Finding Our Fields of Love: Three Modes

NDF's Lama Liz Monson introduces the Three Modes of Practice, which are tools that can help us awaken our inate capacities for care and kindness. Focusing on the Receptivity Mode using the caring moment meditation, she explores how this practice allows us to contact a past experience of deep connection and love in order to build a foundation of security and ease within us in the present. A recording of the caring moment meditation discussed here is available as "Caring Moment Meditation."

Transcript

This morning we're going to begin exploring these sets of practices and teachings that are what I really feel are what we most need in this particular time in our in our human history.

So where do we turn?

Where do we turn within ourselves as we are now?

And where do we also turn externally?

Where do we turn for sanity and for care and kindness and for cultivating orientations to ourselves,

To others,

And to the world that are orientations of care,

Orientations of protection and support and acknowledgement even of the truths that we are facing into coming into the light of what is actually happening instead of living in a,

You know,

A residual fantasy of how things were and how we might still hope they can return.

Where do we find within ourselves?

What can we find even within ourselves that can help us to face forward with grace and with transparency and with honesty and with appreciation for the amazing gift of this human existence?

From the Buddhist perspective,

Where we go is to our deepest essence,

To who we actually are underneath all of the thoughts,

The ideas,

The concepts,

The scaffolding that we have erected to try to prove to ourselves that we do exist in a certain kind of way,

Which is actually not how we fully,

How we truly exist.

It's more of a construction that we have gotten deeply involved in over many lifetimes and deeply attached to over many lifetimes.

But the Buddhist teachings,

They would speak to us of an innate capacity that we all have,

That we all possess for love,

For kindness,

For care,

And for wisdom,

For insight into the truth of how things actually are,

How things exist in their nature,

In their nature.

And this capacity has always been present.

We've always had it.

But we've really,

Most likely,

Most of us haven't had any instruction in how to contact and to cultivate and to live from this deepest aspect of who we actually are.

That this capacity to exist as a being of love,

And we're going to talk about what that means.

You know,

This,

I don't,

Not specifically in any way actually talking about romantic love,

Although that could fall in there somewhere,

But I'm talking about something much bigger than romantic love that fixates on another individual.

But this is an orientation towards the world that is open and caring and attentive and spacious.

And that ability to face into and face out into the world and face into our own experience with that stance of openness and kindness is very much a part of who we are.

We have that capacity.

And Buddhism is known also for the many skillful means that exist in the tradition to help to grow and cultivate and strengthen that innate capacity that we have for care and for kindness.

It's already there,

But it's like a muscle that hasn't been worked out.

You know,

So it might be a little flabby right now.

And these practices that we're going to engage in are ways of beginning to strengthen that muscle,

To really see just what we are capable of.

That this personal life is our exercise ground,

Our gym,

To unfold and strengthen and express these innate capacities of care and kindness and wisdom to awaken that tremendous goodness that is within us and then to act from that space.

The way that these practices are structured is through three different modes of practice,

Three modes of practice.

So I'm going to just briefly describe each of these modes so you can see how they feed into each other and support each other.

So the first mode is known as the receptive mode.

And what this means is that in the receptive mode there are a series of practices that allow us to discover different access points in order to experience this innate capacity and these qualities of love and compassion that abide within us.

The receptive mode provides us with tools to directly access that experience of deep care and love that is part of who we are.

The practices,

They are a way of contacting and experiencing,

Re-experiencing over and over again these deep energies of care,

Of kindness,

Of love in order to build a foundation,

To construct a foundation of security and ease and relaxation that is necessary for us to then progress further into the other modes.

So there's a certain way in which these modes are somewhat sequential,

But as you will see as we go through them,

After a certain point they become much more circular.

They all support and feed each other.

So it isn't like you just have to do one for a long long time and then not touch the others.

No,

We're going to be continuously flowing through all of these modes and yet there may be times in our lives where we need to focus in more deeply on one or another of them because something has come up in our own experience that needs a certain kind of attention that one or another mode is best able to supply.

So receptive mode,

Receptive mode and the term receptive is very key here,

It's the receptive mode practices are practices that train us to be more conscious of the world and the world.

And so these are practices that train us in receiving love and care and protection and respect and appreciation.

And you may think well I don't,

You know,

What do you,

That makes no sense.

I know how to receive love.

I know how to accept care and kindness.

I know how to accept help.

It's interesting when you really start doing that you may actually have a certain,

Certain resistances to really receiving these,

These qualities and discovering them in ourselves.

So this receptive mode is very powerful for helping us to remember,

To reunify with something that's already present within us.

And then to strengthen that,

To strengthen that as the foundation from which we can begin to go further.

So that's the receptive mode.

Second mode is called the deepening mode,

The deepening mode.

And in the deepening mode we're basically learning to rest and to abide more and more directly in the non-conceptual core of our being where all of these energies of kindness and care and love are continuously being expressed.

