Nov 27 -- Final class

H: So, how's the local hero?

J: <Sigh> I'm almost over it.

G: Over what?

J: I had to discuss my mother's partner during desert at Thanksgiving.

G: Oh, dear God.

H: I bet you just launched into action and then later went "Oh my
goodness, what just happened!"

J: I did, it was just, like training, you know, and then I was like "Oh,
God," for a day.  Everybody else was [shocked] and ugh.  But, everything
is fine... Well, he's not fine, he's 88 and wears a pacemaker, but...

H: But that's great, that's amazing.

J: Yeah, he doesn't seem to have suffered any damage... I didn't break
any ribs.

H: On an 88-year-old!

J: It was kind of a weird experience for Thanksgiving.  Not my favorite
holiday, but...  Now it's really, really not my favorite.

H: And is he up at  Cayuga Medical Center?

J: He's actually out now... he's home and there's lots of people coming
to look at him... so, you know, it's as good as could be...  But I've
done a number of resuscitations before, but never on anybody I knew.  So
that was the weird part.

G: Several?

A: Where have you done them?

J: In the hospital.

G: Are you a nurse?

J: I'm a doctor.

G: Oh, my gosh!

A: Oh, you're a psychiatrist.  I thought you were a...

J: I am a psychiatrist, but a psychiatrist is a doctor first.

A: Oh, I know, I know, my sister's a psychiatrist, I thought you were a
psychologist.

J: It was pretty mind-blowing, especially when we were in the ER.  His
health-care [privacy notice?] has "DNR" on it.

A: Ooh!

J: But, you know, how are you going to do that, you know, in the middle
of the family...

A: Is he OK with it, is he happy that you did it?

J: Yes, very happy, yes.  He's very thankful, very happy.

[People talking over each other for a while.]

A: So, since Simon needs to leave early, I'll put something I was going
to do at the end at the start.  I just want to thank you all for
participating.  It's been really good, and this is Ithaca Freeskool, so
I'm not going to ask any money, and the Buddha was actually quite
critical of teachers asking for money, even asking for donations, but he
did say that the best way to repay me would be to take my teachings to
heart and put them into practice.  So if you can find anything in what
I've taught you or in Buddhism and it improves your life, that would
bring me a lot of joy.

I started off thinking I should give G a gift for hosting, and then
I thought I might as well give you all a gift.

[Hands out a bunch of books.  Wake Up To Your Life for S, some Pema
Chodron books, Trunga's The Myth of Freedom for G.]

S: Sweet!  Isn't it supposed to go the other way around?

A: Well, I'm not a renunciate.  [Laughter.]

All right, it's the last class, well how about we start by sitting for
10 minutes.

[10 minutes pass]

So first of all, is there anything coming up in people's practices, that
you want to talk about?

S: A basic question... I'm finding I need to spend some time warming up
before really getting  into it, like doing tonglen or something.  I'll
often have to sit, and I don't know if anyone else gets this, but my
eyelids will flutter and I can feel my eyes wanting to open, especially
if it's light out.  Then that calms down after a couple of minutes, then
my thoughts calm down and then I just focus on my breathing before
getting into it.  Is that standard practice...?

A: Yeah, that's quite common, and actually the full framework around
tonglen is that you do that, and then you try to relate to your
experience according to the meditation that we were doing last week, in
other words you just experience all the sensations and the thoughts and
the feelings -- essentially, awareness -- as essentially independent
things, rather than trying to tie them into a story.

S: So you mean to do that before getting into tonglen, or after, or
during?

A: That kind of meditation is good thing to do almost any time, but it's
definitely a good thing to do at the start.  Another good thing to do at
the start is a little bit of metta.

Anyone else?          

H:  I had a positive experience two days ago, realization that my inner
experience, or what I experience as this flow of mind, or whatever the
sensations I experience in my body, whatever the feelings that I have
related to my outward experience, whatever  is this, it's valuable,
that's it's worth spending time exploring, and that it is so often just
dismissed and not counted in what counts as experience.  And that we
just have a very limited vocabulary and really shitty maps for most of
that terrain, but I'm suddenly realizing that there are maps for that
terrain from different traditions, and that's worth spending time with
because it's not just "me time."  You know, I think I've often thought
about in that language of withdrawl or something selfish, and now [I'm
realizing] "No, this is still part of human experience."

A: Yeah, it's a critical part.

J: It's part of becoming more present.  Sometimes we just run through it
in order to seem "accomplished."

A: Exactly.

H: Yeah, I was just thinking "This is important!"  To me.  I hadn't
really owned it as important.

A: That's great.

So, this being the last class, is there anything which people would like
to cover today?  So my plan is that I'll talk a little bit about
establishing clarity of intention, it's based on a meditation last week,
I'll just jump into the intention version of it this week, and then
we'll talk about how the four immeasurables relate to conflict
resolution again, and maybe do an example of that if there's time, and
if there's any time left after that we can talk about how this is going
to work for people's particular habits.

