(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - It's worth saying actually a little bit about the background of this theme. Myself and Balaji, who I mentioned earlier, have been doing a six-month course on this theme. I couldn't remember this morning for the life of me, whether it's been four or five years, but something like that. And yeah, it's fantastic. We get a group of about 25 people together over the winter months, between October and March, and we meet for a whole day on Zoom, and then we do meditate individual practice reviews with folks in between. And we also have a little WhatsApp group so they can stay connected with each other as well. And the theme really emerged out of my own inspiration around Bante's teachings on the individual, the group and the spiritual community, and his emphasis on Sangha and spiritual friendship, which has been a thread for me since the very beginning. You could say in a way, it's a big part of what drew me to Chi Ratan in the first place, 'cause I was really looking for community. I wouldn't have been able to tell you that at the time, 'cause I wasn't integrated enough, but now looking back, it's very clear. That's what I was looking for. So I've been reflecting on it a lot, and then in particular during COVID, and even more specifically, after the murder of George Floyd, and all of what transpired after that, particularly in our community, I felt it was really important to come back to these themes and look at them even more deeply and continue to call the wisdom there for modern day application, and what we're facing just now as a global community, which isn't easy, things are not easy right now. Not that they've ever been easy, and it feels like a particular time. I do feel it's important to say that I did not come up with the idea I am because we are. It comes from an ancient African spiritual tradition, and the word is Ubuntu, Ubuntu, which loosely translates as I am because we are. Another thing that's worth saying is, this theme seems to just have a life of its own and keeps kind of unfolding, and new things keep coming in, and then I've got my somatic training I'm doing, and I have one of those minds that likes to make lots of links and connections between things. So, yeah, so what you're gonna get today is a work in progress. Some of it may sound familiar to you, some of it might be very new to you, so that the humble request for me is to just stay open to what's coming next. And if there's anything that you're like, I don't know what she's on about, or I'm not sure how that connects to what we're doing here, feel free to ask, 'cause I'd like it to be a kind of collective exploration. Okay, so the title of the weekend is I am because we are an embodied and relational exploration of the individual, the group, and the spiritual community. And then the talk is called somatic going for refuge, embodying true safety, dignity, and belonging as a path of collective awakening. It's a long title. I like words, even though they ultimately fail us. So I'm gonna start with this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. So I want to start with gratitude to Amrita Mati for asking you to do this. It was a very straightforward yes with also an unknown, 'cause I may or may not have been ordaining someone this year, but that didn't work out for this year. So that's good, so I was able to do it. And also I wanted to just name a few folks who I always feel it's important to bring in at the start of offering Dharma, which is my preceptor. So Diane Andi is my full preceptor, Viveka, my private preceptor, and my K.M. Palma Dharani. Viveka's also my K.M. And it's worth saying that Sangha Devi's here, he's also Viveka's private preceptor. Amrita Nita and I both worked out last night that you also are a Dainsay Gupta, so we decided that we're cousins. (audience laughing) And then of course I want to express my gratitude to Bhante. I've been thinking about this, 'cause if he just made one different choice, none of this would have happened. Just one different choice, so it's worth letting that land. Whoa, an amazingness of how all this has come to be. So I said a little bit before we did the exercise about somatics, so I'm going to be coming back to that in a little bit. And maybe I'll just say one more thing about that, which is that, so this word, I'm just pausing, 'cause it can, it's interesting, it's a word that can bring up a lot for people. So the body is where trauma is experienced. So I'm going to bring in that word trauma. We can just sort of appreciate that it's a big word and it can hold a lot. So in the somatic process that I'm training in, there's a, it's based on the science of how the nervous system works and the fact that we are basically hardwired for survival. So safety is so important that we actually have a whole part of our brain that's just about keeping us safe. So the body is both where trauma is experienced and also where the effects of trauma get sort of held and they end up shaping us. So the connection I've made there with Dharma is the idea of sanskaris and how we're shaped by our conditioning. So of course that is, where else could that be happening but in the body and the mind as an inextricable part of the body. So the body is where trauma is experienced and where healing and transformation happen. So