This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Med: Effort as Not-Self; Interpersonal Dharma (4 of 5)Honoring the Neurosis/Pain of the Other. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Effort as Not-Self; Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (4 of 5): Honoring the Neurosis/Pain of the Other - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 13, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Welcome, welcome all. Good morning to most, but I know Switzerland is in the house, so late afternoon, I think. It's lovely to see the names.

Guided Meditation: Effort as Not-Self

For this first minute, just don't do anything. In a sense, see how many things you might stop doing, how many things you think meditation asks you to start doing. Whatever consciously can be stopped, just stop.

It's a certain kind of confidence that freedom is on offer, that there's already goodness here. That it's not the self, the self efforting, that claws its way to freedom.

Sometimes our doing, our effort, our intention, our direction of attention—all of this actually crystallizes the sense of self, the sense of the meditator pulling the strings behind the scenes.

And so we experiment with that, relaxing all the conscious impulses to do something, rather than to trust.

If there's something you can't stop doing, that's okay. Don't double down and try to stop what you cannot stop. Just practice relaxing the deep impulse of doing, of performing.

Now, let us practice doing something, but almost with the spirit of non-doing. Doing something, but somehow doing it in a different way than we've tended to do it, somehow not repeating that kind of subtly desperate energy of doing. But instead, very openly receiving your breathing.

Don't congeal a sense of you, the meditator, behind that receptivity. Just receive this beautiful, rhythmic flow of our breathing.

We're careful not to source our meditation instructions from places or voices within us that are impatient, unwise, or moralistic. We're not letting the superego¹ do our meditation; that's not the headquarters. But we instead source our counsel and motivation from something deeper in us, more intuitive and embodied. And so it's safe to ignore every voice or place that's harshly critical or full of self, or full of the compulsivity of doing. We just find the thread of our practice elsewhere.

Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (4 of 5): Honoring the Neurosis/Pain of the Other

Okay, so we'll continue on with this interpersonal theme. And today is something like honoring neurosis, the neurosis of the other, honoring Dukkha², suffering.

Sometimes I've had the thought—I just did a retreat on the Four Noble Truths with a friend and colleague, Ines Freedman³—and we did the Four Noble Truths, but sometimes I've thought the First Noble Truth sort of contains the other three. The truth of suffering, because you know that there's a cessation of the cause and there's a path. But the first truth, the truth of Dukkha, usually rendered as suffering, that is no joke. And we may say, "Yeah, I get it. I know suffering. Everyone knows suffering. That's why we're here. It's why we're practicing. And I've suffered and you've suffered and yeah, we know it." But do we comprehend it? The Buddha said, "Comprehend Dukkha." Do we realize it as an insight? This is not a process that is for the faint of heart, and we actually really have to stop fighting it, at least momentarily, to comprehend it. And yet, most everything in us rallies the troops to fight. And so it's actually a major project to open to one's suffering.

But sometimes the suffering of the other is even more evocative. And it can be evocative in a way that opens us to very deep compassion. Something in just seeing a loved one suffering, it's like, "Oh, yeah, may you be free." But sometimes our care gets tangled up with a sense of control, with some strand of our own clinging. And so the question: what would it be to follow the Buddha's instruction of comprehending suffering for another's life? We've entrusted our heart to another, either by choice or by birth, and that essentially means that all of their suffering feels like our business.

When you're a child, the suffering of a parent has huge implications for your own safety. It's not really a cause for compassion; their pain is destabilizing. It's a threat. I don't know an exact moment, but I kind of remember the sense of being a little bit shattered when the fantasy of my parents' omnipotence was dashed. It was like, okay, that fantasy crumbles, and then the recognition of, "We're all this vulnerable." And there's something like the echo of that destabilization that still haunts my love for adults now. And their suffering does something of that sort to my heart. And so there can be this deep wobble when we see loved ones in pain, when we see their neurosis, when we see them acting out their greed, hate, and delusion.

And just like goodness can kind of resonate with goodness—we feel that often, we feel that in the Dharma field, it's like, "Oh, okay, yeah, our hearts resonate." We see the beauty of someone's heart and it just does something to us and reverberates. And in the same way, like two bells resonating, suffering can resonate with suffering, neurosis can resonate with neurosis. Something about what they're doing lands in a certain way in my heart that spins me even more deeply than if that suffering were purely my own.

