Spiritual Resilience And Dharma Micro-Dosing

A dharma talk about how to strengthen your spiritual resilience and spiritual immunity during times of uncertainty. This talk introduces the idea of dharma micro-dosing and includes some practices to do on a daily basis. This talk is geared towards awakening.

Transcript

Spiritual resilience and Dharma microdosing.

So since COVID,

A lot's been talked about with physical resilience,

But how much do we really practice or know about emotional or spiritual resilience?

Emotional immunity,

A weakened emotional immunity,

Looks like irritability and patience,

Overwhelm,

Fear,

A lot that we've seen in the last number of years.

And with increases in environmental changes,

What actually happens is we get more human stress,

Which means our brain stem or amygdala is activated more often,

Which is our animal brain or our survival brain.

We have both an animal brain and a survival brain and a Buddha brain.

So spiritual resilience is a lot about increasing our ability to access the Buddha brain versus the animal survival brain.

And every moment can really be a choice,

Buddha brain or animal brain.

During the Buddha's time,

When they asked him about where the mind was located,

He actually pointed to both the heart and the head.

And the Pali word in the Buddhist time for mind was Chitta,

Which actually meant heart and mind.

And even today in Thailand,

The word for heart includes the mind and heart is the same word.

So when we're talking about Buddha brain,

We're really talking about this heart quality as well.

And what does a strong emotional or spiritual resilience look like?

What does the Buddha brain look like?

It looks like compassion and love and connection.

And it looks like quiet,

Like in the meditation we did,

That deep quiet.

As a therapist,

I practice a technique called internal family systems,

Which looks at different parts.

And they have a really beautiful way of bringing online this Buddha brain.

They call it the eight Cs,

Like the letter C of wise self.

And these allow you to return to your true nature and have this spiritual and emotional resilience.

So Paul,

You could go ahead and put up the slide.

These are what will keep you out of your animal brain.

The eight Cs are compassion,

Curiosity,

Clarity,

Calmness,

Connectedness,

Confidence,

Courage,

And creativity.

And getting in any one of these,

Just one of them,

You don't have to do the all eight,

Really allows you to have this spiritual immunity and move out of that amygdala brain.

So again,

Looking at all of these compassion,

Curiosity,

Clarity,

Calm,

Connected,

Confidence,

Courage,

Creativity.

So you can go ahead and take the slide down.

So one of the keys with spiritual immunity is not waiting for the world to give us the right conditions.

If we really waited for the world,

We might wait forever.

As you can see,

There's not going to be less climate catastrophes,

Less more people all of a sudden regulated and happy and undivided.

So practicing this here now,

Being your best self now,

And trying to work with these eight Cs now.

And it doesn't matter whether you have depression or anxiety or any kinds of conditions,

You can really start now,

Wherever you are.

And the first step in spiritual immunity is really a commitment to your practice,

To your spiritual and meditation practice.

And that doesn't necessarily look like how many hours a day you sit.

It's really like a commitment to your beloved.

And you know,

A lot of the Persian mystics,

They would talk about the beloved.

And our practice is a lifetime commitment,

Like we would a best friend or a marriage partner.

It's a willingness to show up.

It might be 30 minutes a day of practice,

But if you had a beloved,

You wouldn't just spend 30 minutes a day with them.

You'd spend all day connecting with them,

Remembering them.

And that's where the Dharma microdosing comes in that I'll talk about later.

So it's this sense of this lifetime of connection.

And I have a friend in the Indian tradition and was talking about the original tantra back in 300 AD.

It was really not about sex.

It was about this constant communion and connection with the truth,

With the beloved.

In our practice,

The Dharma is the beloved.

And you will take retreats.

That's like taking a vacation with your beloved,

Making that special time to go deep,

And to go deep the rest of your life.

This isn't like a couple year thing.

It's a commitment to your practice for the rest of your life.

So if you haven't done this and you really want to,

Just making that commitment right now.

Setting that intention to use all circumstances as our teachers,

To use our life force energy in a continual basis,

To connect with what's important,

The Dharma.

And to really do this,

If this is a goal of yours,

To keep connecting with your spiritual practice until the very end.

Not stopping short,

That willingness to go all the way to the truth.

So this is the first step in spiritual immunity is making this commitment like you would to a beloved.

The second step in increasing our spiritual immunity is working with decreasing the identification with mind and impermanent objects.

Mind is inherently empty.

It's like this bowl.

It's inherently empty.

But the bowl gets filled up with thoughts and concepts and traumas and all kinds of things,

Emotions.