H: I'd love to hear how people have worked through things that have
happened over the course, and what's changed in people's experience
through the course, and I'd also be grateful for a summary of these
different meditation practices that we've done, just to refresh my
memory.

A: OK, yeah, a summary sounds good.  Yeah, that'd be a good thing to
do.

All right, so the topic of this course is applying the four
immeasurables to the habits and patterns in our lives.  The sort of
interesting habits and patterns, the ones which are intractable, arise
from some kind of internal conflict.  So in a sense I've been treating
this course as about conflict resolution, with an emphasis on resolution
of internal conflicts as it relates to habits.

Now the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition has a sequence called the four
enlightened activities, which Ken refers to as the four stages of
conflict... Before I go there... Any time you want to resolve a
conflict, the most important thing is that you get very clear about your
intention.  And that's easy to say, and not always that easy to do,
because it's often the case that the values and intentions that are
underlying difficult patterns in our lives are things that we don't look
at.  Either we're institutionally conditioned not to look at them, or we
don't look at them because they're painful to us in some way.  And as
long as that's the case, it's very difficult to approach what's
happening with these patterns in a conscious, well-informed way.  So I'm
going to quickly go through with you a meditation which can help you to
establish this clarity of intention.  And very often just establishing
this and really keeping it in mind would be enough to resolve these
conflicts.  Because sometimes they just arise from a kind of inertia in
our lives.  I mean, how many people would smoke if every time they
smoked visualized themselves dying of lung cancer.  And if you want to
stop smoking, that's probably one of the reasons, that it's going to
kill you.  That might seem extreme, but this was actually the kind of
relationship that the Buddha proposed that monastics should have towards
food.  One of the similes he had for the way that monastics should be
relating to food is to treat it as though you were a parent crossing the
desert and you'd killed your own child in order to have enough food to
make the crossing.

S: Did you eat your own child?

A: Yeah, I did, during my tantric phase.  [Laughter.]

He's not saying you should eat children.  He's saying, "Imagine how
those parents would feel while they were eating... Would they be
celebrating that food?  Would they be talking about how tasty it is?
Would be eating it to beef themselves up?  Would they be eating it to
make themselves look good?  No.  Their focus would  be getting it across
the desert, and they would be eating it in grief."

So, the connection I'm drawing here is to smoking, and imagining
yourself getting lung cancer.

Well, putting that horrible imagery aside for a second, I probably
shouldn't have talked about that after the 10-minute meditation... But
anyway, let's do this meditation regarding clarity of intention.

So, does everyone have in mind something that's going on in their lives
which you feel some conflict about.  You're doing something, or you're
believing something, and you think that you should be doing something
else... OK, great.

R: I'm just still thinking about that food thing.  So, what did the
Buddha have against food?

A: It's kind of the fundamental craving in our lives, and it does lead
to suffering.  And anything that you're doing in your life which you
take  delight in, is going to lead to that kind of craving and
suffering, at least in the classical Buddhist framework.  When you get
to things like tantra in Tibetan Buddhism, then you try to establish
mindfulness in delight.  But that's really something that you should be
trying to do after you've attained enlightenment as the Buddha
originally referred to it.

R: But Buddha was really obese, wasn't he?

A: No, that's a common misconception.  He's actually always portrayed as
very svelte.  Actually, at the time [just before] his enlightenment he
was undergoing extreme asceticism.  He wanted to starve himself to
death.  The story he tells is that some gods came and told him not to do
that, so he decided instead... he had these five buddies and he was
getting them to feed him really tiny amounts of food, so he wouldn't die
but he would get extremely emaciated.  And then it was after he decided
on this thing called the middle way that he abandoned that and
immediately after that went and got enlightened, but he always had this,
I would say, ambivalent attitude towards food.

The guy with the big belly, is a Chinese deity...

R: Oh, OK.  Because when you see those little statues...

A: Yeah, it's not actually the Buddha.

R: It seems strange though, that they would pick a fat person to
represent someone who was in fact skinny.

A: Yeah, well, I'm talking about the earliest Buddhist teachings which
we have.  I mean, who knows whether they really came from the Buddha, or
even whether he was actually a historical figure.  But there are a
number of either extensions or corruptions of that teaching, depending
on your perspective, which happened after that.  And the guy with the
fat belly... Who is that?

H: Amitabha.

A: Amitabha?  OK.  Oh, it's Amitabha?  Oh, so it's another Buddha!

H: Yeah, it's the pure-land Buddha.

A: Oh, OK, so it's another Buddha.

H: It is another Buddha, but one of the reasons he's represented as fat,
is that it's an iconographic symbol of his spiritual wealth.  So, the
seat of the soul is in the belly, so by having a large belly, he's a
large soul.  So it's not just about food wealth, it's about spiritual
wealth.

