Breaking Karma Bonds - Live Recording

How can you transform through the recognition of karma, karmic bonds and archetypal patterns? Why is understanding identity so important when it comes to freeing yourself from suffering? What is required to break free from your past and walk into a life free of karma?

Join Sarah Sati, of Mindful Island, for an hour-long discussion and practice where she addresses these questions and more. This is a live recording from an Insight Timer event held 28, March 2021.

Transcript

Okay,

So welcome for anyone who's here already.

Hopefully you can hear me all right.

I'm operating on Caribbean internet,

So the quality of the video may come in and out.

But what matters is not the quality of the video,

But that you can hear what I'm saying.

So we're going to give it just a moment here before we get started.

Thank you for coming,

For joining this workshop today.

I'm Sarah Satie from Mindful Island,

And I feel happy again to be here another month sharing what knowledge I have.

So all the knowledge I share I've gained through my own personal experience.

And today that's the case with this mini workshop,

Breaking Dharma Bonds.

I'm going to give it about one more minute to allow people to join,

And then we will begin with a short centering meditation.

So if you're already here and you're ready,

Make sure you have a space that you can sit up for an opening meditation.

And like I said,

I'll just give it one more minute to allow people to join.

And I'll say while we're letting people kind of filter in,

If you have comments or questions,

There's going to be time at the end.

So you can save them up.

You can always put them in the chat,

And I'll try to go back over them.

But for now,

We'll sort of put the chat aside.

So we're already two minutes in.

I really want to honor our time.

So we're going to go ahead and get started.

So you're going to sit in a meditative position.

Let's begin.

You can prepare yourself for our time together.

Just finding this meditative seat,

However that makes sense to you.

And sit upright if that's manageable for you on some support and just take a moment here to begin to shake.

So you can shake your arms and your head.

We're coming into this moment together.

We want to get the energy out of the body.

You can shake your shoulders.

You can even shake yourself loose at the joints.

Let your breath increase,

Increase,

Increase.

Then take one deep inhalation through the nose and an audible,

Ah,

Let it out through the mouth,

A long,

Slow out breath.

And then come to this place of stillness.

Your hands can just rest on your knees.

Your eyes can be closed or they can be lightly open,

Whatever's right for your practice.

Use this time to bring yourself into the present moment with this sense,

This feeling of fullness.

You can imagine that all parts of you,

The parts of you who you know yourself as,

That they come together as one and that they collaborate to experience the entirety of this moment.

So feel the connection of your breath to the sensations in your body.

And as your breath flows naturally in and out of your nose,

Notice where you can sense your breath in your body besides your lungs and begin to send your breath.

As outward to those places,

Just feel the effect this has on the brain,

Sending your breath out,

Inhaling through the nose and then exhaling.

Just allowing your breath to penetrate the various areas of your body you feel can touch.

Notice how this impacts your mind.

Just work for a few more silent moments to bring these three aspects of yourself into collaborative focus,

The breath,

The body and the mind.

So if you've just joined,

Thank you again for being here for Breaking Karma Bonds.

Last month,

I try to do this at the end of every month,

And last month I discussed the concept of transforming suffering,

Maybe you were here for that,

And the importance of karma and identity,

Which is what I'll be discussing today through the tool of archetypes.

These concepts cannot be undervalued when we examine the heart of suffering.

So whenever the concept of suffering is on the table,

The question naturally arises,

Why do some people seem to suffer more than others?

The answers can be found in these two concepts,

The concepts of karma and identity.

So thinking on this after last month,

I knew I wanted to expand on this topic.

By unpacking these concepts a little bit more,

Karma and identity,

And to share what I've learned through study and experience,

Which may be a potentially new perspective from you,

Or just merely an elaboration on a perspective you've possibly already been toying around.

If you want to know more about me,

You can find information on all of the various social media channels that you know of,

Not on all of them,

But most of them.

For now,

I'll just tell you,

I'm someone who has spent years personally studying academically,

Professionally,

And internally the concept of mindfulness as it applies to healing from traumas of experience.

And those can be new,

Inherited,

Either way.

So I'm no stranger to suffering.

And all of what I'm going to share with you today comes not just from what I've studied and researched across the years,

But comes directly,

As I've already said,

From my own experience.

And these are experiential practices,

So you can't just read about them,

You have to do them.

So what some of you may have already experienced is that when it comes to healing from suffering,

Or overcoming suffering if you're on this path,

That at some point,

Someone on a search eventually comes to the conclusion,

As this meme I sometimes see on Facebook says,

I meditate,

I burn candles,

I drink green tea,

I do yoga,

And I still want to smack some people.

