lay down some of those memories, or we shift those memories.

When I was in high school, I was fascinated by the idea of memory. The reason I became a scientist in the first place was that I wanted to understand how the brain chemically created a memory. What does that mean? How do we do that? At the time, that wasn't as strange a way of thinking about memory. Over time, neuroscientists have come up with other explanations for how memories are formed and what a memory actually is.

The brain operates... a way to think about the brain is like a very sophisticated chatbot. What it does is take information it receives about experience and forms meaning boxes—little synaptic circuits. "With this set of conditions, with these things that happen, this means there's danger here, and the reaction should be fear." The memory is actually a process. It's a series of synaptic firings that form patterns that we assign meaning to.

The brain actually works as a kind of predictive device. It says, "Oh, I see this is happening; this is the reaction." To give an example of what that might be, you might say, "I'm thinking of ice cream." As soon as I say "ice cream," something happens in you. You either have a visual idea of ice cream, or you have a giant 'X' in front of ice cream. The ice cream might be vanilla, or it might be chocolate, or it might be pistachio. If it's pistachio, then maybe your salivary glands start moving because now you have a memory of taste. Incorporated in this circuit is the process by which we make sense of what our experience is and we predict how we need to approach something. So hearing "ice cream," all kinds of things get triggered. And the ice cream isn't even real; it's not even here.

Memory has a number of characteristics. I looked up the definition of memory: "Memory is the continued process of information retention over time." It's a process. It's not a chemical stored somewhere in the brain. Memory has characteristics: there's encoding (how is the memory laid down?), it's stored, and then it's retrieved. Functionally, that's what memory does. It turns out there are different kinds of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory only lasts for a few seconds and is usually auditory in nature, so we can remember lists of numbers, for example. Long-term memory is encoded in a different way. It's not just repetition; it has associated with it other kinds of encoding. How something looks, how something sounds. Somatic coding throws it definitely into long-term memory. What that means is it has a meaning. When we store it with a meaning, it goes into long-term memory.

When we hear a siren going off, we hear a siren, and in that siren we can hear danger or we can hear safety, depending on what we laid down—how we think about that sound. Does that sound mean somebody is coming to save me, or does that sound mean people are in danger somewhere? What is the emotional thing laid down in that memory circuit along with what you hear?

The reason I'm talking about all of this is it affects how we view our experience. Just the process of how the brain works. For example, when I smell yeast, I get happy. Automatically, my mood goes up. It is associated with a very old memory of my mother baking bread. When she baked bread—at the time I initially started thinking about this and the neural circuit was set up—I felt very safe. Really safe. There's my mother making bread, and I'm just standing there while she's making bread. Now, the details of that I actually don't have in my memory bank, but as I tell the story, I'm reinforcing that association between yeast (the smell of yeast) and the memory of being safe.

Every time I tell myself that story, I embellish it a little bit. "Yeah, I kind of remember she had this aluminum bowl... no, maybe that was for the biscuits, but I do remember." As you begin to expand the story, you start creating other associations. Just the smell of yeast! All of the things that we conjure up about our experience can be found in these memory banks that consist of neural circuits.

The reason I'm spending so much time on this is I want us to understand the depersonalizing that occurs when you look at it as just a neural circuit, and not from the point of view of ownership: "This is me and who I am." As soon as we make this association where we say, "This sensory input has this meaning," we are shifting away from the experience into what we think about the experience. We've added things together and homogenized them in such a way that we begin to think that this memory, this process of putting together data, is who I am. It's me. When it's just a process. It's just a process.

When we obsess about something, we're reinforcing it as a neural circuit in our brain. As we retell a story to ourselves, we're reinforcing it. If I tell a story: "These people have upset me. These people are really terrible people. This person is really a horrible person," I'm laying down a memory trace that says, "When I hear the sound of this person's voice, I have a bad reaction. This is bad. This is undesirable. This is unpleasant." Maybe when I said "ice cream," you imagined an ice cream splotch on your favorite shirt, and ice cream is not a pleasant thing for you at all. For someone else, it is a very pleasant thing. It's just ice cream. In fact, it's not really ice cream, it's the idea of ice cream. To my knowledge, there's no ice cream in this room, and we're not directly experiencing it.

Or we see a highway patrolman. What happens? Do you automatically step on the brake and look to see what your speed is? I do. It's amazing to me how quickly that happens. I say, "Why are you doing that? I'm not necessarily speeding." Brake first thing. Somewhere in the laying down of that—with that car, the appearance of that car means there is some fear associated with authority, discipline, something, and the reaction is, "I have to be sure. I have to be safe." We think the fear reaction comes from the amygdala. We have all these stories about the location of these thoughts and the source of fear. Really, it can be found in these memory circuits that aren't necessarily true. They aren't necessarily real; they're just habits of mind.

