Experience your feelings completely

From: Heart Sutra Workshop 3
Full transcript
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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? Yeah, let’s be honest. You got angry—all of you did! And 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, Grrr! Grrr! Err. And think, “Okay back to the breath, but he said this and he said that.” Grrr!

Anybody had this experience? [Laughter] And it goes on, you know, for ten minutes or fifteen minutes or twenty minutes or whatever and then suddenly you find yourself sitting there like this…and you’re not angry at all. And you didn’t decide not to be angry. You didn’t say to yourself, “Oh, I’ve worked through this now.” It just stopped. Right? And some part of you may go like, “What happened? I was so angry three minutes ago.” And you try to remember the situation but you can’t get any juice in it. Anybody had this experience?

Well, that arises because the anger has actually been felt. You know it may sound a little stupid but I say a lot of stupid things. So that’s nothing unusual. But the function of a feeling is to be felt. And a feeling can’t be complete until it is felt.

Now 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? You know, “I’m not really angry with you; I just have a few things to tell you.” [Laughter] 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 every thing that’s wrong with you.” Next frame, “Why don’t you get a sheet of foolscap.” Next frame, “Draw a line down the center.” Last frame, “On second thought, get two sheets.” [Laughter]

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 been felt, been experienced, then its 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.

And 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 be anger. Anger arises but it can’t be what we are in the way we were talking about this morning. Oh, okay.

And not only that, we experienced it, we felt it and the world didn’t come to an end. Most people don’t actually experience the emotions because they’re 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.

Pride and other reactive emotions

Reactive emotion (from GDP05 00:00:00.00 - 00:04:43.02)

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Ken: Let's begin with any questions about the practice. No questions?

Student: A case of clear directions.

Ken: Pardon?

Student: A case of clear directions.

Ken: Oh dear, I'll have to muddy it up next time. John?

John: Is pride an attribute?

Ken: Pride isn't. Pride is usually regarded as an emotion. Why?

John: I'm just trying to figure it in a more positive way, it's almost like arrogance.

Ken: Yeah pride, arrogance.

John: But you're not really suffering from it. [Laughter]

Ken: Most of the people I know who are proud aren't suffering from it at all.

John: That's what I'm saying.

Ken: Most of the people I know who get angry don't suffer from it. Everybody else does. That's the characteristic of a reactive emotion. You're discharging the energy so that you don't get to feel it--everybody else does. That's why you're expressing it, so you don't have to feel it. So what's the question behind all this?

John: Well, I got totally thrown off this morning when I came in for an interview and...

Ken: Well who, who did that? [Laughter]

John: That's because you turned it around a bit.

Ken: Yes.

John: Something that was more, that I [unclear]

Ken: No, keep going: this is important.

John: I'm trying to think of what I can...how I started out because I...you ended up saying you wouldn't deem to even consider that those people were effecting you.

Ken: That's right.

John: And deem that your own self-interest that's provoking it or your own "self-betteration".

Ken: Yeah, if you're proud, right, and some little pip-squeak takes issue with something that you've done, does this affect you?

John: Yes.

Ken: I mean if you're really, really proud and even if someone has the temerity to speak to you, which they shouldn't, of course.

John: Yeah, I get that.

Ken: What's the awakened quality here?

Student 1: Vajra pride.

Ken: Yes, but what's the specific quality?

John: Dignity?

Ken: Close.

Student 2: Equanimity.

Ken: Yes. You're not disturbed by anything. Good. Bad. You sail through it all. Everything's the same. So live proud.

The function of a feeling...

In this clip, Ken assures us we won't die or the world won't come to an end if we let our feelings/emotions be felt.

Often this avoidance of feelings gets me in trouble. So now I have a wee bit of a podcast to remind me, I won't die if I just let them arise and fall away.

The function of a feeling (from Heart Sutra Workshop 03- 00:00:40:9 - 00:09:55:0)

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Okay, well any questions from this morning? Microphone, Sophie isn't it?

Sophie: You know when you're talking about like who experiences the experience, if you're having like a lot of pain, who's experiencing that? I mean you know it's very difficult to transform that experience into emptiness, when ...

