Welcoming Without a Hidden Agenda
Dar la bienvenida sin una agenda oculta
A student explores the challenge of truly welcoming difficult experience, and the teacher discusses the difference between genuine allowing and subtle resistance.
Welcoming Without a Hidden Agenda
A student explores the challenge of truly welcoming difficult experience, and the teacher discusses the difference between genuine allowing and subtle resistance.
It's like a homecoming.
Yes. Welcoming. Allowing. As Francis says: welcome it as a guest, but don't have a bat behind your back. Otherwise it's not a true welcoming. "You can come in, but as soon as you're distracted, I'm going to get rid of you." If we are welcoming just so that we can get rid of it, it's not a true welcoming.
It's very devious.
The test of true welcoming
One way to frame that welcoming is to relate to it as if it were going to be there forever. What if it never goes away? Can you still be with it?
The degree to which it feels real is the degree to which I want to take that back. They go hand in hand.
Yes. That's where it becomes a bit of a process. When I say it's like getting into a hot bath: if you go too fast, it's going to burn. All of the reactions come up too quickly. You actually touch it slowly, gently. If you feel too many reactions coming up, you ease off a bit. Then the body-mind will slowly learn, adjust, and be able to be with it. Just come close, and let the heart do the work.
Hearing versus seeing
Different experiences. For example, I can hear a bird. Let's say I recognize that it's a seagull. I can hear the call of a seagull, and then there's the image of the seagull. But the sound doesn't have the image of the seagull. The sound isn't the bird. The sound is a sound, and then there is the mind image of a bird that is a seagull. Those are two different aspects of the experience.
Now, looking at the skin sack, the experience of the legs and the seat beneath you, or in your case, that forest.