Get intimate with your experience

Sophie: When you’re talking about who experiences the experience, if you’re having a lot of pain, who’s experiencing that? It’s very difficult to transform that experience into emptiness when—

Ken: You can’t possibly transform it into emptiness! Whoever told you you could do something like that?

Sophie: I once saw a lama in Tibet who was in tremendous pain, and he laid there smiling as people came in to bow before him. I am curious about that because if you have pain or you see someone suffering, what’s going on there? If there’s no experiencer and no experience … I know I’m confusing relative world with absolute—

Ken: I think this is a very good question, because I think there’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around this. You can’t transform pain into emptiness for the same reason that you can’t wake up a person who’s pretending to sleep. [laughter] I’ll let you chew on that for a little bit, but it is actually the same reason.

I’ll answer your question more completely in the last section this afternoon. But for now, because we’re going to go into this, it isn’t a question of transforming an experience into something else. It’s a matter of experiencing what is arising as completely as possible. Because—I’ll put it very simply—when you experience things completely, then you know what they are.

How many of you got angry over the last week? How many of you took the anger that arose as a fact that you just had to act on? Let’s be honest, you got angry, all of you did. We do that because we don’t know at that moment what anger is. It appears to be very solid and have a lot of force, etc.

But if we experience it completely, then we know that it is a movement in mind, in the same way that a wave is movement in water. I imagine most of you have had the experience in your meditation of sitting there fuming over something that happened the previous week or the previous day. And just sitting there, “Grrrrr,” thinking, “Okay, back to the breath, but he said this and he said that, grrrrr!” Anybody have this experience? [Laughter]

It goes on, for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever. And then, suddenly, you find yourself sitting there like this [gestures] and you’re not angry at all. You didn’t decide not to be angry. You didn’t say it to yourself, “Oh, I’ve worked through this now.” It just stopped. Right?

Some part of you may go, “What happened? I was so angry three minutes ago.” Or you try to remember the situation, but you can’t get any juice in it. Anybody had this experience? That arises because the anger has actually been felt. It may sound a little stupid, but I say a lot of stupid things, so that’s nothing unusual.
The function of a feeling is to be felt. A feeling can’t be complete until it is felt.

What happens if a feeling comes up and you try not to feel it? “No, I don’t really love him.” How well does that one work? “I’m not really angry with you. I just have a few things to tell you.” Or the Charlie Brown version of this:

Lucy says to Charlie Brown, “I’m going to do you a favor, Charlie Brown. I’m going to tell you everything that’s wrong with you.”

Next frame. “Why don’t you get this sheet of foolscap.”

Next frame. “Draw a column, a line down the center.”

Last frame. “On second thought, get two sheets.”

No anger here at all. But when we experience it, and a lot of us don’t do that very gracefully, but when it’s actually being felt, being experienced, then it’s finished.

When we know this about feelings, then we can open to the experience of them. And we experience them vividly, just like our friend here, this piece of paper. And they come and they go.

Something very important happens then. Can you be something that you experience that comes and goes? No. If it comes and goes in our experience, we can’t possibly be it. So we can’t me anger. Anger arises, but it can’t be what we are in the way we were talking about this morning. Oh, okay. Not only that, we experienced it, we felt it, and the world didn’t come to an end. Most people don’t actually experience their emotions because they are afraid that if they do, the world will come to an end, or they’ll die, or something like that will happen. So the more intimately we know our experience, the more we’re able to just experience it.

Pain is an experience

Sophie: What about physical pain or people who have neurological damage? They have ongoing pain. Pain isn’t arising in the mind, it is arising in a sensory body.

Ken: Oh, I’ve experienced enough pain and enough anger to know that they’re both equally intense experiences.

Sophie:
I’m not denying that, but I’m just saying that the anger is a thought that may be creating conditions in the body. Whereas I’m talking about someone in a car accident, and they’re bleeding, there’s a physical body suffering.

Ken: I understand, I know something about that. It’s not easy, but I don’t think any of this is particularly easy. But in the same way that we’re not the anger, we are not the pain. Pain is an experience. It may require a more than trivial capacity in attention to be able to experience pain that way. That can be quite difficult, but it’s possible.

