A (5:38)
The last session class, the focus was on the role of hope on the spiritual path. And I was contrasting spiritual hope to egoic hope. A kind of more narrow, grasping kind of hope. And the mark of egoic hope is that we're wanting certain outcomes to come to pass in the future. So I hope I'll get a raise or win the Olympic gold or whatever it is. So there's a kind of narrowed hope. And with it, along with the grasping, there's a kind of a fear that it won't work out. And there's a real narrowed attention. It's like we miss the universe around us because we've got this idea we want just something in particular. A favorite example has always been this story of an older woman who's kind of sitting on a bench, a park bench in Miami. And very disheveled man in tattered clothing comes and sits down next to her. And so she asked, so how are you? And he said, well, actually, I'm just out of prison 25 years. And she says, oh, what were you in for? He said, murdering my wife. And she said, oh, so you're single. So what happens is that we don't. We have an agenda because we're hoping for a certain thing and we're just not available to how life really is. The hoping for a certain thing to happen a certain way actually makes it so we're not receptive and available and attuned to the whole mystery that's unfolding around us. And this happens even in spiritual realms. When we have an idea of. We're meditating and we have an idea of how we want our practice to be. And when it's not the way we have the idea, it's not crystal rainbows and lights and so on. If there's anxiety that arises, our obsessive thoughts, we think, oh, this isn't supposed to be here. And rather than opening to what is and letting whatever is here be a portal, we're kind of searching for it to be different or grasping. And of course, it happens for many people when we have ideas of the future and how things are supposed to evolve, what kind of heaven realms we want to be able to transcend into, either during our life or in the afterlife. And there's a story about two friends, Norman and Irv, who had a deep interest in the esoteric. And they had this sense or this belief that after they died there was some way to keep in contact with those on Stalin form. And so they made a deal that whoever was the first to die would get in touch and kind of describe how it was to live in the afterlife when more transcendent realms. So Irv dies first, and Norman doesn't hear from him for a year and just decides, okay, there's no afterlife. But one day he gets a call and it's Irv. And he goes, oh, so there is an afterlife. Wow. Because he's hearing this message, this voice in his mind. So he says, what's it like? And Norman asks, and this is Irv's response. He goes, well, I sleep very late. I have a big breakfast, then I have lots of sex, lots of sex. And I go back to sleep. But I get up for lunch, have a big lunch, more sex, take a nap, huge dinner, more sex, and it goes on and on. Wow, says Norman. So that's what heaven's really like. Oh, no, says Irv. I'm not in heaven. I'm a moose in Wyoming. So we have ideas, and they get in the way of our availability to really discover the reality of the moment. Any idea does. So spiritual hope, in contrast to these ideas about how it could or should be, it arises from a trust of consciousness that love is here. Consciousness is here. It's living through us, and it's timeless. It's not really a hope for something in the future. It's that hope and sense of openness to the unfolding of consciousness right here and now. It's described as an attitude of the soul. And I really like that expression, this spiritual hope. It's this wisdom that recognizes our Potential to realize a fully awakened heart, mind. And that sense of our potential makes us available moment to moment, to what's right here. Here's Hamid Ali. The way he describes it, he says hope, and he's talking about what he sometimes describes as holy. Hope is a state of trust that everything will be okay. It's a feeling of optimism, an attitude of openness and true receptivity to what the unfolding of being presents to us. What makes it that everything will be okay? It's that the love and awareness that we belong to is living through us this very moment. That's what gives us the trust. So spiritual hope doesn't have to do with the future. When I look ahead, when I think of the future, a lot of the time I just get anxious, you know, I just think of I have too much to do, you know, and it just gets me tight. That's what comes up habitually when I think of the future. And that's not to say, say, there aren't skillful ways you can think of the future that serve hope, but they have to point you back to the value of being present. Does that make sense? If you have an idea of the future and it's like, and the message is, oh, everything you want is by being present. That's a useful one. So as we're going to explore, fueling and nurturing spiritual hope comes out of connecting right here more fully with our life, our bodies, our hearts, our awareness. It's a reconnecting now in Buddhism. It's always, to me, just very striking that really the heart of Buddhism, Buddhism is this attitude of hope that the First Noble Truth says, okay, there's suffering, there's discontent. And the Second Noble Truth says that it arises because we're always grasping after things or pushing things away. And the Third Noble Truth says, but freedom is possible for any of us, freedom is possible. This is the message. And the example of the Buddha is just the only value of it is it's an example of a human being caught in grasping, caught in pushing things away that was able to come home to a larger sense of being, to that awareness and love that's here. Freedom is possible. Fourth Noble Truth is the path to that freedom, how to manifest that potential. So the path is grounded in hope. And when we're shy on hope, there are ways to nourish it. And that's what we're going to look into tonight. We're going to two things. One is what blocks us, you know, what really blocks us from having that attitude of possibility and the second is when we're blocked. Really, how do we move into that sense of, oh, okay, it's here. I can draw on this. Hope gets blocked, it gets disabled. We contract away from a natural sense of openness or optimism when we have some experience of severed