Belonging

One of the important questions that brought me to this path of practice was how do we change?
So many people are looking to change something, they want to suffer less or they feel dissatisfied with their life and they want a change. So how does change happen?
One way is through understanding. Another way that change happens is how we’re conditioned; The conditioning factors that affect us, the impressions that we take in. This talk explores those conditioning factors.

Transcript

One of the important questions that brought me to this path of practice was how do we change?

So many people are looking to change something.

They want to suffer less or they feel dissatisfied with their life and they want to change.

So how does change happen?

And one way is through understanding.

I love the final teaching of the Buddha before he died when Ananda,

The Buddha's attendant for the 45 years that he taught said to him,

What are we going to do to keep these teachings?

How are we going to save them?

And the Buddha answered,

Be your own light.

And this is the understanding that's supported by this insight meditation that we do.

We shine the light on the dark places within us and we start to see more and more and more clearly.

That's understanding.

Another way that change happens is how we,

How we're conditioned.

The conditioning factors that affect us.

The impressions that we take in.

They're from a really old place.

The human mind can be shaped,

The human heart can be shaped and they can be shaped by conditions.

And if we don't understand that,

Then we'll be shaped by forces that are not of our choosing.

So we can also participate in our conditioning and conditioning ourselves in a useful and beneficial way.

So I've been thinking about this topic because the early conditioning I received as a child is rearing its head again.

It does that as we are developing along the path of practice and sometimes it shows up as healed and other times it shows up as a wound that needs tending.

So some of you know that I grew up in a small town in Northern California and we lived on a farm.

And both my parents were heavy drinkers,

Alcoholics and drug users.

And there were always people,

Friends of my dad's who were on our property,

Mostly misfits and people who had experienced trauma.

Vietnam vets or just seekers that lost their way and my dad would just take them in and have them do projects.

Our farmhouse was built in the early 1900s so it needed a lot of work.

And so these guys would come in and they would stay.

They would either camp or they would sleep in a barn and they would fix the roof and refinish the floors and in return,

You know,

They had a place to stay and my mom would feed them.

My mom,

I guess her love language was cooking.

She was a really amazing cook.

So she would feed them and they would drink a lot of alcohol and smoke dope and play music late into the night.

And one of these nights when I was maybe 10 or 11,

I can't recall,

I couldn't drown out the sound of the music and fall asleep.

So I opened up my bedroom window and I snuck out and I cut across our field and a few other fields and ended up at my middle school playground.

And there was a bench that surrounded the jungle gym and I just took a seat.

And the thought that I had was if I sat there long enough,

Maybe somebody would come and rescue me and take me away.

And I had this deep sense that I didn't belong in that household,

That it wasn't safe and I wanted to get away.

So that experience really shaped me.

It really conditioned me.

That was the first true imprint and impression that I didn't belong.

And there were other repeated experiences growing up on the farm that set this impression that it's not safe here and that I don't belong.

So these impressions were sort of steeped in me.

Like tea that sits for a really long time.

Gets darker and darker into my marrow,

Into my emotions and they stayed.

Now sometimes the conditioning factors are what people say.

My father was pretty verbally abusive.

His speech was often mean and name calling was normal.

So one label that he placed on me was that I was the sensitive one in our family.

And that sensitivity,

The way that it was placed was not good.

It was wrong to be so sensitive.

Not good.

The message was you better quit your sniveling kid and get out there and prove yourself.

That was the message.

Because I wouldn't be loved otherwise.

So I developed a really heavy brick wall around myself,

Around my heart.

And that wall,

I'm still deconstructing.

I'm 53 years old,

Still deconstructing that wall.

So all these things are conditioning factors.

And if we live in the memories of them,

We reinforce them.

So if I live in the memories of not belonging,

Of fear,

Of shame,

What's happening is I'm subtly reinforcing those conditions.

And when I came to practice,

I came with these deep conditions,

These messages from childhood.

And what practice has taught me and is still teaching me is that when I really bring my attention to the story of not belonging,

To the source of that phrase that imprinted so deeply,

When I can bear the way that it feels in my body,

That sticky,

Small discomfort,

Then what happens is I bring such great care to it.

Like I would to a child who fell and hurt themselves.

Belonging comes from within when we open our hearts to what was our survival skills.

Belonging that wall propelled me out of that house.

And it ultimately propelled me into this practice.

It's like John O'Donohue puts it,

You know,

Our bodies know that they belong.

It's our minds that make our lives homeless.

So I had to make myself almost physically homeless so that I could teach my body how to listen to my belonging.

