Oct 30 -- Insight meditation part I

A: OK, so the first thing I wanted to say is that with the stuff we're
covering today, you're not at risk at this point, but at some stage, you
can't really go back anymore.  So we've already an example of this, the
cultivation of the immeasurables which we've done up to this stage have
been fabrications of emotions related to the immeasurables.  And if you
go far enough, you start to see that all emotions are fabricated, and
that changes your relationship to life in certain ways.  If you get past
a certain point, a reasonable distance past where this course is going
to take you, you need to find someone who seems to wise, who knows how
to practice this work, and who you'll listen to, if like you were
talking about, your patterns start running or something like that.  But
don't worry about it for this course.  It's just that because we're
starting to get into insight, it's important for me to tell you that.

G: [To "P"] Did you follow that?  I don't really, could you summarize?

A: Let me read you this section (pp 207-210) of Wake Up to Your Life, I
probably should have started there.

[Reads the section]

R: So, finish the job, I guess.

A: Basically, yeah, and as I was saying to the others [before you came]
you're not going to get to this point with the exercises that we're
going to cover in this class, but we're starting to get into stuff now
where we are taking apart these patterns, and past a certain point, that
process of dismantling develops a momentum that operates on its own.
You start to see parts of your life which you've depended on, but which
you haven't paid very much attention to, and you're going to want to
change some of those parts, but once you do that releases more energy,
which then if you're not paying attention, feeds back into other parts
of your life that you're not paying attention to.



OK, so I was going to bring that story up anyway, because that's getting
at the approach I want to talk about tonight, which is getting into the
insight component of Buddhism.  The way we've been cultivating the
immeasurables up to this point has been through a kind of fabrication in
a way, in the sense of letting the positive emotions from one situation
or person bleed over into another which we bring up in our minds.  And
that's not what the immeasurables are.  Like Ken was saying in that
excerpt, this is leading us toward the unconditioned mind.  So what
we've been doing so far is a form of conditioning.  It's a much better
form of conditioning than what we've been doing in [the rest of our
lives], but it's still conditioned.  What the immeasurables actually are
is something which arises from the unconditioned component of our
minds.

What do I mean by the unconditioned component?  We're going to talk
about ways of seeing the patterns in our life, and potentially ending
those patterns if we decide they should be ended.  And if you take all
the patterns in your life and end them, what you're left with at that
point is the unconditioned mind.  So that's an alternative way to
approach the immeasurables.  Instead of imagining a situation where
you've experienced loving-kindness in the past and bringing that feeling
into other parts of your life, what you do is you go to situations where
it's difficult to feel loving-kindness, and you look at the patterns
which are making that difficult for you.  And this is particularly
important for the final immeasurable, the one that we haven't looked at
at all yet, equanimity, because it's very hard to approach equanimity in
terms of this kind of bleed-over approach.

So before we go on to an exercise for how we're going to do this, I just
wanted to ask, does anyone have any questions about last week's
material, did anything come up there?

R: Can you elaborate on the bleed-over effect?

A: Oh, yeah, so I mean, like with metta, the way that works is you start
with something that's easy to feel metta for, and you build up a feeling
of metta there, and then you go to someone who's a little bit harder to
feel metta for, and you do the same thing there, and you've got this
kind of momentum from the first person that carries over into the next
person, and just progress through like that.  With equanimity, it's hard
to do that, 'cause it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's OK."  And then you go to
this other situation, "Oh that's OK, too."  'Cause that's not really how
equanimity looks.  It really is just getting all the patterns out of the
way.

So, I thought as a demonstration of this approach we would work with joy
again.  There are instructions about this in the book, but they're a
little complex, and I don't think they're good for when you're starting
out.  These instructions, which he came up with a few years later, are
much simpler and easier to work with.  The idea here is, you have these
sayings, they look like prayers, and you can actually approach them that
way, but they're not prayers in the sense of requesting assistance from
a deity or something like that.  They're just wishes.  And the point of
these wishes, again, is not to actualize the wish in some way, it's that
these wishes correspond to the immeasurables they're associated with,
and they will bring up for you the patterns that make it difficult to
connect with that immeasurable.  So, for instance, "May I be free from
preference and prejudice."  If you imagine  wishing that for yourself,
does anything come up?

R: Seems like it might be nice.

A: OK.  How about, "May I experience the world knowing me just as I am?"
Personally I find that terrifying.

R: I don't know, I guess that sounds sort of liberating, I guess.

A: Cool.

G: That's already true, for better or for worse!

A: Cool.

So that's the way these things work.  We're not actually going to work
with these tonight, we're going to do something else.  So this is an
exercise from his book, it's called "Artist and Critic" so we're going
to pair off and one person will be the artist and the other will be the
critic.  And the artist's job is to arrange a set of toothpicks in a
nice way.  And the critic's job is to point out what's wrong with the
arrangement so far.  They don't have to be reasonable criticisms, they
just have to be critical.

G: I'm going to enjoy this exercise.  [Laughter]

A: This will bring us in touch with the critical attitude which all of
us carry around, I think, and gets in the way of joy.

OK, so Rob and I'll pair off, and you guys pair off, and, so we should
start by cultivating metta.  Let's spend five minutes cultivating for
ourselves, then five minutes cultivating metta for our partners.

A: Here's your artistic medium.  I guess we should all just sit on the
floor for this...

R: So, we just, ah, make a pattern on the floor?

A: I think you're being a bit dependent there. [Laughter]

First run through, the artist has to do what the critic says.

R: What's the goal of this exercise.

A: It's to get you hearing the critic in your own head.

R: Ah, so you instruct me on what to do.

A: Well, again I think you're being kind of dependent there.  You do
something, and I'll let you know what the quality of it is.

[We play for a while]

A: All right, so let's do it again, and this time the critic plays the
same role, but the artist does whatever you want.

R: So I listen to you this time, and I just ignore it.

A: Yeah, that's it.  Come on, get started.  Oh, you don't have to do
the opposite of what I want either!  [Laughter]

[We play for a bit, then swap roles.]

So, what was that like, on either side?

R: Minor annoyance... I don't know, I guess that's pretty much it.
Maybe I was just having too much fun with it.

A: What about you guys?

P: It was a lot rougher to be the critic.

R: Yeah, it was a bit more difficult to be the critic.

G: I don't know, it was fine.

A: OK, we'll just have to go to a different exercise, then.  Let's have
a look at the prayers for joy on here.

R: What were we supposed to get from that?

A: Well, another way to aprroach this would be, can you think of any
situations in your life where you think you've done a terrible job and
everybody else has been really happy with what you've done.  Or any part
of your life which you're dissatisfied with, where when you tell other
people you're dissatisfied they go "Are you crazy?"

G: Yeah, volleyball.  They think I'm doing just fine, but if I miss a
hit, it's like "Oh..."

R: And you think they're just being polite, maybe.

G: Yeah, I mean I'm better than the worst people, but I expect more of
myself.

R: There have certainly been cases where I'm not sure if I did a good
job and maybe I've been looking for approval and never get it, so I'm
unsure of myself, so I'm not sure if there's something there, but I
can't think of an example [like you're suggesting].

A: That's fine, that's good.  Something where you're unsure about
whether you're doing a good job, but nobody's telling either.

P: Yeah, school.  There have been lots of papers where I think "It's
awful" and then I get an A.

R: That's never happened to me.  When I think I did terrible, then I did
terrible.

A: Hmm, well a lot of people have this kind of thing, and this exercise
brings it out for many.  But, that's OK.  These situations which you've
been talking about, just think about them and think about this line,
"May I experience the world taking joy in all that I do."  And remember,
the idea is not to actualize this wish.  It's to set up a friction
between that situation and this wish.  Does that make sense?

R: Not exactly.

A: You're uncertain about... actually, ["G" and "P",] you guys do [the
line I just said].  "R", you do "May I know what to do, whatever
arises.

R: Oh, OK.  So just think about the kind of experience I just mentioned,
then think about "may I know what to do whatever arises," and come to
terms between the two.

A:  Not come to terms, but notice the conflict, notice what comes up in
the conflict.  So let's do that for two minutes.

G: That was difficult.

A: What came up for you?

G: Well, the whole team gets annoyed when you miss the ball, so it's
hard for the world to be joyful.  It was difficult to reframe it.

A: So, it's difficult to imagine experiencing joy in the context of
someone disapproving of you.  How about you?

P: I was feeling anxiety and some embarassment, because we're talking
about people experiencing joy for things that I'm not proud of, I
guess.  So that was confusing.  Kind of a relief, but also a confusion.
I don't know how to feel about it.

R: I actually ended up going with "May I experience the world taking joy
in all that I do."  Because I still don't feel like the world is taking
joy in everything that I do.  And it's hard to, when, say I'm sitting
around wasting time, not being productive, how do you take joy in that.

A: So, this good, because this is what I was trying to get at with the
matchstick exercise, the critic being disapproving of the artist.  Now
the question is, we've got in touch with this sense of conflict, of we
would certainly like to experience the world taking joy in everything
that we do, we would certainly like to experience joy regardless of what
the world thinks of us, but these things are very hard to do.  Now, the
question is, once you get in touch with something like this, what do you
do with it.  And we're going to cover this in more detail in next week's
class.  Next week's class is going to be explicitly about insight, which
leads to equanimity, and this is kind of a special case of that.  The
first step in insight is always to see these patterns in operation.
It's kind of the first noble truth on a moment-to-moment level.  Do
people know the four noble truths?  So in Buddhism, after the Buddha's
enlightment, his first talk, he introduced these truths:

  Life is suffering
  Suffering has craving as its cause
  There is a cessation to suffering
  There is a path to the cessation of suffering.

