The basic principles of meditation practice

Ken: We’re going to begin with a period of meditation. How many of you have more than 20 years practice? Okay. 10 plus? More than five? Okay. Less than one? Meditation in today’s world is a very general term and can refer to anything from complex visualizations in the Tibetan system where you have 108 deities, each holding different implements, etc., etc., to listening to a tape of waves breaking on the ocean. Even within Buddhism, there’s a very wide range of meditation methods. For myself, I’ve been trained probably, I’ve never counted, but somewhere between 150 and 200.

One may ask why all of these different approaches and the basic reason is because while what is true is actually very simple, what prevents us from knowing what is true is amazingly complex. So there’s a variety of methods to undo the complex set of blocks and obsessions and misperceptions and so forth. However, they all boil down to a few very simple principles. And so I want to begin this evening by talking about one description of those principles and then we’ll do a period of meditation together.

Return and rest

Ken: One principle I’m going to offer to you is to return to what is already there and rest. Now we sit in meditation on a zafu, on a seiza bench, on a chair. But when we sit, if you just sit saying, let your body express attention, you find the body just naturally straightens. So the body knows what it is to be in attention. So let your body express that. When you do, you’ll find that it sits straight, chin comes in slightly, if you’re putting your hands on your thighs, you’ll find that you position your elbows right below the shoulders. Let the eyes rest, body’s in balance. So you let the body express attention and rest right there. Now for some people it takes a while for the body to adjust to that and there’s adjustments which are made. But as you sit and practice more and more, you find that your body just expresses attention naturally and that natural straightness and you rest there. And whenever you find that the body has twisted or bent over, just note that and return to the natural straightness in the body.

And the same with the breath. When the body’s straight, the breath comes and goes by itself. There are many forms of meditation which use ways of breathing to generate particular mind states, but we’re not going to use those. You just breathe quite naturally. And any time that you notice tension between your body and the breath, it means some kind of emotional material is crept in. Again, just relax. Let the body breathe. It knows how to do this. It’s been doing this for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. It knows how to do it. And so you just return to what is already there, that natural breathing and rest. And then attention, mind. We use this term mind in Buddhism, but it’s a little unfortunate in some ways because in the Tibetan and in the Sanskrit, the word refers to both mind and heart. So whenever you hear something like, “Put your mind on the breath,” that could equally as well be translated as, “Feel the breath with your heart.” And that has a very different flavor. So even though we’ll usually talk about mind, it also means heart so keep that idea in mind. Feel your breath with your heart. If you just breathe out slightly intentionally, you’ll find that you just become aware of the breath. That’s natural attention and you just rest right there.

Now as all of you know, thoughts and feelings arise and you fall into distraction. But one of the great miracles of mind, miracles of our experience is that there’s always a moment of return. Saraha, one of the great Indian masters, said the mind and thought is like a bird on a ship in the middle of the ocean. No matter how far the bird flies away, it has to return to the ship. There’s nowhere else for it to land, so it always comes back. So it doesn’t matter how distracted or how lost you are, you’re always going to come back. It’s always going to happen. And when you do, at that moment, you’re a little bit awake,

So you just rest right there. So rather than thinking of practice as holding attention on the breath, holding a certain state, think of it as resting. Resting deeply in your body, deeply in the breath, deeply in the mind and in the heart. And whenever you’re pulled off by a disturbance and lose your way, then when you return just return and rest. So there’s that constant sense of returning and resting, returning and resting. So let’s meditate together for half an hour. [gong]

I’d like to start off by thanking Chozen and Hogan for the invitation. Also my delight in what you’ve embarked on, I think it’s going to be quite wonderful. As I said last night, the Portland, at least to my knowledge, they don’t do a lot of traveling. Somewhat unique in the way that the various dharma groups and communities interact and intermingle and creates an atmosphere which is very open and allows people curiosity, exploration, experimentation and to find the path that truly fits best in terms of teacher and student and teacher and community and student and community and so forth. And I think this is a lot to do, often does, with the personalities of the principal teachers in the city. So I think this is very wonderful.