first noble truth, there is suffering, third noble truth, there is liberation. Both things happening to and in the body. So I'm, as you can tell, I'm very interested in this and I'm also interested in the potential of this way of working with the body and particularly with trauma and how it's held in the body and how we can use the wisdom of the body to also heal from trauma and transform for how we meet this moment as a global community. So there are explicit social justice implications of this way of working that I'm not gonna say very much more about, but I just wanted to name that because it's very much part of what I'm interested in and how in my own sort of imagination, all of this is sort of part of my own personal expression of the Bodhisattva ideal. So it's never just about me and my trauma and my healing. It's always in the service of the collective and collective healing and transformation. So in this talk, I'll be linking somatics to our collective going for refuge and also to Bodhisattva emphasis on the true individual, the positive group and the spiritual community. And then over the weekend, what we'll be inviting is for you to join us in an embodied and relational approach to healing and transformation. So embodied and relational, again, here and there and ultimately, as we know, not separate. So I'm just gonna say a few things about the true individual, the positive group and the spiritual community, basically just to remind us. It might have been a while since we've gone back over this material. For some of us, you might be going, yeah, I know that. That's alive in me right now. And it is helpful, isn't it, to just keep going back over things. So the true individual, so Bhante defined this as synonymous with someone who has loosened and fundamentally broken through the first three of the 10 fetters. So once that has happened, the true individual is one who has full and complete confidence in their own capacity to grow and change and the Dharma as the path by which that growth and change can happen. So we have confidence in our capacity to change, grow in a positive direction through practice. A true individual is someone who does not mistake the methods on the path. What Bhante called ethical rules and religious observances as ends in themselves. So you could say a true individual is in right relationship with everything that we're doing. All the practices, the rituals, the precepts as means. Not as ends in themselves. And finally, the big one. The true individual no longer relates to themselves as fixed and unchanging. So they've seen through the false view of a fixed self. So in her talk on insight at the 2014 International Order Convention, I can't believe this talk was in 2014. I went to look it up and I was like, oh my God, that was 10 years ago. It felt like it was yesterday. It's worth going back to. I think it's called wow, exclamation point. I think that's literally the title of the talk. It's very Viveka. So she just pulled together different ways of thinking about our poetic descriptions of the true individual. So one who has entered the stream of the Dharma. The arising of the Dharma eye. I love that one. It always makes me think of white Tara's third eye. The arising of the Dharma eye. The irreversibility. That's a good reminder, isn't it? You can't get pulled back. Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. So it's irreversible. Enlightenment is assured apparently in seven or less lifetimes and Bante's talk on this, he emphasizes the or less and seven or less lifetimes. The arising of the Bodhi Chitta, the will to enlightenment, an evolution of consciousness. And I love this one. The development of a mind that can know just as much as what is known. So the development of a mind that can know just as much as what is known. So a mind that can know that it's waking up and what is known as liberation. All loosening. So Viveka said, "There is no denying what one has seen and you have to live in alignment with that. It becomes who you become and results in a natural heedfulness." It's quite surprising end to the quote that it results in a natural heedfulness that you can't unsee what you've seen and becomes who you are. So she goes on to draw out the four qualities of a stream entrant. So the first three are unshakable faith in the three jewels, which makes sense, doesn't it? 'Cause we've eradicated doubt at this stage. She says, "Shrada as a longing for what's possible, born of experience of knowing that this path and goal is attainable." So it's a deep embodied knowing that it's possible. And the fourth quality is a firm foundation in ethics. So this relates back to the heedfulness. So it's not just something's been seen and known, but the implication is that we become much more deeply sensitive to our effect in the world. And she links this firm foundation in ethics to a maturation of right view or perfect vision. So seeing things as they really are and waking up to interconnectivity, not as simply an intellectual idea, but an embodied knowing. So we have a felt sense of our impact, of the effect of our thoughts, words, and deeds. So another quote from Boveka, "This knowing is not just our capacity for clarity, is it is an embodiment of energy, a force and a deepening of our emotional capacity." So it's like the emotional