Day 4: Effortlessness

Let's begin with some practice. So again, find your seat, a stable position, let's let Mother Earth hold us. And one of the important aspects of this style of practice is a sense of effortlessness, as we will see. We'll be cultivating that more and more, that sense of really being effortless. This is about the actual session, the formal practice, if you like, what the Tibetans call the nyamshak.

And there are things that we do when we're in the actual session that we wouldn't do between sessions. We're not awakened, at least I'm not a Buddha, maybe you are. So we're a Buddha, there's a difference between a formal practice, sitting on the cushion, so to speak, or sitting in your chair at the office for a minute or two, or even walking down the street, taking a pause. But wherever you are and however you're doing it, the moment of nyamshak, of really settling the mind, so to speak, is going to be different than between practice. It opens up possibilities for us, possibilities for change.

So being effortless is something that we can really allow in this time of practice, and let's try to do that a little bit more. Settling, allowing Mother Earth to hold you effortlessly, it's nothing you need to do to be held to the earth. A sense of alertness in the body with relaxation. There's a Tibetan saying, lu drangna semjang. If the body is straight or upright, so too will the mind be.

And so the spine is upright, but relaxed and flexible. And remember how we did a little experiment, we noticed how with your eyes open, very naturally, the visual sense settles on an object, even without you intending it. There's actually an effortlessness, even in attending to objects. So just gently offer the mind an object, the breath perhaps, the sensations of breathing at the abdomen. There's no need for effort here.

Just let the mind settle on the breath, right on the breath. As thoughts come and go, simply notice them. But especially notice how you are responding to thoughts. What is the feeling? Just notice.

Let's begin now by thinking about some key aspects of practice, the style of practice that we've been looking at. Again, this is a style that's connected especially to the non-dual traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, but that emerge out of Indian Buddhism. One aspect of this style, as I said, is effortlessness. But effortlessness also has to do with the way we react to what is happening in practice. For example, our thoughts and emotions.

And the key aspect of this is actually the issue of what you might call aversion. So sometimes we are reacting to thoughts or we think of something and it's about something we're attracted to. Maybe it's a nice cup of coffee or a vacation on the beach or a person we're fond of. But also we can be reacting with aversion to what's happening to us as we are meditating. So as we are settling on the breath, suddenly a thought comes up and it's actually maybe a negative thought.

And this also, so we talked about graha. There is actually a kind of grasping that's occurring with aversion too. So that gesture, getting what we want, grasping and fixation, has a similar gesture of trying to avoid things, push them away. And in many ways, that's the greatest problem in practice. Sure, we can have thoughts that sort of pull us along and we get caught in them because we are essentially experiencing a kind of attachment or craving.

But in many ways, the deeper problem actually is aversion. Because if we are reversed to our own experience, a couple of things are going to be very difficult to do. The first of them actually is that it's going to be very difficult to understand what's going on, what is our starting point, where are we, not where we think we are, not the story that we tell about ourselves, but actually what can we observe in terms of our own experience, what kinds of reactivity do we have, what kinds of habits do we have. We won't be able to explore that if we are averse to some elements of our experience. So if there are things about ourselves, for example, that we don't like or that we think we don't like.

So that's one issue that's key. We need to explore those. As we will see, exploring the story of ourselves is really critical. But another part of this actually is actually the whole question of effort itself. So what is, in a sense, effort?

What's it about when I say effort? At a very simple level, effort has to do with obtaining goals, just trying to get what we want and avoid what we don't want. Now off the cushion, in between sessions, obviously, we're going to be engaged in that type of behavior. But the problem, at least from the Buddhist perspective, for most of us, is that the way in which we're doing that is kind of like a merry-go-round of suffering, what we call samsara, the cyclic existence or the cycle of suffering. And we're caught in certain kinds of habitual habit patterns as we're trying to obtain our goals, especially the goal of happiness.