You know,

As I said earlier,

This is always happening.

All of this energy of care is always unfolding within us.

This deep core of our being or sometimes we call it the substrate,

The substrate,

Which really is the source.

It's the source of the openness,

The clarity,

And the compassionate capacity of our basic awareness.

So in the deepening mode we do,

We,

We engage with practices that help us to settle more and more deeply into this essence of who we are,

This nature of our heart-mind,

Compassionate core of our being.

And then in the third mode,

The third mode is called the inclusive mode,

Inclusive mode.

In the third mode we learn how to draw on these innate qualities and these energies as the momentum to extend love and compassion out to the world,

Including all beings,

Human,

Non-human,

And the world,

The whole world.

So in the inclusive mode practices are practices of extending love and compassion,

Sending it out into the world,

Sending it out to those who are closest to us and dearest to us,

To those we don't know,

Have never met,

And then to all beings,

All beings,

Even beings that we have a difficult time with.

The inclusive mode unfolds naturally,

Really from the other two modes,

From the receptive mode and the deepening mode.

So we'll get to the inclusive mode,

But we're going to begin with really focusing in on building our foundation,

Our personal foundation of care and love as the ground from which we can begin to draw the energy of those,

Of those qualities up and allow them to spread out into the world.

So those are the three modes.

So these practices,

They help us to connect back to this deep substrate of our being,

This aspect of who we are that is replete with the qualities of love and care and kindness and equanimity.

And this deep substrate of our being is usually referred to in other Buddhist contexts as the nature of the mind,

The nature of the heart-mind,

Buddha nature.

Sometimes it's called awareness with a capital A.

Sometimes it's called Rigpa in the tradition of Dzogchen.

That's the term.

And in Tibetan is Rigpa,

R-I-G-P-A,

Rigpa.

And then in the Mahamudra tradition,

It's called ordinary mind,

Which is a very interesting way of describing the nature of our heart-mind,

To call it ordinary mind.

And I want you to have those terms because all of those terms,

All of those labels are just ways of describing how our fundamental nature is that of the Buddhas.

It's a way of helping us see that our fundamental nature is not different from a liberated being like a Buddha.

And what does that really mean?

It means that our being,

Our whole existence,

Is pervaded by love and that we are made to express and act from that love.

Now,

Again,

I'm thinking of love writ large here.

And I've been toying with the idea of not even using the word love because we have so many diverse associations with that term.

And maybe care is a better term because I'm trying to include a big spectrum of attitudes and stances and actions of kindness and care.

So it isn't just what we might think of as love in a small sense.

Looking into what we are facing,

It's this dimension of our being that is going to be the key to living well with and for others as this current life situation unfolds.

And it may sound completely nuts,

Right,

To say that our whole existence is pervaded by love when all we see these days are expressions of violence and aggression and division and outrage and,

I mean,

From the Buddhist perspective,

There's this really strong pushback against that way of describing reality,

Right?

From the Buddhist perspective,

The pushback is saying,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No.

It's not all about violence.

It's not all about aggression and breakdown and chaos and dissolution and injustice and inequality.

That's not what it's all about,

Actually.

What it really is about is cultivating and actually realizing ourselves as a being of care.

Rediscovering ourselves as such is really the journey of the entire Buddhist path.

Rediscovering ourselves as a being of care.

But in order to do that,

We have to retrain ourselves to begin to notice and to cultivate the love and care that already permeates our lives.

Because it is there,

But it may not be.

We may not have noticed it very much.

But these particular practices and teachings are designed to bring us back into relationship with who we really are and to provide us with the tools we need to notice and to cultivate the love and care that is already present in our lives,

That is already here.

So in the receptive mode,

Now let me say something more specifically here about the receptive mode.

The first set of practices that we will explore are these receptive mode practices.

And these are here to help us rediscover the world of care that already does exist around us and within us.

And when we recognize that we recognize the care that is already present,

That helps us relax enough to begin to notice the same qualities of care when they rise inside of us.

If we can begin to see the care that is already present around us and use that as a trigger for generating our own energy of care,

That's what the receiving mode,

The receptive mode practices are meant to do.

They train us to cultivate and to strengthen our own innate capacity for care.

And the way they do that is they create conditions.

They place us in a framework that allows us to directly experience the love that is always hovering forth around and through us.

They set up a scenario in which we can have that experience again right now in our practice.

So even more specifically,

I might say that the receiving mode practices show us how to recall and connect with different moments from our lives when we felt seen,

Cared for,

Noticed,

Appreciated,

And loved for just who we are.

So let me just say that again because this is actually the key of these practices is that they create an arena,

An environment in which we can remember,

We can recall and connect with different moments from our lives where we felt seen,

We felt cared for,

We felt appreciated,

We felt loved just as we are.

