The Buddha's Revolution

A contemplation on examining suffering and the Buddha's First Noble Truth. From the Kali Durga Yoga Spring Yintensive 20HR Teacher Training at True Nature in Carbondale, Colorado March 2021. The Buddha used one word in his sermons more than any other- Bhavana. Meaning, to cultivate. The training we provide is a nod towards humananity's agency to direct our attention to areas in which we’d like to manifest.

Transcript

So it said that it was on a full moon in May when the Buddha woke up.

He was 27 years old at the time and had just a depth of insight that fueled a spiritual revolution.

And some of the contemplations that he traversed that night still to this day provide such a rich process of inquiry for so many insight seekers,

So many spiritual seekers.

The first teaching he ever gave from that experience of reaching nirvana,

Just on the eve of his 27th summer,

Was that ordinary life involves anguish.

The first teaching he ever gave suffering,

It exists.

It is part of the path.

And that is,

I think,

Just such an incredibly compassionate place to start.

So that every being that's been touched by or exposed to the Buddha's teachings knows that something hasn't necessarily gone awry when difficulty emerges.

Rather,

We have an opportunity to use discord,

Disharmony,

Disturbance,

Disease as material for our own evolution.

Turn it on to the path.

It becomes a stepping stone into deeper insights.

So anguish,

Discontent,

Part of the package,

We signed up for it.

Part of the soul contract we're going to experience with the Buddha called dukkha.

D-U-K-K-H-A,

Dukkha.

That's a Pali term,

So just breaking that down.

Dukkha means space.

Like Akashic records,

It's like the ether.

Do means collapse or lack of.

So dukkha is that constricted collapse where we forget our spacious nature.

Like when the walls just feel like they're closing in and we're suffering.

So no space in the inner altar.

We just feel like we're existing in this really tight field.

It's congested,

It's contracted.

That's the feeling of dukkha.

Another translation of dukkha has been that the wheels are off-center.

Right,

At that time it was like an ox and cart was like the major way of getting around.

So dukkha was used to kind of explain what happens when a wheel falls off.

We can't really get anywhere,

We just collapse,

We're misaligned,

There's no movement.

And dukkha ranges,

Suffering,

Pain,

It's all relative.

So I love Sharon Salzberg has described dukkha as what happens when you know you get a shopping cart at the grocery store and one of the wheels is sticky and squeaking.

Like that's dukkha.

You're just like,

Damn it.

Like that's a little bit of suffering.

When your wheels are off-center,

That's dukkha.

And there's minor daily little traumas.

What Mark Epstein calls the trauma of everyday life.

We all come to the mat with recent or ancient wounds,

Minuscule or otherwise,

It's material.

And if you don't have something grandiose to deal with in your meditation practice,

Something minor is going to come up,

Like whether or not you did the dishes.

So there's just a way in which we've developed expertise in picking out areas of discontent and fixating on them.

We're really good at that.

So you know,

One of the ways that I feel like it's really helpful to relate to the Four Noble Truths is through verbiage,

Through activity.

So how we relate to the First Noble Truth is through the verb to examine or to explore,

Get to know your suffering,

Get to know what on a daily basis causes your discontent.

Just become really curious.

What upsets me?

Normal or major?

And then the Second Noble Truth is that that anguish we feel,

That suffering that we feel is due to our reactivity.

The way that we respond to stimulus,

To circumstance,

To conditions is what's going to inform the level of suffering we have to work with in this life.

It said that every experience is built through two waves,

Two waves of experience.

The first is the stimulus itself,

The shopping cart squeaking.

But that's not the entire experience,

Right?

The issue is not the issue.

The second wave of experience is how we meet the first wave.

Through a breath,

Through a little check-in,

A little self-pep talk,

A moment of pause to just regather,

Recollect,

And then decide how to respond.

So the way we meet what's happening to us will inform the level of suffering that we have to move through in this life.

So suffering is a choice.

And that was the Buddha's most revolutionary insight.

Our pain can be avoided because it's our reactivity to pain that causes deeper anguish.

And the third noble truth is that that reactivity,

That explosive reactivity,

Can cease.

We can retrain the nervous system to slow down and sustain a sense of inner stability even when the world is crashing down around you.

That's what nirvana is.

That's what enlightenment is.

It's the release between the two waves of experience so that the two don't come crashing down on one another and you have a tsunami.

Something happens,

You can detach for a moment,

Get a bird's eye view of what's emerging now,

And then choose how to meet it.

So our reactivity can cease.

Now this has been cognitively proven,

To bring the Buddha and neuroscience to meet today on this frontier.

It's been proven that our nervous system responds to stimulus,

Outer stimulus,

A sound,

A moving object,

A crash in the background,

A whiff of a smell,

Whether it's pleasant or disdainful.

