Day 2: Fixation & Resilience

So, let's begin this class with practice itself. I invite you to recall that your position is important, but not crucially important. You don't have to assume a particular position. One of the things that's important we didn't mention last time actually about position is that you do want it to be fairly comfortable, and comfortable in a way that doesn't mean you fall asleep. So, again, it's both relaxed and alert.

In this style of practice in particular, we talk about practicing in many sessions for a short time, or in Tibetan what we say, Tun Tun Trang Mang. So the kind of practice that I'm suggesting you try is a practice that you can do repeatedly, and even over the course of, let's say, a 20-minute session, or even a 30 or 40 or 50-minute session, you can meditate for a little while, and then adjust yourself, move yourself, then meditate a little while, and then adjust and move. So that's actually very useful. You don't have to do a long session at all, but if you want to sit on the cushion for 30 minutes, it's not necessarily the case that that whole time is, remember this term Yamshak, the actual practice. The actual practice can just be some minutes within that.

So you do a few minutes, and then you take a little break, move around, some minutes take a little break, move around. As you'll see, one of the key elements of this style of practice that we'll be exploring more and more is actually the notion of really letting go, and of, in a sense, not trying. And it can be very hard to not try, right? We really want to try. We have been raised to try.

Maybe we live in, as I said, a certain culture of fixation, which is also a culture of, like, getting it done, you've got to do it. So letting go and not doing is not easy. Again, obviously, this is about meditation and not post-meditation. I do not recommend that you let go while you're driving on the 101. This is not a good idea.

Things, non-good things will happen, shall we say. All right. So let's settle, find that position, sense of stability. I'm going to take my glasses off. I just like to do that when I practice.

Some people leave them on, whatever you like. Sometimes it's helpful to imagine that you are just supported by the Earth. You don't really have to imagine that. The Earth supports you, doesn't she? Just Mother Earth simply holds us up.

And there's no effort involved in our part. So we just let Mother Earth hold us, sense of stability in the position, being grounded in the Earth, held by the Earth. If you're in a chair, your feet flat on the floor. Imagine the spine is straight but flexible, a strong back and an open front, as my friend Roshi Joan Halifax likes to say. And again, just bring your attention to the sensations of breathing, perhaps at the abdomen.

We'll just settle like this for a moment. No need to figure anything out. Just let the mind flow on the breath. All right, here's something I'd like you to try now. This is part of what you might call your Phenomenological Laboratory, the laboratory of your own experience as the great neuroscientist Francisco Varela called it.

It's something quite interesting about the way our minds work. I invite you now, if your eyes have been closed, that you open your eyes and just open them and sit there and don't look at anything. Just have your eyes open. Now, has something happened? Have you noticed that your visual system has selected an object?

In other words, you're looking at something. You see what I mean? Even though your instruction was not to look at anything, just relax, your eyes, your mind naturally wants to select an object, something maybe with a high contrast, something that somehow stands out from the background. So try it again. Let's just settle.

Just notice, don't force your eyes to not look and don't force them to look. Just sit there with your eyes open and see what happens with your vision. So quite likely, whether it's your own eyes or whether it's the screen that you're looking at, whether it is some background object in the screen, maybe something else in the environment, your eyes have settled on an object. So this is in the cognitive scientific world and I collaborate a lot with cognitive scientists and I'm kind of in the philosophical philosophy is one of the subfields of cognitive science. So again, in my day job, you could say I suppose I'm a kind of cognitive scientist as well.

And what we speak about is this very basic function that occurs in our experience, which is that it seems that our systems just want to select objects, grab that, it's called object selection, just want to select an object. But this also, this is a very subtle level of this term that we've been using before and Buddhist, from the Buddhist perspective, this is actually a kind of zimpa, a kind of graha in Sanskrit, zimpa in Tibetan, that grasping, right, it's a kind of grasping. Just notice one more time, maybe just let the eyes settle. And they settle on something. So this feature of the system is, well, in the moment, obviously this probably, what you're looking at probably doesn't have any particular meaning to it.