A: Oh, I didn't know that.  OK, so it actually is a Buddha, but it's a
different Buddha.

H: Yeah, it's the pureland guy.

J: So that's why he's laughing?

H: Mhm.

R: So whenever anybody refers to Buddha they could be referring to any
of specific figures?

A: Yeah, "Buddha" is kind of like an honorific.  It literally means
"Awake," an awake person.  And the Buddha of Buddhism, the seminal
Buddha if you like, that's Gautama Buddha if you want to be specific,
that was kind of his spiritual name.

All right.  So let's do this meditation.  This is a meditation based on
an early Buddhist framework called the four foundations of mindfulness.
Just some brief background on that which we covered last week, the four
foundations of mindfulness are mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of
feelings -- pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, mindfulness of awareness --
attention, what the mind is currently attending to, and mindfulness of
thoughts, movements in the mind.  So in this case, we're trying to do
mindfulness of the intentions which we have towards our habits.

OK, so just sit for a minute, and when I say so bring to mind the
position that you're taking regarding how your behavior should be.

[A minute passes]

So bring to mind that belief about the way you should be.  As you hold
that in attention, open to the experience of your body.  If you know how
to do a body scan, do a quick one.

Now, as you're holding in attention the belief and the physical
sensations which arise with that belief, you may find some emotional
content arising with that.  If those emotions are very strong, you might
want to open to those just a little bit at a time, so that they don't
overwhelm you.  Then open to the experience of those as well [as much as
you feel able.]

So, as you hold those beliefs, the physical sensations, and the
feelings, you might get a sense of what's really important to you in
this conflict.  That sense might be emotional, it might be a longing
like intense desire, or it could be semantic, it could be a belief about
a quality you feel you ought to have, for instance.  Keep opening to each
of these facets, holding them all in attention.  The belief, the
physical sensations, the emotions, the sense of what's important to you.

Now as you hold all of that in attention, you might see that there are
some ideals and values behind what's important to you in this
situation.  So hold all of that in attention, all four of those those
things.  The belief, the physical sensations, the emotions, what's
really important to you, and the ideals and values behind that.

OK, so let's stop the meditation now.  We went through that very
quickly.  This is a meditation       that it's worth taking a fair bit of time
over, maybe even spending a day on each component.  So don't be
disappointed if you didn't feel like you connected with some component
of it.  Any questions, comments, insights about it?

S: One of the things I've been working on has just been being more
calm.  One part of me  was thinking about just wanting to be generally
calmer, and the other side was, maybe to get the emotional reaction, I
was wondering whether I should be thinking about not being calm, so I
wasn't sure which one I should be focusing on.

A: I would take both sides in separate meditations.  Because there's two
things that are really important to you there, and it's good to get
clear about both of them.  Does that make sense?

S: Yeah, so focusing one on being calm and then doing those steps and
then on an entirely different occasion focusing on the opposite, not
being calm, and the feelings and emotions and physical sensations
associated with that?

A: Yeah, that might actually be the more important.

S: Those are easier to access, actually.  I was able to get this band of
muscle I could feel tense up around here?  Especially when I was
thinking about losing my temper.

A: Cool, yeah.  And I would say when you do that, you want to take quite
a bit of time beforehand to establish a fairly stable base of
attention.  So do some kind of calming meditation like metta practice,
or maybe tonglen if you're finding that calming, for at least 10 minutes
or more like 15 or twenty if you can afford it and stand it.

S: Cool, thanks.

A: Anyone else?

J: It was very fast.  It was very intense.  I mean, I went through all
of those things but I kept going back and forth.  So just taking more
time and trying to focus on just one or two things, because if I'd be
doing doing the emotions and then the body scan, then thinking about the
ideal or the intention and then the body sensations would change.  So
would I want to do that together in a separate meditation?

A: Well, what I would suggest is opening to them in stages and trying to
hold it all in attention at once, and when you see your attention
collapsing down on one aspect of it, then go back to the beginning and
start again.  So in the generic four foundations of mindfulness, that's
how you do it.  You start with your vision, and just focusing on one
point, and then you expand your awareness to include your entire visual
field, and as your visual attention collapses down on one point again,
expand again, and then when you can hold your hold visual field in
attention for a minute or so, then start bringing in auditory
sensations, then doing a very slow scan of tactile sensations throughout
the body, and just including all of the five senses that way.  This is
something you can work on for months or years, but it's very very
fruitful if you do.

And having that generic practice, which we talked about more last week,
is really useful when you go to a more specific situation like this,
where you're just trying to analyze a particular intention, because
there's no place for the ignorance to hide, then, in a sense.  Well,
ideally.  Obviously, we're humans, there'll always be ignorance hiding
somewhere.

H: I was really struggling at the beginning of the meditation, because
there was a "should."  And then later there was an "ought."  And I
stumbled with that.  Can you go back through that and maybe frame it
differently, because that confused me.  I couldn't understand who the
"should" was for.  That seems like a very social construction.  The word
should comes up as a superego or something.  And I'm not sure if that's
what your intention was, but that was unfortunately where I got, and
then I was just angry and confused.  I was, like, "I just want to be
DONE, I'm confused."