But through practice,

We can empty out the contents of the bowl,

Seeing that you're not this,

You're not that,

You're not the different mind states.

And then we're back to this empty bowl of the mind.

But then don't forget,

We take away the mind and there's just what left.

What is it that holds the empty bowl?

You're that as well.

Even when we empty out,

I'm not this,

I'm not that,

And then take away the mind and just this here,

Now.

It's not much.

And most of us come to meditation practice with that bowl full of stuff.

And we're really reverse engineering the mind.

We're reverse engineering what we think we think we are.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey,

Who actually is an avid Buddhist Vipassana meditator,

He says,

Vipassana's singular objective is to hack the deepest layer of your mind and reprogram it.

So we're really turning the mind upside down and reverse engineering what we know.

I'm going to share a couple of tools for reverse engineering the mind that you might find helpful.

And each of them includes a microdosing practice if you want to use those practices.

The first tool is to remember there aren't two minds.

Okay,

There isn't one you talking and another you listening.

When you criticize or get upset with yourself,

There's not another you that's somehow separate that's criticizing and righteous criticizing this other mind.

It's all the same mind.

So microdosing practice for that can be to whom does a thought report?

We assume that it's reporting to something,

This other I just sitting in there listening.

But to whom does a thought report and you can ask yourself a microdosing practice is to do many moments many times a day.

So what is this microdosing practice?

So as some of you might know in popular culture,

There's been a lot about microdosing with very small amounts of a psychedelic drug to enhance performance.

And it's almost like homeopathy,

Putting a psychedelic drug in a very small amount of water.

And then these little tiny microdoses can help you be more present.

It was popular in Silicon Valley for a while.

But they've really found they've done some studies looking that you can do a similar version of these small homeopathy type amounts and it really enhances your practice.

In 2018,

Yale University and Mass General Hospital did a study on the benefits of micromeditation and they found even with individuals with little or no practice,

They had big abilities and changes in their ability to sustain their intention and be less distracted and present just by doing these little meditations throughout the day.

And then in another study in 2020,

In Ontario where they looked at adolescents with attention deficit disorder,

ADHD,

They found that these micro moments of mindfulness throughout the day were way more powerful than a long sitting meditation in helping relieve the symptoms for these ADHD adolescents.

So it really does work,

These small doses of mindfulness.

And there's two types of ways you could microdose your meditation.

One is you could do just a way,

I call it simple microdosing,

Where you're just trying to be more present.

It's kind of more popular in our culture to be that be aware of flossing your teeth or be aware of the movement of your hands throughout the day.

So that's a really simple one,

But the microdosing practice is that I'm going to suggest and use a really a deeper level of uprooting the sense of I,

Not just enhancing your being present,

But we're looking at just taking out this illusion of I altogether as a path to freedom.

Ramana Maharshi,

He was well known for his ask,

Having people repeatedly ask the question,

Who am I as the supercharged microdosing way to uproot the self.

So another way to,

A second way to reverse engineer the mind is to see the how the mind creates its own sense of self importance.

And really when you look,

The mind doesn't do anything.

It's like one of those narcissistic people at work that's always telling you how much they do.

And then,

You know,

Talking about how much work they do.

And then when you really look,

You see,

They don't do much at all.

The mind's like that.

Our body actually does and life itself actually does the majority of the work is our body and life.

When we need food,

Our body finds food.

When we need to lay down,

Our body finds a place to lay down.

The mind just talks about all this.

The importance of the mind and one way that it works this way,

It's always trying to get you to have another thought,

The mind.

It's kind of like the way YouTube videos and TikTok works.

Like you go in to one and boom,

Boom,

Boom,

Boom,

You know,

Two hours later.

That's the way the mind work.

It gives you one thought and then it makes you have another and another,

Another.

So catch that,

Catch how the mind's always trying to get you to have another thought.

I'll go ahead and put up the cartoon.

This is what happens,

Right?

Your own tedious thoughts the next 200 miles,

One after the other after the other.

So you can take that down.

Thank you.

So the microdosing practice for this is in order to decrease the urgency of the mind is to listen to the thoughts like you would a bird song.

That's it.

Listen to the thoughts like you would a bird song.

I just try this now.

You know,

With a bird song,

Thoughts just become another sound.

You're not trying to push them away or grab them.

You're just having this relaxed relationship with the sound of your thoughts.

Just like you would a bird.

Another way to dismantle or reverse engineer the mind and create more spiritual immunity is to realize that words and concepts are empty and to start to see through even words and concepts.