Retreat logistics

Ken: Now, I’m going to do two things this evening. One is to go through a few logistics about the retreat and then lay a foundation for our practice over the next day-and-a-half basically, the short time that we have together. So we’ll try to make the most of it that we can. We’ll be doing several practice sessions. These will be a little departure from the normal practice that you do here at Great Vow. When I do retreats, we usually sit for about half an hour and punctuate sitting periods with a short period of qigong, which is a Chinese discipline. There are many different forms of qigong, but the particular form that we do is known as the Eight Pieces of Brocade and is designed to balance energies in the body. And this is something we’ve been doing for a number of years in Los Angeles and some other people that have interacted with me have started to use it in their practice settings as well. So this evening after we conclude the discussion, I’ll be here and for all of those of you who are not familiar with the Eight Pieces of Brocade, we’ll do a short class, which will probably take about 20 minutes. And George, if you could assist me with that, I’d be very grateful. Second thing, is Hogan here? Yeah, you said there are about 60 people?

Hogan: Yes. That includes our staff … [unclear].

Ken: Ah, I see. Okay. One of the things that I’ve borrowed, stolen, from the Zen tradition is the meditation interviews and why we don’t exactly emulate dokusan, as a teacher I’ve found that meeting with people individually over the course of a retreat is very helpful and many people have expressed how helpful they find getting feedback directly about their meditation in the course of the retreat has been. Realistically, because we’re here for only a short time, we’ll probably only be able to see each of you once, but there’ll be meditation interviews during each of the longer sittings, not the early morning one, but between I think it’s 10:30 and 12:30 and then in the evening we have a long sitting too, easier one because it’s cooler then too. So we’ll work out a method for doing that, which shouldn’t be too complicated, probably just go up and down the aisles. Hogan, where is the interview room?

Hogan: It’s down the hall here, just outside the zendo.

Ken: And what we usually do, just to make sure that I can see everybody is we’ll have two or three people leave at one time and then one person will come in for the interview, when they come back they’ll tap the next person so that I’m not sitting there waiting for people to come and go. But we’ll work out the logistics and give you that tomorrow. It’s not too hard. The third thing is talking versus not talking and I always like to get a feel for this in the course of the retreat because different groups work differently, but from the time that we get up tomorrow morning, which is at 5:30, at least until lunch is completed, which just means you’ve finished the lunch meal, we will observe silence though you are allowed to talk during the meditation interviews and you can also—I can’t read sign language— talk during the teaching sessions for questions and answers—I’m just being facetious. But generally speaking, because this is a relatively short retreat, I think the silence will help to establish a framework so that you can be right in your experience. Those are the main logistic points about the retreat.

The practice called chö

Ken: The subject matter is a Tibetan practice called, in Tibetan the word is chö. It is not chod as many people pronounce it, but it’s chö. This practice was developed in Tibet by a remarkable woman who lived at the 11th, 12th century somewhere around there, named Machik Labdron and in conjunction really with an Indian teacher by the name of Padampa Sangye who was a contemporary of Milarepa. So we’re in the 11th, 12th century,

Machik developed a practice called gcod (pron. chö) and Padampa Sangye developed a comparable practice known by the name zhi byed (pron. zhi je). Chö means to cut, zhi byed means to make peaceful, to pacify or to calm. Well the name of Padampa Sangye’s tradition comes from the Heart Sutra and those of you who are familiar with the text may recall the line, the mantra which calms all suffering. And that’s where the zhi byed or the calming tradition comes from. And chö comes from the Diamond Sutra, of which the full name in Sanskrit or Tibetan and Japanese is, well not the full name, but is often known as the Diamond Cutter Sutra, a presentation of Buddhist teaching that cuts right to the core. Well, both of these are members of a genre of sutras or classification sutras known as the Prajnaparamita or the Perfection of Wisdom. And the Perfection of Wisdom, well, its description has been immortalized in the lines of the Heart Sutra, which I’m sure many of you know.

Form is emptiness.
Emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness.
Emptiness is not other than form.

So both these teachers, Padampa Sangye and Machik Lapdron, had a very deep connection with the Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom. And this is certainly one way in which Buddhist understanding has been communicated down through the course of history. One of the very important aspects or teachings that is found in the Prajnaparamita and the Perfection of Wisdom is that there are always two components which are not ultimately different, but arise in experience in somewhat different ways. And that a practice which neglects either of these components is inherently imbalanced and cannot be ultimately fruitful. And the two components are compassion and wisdom, or awareness or whatever other term you want to use.