So basically,

This meme is saying,

Okay,

I do everything I'm supposed to do.

So why isn't it working?

And that is a great question.

Why is it that someone can do everything in their right mind to live right?

Well,

Maybe someone else is sitting around eating Cheetos and working too much and under a lot of stress,

And yet the healthy one may be suffering mentally more.

So why is this?

The answer is,

As I've said,

Lie in the concepts of karma and identity and potentially not understanding them correctly.

And that's what I'm going to be talking about during our time today.

These are big concepts,

And we have a short time together.

So of course,

There is no way to cover everything.

But I'm going to do my best to just share what I believe to be the most valuable pieces of insight,

And practice will be the highest priority.

So we'll have two practices today.

I'm first going to talk a little bit about today's topic to prime your brain.

And then we're going to have our first contemplation.

I'll talk about what I mean by contemplation in a minute.

Afterwards,

Go into the topics with a little more depth,

And then we'll have a final contemplation practice.

And then there will be some time for questions and answers.

So I've set the time for around an hour.

And I'm going to honor that.

But if for some reason the questions and answers go on longer,

That's okay for me.

But I won't take personally more of your time than that.

Thank you,

Isabella.

So you can know that after an hour,

You can leave if you want.

But to make our time easier,

Let me first define a few concepts that we're going to be talking about today.

So it's important just to prime your mind.

The first concept is karma.

Karma is a rule.

You can think about karma as a rule.

It's a rule that applies to our understanding of how causes or conditions lead to effects or outcomes as perceived within physical experience.

By itself,

Karma has no inherent value.

And it can also just be a word used to describe experience itself.

In our world,

We mostly understand karma in terms of the effects of the things that we do in our life.

I won't be able to touch on it today,

But it's important to also pay attention to the conditions aspect.

And that's a deeper topic than we have time for today.

So that's karma.

The next concept is karma bonds,

The title of the workshop.

My partner said,

Why would you call it karma bonds and not karmic bonds?

And I'm going to explain that now.

Karma bonds is a term that represents the absolute highest level of attachment we feel to the perceived value of conditions and outcomes,

Which culminate to create our perceived overall experience of life.

So this is like how much you desire to have experiences that are good or bad,

And how attached you are to those experiences.

And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.

But you can essentially think of karma bonds as how attached you are to experience a whole.

And that's really what we're talking about today is detaching from experience.

The third concept I want to touch on is karmic bonds.

So karmic bonds are the attachments we feel to the perceived value of the conditions and outcomes that culminate in what we consider to be experience on an individual level.

So this relates to each individual experience,

Whereas karma bonds relates to experience as a whole.

So for instance,

How much you like and so go after or loathe and so resist your relationship with your father or an ex wife.

So in this example,

We'd call your relationship to your father or an ex wife a karmic relationship,

But this example could apply to anything.

So let's use it if you really feel attached to the relationship outcomes with your father or your ex wife,

Even if they are bad,

In fact,

Maybe it's the bad story.

Or attached to,

Then we would call this a strong karmic bond.

But if you pay close attention,

It's not the attachment to your father or your ex wife that I'm calling a karmic bond.

It's the attachment you feel to the perception you have of the value you place on the outcome of the relationship.

So this is a really big concept.

What I'm saying is it's not the attachment you have to the relationship with the ex wife or to your father.

It's attachment you have to the value you place on that relationship.

So that's an important distinguishing factor.

The final concept I'm going to touch on and in this workshop we'll talk more about is archetypes.

So I want to define archetypes as energy bundles of qualitative meaning they have value on them,

Good or bad thought patterns,

Which are universally or culturally recognized for their shared perceptive outcomes.

So this is to say what we call a nerd in the United States may be a very different set of thought patterns than for instance what a Japanese person may call a similar name to.

However,

Both cultures have terms that describe sets of thoughts or behaviors that we've all agreed upon are nerd like.

So archetypes are a great way to assess ourselves and learn about what we're placing value on and how that value impacts our lives in positive or negative ways.

Knowing your specific archetypes is the primary step in learning to break free from karmic bonds,

Which is a preliminary step to breaking free of karmic bonds and I'll talk about this.

There are a lot of layers here in this work.

So okay,

I know that already a lot of information and I just want to assure you it's okay if it's not all making sense yet.

I just want you to bear with me.

This is being recorded and it will be available later on Insight Timer and also on our Mindful Island YouTube channel.

So for now,

Even if it feels like a lot of information,

I just want you to allow yourself to fully absorb it.

Just be present for it and don't have any concern about if it has clarity yet.

It's like planting a seed.

So now that I've defined some of these concepts for you,

Let's do our first practice.