Again,

You can see we're getting more subtle here as far as reverse engineering and taking these things out of that bowl.

You know,

Really when you look at it,

Everything that we base our life on our way we see the world the way we feel about ourselves and our life.

They're made up of thoughts which are made up of sounds.

A E I O U.

OO A OO A E.

They're just sounds that we made up and we put our life on this stuff.

Who we think we are.

So just remembering these are all sounds and you can just pull it all apart.

That's why in Vipassana we really when we're with the breathing,

We're not using the word breath.

We're really looking at the constellation of sensations that makes up breath and not even using the words there just a felt sense.

Because when we get away from the words and concepts,

We can go to this wordless emptiness that really composes all things including you.

So a microdosing practice for this would be if you took away all thoughts and concepts right now,

What would be left?

Just experiment with that.

And I like to use kind of a different set of words,

Sounds for this but I do if I took away name and form,

What would be left if we took away all name and form?

It'd be like when we take away this empty bowl of the mind.

We'd have just this right now.

And lastly,

We can reverse engineer even the idea of the I perceiver itself.

Remember this I or witness is just a cluster of thoughts that come together.

The ego which claims to be the thinker of a thought is just another thought itself.

Again,

That's like there aren't two minds.

There's not something that's thinking.

That's just another thought.

So really,

It becomes when you start to see this,

If you really look and have the intention to see deeply in this,

It starts to become a thought on a thought on a thought on a thought.

It's like being in a hall of mirrors and you realize one day,

Oh my God,

There's nothing here but all these thoughts bouncing off each other,

Creating this illusion of an I perceiver-witnesser.

We get so mesmerized,

We don't realize like there's nothing happening.

Thought on thought on thought,

There's nothing happening.

To some of you,

This can be a little scary,

But actually when you.

.

.

It seems scary,

But when you actually experience it,

It can be quite fun and funny to realize there's no one here and nothing's happening on an absolute level,

Of course.

The microdosing practice for this can be what if there's no me,

It all relates back to.

So throughout the day,

Ask yourself,

What if there's no me this all relates back to?

How many of these thoughts would you have right now?

There wasn't a you they pointed back to?

Probably about zero.

Why would we even need to think much if there was no me to relate back to?

So seeing there aren't two minds,

Seen through the concepts and the words,

Seen through even the I itself,

These are all ways of increasing spiritual immunity and resilience and decreasing the dominance of the mind illusion.

Another very important and different angle in which to increase spiritual immunity is to expand our awareness from the inside out.

It's a bit like allowing the sun on the inside to shine more and more.

I seem to be having bowl analogies today,

But so we have another bowl analogy in the Hawaiian tradition.

They believe that each one of us is born with a bowl of light in our hearts.

And then through traumas,

Things happening to us,

We put a rock in the bowl of light that we are.

And pretty soon,

By the time we get to be 30,

40,

50,

Our whole bowl is covered with these rocks.

We can't even see or feel the light that we are.

So spiritual practice is about taking out those rocks from that bowl of light until we return to this empty bowl of unimpeded,

Infinite light that you've always been.

And Paul,

Do you want to go ahead and put up this picture?

This is from Hawaiian artist Beth Marcil.

I mean,

She's not Hawaiian,

But she lives in Hawaii and Maui,

And she does a lot of artwork with Hawaiian culture.

And this is that bowl of light.

I'm just feeling that.

That's you.

That's our true nature when it doesn't have all the stones in it.

And increasing this bowl of light really happens when we focus on what's true versus being mystified by all the things that we've filled the bowl up with,

The impermanent objects moving towards what's real and true.

You can go ahead and take the slide down.

Adyashanti says,

Teacher Adyashanti,

Our true nature is nourished by meditation.

That's why we do it.

That bowl of light is nourished by meditation.

The following are a couple of ways to do that.

Expanding the bowl of light in you.

That's building that light from the inside out.

One way is to watch your character throughout the day in the movie of you.

Watching your character.

Someone once told me your personality is just an outfit that your spirit wears.

So watching this you in the movie of life,

The character Amita is doing this.

The character,

Our avatar Amita is feeling this now and just watching it.

And it's not some people have asked me in the past,

Is that dissociation?

It's not dissociation.

It's more relaxed kind of meta cognition,

Where you're able to see the whole movie versus blending with this one character.

Not just caught in a part,

But the whole movie.

And it's not dissociation.

Actually,

When you practice it,

It can be a kind of a radical connection.

