Being Effulgent Spaciousness – Deconstructing Yourself
Nov 2, 2023
Guided Nondual Meditation
We are going to begin tonight with some very mild seated movement. The real instructions are: move however you want, but move in circles. Start with circles with your hand. Do whatever you want, but if you feel like following me, let’s not do super tight circles, just really loose. Then elbow circles of whatever sort. Hopefully, your arms are getting more noodle-like by the second. Shoulder circles—they can go both shoulders together, or opposite circles, or forward or backward, or whatever. Then get your elbows and wrists and shoulders all working at once. The goal here is that it feels good. If you’re doing something that does not feel good, switch immediately to something that feels good.
Just feel the looseness coming into the body and looseness coming into the mind and looseness coming into your very soul as you do this. Let your neck do some circles. These don’t have to be huge, just pleasant circles, fun circles. Then torso circles. Kind of anti-hula-hoops, since it’s your upper body moving not your pelvis moving. Now, everything at once. The head moving, the arm moving, the shoulders moving, the hands moving, the elbows moving. Just feel that nice loose openness. I’m going to do these, just because I like it, you don’t have to do it.
Now, sitting up, continue to do little circles with your spine. You guys who’ve been here before know where I’m going with this. Little circle circles with the spine. The idea is to have it be this nice wave in your spine. Start making it smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, till it’s really barely moving at all, but still moving. Really feel that it’s still moving just barely at all. Now I want you to get to the place where you can’t tell if it’s moving or not, because the movement is so tiny. But it’s not still, either, exactly it might be moving and that’s how we achieve nonduality. We don’t know if our spine is moving or not. There it is—just kidding.
Now, from this place, feel deep within. Check out what it’s like to be you right now: the thought weather, the emotion weather, the body sensation weather. There’s a lot of weather in there, and what I want you to do is just check it out. If somebody was like, hey what’s the weather like in there? Just look. You know, we all might have opinions about the weather. I wish it were different, blah blah blah. But it’s also just the weather, so whatever it’s like, just let it be that way exactly that way, Whatever it’s feeling like, let it be that way. Notice if you have this kind of basic sense that I have to change it. No, it’s not okay, I’ve got to change how it is in there. Just for the length of this meditation, just agree to let it be however it is like: we’re not gonna go after it. We’re going to set aside our fundamental self-aggression just for a little while, and just let it be okay to be whatever it is. Let’s do that together for a little while here.
Now, really, we could just do this for the rest of the hour just sit and let ourselves be exactly how we are without interfering, and if you want to do that, go ahead. For everyone else, see if you can notice the already existing spaciousness in your own experience. The way your mind, the way your experience, is already naturally open, already naturally at ease. The way in which you don’t have to try to be aware because it’s already on without you doing anything at all. So, notice that spaciousness, that openness that’s there when we just come into presence with our own already existing wakefulness. You’re just awake. It’s on already, nothing to do, but we can notice that it’s spacious.
Without losing any of that sense of spaciousness, I want you to notice the rising and falling of the breath wave in the body, so that muscle wave of breathing in the body goes up and down. We’re staying very open while we’re doing that, not narrowly focusing down on it. We’re simply feeling it, just like if I said, hey what’s your foot feel like? You could answer the question without vipassana deconstruction of the foot molecules. You could just feel your foot the same way, just feel your breath rising and falling in the wide open, absolutely relaxed, very bright and clear space of wakefulness.
There can be a real sense of wanting to do a lot of stuff here, or trying to figure out how to do this right, or really engaging in a lot of mental gymnastics. Simply because, either we’re just used to doing that, really in the habit of being very mental, or we need to do it to distract from how it feels to breathe, or just what’s going on in our body. So, sitting in our open awareness like this just feeling the breath. I’m encouraging you to let go of trying to figure anything out, trying to do it right, trying to think think think think think. Instead simply feel what it feels like to breathe while remaining present, remaining real aware. Not going into some breath absorption, but rather simply feeling the breath. Just gonna sit and breathe.
