The Heart of the Matter

In this talk we explore five steps to untangle the tangles of our life—and free the heart and mind:
1. Turn towards your experience—to all that is arising in body, heart, and mind
2. Open fully and wholeheartedly to all what is present—saying ‘yes’ to what is
3. Open to and investigate how and where you are suffering (i.e., experiencing clinging, conflict, unhappiness, or sense of dissatisfaction)
4. Investigate your own role in creating or perpetuating your suffering (i.e., the ways in which you are in conflict with your experience, wanting things to be different than they are)
5. Seeing clearly your own role in your suffering provides insight that is freeing—when you see clearly, you can let go and live with greater freedom.

We finished by exploring Pema Chodron’s teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist concept of shenpa, or ‘being hooked’—and how it can help us find freedom through meeting our experience with acceptance and without judgment.

Transcript

The theme today,

I'm calling this the heart of the matter.

And somewhere it's going to be a kind of a culmination of a number of talks that I've been giving here and elsewhere on kind of broadly the theme of untangling the tangles of our lives.

And another way of putting it is freeing the heart and the mind.

Now I've talked about five steps to free the heart and mind or five steps to untangle the tangles of our lives.

I like the metaphor of being tangled.

And I just want to begin on a kind of big picture level about talking about the Buddha's teachings.

As almost all of you know,

The Buddha's teachings really all center on and all revolve around the question of suffering and the end of suffering.

The Buddha said,

I teach one thing,

Suffering and its end.

And people say,

Oh,

That's two things.

Well,

Kind of one thing,

Suffering and its end,

Suffering and the end of suffering.

His concern,

As you know,

I think probably with his own story of wealth and luxury growing up and having everything,

But recognizing there was something missing that he was going to get sick and old and die.

Is there any freedom amidst the vicissitudes of life,

The changing flow of life and the fact that we are all going to die,

Every one of us,

And we'll all experience suffering and loss in our lives?

Is there freedom in the midst of this?

Is it possible that we can find freedom,

That we can experience freedom?

Or are we just kind of swept along by fate,

Just like world stuff happens and some people are lucky and some are not so lucky?

Do we really have a choice in our happiness,

Our well-being?

Or is that just subject to the gods,

However things happen,

The luck of the dice or whatever?

And as you know,

The Buddha in his own life found an answer to that question.

He awakened after it was not an easy process over six years of searching,

But recognized,

Realized in both senses of the word,

Realized,

Achieved,

And made real the understanding that in the midst of everything,

In the midst of the earthquakes and the hurricanes and the people doing harmful things and wars and conflicts and sickness and everything,

That it's possible to be free in the midst of that.

It doesn't mean we change it.

It doesn't mean we become supernatural or avoid the things that come with being human,

But we can change our relationship.

And that's really what all of the teachings revolve around.

And what I'm going to really be focusing a lot on today is our own role in both our suffering and in our freedom.

That we are both implicated,

But also very much actors.

It's not all determined or predetermined.

The choices we make really do determine our well-being and our happiness and our freedom.

And so really all of the teachings point to a kind of,

You know,

Which way will I go in any moment?

Which way will I go?

This way will tend to lead to unhappiness,

To suffering.

And this way will lead to greater freedom,

Greater well-being,

Greater happiness.

I mean,

We're always kind of in a way on that knife edge in every moment.

So that's the importance of the practice to bring awareness to each moment that each moment is important.

Each moment is essential.

Am I choosing to be doing something that's going to be harmful to me or to others?

Or am I choosing kindness,

Compassion,

Awareness,

Equanimity,

All of the other qualities that the Buddha teaches about?

So everything really is about,

For the Buddha,

Was about helping people find,

Helping his followers and anyone who was interested and was open to experience freedom in their own lives.

The teachings are all completely pragmatic.

They're completely about,

You know,

What can I do to find greater freedom?

And the teachings are about what helps us to do that.

So I've been speaking in recent weeks about five steps.

For me,

I found looking in a somewhat systematic way about how do we go from entanglement to greater freedom for kind of untangling ourselves,

Getting ourselves unstuck,

Unhooked.

And I just kind of lay out,

I talked of the first step as just turning towards our experience.

That's kind of fundamental of looking inward.