These confused the hell out of me for a long time, what possible
practical use could there be for these?  It turns out these are actually
practice instructions.  They're not really truths in the usual
ontological sense we're used to thinking about.  The way it works in
practice is "life is suffering" corresponds to identifying the suffering
in a situation, or identifying the patterns of reactivity, and that
doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's amazing how much suffering goes
on our lives without us even noticing.  So exercises like this are
useful for that.  The next step is "craving is the cause for suffering."
So how that works on a practice level is when you've identified
suffering that's going on, you ask "What is the origin of this
suffering, what am I craving here."  Any suggestions, here?

G: Yeah, I want to win, I want to do really well, be the most athletic.
That's what's creating my suffering, because the fact that I'm trying
isn't good enough.

A:  What about what you were saying a moment ago about the team?

G: Yeah, I guess it's the same thing; they want to win.  I do the same
thing when other people miss a serve, it's really bad.

A: So what are you craving that gets in the way of joy when people are
disapproving of you.

G: Success, maybe?

R: Competitivness?

A: Another stage in insight practice is discernment.  This is kind of
Zen koans, if you're familiar with that.  You use the concentration
capacity that we've been developing, and you use it to just hold a
question.  So you make the question the object of your attention.  You
don't try to answer the question, you just make it the object of your
attention.

So why don't we do that for these situations where you're experiencing
stress because someone is disapproving of what you're doing.  We'll just
do that for a minute.  Just imagine the situation and ask, "What is the
cause of this stress?"

R: I don't really have that much stress in my life, I guess.  I'm
craving not suffering, so maybe it's like a vicious circle.  Not that
I'm particularly suffering, either.

A: Yeah, so suffering is a translation of the word "dukkha" which means
stress, dissatisfaction with the way things are.  It doesn't necessarily
mean stress.  It means that there's something that you're reacting to
that you're dissatisfied about.  Another question to hold would be "What
am I dissatisfied with in this situation?"  Or "What am I craving in
this situation?"

R: But that's more complicated to, because everything leads back to
yourself, doesn't it?  You're putting yourself in the situation, so
really it all boils down to you're dissatisfied with yourself.

A: OK, so you're dissatisfied with yourself, so what do you crave in
that situation.

R: Change, I guess, I can't really narrow it down more than that, just
general change, really.

A: So, use that as the question: "What characteristics..."  Hmm, what's
the right way to phrase this question?

R: Maybe you're saying "how can you make your life better?"

A:  No, the issue here is there's something that you're clinging to as a
characteristic of yourself which you would like to have.  It's not how
can you change your life, it's "What do I thirst for here?"

G: I look at it a little differently.  The way I'm approaching this is
that what I'm wishing for is that things would be different than what
they are and that's what's causing my suffering, you know, I wish I was
more athletic than I am.  So it's not that I need to become more
athletic to ease my suffering because there's no end to that, even if I
join the olympics and I'd still be dissatisfied.  Or I could just accept
who I am right at this very moment, how many of my serves go over at the
moment, and once you accept that and you accept which of your teammates
are going to miss a serve, and you're fine with that, then there is no
suffering.  That's just the way it is.

A: Mhmm, that is equanimity, and it is what we're heading towards.  The
question is, how's that working out for you?

G: Most of the time, awesome.  Sometimes, not good at all.  Very few
times, but sometimes, deep end.  So this is good.

A: OK, so could you pick one of those times?

G: Yep.

P: Well, I'm dissatisfied all the time.  [Laughter]

R: Yeah, when you have a general dissatisfaction, what are you really
craving?  You're just craving not being dissatisfied.

A: Craving not being dissatisfied.  We can work with that.  Would that
sum you up?

P: My question was going to be why am I dissatisfied, if we just
answered that, then what's my question?

A: Well, if you work with "I'm always dissatisfied, that's going to be
very hard, but... let's try this a different way.  Think of a situation
in which you've been dissatisfied with yourself recently and hold the
question "What characteristics that I'm craving in myself lie behind
this dissatisfaction?"

[one minute passes]

So, who has a craving of a characteristic of yourself?

R: There's been some brief points in my life where I have absolutely no
craving in my life, all worries or expectations just sort of disappear.
Normally those situations arise for me when I'm at an extreme of
something like, say I'm out backpacking in the woods for days on end.
You're really concentrating on the moment, it's a really Zen-like
experience.  Or if you're really in love with someone and you're with
that person.  And then the funny thing is you don't even realize it
until you get back and join your daily routine again, and all of a
sudden, "Oh, man, I was so free at a that moment."  So I guess that's
what I'm craving, experiencing that rather than just for brief moments.

G: My life's the opposite.  It's the reverse of what you're saying.
There are unusual days or moments where there are cravings for things
and I'm distracted and off-kilter.

P: I guess I'm craving love.

A: That's fantastic, that's really good.

Well it sounds like we all have a craving.

So we have suffering, the suffering is caused by craving.  So let's do
tonglen for this.  So, breathing in, you experiencing the craving.
Breathing out, offer something good, e.g. breathing in, you experience
the craving for love, breathing out, you feel love for someone else.
Just modulate the breathing in of the craving to match the extent to
which you feel the love as you're breathing out.  And the principle here
is that this leads to the cessation of craving.  Now, this takes a bit
of practice.  But let's just try it for three minutes, and see how that
goes.

[Three minutes pass]

So what was that like?

P: I'm still confused about how I'm actually doing this.  What am I
actually breathing in, what am I breathing.  So I'm just thinking about
these different things as I'm breathing in and breathing out.  But also
that's kind of hard to switch gears so fast, takes a while to sink into
these things.

A: Yeah, it takes a bit of time.  What was it like to be choosing to
feel that craving repeatedly like that?

P: I wasn't able to do it very effectively.  It was hard to experience
these things, and then on a meta-level experience my experience of
them.  By the time I got to that, I was thinking "Woah, what's going
on?"

A: Yeah, that takes practice, too.

R: I'm going to need to practice on that, too.  I guess I got the basics
of it, but I don't feel like I was really into it.

A: It was kind of flat?

R: Yeah.

A: Yeah, it takes time to establish some connection to this.  It's worth
it, because I know from experience that this kind of thing can release
those cravings.  So, this is what I suggest you do for this week.  Pick
one of these [Four immeasurables sayings], whichever one seems to be
bringing up some sort of conflict for you, and go through that exercise
with the craving, understanding the craving which underlies the
dissatisfaction, and then working to experience that craving, and as
["P"] was saying, to experience the experience of it.  That's an
important part of insight.

Next week we'll go over the process of insight in more detail and
hopefully it'll become clearer, and at least you've got some aspects of
insight to work with.

From this point forward, meditation becomes more a kind of an experiment
and a kind of an engineering of your mind in a way.  You just keep
trying things, and seeing which things lead to peace and to skillful
states of mind.  What we've covered today is one which has been working
very well for me.  And it's really behind all Buddhist practices.  It's
kind of the seminal Buddhist practice in a  way.

R: These [four immeasurables sayings] actually look good to read every
day.  I feel like if I did that, I'd have a better day.  They seem like
really useful things to repeat to yourself.

A: They're good things to hold in attention even if you're not trying to
do this kind of uncovering process.  And actually, if you go further
with the methods we've been using up to this point, you end up having to
do the same thing, anyway.  Sooner or later in the cultivation of
metta, you'll hit someone who represents something that you just can't
stand, and then you kind of have to shift gears, it's not enough to just
try and feel it.  You've got to get into the semantic components of it
and pull it apart.

Oct 23 -- Loving-kindness meditation

Hi, everyone.  Transcript from yesterday's class is at <http://wutyl-ithaca.blogspot.com/>.  Since people seemed to find  the guided meditations helpful, I have excerpted them: 

Meditation 1 (just the kitten)
Meditation 2 (sequence of people through to someone who annoys you)

Next week, we'll be doing insight meditation, which helps cultivate equanimity, another of the four immeasurables.

Best regards,

Alex

**************************************************************************************************

S: My excuse, which is no excuse, is that I’ve been traveling since last Wednesday, until yesterday, so that’s my excuse, which is no excuse, but I’m sticking to it.  I know it’s a pretty crappy excuse because when you’re on a plane what else are you going to do, so... But it was good, what I did do.  And your haircut looks great, by the way.

A: Oh, I actually haven’t had a haircut. [Laughter]

S: That’s right, exactly.

G: [whispering] He’s not grading us.

S: It’s an old habit.

A: Yeah, well, the Buddha’s gonna get you.  It’s not up to me.  [Laughter]  He’s a vengeful god.

P: I’ve done a little bit more than that, but not much more.  I still run into this problem that I have trouble putting my mind into a scenarios, like you sent me the thing about the loving-friendliness, and imagining this little kitten.  But the kitten isn’t there.  It’s easy for me to focus on my breath because it’s actually there.  But if I try to get my mind thinking about this kitten, the abscence of the kitten just sort of overwhelms and I start thinking about other things.  It’s partly just because I’m just tired all the time, my mind is tired.  But if you have any advice for convincing my mind to think about hypothetical things, I don’t know.

A: Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be hypothetical.  It could be a person that you feel love towards, possibly your parents, or even a specific incident where someone was kind to you, or you were kind to someone.  Does that seem like something which might work better?  We’re going to get an opportunity to experiment with it today because the topic’s metta.