The beauty of doing this,

Of watching your character in the movie is our character can be like a window pane.

And we often if we don't relax back,

We stop at the window pane,

We stop at the characteristics of who we are.

And we don't look through the whole window and see,

Oh my god,

I'm everything beyond the window as well as the window pane.

So again,

You get to have this holistic understanding of who you are at any moment.

Imagine,

You know how the world would be if each of us could see both ourselves as this infinite the window pane and the infinite landscape and see everyone else as their infinite landscape and their character.

Now really,

When you look,

Where do you begin and where do you end?

You know,

We can only breathe because of the trees.

We're only here because of the sun.

This is all connected,

The breathing and the trees and the sun.

What if inner and outer was just another concept?

You know,

Our heart has been beating all day today without us trying to control it or know it.

It's just been doing itself and we've been breathing.

It's all been doing itself.

You've been being breathed.

The movie really just moves on its own.

And it's fascinating to me sometimes to realize like,

How is it that there's the right amount of space in between everything in between yourselves and in between you and I so we can see each other?

It's just there's so much that's happening that this whole landscape of infinite you,

Not just you,

But everything happening together.

So a microdosing practice for this is,

You know,

Notice that the whole game runs on its own.

The sun rises without your help.

And then,

You know,

You can experiment with taking out this separate,

This idea of a separate you just pluck it out and just watch the game run on its own.

That could be a really fun mini practice throughout the day.

It can be like a self-driving car where you're just watching,

Letting the car go where it goes,

Watching the whole movie of the life.

And then when you can do this,

You get to give the game back to the game.

And you're done.

This view of life from awareness itself is where true liberation lies.

And really,

It's transferring our identity from impermanent objects like the mind and its contents in that bowl to the permanent,

To knowing what never changes,

To awareness itself never changes.

And in a meditation,

We're training ourselves to be established in pure awareness more and more be established in awareness rather than established in the mind illusion.

And every time you do that,

It's like poking holes in a piece of paper.

If you had a piece of paper held up to light,

We're poking holes in it.

So the light just can shine through that the illusion can get,

Start to fall away every time you do these microdosing practices.

My teacher,

David Thomas describes it this way.

Our true nature is pure knowledge,

Which is silent knowingness.

The knowledge gets reflected in the mind and the mind splits into two parts,

The knower and what is known.

If we trace it back to its source,

We realize that all questions arise from the source and all answers arise from the same source.

Once this is realized,

All thought ends.

Duality collapses.

Thinking has no real value when you wake up.

So the last microdosing practice I wanted to mention today,

Which you can do easily and often,

I use it almost like the way you use the breath as an anchor in the sitting meditation,

Is being aware of the difference between thoughts and awareness.

I call it a factory reset to awareness.

Every time we're in contact with the world,

We're aware of how our thoughts see the world.

It's the thinking mind and what it says about this person or that person all day long.

A thinking mind is contacting the world.

But meanwhile,

There's this quiet just awareness perspective as well,

Almost like in the background.

You can do a flip and you can switch to how does awareness see this?

That's the microdosing practice.

You notice the first responder is the thought,

And then you can flip how does awareness see this?

So you're driving in the car,

You might be thinking about what people are doing or something else,

And then you can just flip it.

Well,

How does awareness,

Just pure awareness,

See this?

It'll move you off of that thought viewpoint into something greater.

If you want,

Sometimes I do it just to make it more technicolor and more fun.

I do it.

How does infinite eternal awareness see this?

That gets you out of the idea of it's my limited awareness.

You can even try this now.

How does infinite eternal awareness see this person on the screen talking?

See the room that you're in?

See your life?

You might notice it's kind of when you go to how does infinite eternal awareness see this?

It's often fairly quiet.

It might even be laughter or joking.

Whenever I ask the question often,

There's almost like this funny voice.

Really,

You're taking that seriously?

So this kind of flipping to the eternal infinite awareness will just help establish pure awareness as your true identity.

There's really deep benefits in knowing your essence and knowing this pure awareness.

Sometimes I have people who have pretty severe trauma and sometimes we have to go back to the original trauma.

We do this together and we'll see together that no matter how horrible that abuse was,

Their abuser did not eradicate their essence.

It's still here.

It's still intact.

No one can touch.

No one can kill.

No one can hurt your essence.

When people with severe abuse can see this,

It's really a game changer because they can see they're not just the trauma that happened to them.

They're this other thing that no one took away from them and no one ever can take away from them.