We're going to go on an inner exploration of your archetypal identity patterns.

It's important to note first that your capacity to break karma bonds is multilayered,

As I've said,

And you have to start exactly where you are.

It may be the case that you're newer to inner exploration,

So you're not yet very skilled with the concept of mindfulness.

This is okay.

It perhaps also could be the case you're skilled with the concept of mindfulness,

But you're not yet very good at keeping your focus on one thing.

Or you're skilled with mindfulness and you're skilled with self-directed focus,

But you're caught up in the wrong identity.

So all of these are great places to be.

They're just perfectly fine.

You have to begin where you are.

But what this will mean is that your experience as we do this work together may be very different from someone else's,

And that is okay.

You don't want to wait until you've reached a certain level that you perceive as being the right level to begin this work.

So I encourage you to just begin where you are today.

Let the experience unfold without expectations of what it should be like.

Wherever you find yourself,

Just let it be okay.

So let's begin.

If you have a cushion or something to sit on and you're not already sitting up,

We're going to start with this first contemplation.

So you can take your seat.

We're going to explore your archetypes and their impact on your life.

This is less a meditation and more a contemplation.

And I call this the contemplation because it's truly just listening to questions and sitting with whatever answers emerge in whatever form they emerge in and the experience of being asked.

So whether you're newer to meditation or not,

Don't concern yourself with if you're doing it right or wrong.

Just let it be what it is.

And so you can close your eyes or leave your eyes open.

But allow yourself to sit up straight.

And whether your eyes are open or closed,

Let your vision relax.

Let your chest be lifted and allow your breath to flow in its natural way in and out through your nose.

You can relax the space behind your eyes and bring your attention to your out breath.

Just stay here for a few moments as you bring a general sense of awareness.

To your whole body,

Your whole self.

However,

That makes sense to you.

So I'm going to ask you to examine your identity in terms of archetypes.

Archetypes are simply ways of describing general groups of behaviors or energy bundles that exist universally or culturally.

So right now,

However you're sitting,

Bring to mind one label that you have for yourself.

So this can be very simple,

Like father or daughter,

Or it can be a more complex identity relationship like princess or boss.

Just bring to mind one of these identities that you would consider yourself having,

Possessing.

And once you have this identity in mind,

Begin to unpack the qualities of this identity.

What makes you call yourself this name,

This label?

You can just ask yourself the question and sit with any answers that arise.

What makes you call yourself this label?

And as you're exploring the motivations for applying this label,

Ask yourself what behaviors are associated with this label.

So if it's a father and that's your identity,

What kinds of behaviors go with the label of father in your mind?

And you can ask yourself what kinds of life experiences do you have because of this label?

And then start to probe a little more deeply,

What are the good things that occur because you label yourself like this?

So for instance,

You label yourself as father.

A good thing is that you get some very close connection with another human being.

Maybe you learn to love in a new way.

Just start to think about what the good things are that occur in your life because of this label that you've given yourself.

And now ask yourself what are some of the bad things?

So again,

Sticking with this one label you have for yourself,

What are some of the good qualities,

What are some of the bad qualities that come along with this label?

What sort of life outcomes happen as a result of this label?

And just spend a few more moments here dissecting this label you have for yourself.

Really use your inner dialogue to work it through,

Just understanding it as completely as possible.

Now ask yourself the question,

Where does this identity exist?

So you can really look inside your body for the answer,

Where does this identity exist?

What does this identity look like?

So begin this investigation now beyond the form of the identity and the qualities of the identity and look for this identity inside of yourself.

Where is father?

Where is athlete?

What does father look like?

What does athlete look like?

And ask yourself the question,

Is this how you want to be perceived?

Is this identity that you're playing with right now,

Is this the identity that you want to have?

Thinking about all of the things that you just unpacked about it,

Is this the right identity for you?

And you can,

I'll take another two or three minutes just in silence for you.

You can do this with another identity,

You can bring another label to mind.

We all have multiple dimensions in our lives.

We're mothers,

Children,

Bosses,

Husbands,

Leaders,

Whatever.

You can bring up some other identities that you would label yourself as and unpack those a little bit for the next few minutes in silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Just remember if your attention comes in and out,

If it's difficult,

It's just a part of your own process,

Allow that to be okay as well.

We're just planting seeds.

Silence.

Take a deep breath in through the nose,

Out through the nose.

Let go of the questions,

Let go of the contemplations.

For a moment,

Just be with your breath.

And if you're looking for something to happen,

Notice that.

And then just let go of looking.

And just be for a few more moments.

You can open your eyes if you have them closed.