Very good. And now, without making too big a deal out of it, or trying to decide or anything, just find whatever the most pleasant feeling in your body is. Just notice that, again, not focusing on it or getting tight, just with this relaxed loose, open vibe, just feeling whatever feels the best. When I say that, what people will hear is whatever feels like exploding, orgasmic ecstasy, and I’m not saying that. I’m saying, just relatively, whatever is a pleasant feeling in your body, something feels pleasant. My right earlobe is doing pretty good right now. Again, we’re not focusing hard on it, just letting that pleasant sensation arise in the presence of spacious wakefulness.
Now, just in general, what, throughout the entire body, the entire space of body sensation, just whatever feels kind of nice, notice that. So, kind of all of it, rather than just one spot.
Good. Now, go to the opposite end, what is the worst feeling in your body right now? The absolutely worst, painful, unpleasant, uncomfortable, nauseating, whatever feeling, and just feel that in the same way. As if just one thing among the entire sky of awareness, one little bird in the sky of awareness that we’re not focusing down on but certainly noticing. So feel that unpleasant sensation. Especially with the unpleasant sensation you might notice that you’re trying to change it, or you’re wondering what’s wrong: why does it feel that way? How can I make it stop? Oh, God, I went to the doctor, and they don’t even know, or whatever. We’re just setting all that side aside right now we’re setting it down and instead just feeling the feeling.
Now let’s do what we did before with the pleasant feeling but with unpleasant body sensation: the whole body—all the unpleasant stuff in the whole body, just notice that all at once, the various aches and pains, or whatever, just the whole kit and caboodle of not nice sensations. Allowing them, just like the breath wave, and just like the pleasant sensations, to simply arise and pass, arise and pass, and arise and pass in this wide open awareness.
Good. Now let all of body sensation. Be sort of equal in awareness of pleasant body sensation, unpleasant body sensation, and anything in between. All of it—we’re just sitting wide open, wide awakeness feeling the body. Letting it do its thing, feeling-wise, without trying to change it in any way. There it is the body, the sensations of the body. To whatever extent you’re thinking about it, set the thinking aside. We’re not fighting the thinking, we’re not struggling with the thinking, we’re not stopping thinking, but we’re setting it aside and simply feeling what’s there.
I want you to notice something about these body sensations, again, staying nice and wide, not narrow. Do you notice that they have, what, for a lack of a better term, we might call an energetic component? Obviously, I don’t mean that in any physics sense, but we’re just going to use the new age word, we’ll just call it energy. These body sensations are moving and changing. They might feel kind of wavy, they might feel buzzy and tingly, or, if you’re really tuned into that way of experiencing, they might instead of feeling like a solid lump of flesh or a joint or a bone or whatever it feels more like some kind of vibratory experience.
Now, if it doesn’t feel that way, don’t try to make it that way. Just notice if any part of anywhere in the body feels like that. But, for some of us, the more we sit with body sensation without interacting with with thoughts, the more it starts to reveal its energetic qualities because the thinking keeps it kind of stuck in the mental image of a body. Thinking keeps it stuck inside the boundaries and it’s got to be solid, and it’s got to be this and that. Whereas, if we let go of ideas about the body and just feel the feelings, the feelings of body sensation, they begin to feel very mobile, very energetic, very vibratory. So see if you can tune into that. Usually, the more you notice it the more of it you notice.
Isn’t it funny that you can feel your whole body is just kind of a bunch of overlapping interacting wave phenomena. Everyone’s like, don’t say Quantum, don’t say it. I’m not going to say it, but really it’s just a way of talking about it—that it feels like a lot of waves or vibration or something. If we’re experiencing this as a kind of wide open sky of awareness and within that wide open sky, there’s all these kinds of waves and ripples and vibrations. That’s pretty much how the body experiences itself—as continuous wave vibrations, ripples of movement. It is movement, and you can feel that directly without making anything up.
Notice how as you tune into that energetic quality within space, even within the sensations there’s a lot of space. Even tight, constricted, knotted, crimping in body sensation, when experienced like this, as vibratory energetic wave-like phenomena, it starts to open up. You start to notice there’s actually tons of room in there—even if it stays all tight. Lots of room, lots of space. It’s really relaxed. We can shift our attention, just slightly shift our awareness, or our view, just slightly, and notice that the body sensation itself, even the vibration, even the wave-like stuff, even the buzziness, the tingling, even pain, even pleasure, it’s just a kind of moving vibrating space. It, too, is just wide open, wide wide wide open spaciousness, ease, and bright clear, wakefulness. The body’s awake, wide awake. Your mind might be asleep, but your body is awake, in the most pleasant way.
