The Difference Between Being Attached to Feelings and Just Noticing Them – Judith R.

So one of my intentions is to help people develop a meditation practice and to do it every day. So if you have any questions or comments about meditation, why don't you bring them forth and we can talk about it. Okay, in the Zen tradition, they put your left hand on your right hand, making a half moon with thumb tips touching. The left hand is considered more receptive and the right hand is concerned more protective or worldly. And when you're meditating, you want your receptive quality to be on top. so that's uh this is mostly done well lots of people do this the hands gestures are called mudras i think this one is called something like the universal mudra there's another one that rinzai zen people do which is holding your thumb like that and just putting it in your lower abdomen i sometimes do that and then quite a lot of people rest their hands on their knees either flat or with what is that thumb and your index finger touching and it's interesting to experiment what it feels like when you do it flat and then what it feels like. When you do that and if you're quiet and you're sensitive to your energy You can feel the difference in all the mudras, all the way you hold your hands. So for people who are just starting, it's just most important that you do sit and you don't have to be too finicky about everything. And you shouldn't have a mantra or anything there is no should and shouldn't okay you do what works for you i presented tonight uh a very open kind of non-technical sitting right there wasn't that much to do except for the little instruction of returning right but there are a lot of different kinds of meditating and mantra meditation or repetitive meditation is one of them so if that's what you choose to have as your concentration point that's fine then you do your mantra over and over and you will also notice that sometimes your mind wanders off and so at that moment with a gentle voice you invite your mind back to the point of concentration and in a mantra concentration the point of concentration is the mantra and if you're doing a metta then the point of concentration is the feeling of metta do you see you can choose what the point of concentration is and what we were doing tonight really was a present moment I would say what I would call an open field whatever arises but your mind stays with what's arising sometimes they call that shikantaza or just sitting but in Shikantaza there's even less instructions than what I gave tonight define the metta for me well metta is a let me, I'm just thinking is it Pali or Sanskrit? Pali, I believe it's a Pali word that has gotten translated in a lot of different ways but loving kindness is the way that I'm thinking And it's a quality of when you are in meditative absorption, the energy of your absorption is metta, is love. And that's one of the words. There are four different qualities of that energy and one of those qualities is called loving-kindness. the other qualities is compassion for suffering the third quality is joy or rapture and the fourth quality is equanimity or serenity or equalness so if you are in meditative absorption if you're really free and open that's the qualities that would come. So you can do it the cart before the horse which is to intentionally try and have that quality does that make any sense yeah how is that different than becoming attached to the quality or the feeling I know that meditation isn't about trying to conjure up a feeling so how is what's the difference Well, attachment is the difference. One is something that is arising in the moment, it's fluid and it flows without any fabrication or what's the word they say, without any shaping or molding. Now what was it again? Tell me your question again. Well, let's say we've done the loving-kindness meditations before and you started the instruction with imagining a situation where you felt incredible kindness. So that's a mental picture for us. And then the feeling arises. and if one is trying to hold on to the feeling in order to as a concentration point how is that different than becoming attached to the feelings and saying oh I want to feel that way because it feels good well that's interesting I think it's a subtle point of how you hold your meditation practice all the techniques are given to help our wild mind have some way of entering in to present moment practice in the end they're a hindrance because they're made by your own ideas and your own will in fact Katagiri Roshi, my teacher never gave meditation instructions for that very reason that he didn't want the technique to be something you could hold on to um now i have found i i worked with him for you know 17 years during my 20s and 30s and during the beginning of my program life and i needed more than no instruction because i was a loony tune you know My mind, I mean, I was really splattered on the wall. And one of the reasons I teach with more technique than my teacher did was because of that experience. I often thought, God, if someone had just taught me loving kindness, it would have helped me so much getting through my psychological, very deep psychological suffering. uh so i decided to teach with technique so if you're concerned about that then you watch your mind and try and keep the meditation um uh i think it's mostly the same thing with experience you just have the experience without dropping the commentary and what i mean about the commentary is dropping the judgment of the experience. I like it, I don't like it. This feels good, this feels bad. I'm doing it right, I'm doing it wrong. All the commentary, that's what you notice and what you let go of. And you try and just stay with the actual experience of the moment. Now then it gets this mirror thing because sometimes the actual experience of the moment is you're commenting on whether you're doing it right or you're doing it wrong so if I get too mirrory do you