Expressing clarity through writing

Announcer: This question is from Eric in Ann Arbor, Michigan: “What is the relationship between writing and the clear-minded seeing that comes through the perfection of wisdom?”

Ken: Well, I wish I knew. I think there are some people, Musashi for instance, the great sword master in Japan, who wrote his book Five Rings, basically sitting in meditation and whenever something became clear to him, he wrote down a sentence. So he might have written a sentence like every week or two or something like that. And it’s why it’s such a deep book. And there are other masters in various religious traditions whose minds and hearts were so clear that they could just write their experience quite beautifully and very articulately. Somewhat like Mozart writing music in which he never corrected his manuscripts. And it was just right the first time.

Writing is a skill, an art, like many other things. Some people, they write their passion, they write their confusion, they write their reactive patterns. Such writing doesn’t come from the clear mind seeing. Writing that does come from the clear mind seeing, I think is challenging, because you have to let go of so much to write that way. And just writing what you actually experience without any projection of thought or emotion. I think many writers have aspired to that. I actually think it’s quite difficult, but I think if you can write from there then what you have to say will probably have some merit.

Psychotherapy and Buddhism

Lisa: This is Lisa from Los Angeles, and I have some questions regarding psychotherapy and Buddhism, and this is coming out of evaluating an experience recently, within the last year, of my mother passing away and being engulfed with sorrow and confusion and fairly overwhelmed by it. So, I sought out some psychotherapy, which was a very interesting experience, but in the end, not that useful, I think, so …

Ken: What was the question that came out of your experience of your mother’s death, and the lack, that the psychotherapy actually, wasn’t that useful?

Lisa: I think from having done so much practice and really delved into opening and experiencing, what opened up, what I found myself in the middle of was fairly intense and very—I guess from a practice point of view—very good material to be working with. And I couldn’t function that well on a day-to-day basis for a while and just some support here … But what seemed to be happening in the therapeutic session was this offer of some sort of therapeutic relationship, where transference could take place. But beyond that containment, and then within a containment, processing what was coming up.

Ken: What does processing mean?

Lisa: Well, that’s where I got a little tripped up because it seemed to be about mining the stories and the narratives, and really what I was needing was to just really let the emotional content be what it is, or was. And then very quickly the subject came up of, “Well, perhaps you need some medication [Ken laughs] to help with the anxiety.” And, it was coming from a very sincere and caring place, but that’s where it seemed to become less useful.

Ken: Okay. This may be a little unfair, but one of the distinctions that I make is that some forms of psychotherapy anyway, there the effort is to assuage pain and in spiritual practice, in Buddhism, the aim is to end suffering.

Ending suffering doesn’t come about by trying to make conditions all nice so that you feel good all the time. Suffering, as you know from your own studies, is the reaction to experience. So, to end suffering means we stop reacting to experience. Of course, when we stop reacting to experience, then we experience things fully and completely, which means that they can be pretty intense. And I think that’s what you were referring to. You were trying to find a way to experience this loss and all of the disturbance associated with it as completely as possible. That’s what I’m understanding. And your poor therapist was having a little trouble with someone with this completely insane motivation, from her point of view or his point of view. And actually to be fair, when they’re talking about processing that’s actually what they’re trying to move to.

But as you observed, that was pretty conceptually based. There are other forms of therapies such as somatic experiencing in which one’s encouraged to experience what’s going on in the body, which is a more complete experience. And, you know, again, from your own practice, that we work with what is arising in the body, what is arising emotionally, what is arising conceptually, and experience all of it, all at the same time. Now, the difficulty was that this was a sufficiently powerful experience, and by the sound of it, that it resonated with other things that you have not experienced completely. So you get lost in it. And that opens up the possibility of your practice moving to another level. And perhaps that’s why you were doing this reading is to try to find a way to do that.

Coming back to Thurman’s comment: “Don’t worry, there is a self, just different from the one that can’t be found.” To me, this is typical of Bob Thurman’s sleight of hand. One way of interpreting this, and I don’t know that this is what he actually meant, is that there is an awareness which isn’t a self in the ordinary sense. And it’s very different from the one that we’re looking for that can’t be found. And he’s seeking to reassure the reader that there’s something there. In that sense I think he’s actually doing a disservice to the reader. And the other thing is that the notion of self, as it’s used in Buddhism, is very different from the notion of self as it’s commonly used in psychology. So there’s a lot of confusion that comes from that. But in terms of your experience, it’s as you say, good material for practice, good material in the sense that it opens up levels that we haven’t been able to access before. Now, doing that, we don’t necessarily have to experience it all at once. A very useful technique that I’ve found, which comes originally from Thich Nhat Hanh, I received from my colleague Yvonne Rand, is to hold whatever we can in attention, very, very tenderly.

And the use of this word tenderly is very good because it immediately stops us making any kind of enemy out of the experience, which is very important. It means we don’t try to force anything, but because we’re trying to hold it in attention, there’s a certain intention or effort in the loose sort of way there, and it points to the right kind of thing. We hold in attention as much of the experience as we are capable of at that point, and for as long as we’re capable of it. If we go longer, or we try to include too much, then we get overwhelmed and we lose any sense of attention. And now we’re just reconditioning, actually reinforcing the conditioning and that’s not helpful. So learning how to work with that in practice, so that you’re experiencing what is possible with the present level of attention one’s capable of, and not too much, that’s a very important balance to develop. Okay? This helpful?

