Self directed retreat 2021

Today's my birthday, and the gift that I've given myself this year is a week of adapted retreat, ending in a three day virtual retreat on The Wisdom of Emotions, led by Mingyur Rinpoche. 

This was not the kind of deep meditation retreat I've been doing since I went to Dhamma Sutta in 2018. This year, I've had to adapt it to the realities of my father dying and be available for the support, emotional and other that my mother and my brother needed.

The most important thing I learned on this retreat is there is a sea of distance between believing in basic goodness at an intellectual level and believing in it truly and intuitively. This is the whole purpose of meditation, to know deeply in our heart, throughout our body and beyond, that we are good. Only when we do, will we intuitively see the good in others. 

In my retreat of 2019, I had peak experiences, but I'm not sure I really saw the way out of the prison.  And in the end I went back to many of my bad habits, although I did maintain my meditation practice. 

In retreat of 2020, I moved down to the heart, and learned more about non-duality, but I'm not really sure that I understood then, or truly developed an understanding of  what it was to live from the heart. 

In one sense what had been missing from all of them is this simple practice of open awareness, which I let go of when I took the time to explore Theravada.  But taking this time to experience concentrative meditation has had its learning benefits. I know have a felt understanding between the difference of object oriented and subject oriented meditation. And from that, I now have the felt experience of non-conceptual awareness, which I started to really feel and understand in the Mingyur Rinpoche  teaching. 

But it was in my exploration of my self-hatred, this thought and feeling that has been dogging me for as long as I remember that I feel like I finally found the key. No amount of concentration, or theory, is going to change the reality that I still believe, and thus feel that there is a fundamental badness in me. That needs to change if the bell of my "hate myself" mantra is going to decrease in number and intensity.

Rinpoche teaches there are three levels of mind, the emotional, the conceptual and the habitual. This lines up nicely with Lisa Barrett's theory of emotions.  At the first level we have affect, the basic sensations. The conceptual mind sorts these into pleasant and unpleasant sensations and makes guesses and applies concept, words, labels to explain these sensations. The habitual mind makes them automatic so that we don't have to keep repeating the process. 

If we want to change our habitual feelings from negative to positive, then we have to go down, find those bad guesses, and labels, and then make those positive emotions habitual. 

Easier said than done. But Rinpoche believes that every habitual emotion, even the negative ones, contain the key to their transformation. Every sensation is a desire to be happy, or cease suffering. Our basic impulse is towards this state of joy and equanimity. We don't have to go in and re-label and conceive every emotion. We need to make intuitive this basic truth, that we are basically good and have access to a powerful transformative energy. 

Meditation both formal and informal makes this transformation happen. 

If I go back to my top insights of 2021, I remember the first one is that in knowing we don't have to change, we change. 

Acceptance of our own mind, and of the powerful synergy of all minds together is the thing we need to make habitual, if we are to be liberated. 

I hate myself

This week Dan Harris interviewed Mingyur Rinpoche on 10% happier.  At the end of the interview Rinpoche led a guided meditation in just being what you are. "When you know you don't need to change. That's when you change." 

I put a lot of energy into trying to stop hating myself, but it occurs to me this morning, that maybe I don't need to change this part of my mind. Self-hatred can be that lump of coal in my heart that is really a diamond.  It bring me right to the source of my vulnerability. 

What would happen if I truly believed that I didn't need to change this?

And what if my meditation going forward was truly about accepting what was, the conceptual mind, the confusion, the striving, despite all my effort a non-striving? 

I had a vision of myself this morning, like if I were one of those people so rich that they just have a bank account that builds wealth without work.

Could I get to the point where I saw many times, everyday, that I am this rich? That I will be until my last breath.  

When I can greet this statement "I hate myself" like a lifetime loving companion, with the love I would feel to  a long lost friend who just walked through the door, I will know I am here.

Examining self-hatred in primordial consciousness

Last week I discovered Dzogchen, direct pointing out of primordial consciousness. 

I reduced it down to the 3 vital points: 

1. recognize this consciousness free of concepts
2. Be in the decision to be one with this consciousness
3. Know that this consciousness is self-liberating

Now my work is examining the most pernicious and painful concepts as they arise. For me this has always been self-hatred. With all my work and Vipassana, I still hear this inner, poisonous mantra regularly throughout my day, "I hate myself."  I don't think I hate myself, and yet it's there ringing like a church bell. 