know what I mean like I'm too much in my head and then I bring it to my heart and I just try and relax and maybe I don't do the technique if I'm to uh the technique is not there to rile you up it's to help you concentrate help you focus help you to let go so when i get too riled up about the technique i drop it and just sit for a while and then i might start it up again i found that like this evening especially very often i focus on my breath and this evening i didn't and i was it felt very free not to be worried about how i was breathing because I know you're not supposed to make yourself breathe in any particular way. You're just supposed to observe it. But when I'm thinking about the breath or concentrating on the breath, I find myself trying to regulate it. And not doing that felt really good. So that's why Katagiri Roshi didn't teach technique. On the other hand, though, is sometimes when you have no technique, you have low concentration at all. and it can be years of just, you know. You might as well watch television. Do you know what I mean? So you have to have a balanced approach. Not too tight and not too loose. In the middle. And steadfast. Do you understand? Do you get what I meant by steadfast? Keep doing it. Keep coming back. It's interesting. I don't know, does AA always say keep coming back at the end of the meeting? And I think that is meditation instruction. Keep coming back. Don't go into a fantasized life. Experience the intimacy of the present moment. That is actually your life. That is what is actually real. and it's very intimate even if it's terrible it's still very, it's it it's what your life is that's really the teaching of Buddhism and it is hard to stay in the present moment because we don't like it most of the time unless we are having a peak experience especially addicts I might add we don't like it you had a question and then we can stop without technique you have to come to love and kindness through experiencing it right yeah I do think that the end of meditating is the understanding that we're interrelated and that the base of life is harmonious and that produces loving kindness that is loving kindness which is what you said that leads into a little bit I was going to review slightly we've been talking about well, we're in four through nine and we're at the end working with the amends steps. And one of the things I've been talking about is this rhythm in the steps which are one is getting ready and the next one is doing it. Then you get ready and the last one is going to do it. The next one's doing it now. This is very much a Buddhist understanding and it's a lot about written in Buddhism and it's called in the tibetan tradition there are aspiring practices aspiring practices and they're entering practices that's kind of what it's call technically so loving kindness at least the way we've been doing it is an aspirational practice where you work with your mind and your heart and your thoughts and your prayers and you aspire to get that feeling right now the entering practices is actually taking that aspiration and doing it and doing the activity of it and that's the same with the amends step you get ready to make an by your prayer life, by your mind, by doing these practices, by getting your mind and your heart and your clarity about what you want to say all in alignment. And then when the time is right, and in Buddhism they say the time is right through causes and conditions, through cause and effect, all of a sudden the time is right the person's there and you're prepared spiritually prepared and then you do the activity of making the amend do you get what I'm saying so that's the rhythm in a spiritual life and one of the things I wanted to also say about that rhythm of aspiring and action and I'm taking a lot of this from my study of Pema Chodron and she called it aspiring and then becoming an activist which I thought was a cute play on words that you actually are able to do it in the life, in the form relative world to do what you're aspiring. And part of what we're trying to do is learn how to be with our experience more and more and more. And I'm going to say how to be with uncomfortable experience more and more and the more comfortable I am with being uncomfortable, the greater the challenge I can take on because I'm strong enough Or I'm steadfast enough or I'm non-reactive enough to take on a situation that previously I wouldn't have been able to do. And I find this very true for me with relationships. Like in the earlier part of my life, I had no steadfastness with myself. So if something happened in a relationship, out of there. the relationship was over and i didn't want to talk to them ever again and i did never ever you know i used those words i'll never speak to you again or something like that you know i had no ability to stay with what was actually happening because i couldn't stay with the pain or I was so reactive that I would just get so mad I couldn't even talk or worse would be if I just vented on the person again. So through practice, through sitting, through doing these aspirations, through practicing steadfastness, through practicing staying with my pain and not being so frightened or panicky of pain or negative feelings or the feeling that happens when you have a conflict with someone i'm not as afraid of it anymore which makes me able to have relationships more and more difficult ones even and i'm even able to go to difficult people from my past and have a relationship with them which i think is part of the amends and what i want to say is there's a kind aspect to this in i feel in the teaching that if you aren't able to do it if you're not strong enough to contain or hold the emotions that arise they say well don't do it yet do the practices pray uh try it out on easy people do you know what i mean and then when you feel stronger you're able to take on more and i feel that way in terms of helping other people as well sometimes i go to