So when we talk about habits of mind, we're not really just talking about our tendency to do something. We're actually talking about not seeing how this set of conditions is triggering some circuit that calls for a certain reaction. It's not really our fault; it's kind of how the brain works. But when we see it—when we see, "Oh look, I'm reacting"—we can say, "But I don't have to," because it is not me. It's just something misinterpreting what's going on.

This afternoon, my husband came to me. I had said, "Let's have some tofu and vegetables for dinner." He said, "Okay, great. We'll try out that new press that we've got, and we'll put some olive oil on it." So I looked at him and I thought, "Olive oil?" Now, the way he interpreted that was I did not want olive oil under any conditions to be put on the tofu. So he baked the tofu, which turned out to be really hard, crisp, and tasteless, because he interpreted my look to be, "Oh, whatever you do, don't put oil on the tofu." No amount of my saying, "It kind of depends on what you're doing with the tofu whether you put oil on it," had any impact. He had already heard that I didn't want oil on the tofu. Now, all of this is just interpretation. It wasn't my intention, it's not what he wanted to do, but he wanted to please me. Okay, that's interesting. This happens all the time.

In order for us to learn from our mindfulness what's actually happening, we have to watch what the mind does. We have to be able to see, "Oh, this is the mind doing that."

In the last month, despite all my efforts and good actions, I managed to contract COVID. It was interesting to get COVID because there were all kinds of ways to watch my mind work under those conditions. I noticed anger coming up. I told the FDA they should be freeing up that next booster shot! And I laughed at this. What am I being angry at? Some faceless government organization that I felt should have been doing something they didn't do, and sure enough, I got COVID, and it's their fault. We often assign blame when we feel discomfort. It's very difficult to appreciate the fact that we are causing that suffering, not they. It is our reaction to that stimulus. It is totally owned by us. That anger is my fault—well, maybe not my fault, it's just that neural circuit, but I have to own it. It's still my choice to allow it to stay there. It arises, it passes away, unless I keep telling my story about how the FDA was remiss for not releasing the shot, right? The more often I tell that story, the more often I have a justification for being angry.

Or I watched my energy level being really low. Really low energy, and I was starving. All I wanted to do was eat. I wasn't starving, but my body was reacting to low energy by saying, "We've got to get the energy up. Let's eat some food." Because the energy that was being used up—all the ATP was being used up fighting off the infection. I was unable to say, "You're not starving." And then I would catch myself and say, "Maria, you're not starving. You don't have to eat. You don't have to chew." To watch the reaction and say, "I don't have to. I don't have to." Not me saying, "Well, I'm not going to allow myself to eat," so that I'm denying something. I'm saying, "The urge to eat is definitely here. I feel like I'm starving. But what's actually happening is I feel this hollowness in my stomach." Well, the hollowness in the stomach can be caused by any number of things: sadness, feeling of isolation... I got caught, after all. I made a contract with the universe: if I always wore my mask and got my shots, this wouldn't happen. And look what happened. To feel that caving in part and say, "That's not actually hunger, it's the caving in," so that I can separate what the experience is from the meaning that has been assigned based on how the brain is working.

You have to actually catch yourself doing this, and it takes a lot of practice. You have to just keep walking. You have to say, "Oh, look at that. It's doing that again." We come to recognize the tendency of the mind to coalesce around a concept around any sensory input—hearing, taste, smell, feeling. "Oh, this means..." And to watch the mind say, "This means..."

In Buddhist practice, when we talk about what experience is, we talk about the Aggregates^[1]. We say, "Here's how we know we're having an experience." The features of the experience are the physical sensory input; the feeling tone (this is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral); the naming, the concept. "I picked this up. This is round, it's cool, there's some fluid in here, and I call this a glass." That's a concept. As soon as I name it, now I've given it function, meaning, and usefulness. It's still just a piece of glass, which... glass is a liquid actually, but okay. It makes sounds when I tap it with my fingernail. Okay, so there's the concept. And then there's, "Well, this is a nice glass. I like the lines on the glass." Now I'm thinking about the concept. So there's the thinking part, the thinking mind. And then there's the awareness. Until I looked down at this glass, it didn't even exist. Until I look up, I could sit here with my eyes closed talking, and none of you would be here. You might as well be listening on YouTube or something.

Those pieces of the experience can be found in all of our experiences. When we look at them closely, we can distinguish between the experience itself and the meaning we've assigned to that experience, the concept attached to that experience. Why is that important? As we look at what the experience happening in this moment is, it means we're in this moment and not in our memory. We're not relating it to what happened before. That kind of reflective thinking can be very useful when you're solving problems, but if you're just looking at an experience to see just the experience, it's all extra stuff. And it can be misleading.

The concept that we attach, however we describe the experience, then conditions us for the next moment. When we are here in this moment having a new experience with conditions that are not exactly the same—because now we've added the preconception to the next moment. "I'm depressed. I have low energy, and I'm depressed." Oh, and now there follows from that all the things I'm looking for around depression, the feeling that I need to get out of depression, and "Why am I depressed? I shouldn't be depressed," and now I'm criticizing, and I'm lost in the self-critical mode, and each of these things is building on the other. When really, it was just low energy. And maybe the problem is I have COVID and I'm weary. Maybe the problem isn't depression to begin with, but created by my adding a concept to the feeling of very low energy.