We seem to never succeed completely. And all of that is caught up in effort. Part of the issue here is that the effort itself actually reinforces the same habits that we are pursuing as we are trying to attain those goals, constantly trying to do what we think will make us happy. And so being caught up in that cycle is also perpetuated by the effort itself. The effort, in a sense, is part of the conditioning.

It's part of what reinforces the beliefs, the habits, the emotional styles that are not working for us. So finding the sort of space of possibility for change requires letting go of effort. And in fact, that open space where you are truly effortless can really be a revelation like, wow, I'm not really quite caught up in the merry-go-round right now. I'm not being pulled here and there. That sense of sort of spaciousness, of openness is very important in this style of practice at least for giving us the possibility of change.

Now effort also is very much caught up with, of course, as I said, our goals. And let's step back for a second and we're going to come back to effortlessness in a few moments. But let's think about what we mean by our goals. Now a fundamental issue for us is, of course, what exactly is our goal? What do I really want?

And this is where awareness is a critical starting point. What am I actually striving for? What is it that I truly want? Do I have a clear picture of that? Moreover, if I have a clear picture, even if I do manage to come to a clear picture of it, where am I getting these ideas of my goals?

For example, we know actually in cross-cultural research in psychology that there actually are sort of different styles of what you might call favored affect. There's preferred ways of being, so to speak, in different cultures. In American culture, quite typically, it's said that the image of happiness is this kind of really high energy, what we call high arousal state, very positive, very high arousal, kind of happy, happy, happy. Like my friend Antoine Lutz's happiness, you know, American face, like, hi. That incredibly high arousal state is something that's a cultural preference.

But if we look at East Asian cultures, for example, and this is the kind of work that's been done, for example, by Jeanie Tsai at Stanford University. If we look at those cultures, there's a preference for much lower arousal states and not so much positive feeling. So that kind of intense, almost roller coaster, you know, excitement and happiness is not the preferred state. That's not kind of the place to be in terms of being happy. We also find that as people grow older, actually, they shift in this regard.

Instead of really wanting a very positive, very high arousal state, they kind of look for something that's a little more stable, maybe not so intense, as they grow older. Now these are just preferences, in a sense. They're cultural preferences. But it's very important for us to recognize what their implications are. It doesn't mean that one is necessarily good or bad, where you decide to be, whether you'd like high arousal or lower arousal or what have you.

That's not in itself the issue. The issue, you might say, is kind of sustainability. Can we sustain that really high arousal state all the time? If that's what we think constitutes true happiness, probably we're going to be pretty disappointed, or else at some point we're going to be completely burnt out. So that doesn't seem like a very wise choice.

But another issue, a sort of deeper issue, is whether any of these particular kind of affective states are really what constitute happiness. Is happiness an emotional state, really? Is it a specific kind of location in what you might call a sort of representation of all of our emotional or affective possibilities? If we think about what we call the affective circumplex, it's like a graph. We have a vertical axis of high and low arousal.

And then we have a horizontal axis of positive and negative affect or feeling. And again, we might think we should be up here. Oh, this is really where we want to be. We want to be in that roller coaster state. Maybe we should be down here, a more, let's say, East Asian style, not so high arousal, maybe not so such incredibly joyful or positive feeling.

But are any of these locations really what we mean by happiness? Is it a particular kind of affective state? Is that what we're talking about? There was a time when his Holiness the Dada Lama was asked by my friend Richie Davidson. I believe it was Richie during a Mind and Life meeting.

I've been involved quite a lot with the Mind and Life Institute, and his Holiness has been a great supporter there. And he's also offers incredible insights and sometimes really surprising comments. And this is one of my favorite comments. He was asked, what was your happiest moment, your Holiness? And he thought for a moment, and he said, I think right now, why?

Is there something? Does that mean that he was in just the right place, right? Just the right amount of arousal, and just the right amount of pleasure? Or is it something else? So that's a very important question for us.

What do we really think is happiness? Is it really an emotional kind of location? Should we use a different word, even well-being, flourishing? This is not a question I'm going to answer for you. This is a question for you to ponder yourself.

