Change happens: it’s not something we decide

Lynea: This is Lynea from Los Angeles. For almost two years, my experience of practice, or life, is feeling like my heart is bleeding all day long, all the time. It doesn’t necessarily feel like a bad bleeding or a negative. It’s just very consistent. And, at first that felt like that was difficult or something I felt very conscious of. And now, it just is, but I’m relating to it in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m really resting. So I don’t quite know how to open up and rest because I feel like I’m going to lose something.

Ken: What do you feel like you’re going to lose?

Lynea: My grip.

Ken: There’s a quote from Rumi, which I won’t get correct, but I hope I get it close enough. “I’ve been on the lip of insanity, knocking on a door. It opens, from the inside.” The bleeding heart. There are many terms for this, some call it the wound.

It’s a door. And all that can be painful. There’s often a quality about that experience that tells us, or suggests to us, that we’re touching something that’s true. This, do you know this?

Lynea: It feels like everything is in there.

Ken: Yeah. And we can’t sort it out.

Lynea: There doesn’t seem to be a point in sorting it out.

Ken: Exactly. So you’re going to lose your grip. That’s the fear. What’s going to happen if you lose your grip? What does the story say?

Lynea: That my life will then be governed by something else.

Ken: Okay. So, is this a bad thing, a good thing, an unknown thing, what?

Lynea: Practice and teachings tell me that this is a good thing.

Ken: Yes, and?

Lynea: I feel like it’s a clear shift to running off of something entirely unknown, but true. And I don’t know how to let go. Or I don’t want to.

Ken: You say, “I don’t know how to let go.” And then you say, “I don’t want to.” Can you choose to let go right now?

Lynea: Yes. I think I can, or…

Ken: Can you actually choose to let go right now?

Lynea: No, I either do or I don’t. I either open, I either am open or I’m not letting go.

Ken: Okay. Are you sometimes open and sometimes not?

Lynea: Yes, but not in this way. Can I say what’s coming up?

Ken: Sure.

Lynea: The sense that I don’t want to be that spontaneous. That going through this door means becoming significantly more responsive.

Ken: And you don’t know whether you want to go there.

Lynea: I don’t know what it means to go there.

Ken: I think that’s true. You see, what I’m suggesting here is you actually don’t have a choice. Even if you decided to let go right now, it wouldn’t necessarily happen. You follow? Equally, if you decided just to stop everything and pack it in, that wouldn’t happen either because something would keep going. So what can you do?

Lynea: Rest? Live my life? Feel it?

Ken: Pretty well. That’s about it. This came up in a crew of teachers I was meeting with a couple of weeks ago. And I think this is very important.

We don’t decide to change. We practice. We experience things. Things arise, and change takes place. But it’s not something we decide to do. We can make efforts in a certain direction but exactly what happens … we don’t decide one day “I’m going to stop this behavior.” We may start practicing. I, you know, I’d really like to change this behavior, but we try and we try and we try and nothing changes. We practice. And then one day something shifts and that problem isn’t there. But maybe in a different way, a way that we hadn’t even considered before.

Becoming a refugee

Ken: So the idea that we can actually control this process, that’s just a fairy tale. And we don’t know where it’s going to leave us. The only reason we do the practice, this comes back to the whole point of refuges we’ve discussed, is that our current way of living is unacceptable. So we become a refugee. But we don’t know where we’re going or what it’s going to look like or how we’re going to be when we get there, wherever there is. We can read all of these books and describe this is this, and it’s going to be this. And it’s going to be wonderful, etc. But we don’t know that. Maybe that’s what other people experienced, but we have no idea whether that’s going to happen for us. And we can’t know.

But one thing we do know is that the way we are living right now, doesn’t work. As a friend of mine says, it’s broken and it can’t be fixed. So we start exploring new possibilities. But how those actually arise in us, that’s what we’ll find out. But we can’t say it will be like this, because we don’t know. For many people that’s unacceptably frightening. They want to have more control, so they don’t start on the path. Or if they go a certain way down the path, they stop. But for others, well, that’s how it is. And so what comes, comes. It’s usually not what we expected, but at the same time, very few people actually ever regret the path. That’s one thing we can say.

How to live true to your heart and mind at the same time

Sharon: Hi, I’m Sharon from La Jolla, California. And my question for Ken is, not exactly sure how to phrase this, but it’s about the connection, the interrelationship with the physical, the emotional, the spiritual body and how the spiritual heart manifests into and through the physical being.

Ken: Let’s suppose you have an answer to that question. What difference will it make in your life?

Sharon: What difference? I guess I’d feel like I would be living more intelligently.