If you want to take a moment to write down any insights that came to mind,

Go ahead and you can do that now if you have a pen and paper.

I'm just going to kind of keep rolling.

Again,

If questions come up as we go,

I'll save some time at the end.

Here's my first question to you as we dive into the topic more.

Why are you here?

What compelled you about this topic to take this time to sit with me?

I'm going to answer that for you.

You're likely here because you're most likely at the level of involvement with karmic bonds,

Where you are desiring to eliminate negative ones and keep good ones.

And this involvement of yours is a direct misunderstanding of who you really are.

So let me just reiterate that.

Likely you're here thinking,

I want to get rid of my karmic bonds,

Not understanding the karma bonds concept quite yet.

And if I say to you,

Are you really ready?

What you're really asking to get rid of are the negative aspects of karma as we know it that are occurring in your life.

But if I said,

Well,

You have to get rid of all the good too.

You may have thought twice about joining this mini workshop today.

So I just want to point that out.

The number one thing I really want to get across is that you are mis- identified with archetypes who have karmic relationships.

It's not you who has karmic relationships.

It's the archetypes.

And that is what causes suffering.

If you do not want to endure the bond of karma anymore,

You have to actually learn to shift your identity.

To shift your identity.

So the most important thing you have to be willing to believe first is that everything is merely energy in motion,

Which gives the experience of solid matter.

Solid matter gives rise to identity formations and identity formations give rise to suffering.

Identities most easily symbolized by archetypes.

And as I've defined already,

Archetypes are like these bundles of energy patterns that lead to certain conditions which end in certain outcomes.

And again,

This is not you.

This is just the archetype that has this karmic relationship.

So to most clearly illustrate this point,

I'm going to use the example of the hero and the victim.

And these are two identities we can all relate to.

Definitely me.

The victim is an identity we all have.

We all have the victim all the time.

We also all have the hero all the time.

This victim archetype embodies the qualities of things like helplessness,

Lack,

Neediness,

Maybe vulnerability.

But when we think of this identity,

We often apply a negative value to it.

So you may even be thinking now,

Yeah,

I'm a victim and I want to break that bond.

But the thing is,

This is karmic bond thinking.

And breaking karmic bonds is just like being an alcoholic who quits drinking but takes up chugging coffee and smoking cigarettes like a maniac.

Until you're ready to quit karma for good,

Then you will simply replace one karmic bond for another as you operate under this false understanding that there is ever any karmic bond that is entirely positive.

So I use the victim as an example.

It's a great example in my opinion.

Perhaps you want to move from victim to hero.

So I had this.

This is an example of my own life.

I wanted to move from the princess to the queen.

I'd always identified myself as a princess.

And you have these qualities about you too where you've always said this like,

I'm such a homebody or whatever.

This is an archetype of yours.

I've always had the princess archetype and it turns out even the name Sarah translates as princess.

So maybe that's where my archetype came from.

One day I was with a very wise friend of mine who knows a lot about archetypes.

She's done a lot of reading.

And I want to put this in right now with Carolyn Mays who is,

If you're really interested in archetypes and you want some more modern day looking at it,

I really suggest Carolyn Mays sacred contracts book,

A beautiful book.

Anyways,

This very wise friend of mine said to me,

Well,

You know,

Sarah,

And I was in the middle of suffering at the moment.

She said,

You know,

Princesses are always,

Yeah,

It's a great book,

Are always needing rescuing.

She said princesses are always needing rescuing.

And she was right.

I was in that moment,

Right when she said that to me,

I was in this moment needing rescuing.

And I thought on this a long time.

In fact,

I was in tons of situations throughout my life.

And the book is called Sacred Contracts.

I'll actually type it in so people can look back.

By Carolyn Mays.

So I was right in the middle of this and she brings it to my mind and I'm really looking at it.

And I spent some,

A lot of time actually looking at it because it turned out in my life I had been in a lot of situations where I was needy or I was needing rescuing.

I was really locked into this princess identity and it was a deep karmic bond for me.

And all of these outcomes,

Which we would call karma,

Right?

Like,

Oh,

It's my karma to have these kinds of male relationships,

Male female relationships,

Or it's my karma to have these kinds of life experiences.

Maybe I was even like Cinderella in a way.

These things were playing out in my life and I was taking them very seriously.

They were calling me.

They were causing me a lot of suffering.

So I thought about it.

I brought it to the surface.

Yeah,

You're right.

I have this princess identity.

I'm too attached to it.

I'm always needing something.

So what would I want to be instead?

This is like in our identity meditation.

I asked you,

What would you want to be?

And so I thought about it and I looked at my friend who's very wise,

Very,

She's just an awesome human being.