P: Potentially [that would work] but remembering an event is different from the event itself.  I can think about how I felt, but it’s hard to actually make myself feel the same thing.

G: I have some ideas.  I went to a meditation talk on Saturday and some folks were talking about this because I was asking them “What do you think of tonglen, what’s your idea of this?”  A couple of things that they said were that a person who made a really big impact on them is someone who works in hospicare in Ithaca.  So everyday he deals with people who are in the most challenging stages of life.  They’re going through death, their loved ones are there with them, and they’re going through a lot of other challenges.  And he manages to the best part of each person, no matter what they’re going through at the moment.  So what he does, and what they recommended was before you’re even going toward tonglen, you’re just saying “Hey, do I have in me this joy?”  Because if you don’t have that, then there’s nothing to meet the sorrow with.  So I’m feeling super down right now.  Probably not a great time to do tonglen right now, so what you start with is the joy.  And when you get that, then as soon as whatever you’re faced with hits that, hits in your stomach, it just sort of disappears, because it’s absorbed by all that joy.  And that’s what you’re breathing out in tonglen.  But when I put that into practice this weekend, I tried the idea of  not just saying “I take in your sorrow then breath out joy,” but then a very applicable way this weekend, what we talked about last week was, OK, I’m really, really attached right now, because I had expectations from a friend.  I wanted them to spend a certain amount of time with me, to hold me as very important, and how to face that dead-on with tonglen was to imagine that they had made someone else the most important person in their life.  And to just run with that.  So that’s how I took the giving it away to work, to allow them to spend absolutely no time with me, and [for me] to have absolutely no fun, because they’re giving all of that joy and laughter to somebody else.  And when I pracitced that, I was able to give up the attachment.  Maybe not 100%, but I did and it was miraculous, because I was feeling resentful about that.  So that was the tonglen for me.  So it wasn’t about anything abstract.  I think that you can come at it from a lot of different angles and you can draw on your attachments because they’re so powerful.

A: That’s not a bad idea at all.  So the idea there is that you’ve got an expectation of enjoyment or love of some kind for yourself and you imagine that love or joy, and start there.  

[To “P”]:  I’m curious, how do you motivate yourself to do the work you need for school and things like that.

P:  [Laughter] That’s a bit of a problem.  It’s “I have to get this done, because if I don’t get it done now, then I’ll have to do it later because I’ll feel bad about not doing it.

A:  Uh huh.  So in a sense, this is one of the key skills that Buddhist meditation develops, and it does take practice for a lot of people, and it’s a matter of exploring your way around until you find an approach to it which does work.  The way we’re approaching it at the moment is kind of head-on.  “I’m just going to feel metta.”  And if that’s not working, one way to approach taht is to look at the points of resistance that are coming up for you.    This is actually the way that Ken teaches in his book, and it didn’,t work for me, so I’m teaching what worked for me, but I’m familiar with the methods in his book, so one place to start with that is just, if you say to yourself at the moment, “May I be happy, well and at peace,” what comes up for you when you say that?

P:  Good question.  

A:  Nothing much seems to come up?  What do you experience in your body?

P: Confusion.

A: Confusion!  That’s good.   Confusion about what?

P: What I’m feeling, I guess.

A: You’re not sure what you’re feeling?  OK, so that’s a good place to start.  So, this is the way I recommend you approach what we’re going to be covering in class today.  Do the practices as I describe, and notice what’s coming up in physical sensations, thoughts and feelings, and look for any points of resistance tehre, and just experience those, and if anything comes up which starts to feel overwhelming, that’s good, that means you’re on the right track.  If you can experience those points of resistance as they arise, that attention in itself is like the conflict resolution that we’ve been doing up to this point.  It’s a kind of tonglen in a way.  You’re just experiencing teh resistance in your body, and just by experiencing it, you’ll be able to see what underlies it and then we can talk about ways that you can respond to that.

One of the principles of Buddhism is that loving-kindness isn’t about liking or disliking something.  One the examples Ken gives is he’s got this Aunt in England who’s told him several times, “You know Ken, if you ever commit a murder, you be sure to come here.”  And this to him exemplifies loving-kindness.  “I don’t care that you’ve done this terrible thing, I still appreciate you, and I see the inherent goodness in you.”  So the theory behind what I’m recommending to [“P”] is that that appreciation is there in everyone’s experience, and it’s just that there’s something covering it over at the moment, and coming to an understanding of what’s covering it over will allow you to uncover it with practice.  So the fact that you have a solid breath meditation at the moment, it sounds like, taht’s going to be useful.  Because when difficult experiences come up in this, you can use the breath as a point of stability to remain in a attention as those reactions arise.

S: I don’t know if I got the transcripts or not.  I may have given you a confusing email address.

A:  I’ll check.

So, metta.  If you’re here from Quaker meeting and you’re wondering about what you should be doing there, metta is a great place to start.  In Christianity, metta, loving-friendliness, is very important, and devotion to God, and devotion to Christ is a form of metta, too.  And then there’s the whole “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and as I said in the first class, one of the nice things about Buddhism is that it actually gives you this method of cultivating that love, even when your neighbor’s an asshole.  But we don’t start there, we don’t start with assholes, but I wanted to show you this example of what this looks like in the context of conflict resolution.  There are a number of different facets to [metta], but it’s a good example.

[Presentation of youtube video, Former Ku Klux Klan leader Johnny Lee Clary on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton.]

The mythology is [I don’t know if this is even in the suttas] that the Buddha first taught metta to some monks who had gone off to meditate in the forest, and they were frightened of forest spirits.   So metta is a classic antidote to fear or  aversion.  Basically anything you don’t like.  On the other hand, from a Buddhist perspective it does protect you against things in the sense that it’ll protect you from ill will, but obviously it won’t protect you in any practical way.  There’s another story of the Buddha going up to a  serial killer and converting him on the spot, and I don’t think anyone should really try that, and obviously this guy [in the youtube video] was in pretty serious danger.  And that gets to a general issue about the four immeasurables, which for the newcomers are compassion, metta, equanimity and joy.  These are results of practice, they’re n there in all of us, but the practice is not to act as though you have these qualities.  The practice is something I’m going to describe today, and the behaviours come out of that.  And it’s important to keep that in mind, or you can end up with really unbalanced behavior, where someone feels like they need to be compassionate and they make distorted decisions because of that, for example.  

But the practice of metta is very easy, and very very pleasant for most people.  It’s the immeasurable that I’ve gotten the most mileage out of in terms of my own practice, and it’s the one which people have classically started with because it can very quickly lead to deep states of very enjoyable concentration, much like the joy practice which we did in the first class, but some people find it a little easier.  The main reason I chose joy first for this class is that joy is more appropriate in the context of resolving habits, which is the theme of this class.  

For the practice of metta, it seems really sappy, and it is.  You want to get some sap flowing for this.  Despite the sappiness, it really leads to some practical results.  The first one is motivation.  If you can cultivate metta for a situation or task that you’re feeling some kind of resentment or ill-will to, that’s really useful for motivation.  The second is that metta is really the font of creativity.  From metta comes an appreciation of all the good things in a situation and once you see those you can start figuring out ways of putting those together.  So in the Vajrayana sequence of the immeasurables which we’re covering in this class, we start with compassion to see the pain of the situation, see the problems, and often in an interpersonal conflict, it’s enough just to hear those, and that will suffice for the conflict to resolve.  For instance, the conflict which Gloria was talking about at the start with her friend.  If her friend were (well, I’m speaking for you so tell me if I’m wrong), but many people in that situation, if you were to say you seem upset, what’s going on, and Gloria were to say, “Well I’m disappointed, I wanted you to come to this thing, and I wonder where our friendship stands,” for a lot of people that would be enough to heal the rift and resolve the conflict.

I used to volunteer on the suicide hotline, and they train you in a method for talking to people who call up, and the first thing you do is basically Rogerian psychotherapy: someone tells you what’s happened and how they feel about that, and you say back to them “So, it sounds like such-and-such a thing happened, and you’re feeling so-and-so about it.”  And it sounds so hokey when you put it that way, and in a sense it is, and it’s not something you can use in ongoing interpersonal relationships, but it’s remarkable the number of times that just doing that would calm people down, and they would feel a lot better as a result.  But of course, that’s often not enough.  It’s not enough for Bill Clinton just to tell us that he feels our pain.  There often is some a genuine problem or conflict of interest, and that’s where you start bringing in the positive aspects of the situation and trying to put together a solution.  So on the hotline it was, “Well you could call this crisisline, or this is the number for legal aid, etc.” whatever was appropriate to the situtaion, and taht really comes out of metta.  

I’ve been using metta and loving-kindness interchangably.  I hope it’s clear what I mean by those two words.  

So metta is just a soft, warm, open appreciation of the current circumstances.  So we start by cultivating metta for things which we already feel that way towards.  I’m going to teach a metta meditation from the book Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond.  He starts with a kitten which he’s just found on the street which is hungry and wet, and he imagines feeding it and warming it up.  But the object of metta can be anything that you feel this way towards.  It can be a family member, someone who’s shown you a lot of kindness, basically anyone.  And then you go through this progression.  You move from someone who’s very easy to feel this way towards to someone who’s a little more difficult to feel that way about.  Maybe someone who’s a close friend who you’ve known for a year or so.  And you just keep going through a progression of people like this, so it’s kind of like resistance training, like weight-lifting for metta: the stronger you get with metta, the more difficult the person work with.  And in principle, you can feel metta for anyone.  You could feel metta for the perpetrator of a genocide against your people.  But obviously you don’t start there.  You start with what’s easy and build up these capacities slowly.  And as you do, you meet points of resistance, like I was suggesting might be the case for [P] at the moment, and when that happens, it really helps if you can experience metta for those points of resistance.  So at that point, you’re moving away from metta as something you feel towards a person, to metta as something which you feel towards  what’s arising in your experience.  And for some people this can seem like a jump, but actually, when you think about what a person is in terms of your personal experience, a person is just something which arises in your experience.  So this really goes back to the exercise that I was teaching you in the first class where you feel these feelings of joy and then based on those you cultivate exactly the same feeling for, say, that vase of balls over there.