belonging. And I like that term. It's very much in the field of psychology, but I think it's useful. It's really a felt sense of severed belonging. It's not actual severed belonging. We can't be severed. We are awareness. There's no severing, but there's a felt sense from a small self perspective that we've been cut off in some way. It happens typically for many in early childhood because our parents also had severed belonging and are unable to create that kind of resonance field where we're seen and gotten for who we are and we're embraced for who we are. So when there's not a really safe, loving, filled with understanding, kind of attunement in our home life, that is a sense of being cut off. It's really interesting that researchers are discovering more and more how when there's enough nurturance, when there's really good mirroring. I see you, I get you. That is actually what activates the neural connections in the frontal cortex, our capacity, especially the relational network in the frontal cortex. That has to do with empathy and compassion. That gets activated when, as young children were in a resonance field and when we're not. In other words, if we don't get seen and we don't get that loving, we don't get the full activation of our frontal cortex. We're not able to engage in relationships so fully because there's not trust. There's some sense of danger. When that happens, instead of being guided by a wholeness or an integrated brain and an awake heart, we're guided by our limbic system that looks for what's threatening and dangerous and tends not to trust others. And it's really seen. There's some animal studies that show it in a very kind of dramatic way. Some studies with chimps, when the mother is erratic in mothering. Sometimes there, sometimes not. And erratic is what sets off a sense of insecurity and trauma. When the mother's erratic, the chimp babies end up binge eating, being antisocial, withdrawn and fearful. Now, does that sound familiar? I mean, how many of us. So it really creates the groundwork for depression because when we're cut off from a sense of that connection with others, when we're living in anxiety, the tendency is to Want to push under our life energy because it's so unpleasant. So that's one level that it happens is in childhood when there's not good enough parenting. But it also happens through our life when we have experiences of being violated or rejected or some threat to our health where we really sense that we could die. When there's. When there's dramatic accidents, anytime we feel unsafe in some sort of ongoing way that can end up creating that sense of severed belonging, mistrust, lack of hope. We can see it culture wide when we really look at historically marginalized groups. So all these studies of Native American groups in Canada, United States, and how generational trauma has created this experience of depression, addiction, anxiety, the same thing we see when we do, when we humans are animals, make things unsafe and we lose access to hope and we go into anxiety, depression and addictive behavior. See it very much. It's so much in front of us right now with the. An ongoing oppression of violence towards African Americans. I was teaching on the West Coast, I gave a talk at Salesforce. And one of the women I was talking to there was describing how the fear she experiences when her partner goes out to the supermarket when it's late at nighttime because this increasing police violence and you know, black men getting stopped and never know when there's going to be some sense of right on the streets, either killed by police or attacked by a gang member. So she lives in fear and ta Nehisi Coates describes as the fear for the bodily self. This ongoing sense of fear of severed belonging cuts us off from hope. We can't sense the possibility of what we might experience in our lives. So its biggest expression is when there's full trauma. Full trauma means we're fully severed. There's full severed belonging. We're completely gripped by the limbic system. But for most of us, if we haven't had full trauma, there are ways we have felt severed belonging each of us, and to the extent we have, to whatever degree, that means that we're going to have some lack of access to really trusting our own body, trusting our heart, trusting that others care, trusting the earth, the web of life. I think in particular about depression because it's such a. One of the most common and really excruciating versions of separate belonging that when the life energy just depresses what's there and the feeling of no hope, it's a real prison, a biological and psychological prison for anyone that has experienced depression knows it. When we don't have hope, it feels like torment. Hence we begin to look at, for any of us on the spectrum, how do we reconnect? When there's severed belonging at any level, how do we reconnect? And the first thing is again to say it's possible to reconnect. That the Buddha said that I wouldn't be teaching you this dharma, this path, if it wasn't possible to be free, if it wasn't possible to reconnect, if it wasn't possible to be happy. So freedom's possible. It's an intrinsic capacity within us. And there's a pathway and we're going to look at now how to reconnect to the aliveness in the moment, into our lives. What I'd like to do, and this will be for the rest of this talk, is draw on some examples of different people who've really kind of hit bottom. Sometimes that's more extreme, but I think in a way, often in order to find our way to hope, we have to hit bottom. That all of our false refuges, all our compensatory techniques, they don't really work. They don't bring us a deep sense of trust that allows us to move through the ups and downs of life. We're on a roller coaster. You usually. So the first person I'd like to bring in is William James. And many of you know of him as American philosopher, psychologist, educator, and also as one of the well known people that really introduced us to altered states. That reality is not just this narrow version that we have of it. So his story, it's an interesting story. He came from a really accomplished family and his brother Henry was super successful writer. And William, in his 30s, he was unaccomplished. He wanted to be a painter. Then he gave that up and went to medical school. But then he quit that