Live Session Summary, Sunday, May 28, 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:
I began with a quote from Suzuki Roshi, ‘The most important thing is remembering the most important thing.’ What he is saying is that it is essential in our practice and our life to keep focused on what matters most, to be clear about where we are going and why it matters. Being clear about our intentions is essential on the path.
So, what is the most important thing? For the Buddha, the most important thing we can do in our life is to end suffering in our life. Based on his own search and experience, he taught that we all have the potential to abandon the clinging that leads to suffering and experience the deepest freedom and happiness available in this human life.
We don’t end sickness, loss, aging, death—all of us will experience some or all of these. What we can do is find peace in the midst of all the joys and sorrows—and act to change what needs to be changed from a heart of compassion and wisdom rather than reactivity and aversion. Our relationship to life can be as a dance rather than a wrestling match.
I briefly revisited the first two steps to help us untangle the tangles of our life and experience freedom: The first step is to turn towards our experience and pay attention to all that is arising in body, heart, and mind. We can ‘create a clearing in the dense forest’ of our lives, as Martha Postlethwaite’s poem ‘Clearing’ encourages us, and turn towards what is present.
The second step is to open wholeheartedly to what we are experiencing—‘welcoming the guests, even if they are a crowd of sorrows’—in the Sufi poet Rumi’s words, saying ‘yes’ to what is, meeting our experience with radical acceptance, not pushing anything away.
The third step is to investigate our experience and see if and how we are caught up in suffering—tangled, hooked, stuck, caught up in clinging or wanting things to be a certain way, in conflict with our experience. These are all metaphors and expressions of suffering.
In the Pali language, the first language that the Buddha’s teachings were written in, the word used is dukkha, which is most often translated into English as ‘suffering.’ A better translation may be ‘unsatisfactoriness’, the feeling of things not being or working as they should. We can think of it as ‘unpleasantness’, ‘I don’t like this…’, ‘I don’t want this’… ‘This should be different…’ We can experience this when we’re wanting something badly—food, drink, drugs, sex, possessions; when we want this situation or person to be different; when we’re stressed and anxious about the future or ruminating on the past, and many other difficult experiences.
This is the first noble truth—the truth of suffering—and our task is to recognize it and acknowledge it. As James Baldwin said, 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.' We first need to acknowledge our suffering and then we can investigate our own role in creating and perpetuating our suffering—the second noble truth—that craving is the cause of suffering.
We’ll look in the next session at the final two (of the five) steps to free our hearts—acknowledging our own role in our suffering and letting go of the clinging that leads to suffering. These are the second and third of the four noble truths—craving/clinging as the cause of suffering; and abandoning craving/clinging as leading to the end of suffering.
I shared Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s poem, ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’; Martha Postlethwaite’s ‘Clearing’; and part of Rumi’s ‘The Guest House.’
I’ll see you again on Sunday, June 11 and 18 at 9 am Eastern. Wishing you a good week ahead and grateful for our time together today. Warmly, Hugh 🌻 💜 🙏🏻