While this is made very explicit in the longer versions of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras it’s expressed in rather coded form in the Heart Sutra. You may recall that the bulk of the Heart Sutra is a description by Avalokiteshvara of the Perfection of Wisdom. Avalokiteshvara is a member of the Mahayana pantheon, you could say, regarded as a ninth level bodhisattva, who is the embodiment of awakened compassion. So the implicit message, and even in the Heart Sutra, is that perfection of wisdom comes out of awakened compassion, can’t separate the two. And this twofold, or duality let’s say, of compassion and wisdom is a true duality, that is, both of these are important. My own teacher used to say that compassion and wisdom were like the two wings of a bird and with both of those wings healthy and strong the bird can fly but without both of them it can’t.

One of the prayers that we use in Los Angeles—one of my students asked me about this the other day—it’s a dedication prayer, and the phrase “non-residing awakening” is used, it’s a technical term. He said, “What’s non-residing awakening?” Well, all of you know about samsara, which is the experience that arises based on patterning and conditioning in the sense of I, and then there’s nirvana, which is open peace. At least that’s the way Mahayanists view it, it’s not viewed exactly that way in Theravada. And non-residing awakening is an awakening which doesn’t reside in samsara in the world of patterned experience. And it doesn’t rise in disengagement from all experience or in a … [unclear] attitude of emptiness or what have you, it doesn’t reside anywhere. It just is. And that non-arising, non-residing awakening is the fusion of compassion and emptiness or compassion and wisdom, however you want to look at it. And that is the principle on which the practice of chö is based. It works with both compassion and emptiness or wisdom.

And one of the Karmapas, the 8th Karmapa, Mikyö Dorje, one of the great teachers in the Kagyu tradition, when I was in the retreat, I had access to a volume of his collected works and in there is one of his commentaries on the practice of chö. Now Mikyö Dorje writes with the subtlety of a person wielding a sword. I mean, when you read his stuff, you feel like he carved what he’s saying into the paper with a sword. It’s just extraordinarily powerful writing I’ve never read anything like it in Tibetan or English. And he says that for the practice of chö, you need three qualities in order to be able to practice. You have to have compassion like the Buddha, who offered his body to a tigress, an understanding of emptiness that is like the sky, infinite without limit, and a very deep faith. I can’t remember the metaphor that he used for faith but it was something similarly dramatic. You sort of read it and go, “Oh, what’s the use,” and you put the book away! [Laughs] Both chö and zhi byed are unique practices in the Tibetan tradition because whereas most of the other practices, you either develop the seeds which grow into qualities and abilities that allowed you to embrace experience completely, which is the whole Mahayana tradition, or you used various methods to transform your experience of things into something like awakening which is the essence of the Vajrayana. Both chö and zhi byed approached practice as meeting experience directly for what it is, not waiting for the seeds to develop and not to trying to transform it, just meeting it right there.

So they’re very, very direct techniques and I want to talk a bit about that this evening so we can start with that approach to practice tomorrow in the morning. One of the ways that Machik encouraged her students to practice was to go into situations which provoked very powerful feelings. She encouraged them to meditate or to practice in burial grounds, which are rather horrific places in Tibet because, arguably, they’re a little more disturbing than the ones in India and you had a lot of sky burials where corpses were just hacked up and left for the vultures and everything to come. So, just go and meditate with a bunch of body parts, a little unsettling. So there would be all kinds of fear, and disgust, anxiety about death.

How we are robbed of attention

Ken: Now when very strong things come up, they rob us of our attention, just [falling sound] and we fall into reaction. And it’s that process that chö focuses on. How are we robbed of our attention? We are robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing what is arising. And this applies to our ordinary lives. Why do you get angry? Well, we only get angry when we feel weaker than what we are facing. If you feel stronger you don’t get angry. If you feel weaker, in the moment of anger you feel weak and fear arises that something terrible is going to happen. So there’s an eruption of energy into anger in which you try to destroy what you’re facing before it can overwhelm you. So that’s how we’re robbed of our attention, We’re robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing that uncomfortable feeling inside. And if there’s anything you take from this retreat, I’d like it to be that one understanding, that the problems that we exprience in our life which lead us into this practice in the first place arise because we are afraid of experiencing just what is right in that moment. So we withdraw from it, we try to change it in some way, we try to manipulate, shut it down, whatever. And that’s why we react with anger, or with desire, greed, jealousy, whatever. Once those things start they just snowball, moving things more and more out of balance.

