Sit in Simple Presence – Deconstructing Yourself
Meditation
We’re going to move a little bit, so I want you to just move in some way that feels good, and that is fluid. You don’t have to do what I’m doing, but, in the mood of what I’m doing. It feels good, it’s smooth, it’s easy. If you want to do something nice and circular with your hips, whether it’s a hula hoop motion, or something that is circular, get some circle movement in there, especially in the hips, but your knees can be moving in circles, your ankles can be moving in some sort of circle. Then get your wrists moving in a circle. Again, it should feel good. We’re not trying to stretch out, we’re just letting the body feel some fluidity. Get your elbows moving in circles, shoulders in circles, and then just get real random about it. Still circles, but it doesn’t have to be a pattern, it can just be moving. What you want is to just feel nice. Think of your body as just some water that’s very pleasantly splashing around the inside of a bowl, and keep that water splashing in a really fun way. It feels really nice, you can go fast if you want to go fast, you can go really slow if you want to go really slow, but it should feel good, that’s all. Feeling good can mean your soul feels good when you do it. Then, just for me, I’m going to stretch way way up. I’ve been doing this with my infant toddler—stretch away way up—hands to the sky, hands to the sky, hands to the sky, and then all the way down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Then, even if you want to keep your heels on the floor, and go all the way down, way down, way down.
That’s it, just a little bit of movement. Now, we’ll actually continue with floor movement, just the usual one, where we circle our spine, and you can do your shoulders and neck and stuff, but basically, moving your spine in a circle. Maybe moving it the other way in a circle. We’re just, again, feeling good, feeling loose, feeling open, relaxed. Start making the movement smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Still relaxed, but just smaller and smaller, until, eventually, you can’t tell whether you’re moving or not. It’s not that you’re stopped, it’s that you can’t tell if you’re stopped or you’re moving, because the movements are so small. Then, wherever that feels really just perfectly balanced, just stay there. Because you’re not a piece of construction equipment, you actually are still moving, and there are always micro-adjustment going on. Feel into those as clearly as you can, into those totally very small, automatic adjustments, that those little tiny muscles all up and down the spine are doing. Notice it is still moving, including of course the movements of the breathing apparatus, and the movements of the heart beating, and the surging of blood through the capillaries, one platelet at a time.
From this place of inward focus, ask yourself the question, What’s it like to be me right now? By that, I mean you: What’s it like to be you right now? Then simply feel, just feel your body, feel your emotions, feel the thinking, feel the world around you, and see if you can do this without having any ideas at all about it being different. Instead, let go of any sense of aggression towards how you feel right now. Just letting how you feel right now be how you feel. Instead of a stance of, I shouldn’t feel this way, I should feel different, I want it to change. Just for now, just for the length of this guided meditation, just let it be the way it is, even if it’s awful. The stance of continuous aggression towards how we’re feeling just makes it worse, whereas, letting it be the way it is actually already a bit of a relief. So just give yourself a minute or so here, I’ll just be quiet, and we could just sit in simple acceptance with exactly how we feel right now.
Notice if you’re trying to avoid being with how you feel right now. That can come in the form of getting real distracted, getting into fantasies, trying to feel other stuff, trying to escape, all sorts of strategies to get out of the simple experience of right now. What this way of meditating is designed to do–we’re just going to sit still and be with what we’re feeling right now. That’s the whole thing. It’s designed to be free from a lot of distractions. We stay physically still, because even fidgeting and scratching and stuff is a distraction. It’s a way of trying to escape experience, so we just stay nice and relaxed and open with just what’s here, simply, and directly, in our own experience each moment.
I can lead you through a thousand really complicated—extra triple complicated—techniques, but it all comes down to: can you just sit with how you’re feeling or not? One of the moves that is very important here is to notice that if we continuously narrow our attention tighter and smaller, and tighter and smaller, it actually gets kind of harder to sit with what we’re feeling. Whereas, if we let our attention be naturally very wide, naturally open, which is what it’s like when we’re not intentionally squeezing it tight, but we let it be sky-like, broad, it makes it much easier—there’s just so much more room for stuff to happen. So, to whatever extent possible, without forcing, or shoving, or attempting to make your awareness big or something, just let it naturally be open. Just in the way that you can hear the whole room around you without trying to hear it; in the way that with your eyes open, if you don’t narrow them down on purpose, they just take in all of the peripheral field. In the same way, we just let our general awareness be wide open, which is what it’s like when we’re not tightening it.