equivalent. Okay, so that's good. So that's where we're all headed. And Bante said, "This is totally attainable for any practitioner that takes their Dharma practice seriously. And I'm just gonna assume that's all of us." And everyone in the order is taking their practice seriously. All right, so let's move on to the positive group. So in what is the Sangha, Bante defines the positive group as? A group of people interested in growing and developing and supporting each other to do the same. So people who are explicitly wanting to grow and develop, that's positive group. But that's not the only thing that defines positive group 'cause that could be any group growing and developing in lots of different ways, right? So also, the positive group relates to each other on the basis of friendliness, of love and not of power. So we do not relate to each other from a place of power, but from love. And we relate to each other on the basis of the Bodhi Chitta. So trusting in our fundamental and inherent desire or will to be free from suffering for ourselves and others. So that relating to each other based on our potential, you could say, it's another way of saying that. And then this is worth reflecting on the true individuals emerge out of positive group. So that's interesting, isn't it? So the positive group is one of the conditioning factors that results in true individuals emerging. So since the positive group is the context from which true individuals emerge, we could ask ourselves, this is a very long question with many words, so hang with me. How do we support one another in loosening a fixed sense of self, discovering and developing an authentic, appropriate, and creative way of practicing? That's specific to our unique conditioning. So Bhante emphasized that the path is not out there, it's in here and that we each have to find our own way because we're all conditioned differently. So we have the principles set a universal and then we have each of our unique unfoldings. So how do we support one another in loosening a fixed sense of self and also finding ways appropriate and authentic to us? And how do we support one another to deepen our confidence that our way of practicing has merit? Is of value to ourselves and others? So even though we each have our own unique way, it's actually valuable when each of us practices in our own unique way and to deepen our trust and confidence in that. That inherently benefits others. And how do we support a maturation of our vision for liberation for ourselves and others? So a big long question, I'll put it on the notice board and you can chew over it. I do get feedback a lot that I need to cut things back, but I just love that question for all of its many words. Okay, I'm gonna skip a bit here. Okay, so on to spiritual community. So spiritual community. So here we have this lovely often quoted phrase, a free association. So a free association of true individuals and beyond, true individuals and beyond who are going for refuge and supporting members of the positive group to do the same. So there's the connection. Supporting members of the positive group to do the same. The spiritual community forms what Bontay calls the nucleus of a new society and is the context from which Buddhas emerge. So just as true individuals emerge from the positive group, so do Buddhas emerge from the spiritual community. And Bontay was very specific in emphasizing that the spiritual community may or may not be in relationship with each other. But what unites them, he says that they share above space and beyond time the same spiritual experiences and attainments. So when one joins, which is a holy, inadequate word, the spiritual community, one joins the Ariasanga of all of space and time. It's not fantastic. And what unites is that the knowing, what is known and a mind that knows as much as what is known to its complete articulation. So the order is a group of people. So this is us, here we are. Who come together to support one another and others in the process of becoming true individuals and joining the spiritual community. That's what we're doing. Or that's one description among, countless of what we're doing. So a group of people who have come together to support one another and others in the process of becoming true individuals and ultimately joining the spiritual community. So, somatic going for refuge. Now, just to be clear, I'm not adding to (laughs) Von Tae's list of the different levels of going for refuge. This is more needling through of something. Yeah, so maybe it's how we do all that, but through the lens of embodiment. So Von Tae also correlated to individuality to real going for refuge. So again, reminding us of the levels. So we have slightly problematic language of cultural going for refuge. And then we've got provisional going for refuge. We've got effective going for refuge. Real going for refuge, which Von Tae makes synonymous with true individuality and cosmic universal going for refuge. So those are the five levels that Von Tae has given us. So I'm gonna be sharing a few reflections that I have about what the Buddha meant when he spoke of the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha as refuges, focusing specifically on this word refuge and how I connect this to our individual and collective practice. So just bear with me 'cause it's