A: So did you experience this as me saying *you* should and ought to be
doing something, or as your belief about something you should/ought to
be doing?

H: Yeah, I was confused about who the should was.  I couldn't tell from
what you said.  So if you could walk through the initial instructions
again [regarding the belief.]

A: OK, do you mind talking about the situation that you were working
with?

H: I was thinking about food, and my relationship to food.  That I often
thought about having a different relationship than I have.

A: What aspects of the relationship do you want to change?

H: That's where I'm confused.  I don't know what aspect I want to
change.  I mean, I think I know what I want to change, but that's what
triggers the conflict.  Where is that coming from?  Where is the desire
to change the relationship coming from?  And immediately I'm stumbling
into "I don't know what I want."

A: OK, that's great.  So what is it that you think you should be
wanting?

H: I think I should be wanting a healthy relationship to food?

A: And what's unhealthy about your current relationship?

H: I eat when I'm afraid.

A: Ah, OK, so would it be safe to say that you would like to not...

H: I'd like to not be afraid.  Can we do that?  [Laughter.]

G: We'll get to that tomorrow.

H: After tomorrow.. Which is where I got to in the meditation...

A: Oh, [you're afraid] because of your [PhD prospectus] defense meeting tomorrow?

H: Yeah, so I've been experiencing a lot of fear, and trying to take
away the experience of fear with food, and just noticing that that seems
self-destructive, or not where I want to go in some way.

A: Uh huh, but on the other hand, you feel like that's...

H: It works!  I feel better!

A: OK, so these are the two intentions that are in conflict.  That you
want to be at peace in the midst of these fearful things, but you also
want to be in a way that's mindful of what you need for your health and
nutrition.  So those are the two intentions that are in conflict, and
you would work with those.

H: What does it mean, to "work with it?"  Those are things that I
identify before I sit down [to meditate]?

A: Yeah.

H: OK, so I think about, "Wow, I'm really afraid.  I eat when I'm
afraid.  I don't want to do that."  Now I've got a conflict of being
afraid and using food incorrectly.  So, now what do I do?  Walk me
through that.

A: So, now you take one side of that, "I want to eat what I should eat,"
however you want to phrase it, or "I want to be at peace in the midst
of this fear," and hold that desire or intention in attention and look
at what that brings up in terms of the four foundations of mindfulness.

H: OK, that makes more sense.

A: Great.  Anyone else?

All right.  So, let's go back to the summary.

So, the four stages of conflict, according Ken.  Traditionally they're
known as the four enlightened activities.  The first one is
pacification.  That's the traditional translation of it.  This really
corresponds to compassion.  Now, in an interpersonal conflict, this is
where you just talk to the person.  You understand what's going on for
them, what's really important to them in this conflict, and then, having
a good idea of what's really important to you, what's really important
to them, that kind of broadens out the options that you often have, in
thinking about ways of arranging things that basically just make the
conflict [irrelevant.]

Ken talks sometimes about rearranging the furniture.  For instance, if
the furniture is set up so that there's a channel which everyone has to
pass through to get to a certain place, that immediately sets up a
dominance hierarchy about who gives way to who in that channel and under
what conditions.  But if you rearrange the furniture so that people can
get past each other without that happening, then that dominance
hierarchy just goes away.

The next stage is usually translated as enrichment.  And this really
corresponds to loving-kindness.  So at this point, you have a fairly
good understanding of the [priorities underlying] the conflict, but you
haven't figured out a way of just rearranging the furniture, so you
bring in some other factor.  In an interpersonal conflict, there are
many things this could be, it could be money, it could be a mediator.
In an internal conflict, it could be bringing in your wife to control
your access to the internet.  [Laughter.]  Or it could be  taking a
class on emotional regulation or something like that.

Now, whenever a conflict gets resolved at the level of compassion, that
always enriches the relationship, because you've worked through these
things together, you have a better understanding of each other.  And if
you work through the compassion stage and go to the loving-kindness
stage, the "enrichment" stage, and work things out at that level, that
will strengthen the relationship as well.  But you never want to go
straight to enrichment in these conflicts.  That will tend to weaken the
relationship.  So, an example which Ken gives of this is, a husband and
wife are fighting and the wife says "We need to go to couples therapy."
"What?  Shouldn't we just talk about this ourselves, first?"  That would
be very alienating.

Another example would be a mother just giving a tantrum-throwing child
the toy they want, rather than talking them about what's going on with
them.

So, the next stage in the stages of conflict is known as magnetization,
and that corresponds to insight, or manipulation.  [To H]: Is this the
kind of thing you were looking for when you asked for a summary?