someone who's in a lot of pain and i'm so i'm quickly overwhelmed I just feel like, oh my God, if I stay here too long, I will be just like them. I think this has a lot to do with 12-step work. Sometimes their suffering is so intense I don't even want to be around it, the people that I perhaps could help. so if I learn how to really stay with uncomfortable negative feelings to stay with the experience just the way it is I'm able to go into more and more difficult situations and help but again I'm very grateful that when I feel when I get overwhelmed I understand now oh I can't do that yet and i go back and i get myself together and i pray and i do it and then if i feel stronger i try again and in certain situations you know i'm kind of talking a lot about living amends right now you know I have said I'm sorry to certain people in my life and yet I still feel I can't have a relationship with them and i want to particularly you know if they're family or people your old ex you know i don't know what it might be but there are people that you don't like that you have a lot of reaction to and you but you want them in your life or maybe you have children with an ex or something like that so what i'm thinking in the living amends is you work on it internally and maybe it takes a long time a long time meaning years but i have noticed that i'm beginning to be able through practice and through more and more understanding of the teaching i'm begining to be able to just be in the present moment when i'm in relationship to someone else i don't have to haul in you know the whole thing and uh to me i'm very excited about this this is kind of my edge right now can i have relationships with everybody well i mean that's a goal of a bodhisattva right the goal in spiritual life is that you can treat everyone as yourself or or you don't get reactivity all over the place. I find election years very difficult because everyone's polarized and there's a lot of passion going around, and there is a lot hatred really going around. It's very interesting. Can I go through an election process and not hate? Maybe even, you know, do the activity I want to do or, you know, I don't know what you want to but, you might want to go and solicit or make phone calls or whatever you want to do. But can you do it without adding to the problem of hatred in this world I wonder I wonder because to tell you the truth I don't see it very much mostly I see around an election everyone is really reactive I don' know it seems like every election in the last few of them have been pretty energy okay yeah It's okay to ask questions. Yeah. My question has, I went tilt and maybe you just need to repeat yourself. When you're talking about, you brought up Xs and my huge ass relapse had a lot to do with the X and I'm listening to you talk about making the amends and having a relationship being in the moment with this person and the I don't know if you want to call it the Al-Anon side of me all the shit that I went through there's this huge ass block right there and I understand that may not be the time but I wonder I didn't hear you talk at all about boundaries in this thing maybe I'm off the beam thinking that there should be boundaries, but if I were ever to even conceive of approaching this individual, you know, from where I sit right now, there would be a hell of a lot of boundaries set up and a lot just to take care of myself. I'm totally into boundaries. And I've worked in Al-Anon a lot to get myself into a place of understanding what personal boundaries are. So, and I think I talked last week when i was talking about honesty that there is when i'm having to set boundaries i pull on the precept of honesty that i have to be truthful to who i am you know i'm truthful to what is actually happening so i'm not saying you don't set boundaries and in fact in that case i would say you have a lot of aspirational practice to do before you even try to do that you would have to be in a very strong and together place to go to someone that you feel that much emotion about negative emotion to be able to have any contact or something now in my life there have been people i have had no contact with for years and that was a very liberating for me it was a wonderful part of the process for me to know that i could set up boundaries i could protect myself it was very important for me that i would do that and um and now which is now 10 years later or 15 years later, I don't need boundaries out like that. I kind of got them inside now, and I'm more able to work with certain people that I... In fact, the difficult people in my life are my teachers. That's how I look at it. And I completely am into that. And since I've gotten a little bit stronger, I peep my head into my teacher's parlor more often than I used to. I usedと say those people are my teachers, but I was very private about it, and I just did it as an aspirational practice and internally. And I've got a little bеt stronger, and I'm peeping. Do you know what I mean by this? I'm peeping my head and I call them once in a while or I, you know, do stuff like that. Actually as a spiritual practice to help me be non-reactive. To understand that they are not me. And, you Know, to in action have my clarity. And to help them. Doesn't it say in the book? book i'm getting a uh recollection it says when you have a difficult person i think we read this out loud a couple of months ago uh you should ask how can i be helpful to them right doesn't say that well that really makes me mad right i can't even conceive of it right so then that's what i'm saying you have to aspire and one thing that pema chodron says which i like a lot is she said her aspiration is i hope by the end of my life i'll be softer about this topic that's a nice aspiration that's about how long it would take well then accept that just accept it in peace the serenity prayer comes into this there might not be anything you can do in this lifetime and that's fine if that's