Maybe that really isn't quite an exact answer to this question. But it's so important for us to recognize what is this starting point. Where are we starting, and how do we do that with awareness? So on the one hand, we're doing a style of practice, and we'll be doing more and more of a style of practice where we really try to get to a point of being truly effortless without any need to adjust our state, just being with whatever is happening. But there are also times in our practice when we need to notice, to look and see what's happening.

So I invite you for just a moment to settle again, just settle the mind, and bring up for a moment a sense of happiness, maybe a past event, maybe what you aspire to, and simply notice what it is. And when we do this, of course, part of what happens quite likely is that we start to think about, well, how am I going to get it, or is this the right one? We get caught up in all of that sort of effort again, and that's fine because we're doing some analysis. In a sense, it's what we call a kind of analytical meditation. And this is an important distinction that really points to these two ways we can use our practice.

One of them is what we call placement meditation, and the other is analytical meditation. Placement meditation, or jogon in Tibetan, is where we are just letting go. Analytical meditation may be where we're doing a little bit, making a little bit of effort, sometimes a lot of effort, maybe to have a look at something, to inquire into something, to bring up a thought, like what is happiness. And these two need to occur together. They're very helpful.

They're connected in some quite direct ways to two general ways of talking about meditation in the Tibetan tradition and also in the Indian tradition. Indeed, we see this through our Buddhism, really. And these are the distinction between what we call shamata meditation and vipashana meditation. Shamata, it means mental quiescence. It's something that cultivates stability of mind.

Vipashana means insight. It's what enables us to see what's really happening. It's what enables us to counteract our confusion. So placement meditation is generally much more about this shamata style, a style of just cultivating a kind of stability, letting go. Analytical meditation, based upon that kind of stability, enables us to do an inquiry.

And at a certain point, they can come together, where there isn't a kind of effortful inquiry. It's just an awareness of whatever's happening. So when we're engaged in this style of practice now, sometimes we're going to be emphasizing more of that placement meditation of just letting go, and sometimes we're going to be doing something that's a little bit more about inquiry. So let's do a little bit of inquiry now. Also, now that we know we've inquired into our goals, what our goals might be, let's look at something else that's about how goals work for us.

Specifically, if you bring up the idea of doing some task, any task you want, it could be taking out the garbage or whatever it might be, I just want you to imagine doing something right now, something, you know, not terribly important. As you imagine it, what happens? In a way, we sort of start to run a little simulation in our minds. So dealing in a practical way with our lives requires this quite often, where we're planning, thinking about the future, learning from the past, getting ready for this or that, contemplating and considering what we did and how we might do better. There's nothing per se wrong with this.

In fact, humans, you could say, are really good at this. This is something that's called mental time travel, where humans have developed and we've evolved in a way where unlike many other species, maybe we're the only species that can do this to quite this extent, we can project ourselves very elaborately into the future and create very elaborate plans that enable us, for example, to fly to the moon or even build airplanes. All of that requires a capacity to project ourselves into the future. And we can also learn from the past. We can contemplate the past in ways that other species don't seem to be able to do.

Maybe some can. We're not sure. But certainly humans, even other primates, don't seem to have this capacity to our extent. So this is a wonderful thing, but it's also something that can involve quite a lot of one of the main sources of our suffering. We have a plan, let's say, for happiness, and then we fixate on that plan.

And we fixate on the things that are not going according to plan. In other words, there's a way in which we can do that mental time travel that really causes us suffering. And we get stuck in what that plan of happiness seems to be and the person for whom it's happening. What kind of a person am I, the one that is not succeeding at happiness? What kind of a world do I live in?

All of that, the sort of world of our narrative universe, which we will explore later, the idea of the story of ourself, the goal that we're fixated on, all of this can create an incredible source of suffering. And the suffering can be very specific. We can actually get very detailed in the style of suffering that we create for ourselves, but much of it comes from precisely this habit of the way we think, not what we're thinking, but the way we are thinking, our relationship to our thoughts. What is that like? So here's an invitation for you.