Notice, it’s already a little easier to sit with how we’re feeling, to sit with all that’s going on in our experience, just because we’re not trying to shove it all in a box. We’re not trying to put a fitted twin sheet on a king-sized bed all the time. There’s more than enough room. Notice that we’re not trying to stop thinking. You can think as much as you want. What we’re doing is not engaging with the thoughts. So, in a way, the thoughts can go on in the background, but we’re not grabbing onto them. We’re not digging into them, we’re not focusing on them, we’re not engaging. It’s like they are just somewhere in the background, and we have nothing to do with them. But that’s very different than trying to suppress, deny, control, stop, them. Instead, we’re just letting them be there, but not giving them any attention at all.
Notice, when we allow awareness to be very broad on its own, and when we stop trying to change our experience, but just let it be what it is, in the same way, when we just set down that interaction with the thinking, and just totally set it aside, we’re not interacting with it at all, no matter how much is there. All of a sudden, there’s quite a bit more room, maybe even almost too much room. For a moment, it’s, but I’m so used to being engaged with that, what do I do if I’m not engaging with that? Well, what you do is just feel what you’re feeling, just be present in this room right now with exactly what’s going on in your experience. Notice how incredibly easy that is, it might be uncomfortable, but it’s simple.
If you have a strong, long habit of engaging with the thoughts, it’s almost a compulsion, because you do it so much. I don’t want you to struggle or somehow get into a fight trying to disengage, just, really simply and easily, and with a lot of relaxation, just anytime you notice that you’ve grabbed on, you just relax your hand, and let go. Come back to simple presence, right now, with what we’re feeling, simple presence, without doing anything at all. There’s all that body sensation arising, sounds of the room, all the thoughts churning in the background, the sights around you, if your eyes are open, and a lot of other stuff arising in the simple presence. So, let’s just sit with that together for a while, remembering, over and over again, notice if you’re engaged with the thinking, and just let go.
One of the strategies for avoiding feeling what we’re feeling, is to get sleepy, or drowsy, or dull. If you notice that’s happening, sit up straight. This is a very easy meditation to do with your eyes open because we’re having awareness. Be nice and open. We’re not trying to focus on anything in particular. So, again, if there’s drowsiness, sit up, open your eyes, you don’t have to stare. You can blink and move your eyes around, but just let some light in. We’re staying wide awake, and letting go of any engagement with thought at all. If you’re nodding off, sit up straight and open your eyes. Don’t just go to sleep, stay awake. Buddha means awake. We’re awake.
Sometimes there are cogs that just attach your attention to your thinking. The cogs just automatically engage, and you’re just engaged in that thought. Just disengage that cog, just push in the clutch, and leave it in, so that you’re in neutral, and the engine of thought can just turn and turn and turn, but you’re just not engaged with it. You’re not doing anything at all with that, but, instead, all of awareness is just wide open, bright and clear, and just simply present, just nothing but present. It doesn’t take any skill at all. Wide awake, wide open, bright and clear: that’s what’s there if we’re disengaged from the thoughts. It’s not trippy, it’s not psychedelic, it’s not highly altered, it’s not a special state, you’re just not lost in the dream of thought.
Good. Now, you can just stay with that, but if you want to go a little further, in a really relaxed way, gently, if they’re not already open, open your eyes. Look, in a relaxed way forward, and just allow all of peripheral vision to be present together with central vision. So, instead of just looking at one thing, you’re kind of seeing everything at once equally. The whole visual field, all the peripheral vision and the middle all together as one full field of vision, with relaxed eyes.
While you’re doing that, and continuing to remain disengaged from thought, do not engage with thought, ask yourself the question: What is having this experience? Then, just look. You don’t have to look with your eyes, you can feel with your body, you can hear with your ears, you can, in whatever other way, experience. Don’t engage with any thought to answer that question, just look for the answer: What is having this experience? Can you find what’s having the experience without thinking about it? Give it a shot, right now. What is having this experience? You could even ask the question: What is experiencing? Can you find it in your own awareness right now? If it’s a sensation in your body, which particular sensation is having the experience? If it’s a thought, an idea in your head, remember we’re not engaging with that, because that’s not a visual experience. Where is the thing having the experience, right now? Find it.