So in your meditation practice, as I said earlier this evening, the essence of meditation is resting in what is already there. Now when we first start to practice, when we rest, what do we find Is there? A mass of thoughts and confusion. Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. And I’ve had many people say after their first practice of meditation, oh, I don’t think I’m cut out for this, my mind didn’t quiet down for a moment. Well, when I first practiced meditation, I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, I couldn’t sit for than one minute quite literally. I had to resort to extreme measures to sit for two. That’s always the experience don’t be afraid of that. If your mind is in complete chaos, jumble jumble all over the places, that’s what you’re experiencing right there.

So experience the chaos. Experience confusion. Or as one teacher said, “Remember, confusion is just confusion.” That’s it. You can use the breath to help you with that, that is rest with the breath and jumble, jumble, jumble. Then you come back. But just experience the confusion, don’t try and do anything with it. That’s the first step in cutting. You cut your ideas about how it should be and how you want to be and you experience just how you are and just what is. And when you do that, then you start experiencing how the body is, all of these different sensations, discomforts and tugs and tensions in the body. That’s what’s there. And you’ll struggle to find a more comfortable position, but there isn’t one. And then you’ll struggle with all kinds of ways and tricks to play on yourself to make it a pleasant experience, but it isn’t. Forget about all of that. Again, you cut your ideas about how you think it should be and how you want it to be and you just experience what is. And as your body becomes accustomed to the practice of sitting … [unclear] you realize, oh I can just sit here.

And then you begin to find that feelings come up, unasked for, demanding your attention. And you may say, “Go away feeling, you’re disturbing my meditation.” But they don’t. They demand, they keep coming back, they want. And some people they think, oh this is a distraction, so they sit, they sit very, very hard and they create a kind of quietness but it’s really blocking the feelings. And they can be very good in their practice, but as soon as they start practicing all those feelings come flooding back. And so there’s no real peace there.

What is the function of feeling?

Ken: What is the function of a feeling? Well, the function of a feeling is to be felt. It sounds almost trivial to say that, but when you refuse to feel a feeling, you’re denying that feeling the opportunity to fulfill its existence. And they don’t take that very lightly. They just keep coming back, because they’ll keep coming back and they’ll go into the body and do everything until you actually feel it. So I suggest you don’t engage that whole struggle. Feeling comes up, use your breath as a base of attention if you wish, just experience it. Now experiencing it doesn’t mean getting lost in it, acting it out because acting it out is a way of not experiencing it and it certainly doesn’t mean suppressing it. You just experience it, there it is, whether it’s anger, or love, a feeling of accomplishment, jealousy, shame, inferiority, superiority. There it is. You just experience it.

Description of the Tibetan cosmology

Ken: In the Tibetan tradition there’s a very elaborate cosmology and one of the ways it’s described is in terms of the six realms, the hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm, human realm, titan realm, god realm. Like most cosmologies, this is a very precise map of human psychology. In this case, it’s six sets of reactive emotions and the worlds they project. In the hell realm, it’s the realm projected by anger. You see everything in terms of opposition, everything is about a fight. At least that’s in the hot hells, in the cold hells it’s all about hatred. And if you examine hatred, it freezes something in you so that even the idea of moving is painful, like you’re frozen and if you move even so much as a finger it’s going to crack.

Hungry ghost realm is about greed. It’s about having a sense of deficiency and projecting that onto the world outside you, so it doesn’t matter how much you have, there just isn’t enough. So you’ve got to take everything you can get. The human realm is the realm projected by desire, You actually taste enjoyment and then you want more and that fades and you want more. So there’s always this chasing after more and more—different from the hungry ghost realm in that you actually get to enjoy things. But it’s temporary. Then there’s the titan realm which is about jealousy. This is internal sense of deficiency. Doesn’t matter how much you achieve, it’s never as much as the person next door so you’ve got to get more. And then there’s the god realm, which is the feeling of superiority. You’re above it all. You’re the one who understands how life should be lived. You did it correctly and you take pity on everybody else because they didn’t do it in the right way. And you enjoy your world as this feeling of superiority.