So be it.  The seeds of liberation are in there somewhere.  I feel that hatred, I know that it's a conditioned creating. I don't believe that hatred exists in this first consciousness.  Hatred feels real, but it's just a bad dream and I believe I can wake up from it. 

In fact two nights ago I had a very visceral self-hatred dream.  A woman who I saw in the dream as someone sweet, but fundamentally ignorant, started telling me what a fraud I was. I was hurt, shocked and reduced to a contemptuous, scornful tirade of telling her how unworthy her viewpoint was of mine, or anyone's consideration. I felt deeply ashamed of myself of attacking this woman. Tried to make it up to everyone by doing dishes. 

There you go, my life story in a nutshell. 

So the question for this week is who would I be if I didn't deep down believe that I hate myself?

#1 motivation blocker

I've been thinking this week about the difference between impulsivity and inspiration.

I believe that my impulsivity arises from a need to find stimulation to escape the dullness of a mind trapped by learned helplessness.  According to Mingyur Rinpoche, "faint heartendness" is the #1 blocker of our true, buddah nature.  He tells an interesting story in Joy of Living, about a woman who, early in his vocation as an international teacher, told him about her self-hatred.  He didn't know what that meant. This speaks to the new theory of neuroscience that I'm learning, that all our emotions are culturally constructed. My own self-hatred is a prison constructed from my experience and my circumstances.  When I sit with it I feel its core as a low arousal unpleasantness.

The "stims" that I've lived with all my life, my hand flapping, my grievance collecting, the jumping, the angry daydreams, these are all ways of trying to kickstart my muddy heart. 

But I'm experimenting right now with a different way.  I am following Rinpoche's instruction in seeing life as a dream, and thus feeling this faint heartedness and sense of powerlessness as that.  Seeing it the same way I would if I were in a lucid dream and then allowing the mind to open up to all kinds of possibilities of power.  I'm also spending more time in my meditation in that hypnagogic state, between dreams and wakefulness.

It certainly opened my mind up to changing one pattern.  I imagined that my room was miraculously tidy, and every time I finished my meditation, I felt an overwhelming urge to clean.

I am sitting in this moment in the cleanest room I've had in years.

Narayan Helen Libenson speaks of "don't know" mind, and how practicing this attitude of knowing that we don't know liberates us from all the patterns and habits that we delude ourselves into believing are our identity.

Being comfortable with the feeling of not knowing is what allows life to remain fresh and inspired. It's a natural stimulation that comes from the natural way that life changes, rather than the constant chasing after sensations that comes from a life that has calcified into dull routine.

Vipassana 2

Yesterday I finished my second Vipassana at the Montebello Dhamma Suttama. Day 1 of the 10 day silent retreat was also my birthday, so I consider this experience something of a rebirthing process.

I feel stronger than I remember ever feeling. My dedication to the daily-ish 2 hour practice has really paid off. At a more experiential level, I understand that it's not about the sensations, or the peak meditative experiences, or the intellectual insights.  It's about the marriage of awareness and equanimity, and through that, nurturing the identification with that joyful, equanimous wisdom that is activated when we accept the impermanence of all things.

I will write a longer essay on this particular Vipassana, this weekend while I'm in Toronto with Ben for his birthday.  But the key experience I had was the recognition of how much misery is being caused by the automatic habit of self talk. I can feel this ball of craving and aversion in my throat, I can feel the connection to another ball at the level of visualization that connects the daydreams to the words.  I can feel how inactive the energy centres near my ears are, as I block out the input of data from the actual world, imprisoned as I am in my narrative world.

As I toggle between the consequences of a thought stream driven mostly by a constant pulse of longing and self hating, and the rewards of quiet and stable self observation, the choice to be made is obvious. Next Vipassana that challenge will definitely be to keep noble silence with myself.  To my daily practice I add the challenge of spending more time in the spacious non-narrative place, and with equanimity, building a more intuitive ease with that place.  In time, making it not just a refuge, but a home.

The Pleasure of Hatred

I've come across an interesting theory of emotions that I've been experimenting with all week.

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett believes that emotions are conceptions we form during our life that work to explain four base sensations: pain, pleasure, calm, arousal.  Our brain only registers these four states, but it comes up with theories for why we are in whatever state we're in.

For instance we don't feel hatred. We feel pain and high arousal. Hatred is the theory we have for why we feel what we do. If I felt most of my early life in pain, and I was surrounded by hostility and hatred, then hatred becomes the default explanation for every bad feeling I have.  Not only this, but hatred then becomes its own driving force, and then indeed it is the explanation.