H: No, [I was thinking of something more basic] like "We did tonglen, we
did metta meditation..." That was my thought.  But [what you're
covering] is interesting.  But no, I was looking for that kind of review
of the practices we did and how would they go with the conflict stuff
we've done.

A: Yeah, so for compassion we did tonglen, which is the one about
breathing in some form of suffering and breathing out something
positive.  So, take on suffering and give away something positive.  And
for loving-kindness, we did metta practice, which is basically taking
positive feelings you have about one object and projecting them onto
another object, and gradually expanding the objects to which you feel
positive.

The way that you would apply these in working with habits is, first of
all, tonglen is a very useful thing to do for the feelings which come up
during the intention meditation that I was talking about.  Also, when
you're experiencing an internal conflict, there are different identities
that are in conflict, and if you can hold one of those identities in
attention and do tonglen, then that's very productive.  So, for
instance: "I want to be a calm person."  So, breath in the fear  and
anxiety, and breath out the insight that you're developing about this
situation.  For instance.  Or, "I want to use the internet.  I want to
establish some kind of social connection on the internet."  So, breathe
in the loneliness, breathe out the social connections which I have in
[the rest of my life.]

When it comes to the enrichment phase, you'll very often find that
there's some aspect of you which you don't really respect, and that's a
problem in its own right.  It's very hard to come into a healthy
relationship with aspects of yourself which you don't respect, just as
it's hard to have any interpersonal relationship where there isn't a
reasonable amount of respect between the people involved.  So, actually
this is a common remedy proposed for anger: when anger arises, cultivate
metta.  But it's really useful, actually, if you can disassociate from
the anger, establish it as an object of attention, and cultivate metta
for the anger itself.  "May this anger be happy, well and at peace."

S: That makes sense.

A: OK, so the next step is magnetization.  So this corresponds to
insight, and I kind of disagree with Ken on this.  He sees this as using
the power in the situation, but to me it really seems to correspond to
manipulation, and when Ken talks about this, he says he prefers to use
the power "inherent in the situation" rather than his personal power.
So, the example he gives of this is a little bit intricate, but an
example of trying use magnetization or manipulation is, suppose that
you're dealing with someone who doesn't do their taxes because they're
afraid of it.  So you tell them "Look, you might be afraid now, but when
the IRS comes down on you like a tonne of bricks and files your tax
returns for you, and does a really unfavorable job so that you owe three
times more tax than you actually should, and then puts a lien on your
house and levies your bank account and garnishes your wages, you're
going to feel a lot worse!  So you might as well do it now."

This is manipulation, this is insight.  Usally, with these patterns in
our lives, they're trying to protect us from some experience, and
usually, ironically, they don't actually protect us.  So, for instance,
eating food, it does work [to manage anxiety].  I do it too.  It's
amazing that I'm as skinny as I am.  I just have a very high metabolism,
but I do eat a tremendous amount of food for  exactly the same reason as
[H].  But you know, you eat the food and then twenty minutes later, the
project's still due, and the effects of the food has worn off.

Now, when you get to the stage of manipulation, you really are using
power in some sense, and it always weakens the relationship.  Because at
the previous two [stages], the compassion and the loving-kindness,
you're really establishing a connection there.  With the first you're
saying "I want to know what's going on with you."  With the second,
you're saying "I care about this relationship and I'm prepared to devote
resources to it."  With manipulation you're saying "I need to control
you."  And sometimes conflicts do get to this stage, and you have to be
prepared for that with interpersonal as well as internal conflicts.  So
this is another reason why it's very important to be clear about your
intention when you go into a conflict.  It's very important to be clear
about what you're prepared to give up, in terms of the nature of the
relationship and in terms of the things that you get out of it.

H: Then how does magnetization go in relating to a conflict about
habits?

A: An example of that would be the thing that I said before about
visualising yourself getting lung cancer every time you have a
cigarette.  Actually, that example only occurred to me this evening.  I
was thinking "Why am I doing this with the internet [browsing]?  I
should be training myself that every time I get on the internet I..."

G: Um, kittens, guys?  [Laughter.]

A: Yeah, but you know, this is sowing the seeds for an unfulfilled life,
in the sense that the return that I get on those behaviors is relatively
small compared to, say, teaching a class like this or establishing a set
of math students to tutor or something like that.

H: The experience I have with those kinds of things is that [the threat]
is very abstract, whereas the internet is very immediate.  So the only
insight that I can think would work is the death one.  "You could die
tomorrow!  What are your choices now?"  The other ones are kind of
harder to grasp for me.

A: Death meditations are perfect.

S: What's death meditation?

H: Oh, chapter one. [Pointing to S's copy of Wake Up To Your Life.]
[Laughter]

S: I'll get to it right away, then.

A: They're a great example of insight meditation.  "You are going to
die."  It's impermanance, one of the three characteristics of existence
we talked about, suffering and nonself being the other two.

H: It's basically [what I described].  You know, thinking of all the
ways you could die, how fragile your life is.  "Wake up! You're
practically already dead!"