Now we all have all of those six realms. We move from them with a remarkable facility. In terms of chö, in Tibetan cosmology the majority of demons, the things that infest us, come from the titan and the hungry ghost realms. And when you feel that feeling, wanting attention, it can’t get enough of your attention, it has that hungry devouring quality, that very jealous quality. So that’s why the demons in chö are regarded as coming from those two realms. And what you do in chö, is you feed those demons. You feed them, because what do they want? They want your attention. That’s what you feed them. You feed them your attention and that’s acted out in a very elaborate ritual in some forms of chö where you imagine inviting demons and they come flocking out of the sky and out of the earth and out of the seas and rivers and everything like that and you imagine giving them your body and chopping it up and transforming it into something very beautiful and you just feed it to them. But what you transform your body into in chö is pristine awareness.

So you’re feeding the demons all of those nagging, needy feelings in you with pristine awareness and what’s being acted out in the ritual forms of chö is giving attention or feeding attention to the feelings that arise. So this is what we’re going to be doing in our practice, we’re not going to be doing the ritual form, we’re going to be discussing some ways of actually giving those nagging feelings the attention they want. Now what happens when you experience a feeling completely. What happens to the feeling? Anybody? Pardon? It dissolves. It goes. When you experience a feeling completely, the feeling has completed its raison d’être, its reason for being, that’s it. It has to be felt and the more you resist feeling a feeling, what happens? The stronger it gets, the more imbalance it introduces into your life. So in the meditation, when we get up in the morning and practice tomorrow, I want you to start working with this idea.

Feelings that arise, and they can be little niggly feelings associated with thoughts, we all have lots of those, but maybe some of you have some bigger feelings lurking in your being, maybe feelings of lack of accomplishments or feelings of shame. Those are very common. I think it’s a reasonable supposition to suppose that one or two of you might have some old anger in there. Also quite common, though people find this a little harder to work with, there’s some feelings of being loved that may be uncomfortable or maybe there are feelings of loving someone that aren’t comfortable. So this isn’t restricted to negative feelings necessarily. So set a base of attention with your breath or whatever other method you’re used to. And then just be open.

Now if nothing arises, that’s fine. Just rest there and rest as deeply as you can. You don’t have to go dredging for something. As we go on I imagine a few things will come up. You don’t have to go dredging. So if you can rest and rest very deeply, that’s great. But the more deeply we rest, the deeper attention penetrates our whole system. And eventually we start hitting the logs and the rocks where things have been frozen or jammed up. When that happens you may or may not be able to name it, its often the case that we can’t name it, sometimes it’s an unnameable emotion sensation. When you start hitting something that doesn’t feel very resilient, then just experience it. Now what’s very important here, don’t concentrate on it. That’s not going to be helpful. Don’t concentrate on it. Keep an open field of attention. There are various ways you can do that.

Keeping an open field of awareness

Ken: One of the simplest and also one of the most effective is to keep your whole body in awareness. So all the time you’re practicing, you are aware of the body from the top of your head down to the soles of your feet. And that’s kind of a field for your awareness. And then you have these hard, resilient or uncomfortable areas, experience them in that field, don’t concentrate on them. And it may be that you get sucked into it and as soon as you reognize that just treat it as a distraction, return to the whole field again. And if you wish, you can work with a larger field, you can work with the field of all of your sensory experience. That’s also very workable, it’s a little more difficult than the body so you may prefer to work with the body first, but that’s another possibility. And wherever you feel something jammed or resilient, then just experience the lack of reslience or the feeling of tension, or however it arises, the feeling of discomfort. It’s as if your attention is like the sun, and that resilient, inflexible and jammed feeling is like the bud of a flower. You just let your attention, the warmth of your attention soak into it and the flower will open in its own time. And that’s how you feed attention to a feeling. It’s very simple. That’s how you do it. You have an open field of awareness and you include the sensations associated with that feeling, just whatever you experience, in that field of awareness. You don’t need to do anything else. You just rest there in attention and experiencing whatever’s there. Now we always want to do something else, we want to move the project along a little faster, so you have to deal with your own impatience and so forth. That’s fine, just keep coming back and resting. Okay? Any questions?

