Grandmother Mind & The Art Of True Acceptance

Suryacitta, the Happy Buddha, begins this podcast with a short beautiful story about his grandmother and why we all need to cultivate what he calls, a grandmother mind. Cultivating your own grandmother mind is the art of true meditation and what acceptance is really about. He gets practical and talks us through how to be with all those difficult feelings which we all have. He ends by stating that what you feel, you heal - beautiful!

Transcript

Hello,

I want to talk about what we are really doing in meditation.

There are a lot of misunderstandings so I want to go into one particular aspect of what we are doing and to do this I want to tell you a story.

When I was a young boy my mum used to take me to my grandmother's and she would go to work and I remember walking around to my grandmother's we would get about 30-40 yards and I would see her front door and I would run to the front door and barge in and my grandmother I used to call her Nana,

Lovely word Nana.

My grandmother would be sitting there with her newspaper and she would put the newspaper down and she would say come here son and she would give me a big kiss and a big cuddle.

Now I loved that,

I thought I was very special but I think she would treat all the grandchildren the same.

Now my mum would come in and she may say he has been a naughty boy,

He hasn't cleaned his bedroom or washed behind his ears or whatever and my grandmother would say I don't care,

You go to work and leave him with me,

Come here son and she would kiss me again.

Lovely times and when I talk about meditation I often tell that story and the reason why is because we are developing what we could call a grandmother mind,

A mind that welcomes.

See my grandmother welcomed all those naughty bits about me.

It's not that she let me get away with anything when my mum had left but she would correct me with love.

And so what does that mean for our meditation?

Well we all have parts of ourselves we don't like,

We are uncomfortable with.

We might be feeling of shame,

Shame comes up in meditation or in daily life we might feel sad or lonely or just an uncomfortable something,

It might be anxiety.

Now in meditation what we are doing there is cultivating what we call grandmother mind.

Now let's get practical.

It's not going to be talking about grandmother mind and just leaving it like that.

We need to talk about what does it actually mean,

How do we do it?

So let's get practical.

So when we are sitting in meditation and your next meditation you have I'd like you to try this okay.

Meditation is all about feeling.

There is thinking going on and there are the other senses which I am including in feeling,

You know the hearing,

All the senses,

It's about the body.

So we sit down in meditation,

We may close our eyes,

We may take a couple of deeper breaths and then we follow the breath or the objective meditation.

Now we may notice that we have a sad feeling or just an uncomfortable something or a tight tense feeling.

Now often what we do there is try to get rid of it.

If we are honest we try to get rid of it,

We want it to go away or we ignore it.

Oh I can't meditate with this here.

Oh I'll just focus on my breath.

No that feeling of let's say sadness becomes your object of meditation.

We turn our attention to it and just hold it in awareness.

We feel it which is often something we don't want to do because we have an idea that well I want to get somewhere,

Somewhere nice in my meditation.

I want to get calm or you know I want to experience the cosmic love child within or whatever ideas we have.

But forget about all your ideas to do with meditation and just learn to feel what's here.

As I say in feeling I'm including hearing,

Just be the hearing.

If the eyes are open just the seeing,

The feeling,

The sensations in the body.

Now let's go back to this sad feeling.

So let's assume oh we're feeling sad,

We don't like it,

We don't want it.

See what that does,

That attitude,

It keeps it static.

Trying to push things away keeps things static.

Month after month,

Year after year,

Decade after decade.

What needs to happen,

It needs to be felt.

See what we feel we heal.

So we just turn towards a sad feeling.

If we're feeling strong enough we may not do today but eventually we have to start turning towards that which we don't want.

We have to start being our own grandmother,

Cultivating your very own grandmother mind which welcomes everything,

Absolutely everything.

We see we get lost in thoughts,

We accept the fact,

We just say to ourselves thinking and then we return back to the body.

So we turn towards the feeling of sadness,

That sad feeling or whatever it is.

We turn towards the experience in the body of whatever it is,

Not the mind,

Not the thinking about it.

The direct experience of whatever it is.

Might just touch the edges of it with awareness.

You might notice what it really feels like.

What does it feel like?

Is the sad feeling heavy?

How much does the sad feeling weigh?

What shape does it have?

Is it dense?

Is it light?

