Live Session Summary, Sunday, April 23, 2023: It was good to be with you today for our Live session on ‘Five Steps to Free the Heart and Mind.’ In this session we focused on the second step: Opening fully and wholeheartedly to what we are experiencing. Here is a summary of the key points, quotes and poems from today’s session:
I began by highlighting the five steps:
• First Step: Turn towards our experience with awareness
• Second Step: Open fully and wholeheartedly to what is present
• Third Step: Investigate and recognize where and how we are suffering
• Fourth Step: Recognize our own role in creating and perpetuating suffering—clinging/craving, the ‘second arrow’
• Fifth Step: Seeing clearly into how we are creating suffering—through clinging—creates the conditions for letting go and freedom.
I then discussed the second step: Open fully and wholeheartedly to what we’re experiencing:
We begin by turning towards our experience and then open fully to what is present. It’s essential that our opening to what’s present be wholehearted—we can’t ‘phone it in.’ This wholeheartedness is expressed well in different images and metaphors:
• Rumi’s image of ‘welcome the guests… even if they’re a crowd of sorrows…’
• Eckhart Tolle speaks of saying ‘yes to what is’
• Dorothy Hunt in her poem ‘Peace’ points to the quality of opening to everything: ‘Peace is this moment without judgment. // This moment in the heartspace where everything that is is welcome.’
• Tara Brach teaches the importance of ‘radical acceptance,’ deep-rooted acceptance of ourselves and our experience
• Ajahn Sumedho’s encouragement is to reflect, ‘it’s like this…’ ‘Sadness is like this…’, ‘anger is like this…’
• Anthony de Mello described enlightenment as ‘absolute cooperation with the inevitable’—and we can look at our acceptance of our experience as it is through this lens of complete cooperation.
We cultivate the intention to not leave anything out, not push away or reject anything—difficult emotions, like anger, fear, sadness—and open to our direct experience, particularly bringing mindfulness to our body… and bring awareness to the stories in our mind… Opening to what’s coming in from the ‘world’—sounds, news, sensations—as well as our own thoughts and reactions… making space for everything.
Opening to our experience, particularly when it is painful or difficult, can be challenging: It’s not easy to sit with and befriend fear, anger, and other difficult emotions and mind states. Some qualities that can help support us in experiencing challenging states include kindness, acceptance, self-compassion, non-judgment, patience, humor…
Poems I shared in the Live session included ‘Ten thousand flowers in spring,’ by Wu Men; parts of Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’ and Dorothy Hunt’s ‘Peace’; and Naomi Shihab Nye’s story from the Albuquerque airport, ‘Gate A-4.’
In the May 21 session I’ll continue with the third step to free the heart and mind: Investigate and recognize where and how we are suffering.
Wishing everyone a good week ahead and see you on Sunday, May 14 for a Live session that Laurie Cameron and I are doing together on gratitude. I’ll also be teaching Live sessions on May 21 and 28. Warmly, Hugh 🌻 💜 🙏🏻