When we tell people, "When you notice that you are anxious, just stay with the anxiety. Let it be, just let it be there." I wonder how useful that is. Because as soon as we call it anxiety, we have a whole string of meaning to attach to that word "anxiety." Anxiety is not a momentary thing, but it becomes another thing, and we reify it. We make that experience into something rather than the process that it began with. We get trapped into cycles of suffering having to do with just the way the brain works and our saying, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. I know what that is."

I have been working on a major project for three years for my homeowners association, having to do with installing EV chargers. This was an unpopular project; nobody really wanted it. When I started out three years ago, it was just an idea: let's see how we can make EV charging capability possible in our apartment complex, because we're limited. It's an old complex, and I have a charger, but that means other people in the building may not be able to put it in because there's a limited capacity. So I started looking into this, and lo and behold, as time went on, Peninsula Clean Energy came up with some incentives for people like us to install EV chargers, and so now we have a project. Last week, the board approved it, and PCE approved the incentives, and it's actually going to happen.

But the last six weeks of the project were hell. I kept thinking, "We already decided we were going to do this. Let's go, let's go!" And everybody was moving at a different pace. I was thinking of all the things that could happen, because I'm used to big projects and they always have something happen and things fall out of bed, and then you have to pick them up. But for sure, it's not going to happen if you don't start. I noticed patterns of stress being set up that were very familiar to me from my work life. I thought, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, what's going on here?" I could feel the reactions, the reactions that would set in, and how I was going to solve these, and how important it was.

As I asked more and more questions of myself—"What's really happening here? What's really happening here?"—I came to understand that I was falling into an old pattern that I didn't have to. There were several things that happened. One of them was that because I'd been working on it so long, I owned it. It was mine. My project. My very important project. As soon as I said, "It's not your project, you don't need this to happen. There are no consequences to you if this doesn't happen. In fact, it just means there'll be another solution in the future, but it won't be this solution. So what are you attached to that is causing the suffering?" I realized I was attached to a feeling of ownership, responsibility, competence. I could make this happen! And as soon as I let go of that, all of the stress went away. As soon as I said, "I don't actually have to do this. I don't have to make this my project. It doesn't have to be about me. I don't have to be embarrassed because they've asked me to go get somebody to get in writing what they've told me verbally. I don't have to feel like this is a failure for me. I don't have to react this way."

But I have to see it really carefully. I have to see that's what's happening in order to stop creating my own suffering. I have to see what's being triggered. I have to see how the mind is interpreting everything that's happening, and that I don't have to interpret it that way. I don't have to look at the people who are dragging their feet and think negative thoughts about them. I don't have to. I can say, "Oh, they're really worried about something," and not make it about me. Really, really actually difficult to rephrase the meaning that the brain assigns to something.

Another thing that's going on is around me there's a golf course, and they're reconstructing this golf course. They've cut down trees, huge redwood trees, and are digging up the yard. There are all these strange pieces of equipment. I watch the pieces of equipment moving around and I try to imagine what they're doing. "What is that thing that looks like a dung beetle? That big thing that's got that big thing on the front of it. What is it doing, and why are they doing that?" The process of watching the mind, curious. I can see that the mind is trying to establish meaning around every piece of equipment. "They're doing this so that this is true. They're doing this because..." To watch the mind doing that allows me to feel what the mind feels like when it's creating concepts. Does that make any sense? Sort of the experience of watching the mind make new connections, make new stories.

What was interesting was to have my husband and I both looking at the same dung beetle piece of equipment (which was his phrasing for that, by the way; I called it a rake) and see that we were forming different meanings for what that device was doing. He says, "Oh, well, it's digging up the roots." I said, "No, no, no, it's sorting through those piles of debris." Just different stuff. Not important, not significant. But to realize that the meaning that is established by the mind is based on experiences that have come before. All of the conditions of our lives have conditioned the way we react to what's coming next. We have to see that.

The way we see that is by constantly being mindful. Watching, watching what's happening. Seeing what's happening. We just keep walking. And the longer, the more consistently we walk, the more we see. The more clearly we see. We just keep practicing. What comes out of it is the realization that we don't have to judge what we see. "Oh, that's happening." We replace judgment with discernment. "Ah, that's what's happening."

Know where you're going and go there. Be aware of your intentions and take the next step.

That's it. Thank you.

Q&A

I'm sorry I talked a little longer than I expected, but if you have any questions we can talk afterwards, or now if you have something you want to say.

[Laughter]

Okay. May you watch the mind. It's a magical device, but it doesn't do magical things. It just does what it sees. May you see clearly and well. Thank you. Good night.