We're often looking outward like,

What do I have to change to be happy?

I've got to get this person out of my life and this person in,

And I've got to get this.

We're trying to work things out there.

But as all of the teachings point to and come back to,

It's really all about our relationship to our experience.

So turning inward and looking at what am I experiencing right now?

Am I caught up in the tangle or am I actually experiencing ease and well-being?

And if I am,

Can I deepen that?

Can I deepen the happiness?

Can I deepen the peace?

And can I see when I'm getting stuck and kind of move in a different direction?

So turning towards our experience at first.

And the second is opening wholeheartedly to whatever we're experiencing,

Making space for everything.

That's kind of the meditation that we just did.

It was very much about opening to everything.

What helps us to do that?

What helps us to provide the space to say,

Okay,

Yes to this?

And can I say yes to this too?

And this difficult experience,

Can I make space for this as well?

So we're doing it in a sense,

We're cultivating equanimity,

We're cultivating acceptance and kindness to hold on our experience.

So in a way,

Those are the fundamentals turning towards our experience,

Opening to what's present.

And then from there,

The practice I think is one of investigating,

Is kind of looking inward at our experience and saying,

Okay.

The third step is to look at,

Say,

Is there suffering?

Is there something that's painful or difficult right now?

You know,

In any moment we can turn inward and say,

What am I noticing?

Maybe it may not be so noticeable in this moment,

But maybe when we finish and you go back into your life,

You kind of,

Oh,

Yeah,

I've got to go back to work and got this difficult colleague or the boss,

Or I got all these money worries or these health concerns or the political situation.

Some way in which we can get tangled,

We can get stuck.

I like metaphors that speak to the ways that we can experience this.

You know what the Buddha called dukkha,

Unsatisfactoriness.

Suffering is the most common translation of dukkha.

But I think a better sense is feeling things are not the way we want them to be.

Unsatisfactory,

Dissatisfaction,

It could be unhappiness.

And just to look at our experience and say,

Is there suffering right now?

Is there unsatisfactoriness,

Unhappiness,

Dissatisfaction?

The metaphors that I find helpful,

The idea of being tangled,

That things are wrapped around the axle as the expression goes.

They're not smooth,

They're not easy,

They're not flowing.

They're like,

Oh,

I need this to be different.

I want this to be different.

Another term is being hooked.

In some way,

We're not free.

We're stuck would be another term.

It's often experiences,

I don't like this,

I don't want this,

I don't want things to be this way.

This should be different.

I've shared Pema Chodron's Tibetan expression or Tibetan word for this.

I spoke about this some last week of the term shenpa,

Which is often translated as attachment.

But she said the best way of describing it is being hooked,

Like a fish caught on a hook.

We're not free.

We've become kind of enmeshed and tangled.

We've become hooked.

We've in some way taken the bait.

She talks about it.

She gives the metaphor or the simile of poison ivy.

She says we humans are like children who have a bad case of poison ivy.

Because we want to relieve the discomfort,

We automatically scratch.

It seems a perfectly sane thing to do.

In the face of anything we don't like,

We automatically try to escape.

We're experiencing something that we don't like and we're wanting it to be different.

One way of looking at it is suffering as a gap between how things are and how we want them to be.

If how things are is like this,

And how we're wanting them to be is like that,

And there's a difference there,

Then we will experience this as suffering.

We'll experience this as,

No,

I don't like this.

I want it to be warmer right now.

I don't like this cold,

Hypothetically.

I want this person not to be annoying me right now by saying things I disagree with,

Believing things that I don't believe.

I want them to be different.

Insofar as I'm wanting to be different and they're showing up as they are,

As they will tend to do,

Then there'll be suffering.

Then there'll be that gap.

As they say on the tube in London,

Mind the gap.

Mind the gap.

So just some ways in which we can experience this gap or this sense of being hooked.

One of the ways is when we're wanting something,

That experience of we're wanting something we don't have.

I want this.

I'd love to have this new device or this new car.

We're getting not just in a sense of an aspiration,

Oh,

It'd be nice to have that,

Or it'd be nice to have a nice meal,

But really the mind is getting contracted around that.

I need to have it.

There's some sense of tension around that,

Of that wanting.

When it's more extreme,

We can use the expression of being hooked.