It takes the brain about three milliseconds to process it.

So it's like instantaneous reactivity.

There's a way in which whatever stimulus happens through whatever sense or seeing,

Smelling,

Tasting,

Thinking,

Three milliseconds later,

Like a half a second later,

We're either attracted to that stimulus and we want more of it.

So we go into craving.

I like the way that felt.

How can I get more of it?

It's not going to be okay if that goes away.

So I want to make sure I control my external conditions to get more of that.

Or we're instantaneously repulsed by it.

A loud crash in the background or the smell of a garbage truck rolling by or whatever,

Instantly,

Energetically,

We're repulsed and we're pushing away,

Aversion.

So when any moment throughout our day,

We're craving something or we're averse to something and we're just constantly being pulled to wanting more of a certain feeling and less of something else and wanting to curate our environment so we can feel aligned.

And that's exhausting because whatever we're craving is impermanent and that's going to go away.

So if we need that thing to feel okay,

There's going to be deeper Dukkha because it's not going to last.

That's why Hara cultivation is so essential because that space doesn't need anything.

It just is.

So to get to explore our reactivity and notice those quick triggers,

That's the first step.

Of course,

In reaching Nirvana because then we just want to start to slowly create some spaciousness between the stimulus and how we're reacting.

It's okay to have preferences and ideals.

I'm not suggesting that we learn to love the smell of a steaming pile of garbage.

But it's like the ability to just walk through pouring rain without cringing at getting wet.

Just a sense of knowing that's an impermanent condition of perhaps less than ideal climate and not cringing when things don't go your way.

So that's what Nirvana is and that was the third truth that the Buddha suggested.

It can be true for all of us that we can choose how we respond to stimulus.

And for that third truth to really take root means that throughout the day,

We should recognize those moments when we're not consumed by the details.

Because we're mostly drowning in conditions,

In analyzing conditions.

How do I look?

How did that taste?

How does this feel?

How would I like this to be moving forward?

Conditions.

What is it like in those moments throughout your day when you're just not consumed by the details of mundane life?

In the semblance of or container of one yin pose,

Five minutes in child's pose,

There are moments when you're suffering and in total anguish,

You're really experiencing dukkha.

I hate this.

Why am I here?

I should have done more before I got here.

My whole life has been a lie.

Not practicing enough.

I'm not good enough.

Whatever the narrative is.

And then like so temperamental as a species.

And the next breath,

It's like,

I could be here for another moment or two.

This is good.

I'm good.

Now what's changed between those two moments?

Presumably not very much.

You're still in child's pose.

You're still in the same body,

In the same room.

That toxic ex-partner who's still in your field.

You still would like to make more money or lose five pounds or whatever it is.

The details are still there,

But there's a moment when you're just not consumed by them.

And that's nirvana.

That's enlightenment.

We all have access to that.

But we just want more pockets of time in that remembrance.

So noting throughout the day,

When you're feeling genuine contentment,

Santosha,

Contentment,

Peace.

When you're genuinely feeling integrated.

And then noting when you're feeling circumstantial contentment,

Condition-based happiness.

Because that's a great thing to have.

I'm not suggesting that we don't delight in having the perfect meal.

You know,

Drinking your kale smoothie and the sun is shining and you have the right layers of clothes on and you feel like you've really been productive that day and you feel healthy.

You had a good talk with your mother and all of those conditions and you feel happy.

Great.

Note that.

Note that it's circumstantial because all of those conditions are going to change and you're going to drink your smoothie and then you're going to get chilly and you're going to get annoyed at your mom and then you're going to have forgotten to do some chore you wanted and all of those conditions are gone.

Can you still be content then?

So noting genuine versus circumstantial contentment and just noticing when you're flipping between the two and if you actually have access to genuine contentment that is not condition-based.

Now that's the third noble truth.

Nobody can cease,

We can become peaceful irrespective of external conditions.

Now the fourth noble truth just lays out a path,

Ways that we can reach that spaciousness,

That agency to reach genuine contentment and that's the fourth noble truth is a segue to the eightfold path.

The Buddha was a list maker.

I'm not going to get into the eightfold path today,

That's for another time but essentially it's just a list of eight different modalities to walk through the life course that kind of helps with genuine contentment.

Right speech,

Right livelihood,

Right intentionality,

A wise way of just moving through the world to try to decrease your dukkha.

Pause there for any comments or questions.

Pretty straightforward,

Yeah.

Okay.

So then I'll just embellish the first noble truth so we can examine and explore our suffering a little bit more.

And just a note on that that's coming up right now is I had this coca leaf reading in Peru maybe five years ago now.

The Sacred Valley of Peru is a really special place to me.