There’s a second part, which also makes things difficult. And that is, chronic pain drains energy; it’s physically and emotionally wearing. So even though you know, and you are able to experience it, it still drains energy from the system. None of this is easy, but it is possible to experience pain as a sensation, know it to be a sensation. And when you are able to do that—and as I said, it’s primarily a matter of capacity, it’s not “grin and bear it” stuff at all—then, strangely enough, mind and body both relax, and you’re able to be at ease in the pain. This is what it sounds like that lama that you’ve visited has been able to do.

If it’s purely physical pain, even though it may be fairly intense, it’s not so hard. But when it’s physical pain, conjoined with emotional issues, then it can be quite difficult. But the principle remains the same. By developing a certain capacity in attention, then yes, it is possible to find ease, even in the experience of pain. I’m not going to say it’s easy, because it’s not.

Pressure sensations

Announcer: This is a question from Bruce in Seattle: “During meditation, I concentrate on the breath and keep my eyes slightly open. My mind remains pretty devoid of thoughts and emotions, but I experience sensations of pressure in my head, especially the right frontal lobe area. Sometimes these sensations are not too perceptible and at other times, they’re a significant ongoing presence. I’ve been suffering from an anxiety disorder for the last five years or so, which was brought on by the death of someone I loved very much. Perhaps, you could say obsessively, do you have any suggestions or explanations?”

Ken: There are several questions in what you pose here. I’m going to try and break them out a little bit.

First off, you say “I concentrate on the breath and keep my eyes slightly open.” I suggest rather than concentrating on the breath, you rest in the experience of breathing. The difference is that when you’re concentrating on the breath, you’re focusing the mind and you’re actually very often creating a bit of tension. I found that this quality of resting is very important in the meditation. So I encourage people to rest in the experience of breathing.

You may say, “Well, I just fall off and I’ll be distracted” and yes, that’s going to happen, but there’ll always be a moment of recognition. And whenever you recognize that you’ve been distracted, then you come back to the breath and rest in the experience of breathing.

The other reason that I suggest this approach is that when you think of concentrating, energy tends to move up into the head, cause that’s what we usually associate concentration with—the brain. Whereas if you rest in the experience of breathing, you’re going to remain more aware of your whole body and the way your whole body is participating in the activity of breathing.

So there’ll be a more open, resting attention rather than the tense, concentrated attention. That open, resting attention is what we’re actually trying to cultivate. That, in itself, may alleviate some of the sensations of pressure, because I imagine that’s where they are coming from. If I were able to talk with you in person, then I would I have a number of follow-up questions, but I’m not able to do that right now. So this is my best sense of what is going on.

Generally, if you have sensations of pressure in the head, it means that energy and tension has moved up there. Over a long time, it tends to create problems. What I would suggest there is feel that your attention is coming from your navel area, so you’re more in your body, and you’re resting more in the meditation rather than concentrating.

Grief and anxiety

Ken: The next thing you say is you’ve been suffering from an anxiety disorder for the last five years, brought on by the death of someone you cared about very much. You say, “perhaps, obsessively.” Well, I don’t know, but I want to suggest that there’s a difference between an anxiety disorder and experiencing grief.

Here’s a person you love very much and they’ve passed away and that may be five years ago, but it’s a significant loss. And it takes time for that disengagement to happen. We’re losing many parts of our lives that we value. And there may be a discomfort with that.

The anxiety that you describe, maybe a way of avoiding letting go of of this person, and really acknowledging at a deeper level that they have died. I’m sorry for your loss. It’s always painful when we lose someone that’s close to us. But if we try to hold on to them, we’re holding onto the past. We’re living in the past.

I’m not saying you should actively try to say, “I’m going to let this go, I’m going to let this go,” but you just feel the pain—and I would say it’s probably primarily emotional pain of this loss—and you use the breath as a way of staying present in that experience. Just experiencing it as much as you can during your meditation practice, not trying to make it into something other than it is.

I think if you let yourself experience the grief, which is the pain of separation coming from your friend passing, then you may find that the anxiety diminishes, because often anxiety is a way that we use to avoid feeling those things.

Making experience an enemy

Announcer: This question is from Glenda in Daytona Beach, Florida: “What do you do when you’ve tried to learn what your life is teaching you, and your mind comes up blank? I can’t seem to get the lessons. So I re-experience even larger lessons relating to my health. I do want to learn and move forward. To be honest, I’m becoming afraid of the lesson.”

Ken: Your question suggests that you keep running into one thing after another and you don’t know where it’s leading. It also suggests that there’s an idea that if you could just learn what was necessary, then everything would be okay, everything would sort itself out.