If you’re a slick, highly trained Buddhist, you’ll be, like, “it’s unfindable,” so I’m just not going to look. But I want you to look, look—really look—knowing that, by that theory, you’re not supposed to be able to find it, is just engaging with thought, which we’re not doing, so look: What is experiencing right now? Keep looking, keep groping in the dark, keep groping and groping, Where is the thing having this experience? Allow awareness to go through every sensation in your body, feel every feeling in your whole body. Is it one of those feelings? Is it a certain kind of tension behind your eyes? Is it that thing that’s experiencing, or is that just some tension behind your eyes? Again, don’t go to the thought process to try to figure it out, just look. Leave your eyes wide open, seeing all the peripheral vision as well as the center, and just keep looking.
We can change the question a little bit: What is seeing right now? Our eyes are open, we’re seeing this uniform field of vision. What is seeing? Can you find a seer? Look. What is seeing right now? Notice, without engaging thought at all, notice the fact of seeing. It’s bright, it’s colorful, there are shapes, there are textures, there are outlines, there are all kinds of visual stimuli coming in. It’s tremendously alive, it’s awake, it’s clear, it’s bright, it’s a feast, a vision. It’s not nothing. There’s a lot of vision happening. It’s wide awake. The lights are on. The very fact of the experience is cold water in the face, it’s so intense. What is having the experience? Look, feel, find it.
Notice, you can’t find anything. You can find a bunch of experience, feelings in the body, thoughts in the head, vision, hearing, everything else. You can find all the experience, but you can’t find a thing having an experience. What you find is wide open, wide awakeness. Something is wide awake, and it’s wide open. There’s just no tightness in it at all. There’s no rejection in it at all. It’s completely relaxed, wide awake, utterly welcoming to all experience, playful, spontaneous, kind.
Notice the fact of this experience, the shocking water in the face, cold water in the face fact of just experience itself. Notice, there’s no boundary on it, there’s no edge at all. Experience doesn’t stop at the skin, it doesn’t stop at the walls, it doesn’t stop anywhere. There’s just experience, boundless experience, boundaryless wide awake, wide openness. The thinking mind can judge all that experience—this is a good experience, this is a bad experience, this is a boring experience, this is a cool one—I want to hang on to—all kinds of stuff. But awake awareness, wide open, wide awakeness itself does not say no to any experience. It says yes to everything, and it’s not a reluctant kind of begrudging yes, it’s an exuberant loving, wide open yes to everything.
Sit outside the mind, and notice boundless, wide open, wide awakeness, that is utterly
spontaneous, independent, self-arising, free. Don’t just sit there napping, sit up straight, with your eyes open. If you’re tired, that drowsiness is in the mind. We’re sitting outside the mind, which is always wide awake, wide open.
Earlier, I said that this wide open, wide awakeness does not have a boundary. See if you can find a boundary. Don’t just believe me, look: Is there a boundary? Where is the boundary of this awareness? Sitting outside the mind, unengaged with thought, look, feel, into, When did this awareness start? What was the first moment of this awareness? Find it: When was the very first moment of awareness?
In this moment right now of wide awake, wide openness, all you can find is either awareness itself, right now, or memories that you’re aware of right now. We are wide open, wide awakeness, with no boundary, outside of time, simply wide awake. That’s not happening to anything, it’s just happening, with no beginning, and no source. And, yet, experience is there—a splash of cold fresh water. Experience is happening. It’s not nothing. Timeless, beginningless, boundless, wide open, wide awakeness, spontaneously unfolding each moment unfolding.
Notice that, since we can’t find what’s having the experience, there’s no separation at all from the experience. The experience is all; there is no separation at all from the experience. No separation at all from each other. Wide open, wide awakeness welcomes everyone, is everyone, contains everyone, loves everyone, completes everyone. Not as some idea or as an aspiration, but as just what’s happening. There is nothing but connection and interbeing. Nothing but love for wide open, wide awakeness, without a boundary, outside of the mind, outside of time, utterly intimate with everything.
Dharma Talk
So, if nothing else, this at least at least gives you a chance to notice clearly what your strategy is for not resting in your own experience. Besides experience itself, that would be the most obvious thing from sitting here, is just, What came up to take me away from just being? It’s really this super simple thing to do. You could do it by just putting yourself in a quiet room with no distractions, which is what we’re doing right here. Quiet room, fairly quiet, except for me droning on and on, but pretty quiet, not much distraction. You can’t look at your phone, we won’t let you move very much, some of you were scratching the whole time, but still that’s kind of a boring distraction. So, what comes up? The whole instruction is just sit with your experience, sit with however you’re feeling, sit. With an hour of just sitting here, if that wasn’t all that was going on, what else was coming up? What were your strategies for not encountering actual experience?
