Live Session Summary, Sunday, June 11, 2023: It was good to be with you today for our Live session on ‘5 Steps to Free the Heart and Mind.’ Here is a summary of the main themes, quotes and poems from today’s session:
We began by reviewing the first three steps to free the heart and mind that we discussed in previous live sessions:
1) turning towards our experience—from autopilot, habitual and conditioned responses, and unconsciousness into present-moment awareness of our experience;
2) opening wholeheartedly to what is present here and now—welcoming the guests, saying ‘yes’ to what is, bringing radical acceptance to what is present; and
3) investigating and recognizing our suffering—the truth, the reality that ‘this is suffering’ (e.g., a feeling of being hooked, tangled, stuck, wanting things to be different, etc.) This is the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths—the truth of suffering—and our task is to recognize and acknowledge that we are experiencing suffering.
We then discussed the fourth and fifth of the five steps: The fourth step is to investigate and recognize our own role in our suffering. The Buddha taught that the cause of suffering is craving/clinging—wanting things to be a certain way, to stay around if they are pleasant, to be gone if they are unpleasant.
We often believe that our suffering is caused by a person, a situation, or experience—for example, I’m suffering because this person is acting in a way I don’t like, or I’m suffering because I’m having an experience that is unpleasant or painful. But the Buddha taught that suffering always involves a relationship—an unskillful way of relating to a situation or experience. There is something that we are doing (or not doing) that is creating and perpetuating our suffering—for example, clinging to the belief that I’ve ‘got to have X’ or ‘get rid of Y' to be well and happy.
It's the craving—the unskillful wanting—that is the cause of our suffering. In the Pali language, the word for this craving is tanha, which translates literally as ‘thirst.’
I highlighted the metaphor of the ‘second arrow’—the first arrow is the painful situation, experience, feeling, etc. The second arrow is what we add on—'this pain needs to go away’, ‘this person needs to be/act different than they are,’ ‘I have too much to do and I’m going to fail, let people down,’ etc. It’s often said, ‘pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.’ Our suffering comes from adding second and third arrows—for example, getting angry (second arrow) about a person’s behavior (first arrow) and then judging ourselves (third arrow) for getting angry (second arrow)… and so on.
The way of ending suffering—the fifth step—is to let go of craving/clinging by coming into acceptance of our experience just as it is, learning to stay.
I shared a number of quotes from Pema Chodron’s discussion of the Tibetan Buddhist concept of shenpa, or being ‘hooked’ from her book, ‘Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears.’
• ‘The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully…’
• ‘We are encouraged to get comfortable with, begin to relax with, lean into whatever the experience may be…’
• Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives…’
• Finally, Pema Chodron provides a way of remembering how to work with shenpa, the feeling of being hooked, consisting of four ‘R’s’ for finding freedom from suffering: Recognize the shenpa; Refrain from scratching; Relax into the underlying urge to scratch; and Resolve to continue to interrupt our habitual patterns…
I also shared two poems: Derek Walcott’s ‘Love After Love’ and David Wagoner’s ‘Lost’, a rendering of a Native American elder story.
I hope this is helpful. At next week’s live session, June 18 at 9 am eastern, the theme will be ‘Always trust in the difficult’. Have a lovely week and see you next Sunday. Warmly, Hugh 🌻 💜 🙏🏻