A: "This is your life, and it's ending, one minute at a time."

S: Oh my god, I was just going to mention Fight Club.  [Laughter].
Fight Club, and in A Good Man is Hard to Find the misfit says to the
grandmother "She'd be a wonderful person if she had a gun to her head."
[Laughter].  That kind of thing?  Yeah, OK.  That's interesting.

H: A little Heidegger.

S: I can't believe you just...

A: Yeah, I love Fight Club.

S: Yeah, I'm teaching it right now, actually.  I was just doing
powerpoints before I came over here, so it's weird that you just
mentioned that.

R: You're teaching Fight Club?

S: I am.  The book.

R: Oh, OK.

A: I liked the movie better than the book.

S: I do too.  Both are great, don't get me wrong. [Laughter.]

[Lots of cross talk about starting up the Ithaca branch of Fight Club.]

R: I think the first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about
Fight Club.  [Laughter]

S: That's right, I said that at the beginning of my class.  "So, like, I
don't know what to do for the next two weeks."  [Laughter.]

I'm actually going to have to run, but thank you very much.  It was
great to meet everybody, and I hope to see you soon.

Thank you for the book.  I'll enjoy reading it.

A: Yeah, no worries.  Changed my life.

S: Sweet.

A: All right.  So the last stage in the stages of conflict is usually
translated as destruction, and that corresponds to joy, or power
actually.  And that's where you end the relationship, or some aspect of
it in which the conflict is occurring.  So if you're suffering from an
addiction, this is where you generally have to end up going.  "I'm not
going to smoke anymore."  With food, you don't really have that option.

H: You could.

A: Well, yeah you can say, and I've done this at times, for several
months at a time, well, at least the last time it was a few months,
where you do the Buddhist practice of only eating one meal a day, and
then you just eat as much as want at that meal, and then you just don't
eat the rest of the day.  And that's maintaining a relationship with
food, but this relationship where you eat when you're nervous... [clicks
fingers] It's gone.  You just don't have that anymore.

For destruction, the power meditations we were talking about two weeks
ago [are good examples.]

H: Could you review?

A: Well, first of all, there's the joy meditation which we did right at
the start of the course, where you breathe in, you experience joy, but
maintaining attention on the breath, and when you find yourself caught
up in some daydream, you bring yourself back to the breath, and
celebrate that as well.  This is actually an example of destruction in a
way.  We have these playthings in our minds, and the breath meditation
can be treated as almost a suffocation of our relationship to those
mental playthings [by reinforcing the habit of dropping them in order to
return attention to the breath.]

The four foundations of mindfulness which we did last week and which we
went over very quickly earlier this evening in the context of intention,
that's another example of a power meditation.  You know what you need to
do, and you just do it.  That's not so much a question of destruction,
except inasmuch that the advantage of that kind of meditation is that it
will bring to light anything within you that's trying to hide, and that
ignorance is something which you've actually come to depend on.  You
have a relationship with that ignorance, and [by this meditation] you're
bringing that to an end.  So there is an element of destruction there.

And the other stuff we talked about [regarding power] doesn't only
relate to destruction.  For example the exercises we were doing two
weeks ago with mindful speech, and things, that doesn't relate to
destruction.  But with martial arts, the relationship is obvious.

OK, so that's it, pretty much.  So again, I went through that pretty
fast.  There was a lot to cover, this week.  Maybe it raised some more
questions?

H: I have one.  Can you say, then, just as a closing, just reflect on
how does this content bring together something that you'd want to press
forward about the class and habits.

A: So, what I'm hoping  for is that people will go through these stages
of conflict, with the internal conflicts that that they would like to
address in their lives.  We've been using this model of two different
identities which want different things for our lives or present
experience.  So we examine these two identities and their intentions and
desires very closely.  We look to see if there's any way of arranging
things so that the those desires and intentions can actually be
compatible, that's pacification.

H: Oh, right, so in the case of my food thing, it would be...

A: It would be finding some other way...

H: Which shared between them as a peaceful way of living.

A: Yeah, yeah.  Exactly.

J: A balancing of the identities?

A: Maybe, or maybe it's the destruction of one of them, too.  You know,
I quit my job at the end of June because I just couldn't find a way to
be at peace and be an academic, at least not in the field that I was
in.  That's destruction.  That's about as close as you get to actual
death in this society without actually dying.

But yeah, there's a whole continuum, and Ken always says that usually
when there's a conflict we go immediately to magnetization and
destruction, and compassion and loving-kindness don't really get a
look-in.  Say a client says "I'd really like to have your phone number,"
and you say, "Well, psychiatrists don't do that."  That's going to
magnetization.  Whereas, you might start to talk about why they want
that.  I mean, you probably would anyway, knowing you, but...

H: I feel like we could rehearse these all over again.