the truth if that is the truth it's fine as long as you made your initial amend I think I think there has to be something in the form world that has been done so that you can say i swept off my side of the fence otherwise you don't get the freedom or the release inside your heart do you want to say something i think that phrase to the extent that i am able would be helpful in this case because you are automatically saying I do have boundary issues here but to the extent that I am able in this moment you know, I am working on this so that is doing something in this lifetime even if you never get to the point where you have the face to face you are still doing your work and I love that phrase and use it often and also you can set a boundary of i'm never going to see this person talk to this person ever again and right behind the wall that you've put up you have to release that from your own heart you can keep the wall up but if you are holding hatred and bitterness in your own heart that hurts you it has nothing to do with them so this is the letting go of the past process that the amends are about it's about our own personal freedom and our own release from contraction of our own heart and that goes into a little bit of what i was going to work on today Actually, it's quite a bit. Would someone else care to read this? It's one paragraph. Okay. It's the last paragraph and it goes over here. Let me see if I need to give an introduction. It kind of is coming out of this conversation. I'm going to intro first, I've decided. so I wanted to work on this idea of the amends and we have 15 minutes so we can just touch on it this is the idea, and I think this is very hard to swallow, which is you don't criticize the other person you know how can you do it if you don't criticize the other person that's where i was at and still am you know i would love to make amends and just rip the other person you know take the other persons inventory and you know I still often do that under some guise some veneer that I'm helping them or yeah, or I'm being frank so I've been thinking about this a lot and the reason I have is because it's in the precepts too darn it it's in the big book but it's also in the precepts and in fact we've been working with the prefects and I guess my house is getting back together because I found it to Xerox for those of you who don't know I just moved so I've been a Yiddish word just came up about you know just being verplot I just didn't know where anything was. My mind was... Reclamped, right. One of those kind of words, you know, where you don't know what end is up. Okay, so I'm passing around precepts and the precept I was going to work on is the pretext of not talking about others' errors and faults. That's the same thing. The Precept of Not Talking About Others' Errors and Faults. And the commentary, I'm giving you precepts from Bernie Glassman, so they're a little bit different translation for those of you who are familiar with the precept. But I find them very interesting translation. and he talks about his commentary on this precept of not talking about others' errors and faults as unconditionally accepting what each moment has to offer. Isn't that interesting? Unconditionally accepting the moment which contains a fault of someone else or an error of someone else or your own error but so I was interested in this because I always felt I said to myself the big book is too idealistic that you would be able to make your without talking about the other person's faults that's how i used to think like that's impossible or why would you even want to do it but since i've been studying particularly again this year because i'm studying the big book again i'm i'm realizing that there is something truly spiritual it's a different order it's on a different order of things it's not on a psychological it's not on a psychological level it's on a spiritual level that I'm talking spiritually it is possible to make an amend and not take the other person's inventory it is possible not to gossip if you are well I just was going to say letting go of the storyline and then I thought about it's very difficult to talk about this because skillful means does take into account what we need to do psychologically setting boundaries and so forth So please don't read this as you don't need to do what's psychologically appropriate for the situation. But I am investigating for myself in my own practice, what would my life be like if I did not talk about other people's mistakes? i only owned my mistakes and i came to the relationship with intimacy and the present moment i'm just wondering this out loud and i'm i'm experimenting with this and i get some encouragement to experiment with this because it's one of the precepts it really says doesn't it don't talk about other people's errors and faults and now we can read the paragraph from the big book under no circumstance i believe it it uh begins this is page 77 under no condition do we criticize such a person or argue simply we tell him that we will never get over drinking until we have done our utmost to straighten out the past. We are there to sweep off our side of the street, realizing that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished until we do so, never trying to tell him what he should do. His faults are not discussed. We stick to our own. If our manner is calm, frank, and open, we will be gratified with the result. That's pretty clear. and it's pretty clear in the precepts. So, I would like us to experiment, even for a half a day. Just experiment. What would it be like if you didn't talk about other people's faults? Now, that doesn't mean you can't say, when you do that I get angry. That's not talking about someone else's fault, is it? That's talking about your reaction to something they do. You think so? Right. No, that goes back to that right speech. When there's an observable quantifiable event that you can say, you can attribute it to you're