Ken: You can't possibly transform it into emptiness, who ever told you you could do something like that?

Sophie: Well I think ...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 just 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, you know I'm just ...and I know I am confusing relative world with absolute..

Ken: Well, I think this is a very good question. Because I think there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around this. The...you know you can't transform pain into emptiness for the same reason you can't wake up a person who is pretending to sleep. (laughter) I'll let you chew on that for a little bit. But it is actually the same reason.

Now, I'll answer your question more completely in the last section this afternoon, but for now because we are 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 were/took the anger that arose as a fact that you just HAD to act on? Yeah, let's be honest. You got angry all of you did! And 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 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, GRRRH! Grrr! Err. And then back to the breath, but he said this and he said that, Grrr!

Any body had this experience? (laughter) And it goes on for ten minutes or fifteen minutes or twenty minutes or whatever then suddenly you find yourself sitting there like this...and you're not angry at all. And you didn't decide not to be angry, you didn't say to yourself, "Oh self, I've worked through this now." It just stopped. Right?

What happened, I was angry two minutes ago? And you're trying to remember the situation but there's ... you can't get any juice in it. Anybody had this experience?

That arises because the anger has actually been felt. You know it may sound a little stupid but I say a lot of stupid things. So that's nothing unusual. But the function of a feeling is to be felt. And a feeling can't be complete until it is felt.

Now what happens if a feeling comes up and you try not to feel it? NO, I don't really love him. How long does that one work? You know...I'm not really angry with you, I just have a few things to tell you.(laughter)

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 every thing that's wrong with you. Next frame, "Why don't you get a sheet of foolscap (paper)? Nest frame, "Draw a column...line down the center." Last frame, "On second thought, get two sheets." (soft laughter)

No anger here at all.

But when you experience it and a lot of us don't do that very gracefully but when it's actually been felt, been experienced than its 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. And something very important happens then.

Can you be what...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 be 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 en Most people don't actually experience the 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 something.

Working with Anger 4

Working with Anger 4 (from 37P 08b: 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva 00:16:33.80 - 00:19:00.80)

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• Working with Anger 1
• Working with Anger 2
• Working with Anger 3

Working with Anger 3

Working with Anger 3 (from 37P 08b: 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva 00:13:05.00 - 00:15:12.00)

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Working with Anger 2

Working with Anger 2 (from 37P 08b: 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva 00:08:41.00 - 00:12:48.00)

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Working with Anger 1

Working with Anger 1 (from 37P 08b: 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva 00:00:00.00 - 00:08:33.00)

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It Is Not A Thing

It Is Not A Thing (from TAN02: Then and Now (class) 00:36:25.50 - 00:39:21.50)

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Well, the quality of being that anything has, is that it is not a thing, in the same way we saw above, these pieces of paper: big isn’t a thing. It’s relative. It depends on the relationship with other things. So the quality of being that everything has is that it is not a thing. Which means that a Buddha is just as much not a thing as a sentient being. None of us are things.

One way we talk about it in the modern times is that we’re not things, we’re processes. But that actually causes just as much problem. There’s nothing — this goes back to a point I made earlier — there is no thing that I can point to and say, “That is me, that is what I am.” There isn’t anything like that, and that is as true of a Buddha as it is of a sentient being.

This is wonderfully illustrated by a woman, Belle Hooks, who is a student of Lama Yeshe. One day — I think she was in Nepal at this point — she was really, really angry, and it was obvious that she was very angry; she was throwing a tantrum. And in the middle of this Lama Yeshe came up and whispered in her ear, “Buddha mind is very angry today.” [laughter]

Now what would you do if you were very angry and someone kept saying, “Buddha mind is very angry today?” How long would your anger last? This was extremely skillful on the one hand, but it’s also profoundly true.

In just what I was saying earlier, this quality of being awake — this possibility of quiet — is present in everything that we experience — even when we’re extremely angry or extremely caught up in jealousy, or desire, or stupidity, or depression, or anything like that. That quality of being awake is there. It may or may not be something that we can access and that’s what we’re going to move into in a minute.