G: Which you should, because they’re awesome!

A:  Yeah, that is a pretty cool vase of balls, actually.  That is a nice setup.

But it’s fine to work with people for the time being if you find that movement to other things is difficult.  We can come back to it later.  On the other hand, that movement is the path to these really blissful states of concentration, and I highly recommend it if you can feel any sort of love and appreciation just for the experience of the breath, that’s a really fast route into really fast route into really blissful, relaxing states of concentration.  But maybe we’ll cover that in another class.

Let’s go through a complete metta practice with just three people, someone you feel these feelings of softness, generosity, warmth, appreciation; someone you feel neutral towards, possibly someone you meet at the bank occasionally, something like that; and lastly someone who causes a bit of difficulty in your life.  Not someone you hate, but annoys you, let’s say. 

Oh, and I forgot to say, the person you like doesn’t have to be a person.  It can be an animal like a kitten.  Actually, who here has a thing against kittens?

S: They’re delicious!

A: Awesome! [Laughter]

Have you ever been to the aww section of reddit [http://reddit.com/r/aww]? There’s just picture after picture after picture of these really cute animals, and often if I want to get to sleep I just go and look at those.  It’s great.  So that’s my prejudice, I don’t want to lead anyone else…

G: It’s a dark path.

A: True! True!  Yeah, and no reddit aww for me this week.  It’s been difficult.

So why don’t we start there.  Is there anyone who has difficulty conjuring an image of a kitten and feeling some sense of warmth and appreciation for it?  OK, great.  And does everyone have a friend, neutral person and difficult person in mind?  Great.  So let’s start by…

R[?]: So there’s four things.

A: Yeah, we’ll use the kitten to prime the pump, so to speak.  And then we’ll do ourselves at the end of that as well, so really five things.  And if you run into difficulties as we go along, that’s OK.  Just note them as they arise.  Just keep doing the practice.  And the idea is that each person you cultivate metta for, and then you’ve got a kind of momentum from that which goes into the next person.

So let’s imagine a kitten.  You meet this kitten on the street.  It’s really cold, it’s hungry, it’s mewling, it’s wet and its bones are sticking out.  You pick it up, take it home, put it near the heating vent, you give it some food, and imagine yourself stroking it, and the cat really appreciating it.  And you say to the kitten, “Kitten,

I love you, and I am your friend.  I will always love you, I’ll always care for you, I’ll always respect you.

May you always be happy, always well, always at peace.

May you never suffer, may you always find love in your heart, may you enjoy everything that arises in your life.

[Note:  The above formula is repeated several times through the class, and is represented below by the gloss “I love you, and...”]

[This particular instance goes from 34m30s through 36m20s.]

So now just note the physical sensations in your body.   Note any points of sweetness, anything that’s enjoyable.  Just concentrate on those kinds of sensations.

Questions, comments, insights?

S:  Just hearing you saying what you were saying allowed me to go into the feeling if that makes any sense?

A: Yeah, completely.

S: But for some reason when you stopped talking, my image of the kitten wavered.  I had this image, and then it kind of changed, and I started thinking “Maybe this kitten, maybe that kitten, maybe that kitten…”

A: Just do all the kittens!  [Laughter]

S: I found myself at some point trying to move away from the focus on the kitten.

A: What about the sensation?  Was there a sensation of sweetness in the body?

S:  Definitely while you were talking, afterwards less so because I was getting distracted.

A:  Yeah, so it’s a matter of practice.  Why don’t we try this again, so we’ll just do it silently this time.

[three minutes later]

A: By the way, for the newcomers, when I teach a class it’s much easier for me if it’s a conversation.  So you’re welcome to jump in at any time with anything.

AA: I’ll jump in.  I found this one much harder because your voice wasn’t there anymore.  I noticed at one point that I was thinking the words that you said, but I couldn’t hold the image of my friend, and then I was holding the image, but I couldn’t think the words, and then different people popped into my head, so I just included them, and then I got fascinated with the rug, and went back to trying to think of the words, and it went on like that.

A: That’s good.  So you went straight to imagining a human.

AA:  Yeah, multiple people popped in, actually.

A: But you were able to feel the sweetness?

AA: Yeah!

A: OK, good.  I’ll rip out my guided meditation before, and I’ll email it to everyone.  It sounds like that’s actually helping people, at least some people, so I’ll provide that as audio.

How was it for you, [P]?

P: I had the same difficulty as before, so “I don’t know this kitten, what would this kitten look like,” I’m thinking about that and that’s just too much for me to think about, my mind moves too slowly.  I hadn’t gotten to imagining the kitten on the street by the time it had moved to the heating vent.  I guess it’s hard for me to think of the kitten in time for me to make it work.

A:  Sure.  Do you work with animals at all?  I know you’re doing agriculture. 

P: Not currently.

A: Do you have pets?

P: At [my family] home, but not here.

A: OK.  If you like we can stop at my place on the way home and you can feed my cats.  They’ll love it, and if you think that would help to generate that sensation.  [Laughter.]

Does anyone feel like a cookie?

G: Do I look like one? [Laughter]

A: Would anyone like to receive a cookie from [P]? [Laughter]

G: Oh, practice, interesting.

A: It works for me.  I just love doing that kind of stuff.  Any time I can make people happy, it’s great.  And this was even before I got into Buddhism.  It was always that way for me.

So what about resistance, [P]?  So the main thing was that you hadn’t visualized the cat?

P: Yeah, pretty much.

A: OK, and what about the second silent version.  Did the words do anything for you?

P: I guess the words helped me stay on the track.  With the silent version I was thinking, “Why can’t I visualize the kitten,” and this whole existential thing.

A: OK.  Cool.

R: I had no problem visualizing the kitten.  But at the end I was sort of fighting off sleep.  I’m just a bit sleepy at the moment.

A: OK, that’s good.  That’s a sign that you’re doing it right.  There are these different factors which lead towards enlightenment, and some of them are the calm and concentration, which this metta practice will lead to.  And it’s not a good idea to do this practice if your mind is feeling sluggish.  It’s better to do something which’ll rev the mind up a bit.

G: Like anger? [Laughter]

A: No, that’s one of the five hindrances.  You can’t do that.  Well you can do it, but you know…

P: One of the five what?

A: Hindrances, so Buddhist practice has two big components, concentration and discernment, and concentration comes first because you need the stability of mind to see how everything’s working.  And there are five hindrances to concentration, ill-will/anger, sensual desire, torpor (which this practice brings up for me, too), restlessness and anxiety (which this practice is very good for), and uncertainty and doubt.  So, the first jobs in Buddhism is to learn how to respond to those hindrances as they arise.  But insight meditation, if you’ve done any of that, is a good way to wake up.

S: Can you say more about falling asleep?  I’ve had that a number of times, like in the last Quaker meeting I was at, I was partway through and suddenly realized [I was asleep.]  Can you say how that’s a good thing?

A: Well, it’s an expected consequence  of doing this kind of practice if your mind is a little bit tired.  If you were doing metta instead of joy in Quaker meeting before, with something like loving feelings toward your son, that you were sleepy is a sign that this is working.  I mean, the real sign is this sense of sweetness, but drowsiness is a good sign, as well.

R: But shouldn’t your mind be active, as well?

A: Yes, I’m not saying it’s a good thing in general for this practice to lead into a dull state of mind.  But the fact that we’re doing this as a beginning practice and it’s having that impact on you suggests that it’s working the way it’s supposed to be working at this stage.  As you go on, you learn to respond to  what’s coming up in your mind, and so you might start with metta practice to settle yourself and then if you get drowsy, you might switch to the joy practice from the first class, and then you can move between those.  For instance if you do the joy practice too much, you might become elated, so you might want to switch to the insight practice we’ll do next week. 

It’s kind of like a sport in the end.  You learn what causes what mental states, and what practices you can use to respond to those mental states.  The ideal state, as expressed in the suttas is “The monk goes and sits beneath the tree, ardent, alert and mindful.”  And that’s always the state which you want to be heading towards.  Mindful, alert – not sluggish, and serious, that’s what ardent means here, that you’re serious about the goal of establishing concentration.

That’s what I mean, you do want to be heading towards an active mind, but some of these practices do also slow your mind down a bit.  And the fact that that’s happening in this case is good.

G: I have something to add about wandering mind, which some people mentioned they were having problems with.  Sometimes you’ll be walking down the street, and you’ll realize, “Oh, hey, I’m thinking!  Awesome!”  And it could be that you’re stressing yourself out, but it’s totally cool.”  Like, “Yeah!  Awesome!  Thinking!”  If you just keep doing that, it’s no problem.  You could make yourself miserable about it, but you don’t have to make yourself miserable for making yourself miserable.  You’re just like “Hey!  Thinknig!”  And the fact that you recognize that, that’s all it takes.