Being hooked on drugs or on drink or other things,

Sex,

If you have an addiction.

Anything we're strongly craving,

Possessions or a person.

It could be video games that we get so caught up in it.

There's such an energy that we get to wanting that.

We want more of it.

We need to go back to it.

We're feeling lacking if we're not doing it.

Any of these things,

So that's an expression of being hooked,

Being tangled in the craving,

A more obvious kind of craving.

But we can also experience being hooked when we're in conflict with a person,

Somebody at work or a family member who they're doing things we don't like.

They're not living the way we want them to or their views may be polar opposite to ours.

They're sharing them in emails and we don't like this and we are annoyed by it.

It could be something.

We've had a neighbor with leaving out their dog quite late into the evening.

It's easy to get wrapped around that.

In one level,

It's a sound.

Sound coming and going,

Coming and going,

Rising and passing.

But the story in our mind is,

Why are they doing this?

Why are they imposing this on their neighbors?

Then the mind goes into judging them.

Oh,

They're so selfish or thoughtless or whatever.

The story,

We build it into something and that's the dukkha part of it.

That's the suffering.

If we could just hear the sound and say,

Oh,

Dog's barking,

Okay,

Then it's not a problem.

But it's kind of when we get hooked on that in that way or we're feeling pain or discomfort and we don't like it.

We want it to be different.

That's another example of dukkha,

Of suffering,

Of this unsatisfactoriness or being hooked or being tangled.

Another example is when we're stressed or we're worried.

What happens is we might have a lot to do and the mind then starts saying,

Oh,

I'm never going to be able to do this.

Then I've got too much to do and I'm not going to be able to do it well.

Then I'm going to fail and then people are going to think less of me.

Then maybe I'll lose my job.

They can kind of build up.

Then you lose your house and then you lose your relationship and you end up in a ditch,

Naked,

Hungry and alone.

I'm just saying that just because the mind can just keep creating scenarios because it's all in the mind.

That's just another example of a way we can get caught up in another form of unhappiness,

Of suffering.

Another example is we can get caught up in guilt or shame.

When we're kind of hooked around,

Oh,

I did this.

I'm so terrible,

And ruminating on the past.

Again,

That's kind of that suffering,

Getting tangled in that way.

I mean,

We can get hooked into procrastination,

Putting off something we need to do and feeling like,

Oh,

I'm feeling bad.

Oh,

I should be doing this,

But I keep putting it off.

Then again,

There's a gap between what's happening and what we think should be happening.

And there's the dukkha.

There's the dukkha.

I don't know if any of those resonate for you,

If you have other ways in which you get kind of hooked or tangled.

I think for each of us,

We all have our different expressions of how we get caught,

How we get tangled.

It reminds me,

I think it's the beginning of Anna Karenina of Tolstoy saying,

That all happy families are alike,

But unhappy families differ in their own ways.

It's almost like all joy is alike in a way,

All genuine happiness,

But we have a million different ways in which we suffer.

We have all our individual ways in which we get hooked and which we get tangled.

So looking at our own,

How is it for me?

Where do I get stuck?

Where do I get tangled?

And then when we do that,

We can say,

Okay,

That brings us to the next step,

Which is,

What is my role in this tangle?

What is my role in this being hooked?

So this first one is recognizing,

Investigating and recognizing our suffering.

The next step is the second noble truth,

Is to see that the cause of suffering is always something that we are doing or not doing.

There's some way in which we are playing a role in our unhappiness.

It's not just the thing itself.

It's not just the dog barking.

It's not just the difficult colleague.

It's not just the sickness or the busyness or whatever.

It's something we're adding to that.

We tend to think that it's this person is doing that.

This politician who's doing something,

Passing laws that we think are harmful.

They're doing this and they are causing my suffering,

Our suffering or whatever.

But in order for it to be suffering,

There has to be something that we're doing that is unskillful,

That's unhelpful.

Suffering isn't caused by any of these experiences or situations.

They are certainly precipitating,

They're sparks.

But the cause,

As the Buddha says,

Is craving.

There's something that we're doing,

We're holding on to,

Or we're resisting,

That is perpetuating,

Creating or perpetuating the suffering.

The key is suffering isn't a thing.

It's not solid or permanent.