So the system does this, you know, this organism with its cognitive capacities, its amazing cognitive capacities, its capacity for consciousness itself, part of the way that works in our ordinary experience is it just picks out objects. But most of the time, so that's a very low level of this grasping or zimba, but most of the time it's something much more, let's say, goal-oriented, that we are paying attention to things because in a sense they are important to us. So just as an example, if there are a large sound, a very loud sound right now, just like boom, some big sound happened in the environment where you are, you would attend to it. You would look over and say, what is that? Your system would automatically, in a sense, bring your attention over to that sound.

That sound would capture your attention. So there would be a moment of what we call attention capture from that. And why would that happen? Because one of the sort of baseline tasks of your system is to keep this organism alive. Not this one, but that one, right, to keep you alive.

So loud anomalous sounds are a potential danger, and therefore your system says, oh, got to pay attention to that. Whereas there can be many other things in your environment right now that you have no idea they're even there. Maybe there is, I don't know, a particular lamp or the particular color. You have no idea what the color is, or even that there's a lamp over in the corner, or that there's an electrical plug in some other corner. If you needed an electrical plug, you wanted to charge something, maybe you've already noticed it.

Otherwise, look around, is there a plug you haven't noticed? Why didn't you notice it? Why is that not explicitly part of what you've attended to? Because it wasn't relevant to your goals. So there's a very key aspect of this idea of grasping, which is that, first of all, it's kind of built into the system to attend to objects.

But then secondly, the objects that we attend to have to do with, in a sense, what we take as important. And third, that can happen when we don't actually intend for it to do so. In other words, something can capture our attention, because it's somehow important. So one of the key aspects of working with this grasping is, first of all, noticing that this is happening, which is why awareness is so critically important, and we'll be exploring that both this time and next time, and actually throughout the course. What is this kind of awareness, and how do we cultivate it?

That's so important. But another aspect of this is recognizing how it's caught up with what we think is important for us. Why are we paying attention to what we pay attention? You walk down the road, and you see yourself looking at somebody's shoes. Why are you looking at their shoes?

If you notice, you'd have to notice, of course, that you're even doing that. Why is that? Because in some sense, it's important. So why is this important? Why are we paying attention to this?

Why are we noticing somebody's shoes? Why would we look? What's going on? What are they wearing? Because at some level, we think it will accomplish our goals to pay attention to this.

And there's a kind of set of goals that we're always carrying around for ourselves that are not just about survival, not just about avoiding the dangers that a loud sound might indicate, but they're about being happy, about flourishing, about getting what we think will satisfy us, and what we think will get in the way. So we have those sets of goals that are, in a sense, driving our attentional mechanism. And with those goals in place, we are paying attention to different things. So there's this, there's that, there's this, there's that, the thing I want, the thing I don't want. Oh, I need this.

I don't need that. And sometimes even in a way that's almost completely unconscious. So attention in this way is being driven by the kinds of goals that we think, in a sense, are going to lead to a good life and avoid a bad life. Now part of what we want to explore here is, of course, exactly what we think is going to make things better for ourselves. But also part of it is just how, in a sense, does this mechanism operate experientially?

We'll explore, eventually, this whole question of, well, you know, what exactly are the ingredients possibly, at least according to Buddhism, of what kinds of things will make us happy and what kinds of things really do we need to avoid in order to avoid suffering? We will explore that. But for the moment, let's focus on this kind of experiential element just given that that's happening, what's it like for that to happen? What's it like when that happens? So again, let's settle for a second.

See if you can just let your mind settle. This is a style of practice where we just kind of go in and out. So just let the mind settle. Settle on the breath, the sensations of breathing. Probably even by now, your mind has wandered a little bit.