A:  Yeah, that’s wonderful advice, and that’s exactly where we want to head with this stuff.  

So I’ve been saying we start by cultivating the four immeasurables for people, but eventually we can connect to them no matter what arises in our experience as a consequence of doing this kind of practice.  In fact, here’s an exercise Ken recommends.  [“I’m angry… and I’m glad!”  But the class didn’t really connect with it, so I won’t transcribe the whole thing.]

That comes halfway through the book, so let’s forget about that for now… But that’s an example of where this is heading.  There’s a lot of stuff in the suttas about when you reach a certain stage, you can “loathing in the presence of loathsomeness, non-loathing in the presence of loathsomeness, loathing in the presence of the unloathsome, etc.”  It sounds crazy, I know, because we’re used to imagining our emotions as directly connected to the situations that we find ourselves in, but this is one of the key points of Buddhism, that that connection we imagine is actually a fabrication, and that’s one of the things we’re headed toward.  You might wonder “How can I live if I can experience whatever emotion I want whenever I want,” well, that’s where compassion comes in.  That’s where paying attention to the situation comes in.

G: I know I brought it up early, but the reason I think it’s so important is that as soon as you start thinking about meditiation, that’s really the crux of it.  If there was no other practice that was helpful to you, the most important is how do you make friends with yourself.  Because I have to hang out with myself all the time, and if I wasn’t best friends with myself, it’d make like very difficult.  In fact, I wasn’t always best friends with myself.  But as [an experience is just starting to arise], like I was so angry at the other kickball team the other day, so angry.  But [my response was] “Oh, hey, I’m doing that again.”  And I could have been mad at myself for being mad at the other team, and getting on the field and yelling at them (which I did), but I wasn’t mad at myself for that.  You know, there’s no harm done, just sometimes you just get angry.  If you always just treat yourself as your best friend, as in “All right, my mind’s doing that, no problem,” [whatever’s coming up just dissolves and brings you back to right now.  It’s a revolutionary approach for me, and the most important piece of my meditation practice.]

S: What does this have to do with repression?  We’re often told about the dangers of repressing emotion, how it will always come out in some different way, and that’s maybe not ultimately psychologically damaging, but certainly not a good thing.  In what way is this different from that?

A: Well, to start with, it can lead to repression.  And that was part of why I started with those warnings.  You don’t want to go through life pretending to be this loving being.  You want to establish a natural relationship to this stuff.  Because otherwise it can lead to repression amongst other things.  The best case is you just become ridiculous.  The worst case is, well… much worse.  The worst case is you get addicted to this stuff, as in you have a strong connection to metta, but you use it to repress aspects of your experience.  Like I met this person on an internet forum.  She called herself a “bliss bunny.”  So she was doing a kind of Guru Yoga practice, that’s a devotional practice where basically you love your Guru.  And it leads to these very positive feelings, very stable states of concentration that I’ve been talking about.  It’s better than drugs.  And she’d been doing this for eight years, and she was an addict.  She was saying on the forum, “I’m about to lose my house, and I don’t know how to cope with all this stuff.”  And I said to her, you’ve got to get out of that religious community, because you’re an addict, and they’re feeding your addiction.  And she couldn’t do it.  She left the forum, and presumably she’s still in trouble.  So yeah, there are definitely dangers involved with this stuff.  But the benefits outweigh the dangers.  Particularly if you’ve got people depending on you, like you do.  You know, you’re not going to become a bliss bunny when you’ve got to look after your son.

R: I really like “bliss bunny” as a t-shirt, though.

S: It is also just a question of being really conscious, actively aware of your emotional state and how your emotional subjective experience is responding to an object?  And then instead of just letting the object command your subjective experience, allowing for a  moment of thought about it?  So instead of my step-father Alan just pissing me off, and that anger just totally consuming me (which it does), instead I’m getting that instead of having that happen [you can learn to] be aware that that emotional reaction is happening, and instead of having “me” simply having a knee-jerk response to that emotion, learning how to experience it in a conscious way, engaging it emotionally and intellectually.

A: Yeah, that’s exactly what’s going on here.

S: Which is different from repressing it, because instead you’re becoming more [aware of what’s going on.]

A: Well, you can use metta just to block something as well.  And actually, I’ve been using joy to do that repeatedly for the past few weeks.  In fact, I was counseling you all to do that, basically, with the joy meditation.  You realize that your attention has wandered, it comes back [snaps fingers] joy.  You’ve come back, that’s a great thing.  And at least for me, whatever I was thinking about before just stops and I go back to the breath.  Doesn’t have to work that way, other things can go on, and we can talk about that as it comes up.  But you can use it to repress stuff as well, and sometimes that’s even the right move, but the ideal is what you were describing.  These things which come up and try to control our lives, the habits which are the topic of this class, ideally the first step is [see their operation], see that they’re not you, and come into a  better relationship to them than you had before.

Why don’t we go on with the meditation again.  [To P] You don’t have to do this intricate visualization with the cat.  Just imagine feeding the cat, stroking the cat.  Why don’t you take a head start, actually.

P: OK.

A: So, just take a minute, and let us know if any feelings of warmth coming up, or do it with this pet that you have at home.  What kind of pet is it?

P: It’s a dog.

A: OK, perfect.  And the rest of us, we’ll just sit and follow our breath for a moment.

[A minute passes]

Any luck.

P: Maybe it’s partly just that I’m pretty tired.

A: That’s OK, no worries.  So, just follow along as best you can.  [This meditation starts at 1h6m40s and ends at 1h17m20s.]

Let’s start with the kitten again.  [Repeat of the mediation from before.]

Now, notice any sweetness in the sensations from your body.  Just attend to those for a few breaths.

Now imagine the person you like.  And imagine giving them something which they’d really like, tickets to a concert by their favorite music group, or a new car, or something like that.  And imagine their response.  And say to them "I love you, and..."

And again, just notice any sensation of sweetness in your body, attend to that for a few breaths.

Now imagine the person you feel neutral towards.  Imagine they just dropped $200, and you gave it back to them.  And imagine their response.  And imagine saying to them "I love you, and...." 

And just attend to any sensation of sweetness in the body again for a few breaths.

Now imagine the person you find a little bit difficult.  And imagine saying to them, “You know, you were right all along.  You were just trying to help me out.  Thank you!”  And imagine their response.  And say to them "I love you, and..."

And again, just attend to any sensation of sweetness.

Now imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror.  You’re looking at yourself.  And you’ve just done something really worthwhile, really good.  And imagine how that feels.  And say to yourself "I love you, and..."

And again, just attend to any sweet physical sensations for a few breaths. 

Questions, comments, insights, problems?

G:  That was great!

S: That was really good, actually.

A: Yeah, this is good stuff.  And you can’t go all the way with this but you can go a long way.  You can develop really stable states of concentration this way. 

S: Recently as part of this conference trip I went on, I managed to tack on a few days to visit my home town, so I got to see all these old friends, and this one friend, I hadn’t seen her for years, but I when I imagined her, I got this weird tingly feeling and I thought, “Is that what he’s talking about?”  But transferring that became difficult.  I was still able to actively build it up in some instances, but transferring it to my step-father, I just couldn’t build it up.

A: I think your step-father was a really difficult person to…

S: Yeah, he’s an interesting guy.

A: No, I’m not talking about your relationship to him, I’m talking on the level of the practice.  You might want to start with someone a bit easier. [Laughter]

S: Yeah, [I’ll do that.]  That was hard to do.

G: “He is difficult, how did you know?” [Laughter]

S: Yeah, let me start telling you stories, we’ll be here all night…

A:  Yeah, group therapy starts at 9:15.

S: Your voice was helpful.

A: Oh, good.  OK, so I’ll send the recording of this to all of you.  [Some administrivia about publishing policy for transcripts vs recordings.]

OK, I suggest doing that [practice] this week.  And [to S], don’t push it.  This is like physical training.  If you push it too hard… I spent a few months with this where I was doing the [“open your heart to this experience” from the primary practice] and I would get this massive tension [in my head] so it just became a fight, which is like the opposite of metta.  So start with stuff where it’s easier to feel it.

S: Yeah, because even the guy who was kind of neutral, he works at some coffee shop I’ve seen around.  I was able to get [some metta going] with him, but I couldn’t transfer it [to my step-father].

A: Yeah, I’m not surprised.

OK, so it’s a little bit early, but shall we finish up?

G: Time for cookies!

R: What’s all this cookie business?

A: I brought some cookies, and there’s some apple crisp for me, because I can’t eat the cookies.  [To P]: Would you like to serve us?

P: Should I? [Laughter]

A: If you want, yeah.  They’re just out on the left-hand side of the bench, there.

Oct 16 -- Compassion meditation (tonglen)

Hi, everyone.  Here's the transcript from last week's class.

This coming week, we're going to be doing a loving-friendliness meditation.  We are roughly following the Vajrayana model of conflict resolution, which is that first you offer the situation compassion, then loving-friendliness (which includes proposing solutions), then insight (which, roughly speaking, is similar to manipulation), then power/joy (essentially, forcing the issue in some way.)  So the following class will be on insight meditation, and the one after that will be another treatment of joy, but this time from the perspective of power.  The week after that, we'll cover how these work in an interpersonal conflict, and the following week will be on internal conflict.  This model isn't covered in Wake Up To Your Life.  If you want to find out more about it, the four phases of it are usually referred to as pacification, enrichment, magnetization and destruction/subjugation, and they're covered in this talk by Ken.

Again, all critical feedback on any aspect of this is welcome.