to do an expedition up the Amazon. But that didn't work out either. And then in a moment of reckoning, and he wrote this in his diary, he questioned that he had the capacity, capacity to be in any way productive in his life and that he should be alive at all because that counts as hitting bottom, right? That's pretty good. So he had, I guess any possibility was there then if he really didn't have a reason to be alive. But he said, before I do anything rash, I'm going to do a one year experiment. And this is what I think this is fascinating. So he did a one year experiment. He decided that no matter what thoughts arose, no matter how hopeless, no matter how depressed, he would keep turning his attention to the assumption that change was possible. That was it he was going to. Every time he had certain types of thoughts, like hopeless, hopeless, I'm unproductive, never going to work. He would just turn to the assumption of change is possible. Possible. Not. I'm a great person and I'm going to, you know, I'm getting better and better every day. You know, the thing you put on your refrigerator. But change is possible. Okay, all right. So he tracked in his diary and he practiced every day as if things could get better, as if he could transform. And he became increasingly receptive to opportunities in that mind state. And his energy got engaged and he got more and more aligned with deeper interests. He married. He started teaching at Harvard, created a study group, the Metaphysical Club. He wrote a letter after this experiment. He said, I possess for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom. Free to manifest our potential. So this feels like a really super relevant story for us because the training that we do in when we're practicing mindfulness and compassion really, it begins with being able to step out of the trance of thoughts that keep our biology and our mood and our attitude really small. In that prison, we begin to notice, oh, if I'm thinking this, that this is my sense of who I am, I'm going to stay stuck in this pattern. So we step out of certain thoughts. The Buddha said, whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on that will become the inclination of their mind. So you see how hopelessness has to be fueled by thoughts. That mood has to be fueled. So we begin to ask ourselves, what kind of thoughts do we have regularly? Are they thoughts that are going to keep us sensing limitation? Are they thoughts that are going to open us to what's possible and bring us right back into this moment? A friend told me a story of a couple who really loved to travel, were living very fully. He got a diagnosis of Parkinson's. And this friend described how they continued very lively and engaged, very open, with a real capacity for joy. And the way they did it, they had this agreed on attitude, which is that they are going to have a conscious intention to allow each day to be as good as it could be, not saying it had to be a certain way. Some days could be really hard. Oh, exhausted all day. But they were open to even with that having the most presence or care, tenderness or curiosity, kindness. It's that openness and it's an attitude. So let's just take a little moment to practice on this level. This is working with the thoughts a bit. So one expression of severed belonging is limiting thoughts. And one way to re establish belonging morning is to wake up out of them, come back to the living experience, be open to what's possible right here. So I invite you to bring to mind an area in your life where you might feel some doubt, where you might have some limiting thoughts, not be so hopeful. It might be around work or it might be in a certain relationship that feels very, very stuck, hurtful, dead ended, reactive. Might be that you have some limiting ideas and doubts about your health, about your spiritual unfolding or somewhere you feel emotionally stuck. And when you sense the area that you're where you get caught in doubt, you might deepen your listening and just sense, well, what is it you're most believing or telling yourself. That you don't have the capacity to make things different or that you don't have the capacity to live with what's going on, what's unfolding, that it's too much, That something bad is around the corner. Just take a moment to sense whatever it is you're believing, how that belief imprisons you might sense if you're running that belief through your mind when you're believing it, when you're believing in your limitation, your lack of capacity, how it severs you from being available, It severs you from that openness, that receptivity. They're actually not so available to life. Just bring a very kind presence to both the activity of the belief and to the squeeze or the prison that it creates so that you're breathing and as if you're really from your deepest wisest self, just bearing witness with real kindness. Sense that you can perceive this from your highest and wise yourself, how the smaller part of you is caught and also see beyond how the wisest part of you can sense possibility. And you might imagine what your life would be like if you didn't believe the limiting thoughts. Just get a glimpse. What does it feel like in your body if you just for a moment sense what would it be like if I didn't believe? Just let your body sense that, that sense of possibility, that mystery, that aliveness that all of a sudden becomes available. For now just to honor that something that you can tap into that like William James, you can notice when limiting thoughts come and on purpose invite in your deepest wisdom, turn to the light, to the sense of possibility. Opening your eyes. So that's the first first ave and you back to belonging is that we wake up out of the limiting thoughts. The second example of rediscovering our belonging is Henry Thoreau. We're back in history, males back a Century or so. So in his time, a neighbor put it, he was an irresponsible idler, a trial to his family and no credit to his town. He was seen as a loser, and as a writer, he was disregarded. In fact, Walden languished on bookshelves for years. So, age 26, Thoreau goes to New York City and wants to establish himself in the literary scene there. And he tries to develop his career in a conventional way and adopt the kind of style and fashion of the day. He tries to be like those