Something has captured your attention. Usually it doesn't take very long. Maybe it was a sensation other than the sensations of breathing. Maybe it was some kind of a thought. So a key element of this, which you might call attention capture, which is what we call in cognitive scientific context, this idea of attention capture, is that there's a way in which that other object is being grasped, is being selected, right?

That's where that grasping is happening. But there are ways we can grasp and attend and have our attention captured, which are more or less intense, if you like, or more or less sticky. And I'm using that term very deliberately because it has to do with this idea of what we call kleshas in Buddhism. A klesha is a negative mental state. It's a state that causes the mind to be disturbed and that eventually produces suffering, either in the short or the long term.

It also establishes habits that sort of reinforce that same kind of stickiness, the same tendency toward getting stuck, if you like. So there's a way in which grasping actually is driven by that tendency to get stuck. Like if we think something's really important, we're going to really focus on it. If it's really critical for our happiness, we might, we believe it's really critical for our happiness. We're going to focus very, very strongly on it, and even anything else that might get in the way, we're just not going to allow it to bother us.

We're just going to stay right on that object. So that's a certain way of attending to an object, of grasping an object, of grasping something, a thought, a sensation, an emotion. Part of what this shows us is that it's not necessarily what we're attending to that's critically important. We will examine that, but maybe it's how we are attending, how we are engaging with our thoughts and emotions, what our relationship is to our thoughts and emotions that's most important. Now let me give you an example, a kind of traditional example.

This is the example of what we call the second arrow from a text actually in the Pali tradition of Theravada Buddhism called the Salata Sutta. And just to make the story really quick, essentially a fellow's walking through the forest and he gets shot by an arrow, and if he's an ordinary person, maybe there's some wayward hunter out there, I don't know, but if he's an ordinary person, then the way he's going to react as the Buddha is telling this story, he says, how will he react? He will react by, in a sense, shooting another arrow at himself. What's this second arrow? It's the second arrow of why did they shoot me?

Why did this happen to me? Why does it hurt so much? When is it going to be over? How do I get rid of this? Why is there so much pain?

So it's the reaction to the pain. My friend John Kabat-Zinn likes to speak of this is the moment where one is heaping suffering on top of pain. So that there's a way, in other words, that we attend to pain. Pain is important. Pain is a signal that we need to do something, right?

If I've got a burn, if there's an arrow sticking in me, yeah, it hurts, and that means that's the organism saying, okay, this is not an acceptable state to remain in. Let's do something, let's change the state so we can deal with the pain. And it's true of emotional pain as well. Emotional pain is also what drives us to somehow make some changes. So pain in and of itself, in a way, is kind of a signal to the organism for itself to do something about a situation.

But there's a way we can react to that pain, a way that creates another level of suffering which is the reactivity to the pain, the sense that what we sometimes call catastrophizing, that this is the worst possible pain that could ever happen, a sense of personalizing like, why is this happening to me? Why am I the one receiving this pain? What's the reason for this? That whole need, for example, for an explanation is another way in which we can fixate on the experience of the pain instead of simply being with that pain itself and attending to what it is telling us. So that fixation, that kind of fixation is the fixation of what we call the second arrow.

Now there's another way in which we can be fixated. On the one hand we can heap suffering on top of pain, but also we can, in a sense, have a sense of a goal and notice things that are relevant to that goal and persist in the pursuit of whatever that might be regardless of what the feedback of our actual experience is. That's a very kind of abstract way of talking about something quite concrete which is called the hedonic treadmill. Now the hedonic treadmill, it's a great term, and when we talk about the hedonic we're referring to basically pleasure. Now interestingly, the Buddhist world, as we will see, the word for happiness and the word for pleasure are not different, actually.

They're the same words, suka. So it's not like pleasure and happiness are somehow really distinct in and of themselves. But there is a kind of pleasure, if you like, that is a fleeting pleasure, not something that is at a base level a kind of foundational kind of happiness, a foundational suka, but sometimes called authentic happiness slash pleasure. And instead this is the kind of pleasure that comes and goes. It's a kind of dose of something enjoyable where your reward system in your brain, for example, is sending off a nice dose to make you feel good.