gonna feel like we're taking a very long kind of turning, but we're gonna come back. So I'm just gonna take us on a little road trip. So according to the American Sematics practitioner, her name is Stacey Haynes. According to Stacey, we all have three basic needs. And those three fundamental basic needs are for safety, for dignity and for belonging, safety, dignity and belonging. So in my experience, my own, and also friends and people I've supported along the way, many of us come to practice looking for those three basic needs to be met. So for many of us, these needs are part of what bring us to the Sangha, bring us to practice. And really fundamentally, all three of them are aspects of the same, most basic need, which is the need for safety. So when a lot of things went on, a lot of fireworks went off in my head when I first heard this list because of my practice. So firstly, I thought about the three basic fears. And I just have to say I went on the internet to find where these three basic fears are canonically found and I couldn't find that place. So if you know or if you can find it, well, let me know. So our three basic fears are the fear of insecurity, the fear of unworthiness and the fear of loneliness. And I can say personally, when I first came along at the turn of the century, I like to say. I was definitely struggling with all three of these fears in my own life and trying to find my way back to a sense of okayness in myself and deeper connection with others. So there was something about wanting to feel okay with myself and be more deeply connected with others. And I sort of had an intuition that those two things were connected somehow, but I couldn't tell you how. So in the same way that the clay shop are a poison of delusion of separateness, which is a fundamental root root poison, delusion of separateness, props up the clashes of clinging and aversion. So the clashes of clinging and aversion arise out of the root root poison of this delusion of separateness. So a true felt sense of safety is predicated on the extent to which our needs for dignity and belonging are met. Now, obviously not completely because we have some basic safety needs, right? Like shelter and food and things, but beyond that sort of emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual safety is predicated on the extent to which we feel that our needs for dignity and belonging are also met. So this makes safety very fundamental. And until fully awake, we will to some extent look outside of ourselves for these needs to be met. Now I say that with a big question mark over it 'cause I'm not fully awake 'cause I can't really claim that. It's more of a theory. So maybe when we're fully awake or until we're fully awake, we're looking for those needs to be met outside of ourselves. We look outside for safety, dignity and belonging to be met as needs. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's worth saying, developmentally for a child to look outside of themselves for these needs to be met is their survival is based on us. They wouldn't survive without that. So of course, it's part of being in this human body and human predicament one could say that we look outside of ourselves for these needs to be met. I love the story of the burning house with the kids and the guy with the toys. I don't know, I didn't have time to go back and look at it but it's something like kids are in the house, it's burning, you got to get them out. So you trick them with toys. Okay. So just like the story of the children in the burning house, the metaphor is we are in grave danger. We are in grave danger and we don't even know it. So you could say our provisional going for refuge is what gets us out of the house. It gives us a sense of directionality towards something that sort of appears to look like it's going to give us security and safety. So provisional going for refuge gives us directionality away from the danger of delusion and towards the only true safety there is in this world. The only true safety there is in this world, the dharma, refuge, the dharma and the Buddha and the Sangha as the living embodiment of that refuge. So ultimately, the three refuges are one and the same. The dharma and the Buddha and the Sangha as a living embodiment that we can look to for inspiration, support, guidance. So we provisionally seek safety in the Buddha, dharma and Sangha until we establish a rather uncover or discover an unbreakable bond or connection with them. So we provisionally go for refuge to the three jewels until we actually realize there's an unbreakable bond here. So we don't, it's like we're going towards something that was always there, but we have to do that somehow. That has to be part of the process. So this is the core of the whole talk really is I wanna draw out a connection between our three most fundamental needs and the three jewels. So firstly, our need for dignity is ultimately met through going for refuge to the Buddha jewel where we connect with our own inherent worth, stainless purity and the quality of what purity stainlessness, whatever words work for you, luminosity, boundarylessness, clarity, all the good things that we deeply long for, as fundamentally who and what we truly are. So our need for dignity is met through going for refuge to the Buddha jewel and discovering that unbroken