Not the story about how we had that experience,

But what it felt like to have that experience of being seen,

Being held,

Being cared for,

What it felt like deep inside.

And I'm going to harp on this because this is the key to this practice.

It's about the feeling.

It's not about whoever you had the feeling with in the presence of.

It's not about the story of that person having subsequently turned against you or been unkind to you.

It's about what you felt in that specific moment when you felt seen,

When you felt loved,

When you felt cared for just as you are.

It's about the feeling.

We're going to go back to that feeling and we're going to live in it again because why?

The logic is that as we re-engage with the feeling of what it felt like,

That stimulates the same energy of care and appreciation and love that is already present within us to re-emerge,

To fill us up.

It helps to draw those qualities out from their dormant state within us and make them live again,

Bring them back into full energy,

Full power,

Full liveliness and vividness.

The practice is a stepping stone to re-igniting the energies of love and care and appreciation that are already present within us but are simply dormant.

And that's what the practices are meant to do,

To continuously pull those energies back up out of us so we can see them and feel them and remember them.

Okay,

So these moments,

Which we call caring moments,

Caring moments are catalysts for reawakening our own capacity to express those same qualities,

Those same qualities of being held in care,

Appreciated and loved for who we are.

And again,

It doesn't matter when we get to the actual practice,

It doesn't matter if we've had many such moments in our lives or only one or two.

The whole point of the practice is simply to notice and focus on at least just one,

One moment of care and from there we start to see that actually our lives are permeated,

Are populated by many,

Many such moments,

Many such moments.

They can be so tiny,

They can just be so tiny,

But we start to see them unfolding every day in our lives when we start to look for them.

One reason we don't notice them most of the time is that we're not used to looking for moments of care,

Moments of kindness,

Moments of goodness in our lives.

Instead,

We've been taught to focus on the negative,

On the challenging,

The difficult,

The problems.

There's a habit that has been built into our educational systems,

Our family systems,

Our personal systems.

It's not because it isn't just a personal habit,

Right?

This is a national habit,

A global habit.

Look at the focus in the media on highlighting the negative.

Not that we don't need to know about these,

The difficults,

But I mean,

You have to look,

You have to search to find a story of human kindness,

Human love,

A positive story.

And actually there are so many of those stories.

What if the media decided to actually focus on those kinds of stories for a while?

What kind of energy would that communicate to this world?

You know,

How might that actually change how we think about ourselves,

Think about others,

And think about what's happening?

Unfortunately,

We become enmeshed in the storylines that are perpetrated by the media,

And we seize onto and we cling to all the different reactions that we have.

Outrage,

Despair,

Anger,

Fear,

Anxiety.

I mean,

It's hard not to have those emotions come up.

They come up.

What we see,

What we read,

What we connect to,

What we latch onto in terms of our own emotional response becomes our reality.

But everything is a mess.

Well,

You know,

Everything isn't a mess,

Actually.

There are some amazing things happening in this world right now that it would be incredibly helpful for all of us to know about,

But they're not being highlighted.

They're not being shared.

And this is the same process that we engage with in relationship to ourselves.

That's what's even more painful about this.

That it's not only happening in the way that we reflect back and forth with the so-called external world,

But it's happening with how we engage with ourselves.

We tend to focus on the parts of ourselves that,

The parts that we don't like,

Or the parts that we think should be better,

Or the parts that aren't good enough,

Or the habits of negativity that have become stronger and stronger within us because we fed them with stories and with focused energy.

So we end up in a similar state as we see in the media.

We end up tense and anxious and contracted into this little tiny reality that is focused just on I and me and mine,

Because the world makes it seem like we have to go into protective mode.

And our own sense of relationship to ourselves also makes us feel like things aren't okay here.

We don't recognize a point of view that believes that the basic fabric of social well-being is care,

Is love,

Is the desire for others to have happiness and contentment.

That point of view isn't dominant in our society,

In our world.

The fact is really that if care for others is not present,

That there's no policy,

There's no political stance,

There's no militia,

There's no technology that can protect us from the greed and the aggression and the ignorance that just run wild.

And it can be hard to swallow the statement or the proposition that what is at the core of each and every being is this field of care,

This field of love.

It can be hard to believe that.

I know that I really had a hard time believing that for years,

But it's there.

It's there.

It's like a slow flame burning deep inside us that just needs to be fanned,

Needs to be given the oxygen to really blaze up and become the energy of our compassion in the world.

And connecting to that innate capacity for love and kindness is a way of preventing ourselves from the downward spiral of despair and outrage and fear and depression that might otherwise threaten,

Or we might feel threatened that it would overcome us,

Right?

When we connect to that part of ourselves,

It is like a protection circle that we enter into.