I live there on and off and teach there once a year and so whenever I go I always visit the same shaman.

Her name is Doris and she's totally wacky and incredible and I stay with her on her land in the Sacred Valley and every time she'll read my coca leafs.

She just gathers up a bag of a medicine pouch of coca leaves and lays it out on the table and blows it onto the table and then she reads it,

Oh there's your daughter,

You're going to have that in a few years and see your partner there and this is what's happening and just she's like really an incredible experience and one of the readings that I'll never forget from her is she blows the leaves and she pulls one out and she goes,

Oh how interesting.

It's your life's work to teach people how to grieve and at the time I was like,

Oh.

That is dark,

That is dark.

And now several years later really investigating the dharma,

I don't think it's morose or dark or bitter to frame training time and retreat time around these concepts like suffering and loss and I lead whole workshops on trauma and grief and it's just become increasingly clear that those teachings are the opposite of leaning into shadow work.

It's actually like our ability to navigate our suffering makes us lighter people.

It's just liberating to know we're going to grieve.

One of the Taoist practices,

First thing when you wake up,

My death is certain,

That's the first thing.

And then another thing they say,

Everyone who is born will die.

Everyone you love will die.

It's like the first,

You frame it to feel like it's such a bitter,

Dark concept but to know that death is certain in all of its forms.

The death of the chaos smoothie,

The death of the rainstorm,

It's all impermanent and that adds such a lightness of being because I have a choice to really appreciate what's here now,

Whether it's beautiful or it's bitter.

And so to lean in,

To recognize what causes us suffering actually just engenders a greater sense of joy.

So to teach one how to grieve is really also to teach one how to celebrate life.

And so learning our personal tukka is one of the most freeing,

Joyful things in the long run.

And though we like to think that our life course is so complex and no one could ever possibly understand the really specific nuances of the traumatic relationships we've had and our personal concerns and the great,

Deep,

Contemplative uncertainties,

Those big,

Dark question marks in our life,

We've really been able to narrow down the things that cause us suffering and it's all pretty much the same.

And there's a list of like three things.

They're pretty broad and generalized so you can,

You know,

Distill from these broad teachings the ways in which your nuance,

Pain is felt.

But generally speaking,

There's really only three ways that we experience dissatisfaction,

Discontent,

Tukka.

So just see again because Buddhism is more of a science than a religion.

So this is a theory I'm proposing.

This is like the hypothesis.

There are three ways we suffer.

I'm going to give you that not as a dogma to just ingest and absorb,

But to start to examine your own suffering and see if it's true and see if the fears you have fall into one of these categories.

So number one,

What's called dukkha dukkha,

Like double dukkha.

We suffer from circumstances that are outside of our control.

Okay,

So dukkha alone is like some non-preferential condition that happens,

Some non-ideal circumstance like we get sick.

That's dukkha.

It's not suffering.

It's painful.

It's inevitable.

We're going to get sick.

We're going to get injured.

We're going to get sick.

We're going to have to confront our own death.

So that's dukkha.

But dukkha dukkha is the suffering of our suffering.

So being sick is one thing,

But the kind of relation that we have to it,

Like the anger on top of it.

I'm so angry I'm sick.

Why did God do this to me?

I didn't deserve this.

How long am I going to feel this way?

That person should have gotten it instead of me.

So the most painful thing is not the event that's non-ideal,

But the narrative around the event.

So we become oppressed or we really drown in the narrative of the dukkha.

That's dukkha dukkha.

That's why I love working with internal family systems because there are parts of us that have sorrow and fatigue and frustration and jealousy and resentment.

There are parts of us that feel that way.

And we learn to skillfully attend to those parts.

I know you feel that way.

How can I support you?

How can I help you feel?

Recognize that this is a non-ideal circumstance.

You're heartbroken.

You messed up.

You're lonely.

You're scared.

That's one thing.

We can hold that.

But the most difficult feeling to heal is unattended sorrow,

Not attending to our grief.

That's the most difficult trauma to find a way through.

So the IFS model is skillfully attending to the parts of us that have dukkha.

Also when we appropriate parts that have dukkha,

Then we recognize the boundless being,

The nature within that isn't sick,

That isn't lost.

So we're not full organism of just suffering.

There are parts of us that have pain.

So the second dukkha is anitya dukkha.

Anitya means change or time because change happens over time.

So in Sanskrit,

That's the same word.

Anitya dukkha is suffering when things do or do not change according to our preferences,

When we suffer in time.

Like in the child's pose,

When time isn't moving fast enough for you and you're just waiting for the bell to ring.

That's dukkha.

That's anitya dukkha.

I want something to change and it's not happening quick enough.

I feel sick and I'm not getting better yet.

Or wanting something to stay exactly as it is,

To feel okay.