Lisa: Very helpful. Thank you on that. I think I’ve sort of found a way through with some insight practices that seem to offer the same … What you’re saying the containment or this holding what you can, and tenderness.

Ken: I’m a little curious, which insight practices?

Lisa: One of John’s, of dying in it.

Ken: Oh, okay.

Lisa: Yeah.

Ken: All right. Yeah. Which involves actually just opening to the whole thing. Yeah. See, the reason I asked about that, because for this kind of thing, generally ecstatic practices are going to be more fruitful, and that’s the ecstatic component of that practice where you’re just, you’re dying in it. You just, okay, that’s it. So it involves opening to it completely. And that’s fine.

Lisa: I think that covers both parts of my question.

Ken: Okay.

Lisa: Move on?

Ken: Yep.

Lisa: Thank you.

Energy levels

Lynea: This is Lynea from Santa Monica. I’m confused about resting in openness, physically and emotionally, and how that relates to resting with still thoughts. Because my experience has been that when I’ve been sitting for a while and I feel that I’m starting to open up and I experience an increase in energy, but also a certain stillness in my body, usually when I’m meditating by myself, my thoughts begin to settle as well. But I’ve had the experience of meditating with you around and feeling that the energy in the space was quite a lot higher than it would be ordinarily. And I found myself physically opening the way I would, or to some extent the way I would after some time sitting. But my thoughts were all over the place almost as if they didn’t have the chance to catch up. And so I don’t really understand, I guess, are there practices targeted to one aspect of stillness? I just don’t understand the relationship.

Ken: Okay. Attention we could regard as directed energy. It’s not quite right, but it’s close enough for our purposes this evening. So when you’re meditating on your own, you start, let’s say, resting in the experience of breathing, as we’ve talked about many times. And as you say, the body begins to relax and your mind joins with the object of attention, which in this case is the experience of breathing, at which point both body and mind relax. And it feels like everything opens, and that opening quality is the indication that awareness in addition to mindfulness has arisen and the combination of mindfulness and awareness constitutes active attention.

And now in that field of active attention if thoughts arise, they come, they go, you aren’t particularly distracted. It’s because the level of energy in the attention is a little bit higher than the level of energy in the thoughts. So when thoughts arise, they don’t disturb the attention. Now I’m sure that if there’s some emotional issue coming up, then it’s a little more difficult for you to just rest in attention. That’s because the energy in the emotional issue may be higher than the energy in your attention. And so now it disturbs, and this is one of the reasons we practice. It’s because by constantly coming back to the breath over and over again, we actually raise the level of energy in the attention. So becoming increasingly capable of experiencing more and more without disturbance.

Now, when we meditate in a group, everybody’s making an effort in attention.
And, so all of those efforts form a kind of soup, as a friend of mine says, and there are many benefits to that because everybody’s able to tap into that group energy and make a greater effort than they might ordinarily be able to on their own. But because you’re now in a field of higher attention, that field of higher energy also penetrates more deeply into your own system. And so you become aware of stuff that you’re not ordinarily aware of, and that’s what you may be experiencing as the turbulence and turmoil in your mind, and your own ability in attention hasn’t quite caught up to that. But this actually is a benefit because now you get to work at a higher level of attention than you’re able to generate on your own.

Lynea:
That’s really helpful. Can I go to my second part of my question? So sometimes I feel that the energy in my system is just physically overwhelming. And I don’t know whether to just relate to those sensations, what literally just feels like pain, burning, just too much.

Ken: Burning pain?

Lynea: Yeah. Like, feel like energetically burning chest, in my chest. Not all the time, but sometimes, or after a couple of days of sitting a lot, then …

Ken: You start getting those kinds of burning sensations.

Lynea: Yeah.

Ken: I’m glad you’re telling me about this.

Lynea: Okay.

Ken: Whereabouts in your body? It can be anywhere?

Lynea: No, it’s almost always here. I mean, I’ve had it before where like, you know, after, I think, retreat last year, burning sensations in my feet or when I was sleeping. I mean, just really, you know, that sort of stuff.

Ken: Often those burning sensations are associated with stagnating energy.

Lynea: Okay.

Ken: So this is one of the reasons why we’ve introduced the qigong exercises into the retreats because the qigong helps to move the energy around so that it doesn’t stagnate. It’s not good for energy to stagnate because wherever energy stagnates, it attacks the body right at those points. It’s also why we do the dispersion practice in the evening. And it may be that it would be good for you to do some energy exercises in addition, so that you’re encouraging the energy to move in the way that it needs to move naturally or it wants to move naturally. And that will bring out the emotional blocks, which those burning sensations suggest are in there, which actually need to be experienced and released. And that’s done through a combination of these practices. So it’s good for you to tell me about these. Thank you.

Lynea: Okay. Right.

Ken: That’s all?

Lynea: Well, I basically was wondering how to work with the levels of energy cause I feel kind of beyond my capacity.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. So we should talk about that in more detail.

Lynea: Okay, great. Thank you.