A: Yeah, we could role play all of these.  I was actually planning to,
but we'd probably run over time a bit.  How are we doing for time?

H: I think it's probably five of, because he left at quarter of.

A: OK, so who has an internal conflict which they would like to role
play?

Well, we could role play mine...

H: Is it more useful to role play it, or is there another internal
conflict where could just work through these methods.

A: Sure.  Name one.

H: Oh, come on, I'm not the only one.

J: I want my mother to be less passive about moving out of her house.

H: Oh, I can relate to that.

R: Less...?

J: Less passive.  She doesn't want to move, but she won't talk about
it.  She won't say she's sad, she won't say it upsets her, she instead
does these passive-aggressive things which make people believe she's
doing things about it, but then I find out she's doing nothing which
really pisses me off.  So I have to find a way to be compassionate with
her difficulty, but at the hsame time express myself, allow me to be
myself rather than just being, sort of the dutiful daughter or compliant
daughter, which I'm not really, but...

H: You don't want to hurt anyone, right?

J: Yeah, I don't really want to hurt her feelings, but they're going to
hurt because she has to do something she doesn't want to do.  So whether
I hurt them or she's just hurt by the situation... So, how's that work?

A: Well, it sounds like you've already tried compassion...

J: I just started.

A: Oh, you just started?  Oh, OK.

J: Yeah, it's kind of been brewing but it's just popped up...

A: So why do want her to move out?

J: Because she's too old to live where she lives.  She lives on a huge
house on a hill, and she's 83 and getting a little senile and had a
health problem a couple of months ago.

A: Uh huh, that all makes sense.  (I'm just speeding things up a bit
here [because of the time].)

J: And even though she lives near me, I can't be taking care of her all
the time.  Because I don't want to give up my life in order to do that.

A: And does she acknowledge the need for her to move out?

J: She acknowledges it, but she doesn't do anything about it.  She's not
taking any responsibility.  Which is her personality.  That's old.

A: OK, so you probably have a lot of emotional reactivity about that
yourself.

J: Yes, old anger about that.

H: Enrichment!

A: [Laughs] I don't think we're at compassion, yet.

H: Right, but what I like about this schema is that you can jump around
it and then recognize that before you end your relationship with your
mother, you could probably try some other things in the
meantime. [Laughter].

J: That's what I did when I was 17.  I can't do that now!

H: I guess what I'm saying is that it's fun to acknowledge in these
conflict situations is that what's really at stake here is an end.  So
then you go "That's not what I want.  So what can we do instead?"

A: Yeah, the nice thing about this framework is that it always gives you
space to move.  Well, not always, but it gives you a lot more space than
I used to usually have when I was thinking about a conflict.  You know,
if you go straight to magnetization then it's a battle of wills.  If you
go straight to destruction, it's an actual war, or just an ending, which
is destructive in itself.

So, I would actually probably take a more specific conflict.  Is there
some specific action you would like her to take?

J: Yes, to go and look at  Lawnview.

A: OK, and have you asked her to do that?

J: Yes, and she says "I need to do things one step at a time."  Meaning
she's not ready.

A: OK.

J: So, I'm going go make an appointment and say "This is the day I have
free and I'm willing to take you on this day.  I understand that you
don't want to move fast on this, but we need to get started."

A: Yeah, that's magnetization.

J: Is it?

A: Yeah.

J: So it's sort of a power move?  Is that what that means?

A: Yeah.  So she wants to take things one step at a time.  So what steps
does she need to take before...

J: So, you know, if we do this now, you'll have more choice in how this
happens.

A: So, yeah, that's more like enrichment.  I would say that at the
compassion level, what you want to talk to her about is what steps she
wants to take before going to see Lawnview.  She's saying "one step at a
time," so what steps are you skipping over?

[J shrugs]

A: Right.  [Laughter]  So then you have a new conflict.

J: So I should ask her that!

A: Yeah.

J: So, the new conflict is...

H: So what do you think her answer is?  (Sorry!)

A: Yeah, no, that's a good question.

J: Well, her answer would probably be "You're pushing me."

A: OK, so, great.  OK.  "So, pushing you into what?"

J: Well, that means she's angry.

A: OK.

J: So I do compassion then, like "Sorry this is hard for you?  I know
you love where you live?  But..."

A: You know this Rogerian stuff?  Like reflective listening?  I would
give that a go.  If you haven't done anything like that with her.  I
mean, you can't do that on an ongoing basis in a relationship obviously,
but when I was working on the suicide hotline, I found that very
effective.  When powerful emotions were coming up.  And for a while it
was very effective with H, too, but now it's like [Laughter] I'll say,
"So so-and-so didn't listen to your question and you're angry about
that."  And she'll say "Yeah, I just said that!"  [Laughter]

J: OK.