Maybe actual experience is boring, okay, my strategy is to get really interested in some idea. Or, maybe, actual experience feels really kind of depressing right now, and I don’t want to feel that feeling, so I’m going to constantly try to be up up up up. If I’m sitting here, I have to somehow be up, but especially if you’re not allowing yourself to engage with the strategy, you’ll keep noticing it trying to come up. It’ll keep poking at you, because just resting with what’s actually going on is intolerable. Isn’t that interesting. Just sitting here with whatever is actually happening is intolerable, unless you’ve done a lot of this, it’s intolerable. No, it’s not, I can tolerate it. Really? Were you able to not spin off into a strategy? If you weren’t, then you just proved it was intolerable to just simply rest with your own experience.
Does everyone know about the battery experiment? This was in about 2013. A simple white room with a chair and a desk. The instructions are go in the room and sit there with no phone, no TV, no music, no books, nothing. That’s it, that’s all you have to do: come out in 15 minutes. Oh, but they just happen to leave a 9 volt battery there. I don’t think they made you lick it. I think it was something like a button, so the one thing you were allowed to do is give yourself a painful, actually, very unpleasant, electrical shock. So it was really surprising to the researchers—everyone could just sit there and hang out with their own thoughts and feelings in a white room for 15 minutes without ever shocking themselves. Oops, I meant, the majority of people sat there and shocked themselves instead of just feeling their feelings, instead of just being, 67%. It was more than that—some did it hundreds of times, usually young men. That’s an actual study: It was better to sit there and shock yourself painfully over and over, than to simply be with experience without distraction. So, experience without distraction for the average person is intolerable, it’s worse than being electrically shocked over and over.
So, when I say, what’s your strategy? I’m serious. What did you use as your battery to give yourself some kind of something so you wouldn’t have to just be with yourself? That’s what this experiment does. It’s a really simple experiment: what did you do? Because, there it is—that’s it! There might be more than one, but it shows you what your electric shock is.
Notice that, if you pay attention, that’s your whole life you’re doing that, all day long, every day, simply because feeling what you’re feeling and being with yourself is intolerable. That’s sad, right, really sad. What’s so bad about sitting with yourself? Hint: it might be in that pile of thinking that I said to not engage with. Even though we’re not stopping it or denying it, it’s there, but that can be pretty gnarly. We can work with that, too, and should work with it to make it much more pleasant company, but to be able to do this experiment we were doing, we’ll want to set it aside, because actually the pile of thinking isn’t really where we’re coming from anyway.
We’re coming from wide awake, wide openness that has no center, that has no time, that has no boundary, that has no beginning, that says yes to everything, it has no problem sitting with experience, has no problem sitting with how you’re feeling right now, it has no problem sitting with being you at all, not the slightest problem with it.
Being able to sit with how you’re feeling and sit with being you, will that directly solve all the problems in the world? Not directly. But, I would say that, all or at least most, of the problems in the world are caused because people can’t sit with how they’re feeling. So, actually, yeah, it solves most of the problems of the world. Most of the terrible things people do are because they can’t sit with how they’re feeling. So simply, simply, sitting here in a quiet room, being with how you’re feeling, being you, is already beginning to heal the world. At least for an hour of sitting here, you’re not just lashing out, or mindlessly consuming, or whatever, to distract, distract, distract, or try to change how you’re feeling. Just for a little while, not being part of the problem, and not contributing to the pain.
So, it’s actually kind of a big deal to be willing, I mean, to be brave enough, to just even try to sit here and face this thing that almost all people find intolerable. To face, which is, just this moment, just the way it is, just yourself, exactly the way you are. It’s a very significant act, each time you sit down and do that instead of just being another one of the dominoes falling, you’re pulling one of the dominoes out of the chain and breaking the chain. Each time you sit, you can imagine the whole world is just people hurting other people because they were hurting, and somewhere in there you pull the domino out, and just sit with how you’re feeling and be with that, and it breaks the chain, it breaks the chain.
So, thanks for sitting with me tonight, and helping to turn things around. If anyone has anything they’d like to say, reports, questions, ask for the microphone. Remember, that it’s going out to live to the internet, not just to this room.
Q&A
Questioner 1: Thank you for leading that meditation. I’ve been trying to practice in life, just, let me feel something, but sitting here, I was getting this almost excruciating pain. It hurt a lot, and I still tried to feel it, but, around halfway, I noticed I started trying to do something. It was like, Where is it? What is the thing? It’s here, I’m looking, looking…
Michael: You were doing the self-inquiry question. That is a doing, the instruction is to do something.