I'd like you to bring up for a moment, this is a more analytical style of meditation. I'd like you to bring up something that's maybe a challenging event. It can be an event in the future, maybe you know you're going to have a difficult conversation with someone tomorrow, it could be something from the past, there's no need to traumatize yourself, you don't need to bring up something too intense, but just bring up a thought about something past or future, challenging. See it as clearly as you can. And now notice how you are thinking, what is happening?

Using your meta awareness, the ability to notice the background, to notice your emotional state, what's going on? What's happening in your body? What kinds of feelings are coming up? You can say that this process of thinking in this way, this mental time travel projecting into the past or into the future, it's like a kind of simulation, you're almost living in the old movie The Matrix or the Star Trek Hollow Deck or whatever it might be. We actually are running a kind of embodied simulation.

There's a lot of work in cognitive science that suggests that this is in a certain way kind of the key way that human thinking operates. It's often running as a kind of simulation, a simulation that's often involved in predicting what's going to happen next for us. But when we're just sitting there, let's say thinking about a difficult conversation in the past or that we think is going to happen in the future, we can literally create a kind of response in our bodies as if we were in the situation itself. In other words, we can have a stress response. And that stress response, if it's strong enough, can actually make us feel sick because along with a strong stress response comes an inflammatory response.

That result of that inflammatory response actually makes you feel like achy. When our immune system reacts to a pathogen, when there's actually a disease and we have a fever and aches and pains, it's not the pathogen itself that's creating those feelings. It's actually the response of our immune system, especially the inflammatory response that creates those feelings. And if we have enough of a stress response, strong enough stress, especially chronic stress, like ongoing stress, we can feel this achiness sometimes quite a lot, or we can feel very tired. And a lot of that can be driven by these simulations.

So one way of thinking about what's going on here is that there's a way of simulating, if you like, that in a sense is too real, so to speak. We have, remember this idea of grasping, we are grasping to the reality of our thoughts. One term that we use for this is reification. It is essentially thinking that our thoughts are reality. Now of course we do need to plan, we as humans, and again it's a wonderful thing that we can do this.

But it's when we are too invested in our thoughts, when we have what in the psychological world we sometimes call cognitive fusion, we fuse our thoughts with reality. We think that the idea of a conversation is the conversation itself. And as that simulation runs, it has stronger and stronger impact on our body and mind in proportion to the amount of fusion that we're giving to it, the amount of reality that we're giving to it. And if we're stuck in that kind of a situation, a couple of things are going to be happening. So one of them is, first of all, that we're going to be quite possibly making ourselves kind of sick in a way.

We're not going to feel very well. If we're chronically stressed, especially if we have a lot of negative thoughts, and we do have a tendency as humans to have what we call the negativity bias, which is that we're a little bit more prone toward negative information because it's dangerous, right? So our ancient ancestors, as they evolved, if there was some kind of negative, some danger, they really wanted to pay attention to that as opposed to something positive. So if I think, for example, maybe I'm seeing some strawberries over there in the bush, but then another bush is shaking and maybe that's a tiger, well, which of these am I going to pay more attention to? I'm not sure about either of them, but I'm going to pay more attention to that shaking bush that might be a tiger over there because that could kill me.

I can go without strawberries, were they? But a tiger, that's it. It's all over, right? So we have this negativity bias. So when we are thinking very often, what we can most get caught in and what we can give the most fusion to, the most reality to, are negative thoughts and negative simulations.

So if we get caught in that, and everyone does at some point or another, I'm sure, certainly I have been caught in that, we can get caught in that and then it can become a cycle and it can become a kind of habit, right? So a lot of, remember, a lot of what we're talking about here is transforming our habits and forming, letting go of old habits and forming different habits, actually. That's a big part of what Buddhist practice is about, what meditation is about, even. So how do we let go of this kind of thinking? Well, we use this term, reification, to talk about this idea of cognitive fusion, of reifying, making real our thoughts, too real, in a sense.

Then we can also do de-reification. We can remove the reality of the thoughts, see through the reality, the seeming reality, to recognize that thoughts simply are thoughts, they are not reality. And this is where meditation, remember we have the view meditation and life or engagement or conduct, view meditation life. So we've been kind of really, for this course, we're really focusing a lot on meditation, on the experiential, but all of three of these always kind of intermingle with each other and this is where the view is really coming in a bit, right, the view of what's the nature of reality. In one aspect of that view is simply this, thoughts are not reality, even though our system can treat them that way.

So let's get very concrete about this now. I'd like you to visualize something and I'm going to, I like strawberries, now everywhere I go, people seem to give me strawberries whenever I can end up places, I do like them, but sometimes almost too many strawberries available, but I do like to use strawberries for this exercise. If you'd rather use something else, you can, but let's try together with a strawberry initially. Hopefully you don't, you're not a strawberry hater, there are some people out there like that, and if you are, that's fine, this could work just as well because it'll just bring up a version instead of attachment. But it's kind of nicer to do it with something with attachment so we don't have to feel negative responses.

So let's start this practice. This is an interesting kind of analytical meditation in a way that's going to shift to placement, you'll see. So let's just begin by settling, settle the mind, maybe just attend to breathing. And now I invite you to bring up the image of a strawberry, perhaps closing your eyes will help, or maybe let's say a whole bowl of strawberries. They're freshly washed, sort of glistening in the morning sun, organic, that delicious smell, maybe you lean forward and smell them, and the delicious smell is coming from them.

Perhaps there's a bowl of chocolate sauce nearby for dipping, so delicious. Now let's take a pause for a second, and here, think about this, maybe notice this, is your mouth watering, do you feel some reaction? Very often people, if you visualize this clearly enough, especially if it's a little before lunchtime or something, whether it's strawberries or something else that you prefer, your mouth will water. So here's that amazing thing, right? There are no strawberries here, there's no bowl of strawberries in front of me, and yet my mouth waters, I actually managed to make my mouth water a little bit, isn't that amazing?

Just by thinking of strawberries, thinking of food can make the mouth water. This is precisely what we're talking about, how that kind of full embodied simulation can have an effect on the body. So if we really focus hard, maybe hard is not the right word, clearly, and really bring up a sense of this food, then the system starts to react as if there is food right here. But only there are thoughts. So now we're going to do this visualization again, and as we do that visualization, I'm going to invite you to do something with that visualization.

We're going to see it as thought. Because after all, what is this strawberry, the strawberries, the bowl of strawberries that we're imagining, that we're simulating, what is that stuff made out of? It's just made out of mind stuff, so to speak. It's just a manifestation of your own consciousness. So let's try this now, again, settle, and now visualize as clearly as you can the strawberries.

Perhaps even just take one, a nice big juicy strawberry. Just see it there in front of you. So delicious, a perfect strawberry, freshly washed, all ready to go, ready to be eaten. See it clearly, and now it's a thought. See it as a thought.

What happens then? For many people, what happens is that the strawberry itself disappears, and this makes good sense, because part of the reason that it's being sustained there is it's being sustained by our attention, just like a dream, and it's important to us. Maybe not super important, but it's important like we like strawberries and we want them. Same with our stressful simulations. They're important not because they're delicious strawberries, but maybe because they're threatening or they feel dangerous or there's something important we need to deal with.

So they're sustained by our attention, and our attention has to do with what's important to us, what our goals are. But once we recognize that the strawberry itself is actually just a thought that loses its importance, it goes poof, it disappears. And there's a closely related style of practice to this in the Tibetan non-dual traditions that's called recognizing that appearances are just a mind, or more specifically, recognizing that thoughts are just a mind. Just recognizing that thoughts are mind, which we all know. Now sometimes when we do this also, instead of going poof, sometimes it sort of seems to fade away, and very interestingly, I do this in classes and so on to demonstrate this feature of actually a style of mindfulness you could call it.