A: But, you know, if your Mom's not familiar with that... [Laughter]

If you're in a situation where there's a lot emotional stuff coming up
for you at the same time, then it's good to have something fairly
formulaic like that to fall back on sometimes.  If you're anticipating
that she's going to be angry at you, and I assume you're going to be
angry about that, I would practice metta for her, and metta for your own
anger, ahead of time.  And when she says "You're pushing me," one thing
you could ask is, "How do we need to arrange this so that you'll feel
comfortable about it?"

J: It it puts it back on her choice.

A: Well, it's not so much about her choice at this stage, but it's
trying to find out from her what she actually wants out of this
situation.  What's really important to her.

J: Well, I think it's more her emotional reaction than something actual.

A: Right, and so if that's the case... Well, I get stuck with that
stuff, too.  I get stuck with it.  But this is the way I approach these
things.  If you can get to a point where your side of the reaction isn't
happening anymore, then it's easier to see her side, to see... If you're
a psychiatrist this is probably all quite trite to you.

J: No, it's not quite trite, that's why I'm here.  Because actually,
we're socialized and trained in a very narrow focus, so it's part of why
I'm here and what I've gotten out of the course.  That there are other
ways to think about all these things.  It's extremely helpful.  And
it'll help with impasses not only in my life, but in my work.

A: Cool, that's very kind of you.

J: Well, it's true!

H: Perhaps that's a good closing, just to hear from people what they
take from the course.

A: Yeah, do people want to do something like that?  Anyone who wants to,
feel free.

G: Well, to build on that, this meditation, and looking at things in
this new way has worked for me this Fall.  I've been working on creating
space, and I'm in a relationship that causes conflict or difficulty, so
I keep creating space between this person and I.  And that means that
what [A] was telling you, which is like doing the meditation to have
compassion for the way you and the person reacts, and just to keep
coming back to that open space, because it really changes the dynamic.
And I've had a couple of situations where that actually was completely
true, and the dynamic was completely different than before I'd tried all
this practice.

But also in this class I was actually meditating every single day for
half an hour, and I've been trying to do [establish that habit] for
years, so...

A: That's fantastic!

G: Yeah, it was a really big win.  And because of that, I've had just
the best breaking of bad patterns and habits and the best Fall, so...
It's been really good.  This class has been really helpful in just
getting back to basics and rolling with it.

A: Cool!  Thanks a lot.

R: I don't know if there's any direct link.  I don't know if I should
say there's no direct improvement that I experienced from this class,
but for me what this class does is it's just a way of keeping the
practice of meditation in my consciousness, which then makes me do it
more often than I would otherwise.  And I feel like maybe if I'd had the
opportunity to read the book first... because a lot of the stuff you're
putting out there I'm just hearing for the first time so it just flies
by me.  So maybe if I'd had some earlier exposure to it by reading the
book, then I would have absorbed more of it because it would have been
reinforced by talking about it in each class.

P: Should have had assigned reading.  [Laughter]

J: Homework.

A: Yeah, a lot of what I've been talking about actually is from his
podcasts, so if there's any...

J: I've been listening to those, they're very interesting.

A: Oh, which one have you been listening to?

J: Oh, well quite a few of them.  But there was one which impressed me
deeply, that was about how he was full of tension and he just held it
and held it and he couldn't figure out what it was but he just stayed
with it, and it went away and he never quite figured out what it was.
And that's so unanalytical, it was cool.  It was like, "Oh, God, you can
do that without having to overthink it?  That's wonderful!"  Just sit
with it, and you can tolerate the tension and anxiety, and you don't
have to go run out and do anything about it.

A: That's Ken's way.  He's all about that kind of thing.

G: "Don't just do something, sit there!"  [Laughter.]

A: Anyway, if you wanted to get a second exposure to it and you have
anywhere in your life where you're listening to audio a lot, his
podcasts would be a good place to start.  In particular the one on
relationship  and conflict is a really good one, and also "Power and
Presence" and "The Warrior's Solution" are good ones, too.  Although the
audio on Warrior's Solution is terrible.

J: Could you shoot us  an email about those?

A: Sure.

H: This seems obvious to me, but maybe... I am grateful for working with
these things with other people.  Because the energy's hard to maintain
on my own.  So to know that there's a group of people who are also
asking the same questions or thinking about the same thing during the
week or at least agreeing to meet together, keeps the intention
stronger, and provides an extra emphasis that [this work] really is
important to me, although I don't always know how to acknowledge that.
So I'm grateful for everyone's continuing presence and intention.

J: Thanks, H.

A: And for me it's been great to get these ideas out to other people and
get some push-back about them.  See how they stand up in other people's
lives.

R: Do you think you'll try teaching the course again?

A: Yeah, actually there's already a Wake Up To Your Life group in
Columbus, so I may try to teach the same thing there.

R: Oh, that's right, you're moving.

A: Yeah, if I hadn't been this probably would  have gone a couple more
classes in December, but I won't have time.  But there's like a 60%-80%
chance that we'll be back by the Summer, so I might teach another one.

OK!  Thanks again folks.