It isn’t good, it isn’t bad, it isn’t this, it isn’t that, it’s not many, it’s not one, it’s not eternal, it’s not eteralism, it’s not nihilism, it’s.... There isn’t any quality you can put on it, but it is something — an experience that is always available to us. One can argue that the main thrust of Buddhist practice is to experience that. And when we do, we experience being without projection and that’s one way (without projection/without confusion) of talking about being awake.

Releasing Emotional Reactions 1

This clip was selected and transcribed by Tracy Ormond!

This is the first step of a Five-Step Mindfulness Practice.

RER Phase One (from RER 02: Releasing Emotional Reactions (retreat) 00:22:49.60 - 00:26:00.10)

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So the first phase is, "Breathing in I experience this," and I am going to use the word feeling, but it could be emotion, it could be pain, it could be problems, and you just fill in the blank. So let's just do that.

You take this and you say, "Breathing in I feel this pain." Breathe in. "Breathing out I feel this pain." With each breath, "Breathing in I feel this pain, breathing out I feel this pain."

Now, in the beginning, depending what you have chosen, that may be a bit like a hot potato. So there are two methods I've found that can at least get us in touch with it to some extend. The first is: "Okay, that's too hot, too difficult, too much for my capacity of attention at this point." So experience one tenth of it, or one hundredth, or one thousandth. And that approach works for some people. For other people, they find it more helpful to think, "Well that's too close, if I put it on the other side of the room, well, maybe on the other side of town." So it's a safe distance away, but still in one's awareness.

So the first step is just to bring it into awareness, either a small piece of it or at a proximity that you can handle. And that's for you to determine in your own practice. So set it up that way, whatever is appropriate for you, we go back to phase one. "Breathing in, I experience this pain, breathing out..." and imagine holding the pain tenderly in your attention. Which means that you're not going to do anything to it. And you're not trying to get anything from it. You're just holding it, and you are holding it very, very gently.

Some background info--the following is a comment made by Ken in response to a question asked by Michael, who was working on translating this practice into German:

"The crucial point is in Michael's last comment: 'To use these meditation instructions it is not necessary to feel pain. It can be an emotion or a problem which may be experienced as a kind of imbalance for example, rather than pain. And even an imbalance can make patterns run.'

This meditation is for working with reactions, those seemingly automatic processes that just run and throw us into confusion and lead us to do things we wouldn't do if we were clearer and more responsive. Reactions can be blissful or painful, though usually the latter. Think of falling in love (a blissful reaction, frequently) or the anger that arises when love is not returned.

The aim is to experience what is arising as completely as possible. In English, to give an idea of the range of experiences, I use "reaction, pain, problem, issue, difficulty, etc.". Basically, it covers anything that we can't experience for any reason."
...
In teaching people, I give them this meditation whenever people are encountering something that prevents them from resting. If one can rest, then one rests and lets the resting deepen on its own. When one encounters something difficult, then more specific effort and attention, as in this practice, can help.

Wanting To Be Loved

Wanting To Be Loved (from Three Jewels 00:19:54.35 - 00:23:01.00)

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And then there’s all the emotional reactions which we’re getting stuck on all the time. So here’s where the Dharma comes in: relating to experience completely.

Well, very interesting things happen then. For instance, you take a typical emotional reaction, say, wanting to be loved. Now if you go into this completely, you’re going to have to figure out what there is in you to be loved. Right? And who’s going to do all of that loving? And as with any facet of our experience the more deeply you go into it the less you find to hold onto.

And you find that in the case of wanting to be loved, means that the only way to do that – to meet that is to be completely open to all of experience yourself. In other words, to love everything. And you find that this turn happens over and over again when we go into experience.

Anger, the other thing; If you’re going to be angry you’ve got to be angry at something, you can’t be angry at nothing. So to really go into that you’ve got to find what you’re angry at. And because anger has so much energy the more that you go into it the more difficult it is to find anything to be angry at, but the clearer and clearer your mind grows. So this is what it means to go into your experience completely. And that’s the Dharma.