So the anxiety of change,

That includes the suffering we have over our aging process,

Over decay,

Death.

So anitya dukkha is the suffering of impermanence.

Whether things are not impermanent fast enough or when things are changing too fast,

We suffer.

So another way to think of anitya dukkha is that we're in resistance to now.

We're resisting now.

And that is the only place in time that we can suffer,

Is right now.

So meditation and the yin practice offers an opportunity to take something that's unpleasant and to unblend from it.

This is painful.

You know,

As long as it's not that risky pain I spoke about,

This is uncomfortable.

I want this to change.

And just taking that as an object and unblending from it.

So put it in front of you in the meditation practice and sit it in front of you and look at it.

Huh,

How interesting.

This is unpleasant.

Or whatever's coming up.

And then just as you unblend from it,

As you take a part that's in pain and you look at it and you meet it and the two of you hold hands,

You take a sunset stroll down the Hara landscape,

Whatever it is.

I have parts that really need skillful attendance,

Like my organization part needs like the motherly love.

So when she's distracting me in meditation and I can't quiet because she's listing off all the things that I need to do and she wants to make lists and she's like redecorating the kitchen and her head and all of these productive oriented parts that's causing suffering.

We're not getting out of this meditation quick enough.

We need to move on.

Life is moving on.

We've got things to do.

That's a part of me.

I can bring her out and unblend from her and see her and see her fears and see her suffering.

And the very act of separating what IFS calls unblending,

When we unblend from our parts,

We can actually befriend our parts.

If we're blended,

Then we're acting through our parts and that neuroses.

But if we can unblend,

We can befriend the part and ask it what it needs.

Like it's a seven year old girl that I'm babysitting.

You're being distracting.

We're doing an activity.

What's going on?

And then she'll say,

I'm stressed.

There's all this stuff that needs to happen.

I would rather do something else.

Okay.

Now I have a choice.

Now I can skillfully attend to that part.

I can get out of my meditation seat and start making a list or go check my emails and go on with the day.

And that part would have felt listened to and heard.

So that's a choice.

Or I can kind of,

As the mother figure,

Lay some authority.

We're meditating for agataka.

There's like,

We're two minutes in.

We've got 22 to go.

We're going to do this.

Come lay down in the belly.

Just take a rest.

After the meditation,

You negotiate like they're children,

Right?

After the meditation,

We're going to get up and you and I,

We're going to go organize the closet.

And we'll put all of the yoga pants,

We'll fold them and we'll put them in that cubby.

Then we'll check the email and we'll do that.

She's like,

Okay,

Yeah,

That sounds good.

So she's heard.

I've understood her fears.

Now she's going to be less distracting in the meditation.

And then she can come be quiet and I can move on.

But then I really have to follow up after the practice so that she builds trust with the inner mother.

I have to go do what we just negotiated.

So you have to attend to your parts.

The part of me that needs like a vigorous vinyasa practice.

I didn't get that this morning.

I woke up later than I would have liked.

So it's like,

Okay,

That part of me is feeling like a little bit worried.

Am I going to get my workout in today?

I know that that makes the whole inner family feel better.

And that's my job to make sure we do that.

You didn't let me do my job.

So if I don't speak to her at some point in the day,

I know that wasn't done.

Maybe today's a rest day.

Maybe we'll do something this evening.

Tomorrow we'll have an extra half hour or whatever it is.

So it's like we're just negotiating with the needs of our parts all the time.

What do you need,

Honey?

And then you can negotiate.

Well,

We're not doing that right now,

But later we can do this.

And we feel less crazy when our parts have something to say.

And we also feel a little bit more clear about our boundaries.

Erin and I were having a talk yesterday about boundaries.

I feel pretty confident asking for what I need so that I'm taking care of my parts.

I feel like they're realistic needs.

They're not overindulgent because I've negotiated with my parts enough to be like,

Yes,

I understand that that's needed.

I'm unapologetically going to make sure that happens daily,

Weekly,

Whatever.

So that's kind of a nice way to get clear on what your boundaries are.

The parts,

We need our parts to help us with that.

So externalizing the parts,

Those parts suffer with a nidja dukkha when things aren't changing quick enough or they're changing too fast.

And then the last suffering is a vidya dukkha.

Vidya is,

V-I-D-Y-A is awareness,

Clarity,

Insight,

Connection.

A just means lack of.

So a-vidya.

We suffer constantly in gross or extremely subtle ways by not feeling inherently connected.

By just not knowing our basic goodness,

Our ground.

By forgetting we have a wisdom nature.

We suffer when we forget who we really are.

We suffer when we forget who we really are.

So let's find child's pose for a moment to bake that in.

Reviews

Interesting perspective. Thanks for posting