I spent the week trying out several paths to deconstructing this hatred. One is to just be with the sensations and deconstruct the feelings. I've had a fair amount of opportunity this week because I have a work colleague who sees me as an adversary, and things have come to a head.

She said something to me that has crawled under my skin and doesn't seem to want to budge. She says people are turned off by my dominating tone. It's true, probably, that I enjoy criticizing people. Hatred is always included a component of pleasure.  That's why we stay in the loop. There are all kinds of pleasure in hatred that I'm not acknowledging and if I don't, I will probably stay in that loop forever. There is pleasure in contempt towards others, or we wouldn't be so addicted to television. There is pleasure in hatred of self. Being with that pleasure is one of the most difficult challenges I can imagine feeling because it forces me to confront a self-image that I don't want to have.

It could mean that I take pleasure in causing other people pain.

Not a recipe for a good life.

But it comes down to the realization that we all want to be happy, and that hatred can become the default loop that brings us "happiness" in the form of pleasure, even a cold calm. Ignorance is the defilement that keeps it in place. The challenge is to become aware of this pleasure, and re-route it to lovingkindness and nurturing.

Sleep Tonglen

Day 4 of my sleep retreat.  The plan to spend the next three weeks in bed at natural sunset and lie in bed until sunrise. No matter what.  Beyond my sleep mask and my white noise machine, no sleep aids, no Netflix, or podcasts, or any of the other technology companions I bring to bed with me.

The first few nights I had an easy enough time falling asleep, maybe because I have a lot of sleep debt.  But last night I was hit with the full tsunami of self-hatred that always has me turning to outside resources for relaxation.  I was probably about an hour in before I came upon a solution: tonglen.

I am not alone in my self-loathing.  I never was, surrounded by my self-hating family.  But it's not a legacy I want to pass on. If I'm going to have a son who accepts himself, I have to accept myself first.  So I fell asleep thinking of all the self-hatred I have, all the self-hatred of the people who pop up in my memory, and I decided to use my tonglen practice on them.  Tonglen is the Tibetan practice of breathing in the suffering of others and sending out our pure natural energy to replace it.  It's like a natural green technology of the mind. It's what trees do.  The beautify of tonglen is that you not only purify others, you purity yourself with this practice.  It's like having a super power.

It's interesting that no one has ever created a superhero like that.  Someone who could just take away the motivation to inflict suffering on others.

But if I'm going to be able to fall asleep more easily and more naturally and have that four hours of slow wave sleep that I need, I'm going to have to find a way to release this self-hatred, or at least diminish it.

Absolute Love

A few years back I wrote a post about a pivotal moment in my practice, the night my depression died. This morning I write about another such moment. The morning my self-hatred healed.

The process started last night, in much the same way, with insomnia. To try to nudge myself asleep I listend to a Tergar meditation on essence love, a meditation where we forget about lovingkindness and compassion, and practice being, without concept, without cognition with whatever suffering we're feeling in its rawest, most present energy. Only there is transformation possible.

I followed that up with a Rob Bell podcast on grace and peace. Grace is that energy that allows us to receive the gifts of life, and its abundant rewards that are always available to us, whether we deserve them or not. I usually fall asleep half way through a Robcast, but not this night.

Finally, tired of every virtuous option available to me,  I watched the last episode of Downton Abbey on Netflix, until eventually I drifted off.

This morning I was too dull in my brain to read or think much, so I meditated during the hour that I've been trying to devote to tidying. During this meditation, the completion of the triad I started two weeks ago with Absolute Joy and Absolute Self emerged.  Absolute Love, the love that is always there, whether we see it or not, regardless of what we have done in our lives.

Then it came to me that before I assimilate this sense of Absolute Love, I need to deal with the deep block, such a strong part of me, so persistent a presence, I'm not even aware it's there.  Self hatred.  My legacy of years of rage, frustration, unkindness. That self hatred is like this lump of carbon in my heart.  But it  is also  in its way the gem like flame that Walter Pater writes about in his famous essay on the Renaissance. It is love gone hard. But it is love.

My parents successfully maintained their hatred for over 50 years. And I wonder if this has been a great gift to me in a way, because al I need to do is turn it into love.  I have the maintenance part down, I just need the antidote.

