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Guided Meditation: Getting Somewhere by Going Nowhere

Welcome, folks. It's nice to see your names and chats over there.

Yesterday, I began with the formulation regarding the complications of goals. We have goals; they give our life meaning. If we don't achieve them, it's not great. If we do achieve them, we lose the meaning-giving function of the goal itself. There's a different way of characterizing unsatisfactoriness—that wanting something is always different than getting it.

The response to that is to turn meditation not into a goal-directed pursuit. We see this in whole lineages: just embody the Buddha, or something like this. And that's real, to sit without any sense of going or getting somewhere. Meditation is an atelic activity. But meditation is also a telic activity, to use the language from Kieran Setiya^[1] that I mentioned yesterday. It is structured by goals—the goal of being free, or more free.

But the interesting thing about the way we make our way to that goal is we make our way to it in an atelic kind of way. We're not pretending not to have goals exactly, but there's a sense of actually surrendering the goal-making mind, the striving, the sense of being sandwiched in time between the past and the future. We make progress towards goals by giving up that orientation. We are cultivating lots of spiritual faculties. We are cultivating the steadiness of mind, samadhi^[2], cultivating a million things. But we do it all one moment at a time, and that moment is free of grasping, engineering, and the desperation that we usually have around striving and goal-making.

So let's sit and see what happens.

In the most general sense, our goals are wisdom, compassion, and, to use Thich Nhat Hanh's^[3] language, understanding and love. Whatever progress we make towards the actualization of those goals, we can be happy with.

So we just begin with a sense of the depth of aspiration, the reverence for those who have manifested understanding and love, and a sense of finding ourselves here in this stream, this lineage of understanding and love.

There's an aspiration, but no urgency.

We let go of our need to get anywhere. And in this way, we get somewhere.

Just pouring your awareness into your body, blessing your whole body with awareness. Blooming and buzzing, the constellation of sensations, all infused with the intimacy of awareness.

All phenomena have liberation as their core. Just the Buddha. Every phenomenon, every sensation and thought, sound—all are a kind of invitation to know everything.

But grasping and striving towards goals makes things solid. It gives everything a solid core, not a core of liberation.

And so we relax everything. Clinging always experiences a kind of friction, tension. We relax everything.

We practice being a monastic in the sense that finally, we're privileging awareness over our life, over the relentless struggle to get our ducks in a row.

Dharmette: Dharma as Exposure Therapy for Samsara

Thank you. It's good to sit with you.

On Tuesday, I said that a core mechanism of action in Dharma is attention—attention therapy. And yesterday, I said the Dharma is a kind of cognitive therapy, and they interact: attentional stability makes the learnings sink in deeper. Today, I'm characterizing the Dharma as an exposure therapy, moving towards that which we habitually avoid.

Virtually every psychotherapy or group approach, no matter what its name, has exposure as a core component. That is a function of the pervasiveness of experiential avoidance, defined as the unwillingness to remain in contact with unpleasant thoughts, memories, emotions, and other private internal experiences, and taking steps to alter aversive experiences or the events that elicited them.

Experiential avoidance is known as a trans-diagnostic risk factor; it's seen across a wide range of psychological distress. Steven Hayes^[4] in 1996 noted that many forms of psychopathology are not merely bad problems; they are also bad solutions based on a dangerous and ineffective use of experiential avoidance strategies. Instead of encouraging people to use more clever ways to fight and win this war with their own thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, the ubiquity of problems associated with experiential avoidance suggests that it might be safer to help people step out of this war altogether.

Experiential avoidance—we often talk about it implicitly in the Dharma world, but it manifests in different ways. It has been characterized (and this is not a definitive list), but operationalized as procrastination, distraction, behavioral avoidance, difficulty enduring distress, aversion to distress, repression, and denial.

Exposure therapy in the psychotherapeutic world involves the deliberate approach of anxiety-provoking stimuli, people, activities, places, and other internal experiences, with the ultimate goal of changing emotional and behavioral responses to life's experiences. We do this to habituate, to become desensitized to the fear, and to disconfirm catastrophic beliefs around the feared outcomes ("If I feel this, if I do that, if I encounter..."). It helps to de-catastrophize and to develop new learning, to actually form associations between the feared experience or object and the experience of safety.

In clinical situations, you create a hierarchy of exposures. For a snake phobia, just to give a simple example, you give a rationale for the treatment and develop some access to tranquility and ease. Then you gradually introduce more and more anxiety-provoking experiences. First, you're writing the word "snake," then seeing a picture of a snake, then walking past a pet store, getting close to the snake, and holding the snake. Graduation day is having the boa constrictor wrapped around your shoulders, and you're at ease. It's called systematic desensitization.

The Dharma is unsystematic exposure therapy. The Dharma is exposure therapy for samsara^[5], for this realm. Exposure therapy for samsara because we know as practitioners that anything that can disrupt our peace, will. That is the logic of the Dharma: anything that can disrupt our peace will.

That means this is the path of purification. Freedom, or enlightenment, is often characterized as the uprooting of greed, hate, and delusion. But that entails a deep, intimate contact with those forces. We cannot live in fear and obedience to the forces of greed, hate, and delusion, but that means we're going to have to feel our way through them. And so, every time I get hungry, I can't eat. Every time I'm angry, I can't yell. Every time I'm anxious, I can't ruminate. We practice new strategies. We have these familiar ways we neutralize aversive experience, and in Dharma, we expand by relinquishing the usual ways we neutralize and soothe aversive experience.

Purification is its own kind of unpleasantness, but it's wholesome unpleasantness. You can taste the relief in it. The unpleasantness of purification is dominant, for sure, but you can also sense things getting lighter. One of my teachers, Shinzen Young^[6], says we develop a taste for purification.

University College London published a survey in a prominent journal of 1,200 meditators. Researchers were assessing unpleasant experiences in meditators. In this survey, they found that 26% of meditation practitioners reported particularly unpleasant experiences associated with meditation. They found strong evidence for an association between particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences and retreat. [Laughter] That's funny to me. 26% reporting unpleasant experience, and the very obvious question is, what on earth are the other 74% doing?

As our attention stabilizes, we get bigger and bigger doses of suffering. Samadhi—the attentional stability—lubricates the mind, and so where it goes, it really goes. We see this very clearly on retreat: where it goes, it really goes. Our peace, at some point, gives way to purification. Whatever happiness, ease, or tranquility we have gives way, and we move from the mode of abiding in some peace to purification. In purification, we are called to make peace with primal forces that disrupt peace—sometimes really intense, high-affect states of rage, terror, or helplessness.

We just keep making peace with our conditioning. This is the exposure therapy dimension of Dharma. And in that exposure, we change our conditioning. We develop new understandings and more degrees of freedom. Michele McDonald^[7], who speaks so beautifully about all of this, says we develop a relationship with everything so that we're not afraid of anything.

I read a story about a mathematician who had a major impact on the field and then vanished into loops of isolation and pain. It's not totally clear, but something from one of his journals reminded me of this theme today:

"I know that there is nourishing substance in everything that happens to me, whether the seeds are by my own hand or by others. It is up to me to eat it and watch it transform into knowledge. I've learned that in the harvest, however bitter, there is substantial flesh which is up to us to nourish ourselves with. When this substance is eaten and has become part of our flesh, the bitterness, which was only the sign of our resistance to the food intended for us, has disappeared."^[8]

It's the Dharma. Dharma as exposure therapy for samsara. I offer this for consideration. Pick up what's useful, leave behind what is not. Thank you all, happy to be with you, and we'll keep going tomorrow. Have a lovely day, whatever lovely is supposed to look like today. May it be lovely.