Student questions

Student: Would you talk about sleepiness and drowsiness as part of this awareness that you’ve been discussing?

Ken: Sure.

Student: It’s the nature of the … [unclear].

Ken: Well, I’ll talk about it a little bit more generally than just sleepiness and drowsiness. There’s a reason we haven’t experienced those feelings before. We’re afraid of them, which is very interesting because they’ve already happened and it’s like we’re afraid of the past, it’s not like we’re afraid of what’s going to happen, we’re afraid of what has happened which makes no sense but that’s how it is.

In Buddhism, awake awareness is almost always represented by the feminine and attention is represented by the masculine. So a rather crude analogy which I’ve developed is that, the awareness that’s intrinsic in that unfelt feeling is like a woman and she’s surrounded by lions and tigers, crocodiles, dragons, bears, wolves and everybody’s asleep. She’s asleep, the feeling’s not being felt. All of the animals around her are asleep. Along comes Prince Charming representing attention. And as Prince Charming approaches, she wakes up, she’s going to be felt, great, but as soon as she wakes up, all the lions and tigers and crocodiles and bears and wolves also wake up and they go hunting for the attention, they go hunting for Prince Charming and they either drive him away or they kill him. And then everybody goes back to sleep.

So when you do this practice, it’s quite possible that you may experience great levels of distraction, mind’s all over the place. That’s a good sign, it means you’re on the right track. But for other people, as soon as they start moving into something they haven’t felt for a long time, they just go straight to sleep. And that’s probably going to be reinforced a little bit by the weather. And there are other things: you start thinking about something really important. I mean really important! I did a retreat in 1974—somebody warned me about this but I didn’t catch it—two days into the retreat, I knew I had the wrong brand of kapoc in my cushion. I had to get the the right brand and then my retreat would be okay. That’s what I thought about for the next four days! See I tell you, you think about the things that are really important. [Laughter]

Now what do you do about this? Well, what can you do about distracting thoughts? Can you stop them from arising? Has anybody figured out how to stop distracting thoughts from arising? I’ll pay you! Can’t do anything about that. But as I said earlier, there always comes a moment when you recognize, oh!, and then you just come back, come back to what you were doing. That’s the principle of returning.

What do you do about falling asleep? Well, a story’s told, I think it was a westerner who asked this question of Munindra, who was a Theravadan teacher of extraordinary precision of attention, which is what he trains his students in. A student said, “I keep falling asleep when I meditate,” and Munindra said “So?” “Well, I have this problem”, said the student. “I keep falling asleep when I meditate.” “So?” “Well, what do I do about this problem?” “What problem?” “That I fall asleep when I meditate!” “I don’t understand what the problem is,” said Munindra. And the student said, “What do you mean?” and he didn’t know where to go so he got up to leave and as he got up to leave Munindra said, “When you fall asleep, is there more air going through your left nostril or your right nostril in the last breath before you go to sleep?” “I don’t know!”, said the student. “Oh, now I understand your problem!”

When we practice, and it’s said again and again in the Tibetan tradition, when you practice deeply, big problems come. It’s true! Because you’re bringing attention right into areas of chaos and confusion in your being. And so you encounter big problems. Well, we can’t control when those problems arise or how those problems arise. We can’t do anything about that. What we can do however, is be right in the experience, right in the experience, so there you are and it’s hot. Be right in the experience of being hot. What is it? What’s it like? You don’t think about it. You just experience it completely, sweat dripping off your forehead into your eyes, the sting of the salt of the sweat in your eyes, your body feeling limp like damp cloth, feeling like everything’s going to burn up, you’re going to be incinerated. Maybe in the middle of this there’s just that faintest waft of a breeze, and you think, oh, how refreshing, but you’re right in the experience and you get drowsy and you think, oh, I’m drowsy. So what is drowsiness like? Oh, the eyelids are heavy. You feel that and the mind becomes dark and thick and you experience that very precisely. So you’re actually right in the experience. See I have a lot of experience with this, I know what I’m talking about. [laugh] Because that’s the essence of the practice, being right in the experience. And then you have your little two-second nap and then you wake up and there could be all kinds of different physical sensations right in that moment so you’re right in those. And of course there’s all the discomfort that arises, oh, I fell asleep again, I can’t do this. And all of the shame and disappointment and anger with yourself. Can you be right in that? That’s all, that’s all you can do, is just be right in whatever experiences arise. And that’s the effort I want you to be making over the next couple of days. Thank you Hogan. Any other questions? I love questions by the way. Sorry, yes?