So, now, we’re sitting as the space of awareness, with even the body sensation as spaciousness. It’s like there’s space in the room, and there’s space in your body, so there’s just space meditating in space.
Now, within this spacious energized wave-like vibratory experience, notice any emotions that are arising. In this way of working with emotions, we’re not including anything about thought. Rather, we’re just feeling the body sensation part of emotion—embodied emotion. These are James-Lange emotions, not cognitive behavioral emotions. Whatever emotional sensations are in your body, whether they’re pleasant, or unpleasant, or both; overwhelmingly large, or barely there at all. Coming from this very, very, spacious awareness very, very, spacious sense of the body, notice the vibratory wave-like energetic quality of that emotional sensation and really feel it.
We’re not trying to somehow dodge your emotions by pretending they’re all space. Feel it. Feel what’s there, wherever it is in the body. Not trying to figure it out, not trying to think about why it’s there, not trying to solve it. Just feeling it. I invite you to go deep with this. If maybe on the surface you sort of feel like, oh well, this or that happened, I’m kind of having these feelings today, but you sit here without interfering, without engaging the machinery of thought, from a very spacious place with an energized body, you might start noticing some other stuff underneath the surface emotions. Like, geez, I’m pretty sure I’m unlovable, and I will always be alone and unloved—not as a thought—but as a sickening certainty in your belly. Or some other equally unpleasant emotion. The world is unsafe and I just have to be afraid all the time. Things like that. I’m expressing it like a thought, but it’s a feeling, a certainty so deep and so common in your experience that you probably haven’t even noticed it for a while. But it’s there, so just feel that, again, just directly. There it is in the body.
Begin noticing, just like we did with the regular body sensations, notice the energetic quality, the fact that even that kind of really deep certainty of something really unpleasant, is just in the body as a sense of movement, change, wave vibratory phenomena. If it’s not, just come back to feeling the regular body that way. Just relax, notice maybe your thoughts got really engaged, and set the thoughts aside again, and come back to feeling just that emotion. We’re never trying to escape any emotions. We want to feel them completely. This stuff never works right…just feel the energetic quality of those feelings, which allows us with all the space and all the vibration and movement; it allows us to feel it even more completely, even more totally, whilst staying loose and open.
Then notice, as we did before, notice that even these emotional sensations, which might be really intense, are themselves suffused with space, wide open, wide awake openness. Ease even in the midst of it. Feeling really terrible, really sad, really scary—that, too, is space, and we feel it as space and vibration, even as we’re feeling the totality of the emotion, not denying it or somehow abstracting it away. We’re staying right with it, right with it, right with it.
So now, the body with all its sensations, pleasant and unpleasant, emotional, non-emotional, we’re experiencing as energized awake space without adding anything. Let’s just sit with that for a little while.
If you find yourself engaged with the machinery of thought, just disengage. Set that thing back down. Come back to simple presence, openness, feeling what’s there. Snap out of it.
If you find yourself engaging with the machinery thought, set it back down. Don’t stop it, but just set it down. Come back to simple presence with what’s arising in the spacious clear openness of the body.
Without changing anything at all about your experience, can you change your perspective and notice, without imagining anything at all, but just by changing your perspective, can you notice that the body, all the body sensations, all the feelings of the body, are arising out of that space—are like an expression of that openness? A beautiful exuberant vibratory expression of just space itself. Space is so lively it vibrates a body into being out of nothing. The body, even as a non-vibration, the body has like meat and heavy stuff and bones and blood—I’m starting to go into death Sangha there—stop. The body as all the heavy stuff is nothing other than the beautiful dream of a wakefulness that never, ever, has not been awake.
Wide awake space can exuberantly pass out sometimes. So, again, without changing anything at all, without adding anything. We’re not imagining, we’re not layering on concepts, we’re simply shifting our view slightly. With what’s already going on, notice the entirety of the body as an expression of wakefulness itself. Nothing other than wakefulness itself in the form of a body that has feelings and emotions and aches and pains, and ups and downs.