I look up to very much.

I thought,

Well,

Well,

She's like a queen and I want to be like a queen.

I need to graduate.

What's enough of this princess bullshit.

I want to be a queen.

And so I started exploring the queen archetype.

I really,

I really thought,

Okay,

I'm going to embody this queen archetype and I started to sort of live it a little bit as similar to my friend,

How she lived this queen archetype.

And then I realized that the queen actually has some pretty nasty stuff that comes along with it.

And the princess actually has some pretty great stuff.

And that's because no matter who I identify myself as,

There will never be all good or all bad things about it.

So it didn't matter what I switched to.

They both had some positive things and they both had some negative things.

And I wasn't going to escape negative aspects just by graduating from the princess to the queen.

And just as an update,

I still would say I embody a lot of princess qualities,

But not necessarily the neediness aspect,

Some other ones and some queen qualities.

But so you can see this is sort of like applying the victim to the princess and queen.

The victim seems all bad.

So you think,

Okay,

I want to become the hero,

Whatever that is.

And this can truly apply to any archetype.

The hero mother or the victim mother,

The hero boss or the victim boss,

Hero athlete or the victim athlete.

You think,

Okay,

I want to swap one for the other.

And then you do that and you find just as that adage tells us,

The grass is not only always greener,

It's almost never greener,

Just green in some different spots.

As it turns out,

Victims get a lot of privileges and heroes aren't cut much slack.

So you move from victim to hero and you find you never get any rest.

You have to work way harder than before at life.

And maybe this brings more meaning or you feel more in control of your environment and those are great things,

But even still not going to escape what you are currently thinking of as bad karma.

This is because just as much as cause and effect is a truth of life,

So is the nature of experience,

Which says that no matter what you do,

There will always be loss,

Sickness,

Old age and death.

So the first thing you need to get out of your head is that you can ever escape bad karma.

So if that's what you're here to do today,

I can't help you.

Quite likely,

You're just misunderstanding the concepts of karma and identity.

And so you may be at this layer of awakening to these concepts where this is all very new and this may just be planting a seed for you that will need watering over time.

Everybody,

This will be a seed that needs watering over time.

But you may also be ready for the step of moving out of karmic and into the concept of karma.

And this is where the real training is required.

No matter what layer you are at,

We can all agree when you go to look for this identity inside of yourself,

So the princess or the athlete or the father,

It's nowhere to be found.

There is no Princess Sarah.

There are only some behaviors consistent with the concept of princess.

I've attached myself to them.

They create certain conditions and lead to certain outcomes.

And then I place this value on those conditions and those outcomes.

I become even more attached.

And this attachment that I have,

This is what causes my suffering.

And it's all coming from the magic of the mind.

If we know there's no victim and there's no princess,

There's no hero and there's no queen,

Then we know we have no actual concrete identity,

At least as we currently understand identity.

But we must be something,

Right?

So if we are something,

What is it that we are?

We must be something.

And this is really what we're pushed to.

We search and search for our identity.

You can imagine a teenager searching and searching for identity and you can't find it anywhere.

You can change again and again.

You can embody archetype after archetype that you feel like you're leveling up.

Well,

I used to embody lazy archetype,

But now I embody spiritual guru archetype.

And you think life is going to get better because of that new embodiment,

But actually it stays the same because experience is where these karmic bonds live.

And the attachment to the experience is what we have to break.

So we have to find out what are we?

If we are not a princess,

If we are not a hero,

What are we?

We are unlimited awareness.

Unlimited awareness,

Which is empty in essence.

We are unlimited awareness,

Which is empty in essence.

And this is the only thing you will find when you look within because this is the only constant.

It is the only thing we can know for sure that it is absolutely okay to identify with.

And when we take the lesson of identifying with what we really are,

Then we're able to finally break karma bonds.

But that means we must train so nobody gets out of it without training.

So how does this work?

Is there a formula you might be wondering?

And yes,

There is.

There is a formula for this.

The first step is you must know who you identify as and what that identity means to you.

This is the first layer.

Then you must awaken to the positive and negative aspects of that identity.

Don't lie to yourself that it's all good or all bad.

Next,

You have to ask yourself,

Who do you want to be identified as?

And then you must honestly appraise the types of karmic relationships that identity comes with.

When you look honestly,

You see there is no eliminating bad karma.

And you eventually come to the conclusion there must be something more than this.

And once you reach this conclusion,

That's when you begin to spend time looking within to analyze and uncover.

If you are not these archetypes,

Who are you?

And you find nothing there.

And so you begin to bring awareness to the qualities of nothingness,

Of emptiness.

And this is the formula.