So through meditation practice,

We learned that we can choose our conditions.

We can be involved with helping create healthy conditions.

Like our community of practitioners.

You know,

We come together and just this act,

We're creating healthy conditions by caring for our minds,

By resting them,

By following our breath,

And by keep coming back to our breath,

By listening to our bodies.

When we're sitting together,

We all belong.

Our role is simply showing up.

And by showing up,

We're conditioned by that experience.

It may show up as just being aware of one breath during the day or being present when you're washing your dishes after practice.

There's a conditioning happening in practice.

And people will say things and do things in life that will impact you.

And those that impact can be really powerful.

It calls us to look at who we choose to spend time with,

And the values that those people have.

Are they in line with your values?

They make an impact.

So,

For example,

If you're spending time with someone who is really critical and angry a lot,

That will touch you.

It's a conditioning factor.

So we look at our conditioning.

And over time,

Maybe we'll understand that the conditioning isn't our fault.

It's our responsibility to care for,

But it's not our fault.

Wes Nisker,

A teacher and really a lovely human being.

One of his Dharma teachings he offers is this teaching that I use a lot,

That he teaches from.

And it is that phrase,

You are not your fault.

It's a really important understanding.

Sometimes the conditions in our life are not optimal.

They're caused by,

Excuse me,

They're caused by genetic tendencies,

You know,

Tendencies that now have a diagnostic label associated with them.

So anxiety and depression and bipolar.

These tendencies,

And I'm asserting here,

Are conditioned from experiences generally of trauma and lack of belonging.

Just a long tail quite often.

That's how they manifest and become this label of depression or bipolar.

There's some evidence in science that suggests that this assertion is true.

So you are not your fault.

When you're conditioned by a culture that's plagued by violence and addiction,

You are not your fault.

Isn't that good news?

It feels like good news to me.

One of the purposes of Buddhist practice is not only to understand and see,

But to have conditioning affect us and change us in some way.

So initially it might be small,

But the repeated impressions we get or that we contribute to,

Like showing up for meditation,

Make an impact for us.

So if we come to meditation and we sit and let's say we spend a lot of time thinking and planning and remembering,

The quality of planning or memories will certainly have an impact on you and reinforce whatever the plan is or the memory.

And it may even reinforce that every time you sit,

That's the first thing you do is that you go into your plans and your memories,

That rumination.

But if you come back and take that three-breath journey,

Starting meditation with taking three deep breaths,

Then you're affecting the conditions and that simple action.

Okay,

I'm going to start the practice with three deep breaths and I'm going to come back to a deep breath every time I get pulled into thinking.

So then we get to quiet the mind and we're not thinking so much and the focus is on being settled and relaxed and that will affect us differently.

So part of the function of meditation is to develop a certain kind of well-being and ease.

Conditioning ourselves with safety and openness and that begins to change us.

That allows us to feel into all of the old conditioning.

We have a role in creating this well-being but it has a very different way of changing us than we normally ascribe.

We're not the agent of the change.

We can't will ourselves or figure out or organize something so that these changes happen to me in the right way.

Instead there has to be some kind of receptivity like radical listening.

Listening to ourselves.

Sometimes we sit down to practice with this intent to condition our experience with goodness you know and what happens is all the darkness of our life shows up and you're like no no no no I'm here to like create abundance and gratitude and compassion.

But then we have this darkness that surfaces.

So it's important to remember that part of the understanding to actually become a free person we have to be willing to feel that darkness.

We have to be able to endure the sometimes really uncomfortable physicality of the pain that we experience,

The clinging,

The holding on that we have,

The memories,

The trauma,

The fear and what we take with us to experience and to feel that,

To endure that.

The only thing that can go with us is love,

Compassion and our own wisdom.

Like Wendell Berry has said,

To go into the dark with the light is to know the light.

To know the dark,

Go dark.

Go without sight and find that the dark too blooms and sings and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

We start to see some value when we go deeper.

Our pain,

Our suffering is school you know it's school.

Life is school.

So are we paying attention and if not we got to repeat that chapter don't we?

And with that we can start to respond with kindness because there's really no other way that sane.

Kindness seems to be the only way.

So thank you for your kind attention.

Reviews

Electrifying

Thank you. I love the idea of practicing meditation as being a way for me to belong to me. It goes with another teaching that said that meditation is sitting with yourself and really listening, like a friend, to yourself. Even if I don’t belong anywhere else, I always have a cozy spot right here.

Super.

I care for myself. Thank you! 💚🙏

Always a joy 💜🌸

Thank you Lisa for sharing your personel story - it touched me 🫶