Live Session Summary, Sunday, October 13, 2024: It was good to be with you today for our Live session. The focus of the session was ‘Cultivating compassionate curiosity as a way of being in the world.’
Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from today’s Live session:
I began by talking about attitudes and their role in our happiness, well-being, and freedom and shared the reflection that when you change your attitude, you change your experience and your world.
I gave the example of how different it is to practice meditation with, on one hand, an attitude of accepting with kindness our changing bodily sensations, emotions, mind states and thoughts, and on the other, meeting these different experiences with clinging, resistance, or judgment.
Our experience in each case is (in my experience) fundamentally different—the first, when practiced wholeheartedly, tends to lead to greater ease, well-being, and freedom, and the latter, to feelings of contraction, unpleasantness, or suffering. As the Buddha said, ‘see for yourself.’ Test it in your own experience.
To exemplify the importance of our attitudes, I shared the story of two different people asking a wise person what their town was like to live in. Different versions of this story can be found by googling ‘moving to a new city (a parable)’.
Choosing how we meet our experience is key to our happiness and freedom. It’s what Viktor Frankl called ‘the last of the human freedoms’: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (Frankl, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning.’)
One of the important things we can say about attitudes is that they can be cultivated. One person might appear to be more kind, generous, compassionate, accepting, etc., than another. But all of us can cultivate these and other wholesome qualities and bring them into our life.
We can think of ourselves as all having seeds of anger, cruelty, greed, etc., within us, and also having seeds of generosity, gratitude, peace, loving-kindness, and other skillful qualities. As humans, we all have the capacity to do great good in the world—and also to do great harm. What we become in our lives and how we live in the world depends greatly on whether we train our mind and which seeds we nurture.
There are many wholesome qualities that we can cultivate. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed the training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and wrote ‘Full-Catastrophe Living,’ highlighted seven key attitudes of mindfulness; 1) Non-judging; 2) Patience; 3) Beginner’s mind; 4) Trust; 5) Non-striving; 6) Acceptance; and 7) Letting go. (Kabat-Zinn, ‘Full-Catastrophe Living’)
In my first book on mindfulness and habit change, ‘The Here-and-Now Habit,’ I stressed three key qualities or attitudes that help us find greater freedom in our lives: 1) Kindness; 2) Acceptance; and 3) Curiosity. We can bring these qualities actively into our meditation and our lives by cultivating compassionate curiosity as an attitude and a way of being in the world.
When we meet our experience with curiosity, we are opening ourselves to life as it is. We are not in a conflict with life. We can, of course, respond to whatever is coming up and when we do so with kindness and wisdom we are in alignment with life. When we respond with blame, judgment, resistance, or clinging, we suffer.
I shared a quote from the spiritual teacher Adyashanti: Arguing with reality—"thinking, for example, that ‘so and so shouldn’t have said that to me’ but the reality is that they did… is a sure way to suffer, a perfect prescription for suffering… Arguing with reality imprisons us… it ties us to whatever it is that we are arguing with...” (Adyashanti, ‘The End of Your World’, p143-144)
Meeting our experience with curiosity can lead to liberating insights into the truth of impermanence and change; and help us see that nothing can be clung to as ‘I’ or ‘mine’—and if we cling, we suffer. Curiosity opens us to life and to infinite possibilities. As the renowned Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi said, ‘In the beginner’s mind [a mind embodying curiosity and openness] there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.’ (Suzuki, ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’)
Meeting our experience with compassion allows us to bring kindness and the wish to alleviate suffering to ourselves, to others, and to all beings and experiences. With an attitude of compassion, we see the suffering that is everywhere and don’t put anyone out of our hearts.
Compassion connects us to all beings and all of life. Joining compassion with curiosity brings together the ‘two wings of the bird’—the wing of insight/understanding (curiosity) and the wing of compassion—that we need in our practice and in our lives. How would it be to consciously invite an attitude of compassionate curiosity to all that arises in meditation and in daily life? Does it make a difference when you bring this quality of openness and receptivity supported by kindness and care to your experiences?
Poems I shared include ‘The Way It Is’ by Lynn Ungar; ‘There was a time I would reject those…’ by Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Al Arabi; and quotes from ‘The Guest House’ by Rumi; and ‘Peace is this moment without judgment’ by Dorothy Hunt.
It was good to be with you all today. I wish you a peaceful week ahead and look forward to seeing you next Sunday, October 20 at 9am eastern for our next live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
