Live Session Summary, April 10, 2022: The theme of this week’s Live session was ‘Untangling the Tangles of our Lives’. We explored the essential role played by awareness of our present-moment experience on the path to freedom of the heart.
In a well-known sutta, or discourse, of the Buddha, a brahmin came to the Buddha and asked him a question: ‘A tangle within, a tangle without, people are entangled in a tangle. Gotama (the Buddha’s family name), I ask you this: who can untangle this tangle?’ The Buddha responded that a person trained in meditation, wise and compassionate living, and wisdom can untangle the tangle and live free of suffering. In this session, we explored one of the most direct paths to freedom: using conscious awareness to investigate the four noble truths of suffering and its end.
The Buddha taught that mindfulness—a kind, accepting, and non-judgmental awareness of our present experience—is a direct path to the deepest freedom we can realize in this human life. This awareness is available at any time, but we spend much of our lives in the future or the past, lost in distraction, wanting, or reactivity. However, the possibility of coming home to ourselves is never more than a breath away… In any moment, we can ask ourselves: What am I aware of right now?
Mindfulness provides a doorway to insight into the four noble truths—the Buddha’s core teaching of freedom from suffering. We begin by bringing awareness to our present experience and investigating: Is suffering present? Am I caught up in resisting my experience, clinging, judging, or other afflictive state? Acknowledging when suffering—dukkha, in Pali—is present is the first step to freeing ourselves from suffering.
The Buddha taught the second noble truth—that the cause of suffering is craving, holding on to how we want things to be or resisting what we don’t like. When suffer, there is always something we are adding to the experience, a resistance we are bringing to the way things are. This clinging or resistance is sometimes described as the ‘second arrow’—the first arrow is pain, or something unpleasant; the second arrow is the resistance we bring to the first arrow: ‘this shouldn’t be happening…’, ‘when will this end?’ There is another well-known axiom: ‘pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.’ If we can stay with the first arrow, the direct experience, we can find freedom from suffering. We won’t escape the pains of being human, but we don’t have to add unhappiness, discontent, or anguish to our experience.
When we are able to see our own role in our suffering and are willing to experience the waves of wanting, resistance, or other difficult feelings without acting them out, this leads to freedom from suffering—the third noble truth that freedom comes from letting go of clinging. The fourth noble truth is that there is a path of training—in meditation, ethics/wise and compassionate living, and wisdom—that leads to the end of suffering. Bringing mindfulness to our experience just as it is opens the doorway to ending suffering in our lives—untangling the tangle.
The poems I shared included ‘Clearing’ by Martha Postlethwaite; part of Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’; part of Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’; and Mary Oliver’s ‘Am I not among the early risers…’ I also shared a quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: ‘If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.’
All good wishes for the week ahead—and see you next Sunday at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 🌻