that were popular. Totally crashes, reject it. So he goes home and he's doing a lot of soul searching, and he basically discovers what happened. That he had lost touch with his own being and trying to be the way the world thought he should be, or the way he thought the world thought he should be anyway. You know, meeting expectations and so on. So he really asked himself, you know, what is it that I love? And he returned to his beloved wood with wisdom from failure, which was, you have to be who you are. You have to stay true to what you love. So he found the still point, the center of the natural world. And it was, for him, 1.5 miles from home. And I thought it was interesting that his mother would bring him cookies and sandwiches. So he was still this loafer, you know, but he was a loafer that had found his way back home again. And what he found was attentiveness to nature. This natural world was a way to come home to the nature of his inner world. This was his pathway to belonging. So his message, this is a quote. One should be always on the train of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the divine. So there's this homecoming that comes in the face of having to extricate ourselves from this idea of we're supposed to be a certain way. Because it's a deep, deep imprint on every one of us that we should act a certain way, we should be successful in a certain way, we should look a certain way. So for us to imagine, who would I be in this moment if I was not obeying any of that? What really matters to me? Rumi puts it this way. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kiss the ground. So there's an intention here for each of us. Are we really kissing the ground in a way that aligns with our particular body, mind, spirit, personal story. My father was a lawyer and also a social activist. And when I went to college, My plan was I was going to go to college and then go to law school and do law in the service of social change. And so I went in thinking I was going to go to law school and I came out and joined an ashram spiritual community. So something happened in there, some shift. My understanding is that I got very involved with tenants rights organizing, community organizing and left wing activity that was really trying to address inequity in the culture. And while the causes were fabulous, same causes I believe in today, the energy was very militant. It was very shaking a fist at the heavens and making others wrong and bad. It felt very polarizing and divisive. So I began to do yoga and meditation and it was like I came alive. I realized, oh, we can come home to a sense of alternative open heartedness and presence with others. That, that's the consciousness I want to live from and act from. And I could tell I needed to really immerse myself. So I switched gears. Instead of law school, I joined an ashram. And just to say that I had a lot to face and work out in doing that, because, you know, there was just some guilt that I wasn't being a social change agent in the way that my family must, admired both of my parents, real active. And not only that, I wasn't on an apparent career track at all. So I just want to name that my example comes with a lot of privilege. I was in my early 20s, I didn't have anyone to support. I was joining pretty much of a commune. I didn't have to earn, earn money and so on. And my parents were very supportive actually. They were actually fabulous. And still, even if we can't change our job so it fully matches energetically what we feel is the way of kissing the ground. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. And if we're not kissing the ground, if we're not doing what we love, love, then we're not nourishing hope. Says Thoreau put it that we really have to stay aligned with our spirit in this. So we'll take another moment to reflect, if you will. So again we severed belonging, went through our parents, our culture. We, we leave ourselves, we leave the life that really expresses what we love. And how do we reconnect? You might ask yourself, when you're feeling most alive and present and inflow and awake, what's going on? What are you doing? What is it you love? You might imagine an open space of time with zero demands and expectations. What do you want to do with that? Just as a Starting point. We know the expectations are there. But first find what do you love? Do you love being with certain people? Do you love gardening or hiking? Do you love serving? Feeling that you're helping? Do you love creativity? Painting or dancing or music? Do you love non doing? Just being still. Take a moment to choose just one thing you love. You may love many, many, but one thing that you know you really love, Just imagine it. Sense yourself engaged in what you love. Sense what you most love about it. What's the actual felt experience? What's going on inside you? What's the quality of presence that arises that makes this so precious? Just sense that background of presence, that being quality that you have access to. Sense who you are when you're doing what you love, when you're kissing the ground. And know that this is another pathway to belonging, to your heart, to aliveness. This is a pathway to living with a sense of possibility in every moment to take the time to kiss the ground. Rumi says, let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you love. Okay, so we've talked a bit about the severed belonging that comes when we get limiting thoughts and waking up out of them and exploring now the sense of kissing the ground coming back to what we love. Oscar Wilde puts it this way. He says, be who you are, everyone else is taken. So when we believe belong to ourselves in our life, we rediscover that sense of possibility and hope. Next one I want to discuss is, comes from the question of, yeah, but I don't know what I love. You know, sometimes when we're really depressed, we don't know what we love. We don't find joy in things. And so the next teaching on rediscovering belonging is the centerpiece of all Dharma, which is then belong to what's right here in this moment, including the misery and the pain and the sorrow and the sadness belong to this moment's experience. The benefit is if you start right where you are with this moment, it will become a portal to the presence that we long for. But we start by being with what is.