connection with who and what we truly are. Our need for safety is met by going for refuge to the Dharma jewel so often described as the raft that carries us safely from the shore of suffering to the shore of liberation. So the Dharma jewel meets our need for safety and finally our need for belonging, not surprisingly, is met going for refuge to the Sangha jewel. So we go for a refuge to all of those who have achieved some degree of awakening as sources of inspiration and guidance. And I'll just add this 'cause we are talking around somatics. It can be deeply affirming to know that they too awakened in a human body with the same six senses. So the Buddha didn't have some extra seven cents that meant that he could wake up. That's it, it was in a body just like ours. As the Buddha was born, we are born as let the Buddha overcame, we too can overcome. So that's very affirming, isn't it? So just as it's not perceptions that bind us to suffering but the clinging to them as me or mine, so it isn't safety that we go for a refuge to. But our fundamental connection to the means to safety, which is the Dharma, the fundamental connection to the means to safety, which is the Dharma, what gets us to, oh, I'm actually okay. No matter what's happening, I can be okay. So I have a theory, it might be, I don't think it's controversial, but it could be. Sometimes I say things that I don't think are controversial and find out later that they are, to my surprise. So Sarana, Sarana, refuge. So this is my theory. I think the Buddha wasn't talking metaphorically when he used the language of refuge. I think he literally meant true and complete, fully embodied felt sense of safety, is the awakened state. So I think he meant we literally awaken to a state that feels fully safe all the time, an embodied experience of true and complete safety where nothing can knock us out of our window of tolerance for what we are able to be with. So window of tolerance is a somatic term for basically how much we can tolerate. So some people who have had a lot of trauma in their life will have a very narrow window of tolerance if they haven't been given the right supports and resources to heal from their trauma. So I have this vision of the Buddha as we all have, and given different conditions, our window of tolerance may expand or decrease. And the work that I'm doing with clients in the somatic work that I do is helping them to slowly expand their window of tolerance, build their resilience for discomfort, because we know we're just always gonna be discomfort. So we can't get rid of that, but we can build the resilience and expand the window. So I think what happened to the Buddha and all those who've awakened is they basically blew their window of tolerance wide open, like boom, it's just like no boundaries. Anything can happen. And they're fine, like I'm here, it's okay. Old age sickness and death, I got this, right? So big wide open window of tolerance. So one could say that when completely awake, we no longer experience the needs for safety, dignity and belonging as needs. So instead, maybe they are experienced as fulfilled promises, fulfilled promises. No matter what is happening, we are always completely safe, totally dignified and fully belong. We literally become the three repuges embodied. We become a Buddha, we fully embody alignment with reality, the Dharma, and we become fully awakened members of the Arya Sangha. Isn't that sound good? It sounds so good to me. Okay, so this is where we come to the theme, I am because we are, in case you're wondering when we were gonna get to that. So, yeah, so we know that it's nearly impossible to wake up on our own, particularly without the support of those further along the path and those treading it with us. So we know we need help, we need each other. And we also know at least intellectually that we're fundamentally interconnected. And that the energy produced by our delusion, as well as the energy produced by our awakening, so both energies have an effect in the world, they can't not. So this is worth reflecting on, isn't it? Until awake, everything we do is either creating more suffering or liberating us from it. So there's no sort of neutral on the gear shift and that both the extent to which we are deluded and the extent to which we are awake, energetically has an effect. So we affect each other. So I'm gonna just take things out a little bit more like cosmically and say the obvious, state the obvious, which also every time I think it, even though it's so obvious, I'm like, wow, it's amazing. So we exist because others have existed before us. We exist because others have existed before us. And we awaken because others have awakened before us. We also suffer because others have suffered before us and we continue to suffer as a result of our own delusion and that of others. So it's worth taking this on board, that we have a deep and profound effect on one another and the extent to which we are not yet free, so we keep one another bound and the world. So this is what I'm probably, you're gonna ask me what I'm most concerned with in terms of my own practice of when I'm trying to help other people do, is to take really, really seriously how particularly meditation, but not only meditation, can support us to get karma working in the right direction. Yeah, so get