Summary of Sunday, June 9, 2024 Session: Dear Friends. It was good to be with you for our Live session on Sunday. We’ve just got back from a visit to California, so this summary is going out later than usual.
The focus of the session was ‘The present moment as the doorway to peace, joy, and freedom.’ Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from Sunday’s session:
Turning towards our experience in the body, heart, and mind, and opening fully to what is present is an essential path to freedom in Buddhist and other wisdom traditions. In the Buddha’s teachings, mindfulness—bringing awareness to our present-moment experience, in the body, feelings, emotions, mind states, and in all dimensions of experience—is a direct path to insight, or seeing clearly, that frees us from suffering.
When we are unable or unwilling to open to our experience, we experience unhappiness, dissatisfaction, suffering. The cause of this suffering, the Buddha called ‘clinging’—holding onto what we find pleasant, resisting or pushing away the unpleasant, and avoiding or escaping what is neutral or uninteresting.
This resistance to what is prevents us from being fully alive and accessing our potential and capacity for true freedom. Rather than taking refuge in the truth, we look for lasting happiness where it can’t be found, trying to make permanent what is unstable and changing.
Contemporary teachers of awakening, including Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Gangaji, and others also point to our relationship to our experience here and now as a key to realizing the freedom that is our true nature. Tolle stresses the liberating potential of being fully present: `
• “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. 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, 28)
Adyashanti emphasizes the price we pay for resisting reality, or what we are directly experiencing:
• “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”… [When we come] “into deeper realms of reality, 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.’ (Adyashanti, the End of Your World, p143)
Highlighting the price we pay for our inability to open to and accept our present-moment experience, the renowned 20th psychologist Carl Jung, said: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” When our experience feels like it’s too much to be with or bear, we unconsciously find ways of avoiding it. We do this in many different ways—through repressing our feelings; blaming or judging ourselves or others; becoming angry, sad, anxious, depressed; getting caught up in unconscious and unhelpful habits and behaviors (e.g., in relation to food, drink, drugs, sex, shopping, procrastination, workaholism, and many other false refuges.)
In Jung’s formulation, ‘legitimate suffering’ can be understood as painful or difficult feelings or emotions that can lead us to growth and greater freedom if we are willing to experience them. When we are not, these difficult feelings get acted out in ways that create more problems, certainly in the long-term.
Contemporary Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Bruce Tift, in his book Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, expands Jung’s aphorism to say: ‘Neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity.’
• “I agree with Jung, though I would say neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity. I say that because we tend to contract away from not only pain but also aliveness, sexuality, joy, open awareness and a number of other intense experiences. One of the things I like about Jung’s understanding is that it characterizes neurosis as an activity of intelligence (which is not synonymous with wisdom). It’s not pathological; it’s not some pattern that blindly got put into place.
Tift continues: “Neurosis is not something that happened to us. It’s what happens when we say, ‘I would actually prefer to not feel this incredibly difficult, vulnerable, disturbing experience right now, so I am going to try to go around it. I will distract myself. I’ll be self-aggressive. I’ll get very activated. I’ll get involved with parenting, with work. I’ll learn to meditate and be calm [This is when we use meditation to bypass or cover over difficult experiences.] I’ll exercise.’ We might try to get out of our immediate experience of intensity through any number of ways, and basically they all work in the short term. In the long run, neurotic habits have a counterproductive effect. Why? Because we are not dealing with the truth of our lives. Avoiding our difficult experience doesn’t make it go away.” (Tift’s post can be found by searching for ‘Bruce Tift’ and ‘experiential intensity’)
To summarize, Our willingness to meet our experience as it is—saying ‘yes’ to what is—is a doorway to freedom and true peace. Resisting our experience—through avoidance, acting out, aggression, spacing out, seeking pleasant feelings, etc.—is a recipe for unhappiness and suffering. Saying yes to what is difficult, painful, or too intense, is often not easy. This is why a path of training the heart and mind can be of great support in expanding our capacity to be with what is—expanding our ‘window of tolerance,’ a term coined by Daniel J. Siegel for all our feelings, sensations, thoughts, and emotions.
Turning towards our experience is the heart of our practice and the gateway to freedom. A poem I shared that speaks most directly to this realization is Dorothy Hunt's 'Peace is this moment without judgment' that includes the lines: "Peace is this moment without judgment. // That is all. // This moment in the Heart-space // where everything that is is welcome." May we learn to open to and accept all our experience wholeheartedly.
Wishing you a good week ahead and I’ll see you on Sunday, June 23 at 9am eastern time for our next Live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜
