Category: Understanding Reactivity

Mindfulness Lab:101

August 26, 2019

Awakening where we are, Awareness, habit patterns, Listening to Ourselves, Mindfulness of feelings, Mindfulness of the Body, present moment, Sangha, The Eight Worldly Winds, Uncategorized, understanding Negativity Bias, Understanding Reactivity

Blue Cliff Monastery, Photo by Celia

“Spiritual practice is not just sitting and meditating. Practice is looking, thinking, touching, drinking, eating, and talking. Every act, every breath, and every step can be practice and can help us to become more ourselves.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

“Mindfulness is not difficult; we just need to remember to do it.” ~ Sharon Salzberg

“What are you using that time for? Are you using your time to worry or using your time to live?” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Dear friends,

It’s not hard to love people when they’re silent. On silent retreats, especially those with extended periods of quiet and intensive meditation practice, I can send metta and imagine my fellow retreatants in perfect health. I can wish they have no sorrow and their lives be filled with joy. Fast forward to the end of the retreat and my dedicated practice of openhearted friendliness and wishing the best for others can come to a screeching halt when they open their mouths. Even after deep realizations about our interconnectedness, our non-self nature and how we are caught in habit patterns, all these valuable and worthy insights seem to evaporate when we are faced with folks behaving the way they sometimes do. All our insights and wisdom are put to the test in relationship, in working and living with others who may say or do the wrong thing. Showing up as a part-time Buddha in our real life is what we are practicing for.

A week ago, I was on staff at the For a Future to be Possible retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery. What is both wonderful and challenging about Blue Cliff is that it’s a place where we are embodying the Dharma in a relational way. It’s a sort of mindfulness lab where we can experience mindful living in community. We practice mindful working, eating, communicating, and even being a mindful roommate. For this retreat, I came with the expectation of encountering confusion and clarity, moments of disconnection and community, and times when folks liked what I did when they didn’t—and I wasn’t disappointed. I met all of that and more.

In life and on retreat we encounter the Eight Worldly Winds or vicissitudes that blow through life. The Buddha was the ultimate systems analysist. He saw all life as functioning in conjunction with the concert of wholeness and that our perception is a small fragmented piece of what is truly arising. In the Lokavipatti Sutta, AN 8:6, the Buddha described a way to understand our experience of being in relationship with others and ourselves using the teaching of the Eight Worldly Winds. They are a codified example of the moving and fluid nature of our perception—and a reminder that our experience is not as personal as we think. The Worldly Winds are presented as pairs, with one aspect being something desirable and pleasant, and the other—not so much: they are gain and loss, status and disgrace, praise and blame, pleasure and pain.

You may have shared this experience of encountering one email praising us for something we’ve done and another letting us know that the exact same thing did not meet another’s needs—both on the same day. Because of the ingrained negativity bias in humans, we may find the email not liking what we did, sticks in our minds. It’s easy to run past the praise, dismissing it as coming from someone who’s easy to please, or that what we’ve done isn’t really that great—and we may find it easy to focus on criticism and get caught analyzing how we have missed the mark for the other person.

The negativity bias is part of our biological evolutionary strategy and was a useful tool for our ancestors who needed to be aware of the poison berries, the snake that bites, the warlike tribe or person who threatens our lives. We humans got very adept as distinguishing threat and avoiding it to protect our gene line and this biological evolutionary adaptation is still in play today. Although most of us don’t have to focus on which roots are edible and which will kill us, we, as a species, still give priority attention to what harms us and makes life dangerous.

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, Ph.D. tells us that in relationship we store up the bad and skip over the good—so much so, that it takes five positive interactions to diminish the sting of one negative encounter. We are so sensitized to criticism that we as a species tend to overestimate threat and interpret another person’s disapproval as dangerous and threatening. We can get very tight and defended when we encounter the downside of the Worldly Winds. What can help to keep us in an open relational state are two things. The first is to recognize that in moments when we are not hearing the acknowledgment or acceptance we are longing, that this is our turn at experiencing disapproval. We can remind ourselves that we also experience praise and that both these shifting winds are temporary, inconsistent, and depend upon conditions. The second way to practice is to bring our own care and compassion into this experience and to let ourselves be fully present without pushing away this feeling of sadness, disappointment, or hurt. We can look deeply at our instrument of emotion—our body—noting where this experience directly in the body. What does it feel like to be blamed? Where does it live in the body—in the flushed cheeks, the constricted throat, the burning of adrenalin in the hands? Can we stay with the sensations as they too shift and live out the life of this impermanent emotion?

A young nun on the retreat shared her experience with anger with me and a group of teens. She said she was aware when she was hurt and angry there was the desire to hurt the other person as much as they had hurt her. When we look at the range of experience we have in life, the hurt can take on a different meaning. It can be the portal to the way we practice with this condition in the world—the condition of blame or bad reputation. Doing our best to live in accordance with the Dharma involves actively working to reconcile and address these hurts and miscommunications as they occur. It takes bravery and vulnerability to stop continuing in the same pattern of aversion and distancing. Seeing these moments as part of this greater system of life can allow us to see these painful experiences not as torture and grounds for war, but as practice opportunities.

When I find myself tossed about by the changing winds, I remind myself, oh, this is what blame feels like. It doesn’t feel good—and I can be present for this too. I care about this feeling. The simple joy of fearlessly feeling what we feel can be a surprising balm for the painful side of the Worldly Winds. And moment after moment, we learn to trust that we can befriend ourselves through both gentle breezes and the wildest storms.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

Calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh

2 comments on Mindfulness Lab:101
It’s not you; it’s my vedana.