If you feel capable of it, and you may not, you may wish to stay just right here. This is a good spot to meditate. If you feel capable of it, notice the same things about thinking. Pick up the machinery of thought without really engaging, but still, now noticing the thoughts, thinking, and notice how the thoughts, too, are just movement vibration, waves, energy.
If that’s not obvious, then just go back to the body. If it is obvious, then you’re ready to work here. Like any other information medium, thoughts have their content but they also have their substrate, the actual, in this case, feeling of thinking, we’re going to just call it a wave or energy, but it’s almost like the medium that the ideas are in. But we’re just feeling the medium, and the medium is moving. It’s like waves, it’s like energy, it’s like vibration,awves of thought.
For most people, they tend to move up from below the head and rise up from the belly or way down, they rise up. It’s just a feeling of a thought arising. Again, if that’s not obvious, just come back to regular body sensation. But, if you can notice the waves of thought, the waves of energy and thinking, sit with that for a minute. It is very pleasant. Thought is a kind of fountain, a very pleasant fountain that’s just bubbling along, not hurting anybody, just doing its thing. Noticing that there is a quality of thought that is simply energy, movement, a wave that is not in any way different from the body. It’s not some kind of separate thing. Feels like a body sensation, and keeps feeling those waves arising in the sky of wakefulness.
Notice that ,at the very center of those waves, the energy of thought, it’s not separate from awareness, it’s not separate from space at all. Thoughts are simply space exuberantly expressing itself as thought. Spaciousness, openness, dancing as thought. The body is openness dancing as the body. Dancing as sensation. Thoughts are spaciousness dancing as thoughts. Another kind of sensation. It’s not really that different at all.
Notice the feeling of the mind as just wide open, wide awakeness, an ocean of wakefulness through which waves, ripples of thoughts, pass, without ever being different than the ocean, never separate. The waves are never separate from the ocean. Movement of thought is never separate from wakefulness.
Now, without engaging ideas at all, and noticing this wide open wide awake spacious, boundaryless, vibratory body and mind. Just notice directly what you notice when I ask you to ask yourself the question, what separates me from anybody else? Notice how that sense of wide openness welcomes everything, welcomes everyone. It’s not rejecting anything, ever. Without adding anything, or trying to be a certain way, or imagining this, or trying to do that. Awareness itself is already completely welcoming. It’s warm. It says welcome, come on in. Awareness itself has belonging, it has connection, it has brother- and sister-hood. It has compassion. I’ll say siblinghood of any sort. We don’t have to gin up any strong sentiment of compassion, we just feel that open, welcoming, warm-heartedness that’s always there. It’s always there.
So, let this wide open, wide awake, warm open-heartedness, that is very welcoming, very kind, notice that it has no boundary. All the other wide open, wide awake, open-hearted, warm, welcoming, kind awarenesses, all around, are completely in touch. Just let that flavor of open-heartedness just notice that it’s naturally radiating outward and that it’s also receiving back from everyone else that same sense of welcoming warmth, kindness, and caring.
Okay, very good.
I was saying last week, when we do this, we’re just feeling what’s there. I’m just noticing what’s there. I’m not asking you to add anything, but even more clearly, I’m asking you to subtract some stuff. It’s really more about subtracting the usual things we’re adding, than adding in anything new. If you notice, the big subtraction is when I say, take the machinery of thought and just set that aside. Don’t fight it, don’t struggle with it, don’t try to stop it, but just don’t engage with it. For most adults in our society, that’s about 95% of what they’re doing all the time, is just engaging with thought. So, when I say, let’s just set that aside, that’s a subtraction: that’s pretty major. Even though we’re not stopping anything, the engagement is most of our activity. So when I’m saying, just don’t hang on to those gears anymore, just let it go. Most of the things that you’re adding into the mix all the time are now not being added in—all the story, all the strategy, the fantasy, and the ego story just gets, for a moment, disconnected. It’s still there, still happening, we can engage with it any time.
Notice, I’m not saying disconnect with the emotion. We want to stay with the emotion, right, because those are present right there, so it’s not just completely dissociate from your thoughts and feelings. No, just feel all the feelings, but let the complexity of the thought activity sit over there for a while, and instead, come into simple presence with your body, with your emotions, with the catastrophe of your life, or whatever. Just sit there with it without the distraction machine for a while. What does it simply feel like? What do the emotions feel like? Eventually, even thoughts feel like that when we re-engage with the movement of thought without necessarily the content.