That direct experience of care,

The genuine wish for others to have happiness,

It begins to transform not only our bodies and our minds,

But it can transform our workplaces,

Our homes,

Our interactions everywhere we go into an environment of care and protection.

And just on the personal level,

To experience our own innate love and care protects us from our worst tendencies,

From our habits,

From sometimes our unconscious habits of reducing ourselves to a negative impression of some kind.

That's what we're doing a lot of the time is we have some storyline about ourselves and we think that's all there is.

And it's a way of reducing the sense of self to this one way of being,

A very limited and restricted way of being,

When in fact it's just one story.

We could just as easily tell a totally different story and cultivate that story.

When we get caught in our attitudes of self-dislike,

Lack of self-worth,

Attitudes of righteousness,

Injustice,

Bias,

We cut ourselves off from the actual reality of other people and of ourselves and of the world.

That's just one small piece of what's unfolding.

When we get caught in anger,

For example,

We get lost in the projections of that anger and the whole world again then is seen through a filter of this energy that we call anger.

It's a very reductive way of experiencing ourselves,

Experiencing another person and experiencing the world.

It's a projection.

We're triggered,

The energy rises up,

We call that energy anger and then a whole world unfolds from there.

Everything seems to exist in that world.

But such a projection actually,

It's just an appearance.

It could just as easily be a projection of love.

And in fact,

A projection of love would be far closer to who we really are.

Anger is simply an energy moving through and arising and dissolving and so too is love,

But it is a continuous flow.

It's a continuous flow.

But if we only have a projection of love,

It's a continuous flow.

But if we only see the surface of ourselves,

If we're only paying attention to the stories and the concepts and the ideas that we use to structure our sense of reality,

Then it's no wonder that everyone seems filled with aggression and greed and fear and the whole world looks that way.

So these teachings are saying,

Okay,

Well,

Contrary to that projection,

Our deepest qualities of destruction are these deepest qualities of who we are.

Impartial love,

Compassion,

Wisdom,

Qualities that are in harmony with the actual truth of who we are and who so-called others are beyond our projections.

So we have to make a shift,

Right?

We have to make a shift to turn towards the good,

The basic goodness as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche is our essence,

Our nature,

To begin to have some faith and trust that actually that is who we are.

And the faith and trust to grow in proportion to the amount of time we spend practicing cultivating those qualities and bringing them out because we see that they're real.

We see that they're true and that our faith and our trust in their power can grow,

Can develop.

We can do that.

We can purify these patterns of thought and emotion that are focused on the negative and that obscure our true nature,

Our natural goodness,

Our wisdom through these kinds of technologies of the self.

I love this phrase,

Technologies of the self,

But it's a phrase that is developed by Foucault,

Michel Foucault to describe the different actions that we perform upon ourselves to grow and develop.

So through these Buddhist technologies of the self,

We rediscover ourselves and everyone else as intrinsically sacred,

Intrinsically sacred.

And that's what the Bodhisattva path is a profound encouragement to do,

Right?

To take the responsibility,

To rediscover our life as a point of connection to all other beings.

This life that you have right now is your contact,

Your gateway,

Your doorway into connection with other,

Care for other.

Your gateway to awakening this tremendous goodness that is lying dormant within us and to act from that recognition.

So the practice that we're going to do is the first of these receptive mode practices,

And it's called the caring moment practice.

I want you as much as possible to remember that the goal of the practice is to rest in what it feels like to be held in care,

Held in love.

So when you're asked to bring to mind a moment in which you felt seen and cared for and loved just as you are,

One moment,

A moment,

A moment with another person,

It could be a moment with a pet,

Right?

Pets are so good for this because they just love us so much unconditionally and it's so easy,

Right?

You feel love,

It loves you.

Hard to feel a feeling of like being judged by your pomeranian or maybe your cat.

So I'm just,

I'm offering that now as a suggestion only because I'm not going to be able to do that.

I'm offering that now as a suggestion only because if you can,

Of course,

Bring to mind a person with whom you felt this moment of care,

That's wonderful.

But sometimes people are complicated.

We may have had a moment of care,

A feeling of a moment of care with a person who later on wasn't able to share with us in that way,

To be present with us in that way.

And actually that's totally fine.

You can still,

In fact,

There's no problem at all unless you get caught in the story of,

Oh yes,

Well that was so wonderful and I had that feeling and then that jerk,

You know,

Turned around and did blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

And then you're gone,

Right?

Off into that.

Okay,

Then you're not doing the practice anymore.

That's a distraction.

So sometimes a pet can be simpler.

I know for years I used a place in nature,

A place in the natural world where I would go and simply feel okay as I am,

Not needing to try to be something different to show myself in any particular way,

But just held and allowed to be just as I am.

So that's another possibility,

You know,

That it might be easier and more accessible to go in the direction of something like that.

Just to let you know there are options for finding a moment.

One moment,

One caring moment.

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