that energy moving towards the loosening and the breaking of the feathers, towards the getting free liberation. So how we meet and come into a more creative relationship with what you could say is our karmic inheritance, our karmic inheritance, all of what we've inherited, be it ancestrally or through past lives or just what we did last week, or the thought I had this morning, the inheritance meaning what's showing up right now when I sit down to look and discover what's here. So, and the implication of that in terms of how we relate to others, so another way of saying that is how we, the more creatively we can learn to relate to ourselves and our own delusion and awakening has a direct impact and effect on how we can also meet that in others. So the relational in terms of how I'm being with me, effects on being with others, and how I'm being with others, effects on being with me. So an example of this, so for example, there are, it used to be three, but now it's four, four sort of my, I don't know, fundamental emotions. I don't know how else to describe them. Four emotions that are like, it's just, it's human. It's human emotions, emotions that we can't have, that we can't not have on the base of being human. Fear, anger, grief, shame, fear, anger, grief, shame. They come, they come. There's actually, again, I'm gonna say something that you can argue with me about, and maybe controversial. I don't think there's anything wrong with any of this, any of these four things. In their initial raw arising, fear, anger, grief, shame, they come, those energies come. But what we do with them, how we relate to them, that's where the claysha is. That's where we get into trouble, you could say. So if we can't fully meet those emotions in ourselves, and they're strong, I get it, they're strong, they can be very hard to be with, that's the work, is to learn to meet these emotions in ourselves and transform them in the clear light of awareness. If we can't do that, how are we gonna do that with others? How do we, if it's not happening here, it can't really, truly happen out there. So it's much harder to hold space for other people when they're feeling these emotions, when we haven't learned to hold that space in ourselves. So we work on our own minds, mind, body. We work on our own, what's here, what's arising in any moment, in order to be able to be more fully available for collective healing and transformation. So to step more fully into the collective project of waking up, which is always a collective project, well, and except in the case of Jacobutas, which I don't know any. So I hope that makes sense. It's one of those things that feels, every time I say it and I think it, it feels quite obvious and in practice, it's very, very hard to do. I think it's what we're always doing really, what we're trying to do. Okay, so good, so that's pretty much, so I'm just gonna say a little bit now about the approach, this embodied and relational approach. So over the weekend, we're inviting this for you to join us in this way of working, a way of practicing that's about deep listening to our own bodies and each other. And there's a few different pieces to this. So the first, which we'll be doing this afternoon, is called daring to dream, daring to dream. So this is daring to dream of liberation or awakening for ourselves, others and the world, daring to dream, or in Bante's language, developing perfect vision. So using the imagination to plant the seed of awakening in ourselves, exploring on a felt sense how that feels, the wisdom that's there, and also getting curious about the edges we come up against in the process. So we'll be inviting you to actually imagine what being awake might look like, might be like, and then what happens when we try and do that? Like something, I don't know about you, but for me, something kind of short circuits sometimes, or doubt comes, or I can't quite see it, or a part of me that doesn't wanna go there. You know, there could be so much that comes up. So daring to dream, but not just for ourselves, for others and for the world. What is a world of fully awakened Buddhas? What would that be like? This is like pure land, envisioning pure lands, yeah. So daring to dream. This is an important one. So becoming more and more familiar with a felt sense of safety, dignity, and belonging in the body, and getting curious about what conditions that felt sense. So just like how Sanghidevi was talking about the beginnings of pretty in the body during that initial exercise, and we know from the teachings that Deanna, although conditioned, is gives us a flavor of what awakening might be like. The awakening factors are mirrored in the Deanna factors, advice versa. So just like how the Deanna's can give us a felt sense of what freedom might be like, I'm suggesting that if we could get curious about what safety, dignity, and belonging actually feels like in the body, we can learn to look out for that, and to set up conditions for that more and more, for ourselves and others. - Is that a short hand tied up for that one? - Yeah, that's a good question. I don't have one yet, but maybe one will emerge. That's very good, thank you for that. And the reason for this is because of what I said earlier about maybe the Buddha just like always felt safe. So if that's the case, then maybe we could