Researchers have done brain imaging when seeing a loved one suffer with some kind of pain task, some modest amount of pain, but a partner's in the scanner and you're somehow seeing a loved one suffer. And a lot of the brain lights up—regions associated with understanding the inner states of others, mentalization, with emotional resonance. Some of the same parts of the brain that would activate if we were getting the pain.

Kittisaro and Thanissara⁴, the monastics for for many years—many of you may know them, sat with them—but I heard this response of what it is like to be in a relationship. "You're both these dharma people, what's it like to be in a relationship, having been monks and a nun for a long time?" And I think Kittisaro's response was, "Relationship is like two people under one robe." A very potent answer, you know, to recognize, okay, what as a monastic was, "Okay, I was working with this system," is now working with two people under one robe.

And we know that seeing suffering in our own life can get us scrambling to reorder circumstances. And when we see the suffering of someone we care about deeply, it's the same. We often have to work with the impulse to reorder them, who they are. And compassion devolves into something like this desperation to change them, to make them grow. This is not actually compassion. This is a certain kind of compulsivity, because I can see it's my aversion or fear or worry or something that is driving the show. Are they going to be okay? Or sometimes it's even more basic. It's like, is this who I love? We love other imperfect beings, right?

But at some level, I think what I want in all of my relationships, I want them to be fully enlightened arhats⁵. You know, that's what I want from everyone in my life. Me, I can be just like a basket of defilements, but you, I need you actually to be free from greed, hate, and delusion. Then maybe I would not be triggered. You know, that's kind of the fantasy.

So we know when we respond to our own suffering with that kind of desperate scramble, it's often unproductive. And somehow it's harder to resist that when it's interpersonal suffering. And it maybe takes a kind of balance of melting and freezing. Melting and freezing, what I was talking about, I think, yesterday. So we melt in the sense that we become clearly aware of their pain. We almost inhabit their mind. This is empathic connection. But then there's some freezing, too.

In the melting, there's this line that I quote often from a novelist who was asked if and how literature changes people. And he responded, "I don't think people change very much. To the extent they change at all, it's because of some encounter that has love in it." We know it's hard to change. We know that well. It's hard to change, it's hard to grow at depth. And if we're going to do it, love will be involved. And the kind of cruel, perverse irony is that the people we most want to change are often the ones we're most enraged by, even though we know anger is the single worst way to get someone to deeply change. We might shape them momentarily, but that's not a good behavioral modification program to run them on: anger and our judgment and harshness.

So there's love, there's melting. But then we freeze, too, in a good sense. Not in the kind of dissociative sense, but freeze in the sense that if their pain becomes pure emotional contagion, it just spins us too much. And so there's some sense of boundaries, too. We care for the other as if their pain were our own, but without losing the "as if" condition. Carl Rogers⁶ said something like that.

And so this is the equanimity side of relating to their pain, to their neurosis, to their habits that they can't shake out of. This is love in the face of helplessness. I cannot rescue you from this suffering. I desperately want to. I would even be angry if I could do it, if the anger would work, but I know that's a dead end. I can't. And so the equanimity needs to counterbalance the compassion, otherwise the compassion can devolve into an insistence that someone else change. That's not what's called for.

Deep, bowing acceptance. We forgive, which really means just to understand, to understand their inner life, to open to our own ambivalence that we must tolerate, the mixed feelings we have about any other person. We must tolerate that. Maybe there's some sense of loss, of grief, and we open to that rather than the anger and the kind of pseudo-compassion, which is often some attempt just to discharge the energy that feels like too much for our system. Can we soothe our own heart? It's not self-indulgent to move into some measure of self-compassion when you see the other suffering, because if we're spun, our interventions will always be misdirected.

And so we tend to our own heart, the deeply evocative pain of witnessing a loved one suffer. And that love is soothing. It weakens the kind of compulsive, pseudo-compassion, the compulsive interventionist spirit of our love lives with partners or parents or children or other loved ones.

So again, Leonard Cohen⁷: "I wish there were a treaty we could sign. I do not care who takes this bloody hill. I'm angry and I'm tired all the time. I wish there was a treaty, I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine."

What would that be, a treaty between your love and mine? In the realm of relationship, that's a deep question. So I offer this for your consideration, and we'll gather back tomorrow.