And what we know actually experimentally is that that can wear itself out. In the Buddhist world, this is called the suffering of change. So we can enjoy, if you enjoy ice cream, for example, and I give you a bowl of ice cream, you might quite enjoy it. If I then say, OK, for the next month, every meal is going to be ice cream and only ice cream, and that's it. Pretty soon, you're probably going to be sick of ice cream, which used to be your favorite.

So that pursuit of that pleasure eventually starts to wear itself out, literally like the system just can't produce the reward response anymore. And what do we do? We want more and more and more. So this is a kind of fixation as well. But here, instead of being a fixation on pain, like, oh, this is terrible and so on, which is really all about aversion, right?

Like I just don't want this pain. Let me get rid of this pain. Now it's a fixation on pleasure. But equally destructive, maybe even more, that we get stuck in that sense, fixated on what this pleasure is. So we have on the one hand a kind of fixation on pleasure, another hand a fixation on pain, and then in very concrete context, this tendency toward fixation can have very negative consequences.

But most immediately, the one way we can think of these consequences is in response to something that's a kind of challenge. And this raises the idea of what we call resilience. Now at the Center for Healthy Minds and in many other institutions around the country, my psychologist colleagues and others have been studying the psychological dimensions of resilience. And this is also an idea that we find in Buddhism as well. When we think of it in psychological terms, we often talk, you can kind of imagine a graph if you like.

And what you find is, say, we have time here, you know, and the intensity of your response here. In response, we could be measuring any number of things, we could be measuring the intensity of your amygdala's response to a challenge, we could be measuring the intensity of an inflammatory response in your immune system, we could even be measuring your heart rate. The idea here is that when we face a challenge of some kind, various kinds, it could be just an emotional challenge, it could be a physiological challenge, often it's some kind of a combination, then there's system response. And with that response, and sometimes there can be behaviors that follow from that, you know, let's say there's some danger, a bus is rushing out, your heart rate goes up, you have an immune response as well because you're getting ready to be wounded, and then a little bit of inflammation maybe starts, but you're just going to get out of the way as soon as you can. And you jump away.

And now you're out of the path of the bus, the bus is gone, you're okay, there are no other dangers, how long does it take for us to recover? In other words, we have this kind of peak response to some kind of a challenge, and then there's a recovery period. And how quickly does that recovery happen? We've done some work, some of my colleagues at the Center for Healthy Minds, and I'm thinking especially of my colleague Antoine Lutz and also David Perlman, and of course Richie Davidson who directed these studies, the director of the Center, we've done some work on pain in long-term meditators. And we've got a kind of clever device you put on the skin and you calibrate it for the capacity of different individuals, and basically what it does is it produces heat, and really quite intense, even uncomfortable heat.

And you can make it have a little glow first, like a little warm thing, and then turn it all the way up so that there's quite an intense heat. And when we look at the reactivity of long-term meditators, and some of these meditators have done 30,000 hours of practice in their lifetime, really long-term meditators, most of them Tibetan actually, when we look at their reactivity, they respond, like the system responds just as intensely. But like the kinds of practices we're talking about here, or really any Buddhist practice probably, it's not going to like damp down the pain. It's not going to make it so that the system doesn't respond. Meditation is not an anesthetic.

It's not, you know, turning you into a zombie, right? That's not the idea here. So what is it doing? It actually maybe even intensifies the experience in the moment. This intensity of that experience of pain.

But although whether we'd call it pain is another question, we won't deal with that right now. But in any case, the system responds like, yes, this is a signal that we would usually call pain. And then there's the recovery. And there's a couple of things that we find with expert meditators when we look at their reaction to pain, as opposed to our other persons. So first of all, there's this kind of lead up period before the pain comes.

