Live Session Summary, Sunday, April 9, 2023: It was good to be with you today for our Live session on ‘Five Steps to Free the Heart and Mind.’ Here is a summary of the key points, quotes and poems from today’s session:
I highlighted the five steps that we began exploring today and will continue investigating in the next two Live sessions:
• First Step: Turn toward your experience with awareness
• Second Step: Open fully and wholeheartedly to what is present
• Third Step: Investigate and recognize when and how you are suffering
• Fourth Step: Recognize your own role in creating and perpetuating suffering—the ‘second arrow’
• Fifth Step: Seeing clearly into how we are creating suffering by clinging creates the conditions for letting go—and freedom.
Exploring the first step—turning toward your experience—we discussed how much of our lives we miss and how much we can experience suffering (or, ‘unsatisfactoriness’) when we are acting out entrenched habits (e.g., eating/drinking/smoking/lost in online wandering/caught up in stress or anxiety); when we are caught up in craving or addictive behavior; and when we are on autopilot much of the time.
Turning towards what is present here and now in body, mind, and heart brings us back to ourselves and to our life and creates the conditions for beneficial change.
Moving from the habitual, from autopilot, from being swept up in a difficult emotion, mind state, or mental story into awareness is a move from unconsciousness to consciousness—from not being aware to being aware. This shift allows us to be present for our life and to make choices that lead to well-being rather than unhappiness and suffering.
I shared quotes emphasizing the importance of coming into awareness from Viktor Frankl, Carl Jung, and James Baldwin:
• “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our ability to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” (Viktor Frankl)
• “What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.” (Carl Jung)
• James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
I also shared quotes from Thai forest meditation master, Ajahn Chah, and American psychologist, Carl Rogers:
• “If you let go a little, you’ll experience a little peace; if you let go a lot, you’ll experience a lot of peace; if you let go completely, you’ll have complete peace. Your struggle with the world will be at an end.” (Ajahn Chah)
• “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” (Carl Rogers)
Poems I shared: “Clearing” by Martha Postlethwaite; parts of ‘The Guest House’ by Jellaludin Rumi; and ‘There was a time I would reject those…’ by Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi.
I hope this is helpful and look forward to continuing the exploration of these five steps to greater freedom on Sunday, April 23 at 9 am eastern.
I also want to let you know that Insight Timer has published a talk I uploaded on the four noble truths and a meditation on the same theme should be available on Insight Timer in the next day or so…
Wishing you all a good week ahead and see you on Sunday, April 23 at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🌻 💜 🙏🏻