entitled to have a reaction and you're titled through right speech to talk about that but I think that's where the intent comes in. If this person is being a bitch that may be what I'm thinking of to use right speech I would say when you throw that spitball at me I really get angry or whatever. I'm putting it as an I-centered statement. Well, this is the art of speaking, right? So we don't know. Yeah, you want to say something? My point is that the word bitch is subjective. In action, you close the door on me. That action is not subjective. It's quantifiable. Bitch is something I can interpret. Your action to him may not be bitchy, but it may be to me because it's subjective. The difference, I think, is whether there's a subjective action or an objective action. Right. What really happens versus what you think. Right, the interpretation. The subjective interpretation. Right. So this is skillful communication, what we're talking about. It's skillful means. And I like the way Bernie Glassman has worded some of these. Like the one on not lying, on being honest. He words it listening and speaking from the heart. that's very nice because then you can express yourself it's not like you have to shut up we're not talking about repressing it's a way of learning how to speak from an open heart without blaming the other person do you want to say something yeah you know you can also not say when you do this i get angry just i'm feeling very angry that takes all of it away and it's fairly clear somebody just slammed the door on your foot and you're saying i'm feeling very angry that's maybe what it's about but without saying you're anything you did anything you are nothing just i'm just owning what you're feeling and that and maybe what you'RE feeling and what you might need or what you MIGHT NEED or what YOU'RE GOING TO DO about it or what You'RE FEELING or what it's much, much more intimate and therefore feels much, much more risky to say an I statement. What's a communication wheel? I think, I feel, I need, I want. Aren't there like seven different statements that are about right speech and how to communicate where you're at with someone? I don't know offhand but this is all, again, without totally getting into it, and it's time for us to stop. Learning communication skills on a psychological level is very important. And then there's these spiritual principles that back it up. The other one that I like a lot is this idea of what not talking about other errors and faults is, this is number six, unconditionally accepting what each moment has to offer, what each movement brings, even if it's a difficulty or conflict in a relationship. That is what the moment is bringing. And the other one I think is good too is speaking what I perceive to be the truth without guilt or blame. This is the precept of not elevating oneself and blaming others so those are very interesting and precept practice would be could be taking one of these for a month or two months and investigating investigating one of the precepts this is what we would call a precept practiced you take one precept i think that's a good way of doing it And you keep investigating. For example, honesty. What would this... First I do it inside. Well, what am I honestly feeling? Oftentimes I don't even know. What is the honesty in this situation? And then working on knowing what I feel and then working upon knowing the art of expressing it. So that's all the time we have today. Did this have any coherence, what we were talking? And can you get the relationships to amends? Yes. Because amends for me now is that I live in relationship and that I don't, I'm not isolated. And for me not to be isolated, I've had to learn a lot about communication skills and almost from scratch compared to my addictive days i didn't really not have very many communication skills and it's something i've tried to learn and continue to learn and as i said last week i'll say it again whenever i'm in a conflict with someone and i have to talk with them i'm always scared i'm Always nervous i always feel like i don't know how to do it but now because i developed my steadfastness or my ability to hold the feelings i'm more able to say yeah that's what it feels like when you're in conflict and i go and have the talk with as open a heart as i can and i see what happens and i think that's true with the men's you go with your best intention you try and do your best and see what happens sometimes it doesn't work out sometimes the person slams the door in your face and says, I don't care you're in program. You know? Or sometimes it works out that you get a forgiveness or a feeling of warmth or something comes out of it. But not always. I think that's okay, and it says in the big book, too, that you can write letters. So I think that's OK. I hope you have someone else read the letter. This is what we said last week, right? The rules, you need to check it out with other people to make sure that you're on the beam. And for me, I think doing it in person is the best because you can read people's body language you get voice i think doing it by letter is second and i think email's the worst don't you agree email you don't get any sign it's often misinterpreted email is wonderful for business for clear-cut things but for emotional things it's not a good medium that's why i'm worried about all the kids doing all their relationship on email. It's a fantasy relationship. You know, you don't have any idea who the person actually is. So I think letter writing is an art. Many, many people do amends through letters, especially if it's a very difficult situation. All of them are very well accepted so I continue to read them. and the point of the amends is to release the bitterness from your own heart it doesn't have anything to do with fixing the exterior outer circumstance that's in god's hands but what's in your hands is you release the hatred or the fear from your on heart okay we did the everyone do the basket