What’s interesting is, if you do that for a while, you get some facility with just sitting there with what’s happening, you’ll start to notice that because of your training and because of societal norms and because of pictures in books or on the web, all along you’ve been putting your body into a certain kind of box. You’ve been putting your emotions into another kind of box, and you’ve been putting your experience in general in a certain kind of box. And the box is made of meat and blood, and it’s only got these certain possibilities, and it’s very mechanical, and it’s very dead, because that’s how the machinery of thought imposes itself on the body. But when you set that aside for a minute and just you get good at setting it aside, so it’s not coming up all the time, but it’s just sitting there.You come into direct experience of the body, you’ll notice it doesn’t feel dead, and it doesn’t feel like machinery, and it doesn’t feel like any of that stuff. It feels mainly like moving stuff, like waves and vibration and buzzy, tingly-ness, and so on. So, we’re not imagining that, it’s what you start to feel the more you get out of the conceptual overlay that we’re normally putting on it. The more that you look at any of these wave type phenomena, it starts to be clear that there’s a lot of space there, too. It’s really spacious.
We can go into this one form of the deep end, which is continuously moving and changing waves with a bunch of spaciousness—how is it even a thing? Even more interesting is that feels like what it’s like to experience a body and emotions, and eventually even thoughts, as just continuously changing flows that we’re not trying to escape. We’re not trying to explain away, we’re not trying to somehow abstract into nothingness. We’re really just feeling them in a simple present way, but not putting a bunch of conceptual overlay on it.
It feels really interesting, it feels really alive, it feels really present, really juicy. A lot of it might feel really bad, a lot of it might feel really good, but it’s not uninterrupted, yeah it just feels great. No my back hurts, or my knees, but it’s interesting when that’s experienced outside of the concept of all that and more like—I’m trying to think of Leigh Brasington’s phrase, “streams of dependently arising processes interacting,” like this stuff arising, waves happening—so that’s a direct experience after a while.
Then eventually, even the thoughts have that quality because they’re not somehow different than the body. They are different, but they’re also embodied, and you can feel it as a feeling and a wave phenomena, and eventually, as spacious awakeness.That’s where it gets interesting–when you arrive in presence you notice all this openness and ease and wakefulness, then it flips sometimes. You can flip it on purpose, but it flips of its own accord, too, and you’ll notice, wow! Everything that I’m feeling and experiencing is just space. Kind of exuberating! Even that experience, even me, is just space kind of popping out. Then coming back into your day where, even if it’s coming into your day as—wow, vibrating space! That’s having good experiences, bad experiences, difficult experiences, crunchy experiences, pleasant experiences, whatever. That’s very cool. It’s even more interesting when it’s, this whole day is just space exuberating. We could say, the mind of the Goddess is just having a cool thought.
Now that sounds like, Michael, I thought you said we weren’t going to add anything or have any concepts. Well, I’m talking about it, so sounds pretty conceptual—but I want my money back, Jesus! That was a whole load of concepts. It’s just hard to talk about but that’s what naked experience starts feeling like, because that’s what deep underneath all our layers and layers and layers of concepts. It is really all that’s going on, and even the layers of concept are just that, going on. Those aren’t the enemy, either, they’re just initially blocking. But they come back around to show that they’re not different either: they’re just more exuberant space doing its thing. I don’t know. I could talk about this for a long time.
Any questions or comments? Anyone have any things they want to say?
Questioner 1: I just want to say I don’t have any questions, but every time I do this sit, I’m always surprised, in a really beautiful way, with how powerful the spaciousness flows, and just how connected it is to everything. This is just some real ass shit, and I really appreciate it. It’s really been a life-changing meditation that I’ve attended in person and on the live stream and I’m just grateful, thank you!
Michael: Thank you.
Questioner 1: I’m so thankful you’re here. Thanks for what you do you.
Michael: Who wants to follow that?
Questioner 2: Thanks. So, if just sitting with feelings sort of lets you see them as these energy waves, but then when we transition to sort of looking at thought that way, you sort of had an instruction about, if you already see it as an energy wave sort of great. If not, don’t worry about it. If not, maybe just stay with the body because it might be hard. Sure, that’s totally cool and I appreciate that instruction.