To my mind, one of the trickier aspects of practice, when you’re encountering really difficult obstacles, is to let go of the desire to work through them, or the wish to work through them. As long as we have that wish—I’m detecting that in the vocabulary you use around lessons and learning—even in a very subtle way, we’re making our experience, what is arising in our experience, an enemy. This is very understandable when what is arising in experience is pain and illness and fear and so forth.

We don’t actually have any say on what arises in experience. A couple of weekends ago I was teaching a program on karma and I wanted to make this point that we actually can’t control what arises in our minds. So I asked somebody a question about spiders and I asked another person about astronomy. And I said, did you expect to be discussing either spiders or astronomy at this weekend? And they said, no. In a certain sense, I had more control over what they were thinking than they did. Compared to what you seem to be describing here, that was a very trivial example, but I just say this to point out that we actually don’t have any control or call on what arises in experience. All we do have is how we experience it, how we relate to that experience. As long as we relate to the experience with the intention of getting rid of it, then we’re regarding what arises in the experience as an enemy, and that creates a polarity, which, generally speaking, perpetuates any suffering or struggle that is there. As a friend of mine puts it, “We’re in a box. If we ignore the box, we’re in the box. If we pretend the box isn’t there, we’re in the box. If we try to get out of the box, we’re in the box. We’re in the box. The only thing that we can do is experience being in the box.” And this is usually the last place that we want to go to.

I would encourage you—to the extent that you’re able—to open to whatever you are experiencing as tenderly and gently as you can, let go of the idea of learning from it, and see what happens.

Another way of putting this, possibly we could say you’re experiencing some kind of block. In the book called Radical Acceptance it was pointed out that a block always consists of two components: something that wants to move, and something that doesn’t want to move. We call what we’re experiencing a block when you’ve identified with the part that wants to move. We actually don’t have to identify with the part that wants to move. We don’t have to identify with the part that doesn’t want to move. We could just experience both at the same time; that would be the complete experience. So that’s what I suggest. And perhaps that will be helpful to you in some way.

Spiralling reactions

Announcer: Jason in Albuquerque, New Mexico asks, “Around age 19, I started having panic attacks, the bouts come and go but recently I’ve had a series of especially terrifying ones. I’ve tried to use my sitting practice for help, but they keep coming. When they hit, I’m powerless to the terror and afterward it lingers, and I’m always scared for its return. How do I deal with my panic attacks?”

Ken: I’m a little short on information here because you say 19 and I have no idea how old you are now. Nor am I clear about how long you’ve been sitting. Generally speaking, you’ve got two or three levels here. There’s the arising of anxiety, there’s an anxiety attack and there’s a panic attack. What I’m not clear about from your question is whether there is a process of accumulation and intensification or whether these come right out of the blue just immediately. In order to give you some help here in ways that I feel might be helpful to you, I’m going to make the assumption that there’s a progression here.

If we look at anxiety becoming an anxiety attack and then becoming a panic attack, what is happening there is that one is reacting. Something happens. There’s a reaction to that. Then we react to the reaction, then we react to the reaction to the reaction, and it just spirals. It can spiral very quickly, become extremely intense, and ends up being a panic attack. The key to changing this is to develop—through your sitting practice—an ability to recognize reactions and then just step out of them.

The way you step out of them—as soon as you recognize a reaction is beginning, you just go to your breath, you go to your body breathing and you ground yourself in that. There are two things that I can suggest here. One is—where are your feet? Where are your hands? Where is your head? You feel your feet on the floor which grounds your body. Where are your hands—allows you to be in touch with what you are emotionally. Where is my head—puts you in touch with the stories you’re telling, and if you’re able to touch into those and stay in the present, you’re likely to see that there’s some discrepancy between what you’re feeling and what is actually going on.

Another method, which some people have found helpful, when they feel this happening, is to look at all four walls or in all four directions of wherever you are, which reorients you in your surroundings. Feel your body in particular, again, feel your feet on the ground so that you reorient yourself and then you ground in the body.

I doubt that these will be immediately helpful, but as you practice these over and over again, you’re going to accumulate some momentum. And that may be helpful.

In addition to both of those methods, I would encourage you to form an intimate relationship with your breath so that whenever you feel a bout coming on, or even when it is going on, you train yourself to go to the breath. In particular, the sensations in your body when you’re breathing. This is also going to ground you and pull you out of the spiralling reactions and hopefully it will be of some help too.