You spend time every day exploring these qualities.

And you train yourself inside and outside of meditation to embody these qualities more and more until one day the karmic relationships fade.

And what exists in their stead is simply experience unfolding inside of your true nature.

And this brings us to our last practice.

The practice of seeing your true nature and uncovering what about this nature you should be identifying with.

So let's do our final practice.

It's basically just called training in the qualities of emptiness.

We need to train in the qualities of emptiness more than we train in the qualities of a princess,

Of an ex-husband,

Of a girl who had no father,

Of a boy whose mom wasn't around enough,

Of a businessman who never has enough free time.

We are currently training in those qualities more than we are training in the qualities of who we really are.

And it's because of this that we suffer.

So last month I jumped ahead of myself talking about transforming suffering because you can do all this work but it's like going into a field covered with weeds and chopping them all down right at the base of the stem and then thinking that they'll never grow back.

They're just going to keep growing back again and again and again.

You have to get to the root and you have to pull them up at the roots if you want them to stop regrowing.

And for the sake of suffering that means you have to go to the root of your identity.

And so we're going to create an archetype out of the identity of emptiness.

And to withstand the suffering of life,

To break free from karma bonds,

We're going to train in this archetype.

And even still we're going to do that with a relaxed feeling that we know nothing at all.

So take your seat.

Sit up tall.

Let's begin.

Find your meditation seat,

Whatever that means to you.

You can also lie down if you find that your body needs some rest.

Leave your eyes open or close them,

Whatever is right for your individual practice,

But whichever you do,

Relax your eyes.

Just connect your mind to a moment to your out breath.

Feeling each out breath as it leaves the body.

Not worrying about the in breath so much.

Just feel yourself breathing out.

And you can move around a little bit just like we did at the very beginning,

Shaking your head slightly,

Your shoulders.

Just getting out any energy that's causing you to feel distracted or unfocused.

Take a deep inhale through the nose and open the mouth,

Let it out.

Take a deep breath as I ask you some questions for contemplation.

Simply experience the answers in whatever form they take.

Resist nothing.

Push nothing away.

Who are you?

Look for you inside.

Can you find yourself anywhere?

If you cannot find a you,

Which I'm certain that you cannot,

What do you find?

You find this empty space that contains all of experience.

And if you find this space,

You begin to inspect it.

So there may be thoughts in there.

It's okay.

Sensations all good.

Let all of that be present and look around all of that for this empty spaciousness.

And once you find it,

I want you to explore it.

What is this space like?

And again,

I'm asking these questions,

But answers don't have to be coming in words.

Answers don't even have to be something that you can understand.

Just let yourself sit with the question.

What is this space like?

What qualities does emptiness have?

You can literally begin to name them now.

The types of qualities that you find inside of emptiness.

And again,

I'm transmitting some knowledge to you,

But for you to truly understand it,

You have to experience it.

It does no good for me to tell you what qualities emptiness has.

You must look and find them out for yourself.

And so you're naming these qualities.

You're sitting with this feeling of emptiness.

We can all touch this space,

Even if there are a million thoughts in the mind right now.

We can all touch the space that's always present,

That holds all of the thoughts.

As you identify some qualities of this spaciousness,

Now I want you to imagine that these are your qualities.

What does it feel like to imagine that these qualities of spaciousness are your qualities?

As you imagine these qualities,

Imagine them as your qualities,

Who you truly are.

Can you imagine if you spent your life training in experiencing reality through these qualities?

How would that affect your life?

How would that change your relationship to the things you believe happen to you that are good or bad?

Stay with it just a little bit longer.

I'm going to name some qualities that you may or may not have identified for yourself when you inspect spaciousness.

Just imagine,

As I say these qualities,

That they are yours,

That these are the qualities of you.

You are fully open and filled with space.

You can breathe in the words as I say them,

Or you can just let them sink in your mind.

You are fully open and filled with space.

You are completely allowing and accepting of everything.

You are fully aware at all times.

In fact,

You are awareness at all times.

You are spacious and restful.

You are spacious and restful and even.

You are luminous love.

Now just be with your breath.

If you can,

Just rest inside this space that you are.

You can let your breath deepen.

Let your eyes open.

This is the path,

Training in emptiness,

Learning who you truly are and then spending time practicing,

Embodying the qualities of what that is.

When you have accomplished this,

Karma as you know it disappears effortlessly.

What is left is only experience.

This doesn't mean you stop being a father or a boss,

But you do these things with a fluidity that is not attached to beliefs about what a boss or a father are.

We call this wearing your identity like loose-fitting clothing.