Michael: But…
Questioner 2: and, is it just sort of continuing to do the practice, do you start to see thoughts that way as well, or do you have eventually….
Michael: Yes, and there’s lots of you know hints, tips and tricks and other practices we can do to make that easier, but you know that’s the real sticky stuff. So, trying to do it immediately, it might work, but you might just be caught up again.
Questioner 2: Yeah, I appreciate you having skillful instructions on how to not get bogged down there right, but it is interesting as a point of reference.
Michael: There are a couple things, but I would say, the main instruction that gets you there is: notice that thoughts have a feeling quality, they are a movement of the body, or a movement in the body, they have a wave-like quality. If that’s clear, then all the things you did with body sensation and difficult and easy body sensation and emotion and all that, suddenly, it’s just the same. Do the same thing with those waves of thought, and then you’ll see the spaciousness, and you’ll notice the spaciousness becoming the ways of thought, all of that. But, if not, if you can’t notice yet the subtlety of that thought wave, then just give it time, and you just keep working on the other stuff.
Questioner 2: Yeah, it comes and goes, that’s great, thank you.
Questioner 3: Hi. I have a problem with falling asleep during meditation. I think I’ve trained myself accidentally to be really really good at it. So I’ve started meditating with my eyes open instead, but I’m wondering if you have any other advice.
Michael: Maybe you’re the only one getting enough sleep so that’s good. Are you still falling asleep with your eyes open?
Questioner 3: A little, but it’s better.
Michael: It’s better, okay. It’s the same advice as always, which is, eyes open, sit up straight, so your back is maybe a little military, just a little bit, because that does a thing to your nervous system. It’s hard to fall asleep unless your back slumps a little bit, so if you’re keeping your back really upright, it’s really hard to go to sleep. Stand up if you have to. Another one is, sometimes, looking down leads to sleeping. Looking up has the opposite effect—it’s sort of alerting. So, instead of looking down, look up.
There’s another one in there, a little subtler but, in a way, very powerful: it is that wide awake spaciousness is never tired. How do you know you’re tired? How do you know? Because you feel tired, and you’re slumping, and you’re drooling, and your eyes are goopy. But something is aware of all that, and it’s just as aware of it as it is aware of anything else. So, that’s a little trickier, because if you’re stuck in the mind, if you’re stuck in the machinery of thought, it’s hard to notice that, But, if you can set aside the machinery of thought, the wakefulness is awake. So this is true even if you go into a dream, even if you fall all the way asleep, the wakefulness is still awake. So, that’s harder, but that’s kind of the industrial strength version. Notice that the awareness isn’t sleepy.
Then, one last thing, which is to do yoga nidra—do guided sleep meditation for a while, and notice that you’ll fall asleep and then come back out of the sleepiness. You give up resisting the sleepiness and you just let go into it while laying on your back, and then you’ll come back out of it. You might even be really awake. So those are some pointers. Don’t make the sleepiness into the big enemy, just see if we can play with it in different ways.
Questioner 3: Okay, thank you
Michael: Yep.
Questioner 4: My question is, when you were saying to look for vibrations. I’m not quite sure I know what you’re pointing at with the word vibrations. What it feels like when I’m…
Michael: Do you do jhanas?
Questioner 3: Yes.
Michael: You know what piti is?
Questioner 3: Yeah.
Michael: That’s it, okay. So even the simple version of it, where it’s just you feel your hands tingling.
Questioner 3: So, you can look for very, very, very subtle piti?
Michael: To use that language absolutely. In other words, I know, just because I know your practice a little bit. I know you know what vibration is.
Questioner 3: Okay, okay
Michael: That’s why I’m talking in that way.
Questioner 3: Thank you.
Michael: It’s not hard. It’s not a special vibration.
Questioner 4: More of a report, and a question at the end. I felt basically like I had a metaphysical finger shoved down my throat, and a lot came up. I mean, I’m not too
surprised, but I don’t know, I feel like a hypocrite in a way because I work with people directly in teaching yoga or coaching. A common thing is you have to feel your emotions, you can’t avoid it right now. I don’t want to feel my emotions.