July 8, 2019

#training the mind, Awareness, habit patterns, Mindfulness, Satipatthana, Uncategorized, Understanding Reactivity, vedana

Columbia River Gorge. Photo by Celia

“May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease.”

~John O’Donohue

“Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

“Desirable things do not provoke one’s mind. Towards the undesirable one has no aversion.” ~The Buddha. Connected Discourses, 1265, Bhodi trans.

Dear Friends,

I am back East from the great state of Oregon—Go Ducks! Travel is a wonderful way to notice our habits. When we lose our routines and possessions that insulate us, we often find ourselves anxious and fearful of what is coming our way. It can be humorous to look at all the ways we protect ourselves from the unwanted, all the ways we move and adjust our bodies, the temperature, and our surroundings to minimize discomfort. Dharma teacher Jack Kornfield (2013, 2016) notes that “It would be interesting to notice how many of our actions during the day—even small changes of posture—come about through an effort to avoid unpleasant feeling” (p.83). The unpleasant feelings are not usually the things we tell ourselves we are avoiding because we unconsciously equate pleasure and displeasure with what is outside ourselves. This is mistaking vedana (the second foundation of mindfulness) for the thing itself.

Vedana is sometimes translated as feeling, which can be confusing as the third foundation of mindfulness [cognition/objects of the mind] consists of the activities of the mind, including thoughts and emotional states. Former Forest monk, Buddhist psychotherapist, and meditation teacher Akincino Marc Weber has done extensive scholarly research on vedana. I’ve learned from him that vedana is never merely sensation or to be confused with emotion. Vedana is the quality of “hedonic feeling tone,” meaning that it contains that instant hit of liking, disliking. Even in the space called “neutral,” there exists a subtle flavor of pleasure and displeasure, too quiet to perceive. This is true even for enlightened beings, who still sense what is sweet and sour, but without the pull that drags us towards or away from.

Vedana is the awareness of the automatic like and dislike that comes from living in a body that has a built-in threat detection system. We see this easily with food. We are designed to like sugar, fat, and salt because those ingredients help us survive. Sugar and fat have the biggest caloric bang for our buck and salt is the essential mineral we need to sustain homeostasis. Most of us have very pleasant vedana when confronted with these tastes—and this is where it can get confusing—we believe that pleasure lives in the chocolate cake, or the bag of chips when it’s really pleasant vedana which comes and goes. The first potato chip tastes very different than the last as we finish off the family-sized bag and the chocolate cake isn’t at all appealing when we have a stomach virus.

In the groovy city of Portland, OR, we visited pods of food trucks and I noticed how I was drawn to certain items, smells, physically pleasing images, and tastes I associated with pleasure. I could sit back and watch the vedana show from all the six sense doors, sights, smells, sounds, the quality of touch, tastes, and the mind’s perception.

I saw my expectation shattered and the pleasant vedana I associated with an item shift abruptly when the tofu taco was watery, or the coffee was tepid. Instant dislike. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t reacting to the thing itself—I had slid into the third foundation of mindfulness [cognition] and was feeling disappointment. And I didn’t want to confuse my dislike and the disappointment with the actual thing.

A good example of confusing the thing for the vedana comes from the founder of Nonviolent Communication and admirer of Buddhist thought, Marshall Rosenberg, who uses the experience of waiting for someone who is late to demonstrate how we blame the external situation and other people for our own emotional state. We have all had the experience of waiting for someone and believing their lateness is the cause of our irritation. We can easily move into judgment and say they are inconsiderate. We can label them as chronically tardy. And my favorite pastime while waiting, to strategize how to never wait again, by being purposefully late in the future. When we confuse the unpleasant vedana for that specific person in that specific situation, we may say, I hate waiting, or I hate John. He’s so disrespectful. We don’t take responsibility for our own mental formations and emotions that are conditioned by our unpleasant vedana.

Marshall Rosenberg offers a second scenario. What if we are waiting for someone and it’s our first chance all day to rest—maybe we have been looking for an opportunity to check our email, or we just need a break. Or we are late ourselves and arrive fifteen minutes late. When our person shows up seventeen minutes late, we are actually glad they are so late. In this example, we see that lateness is not the cause of our anger. It’s our vedana and mental formations that create our happiness or unhappiness with the situation.

This week I invite you to look at the things you like and dislike—things you are drawn towards or move away from. What is the mental formation and vedana in that situation or thing that is pulling you? When we imbue something with a permanent fixed identity, we can be jerked around by the automatic response of vedana. Whenever we have a judgment, that is a good indication that we have mistaken vedana and our emotions for the thing itself and we are believing what we think

We can still have a favorite dessert—and it might taste even better when we let ourselves enjoy the experience of pleasant vedana, knowing that all vedana is fleeting and conditional. Practicing with vedana, we can get some clarity and use this awareness as information. Knowing our experience as it truly is, shows us the impermanent and constant flickering nature of pleasant and unpleasant. Recognizing the tireless pulse of liking and disliking for what it is can give us the clarity we need to choose our path instead of being dragged along by our senses.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

Reference:

Kornfield, J. (2013, 2016). Mindfulness: A practical guide to awakening. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

No comments on It’s not you; it’s my vedana.

Category: Understanding Reactivity

Mindfulness Lab:101

It’s not you; it’s my vedana.