Similarly with people with fear and anxiety,

Even when your mind goes crazy,

If you can see that there's something that doesn't go crazy,

Even when your mind's agitated or fearful,

There's something that never moves.

Awareness is never lost.

Awareness is never anxious.

Awareness is never fearful.

Awareness just is.

When you can connect with that,

Even though I know it's subtle,

It's really a game changer.

The program is really designed,

This program of life,

To walk you all the way back home.

Like the Buddha,

He had everything he wanted.

He had the perfect life and yet he was like,

Something feels not quite it.

Still something's unsatisfactory.

This system of the Four Noble Truths and this feeling of something's not quite right is what's going to take you all the way back to complete awareness,

To complete freedom.

Because we'll be slightly off,

Even if we get everything the way we want in this life,

It won't be it because that's not quite it.

And you'll go and go until you get to the very end,

Until you get to the source.

It's a beautiful system in a way when you really see it.

It's designed to take you completely all the way back home.

Everybody.

A long time ago a Buddhist teacher told me that when we die,

It's like we're in this big corral with all these doors.

And whatever door that we're standing next to,

Which is usually a door we've practiced in our life,

Is when death comes,

We fall through that door.

It's almost like a swinging door and you fall into the next lifetime through that door.

So really be aware of what door you're standing next to.

Are you standing next to the pure awareness door?

Are you standing next to the silence door?

Or are you standing next to the fear door or anxiety door?

You know,

When death comes,

You're not going to have an opportunity,

There couldn't be any moments to walk across the corral to the other door.

It's the one you're next to now.

So work with that.

Work with seeing what door you're standing next to and if it's not the one you want to,

Really doing this communion with your beloved in these practices.

This is a limited time only offering this human realm.

This realm of separation and we get to practice things and learn things here that if we were in another realm like where Deepa Ma is,

We had a body of light,

We might not get to practice love and service.

So really using this time well and what you cultivate and what do you want to learn here in this limited time only?

And what door do you want to stand by every moment,

Every day,

As far as what you're practicing?

One of my students in her 30s,

She's struggling with cancer and she wrote me a few months ago about results she's experienced since doing these spiritual immunity type practices and microdosing and I asked if I could share with you what she wrote.

She said yes.

She wrote,

The presence to me now is almost too expansive for words and intellectual understanding.

This has not been a comfortable experience.

I'm not sure the dismantling of the matrix or Mara ever is,

But the blessings that have come out of losing everything I thought dearest to me,

Quote,

Things I did not believe I could live without that space,

This space is something else altogether,

Way outside of suffering.

If this is dying,

I'm already in heaven.

I'm also surrendering to the process of whatever the next condition brings with a lot more equanimity and ease.

This is living.

So this is the effect that a commitment to spiritual practices does.

The resilience that prepares us for death and also the being able to know what is deathless.

Being able to know yourself as the essence,

Your true nature.

And then that's the ultimate spirituality and spiritual immunity that heals yourself and heals the world.

I'd like to close with an example of how we can actually create super spiritual immunity through these practices,

Not only just making yourself more calm like my student and your life more equanimous,

But the ability to affect many,

Many others when we do these practices,

When you know yourself as that bowl of light,

When you're cultivating that awareness you.

So this is a story from Jacques Lucerin.

He was a 19 year old Frenchman who was blind and he was imprisoned in Buchenwald for being a French resistance fighter.

He was one of only 30 people that survived Buchenwald.

2000 people died.

He was one of only 30.

And in 1944,

A man came through the camps that changed Jacques Lucerin and gave him this incredible super spiritual immunity.

And he wrote about him years later in his book.

This man's name was Jeremy Regard.

And this is what Jacques Lucerin wrote about him.

In the middle of block 57,

Jeremy Regard found joy.

He found it in times of day when we were all only terrified.

What kind of joy was this?

It was a joy that is unconditional and that no condition,

Even the worst,

Can destroy it.

When Jeremy wandered through the block,

We could breathe.

In my memory,

I can follow his light and the pure way he took through the crowd.

The experience of the concentration camp couldn't touch his center.

Jeremy had reached his center and found there the supernatural,

Or if you dislike that word,

He had found inside what's essential.

What is not dependent on circumstances,

What exists at every time and in every place in pain and in joy,

He had found the fountain of life.

So this is spiritual resilience.

This is why we practice.

May you find that spiritual,

What is essential fountain of life in you and be able to share that with others.

Thank you.

Reviews

What wonderful insight and a path to explore. Thank you!

Thank you for sharing this wisdom.