Live Session Summary, Sunday, March 17, 2024: It was good to be with you for our Live session today. The theme of the talk was ‘Saying yes to life: The heart of our practice.’
Here are some of the main themes, quotes, and poems:
I began with a quote from 17th century French philosopher and inventor Blaise Pascal, "All of humanity's misfortunes stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" and shared highlights of a 2014 study reported in Science and summarized in an article as, “People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts.”
When we are unable or unwilling to open to our feelings, emotions, and thoughts, we tend to act out our painful mind states in ways that cause conflict and division with others as well as separation from oneself.
I highlighted the main theme of the talk: When we open fully to our experience, saying ‘yes’ to what is present, we come into alignment with life and this is the path to awakening and the deepest freedom. When we say ‘no’ to our experience, we are in conflict with life and become divided from ourselves and this leads to dissatisfaction and suffering.
In the words of Anthony de Mello, “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable,” and Eckhart Tolle, “What you accept fully you go beyond.”
We discussed different ways we resist our experience and get in conflict with reality, with life:
• When we complain about something or someone, we are essentially saying, ‘This situation/person/experience shouldn’t be like this’ and we are divided between how things are (reality) and how we want them to be. In this gap or division we experience suffering;
• When we are worrying, anxious, or stressed, our body and experience (tightness, tension, fear, etc.) are here, but our mind is in the future, trying to control or rearrange how things could turn out—in the gap between the two, the present and the future, how things are and how we want them to be, we experience discomfort and suffering;
• When we are clinging or believing we need something we don’t have—or we’re wanting something unpleasant to go away—there is the same gap between how things are and how we want them to be or think they should be and we experience this as suffering.
Whenever we resist life, resist our experience, we are locked in suffering. The way out of this unconsciousness and suffering is the same: to turn towards our direct experience and to open to it—to say yes to life just as it is, to end the conflict with reality.
I shared reflections on this theme of saying yes to life from contemporary teachers of awakening Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti:
• Tolle: “Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say ‘yes’ to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” (The Power of Now, p28)
• Adyashanti: “We may think, ‘So-and-so shouldn’t have said that to me,’ but the reality is that they did. As soon as the mind says something shouldn’t have happened, we experience internal division. It is immediate. Why do we experience division? Because we are in an argument with reality.
This much is assured: if we argue with reality, for any reason, we will go into division. That is just the way it works. Reality is simply what is. As soon as we have anything in us that judges it, that condemns it, that says it shouldn’t be, we will feel division. (143)
[When we come to see things more clearly] “we realize there isn’t a justified reason to argue with reality, because we’ll never win the fight. Arguing with reality is a sure way to suffer, a perfect prescription for suffering.” (The End of Your World, p143)
Elsewhere, Adyashanti says, “Thankfully, we will all lose our argument with reality. It’s a good thing. Some of us have an extraordinary endurance to continue the argument. I had a fair amount of endurance myself, unfortunately. But no matter, we will all end up losing the argument with what is. And the more you lose the argument with what is, the more you recognize what always is. What doesn’t come, what doesn’t go.” (“An Invitation to Awaken, Part 1”, Talk)
I finished by inviting us to reflect on where we find ourselves divided, in conflict with reality—clinging, resisting, complaining, worrying, ruminating, judging, escaping—and to practice being with the underlying experience here and now that we are trying to get away from. Through coming home to ourselves and our experience we come to understand that everything is changing, nothing can be clung to as ‘I’ or ‘mine’ and that realization leads to letting go and the deepest freedom.
Other quotes and poem I shared include:
• Chogyam Trungpa’s instruction to come back to ‘square one’ (in Pema Chodron’s Taking the Leap, p27) and Pema Chodron’s invitation to “Learn to stay. Learn to stay with the uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa [attachment, being hooked], so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives…” (p20)
• James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
• Poem by Lynn Ungar, “The Way It Is.”
I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if I missed anything. Good wishes for the week ahead. I look forward to seeing you next Sunday, March 24, at 9am eastern for our next live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