Student: Could you just clarify … [unclear].

Ken: You’re going to just sit, okay. Now, do you ever have any thoughts when you meditate? What’s a typical thought that comes up for you? One that keeps coming back again and again, we all have one or two of those. There we go, that’s a popular one! How much longer? So there is, “how much longer do I have to sit here?” Ok, that’s the thought, right? What are you experiencing in your body when that thought arises? Hmm?

Student: Usually I have to restrain myself from jumping up off the cushion.

Ken: So you’re feeling itchy and antsy, right? So that’s the body sensation, itchy, antsy [uncomfortable grunt]. Okay? What emotions are you experiencing. Pardon?

Student: Patience

Ken: No, you’re not! You’re experiencing impatience, you’re not experiencing patience …

Student: I do.

Ken: You’re experiencing impatience. And what you’re trying to do is suppress that, “I’m going to be patient here!” Right? You’re experiencing impatience. When is the stupid guy going to ring that damn gong? Doesn’t he know time’s up! His watch is broken! Something like this? it’s too hot, all of that’s going on, isn’t it? Does it ever boil up to the level of anger? As in, if he doesn’t ring that gong soon I’m going to walk over and thump him? [laughs]

Student: It could.

Ken: Okay, now those are feelings, right? What do you usually do with those feelings when they arise in your meditation? What do you usually do? No you don’t, you push them down because you’re practicing patience. You try not to feel them. No, no, I’m going to meditate, I’m going to be good, this is fine, I can sit for this. Right? Okay. Don’t. I’m angry. I’m really angry. Now how do you experience anger? Do you know how you experience anger? You do? Can you be right in that experience? Good. So that’s feeding attention to anger. So you just actually experience it. Oh, I’m very impatient right now. What does impatience feel like in the body? What does it feel like emotionally? What are all the thoughts and memories, associations, story center going on? There’s a whole bunch of stuff there, right? That’s the experience.

Student: You used a metaphor about neediness. In other words, you’re saying that these feelings need our attention.

Ken: They’re grabbing it, they want it, don’t they?

Student: Yeah, so that’s what we’re doing, we’re feeding it.

Ken: Yes. Which means you get to experience the feeling. None of this patience business. Does it make sense to you now? Good.

Student: Feeling the feeling or thinking about the feeling?

Ken: Oh, totally different. Great question.

Student: It sounds like you’re talking about thinking about feelings rather than feeling the feeling, like if I’m feeling sadness, I would cry.

Ken: Fine. The way that I personally find most helpful to move into the experience of the feeling rather than thinking about it, because if you’re thinking about the feeling you’re not experiencing it. What am I experiencing in my body? Okay, there’s sadness. Now most of the time people don’t know what they’re experiencing in their body when sadness is there, so that’s the place you start. Gets you right out of your head, real quick [snaps fingers]. What am I experiencing in my body? Okay, sadness, hollow feeling in the stomach, no, like your heart just dropped down into your stomach or something like that. Right? There’s a physical sensation.

And most people don’t want to go there because they’re afraid that if they actually feel the sadness, they’re going to break down in tears, they’re going to fall apart and they’re never going to get up again, which is why we keep pushing it away. So there’s a sadness. And then there’s all that emotion, and often connected with sadness there’s maybe a feeling of deep hurt. Depending on the situation maybe a terrible feeling of betrayal. Or there could be feelings of loss, loss from which you are never going to recover. Just like, an emotional emptiness, despair, all of these different feelings. And then there are all the stories that go on at the same time.