get curious about what safety feels like right now. So what would it be like for me to be having that feeling when this really challenging thing is happening? Okay, and then this is a really important one. So the shorthand for this one might be well, it's not very short, but I'm not very good at shorthand. But curious about this term, I'm using karmic inheritance. So getting to know and understand how we are conditioned. So this is like Corbante, isn't it? And also like the selves that are coming in, the selves that show up, the doubting parts, the excited parts, the ambivalent parts, the angry parts, the grieving parts, the sad parts, the little parts, the big parts, so all these different parts. And getting curious particularly about how our social conditioning affects that. Our people, the people we come from, the people we choose, the people we end up with, the people we'd like to be, the people we don't want to be. That all that is very, very interesting and conditioned so much of who and what we think we are, what is it that we think we're doing, how we relate to what's happening, what we think is possible. - Not because who do you think you are? - Who do you think you are? And what do you think you're doing? Yes, who do you think you are is a good one actually? Yeah. And again, this is Corbante, just working to create conditions for safety, dignity and belonging for ourselves and each other in a way that could be another way of describing the entire true retina project. So here I'm just gonna name a razor's edge. So there's a razor's edge in this thing about creating conditions for safety, dignity and belonging because sometimes what can happen is we think, well, people just need to learn how to take care of themselves because that's their karma. And that's what we're all doing. We're just all learning how to take care of ourselves. So that doesn't really work, does it? 'Cause we need to feel safe. We need to feel like this is a place where I can even begin to do the work of taking care of myself. So there's a big both end here where we're both supporting one another to use the language, expand the window of tolerance, grow and develop in ways unique to us that lead ultimately to liberation. So supporting each other do that. But also, so that's like looking at the level of like the individual body and what the individual karmic inheritance is while also explicitly and intentionally creating conditions that support that because we know it's hard so that the onus isn't placed entirely on the individual to carry the weight of the collective karma. So as soon as we've come, another way you can say that as soon as we come together collectively, collective karma will be in the room, will be in the space. And to put the onus on the individual to have to deal with all of that without sort of explicitly creating conditions is can put people outside of their window of tolerance and then they leave and they don't come back. So I know I'm speaking theoretically right now, but I could tell a lot of stories about this, people that I've seen come and go from specifically truth out in the spaces because they didn't feel that it was held in a safe enough way for them to do their individual work. So this is a very, very important point, particularly in the area of inclusivity. All right, I've got two more points and I'm gonna stop and talk about what's next. Well, no, we'll get questions actually 'cause it'd be good to just call a few questions. So this is really, really important. In somatics, this is called resourcing. So knowing, first of all, discovering your resources and then cultivating them. Resources meaning things that support a sense of safety, dignity and belonging in the body. And bring a sense of all of the good things, everything we want and long for. Joy, ease, calm, tranquility. Energy, clarity. So anything that supports, you could say the awakening factors, cultivating that in our bodies and with each other to support a growing sense of safety and particularly to support a growing sense of deepening capacity to be with what's difficult. So we don't resource just for the resourcing. That would be hedonistic. We do it out of our intention to then be able to turn towards more difficult aspects of our experience. The resourcing allows that to happen. The more safe in our ease we feel, the more than we have an expandable no tolerance to be with what's difficult. Okay, and finally, I already said this thing about parts. I've found this really helpful. Viveka's been really important in this for me. So there's something about learning to relate to the more difficult parts. As if they have some integrity to them, they have something important to tell us, to teach us that they're asking of us. And just going back to my somatics training, and what I've learned from working with literally hundreds of practitioners, often these parts are young, very young, sometimes pre-verbal, even, pre-memory formation. And the way they're acting now is born out of those fundamental needs for safety dignity, belonging having not been met in some way in our early lives, in our early conditioning. So there's an integrity of these parts. They've been keeping us safe for a long time, they've been protecting us. And we can't just slap the impermanence label on them and tell them to go away, that we