Peace exists on the other side of your resistance.

The noise, talking, and eating of the holidays, A haze cast over the clearer vision I had developed with my practice.

Awareness of wholeness seems to slip away little by little until I am binge eating all those sweets I swore I didn't want and rubbing my Magic the Gathering headache.

How come the lived experience of peace is so easy to forget and the mechanical habits so enticing?

Getting ready to head back to work after this long holiday break, I decided to get back into my regular sitting practice. Sitting down into my Zazen posture, it took only minutes until my awareness touched the confusion and irritation in my body.

Becoming aware, I saw how the confusion in my body moved to churn thoughts in my head and this aversion to what was happening, resistance to what already was.

The thoughts sounded like this:

"Why did you eat so much sugar? You're lazy. Why didn't you offer to help wash the dishes? You really feel like shit now, don't you? What is wrong with you?"

Seeing the energy and thoughts clearly, I smiled. I saw my mind flicker as if to say, "Well, if you don't resist this, then what?"

As I let go of that thought, instant peace came over me. The "negative feelings" didn't change, but my awareness reclaimed its seat in freedom. I let go of the desire for this moment to be anything but what it was.

Many teachers talk about this concept of naming what is happening in our bodies and minds. Here is an excerpt from an article on the website growmindfulness.com

"In his book, Mindsight, Dan Siegel argues that we "Name It to Tame It" – in other words, by naming our feelings, we are better able to control them or, at least, lessen their impact...

To say "I feel angry" is a very different statement, both in content and impact, then the words "I am angry". The latter tends to define us as angry people, whereas the former helps us to recognize that we are not our feelings – we are a lot more than what we feel. Feelings come and go in nature and intensity – our essence remains. Naming our emotions in a gentle, non-judgmental way affirms our self-worth and opens up the opportunity to master our feelings."

- growmindfulness.com

I like what was said here. However, I don't like the statement, "master our feelings," as this continues the legacy of war between our thoughts and how we want things to be.

As we become truly aware of what is happening in our bodies and minds and hold that truth in open awareness, there will be no need to "Master our feelings." Once we encounter the truth in and around our complex emotions, that reality fundamentally changes the challenging emotion itself.

Yes, better controlling our emotions is an admirable skill and is undoubtedly a by-product of Zazen. However, we don't sit in Zazen to change anything.

Speaking of the distraction of the holidays, I like the idea of embracing distraction. I and many others have tapped purposefully on their phone screen, deleting Instagram and Facebook, writing a very heartfelt post to my friends explaining my decision to leave social media alone. All this to find myself redownloading the apps or sneaking a peek of Facebook through the browser.

Embracing distraction as a lay practitioner may be the only way to go. It is a path of nonresistance. Can we find the middle path with all of this technology?

If you've found the path and been able to walk it, please let me know. I have yet to be able to walk it.

The only skillful way to reclaim my attention and original Mind is through a regular sitting practice. After all of the holiday noise, food, and waves of experiences, it is easy to get pulled back into the flow and pushed around by things. If we have a regular sitting practice, we build our reconnection to original Mind into our schedules.

We remove the stumbling block of missed Zazen practice by ensuring our reconnection to the Dharma through regular, scheduled training.

Just like when we were kids, our parents repeatedly reminded us to brush our teeth until the habit was clearly formed, every morning and night. We must be our own good parents and develop the habit of Zazen. We brush our teeth to avoid cavities and decay. We sit Zazen to reconnect us with our Original Mind.

Why do we resist? We resist out of our illusion of control. We believe that by fighting something, we can avoid it or change it. However, the reality is that what we resist persists.

My wife brought up to me over the holidays her frustration with a comment someone close to her made; when she told them about her struggles with PMDD, they said, "Well, you just have to choose to not take it personally." This really frustrated her, as I assume it would have for most people.

I wonder if they have some different machinery than me? Maybe some people really can control their thoughts and emotions with precision like that. I, however, cannot.

The only thing that has led to any peace for me is fully becoming aware in those moments when I feel attacked, offended, or hurt. I cannot turn these emotions or thoughts off, but I have trained my awareness system to kick on faster and faster when these emotional bumps come along.

The more I become aware of and see these emotions and thoughts for what they are, they change, and my sense of self grows larger.

For instance, instead of being solely the experience of being offended by a side comment someone made, I am now simultaneously both offended by a comment someone made and aware of swinging around an unimaginably hot ball of gas whirling ever out into the blackness of space. It is the realized concept of "This Too."

Soaking our attention in the stillness of Zazen allows our "Orignal Mind" to be uncovered.

I have mentioned this term original mind a couple of times. Here is an excerpt from one of Shodo Harada Rōshis writings, titled, Original Mind.

He writes:

"In Buddhism, it's often said that humans' Original Mind, that Mind we have at birth, is like a clear mirror, pure and uncluttered, without shape, form, or color, with nothing in it whatsoever.