It's always a relationship.

Suffering is always a relationship.

It's really always an unskillful relationship to our experience or to what is happening.

So,

I'm wanting a family member or a colleague to be acting differently.

It's that holding on to them being different than they are that is the cause of the suffering,

Not the fact that they're doing it.

The dog barking or the family member sending emails that we disagree with is just a thing.

It's not suffering in itself.

It's only when we take the bait,

When we grab hold of the hook and get hooked by it that there's suffering.

It's not the wanting that's a problem.

It's the clinging.

We can want something,

And if we want something,

Assuming it's not a harmful thing,

We can want something.

It's often used to be said that desire is the problem.

Desire is an energy of life.

Desire isn't a problem.

Clinging is the problem.

It's when the desire turns into clinging that it becomes problematical for us in our life.

In the language of the Buddha,

He calls this craving.

In the Pali language,

It's tanha,

Which literally translates as thirst.

So,

In that sense,

We all know what it feels like to be thirsty.

But what we tend to do is when we're thirsty,

When we're clinging in that way,

We drink salt water,

Which makes us more thirsty.

It's like Pema Chodron talking about the shempa and we're itching,

But what we're doing is we're scratching the itch.

We're needing to scratch the itch.

So,

This is the second noble truth that the craving is the cause of suffering.

It's not the thing.

It's not the emotion,

The pain.

It's how we're relating to it.

It's the clinging.

I share and you're probably familiar with this,

That term is a saying,

Pain is inevitable,

Suffering is optional.

Suffering is the add-on.

Think of it as an add-on to our experience.

Probably many of you are familiar with the two arrows metaphor.

The first arrow is you feel you've been hit by the arrow,

Ouch,

Pain,

Really hurting.

The second arrow is like,

Who did this?

How could they do this to me?

They're terrible people.

I'm going to give them all this kind of add-ons of what caused the suffering.

The pain is just the pain.

In life,

Pain is inevitable.

It's the suffering that is the optional part.

If we can deal with the suffering in a skillful way,

If we can avoid it by saying,

Okay,

Can I just stay with the pain without adding anything to the experience,

Then we can experience freedom even in the midst of the pain.

The pain being life,

Pain being whatever happens in life.

If we can hold it and meet it in an open and a spacious way,

Then we can experience happiness in the midst of difficulties,

Challenges,

Pain,

Sickness,

Aging,

Death,

And the whole enchilada,

The full catastrophe.

We can experience ease,

Well-being,

And happiness.

This is really the hub,

The core,

As I said,

The heart of the matter of Buddha's teachings.

I meet with a group.

We've been meeting together for 17 years or so.

One of the members of the group shared about how she was driving along and came to a light behind somebody in the car in front.

The person,

I think it was a woman in the car in front,

Opened the window and started tossing stuff out of the car.

Kentucky fried chicken boxes.

My friend,

The person in the group,

All of this.

She shared how it must have been a longer light,

But she shared how she got out of the car and she started picking up the stuff that the person had thrown out of the car.

You could do that in different ways,

Right?

You could do it and say,

Okay,

The person,

Let me clean things up.

But she was sharing how she didn't do it in that way.

She did it like,

I'm going to look at this person and give her a sense of what a selfish,

Thoughtless,

Etc.

Kind of person she is.

She said the woman just kept them in the car in front and just kept looking ahead.

But there's the first arrow.

The stuff is getting tossed out of the car.

Maybe there's a kind of inevitability of the mind going,

Oh,

This is unpleasant.

This is unpleasant.

I don't like to see people throwing trash.

But before it gets to the judging and the separation of like,

Oh,

Yeah,

I don't find this appealing.

You could even get up and pick things up without it being like,

I'm going to show this person how badly they're behaving.

My friend was sharing this story and what was interesting was she was saying,

I felt all this righteousness.

We talked about it as like the second arrow and we can all relate to that.

You're seeing people doing something or hearing about it and doing something and we're getting hooked around that.

How could they do this?

What a terrible person.

How mean,

How selfish,

And all of this.

What was interesting was then my friend had enough awareness to see that.

She said,

Oh,

What a terrible person I am for judging this person.

So then she added the third arrow to the second arrow.

She was judging the judging.

She was judging her own righteousness in the face of the first arrow.