I encourage you to create a practice around this,

Especially if you find yourself suffering from some aspect of your attachment to identity.

You every day want to train in emptiness,

You want to train in seeing reality beyond labels.

You want to go deeper and deeper to the core of reality.

If I can be of any help,

Connect with me.

Please feel free to reach out.

I'm now going to leave space for some discussion if people want to talk about this a little bit,

If you want to process the experience.

Feel free to share everything.

I love that Shona,

I hope I pronounced your name right.

It's a welcoming quiet space to float in being.

Imagine these are the qualities of you.

Imagine you go into a room and people are like,

Shona arrived,

She's so welcoming.

Her space is so quiet and she's floating all the time.

These are qualities that really allow us to live experience without this heavy weight of suffering.

I want to just very briefly,

Because I mentioned the book by Carolyn Mays,

I want to just talk about this.

Carolyn Mays is great and I love her work.

I have nothing bad to say about it.

I love her work,

But it's limited.

As Sunshine just pointed out,

We are limitless.

We are limitless potential.

Carolyn Mays and actually a lot of people in the modern world today are trying to teach you to become something.

Break your karmic bonds and become the hero.

Do all of these things that you can transcend and be the next best thing.

But those still come with baggage.

That's attachment to experience.

That is living karmically.

I want you to live beyond karmic relationships.

I want you to experience that one taste of the ocean waves,

Maggie,

Peaking and crashing and calming all at one time.

That is a beautiful description of it.

I want you to experience life from that perspective because it's maybe selfish.

The more other people are living from this identity,

The better the world will be.

It's no longer the small selfish self.

Sarah the princess or Sarah the queen,

Both of them are binding me in these ways that lead to suffering.

So accept and detached on,

Yeah,

But also train.

So let me be very,

Very clear.

Train every single day.

Have a practice no matter where you're at.

Even if you're like,

I'm right at the beginning and I need to learn how to be mindful.

Train in emptiness.

You're like,

I'm deep in.

I'm already good with karmic relationships.

Now I'm working on karma.

Train in emptiness.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Real.

We are really connected and we matter to each other whether we like it or not.

That's true.

And who likes it or who doesn't like it?

This is karmic bondage.

Somebody who says I like it or I don't like it.

This is,

Again,

Our relationship to experience.

I'd say like,

Experience means a lot to me.

Put any experience in,

Experience means a lot to me and I have to get,

I'm valued based on what my experiences are and I'm only good or bad based on the experiences that I have and I need to loosen that attachment.

I need to relax and release it.

Shake it out.

Drop it.

I'm over caring about reality.

So what?

Who cares?

It's all an illusion.

I don't have a recording on the practice of emptiness up on Insight Timer,

I don't think,

But I might have one on the website,

On our Mindful Island website.

Either way,

After this practice,

I'll put this up onto Insight Timer,

Also onto YouTube and then I will offer a recording just to practice emptiness.

I really want to do it every single day.

You didn't become the identity you believe yourself to be right now,

Whether it's an athlete or it's a nerd or it's a boss or whatever.

You didn't become that overnight.

You maybe inherited some of those qualities from your parents or your family of origin,

But you trained in those qualities.

If you're connected to the archetype of an athlete,

You trained to become an athlete.

And just like you can train to become an archetype,

You can train to become the embodiment of what you really are,

Which is emptiness.

And emptiness is not the right word for it.

You know,

There are no right words for it because it's actually beyond description.

And that's why this is an experiential practice.

We can sit here together and we can blah,

Blah,

Blah about it all we want,

But you have to practice it.

And over time you come to see like,

I am really embodying this.

So,

Stuff happens and it sucks.

And instead of saying,

Oh,

My life sucks.

It's over.

Oh,

Again with this relationship again and again.

Instead of that,

I can just say,

This is another experience and all experiences are welcome in emptiness.

I say,

Yes,

It takes time.

Wide open spaces.

I love this idea in Dzogchen Buddhism that talks about the view,

Terry.

And the view is something I find really beautiful.

The view is like looking at a calm,

Clear lake,

Totally still,

A mountain,

Unmoving,

And an empty sky,

Cloudless.

And these are the aspects of the self.

And you can imagine now,

We've all seen an environment like that.

You can imagine that you're looking out onto this view.

And anything can come into it.

A tornado,

A bird,

An airplane,

A dog taking a poop in the tree next to you,

Somebody you don't even know throwing a can out their car window as they drive by,

The sound of birds,

The beautiful sound of birds,

A little squirrel running and gathering nuts.

All of these things can come into that view and it's okay.

It doesn't change the view.

What happens is that the mind narrows and expands,

Narrows and expands.

And it's like a blank canvas.