Questioner 1: Yeah. It felt like when I let go, it felt a little bit easier to search for that feeling. I really wanted to find something, and I had an idea of what that something was. I just want to say gratitude for that. and I wanted to report what I was feeling. This is my first time here.
Michael: Thanks for your report. Awesome, what else? Other things coming up? Stuff arising, questions arising, reports arising?
Questioner 2: Hello. I have sort of a sassy, sort of a curious question. Do you ever get lost in your thoughts?
Michael: Sure!
Questioner 2: Okay, just curious
Michael: I’m just an asshole, don’t listen to me.
Questioner 2: Okay, cool, you’re just like me. Is this practice sort of disengaging like pressing the clutch, is this a thing that we are just practicing right now, or is this a thing that we practice like all the time.
Michael: Kind of both. Obviously, there are certain types of thoughts that you wouldn’t want to do that with, like if you’re coding or something, then you engage with, in order to do the task. It’s necessary to do that sort of thinking. You need to think to do your taxes, but that’s not a problem. That’s a functional type of thinking that’s useful. But not doing that type of thinking, even when walking around, it’s very useful to just disengage from the kind of slurry that goes on in the background. However, I will say, in the long run—this is my tricky response from a moment ago—you can even eventually re-engage with the thought, because when you recognize there’s nobody having it, and nobody engaging, there’s no problem with engaging with it. It starts to open up, it becomes something very different, to put it in another way. But there’s an in-between phase where disengaging opens up the room.
In the long run, meditation isn’t brain surgery that removes the ability to think or something. You can get actually very good at thinking really well, but for the purposes of the meditation, disengaging with the ruminative self-talk is incredibly helpful. That does tend to die out a lot over time because you’re not feeding. It doesn’t actually do anything except make you miserable. But this isn’t some kind of sledgehammer to the head, where you might as well just chop out half your brain or something, that’s not what we’re doing. The ability to think really clearly and really well goes up when it’s not all mucked up with ruminatory self, just chewing.
Questioner 2: Okay. I think I understand, maybe, thank you.
Michael: What we’re doing is, I’ll just quote Shinzen for a minute, one of my main teachers, is that we’re removing the drivenness of thought. There’s an addiction to thinking because it takes us out of experience. So we want to remove the need to think. When that does truly go away, the actual need to think, like I need a fix, I need to be distracted from this moment, I need to be in my drama this moment, I need it, I need it. That’s what we’re starving out. But once that’s starved out for real, it doesn’t come back, and any thinking that occurs after that is completely fine, because it’s not an addiction. Thinking is not the enemy. That’s why, even when we’re disengaging, we’re still letting it happen.
Questioner 3: Hi. I’m going to see if I can articulate this question. I was noticing this experience that feels kind of like it’s piggybacking on what you were just saying, where there will be this opening, and something comes up, like maybe a sensation that’s a strong emotional quality. It’s a pocket of spaciousness like welcoming acceptance, and then something will come up, and then it’ll start to move.
Michael: Which “it” moves?
Questioner 3: For example, a sensation of emotion in my stomach will just arise in response to this openness or—I don’t know.
Michael: And then what moves?
Questioner 3: The energy. It feels like it wants to express, the emotion wants to express, or something in that vein. Then, the strategy that I seem to take pretty often in my meditation is to get excited about that emotion expressing, because it means I’m going to heal or something. So there’s excitement that arises, or a little bit of grasping that happens. So it ends up being this back and forth between this expansion and then a little contraction around the results. Like “I’m going to feel this emotion now” but it’s actually a little bit of a contraction. Then, I was noticing that it seems like that motion, that sort of like expansion contraction creates a lot of speed or like there’s a lot of speed happening
Michael: What kind of speed?
Questioner 3: I was exploring it and then I was just kind of like oh like the velocity is high in the system. This expansion/emotion/contraction cycle, and it almost feels like too fast.
Michael: What’s going to happen if it goes just a little faster, gets really fast? It’s going to get buzzy, something’s going to break.
Questioner 3: I don’t know, so I was just sitting with the velocity for a while
and I was just like, whoa, this is too fast.
Michael: Too fast for what? What doesn’t like that? What wants to slow it down?
What wants to slow it down?
Questioner 3: That’s a great question. Well, that seems like the meditative thing to do.
Michael: There’s just really tremendous energy and experience, right?