That night my depression died, did not mean the end of depression, but it did mean the end of depression having a death grip on me.  It still visits from time to time, but it's never been as strong in me again.  This has happened now with my hatred.  I don't expect it to leave me, but it will never rule me in the way it once did. And for that I am deeply grateful.

Liberation

This week I've been feeling a shift in my practice. An awareness of awareness at an almost machine like level. When the spine is straight, energy flows naturally, the belly fills with oxygen like a reservoir and vitality thaws and then runs hot. It is the technology of the soul. It is the mechanism of liberation.

I understand it. I see it. Why is it so hard to make it permanent? Why can't I just be free. Free of suffering financial anxiety, loneliness, self-hatred. Why is that part still so hard?

Because I don't believe in it.  I don't believe it's possible.  Or because I feel I would have to give up something for that belief. To be truly free, I would have to renounce things. I would have to renounce the belief that lasting happiness is found in money, success, fame.

Another reason that it's hard is because that level of pure awareness takes commitment. I feel it because I've been practising for an hour in the morning and evening. To keep it up, I would have to maintain that level of practice and commitment.

What I want is effortless liberation, but to get there I have to expend the effort of commitment. Endure productive discomfort, make commitment the driving force in my life, not desire.

Without that commitment, awareness has no foundation. Motivation is always going to be fluctuating, and so will happiness.

The foundation to happiness and liberation is awareness, the profound, pervasive presence of awareness. And awareness I can feel. An awareness that has an energy and force and power of it's own.  An awareness that is committed to me, and that I can only perceive when I am committed to it.

Pain

On this last retreat for the summer we explored pain meditation.

It wasn't a meditation that I would have chosen because I hate pain. I avoid it. I have never seen a purpose for it.  In that way I suppose I am normal. I'm also quite fortunate because I'm basically healthy and have never had to experience a lot of pain, or live with someone who is in pain.  And I live in a society that has an entire industry devoted to numbing, managing, getting rid of pain. So it would never occur to me, on my own, to find something positive in pain.

But as Mingyur Rinpoche points out, pain is energy and awareness. Pain brings us immediately into the present. Presence is effortless as long as we have pain, because the mind focusses easily on pain.

If we let it. But so much of our suffering is built on aversion to pain. So much of my suffering is built on aversion to pain. And that is a legacy that Ben is already learning.

On the way to the retreat I did a breathing meditation on the bus, just watching my breath and feeling it as awareness in itself.  And I had a moment where pure awareness was interrupting monkey mind. Minjur says that I'm on the cusp of higher awareness and what I should do when I feel that is to try to extend it. And also to notice the fear that takes me out of it.  Because in the same way that I avoid pain, I also avoid awakening, pure awareness and the loss of control.

Meditating on pain seems to me just the flip side of meditating in emptiness, bliss and timeless awareness. The better you get at one, the better you get at the other. Maybe I'm more able to face pain now that I'm finding it a little easier to feel a life free of suffering and pain.

Hatred is another kind of pain and at the end of this morning's meditation I felt that familiar self hatred, and remembered how much of my life has been spent steeped in hatred. If I am able to break down my resistance to feeling and letting go of pain, then I will be better prepared to feel and finally let go of all that hatred.

Self Compassion

One of the blocks to my mission to cultivate wellbeing, is that I doubt myself.  I am still, too often, plagued by the certainty that I can't take care of myself and my son. That one day reality will catch up with me and I will have to face the truth, that I'm a fraud and a fool.  All will be revealed.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Tergar mini-retreat and we explored the practice of self-compassion. I've been listening to a guided meditation that prompts me to aspire to safety, peace, kindness towards myself and acceptance of myself.

But one thing that I read in Joy of Living struck me as very true.  Compassion is a powerful practice.  And as a powerful practice, it can spark a powerful reaction.  Rinpoche recommends that when practicing compassion, it's always best to start small, a minute of two of compassion, alternated with a minute of open, effortless awareness.  This helps smooth the path, and dampen any tendency to reactivity.

This morning in my practice I reached a different perspective on my mission.  Yes "I" want to cultivate well-being.  But really the mission is also to let go and allow well-being to cultivate me.  Not comfort, but the energy that arises from a life well lived. The more of this energy in my life, the less "I" there is to doubt.  Self compassion is often compassion for the delusion that there is this isolated, vulnerable "I".

That's why it's very important that self-compassion isn't self pity. And important that self-compassion is layered with open awareness, so that we get that little break from self-cultivation.  So that the energy that we do believe in washes aways the doubt that keeps us in the self-looping cage.