Ken: So your question’s actually about living intelligently.

Sharon: I hadn’t thought about that, but that might be a better question than the one I posed.

Ken: What leads you to feel that you aren’t living intelligently?

Sharon: I seem to get results that I don’t think I’m intending. And then I guess the other thing of course as I was mentioning, I’m from the East Coast, Washington DC. I hope I’ll be forgiven but I grew up that if you didn’t read at least three newspapers every morning, you would be garroted by noon. So I’m probably a lot more accustomed to attempting to look at things so-called rationally, which I’ve come to think isn’t rational at all.

Ken: Okay. So your question’s about, I’m going to make an assumption or two here, you can tell me if I’m on track, but it sounds like your question is about how do you live true to your heart and true to your mind at the same time?

Sharon: Oh, I like that.

Ken: Well, the first thing is, if we rely exclusively on the mind or if we rely exclusively on the heart, we often end up in a bit of trouble. It’s an interesting dichotomy, which arises in Western thought, and doesn’t arise in the same way in Eastern thought. In Sanskrit and Tibetan, the word that is normally translated as mind can also be translated as heart, and both refer to all of the activity that goes on, both emotional and conceptual. We fall into confusion. On the emotional level we fall into confusion because we believe what our feelings tell us. On the conceptual level we fall into confusion because we believe the stories and the explanations and the rationalizations that are actually propelled by the feelings. So it’s possible and, one might say, this is the point of Buddhist practice, it’s possible to experience what arises without the projection of thought and emotion. We would call this clear knowing. It can be called a lot of different things.

And, that’s what we seek to cultivate in meditation practice, the capacity and the skill to know things clearly without the projection of thoughts and emotion. Why meditation practice and how does that work, you might ask. Well, the first thing when we sit down to meditate is that we find that there are just all of these stories going on, all of these thoughts, and ordinarily that’s how we understand the world. But as we sit in meditation, we realize that a good 99% of these are just stuff. And so as we practice more meditation, we are less distracted by all of that stuff, not only in meditation, but also in our daily lives. And so we begin, when somebody else is talking, we begin to actually listen to them and not to everything that’s going on. And now we’re experiencing things more clearly.

At a deeper level, we also come to realize that emotions come and go. They aren’t things that we actually have to do anything about except experience and feel them. We don’t have to act on them. And there’s a freedom that comes from that. Oh, I can feel angry, but I don’t have to act on my anger. I can feel desire, but I don’t have to act on it. And so these things now become much more fluid and because they’re more fluid, we actually experience them more clearly and can let them go more easily.

Experiencing the world without projection

Ken: There’s also a third level, which I think is very important here. For most of our lives, certainly from the time we were born all through our education system, our sense of who or what we are, was always mediated by somebody else. First it was our mother, then father and mother and family and siblings, and then the school system and friends and so forth. And we came to know who we are by how we were reflected by these people.

In meditation practice we sit down and there’s nobody to reflect. And so we come to know who and what we are directly, through our own experience. There’s a freedom there, too. So I think, then, when you can experience the world without the projection of thoughts or emotion or all of these old ideas of who and what we are, then you see things more clearly. And when you see things more clearly, you may find you may act more precisely in various situations and then you may find that there’s more congruence between your intention and your result. Okay

Sharon: Thank you.

Ken: You’re welcome.

Experience the emotions by using the breath

Announcer: The question from Helen in Davis, California. “I noticed that as I age, my expectations become more solid and that when they’re not met emotions take over and control me. I don’t understand how meditation practices can help to create a more flexible mind, one that’s not so strongly controlled by emotions. What are some helpful practices for working with emotions?”

Ken: Yes, you’re quite right. Unattended, our expectations and ways of acting become more and more rigid as we grow older. And this is one of the reasons why meditation practice is probably a good thing to do, because regular practice of meditation changes our relationship with that solidification process. Because we keep letting go of our ideas about how things should be and what we want and so forth. I mean, that’s what we actually do while we’re meditating and this allows us more flexibility and openness in our lives. So you ask, what are some helpful practices for working with emotions? What I suggest here, because I found this very helpful, is that you go to unfetteredmind.org and click on and click on Five-Step Meditation or Five-Step Mindfulness Practice, something like that.

This is a very simple practice that was developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and it’s an abbreviation of a more complex practice found in the Anapanasati Sutra. And what one does in this practice is just open to the experience of the emotions by using the breath as an anchor of attention. Breathing in, I experience this emotion; breathing out, I experience this emotion. And the more completely we experience each emotion as it arises, the more freedom we will find. This is not something that develops quickly but it does, very definitely, develop through consistent effort over time.