Best regards, 

Alex

***********************************************************************************************

This is WUTYL, 16^th October, Compassion meditation.

Why don’t we go around the room and talk about what happened with the meditation from last week.  Any questions, comments, insights, problems which came out of that?  I’ve already heard about a couple of problems, and I’d be interested to hear more.

G:  It was good.  I practiced it quite a bit during the Saturday meditation, and that was good because it gave me something to actually think about.  No problems.

A: OK, great.

J: I had a problem if I only did one breath, because I had done a lot of breathing meditation in the past, so I found I had to do somewhere between five and ten breaths, probably deep breaths, because I’ve done all sorts of fancy meditation with breathing and yoga.  So it was like I couldn’t get far enough into it to sort of appreciate it, and then I couldn’t do the meditation on the breath.   So I had to do it long enough in order to sort of feel it.

A: Long enough on the breath meditation to feel it physically?

J: Yes.  And then I had to do it long enough on the joyful meditation to let that happen.  It took me time, and I had to make them quite separate, because if I didn’t take time to do the joyful meditation, it just disappeared. 

A:  Sounds like a good way of arranging things.  That’s good.

H: I really struggled with experiencing joy after Tuesday.  There wasn’t anything concrete that happened existentially in my life but there was less concentrated energy and I still kept up 10 minutes about every other day, I guess, sometimes less just informally when I remembered.  But it was difficult to connect to joy.

A: How am I going to maintain class discipline when the teacher’s wife is shirking off?

[laughter]

H: I’m setting an example.  Let’s be clear.

S: I had a very similar experience as [J] did with the breathing.  A couple of times it felt like I was hyperventilating.  I have done breathing meditation before, but it was like five years ago and I think some it was getting back into the swing of just learning how to breathe and just be aware of my breathing.  So I found myself, I think I mentioned to [A] on Sunday, I would have to do a few breaths,  focusing on my breathing, and then do the breathing and joy.  And your suggestion of thinking about love instead, because I was doing it in the evening just before bed, was interesting, but similar to what you were saying, “H”, the transition to actually focusing on the breathing was fine, but after that, switching to conceptualizing that feeling, maybe felt more intellectual or abstract.  I could think it, but I was finding it hard to feel it.

A: So, how were you trying to trigger the joy or love?

S: In both cases, it was a kind of transference.  I would think of something that gave me a feeling of joy, and then grafting that onto the feeling of achievement in thinking about the breath, or reminding myself to go back to thinking about breathing.  I think I was kind of caught between intellectualizing it and, you know, I’d be thinking about something like my son’s head, because that gives me the sense of joy, but I would have difficulty then just feeling it just on its own. 

A: Did you resort to thinking of your son’s head each time, or something like that?

S: Kind of.  Is that what I was supposed to do, because that’s what I did, and it seemed to work.   Basically, I was trying to skype with him once, and he was walking around and I could only see his head because he wouldn’t get up on the table to talk to me.  And I could imagine him doing that, and then breathe, and get a little bit of that feeling.

A:  That’s great, that’s a good way of doing it.

P: I had kind of a similar experience.  I would think about situations in which I feel joy.  And then I would think, “Well, am I really feeling joy?  Well, these are all the different emotions”, and then I would try to put myself in that situation, and I’d have trouble with that, and then to the extent that I succeeded, I still wasn’t getting the same emotion that I remember feeling in that situation, and then with all that thinking and trying to pay attention to my emotions, and I would realize it would make me anxious.  So, in terms of the meditation, I just focused on the breathing.  And I didn’t do it one breath at a time, I just breathed continuously.  I figured rather than trying to bring about an emotion, I figured I would just do the sort of non-judgemental part of the meditation, as in “not kicking the dog,” even if I wasn’t giving the dog a treat.

A: So what made you anxious, just the fact that you were supposed to feel joy?

P: Yeah, just the feeling like, “Well am I doing something wrong, or…?”

A: “Bad meditator!” 

A: So presumably for everybody, your attention wandered sometimes.  Were there consistent themes to the places you wandered to?

[Most people didn’t discern such a theme, and in fact most people were able to stay present with the breath for the full ten minutes.  “A” is pleasantly surprised by this.  One theme which does come up is the difficulty that “S” talked about, of not being sure that he was getting the feeling correct.]

G: I had two ideas to put out there.  My mind is a giant party [and was during the Saturday meditation], but that’s something I had to work on.  Because Seasonal Affective Disorder can get to me pretty bad, Jan, Feb Mar are pretty intense.  So what I did was rewire my brain by choosing to experience certain emotions more often.  So, my default emotion is joy, why because I told my brain to rewire itself.  The how, two things which work for me: force a smile when you’re walking down the street, brushing your hair, etc., cause that smile is joy, and that joy rewires your neurons.  You fake it till you make it, and then that just works.  The other thing which helped, because I don’t have a lot of time for sitting meditation, is when I’m just walking around, I’m looking at an object, I just look at the object, and that’s all I’m doing until I pass that object.  And then I choose another object.  That puts you in the present moment.  You do that enough times and you’re in the present moment.

A: That’s really cool.  Yeah, there are formal meditations for joy, loving-kindness, compassion, and the meditation we’re going to be covering today is one of those formal meditations, the one last week I just made it up, though obviously I’ve been using for a while, I wasn’t just using you all as guinea pigs.  But the really important thing about these meditations is the intention is to cultivate a certain attitude to what’s arising in your experience, so with joy it’s the enjoyment of what’s coming up, and there’s a lot of different ways that you can do that, and it’s good to keep that in mind, because sometimes different methods go flat for us, and it’s good to know that you switch to something else.  So that’s really useful.  Thanks.

So, all of you, it seems like your minds don’t wander as much as mine does when you do this meditation, so I guess you’re all actually more accomplished meditators than I am.  I was expecting more to come up, in terms of mind wandering, because that happens to me a lot.

P: My mind wandered, it just didn’t wander in any  specific direction! [laughter.]

A: OK, so we’re trying to cultivate a habit here, a habit of where we put our attention, and we’re trying to train a behavior for our attention which is very different from the way the world has trained us to attend.  That usually creates a certain amount of conflict.  And I’m glad that in this case, for the most part you guys didn’t run into that.  That’s really wonderful.  But there was some conflict, such as “H” not wanting to feel joy, at least that’s what you said to me earlier.

H: It was more like a dullness around my face.  I could feel some physical sensations, but when I wanted to connect to the sensation of lightness which I associate with joy, or warm tingling across my chest.  And I’d think “OK, now lean into that,” and the response would be “Uh uh.” [laughter]  So I’d think, “Oh, look, I’m not interested in experiencing joy, what’s that resistance feel like?

A: Perfect, this is good.

H: So I’d find “Oh, it feels a little bit like heaviness…”  So then I was more at ease with recognizing those emotions and sensations and thoughts, but whenever I thought “OK, time to feel joy!” the response was “Uh uh.”  Every time!  So in the end I thought “Well, OK, maybe this isn’t the week of joy…”

A: That’s perfect.  So, this is the direction we’re heading in this week.  Why don’t we start just by doing 10 minutes of the joy/breath meditation.  Everyone just notice if there’s any resistance coming up, and then go back to doing the practice.  In fact, if you notice resistance coming up, celebrate it, because that’s what this practice is about.

[10 minutes pass]

So the point of resistance which is always coming up for me with this is that I want to plan something.  So, when I was doing that just now, I kept planning what I was going to talk about when we were done, and then coming back to the breath, celebrating that, and so on.  And this technique that we’ve been practicing is very powerful.  It can lead you to some very deep, very very pleasant and very stable states of concentration, from which you can do some very powerful insight work.  But it’s not a complete practice.  You can’t actually train a human the  way that you train a dog.  So, joy is really connected to power.  A lot of the things that we celebrate in our lives are related to power in some way.   You know even things like birthdays, “I’ve survived another year!”  And in interpersonal relationships, power is often where we go [when in conflict] and often it’s an effective thing to do, and it doesn’t really impact the relationship.  If someone’s doing something that annoys me, and I just bring it up with them, and it doesn’t really bother them, then in a sense that’s an expression of power.  You know, they want to get along with me, so they’re doing what I ask.  The thing there is that there’s not any enduring, intractable conflict of interest there.  And the same thing goes for our internal lives and our relationships with ourselves to a certain extent.  A  lot of the time we’re doing something which is out of balance so we just stop.

H: Can you give me an example of that?

A: Yeah, my Mum used to smoke, and when she learned that she was having me, she just stopped.  But she didn’t smoke a lot, so it wasn’t as big a deal for her is it is for someone who’s smoking three packs a day.  And that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.  There wasn’t an enduring conflict between an addiction and a need to abandon the object of the addiction in that case.  But I’ve been addicted to the internet for over a decade, and I want to stop!  I really want to stop!  [laughter]

G: There’s nothing to do on it!

A: I have a lot of fun on the internet.  It’s tremendously entertaining.

P: I spend a lot less time on the internet now that I don’t have it in my apartment. 