So what's interesting is how we can add arrows to arrows.

We could get angry with ourselves for getting judgmental or we can just have layers and layers of judgment.

Just as we can have layers and layers of fear.

We're fearful of something and we don't want to go there.

We're actually fearful about the fear.

We don't want to go to the place of fear.

We don't want to feel it and how we can add things.

So this is the second arrow.

This is what the Buddha talked about as the craving that causes suffering.

So our job is to work,

Our task is to really see how we're adding to our experience,

How we're staying tangled.

Often it's our beliefs and our stories that keep us hooked.

You know,

This person should be different.

I should be different.

I shouldn't be doing this.

So this is the second noble truth.

In the sequence of these steps,

This is the fourth step.

Open to our experience,

Turn towards our experience,

Open wholeheartedly,

Investigate the suffering and then explore what is my role in this suffering.

What's key is when we see clearly how our holding,

How our resistance is perpetuating the suffering,

Is creating and perpetuating the suffering,

Then in seeing,

We can let go.

Because if we can't see,

There's no chance really of letting go.

If we're not aware,

If we haven't brought it into awareness,

So we're bringing it into awareness and we're saying,

Oh,

I'm actually implicated in this suffering I'm feeling,

In this unhappiness I'm feeling.

There's something that I'm doing or not doing.

There's something that I'm not seeing.

There's something that I'm believing that is helping perpetuate this suffering.

In seeing that,

I could say,

Oh,

Actually it would result in more happiness and more freedom if I could let go of that.

If I could choose not to keep perpetuating it,

Not to keep judging myself,

Not to keep judging somebody else,

Not to keep clinging to the thing that I'm clinging to.

If I could let go.

It's the seeing.

I share this often with Rob Burbea,

Wonderful teacher.

It was his third anniversary of his death actually this week.

He died on the Feast of Vesak,

Which commemorates the birth,

Enlightenment and death of the Buddha.

He died on Vesak of 2020.

This is his third anniversary,

But his book is called Seeing That Frees.

What's key is seeing clearly is what frees us.

When we see something clearly,

Then we can let go.

When we see clearly how holding onto this hot coal is actually burning me,

Then I can let go.

When the seeing becomes clear,

This is vipassana.

Vipassana means clear seeing or insight.

Mindfulness,

Awareness helps us to see clearly.

We bring what is unconscious or unaware into awareness.

When we see clearly,

Then we can let go.

This is the third noble truth,

The noble truth of letting go of suffering,

That freedom is possible.

The Buddha talked about it as nirvana,

Quenching,

Letting go,

A freedom that comes from letting go of clinging.

What I want to finish up with today are some quotes from Pema Chodron,

Particularly her book Taking the Leap,

Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears.

It's a very,

Very short book.

It's like 75 pages,

And yet it's very,

Very rich in practice.

She's a wonderful teacher.

I wanted to share a few quotes from it about how we work with the dukkha,

How we work with the clinging,

And what helps us to let go and experience freedom.

She says,

A little bit kind of background,

She says,

Our energy and the energy of the universe are always in flux,

But we have little tolerance for this unpredictability.

We have little ability to see ourselves and the world as an exciting fluid situation that is always fresh and new.

Instead,

We get stuck in a rut,

The rut of I want and I don't want,

The rut of shempa,

The rut of continually getting hooked by our personal preferences.

So we've been talking about getting hooked,

And she speaks about how we can work with it when we're hooked.

She says the approach here is radical,

Radical,

Deep rooted.

We're encouraged to get comfortable with,

Begin to relax with,

Lean into whatever the experience may be.

So as in the meditation,

Just to open to whatever is present.

We're encouraged to drop the storyline and simply pause,

Look out and breathe.

Simply be present for a few seconds,

A few minutes,

A few hours,

A whole lifetime with our own shifting energies and with the unpredictability of life as it unfolds.

Unfolds,

Wholly partaking in all experiences,

Just exactly as they are.

And then she says a little earlier,

She's in the book,

She says the message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully.

That's been the message.

The only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully.

We normally think that the way to ease our pain is to cover it up or avoid it or push it away.

But what she's saying and what the teachings say is,

Can I stay with what's here,

What I'm experiencing?