If something comes before it, the mirror reflects it precisely, but the mirror itself gives birth to nothing. If what has been reflected leaves, its image disappears, but the mirror itself loses nothing. Within the mirror, there is no birth, no death. No matter how dirty a thing that is reflected might be, the mirror doesn't get dirty, nor does it become beautiful because something beautiful is reflected in it.

Just because additional things are reflected, that doesn't mean anything increases in the mirror itself, nor does anything ever decrease when fewer objects are reflected. A mirror is without increase or decrease.

Humans' pure Original Nature is just this. Without shape, form, or color; without birth and death; not clean or dirty; not increasing or decreasing; not male or female; not young, not old; not intelligent, not stupid; not rich, not poor. There are no words, no explanation possible, no description that will apply here, only a pure mirror-like base. This is humans' true quality; this is an actual experience. From our Zazen (sitting meditation), cut all nen (mind-instants), dig down completely to the source of those nen—dig, dig, dig until we reach the place where the human character has been totally cleared. When the source point is reached, this state of Mind can be touched."

By Shodo Harada Rōshis

"No matter how dirty a thing that is reflected might be, the mirror doesn't get dirty, nor does it become beautiful because something beautiful is reflected in it."

We resist what appears in the mirror out of a desire to deny the thing being reflected. We aren't fully aware of our true identity as the mirror yet and mistake ourselves as the reflected object.

As mentioned by Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now, a lot of our identity is wrapped up in these negative parts of ourselves.

Even though a particular aspect of our thinking and belief system causes us much pain and trouble in our lives, we may still cling to it. Why is this?

It comes from the strength of the ego. The part of us that fears annihilation, desperately grasping for something solid. A deep well of fear can open up in someone as they start to look behind the curtain of their most well-orchestrated negative concepts of reality.

So then, resistance can manifest in multiple forms. One is our avoidance of facing and feeling something. Another is our inability to let a specific aspect of our beliefs dissolve, negative as they may be.

We fear stepping into beginners' Mind because of our fear of annihilation. We want so badly to control our version, our narrative of reality, that we will create multitudes of reasons why this practice is stupid, how it's not working, or downright unsafe!

We fear letting go because we haven't experienced the freedom of our original Mind yet, the peace of letting go.

One of the cliches worth mentioning here is Gandhi's quote, "There is no path to peace. Peace is the path." When I say, "Peace exists on the other side of your resistance." I don't mean that you will have peace once you do this or that other thing. I mean that peace is available to you now, but you must stop resisting, easier said than done, right? This is where Zazen comes in.

When we practice Zazen, we cultivate the ability to hold our experiences in equanimity or open awareness. Zazen practice trains our minds to hold experiences from the witnessing perspective. That's why many teachers have students start with watching their breath. There isn't much to judge about our breath, good or bad. It just is. Over time we develop this ability to witness, and we can take this attention to other aspects of our experience. Now we can see our sadness, loneliness, anger, or physical pain with equanimity, with the open awareness we have cultivated.

I first learned about the concept of Witnessing Presence while reading Eckhart Tolles The Power of Now. In it, he says:

"The good news is that you can free yourself from your Mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.

When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the Mind.

So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence — your deeper self — behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the Mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking." - Eckhart Tolle.

Repetitive thoughts followed by cycles of guilt haunted me as I read the power of now for the first time 12 years ago. I had never heard of "mindfulness" or practiced mediation before. Still, as I sat there on my parent's patio by the river, I remember this odd practice of continuously bringing my attention back to the sound of the river rushing by beneath me.

I felt wholly relieved to read that I was not my thoughts and that there was an ancient practice available for slowing the Mind and moving through suffering. My Mind was a whirlwind of pain and medications were no longer an option.

I remember Eckhart urging me from the pages to turn towards my pain, to watch the repetitive thoughts and painful cycles with the eyes of the witness (nonjudgmental presence.) To be honest, it didn't make a lot of sense, but I pursued the instructions with such vigor because of the pain I was in.

Little breakthroughs began to happen. I remember looking up at the blue sky with little whisps of clouds stretching out behind a giant pine tree and feeling connected to the presence and beauty of that moment. My worrying Mind was paused for that instant.

So far, after 12 years of off-and-on practice, I can say this. Something is happening to how I meet my life.

When worry, grief, anger, or confusion set in, a new dimension is available to me. A spaciousness in and around the troubling emotions. Paraphrasing a quote, I read, "It feels that I have moved from a cramped apartment into an airplane hanger. I still have all of the same stuff, but now there is a whole lot more room!"

I enjoyed making this one and sharing it with you. I am experimenting with writing out my episodes again.

Thinking on my biggest struggle with this podcast, it is consistency. I want to provide you with a consistent release schedule, but I worry it will stretch the content too thin. I will experiment on it! What did you think?

I hope you have a wonderful week! Until next time.

Matt

Source: https://growmindfulness.com/naming-your-feelings-to-tame-them/

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-imperfect-buddhist/donations