Michael: Well that’s another emotion, right? I mean resistance is there.
Questioner 4: Is there some Voodoo that you can just turn off the bad emotions and only feel the good ones? Is there some magic heroin, I don’t know, it sucks.
Michael: Give it a shot.
Questioner 4: I guess the real question behind this is what I’ve experienced. I think you describe it as nondual 1, the sense that I am not separate from the world but there’s this observer observing it. And it’s like there’s…
Michael: That’s different than what I would call nondual 1.
Questioner 4: Okay, that’s my experience, I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
I feel frustrated in a way, because I can experience this vibration while I’m crying and I feel like shit.
Michael: Didn’t I say that though? I did say, this can feel really bad—and it’s still vibrating. This can feel really crunchy and uncomfortable and awful and it’s still wide open, right? That doesn’t mean I can do whatever I want to other people and it’s still wide open. I’m not saying that. I’m saying, notice your own experience of feeling unpleasant is still wide open, still vibrating. So what’s the trick you want, the voodoo? You aren’t those bad feelings. They’re there, you’re the awake space, too, and the awake space is what becomes the feelings. All that’s happening is you’re spending the time being the feeling, and not in a nondual way—totally glommed into it. Instead, try and be the space, okay and then eventually you notice those two things aren’t actually separate.
Questioner 4: Does that lead to some kind of okayness with the emotion? Does it ever mean that the emotion doesn’t hit so hard, or is so painful?
Michael: It’s just hard to talk about correctly, but I’ll say it definitely makes it hit in a different way that is much easier to deal with, but it might suck just as bad.
Questioner 4: Got it, thank you.
Michael: In the same way, does a meditation experience mean if my knee were crushed by a 16 ton weight it wouldn’t hurt? No, it’s gonna hurt—a lot, but your experience of that hurt will be different in a way that is much easier to handle. But if it didn’t hurt, there’d be something wrong with you. We want to have a full human experience, not a numb experience.
Questioner 4: Thank you, I’ll try heroin. [laughter]
Michael: Good luck.
Questioner 5: I notice feeling, observing my body and feeling all the changes that are going on, and I’m interpreting that as the vibration. I’m even having the experience of not being so attached to what I normally think was the shape of my body. But I have no idea what you’re talking about when you talk about space exuberating.
Michael: Just come back to feeling the vibration and maybe some spaciousness. If you’re feeling vibration and spaciousness, then in one way, you’re still kind of coming from I’m watching the vibration in space, but here I am, I’m a body and a brain watching vibration in space. Remember, I said without changing anything, except the direction you’re coming from, notice that could just be space vibrating into being a body. That’s what I mean. Still vibration in space, didn’t add anything, just came this way. That’s what I mean.
Questioner 6: Hi, my question was about the sensations associated with thoughts. That was really cool to me because it was the first time where I looked at my thoughts, not as like whether they’re true or not, but as a feeling in my body. I noticed that some of them create this like feeling of buoyancy and others create this feeling of, I guess, thinking.
Michael: Those are emotional reactions to the thought. Still body sensation, but those are side effects, right?
Questioner 6: Right. It was interesting because when I would experience a sinking thought, I could kind of reach for something that felt higher up and more buoyant to stay afloat. But I was wondering if trying to shape my thoughts in this way is going in the right direction or not, or if it’s better to just be aware of them and kind of let them be.
Michael: You get to choose. There’s a whole beautiful direction of imaginal work that is about shaping that, and there’s a whole other direction of just letting them be and it’s not even like some kind of permanent decision, right? You could do one at one time, and the other at another time. So both are fine, honestly. I’m not going to be like, no, never shape the thought, because that’s great—that’s creativity, right? Sometimes shaping all that is really beautiful and fun and cool and actually how we make stuff happen, so yeah.
Questioner 6: Thank you,
Questioner 7: I don’t have any questions, but just a comment. There was like kind of a nondual moment when she fainted.
Michael: You bet. What’s going on?
Questioner 7: Well that, but, also, you had said something right before you’re like wakefulness is never not awake and then she’s like shhhh, and I was like oh I get it yeah, I get it.
Michael: Yeah, we paid her to do that. [laughter] Thanks for your questions.
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