A: Yeah, well actually “H” is going to Ohio for a week this weekend, and I’m asking her to take all the computing devices in the house because I want a break.  And we’re talking about me doing a retreat, like hiring a cabin out at Treman park or something like that, and “H” bringing food out to me, because otherwise, I know I’ll overeat!  Because I eat for entertainment, too.  And these [renunciations] are expressions of power.  You know, I can do this to myself because I see the benefit.  BUT, you can’t build a relationship on power.  Because sooner or later you come into some kind of intractable conflict, and when that happens you’re going to have power against power, and that’s when things get sticky.  But conflict doesn’t have to work that way.  It can simply be an accommodation, and ideally it works that way, but for that to happen there has to be some kind of sensitivity  so you see this in really good martial arts instruction sometimes.  Has anyone here heard of the “unbendable arm?”  So this is kind of a parlor trick.   So, I’m holding my arm really stiff now, I’m not going to let anyone bend it, and now, bend it.  [S bends it.]  So now I’m not going to hold my arm stiff, I’m just going to hold it out, and I’m going to respond to you bending it.  [S doesn’t bend it.]  So it’s a bit of a parlour trick.  In martial arts they’ll tell you to imagine the chi flowing through your arm, and whatever.  What’s actually happening is that when I hold my arm out stiff like this, the bicep is opposing the tricep, so I’m actually helping the person who’s bending my arm.  Whereas when I just hold my arm out relaxed and respond, the response just comes from the tricep, and so that takes a lot more force.

And this is a demonstration of compassion.  Compassion is sensitivity.  The etymology of compassion, even in English is literally “to suffer with.” And it’s become a little bit corrupted in modern usage, in that we talk about compassionate leave or showing compassion, which basically means how do I fix this situation.  But that’s not what compassion is about, at least in a Buddhist context.  Compassion is simply to suffer with.  And I say simply, and it is simple, but it’s not easy.  Because there are all these defenses that we erect, because to suffer with someone is to experience their pain.  And this is kind of the first step in conflict resolution.  This was Bill Clinton’s big schtick in the [presidential debate corresponding to tonight’s] in ’92, “I feel your pain…”  And there was a cynical aspect to that, but at the same time I think he was genuinely showing compassion there. 

S: That was a town hall debate, too.

A: Exactly.  I was reading about this yesterday.  People would ask him questions and he would go up to them and people got a sense that he was actually experiencing what was going on for them. 

So the question is how does this work for us internally.  I’m kind of racing ahead a bit here.  There’s this idea in Western Buddhism of compassion for yourself.  Well, looking after yourself is a good idea, but compassion for yourself in this context means something arises in your experience, and you really feel that.  You don’t do any of the tricks we usually do.  You don’t do any of the tricks we usually do, like run to entertainment or just find a way to ignore it.  You really feel what’s coming up.  So compassion is another one of the four immeasurables that I was telling you about last week.  Joy is one, compassion is another.  This is where conflict resolution actually starts, and this is where you really want to start if there’s a habit that you want to… I’m not going to say fix, because this is conflict resolution.  If you’re in a conflict with someone you don’t try to fix them.  The first thing you do is you listen to them, and that’s compassion.  So we’re trying to come into a better relationship with these conflicts within ourselves at the moment.  So pick something that is making a habit difficult for you develop or shift.  It could be something which is coming up in the 10 minute meditation we were doing, like “I don’t really feel like feeling joy today.”  Or, “I need to think what I’m going to do next, or “Am I doing this right?”  Or it could be something in the habits that you’re thinking of adjusting, like “If I can’t complain then I can’t defend my interests,” or “I don’t have time to meditate,” or something like that.

The technique that we’re going to learn is called tonglen.  The way it works, it’s again a breath-based meditation, and usually you start by doing it with an external person.  So you may find it easier to imagine a person who’s experiencing the sensations or the emotions or the thoughts that you want to work with, or if you feel like it makes sense for you, you can just work with them in yourself.  And what you do is, when you’re breathing in, you imagine breathing in this suffering, and feeling this suffering.  And often in traditional meditation, you imagine that the suffering you’re breathing in is this thick, oily, black smoke.  And then on the out-breath, you breathe out something positive in your life, something which would hurt for you to lose.  It could even be joy.  The thing that I often do is  I breathe in the sensation that I’m experiencing at the moment, and then I breathe out compassion, or I breathe out [loving-kindness].  And I don’t even really do it with another person in mind anymore, but you may find it easier to imagine another person to relate to.

Any questions?

S: So we do it the same we we were doing it with the breath meditation before, just imagine ourselves breathing in that suffering, and then breathing out a feeling of joy, or compassion, or can we imagine something which gives us joy, and then imagine breathing that out?

A: Yeah, like giving away your son.

H: What?  That’s confusing.

J: Yeah, what?

A: Imagining giving away your son.  You’re not actually going to give away your son.

S: Yeah, like giving away the feeling of joy that I get by thinking of my son.

A: Yeah.

S: Or selling him, because I want the money… [Laughter]

A: No, no.

S: So the experience of joy that I get when I think about him, giving that away.

A: Yeah, and it has to be freely giving that away.  Because part of what you’re trying to set up here is that there’s this identity that you have that you’re trying to defend, and this process breaks down that sense of defense.  Does that raise anything else?

S: No, I think that makes sense.  So instead of resisting somebody else’s suffering I’m actually bringing it in and cycling back something like love or compassion.

A: Yeah, that’s perfect.  That’s good.

H: I think I understand what you’re going towards in the sense of the dissolving self, but I wonder about that at this stage of practice, where you’re asking for a dissolution of one’s, the divestment of something that you hold dear triggers fear when I imagine it.  So then I’m stuck with inhaling all the fear that comes with that. 

A: Yeah, pick something you can handle.

H: Thank you, that’s what I guess… You went really pretty quickly to a pretty dramatic example. 

A: That’s true.

H: My memory when I was taught this meditation in a couple of different contexts is just to even play with the smoke for a period of time if the people or the sensations seemed like too much to handle.  Because it can go pretty deep kind of quickly.

A:  Yeah, I’m glad you’re here.  Because this is always a problem with this kind of meditation, that I push too hard with this kind of stuff.  Unlike the practice we were doing last week, which is a very, very good practice to do, this one is complete.  You can in principle go all the way just by doing tonglen.

H: Go all the way through stages of jhana?  Or through bodhisattvahood?

A: Yeah, all the way through bodhisattvahood.

G: Which you should explain.

A:  Yes, you can all the way to, you know, enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense, let’s not get into the definition of enlightenment.

G: Right.

A: You don’t want to do that quickly.  This is just like what I was saying with the martial arts.  Ideally you don’t want to trigger reactions really fiercely at any point.   You want to kind of worm your way in, kind of like you do with really good martial arts.  You don’t resist the person, you just blend with their motion.  And similarly here, when a reaction arises in your experience, you don’t want to resist that.  Just breathe it it, then breathe out something you can give away without an intense reaction, but still feeling it a little bit.

J:  What is this called?

A: It’s called tonglen, which literally means taking and sending.  Ken says that in Tibetan, putting two opposite words together like that combines to mean basically a swap, I can’t remember exactly… but they often compound opposite words like that.  So in this case it really means exchange.  So I’m going to exchange with you my happiness in order to take on your suffering.

H: One of the things that’s interesting to me about this meditation is that it reverses many other meditation practices where you’re breathing in all the clear good energy and exhaling all the negative, and it reverses that in a way that can be startling.  It takes a little bit of practice to see the benefit.

J: If the opposite meditation is also beneficial, how can they both be beneficial?

A: Well, they’re both beneficial.  The kind of meditation we were doing last week or the kind “H” was talking about, that’s taking care of yourself, establishing a peaceful, tranquil, alert, joyous, open state of mind.  And then the one we’re looking at now is actually good to do after you’ve done the other kind of meditation, because that creates a stable mind, and then you can see the reactions that are arising in you very clearly.  So you really need both.  In Tibetan terminology, the sort you’re describing is Shamatha, “calm-abiding” meditation.  And tonglen is a kind of vipassana.  It’s an insight meditation. 

G: I’ve practiced tonglen for a long while.  The reason that comes into play, and what’s different now than what I would have done five years ago, is that my grandma had a stroke, quite recently, and she’s suffering a lot, immense suffering, you know, losing speech, losing ability to move around.  So for me, that causes a lot of pain.  So the meditation, the other kinds of meditation, really help me in this moment when I’m continually faced with knowing that she’s facing this pain and wishing that she didn’t have to.  So what I would have done maybe five years ago is maybe drink too much, watch too many movies, eat chocolate all day, just escape, whatever your escapes are, I’d just do it, because then I could escape for a moment from this.  Because it’s terrible.  You’re faced with this in many situations.  But having that practice, I can breathe in her pain, and really breathe out the wish that her pain goes away.  And just breathe out the wish to ease her suffering.  And that’s a powerful thing, and that’s where it is [for me] right now.  And there’s absolutely no need to escape into all the fun things that your mind wants to do when it’s faced with a particularly painful situation.  So I don’t run away from it, I actually experience it, but then it doesn’t overtake you because you’ve done these little practices over time, you’re not starting out with the most intense emotion.  So when you’re faced with the most intense emotion, you can just experience it and it’s OK, because it’s part of the human experience and you’re not wishing for anything to be different. 

A: That’s a great example.  Thank you.

P: What’s confusing to me is that you breathe out, wishing that your grandmother’s pain goes away, but it seems like you were saying more like you’re giving something up, but that’s not giving something up, that would be beneficial to you, because you’re feeling pain for your grandma.  So it’s different from, say, giving away a son.  That just seems a lot harder to me.

A: Yeah, that was a mistake.  I mean, eventually the practice leads there.  But you could say that instead of “G” wishing for her grandmother to be better, that she’s offering up her compassion.

P: What does that mean, to give away compassion?