have to find a more creative way. So, yeah, so working creatively. And I love this from Viveka. It's such a playful approach. She says, oh, if you can get into dialogue with these parts and really learn to relate to them more creatively, then you can update their job description. It's like, thank you for keeping me safe for so long. Why don't you now come and make the shrine? So you give them something to do so they don't feel left out. It sort of helps them to come on board with the waking up progress or programmer plan or whatever, you want to call your process. This, in a way, you could, another way you could frame all of what I'm sharing today is a way to practice that safeguards against spiritual bypassing. It's, and again, I really want to encourage us not to get into dualistic thinking around right or wrong ways or, but it's like, of course, we're going to hear the teachings and the luxuries and then wanna, I can't, this is from Viveka, write impermanence on a post and slap it onto everything. 'Cause that's a strategy that can get us some way, actually, to just, okay, everything's just impermanent. Not gonna deal with that, it's impermanate, not gonna deal with that, it's gonna come back to breath. Generate meta, you know, all that has value. And at some point, we've got to deal with all all of what's here. So to just say, oh, well, that psychological misses the critical point that it's not that it's psychological, it's a problem, it's how we relate to the psychological that can be problematic in terms of getting in the way of actually learning to transcend, which is ultimately what we're doing. But we can't transcend without actually knowing. I think it was Talopa, or Narap, I always get them confused, said, you know, you can't, in order to know that a certain person exists, first you must know the absent person. Likewise, in order to know that the self doesn't exist, first you must know the self that is here, (laughs) right? So it's like we have to go through the uncondition, the condition to come out the other end of the uncondition. That's why Tara's wisdom, she sees right through, she doesn't go around us to see our fundamental nature, she sees it right through everything that we're doing, that's in the way of it. Yeah, so, it's a fantastic question, yeah. And it's totally, it's unavoidable spiritual bypassing, I think we all do it, it's part of the process of seeing, oh, actually I tried that strategy and it didn't ultimately work. Maybe I got a bit calmer as a result of it, but actually, now I need to see through it completely. See, that it's not actually me. Yeah, so we've gotta take part of those, take care of those parts that find it so hard and that's where the resourcing comes in. The kinds of emotions that we tend to not wanna feel avoid and out of our karmic inheritance, develop strategies out of which the glaciers emerge. So for example, anger, anger's got a lot of integrity to it, it tells me so many things about what's not right, what's not fair, what shouldn't be happening. And in like less than a nanosecond, it's hatred. It just because of all of the conditioning and particularly on long retreat, I've seen that proliferation very clearly and I've been able to make a distinction like between the raw energy of anger and just letting it be here and letting myself feel it and letting it burn itself through me and the parts of me that wanna co-opt it and do something with it, make something about it, separate out myself from others based on it. So it's very, very important this because most of us suppress anger, some of us like to act it out. Well, I shouldn't say like to act it out, but have a strong proclivity towards acting it out and we'll get some some impermanent, not lasting relief from that and ultimately there's a cost that we know. So it's very, very important because they're gonna keep coming and they've got something to tell us and if we can learn to transform that energy, then we get viria, which is like so needed in this world. So another way you could put, just now let's just call Pham Pham Osama because his energy is very much this is his way of working. Another way of thinking about it is you could think these energies in their raw form are just part of what's, what it means to be human and when we do, what I was just describing, this kind of indulgence or suppression, they remain locked in samsara and that energy is not available for awakening. So what we want to do is unlock that energy and reapply it to the waking up process and then it all just becomes really exciting. Like, oh yeah, anger, bring it on. I'm gonna let that flow through me. I'm not gonna do the egoic thing and oh yeah, now there's all this energy and let's put that, like and there's clarity. That's what's on the other side of anger is clarity. There's a lot of clarity. So yeah, that's just me getting into a whole lot like very passionate stuff, but yeah, it's worth naming that. So thank you. And there's all sorts of other emotions that of course also make us human that aren't in that list 'cause they're not necessarily difficult. Although sometimes they also can be difficult to be with. Like happiness and gratitude can also be difficult to be with depending on your conditioning. - We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. (upbeat music) (gentle music)