And students sometimes say, oh, it goes in the background and I really felt disappointed because it was going away and like, oh no, it's all gone. So there can be emotional reactions, it's interesting. But a lot of the time, especially if we're in the middle of a stressful simulation, part of what we also feel is a kind of relief or an openness. Notice that for a second. Let's try again now, but this time let's use maybe something that again is a little bit of a stressful thought.

Nothing too intense. Settling again. See if you can recollect or anticipate some kind of difficult situation. Really see yourself there. And now it's a thought.

What happens when you do that? Well if it's a stress, then obviously there will be relief. But also, isn't there something like a kind of openness that happens? When you see thoughts as thoughts, it kind of creates maybe a moment of spaciousness, a kind of opening, a sense of possibility. And that's a key aspect of this style of practice.

So when we're actually doing our placement meditation, we're trying to settle the mind. Eventually this is going to become the full blown version of what we call settling the mind at the natural state or allowing the mind to settle on its own. We're moving toward that more and more. But for now, as we are doing that, let's say settling on the breath, thoughts come up. When they come up, try doing this.

Try just seeing the thoughts are thoughts. See what happens when you do that. When a thought comes up, just see it as a thought. Again let's take that for just two minutes of this. Just settle.

Another mind to ride on the breath. Relax. Thank you. What was that like? Could you see the thoughts as just events in consciousness?

Just your mind? Try this practice. As thoughts arise, just notice them as thoughts. A lot of what happens, as we are meditating, is that we're trying to allow the mind to just settle on the breath in this style. And then thoughts arise and they capture us.

Remember that? The idea of attention capture. Why? Because now we're grasping at them. But when they just turn out to be mind, what is there to grasp? So that kind of style of practice starts to give us, first of all, a skill that we can use, which is when we're getting too caught up in the reality, what is in fact not reality, the apparent reality of this mental world of thought, we can de-reify it, we can see through it. So even when you're off the cushion, you can use this as a technique to kind of just get a little space. It can be very helpful.

Of course, we do need to think, right? So again, on the cushion, our goal is not to be, especially when we're doing this style of practice, the more placement meditation, we're not doing any kind of analysis or inquiry, we're not doing some kind of analytical practice, we're just settling, then what's our task in a sense? Our task is simply to not be caught by thoughts, to not get lost. And of course, we will be caught, inevitably, everyone does, even the most advanced meditators get caught at some point or another, and that's fine. But then, that's actually a really great opportunity because when you're caught by the thought, it gives you an opportunity to practice seeing through it. Seeing it is just mind.

So as we do that practice, we develop a different kind of relationship to our thoughts. It doesn't mean that when we're off the cushion, on the cushion, in placement style of meditation, we are just seeing through thoughts. Whatever thoughts arise, we just see through them. So this is similar to the idea of being non-judgmental in contemporary mindfulness styles of practice. It's like the goal of this style of practice is not to figure something out, not to analyze something.

It's just to simply be aware and not be lost. So when we're practicing in that way, thoughts arise, we see through them. Thoughts arise, we see through them. Sometimes we get really caught, that's okay. Just arise, see through.

But sometimes we need to think, of course, off the cushion. It's not like we're going to do that off the cushion, between sessions, but we start to develop a different relationship to our thoughts. As I said, we also have developed this skill to be able to see through thoughts, but now we also start to develop a different kind of relationship to our thoughts, where maybe we're a little bit less fused. This is a really key element of practice, of leading this life of awakening. The bodhisattva life is a life that is very much about not being completely locked into even our bodhisattva world, our world of awakening, the idea of what awakening is.

That kind of fixation of grasping is actually the obstacle. It's part of the source of suffering. It's part of the way in which our sticky mind operates. So in this style of practice, a lot of what we're learning to do is instead of to grasp, we're learning to let go. So let's end now with just a moment or two of this style of meditation.

We're going to take this as an opportunity just to notice, as a thought comes up, what's your baseline, so to speak? How fixated, how much fusion is there? Before you see the thought as a thought, simply notice, well, how much fixation do I have on my thoughts? And notice also, even just for a moment, the kind of spaciousness or openness that you can experience when you see your thoughts just as events in consciousness. So let's begin.