And in this design, at least in some of the work that we did, we gave a little stimulus before the actual hot pain stimulus, a little warmth. And when we gave the expert meditators that little bit of warmth, nothing happened. Their pain systems didn't what we call their various matrices or regions in the brain that work together to represent pain. And now we think there's a neuroscientist named Tor Vega who's done some work to suggest there are actually kind of a distinct system. One of them is to represent what we call the nociceptive signal, the actual physical signal of pain.

And the other represents the interpretation of the intensity of pain. So in any case, we didn't separate those two when we did this work. But what we did find is that neither of those matrices showed any increase in the ordinary â?? in the expert meditators, in the long-term meditators, what we call the adepts. But when that little pain signal is shown, not like the precursor, the little warmth is shown or is initiated on the skin of ordinary people, many of them start to actually represent pain in their brains. In other words, there's no â?? like, it's not hot.

But they are already anticipating, oh, the pain is going to come. It's on its way. So not only have they not had the first arrow, they've already shot the second arrow before the first arrows hit them. And I say them, it's like, I'm sure â?? I've done this many times too, like we anticipate the terror of it, we anticipate the pain, we anticipate the loss, whatever it might be. And that's a key feature of our suffering, actually, is that â?? that comes from this kind of grasping, like we're fixated on the pain.

So even if it's not there, we're fixated on it, it's going to be there. And that fixation on the pain actually creates a pain signal in the brain. And then the signal actually happens. Sometimes in some versions of this protocol, we didn't â?? you'd get the warmth and there would be no actual hot pain. You just get the warmth.

And people would still show â?? they would still be representing pain to themselves. But when we actually gave them pain, you know, then the system represents pain. And then there's a recovery period. And I bet you already know what this looked like. In the advanced meditators, this slope of this recovery was much quicker.

But in many ordinary people, it takes a lot longer for that recovery to happen. And a key way of thinking about resilience is that some of us have a capacity for quite fast recovery. Maybe not as fast as those adepts, but maybe, maybe some of you, you know, are just as flexible in that way. Just have just as much resilience as a long-term meditator. But many people don't have that.

They don't recover as quickly. So here's a couple of key elements that we want to consider about this. The first is that there is something you can do about it. We like at the Center for Healthy Minds to say, you know, as Richie Davidson so often says, well-being is a skill. You can learn it.

And this â?? the capacity for resilience to recover from a challenge is a really important skill for well-being, for flourishing, for leading a good life. It's an important skill for the bodhisattva's life. So there is something you can do about it. There are actually many things you can do about it, and we're going to be exploring some of that. But the other thing that's really important to keep in mind is that this is not, in a sense, your fault.

And I mean that in a very direct sense, right? So if I am a person and I have certain inflammatory issues myself, so if we looked at my system, I would bet â?? I've never had this done â?? but I would bet that when we look at inflammatory â?? what we call inflammatory cytokines like IL-6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha and so on, I know how to say those things. I don't really know what they mean. But my fellow scientists like Melissa Rosencrantz can explain them to me. So when I look at those, then probably they're going to be a bit more elevated than most people.

So is this my fault? One way of thinking about this that's really helpful in the Buddhist context is to think about this in terms of the distinction between karma and klesha. So klesha is a word you've already heard. It's that kind of stickiness. It's the emotional and cognitive framework in which our grasping and fixation is occurring.

It's the sticky negative states of mind like craving, like ferocious anger, those negative states of mind. Even a kind of irritation could count as klesha. But then there's karma, or karmic conditioning. And to put this in a sort of â?? I don't know â?? maybe a fairly straightforward way, but not necessarily a very traditional metaphor, you could say that we've kind of all been dealt a karmic hand of cards. The psychologist Jonathan Hike talks about this in terms of the cortical lottery.

