September 11, 2024
Friction, Addiction, and the Shifts We Cannot Want
Fricción, adicción y los cambios que no podemos desear
A meditation session on noticing friction and contraction without treating them as problems, followed by dialogues exploring how the compulsive cycle of creating and solving problems sustains the sense of a separate self. The teacher discusses trust, fear around work and money, the nature of attention moving on its own, and how shifts between contraction and expansion can themselves become an addiction that ends only when what was glimpsed is recognized as always already the case.
meditation
Friction Is Not a Problem
An invitation to meet whatever tension or resistance arises during practice without treating it as something that needs fixing.
dialogue
When Nothing Pulls You In
A student describes visual phenomena and relaxing sensations during meditation, and the teacher explains what to do when no friction or contraction is arising.
dialogue
The Addiction of Problem-Solving
A student describes the pull of mental reactivity after a stimulating event, and the teacher explores how the compulsive cycle of creating and solving problems sustains the illusion of a separate self.
dialogue
Trust and Its Conditions
A student explores whether her sense that "all is well" reflects genuine trust or a habitual pattern of avoidance, particularly in the context of a major life transition.
dialogue
The Storm and What Lies Beneath It
A student shares feelings of creative stuckness, fear around work and money, and the difficulty of trusting the process when self-judgment and a sense of not being good enough arise.
dialogue
When Thoughts Are Seen as Thoughts
A student describes watching fearful thoughts arise, followed by judgmental thoughts criticizing the fearful ones, and how seeing their nature causes them all to dissolve.
dialogue
Attention Moving on Its Own
A question about whether to let attention flow by itself, and the discovery that attention naturally releases from thought without any deliberate effort.
teaching
Absorbing Everything and Attention
A student asks whether the practice of simply absorbing everything that arises is similar to the open, thought-free attention discussed in the meditation.
teaching
The Illusion of Directing Attention
A reflection on the belief that we control attention, and how releasing that belief reveals something that was already present prior to thought.
dialogue
Foreground and Background
A reflection on how shifts in perspective, like the movement between absorption and awareness, are secondary to what is always already present.
dialogue
The Addiction to Shifts
The teacher discusses how initial tastes of awakening can become something we chase, and how this cycle breaks when we recognize that what we glimpsed was always already the case.
dialogue
When Everything Tastes of Presence
The teacher describes what happens when all experience is known as presence or emptiness, and how this realization marks the end of spiritual striving.
dialogue
The Shift You Cannot Want
A reflection on the movement out of identification with the body-mind, and why the stabilization of that shift cannot be pursued or even imagined in advance.
dialogue
What Shifts Is the Belief in What I Am
The teacher points out that the absorption described in meditation is always already the case, and that what changes is not experience itself but the belief about what we are.
dialogue
The Addiction to Expansion
A student describes a powerful yet familiar shift in perception, and the teacher explores how the cycle of contraction and expansion can itself become a trap.
meditation
Looking for Resistance and Finding Nothing
An invitation to stop chasing past insights and instead examine resistance directly, discovering it dissolves under honest looking.
teaching
The Ending of Identification
A reflection on how identification shifts through progressive stages, from thought to body to spacious subjectivity, and ultimately toward an emptiness that cannot be named.
teaching
Emptiness as the Nature of Everything
A reflection on how the apparent divide between subjective experience and objective reality dissolves when emptiness is recognized as the nature of all things, including the self.
dialogue
Choosing Silence
A question about a deep state of samadhi that arises near the ear and fills the body, and whether turning toward it to quiet the mind constitutes avoidance.