Live Session Summary, April 17, 2022: Good to see everyone today for the Live session. The theme was ‘The transforming power of mindfulness in freeing our heart’. Here are the main themes, poems and quotes:
I briefly reviewed last week’s session on how mindfulness can help us untangle ourselves from suffering using the Buddha’s four noble truths as a framework for investigating suffering in our experience and how to find release from suffering.
I went on to discuss key elements of wise or skillful mindfulness (Samma Sati, in Pali, or highest mindfulness,) that need to be present if mindfulness is to help us realize freedom from suffering:
• The first is wise understanding—our awareness needs to be directed to freeing ourselves from suffering, rather than towards gaining wealth or fame or worldly pleasure. Mindfulness directed to these worldly goals is not wise or skillful mindfulness.
• Similarly, mindfulness needs to be supported by wise intention—the intention of loving-kindness, compassion, and letting go of clinging rather than the intention of harming, cruelty or gaining some material advantage.
• Mindfulness also needs to be supported by wise or appropriate effort—the use of energy and effort to free ourselves from suffering rather than for gain or fame or another worldly goal. Our effort needs also to be balanced, not too tight or clinging, or too loose and lethargic, if it is to support mindfulness and insight.
• Mindfulness needs to be imbued with attitudes that support us being present and opening to our experience—attitudes of kindness, acceptance, curiosity, patience, non-judging rather than attitudes of clinging, resisting, or judging our experience.
When mindfulness is supported by these qualities, we can shine the spotlight of attention on any aspect of our experience and move from a state of suffering and entanglement to awareness and freedom. This shift from being swept up in, or identified with, our experience—for example, with our fear, worry, craving, blame, or anger—to being aware of our experience is a key to freeing ourselves from suffering.
I shared the story of the horse and rider and the person shouting ‘where are you going?’ and the rider replying, ‘don’t ask me, ask the horse!’ to illustrate the way that we are often habitually swept along by our thoughts, emotions, and mental narratives rather than choosing the direction of our thoughts and actions. I also shared the quote from Viktor Frankl: ‘Between stimulus and response is a space. In that space lies our ability to choose our response. In our ability to choose lies our growth and our freedom.’
The poems I shared today included lines from Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’; Martha Postlethwaite’s ‘Clearing’; Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’; and Lynn Ungar’s ‘The Way It Is.’ Good wishes for the week ahead and see you next Sunday at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 🌻