You've kind of gone through â?? the reason this isn't so traditional is that there is a sense in which there's a whole long-term causal pattern that you're fitting into. So it's not just a matter of random luck. But putting that aside, the idea here is that we kind of end up with, at our birth, a certain kind of hand of karmic cards that we've been dealt. And there's not anything we can do about that as individuals. Now that hand of karmic card, even in the traditional Buddhist sense, is not really just about us, either.

It's about the kind of world we've been born into as well. The Buddhist perspective, the multi-life perspective, which is that there's a notion of rebirth, and we'll explore that later. It's an interesting idea that may be useful, is that we kind of inherit from previous lifetimes certain kinds of tendencies, and even our physiology. So in an analogous way, we can think of us as â?? but we're not â?? the idea that you are exactly the person in a previous lifetime who committed these karmic acts that led to your conditioning is inaccurate. People talk about that in a kind of folkloric way.

But the idea in karma is that you are not exactly that person whose karmic activities you've inherited. It's not so simple. It's more like you're kind of their ancestor in a way. And in a simple way, you could say that maybe even not so simple, maybe quite direct way, the kind of analogy here also for us in contemporary times would be some idea of genetics, that we've inherited a kind of â?? we have a genetic heritage. And to say that that genetic heritage is our fault would make no sense at all.

We also have an epigenetic context. So epigenetics is a big thing these days. Basically what it means is you have a set of genes, but the way in which those genes actually function, how they express themselves, the effects that they have are highly dependent on the environment. And so the environmental circumstances of your genetic physical inheritance are also important. And again to say that in some sense that's your fault doesn't make much sense.

If I happen to be born in a war zone, where the ongoing, the nature of that kind of a context actually has very deleterious effects, they're not necessarily genetic effects, they're epigenetic effects. If I'm born in a place where there's a lot of other violence, if I'm born in a group that faces a lot of discrimination, if I'm born in a context where there's not enough nutrition, I can't get enough food, those all are going to have tremendous impacts in the way in which my genes are going to express themselves. And then on top of it as well, we have something that's a little more amorphous, although some scientists are really starting to pay attention to this, which is that we have a kind of cultural inheritance as well. There's almost like, you can almost talk about cultural genetics like Nicholas Christakis does in his book Blueprint. So in a sense there's also another, a whole other inheritance which actually literally gets into the body and in the brain, which is that we learn how to be a particular kind of person.

You know, one of the ways I like to express this is, one of the ways this can come out is in facial expressions. You know, I mentioned my friend Antoine Lutz, a scientist I work a lot with, and I sometimes have teased Antoine about you being French and showing him my French face. You know, when I speak French, I even get my French face and tell him, oh, c'est comme ça, un poule frumale, c'est ça est rey bien, comme ça, avec jouvain, c'est bien. And then he does, so you know, there is like culture, this is, we hear this in Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, this idea of culture, it's like, it's embodied, right? You express it.

And then Antoine then does the, his American face back at me. Hi, how are you? And it's, you know, de frusie, bien, right? So these are like ingrained, you can almost see an American abroad. If you're an American and you spend enough time abroad, you start to look and identify, you start to see that Americans kind of move a particular way.

There's nothing wrong with this, right? And then dress and so on. So all of that, we inherit, we inherit all of this. And when we are born, we are like, we are very, very, we're like sponges to soak up all of this from our environment. Then at a certain point, and especially it seems, it's interesting to see how in traditional cultures, traditional Buddhist cultures, the children are not really taught formal meditation very often, there's certainly indirect ways in which they learn many of the same principles like mindfulness, which we'll be talking about, and compassion, and so on.

But they don't really talk formal meditation very often, formal practices are reserved until they become young adults. And it's around that time when we also know there are certain kinds of physiological capacities developing especially in the brain, where in a sense, let's not talk about blame, but now we start to have a capacity to kind of do something about all this, a little bit more than when will children, maybe actually a lot more. So children much more susceptible, in a sense, to the environment, just soaking in especially infants. And so that's why adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and so on can have such a tremendous impact. But as adults, we have an amazing capacity to transform those circumstances.