And when you can experience what you’re experiencing in your body, in your emotions and in all the stories, you experience that all together, that’s experiencing the feeling. Most of the time, the stories that go on are ways that reactive processes are operating in order to dissipate attention so we don’t actually experience the feeling. So when you’re angry at somebody say, and you think this person really didn’t do what I said and I’m really angry at him, and there’s all this chatter that goes on, we don’t actually experience the anger, which is why it goes on and on and never stops. And if you just stop that and say, what am I experiencing in my body, I’m rigid like concrete, but it’s on fire at the same time, oh, that’s a very different experience! So you’re fire concrete. What are experiencing emotionally? I’m disappointed, I’m ashamed because I let this person fool me, etc., etc. All of those things, those are feelings then there’s all the stories that go … [unclear], so all of that. As long as you just stay in the stories you aren’t experiencing the feeling at all. So you go to the body first.

Student: The feeling of anger for me, I seldom am angry other than in the moment, simultaneous, somebody says something, response is that I’m thinking I’m not conscious of, it’s an emotional response. It’s instantaneous.

Ken: And then it goes? Then it goes and it’s gone?

Student: Sometimes not so quickly.

Ken: Ah, so it does hang around for a little bit.

Student: The anger doesn’t hang around as much as I will prove my point. [laughter]

Ken: I felt that! Sitting over here, I felt that. [laughter, unclear] Yeah. What did you experience in your body just right now when you said, “I will make my point.”

Student: What did I feel?

Ken: In your body.

Student: Really nothing.

Ken: And that’s how it often starts. No, I understand because when we start this process, we’re so unused to putting attention into the body this way that the first thing is, I don’t feel anything. What I’d like you to do, and this is a very good example: “I will make my point.” You can remember how you feel when you say that, right?

Student: The anger is not about making my point.

Ken: I just want you to stay with “I will make my point”, just that. Okay, and say that to yourself a few times and not quickly, just every now and then and begin to sense what’s in your body. And then as you sense what’s in your body, sense what emotions are there. Well, for one thing there’s determination. Yes, very strong. How do you experience that determination in your body?

Student: My hope is so great … [unclear] that you can almost describe it as …[unclear] permanent.

Ken: Permanent. But that’s what it feels like, yeah. So now you’re beginning to move into the experience of it. So you repeat, “I’m going to make my point.” Now, right at that moment when you’re saying that there’s a physical experience in the body and you keep repeating it until you can identify that physical experience and then you have that determination and it feels permanent, like it’s always going to be there. As you say, obviously not, but that’s the feeling at the time, it’s never changing. And as you do this, you’re going to move into the experience of it. You’ve already started. That’s how you do it.

Student: Where will that take me?

Ken: I have no idea. [Laughter] I know where it’ll take you eventually, but the route, I can’t possibly predict. Will you settle for the eventually? It will eventually take you to an experience, how to say this … [pause]. It’ll take you to the place where you will know whether you need to make your point or not. And there you will experience some freedom from having to make your point. Follow?

Student: That would be my greatest wish, frankly.

Ken: Great, you’ve got a clear path here. Have no idea where it’s going to take you. There’s another question, yes.

Student: You had said that expressing feelings were a long away from actually experiencing.

Ken: That’s right.

Student: How about, where’s the line, between feeling and expressing such as tears or shaking the body, or the body wanting to move in a certain way.

Ken: Oh, that can all be part of experiencing. Not necessarily, no. Acting out is where everybody around you experiences the feeling, but you don’t. [Laughter]

Jealousy, what do you do when you’re jealous? You get very, very competitive and you knock everybody down and around and you get there first. You don’t experience anything there, you’re too caught up in the thing, everybody else has experienced your jealousy or your competitiveness. Desire. The object of your desire is a person, they experience your desire. You follow? So expression and suppression are both ways of not experiencing the feeling. When you experience the feeling in attention, in the way I’ve been describing, then the freedom comes up. So you can actually engage the object of your desire and enjoy it because the needing it or the wanting it is gone because you’ve experienced the wanting of it. Now you’re free to enjoy it. And with anger, you’re able to engage the object of your anger appropriately, set the boundary, whatever, but you aren’t impelled by the anger because you’ve actually experienced it. Makes all the difference.