What colour is the sad feeling?

So we're just there holding it in awareness,

Just feeling it and healing it.

You may have to do that with feelings of anxiety in the body,

Feelings of fear,

Feelings of delight.

If you're feeling delight or contentment or peace,

Just feel it.

But please don't turn away from that which you don't like.

The path of meditation is too open to everything and that's the end of inner conflict.

So you might think,

Well what happens if I feel the sad feeling?

Well that's not the best attitude with which to go into it but I'm going to tell you anyway because we often want something to inspire us to do this.

For me compassion is just being with that feeling of sadness,

Not expecting it to go away.

See let's take sadness.

Sadness is the seed of compassion.

If I feel sad,

If I allow myself to feel sad consciously,

What dawns on me is that everybody else feels sad.

I'm not the only one.

So it starts to open our hearts to others and to ourself.

Now we don't try to transform sadness into anything else,

Into compassion,

Into something pleasant.

That's not the way forward.

What happens is that sadness,

It both transforms into something,

We don't need to be concerned with what it transforms into,

But it opens our hearts for compassion.

It's the seed of compassion.

But what it does,

And this is more important,

It transforms you.

You don't transform it.

With your attention and your holding it and feeling it,

You allow it to change,

You allow it to transform.

But that's not your job,

You just set up the conditions.

Grandmother mind,

A mind that's gently curious.

A good grandmother would be curious about the grandchild.

How's he or she doing?

Now you may,

Someone said to me once,

I didn't have a very nice grandmother,

But that's missing the point.

We all don't and I get that.

But it's the model,

If you like,

Of the loving grandmother.

That's what we're looking at here.

Developing,

Cultivating your very own grandmother mind.

Not one that pushes the grandchild away,

But one that welcomes a mind that's open,

A heart that's open to whatever arises.

The joys and the sorrows,

Because you will have both in your life.

So take this attitude into your next meditation.

Give up the idea of trying to get somewhere.

Don't involve yourself in that.

You have this idea in your head.

It's just an idea.

You're here now.

Explore now.

Be curious about now.

And that's a way to develop your very own grandmother mind.

Thank you.

Reviews

yes, yes, yes!!! said perfectly (your grandmother sounds divine) 🌻🌞🧡🌻🌞🧡🌻🌞🧡🌻🌞🧡🌻

Love this and will work on developing my grandmother mind. Funny, I listened to this and realized I was drinking out of my great grandmother tea cup that reads Oma. Love the coincidence.❤️

This meditation brought me back to myself.
Thank you 🙏🏻

I loved this! Mow I can see how to do, how to be in my feelings! Thank you 🙏🌞

Excellent advice, beautifully and compellingly expressed. Thank you.

So many gems here for me to revisit and explore. I really appreciate the practical guidance. Often I get stuck on labelling an uncomfortable feeling. So to consider instead on describing how it feels, such as weight, shape, size, texture etc.. may offer me another way of accepting with compassion what is, rather than pushing away.
Thank you so much 🙏💛

Dear Suryacitta. First of all I feel so blessed to have been guided to your meditations. I love the grandmother mind. Our grandchildren are such precious souls and now having listened and smiled with you I realise so are we!
Appreciate you. Thank you.
💖🙏🕊🦋

Absolutely wonderful! I will now hold my inner child like my Oma did.
Thank you 🦋

Excellent lesson to adjust my perspective while meditating!
Thank you he who has a heart like the sun. 🙏

A gentle and useful concept to support your meditation practice. Worth a listen!

A clear, memorable description of what we do when we meditate. So helpful- like a grandmother!

What we feel we heal. Taking so much from this talk. Thank you.

Absolutely wonderful. Thank you.

I learnt a lot about meditation from this. No expectations and being in the present moment, whatever feelings we have. Beautiful

Beautiful 🙏

Very comforting. I didn’t have grandparents but this put compassion into that empty place.

I love your voice Suryacitta. And Grandmother mind really speaks to me too. Thank you 😊 Subhavandana

Kind and beautiful words that give the concept of meditation a different approach. Thank you 💖

Very nice way to think about meditation practice. Thank you.

Thank you so much for this! The grandmother analogy is brilliant and clarified so much for me. I felt a huge shift in understanding.