An amazing capacity for resilience. So the important thing to remember is that on the one hand, we're dealt a death to cards, and those cards even maybe are kind of intensified in our infancy and even as young children. And then eventually, we kind of learn how to play with the cards, so to speak. And we can make certain kinds of choices. And importantly, we all have the capacity to develop the skills to be more resilient.

So what do those skills look like? Well, another way of saying that is what are the issues that, in a sense, make us not so resilient? First of all, there's all that other stuff, which we can't really do that much about. Maybe we need some medication of one kind or another in order to deal with whether it's some kind of an issue with the way in which our brains are working or the way in which our guts are working, whatever, things that we need to do. But not that we can directly control, let's say.

But there are some things that we can learn how to really change very directly in our own experience. And a lot of that has to do with the way in which we're stuck in our fixation, the way in which we are grasping. So I want to just point out three ways of thinking about that that we'll be examining in coming sessions. So one of them is actually where we are fixated on a kind of story. And I mean especially fixated on the story of ourselves, the story of who I think I am and who I think I am supposed to be.

And very often, who I think I was, where I came from, a kind of narrative of the self. And we can have a very inflexible narrative. That narrative can maybe be a happy one. Sometimes it's not a very happy one. So that fixation on the story is one form of fixation that can really disrupt our capacity to be resilient.

So that when I face a challenge, if part of the story I have is that I'm just incapable of facing these challenges, I just can't do it. It's just not who I am. That that story will actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then there's another way that we can grasp, which is not grasping kind of on a narrative like a story of ourselves, but we can fixate, let's say, just on like thoughts. This is a bit subtler, where we are fixating just on a particular content, when we get stuck in a particular content.

So a story is a kind of maybe a whole lot of thoughts, right, and even a whole world in a way, a kind of whole narrative universe that we are kind of living out a particular tale in that we imagine and that we're fixated on. But we can also just have a particular thought of something, right? And we'll experiment with that in practice, how we work with those kinds of thoughts and fixation with thought. It can be very disruptive, actually, fixation in thought, because sometimes we have very pleasant thoughts, but sometimes we have very challenging thoughts. And they can literally create a kind of pain in us, those thoughts.

And then third, there's emotion, and emotion is very interesting. Buddhist theorists long ago, Buddhist practitioners long ago, long before our contemporary scientists sort of learned something that contemporary scientists have come to recognize, a little bit of dispute about it, but it seems pretty well established, which is basically that when we are really in the throes of a strong emotional state, it's very difficult for us to accept any information that's contrary to that state. So if I'm really mad at someone for, I don't know, breaking my phone, and I'm furious at them, and they're saying, no, I didn't do it. I'm just convinced. I just know they did it.

And then finally, even though there's irrefutable evidence to the contrary being presented to me by my other friends, like, no, look, I took a picture. Here's the other guy who did it, whatever. It's like, no, I can't even see the other evidence in what's called the refractory period. I'm just stuck in my interpretation of reality that's driven by that emotion. So that's another way of being, in a sense, fixated, right, of this grasping.

So we can have grasping in terms of our story, in terms of individual thoughts, and in terms of emotion. And we can learn how to move past that kind of grasping at all three levels through some very basic kinds of practice, especially a kind of practice that you might call mindful awareness. So let's end now with a little bit of just a little short practice just to settle our minds. And again and again, we come back to this basic practice of just letting the mind settle naturally. And one element that's very important here as we settle the mind is recognizing how we can be averse to our own experience, that that flip side of fixation of trying to get what we want is also about avoiding what we don't want.

There are things about our experience that we may not like. The invitation here is to set aside all those interpretations, to set aside the habit of shooting that second arrow, and just be with whatever's happening. Whatever thoughts arise, whatever emotions arise, just take a moment to let the breath be your anchor and whatever happens, happens. See you next time.