It doesn't mean we don't take an Advil or whatever it might be.

We don't choose to change things.

We could do that.

But knowing what to change and what to accept.

She says,

Learn to stay,

Learn to stay with uneasiness,

Learn to stay with the tightening,

Learn to stay with the itch and urge of Shempa so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule our lives and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don't keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.

I shared this last week.

Someone once sent me a bone-shaped dog tag that you could wear on a cord around your neck.

Instead of a dog's name,

It said,

Sit,

Stay,

Heal.

H-E-A-L.

We can heal ourselves and the world by training in this way.

Our practice is to keep coming back and then we come back.

That's the fifth step is to let go.

The letting go that comes with seeing clearly.

We can let go of clinging and that letting go leads to freedom and leads to peace.

Sometimes these teachings can sound like,

Oh,

Acceptance,

Acceptance,

Acceptance.

It sometimes can sound like passivity that we never change anything or nothing.

We always have to just,

Someone does something terrible.

Oh,

That's just the way it is.

That's not what I'm saying and certainly not what the Buddha was saying.

Knowing the difference between what needs to be changed and what to accept and what to change as with the serenity prayer.

Changing what we can change,

Accepting what we can't change,

And having the wisdom to know the difference.

I love this quote from Eckhart Tolle,

Who wrote The Power of Now.

He says,

To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner non-resistance with what happens.

So this,

To be in alignment with what is,

Means to be in a relationship of inner non-resistance with what happens.

It means not to label it mentally as good or bad,

But to let it be.

To let it be.

Now,

Then he asked the question,

Does this mean that you can no longer take action to bring about change in your life?

And then he answers,

On the contrary,

When the basis of your action is inner alignment with the present moment,

Your actions become empowered by the intelligence of life itself.

When the basis of your action is inner alignment with the present moment,

Saying yes to what is,

Then your actions become empowered by the intelligence of life itself.

It's like when we let go,

When we let go,

You think of that saying of Arjun Chars,

Let go a little,

You'll experience a little peace.

Let go a lot,

You'll experience a lot of peace.

Let go completely and you'll experience complete peace.

And then he ends with the line,

Your struggle with the world will be at an end.

And what the teachings point to is,

We can end our struggle with the world.

We can end our struggle with the world.

We don't have to be in conflict with the world.

That doesn't mean we don't change things that we think are helpful to change,

But we do it from that place of inner alignment with what is,

As Eckhart Tolle says.

We're doing it from that place of openness and acceptance and not from the place of clinging.

That makes all the difference in the world.

So we can change.

If we're in that place of inner alignment with the truth,

With reality,

With life as it is,

Then what will naturally happen is we'll have the wisdom and the compassion to act in the world to change what needs to be changed.

But we're doing it not from a place of craving or clinging,

But from a much more spacious place.

Pema Chodron comes back and she shares four ways of working.

She says,

Just keep coming back to square one.

And if square one feels edgy and restless and filled with shampa,

Still you just come back there.

The shampa itself is not the problem.

The ignorance that doesn't acknowledge that you're hooked,

That just goes unconscious and allows you to act it out.

That's the problem.

So it's the being hooked that's the problem.

And so seeing clearly,

And she finishes when she talks about four R's,

The letter R for finding freedom from suffering.

Recognize the shampa,

Refrain from scratching,

That's letting go of the clinging.

Relax into the underlying urge to scratch.

Just allow the feelings to come and go as we were doing in the meditation.

And fourth,

Resolve to continue to interrupt our habitual patterns.

So recognize,

Refrain,

Relax,

And resolve,

Resolve to continue,

To just keep practicing with being with.

And then when we do get hooked again,

We just come back to square one.

We practice again.

So I'll finish there getting unhooked.

Reviews

Truths about the ways we make ourself stumble spoken simply and compassionately. Thank you Hugh

Splendid! Such an engaging and helpful talk.
Thank you so very much Hugh.

Very interesting talk about suffering. Lots to think about. Thank you. 🙏🏻

This was brilliant!! So many good nuggets I will definitely be listening to it again. Thank you Hugh!! 🙏🏾💖🙏🏾

The title says it all. Practical, helpful, and really essential content. It’s one to listen to again and again. Thank you, Hugh, for this talk 🙏❤️