Our attachment to identity,

Especially our archetypal identities,

Make us zoom in so that we're constantly zoomed in and we're in this very narrow perspective of reality so things become good or bad.

This is where dualistic thinking comes from,

Dualistic mind comes from.

We don't want to be so zoomed in all the time.

We actually want to notice when we've zoomed in.

So let's say I embody the princess archetype.

That's okay.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But when the princess archetype begins to turn me into tunnel vision,

I want to notice it.

I want to acknowledge it.

And so I have to train in recognizing the princess archetype.

I have to train in recognizing the cues that lock me in.

You can learn more on archetypes from Carl Jung.

That's actually like the foremost person.

Joseph Campbell also,

Some great stuff on mythology.

I know Carolyn Mays,

I really love her work on archetypes.

And this is sort of a,

You can think about it as a phase,

As a level.

You first learn about archetypes.

Like,

Who am I?

I'm embodying all of these things.

And we all have different archetypes,

But we all share some archetypes too,

Like the hero and the victim.

Ivy,

How do you keep from allowing things that are not okay?

Aren't there some things that are inherently bad and should be avoided?

This is a great question,

Ivy.

You don't keep from allowing anything.

It's actually your desire to stop things from being okay that causes suffering.

Remember the view.

And so I'm not expecting you to right now in this moment be like,

Yeah,

Sarah,

I get it.

Okay,

Ivy,

So I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is you want to train in the view.

Remember looking at the view,

A calm,

Clear lake,

An unmoving mountain,

An endless blue sky.

A guy drives by in a really loud diesel truck that's blowing black smoke out and throws a can out the window.

And what does the view do?

The view does nothing.

The view allows it.

Now,

I'm not suggesting that you should be someone who throws cans out your window while you're driving a black truck.

I'm suggesting that you train in being the view that allows experience to be exactly what it is without having to stop anything.

And it's the desire to stop things and just sit with this that will actually cause you suffering.

You want to stop that guy who cut you off on that road.

It's that desire to stop that guy who cut you off on that road that leads to your own self-harm.

Yeah,

Mia,

You're welcome.

Okay,

So Shona,

This will be uploaded.

So you can listen to it again if you'd like and also maybe I'll have a transcript of it that I'll put on the website.

Sunshine,

What about physical or emotional harm done to you?

So allowing doesn't mean that we are allowing ourselves to be harmed.

Allowing means that we recognize all experience is experience,

Not good or bad.

That doesn't mean that we are really living lives as daughters,

Brothers,

Sisters,

Fathers,

Bosses.

So if we are in physical or emotional harm's way,

We have to do what's needed in order to eliminate that from our lives.

But that doesn't mean that we have to become locked in the identity of being someone who was physically or emotionally harmed.

We can embrace that identity and become healers for others,

And that's a great way to channel the energy of having been someone who's been physically or emotionally harmed before.

But even to that,

We should apply the statement,

I wear my identity like loose-fitting clothing so that I'm never so fixed to it that it continues to perpetuate my own suffering.

Yeah,

Thank you,

Amy.

I'm glad you're finding it valuable to you.

We are divine beings having a human experience.

Yeah,

Charlie,

So somebody asked me in my last workshop afterwards,

What does divinity mean?

How would I explain divinity or divine,

The divine?

I gave this explanation of the divine essentially being the conditions all coming together at exactly the right time,

Manifest in an outcome.

So the divine can be just as much loaded into negative experiences.

In fact,

Sometimes it's even more palpable inside of our negative experiences than it is inside of our positive ones.

So we're definitely at our time.

I just want to recognize you all for allowing me to be here and lead this experience together.

I really,

Really get a lot from these experiences for myself and my own personal practice and understanding.

If you have any last minute questions,

Please feel free to send them.

You can also find me,

As I said,

On the social medias and please connect with me because I love to connect with people and continue these dialogues.

And I'll just kind of leave it open for the next minute or so.

Otherwise,

Just much gratitude to you.

May all beings be free.

May all beings experience joy,

Happiness,

Unlimited compassion,

Unlimited equanimity.

Thank you,

Christopher.

Okay.

If there are any more questions,

Please feel free to email me.

Info at mindfulisland.

Com.

I'll put it here.

A lot to think about and really just to be sitting with.

Thanks for joining me today,

Shona,

Ivy.

Thank you so much,

Christopher.

Also,

Dawn,

As always,

I really appreciate,

I really,

Really appreciate and the Insight Timer platform,

Which I also really appreciate.

May the rest of your Sunday be fully,

Fully,

May it be fully whatever.

Thank you,

Charlie.

Okay,

I'm ending now.