S: I guess the idea is selflessness to some extent, too.  The idea is that you’re giving away something that gives you joy.  Which is a very selfless act.  I think [P] is saying that if you’re taking in that pain and getting solace from it that’s different from taking in that pain and at the same time also exchanging it for some experience of joy of your own.

A: Yeah, there’s a kind of double-think going on here.  Because if you view it from the perspective of conflict resolution, there’s a conflict.  I’m in a similar situation, my Mum passed away last year, and I’ve had a very different experience than “G” has.  I quit my job, I watch a lot of TV, and I eat too much.  And that’s not where I want to be.  And “G” has found a way through that.  But the way she’s found through that is through the experience of this pain.  And you can go to deeper and deeper levels of this as you go on.  Now, if you try to do tonglen with the idea of “this pain is messing me up, and I’m going to do tonglen to fix myself or fix the pain,” it’s not going to be effective.  For example, have you ever taken a course in nonviolent communication or something like that?  You know, there are these courses where they give you these formulas like “What I hear you saying is this, and I believe this, and I’m feeling this,” and it’s just a formula, and if you’ve ever seen someone trying to communicate this way after they’ve taken one of these courses and they think it’s the answer to everything, they sound like a robot, and it just shuts their interlocutor down, because they can tell that they’re being manipulated.  At the same time, I agree with you that what “G” is doing is not exactly tonglen at this point, because she has found the  peace that she was looking for.  But that’s where this process leads.  When she started it…

G: It was difficult.  I mean, it is difficult, period.  When you see someone walking on the street and they don’t have a home, or you see someone in Ithaca pushing a cart of cans, it’s just heart-breaking, you know.  But to not shy away from away from that, to not go to your iPod and say “Well let me me quickly listen to some upbeat music so I don’t have to think about that, and I don’t have to feel their pain.  I’ve felt it, I’ve actually felt it, and it’s pretty intense.  And you can start with something that’s maybe a little easier for you, or someone who’s more distant from you so that it’s a less intense situation.  But what it leads to is that when you get to that intense situation, you simply allow yourself to feel the depth of that pain without escaping from it, and it’s just there, and when you’re not fighting it, it’s just OK.  There’s no resistance.  It’s like the willow tree.  Because there’s no resistance to the wind, it just bends, it doesn’t break so you don’t fall apart in those situations.  I think that’s how it was, so the idea of what tonglen was for me, was maybe it was slightly different, but  it was just breathing in the suffering of somebody who doesn’t have a house, or breathing out the wish that things would improve, or that things would heal, for someone who’s sick.   So for me that’s what it’s like, the idea that you could just sit at your sick uncle’s bedside and say “He’s suffering.  I take in the suffering and I just breathe out love and compassion for him at this moment right here.  Not running away from it, not going to the soda machine, just right here.  And that is actually a really powerful thing, if you’ve ever been in the same room with someone who’s suffering and you just try that, it’s incredible.

A: The other thing I’d say here is that the question you ask is really valuable, and keep asking when things don’t make sense, but an important thing to keep in mind about this stuff is that we’re trying to come into a different relationship with our lives.  And we’re not trying to come into a fixed relationship with the practice itself.  So if there are parts of the practice which don’t make sense, as long as you can see how to do the practice and you give it a try and it leads to peace, it leads to greater skillfulness, greater flexibility in your life, it’s a worthwhile practice on that level.  You see all these arguments about “Buddhism says there’s no self!  What does this mean?”  But no-self, which is part of what this giving-stuff-away is about, is just a practice instruction.  It’s not you, you don’t own it.  It’s just what’s arising in experience.  So the philosophy of it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re capable of doing it.  But on the other hand, I don’t want to shut down intellectual queries, either.  Those are important, particularly if it means you’re not sure how to do the practice.

OK, so I thought of something else while we were talking.  Since we’re looking at internal conflict resolution, but for something like this, it might actually be easier to work with something that’s coming up in an enduring conflict in your life with somebody else.  So can everybody think about an enduring conflict you have with somebody, where you understand the emotional content that’s driving the conflict in the other person. [Laughter]  Just pick the one you think is going to be easiest to work with.  [P], you’ve got a good one already.  When you were doing the meditation before you weren’t sure if you were doing it right, and that was causing you anxiety.  So just imagine a person who is stuck doing a task and thinks they’re not doing it right, and is anxious about that.  So do tonglen with that.

OK, so why don’t we do this for say three minutes and see what comes up for people.

[three minutes pass]

Any questions, comments, problems?

S: In terms of breathing, should I just be breathing through my nose?  Out of my mouth, is there a particular rule?

A: No, there isn’t.

S: Any way is fine?

G: Just keep breathing. [Laughter]

S: That’s actually good advice.  Sometimes it’s like “Phew, that was close.”  No, actually, when I was saying earlier that I was focusing too much on my breathing, sometimes I was saying “OK, breathe [the one-breath meditation.]  Finish your breath, now joy,” and then I’d have to think, “Oh and breathe while you’re doing that.”  Because I was noticing that conceptually I was imagining breathing in smoke or sludge, and then breathing out sunlight, cool air, like that.  Because initially I was trying to imagine specific things like my son, breathing in this person’s pain and then breathing out thoughts of my son, that wasn’t working, and then I thought of this great remix I heard today like Frank Sinatra and this drum thing, and it made me like really happy, and I thought can I try that.  And then I was imaging smoke and this like sunlight, cool, breath, and when I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth I could actually make that work, and that worked.  Is that kind of right?

A: Yeah, definitely, definitely sounds good.  What were you experiencing on the in-breath and the out-breath?

S:  I started by thinking that when you breathe through your nose you kind of feel a little burning right here, and I was imagining that breathing in campfire smoke.  And I was imagining a difficult conversation I was having with my wife earlier, and I was imagining breathing in her feelings of worry and anxiety and so on, and breathing that in has kind of a smoking feeling, and then breathing out I was imagining sunlight in winter,  you know that really crisp brightness.  And I found that somehow I was able to do that, and that was working.  The drum beats didn’t work at all. [Laughter]

A: Great, that’s good.

H: I struggled with the breathing.  I noticed this in this short time, that if I focus  too much on my face it goes to my head ,and it starts giving me a headache.  So I have to think about first feeling the sensations of suffering in my chest mostly, so I found that if I breathe in, I have to remember with my whole body and not just with my head, or I’ll give myself a headache.

S: Diaphragm breathing.

H: Yeah.

J: My breathing was really sucking out the poison.  So I just saw the problem, I’d suck in the problem, and then I’d just breathe out the answer, then I was like, “Oh, no.”  And then it was more about being patient, and allowing the breathing in to sort of open up to the person that I was thinking about, and doing that, and breathing out compassion loosened up the situation for me.

[Inaudible]

A: Yeah, what often happens with me, once I got fluent with this , I would breathe in whatever it is, breathe out whatever it is, and in that cycle, some other reaction would be triggered, and that would become the topic for the next in-breath, so I would breathe in whatever was associated with that reaction, and breathe out something else good.  And I’m not saying people should do that now, you want to get fluent with the technique first, but that’s kind of where this is leading.  You don’t want to be a meditator who’s doing breath meditation in the end, you want to become an ongoing response to whatever’s arising in your experience.  I’m just bringing that up to say that if you get stuck with whatever’s coming up, like wanting to fix things, you can then make that…

J: The fixing things becomes the thing you breathe in.

A: Yeah.

H: I found a radical imbalance between the depth of pain that I could experience breathing in, and the (“blah”) that I was exhaling.  And I could see it as an imbalance, but I didn’t feel any dissonance about the practice.  But I didn’t know over time whether the balance would come over, or if I was simply trying to do something which was too difficult at first.  Because what I was experiencing was this person’s pain, but noticing that, “That’s really mine.”  I don’t know whether it’s theirs or not, but when I think of this person, I experience pain and suffering.  I don’t know if it’s this person’s or it’s mine.

A: It doesn’t matter.

H: But then there’s all this hurt, and [there’s nothing on the outbreath], and it’s just “Ahh, it just huuurts.” [Laughter]  So I don’t know if you have any… I mean I felt grateful to be attending to the suffering, I felt a sense of, well, compassion, in a sense gratitude that I was giving the suffering space to move, but there was [no exchange in the sense tonglen intends].

A: Was your attention stable?  Was there any resistance to the pain?

H: No, as long as I kept thinking about my breathing body.  As long as I didn’t lose attachment to [my breath].  It’s “Oh, I’m taking in the suffering while I push out my diaphragm.”

A: The classic instructions are that you shouldn’t be imbalanced.  That you should be breathing in about the same amount of pain as the happiness you’re offering.  But I don’t actually understand that instruction.  To me, it sounds like what’s going on there is fine.  I think the classic advice would be to choose something easier to work with that balances with the happiness that you feel able to offer at the moment.  But I think it would be fine to go on the way you are as long as you kept an eye on it.  The other thing I would say is that when you do this practice during the week, we’re going to do eleven minutes now, not ten minutes, so I’m shaping it like a dog, here [laughter].  So do the ten minutes of the one-breath celebration meditation that we did last week, then do a minute of tonglen at the end of that.  And you can either work with something in an interpersonal relationship, or something that’s coming up consistently in the meditation and seems to be evolving into a conflict, or something which is coming up in the [life] habits that you’d like to work with.  Any of those, but I keep things at around that balance.  Do the breath meditation for about ten minutes and do the tonglen for about one minute.  And that will both stabilize your attention, hopefully, and also may increase your sense of positive emotions which you have to offer in the process.  So why don’t we do five minutes of breath-celebration meditation to finish up?