Questioner 3: Right, that’s really interesting, I will sit with that.
Michael: And, also, it’s really hard to get involved in the strategy if it’s all moving so fast. It’s like there’s no time to grab on and turn it into a [grr-rrr], right?
Questioner 3: I don’t know, I have to think about it. I feel like I have to think about what you said first for a little while, then I can think about what you just said.
Michael: What’s the thing that doesn’t want it to go fast, just check it out. That’s a good question, thank you.
Other stuff coming up?
Questioner 4: Thank you very much for that, that was very, very nice. I’m wondering how the common technique of concentrating on the breath relates to this method. It seems like the breath work would be preliminary to this so that it concentrates you enough so that you can actually be open, without being completely dragged around and thrown off the target.
Michael: That’s the idea of doing that kind of breath work, and typically, that’s how I would teach someone, simply because it slows things down a little bit, right? But, really, really, really, it’s not necessary.
Questioner 4: I understand theoretically it’s not necessary but it seems like…
Michael: Okay, so what’s your question?
Questioner 4: Well, what about doing the breath work first, before this method?
Michael: Go for it.
Questioner 4: Okay I’ll do it.
Michael: Again, that’s typically how I would teach it in a long class, or any other concentration object. It doesn’t have to be the breath.
Questioner 5: Hello, hello. Thank you so much for this sit. It was quite painful, but I’m very grateful. Wow, it closed beautifully, and that’s when it got really, really painful, really feeling out how connected everything is. I was, like, oh, I felt my resistance there, so I was just like, okay we just got to be with it. I do have a question, surprisingly. I usually just share. My question is, what is the difference between openness and spaciousness? Also, does that even matter?
Michael: I’m just using them as synonyms, but they’re two different words. Spaciousness—I like that it really gets at the boundlessness part, but I add in openness. Again, it’s just another word. People relate to it differently, but it also is a little more relational, open to others. It’s not just me being spacious, it’s openness. You felt that, right? It’s got a little different flavor, and it also points to that welcoming quality. Space could be cold or uncaring, whereas openness is warm, right? So it’s all just vocabulary. In one way, like you said, who cares, it doesn’t matter, but there’s stuff in there.
Questioner 5: I appreciate, that I felt that little soupçon difference. Yeah, thank you.
Michael: If I was talking Buddhist, I’d call it emptiness, but that sounds even more cold and uncaring and nothing, so we use all kinds of words.
Questioner 6: Hi. I have a question about a concept that I think I’ve heard kind of mixed instruction from teachers on.
Michael: I’m sure you have, it’s not like everyone’s teaching the same thing, that’s for sure. Maybe that’s the answer, it’s just that different people are teaching different things.
Questioner 6: That makes sense. Maybe I could get some clarification or guidance, because I’ve been doing this for a while and it seems to feel good, but maybe there’s a better thing for me to do.
Michael: Like shocking yourself with a battery? [laughter]
Questioner 6: I’ve been doing this thing where I let my mind go really expansive, or maybe some body scanning, and I find some kind of extreme emotion intensity in my chest or somewhere else, and it comes to the surface. I celebrate a little bit, and it hurts a lot, and I’ll try to tune into it, and feel it out, and I will have this idea that I’m clearing something out of my system, or releasing some kind of trauma. That does feel good, and I think it actually has contributed to less tension in my body, and also in my thinking.
I’ve been doing this for quite a while, and I also know that this comes with all kinds of assumptions about, I’m this body that has trauma in my body, and I’m clearing out my trauma. I want to make sure that I’m not just going to get stuck in this kind of paradigm, or to what extent is that paradigm useful? I know Frank Yang loves body scanning and likes this kind of thing, and I’ve also heard Rob Burbea says you can get stuck thinking you’re just oh you’re just this endless cycle of clearing trauma from your body, so I wanted to hear if you had thoughts on that, or could see my confusion.
Michael: I can see it real clearly. We all have that to a certain extent, and, actually, that
question touches into a really deep question about spirituality at all, which is, Are we doing anything, or is it just grace? Are we getting anywhere, or are we just finding we’re already God, right? It’s really the same question, and that question never gets finished being answered.
So sometimes you’ll be in a cycle of clearing trauma, and you’re clearing your trauma, and you’re doing a good job of clearing your trauma. Of course that’s doing something useful, right? Other times you’ll be, like, it’s already complete, everything was always complete, there was never anything to do. And they’re both right.
Questioner 6: Thanks
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