Through the Gateway of What We Avoid
January 22, 2025

Through the Gateway of What We Avoid

A través del portal de lo que evitamos

This session explores the two fundamental challenges of spiritual practice: the complexity of thoughts and the intensity of emotional sensations. The teacher guides students to directly encounter the core sensations they habitually avoid, revealing how contraction and avoidance mechanisms originate from a belief in a separate self. Through personal accounts and dialogue, the session examines how what we spend decades running from turns out to be far less threatening than imagined, and how intimate contact with avoided experience is itself the doorway to liberation.

avoidance core sensation contraction sense of self thoughts and emotions direct experience fear coping mechanisms spiritual awakening vipassana letting go intimate relationship with sensation
Through the Gateway
meditation
Through the Gateway
This meditation guides you to turn toward difficult feelings and thoughts with curiosity, discovering that you are safe to fully experience whatever arises.
The Sensation You've Been Running From
dialogue
The Sensation You've Been Running From
A student describes intense cycles of bodily contraction, resistance, and feeling trapped, and the teacher explores how these experiences originate in a core sensation we spend our lives avoiding.
The Core Energetic Beneath the Noise
dialogue
The Core Energetic Beneath the Noise
A vipassana practitioner asks about the tension between continuously scanning through sensations and staying with a single deeper sensation, and the teacher explains how foundational practice naturally gives way to encountering a core energetic that demands a different kind of relationship.
The Avoidance That Wasn't That Bad
dialogue
The Avoidance That Wasn't That Bad
A student asks what delays or blocks the process of self-realization, and the teacher reflects on how the thing we spend decades avoiding turns out to be far less terrible than we imagined.
The Tamed and the Untamed
dialogue
The Tamed and the Untamed
A student describes experiences of intense fear and boredom in practice, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of familiar emotional patterns versus the unknown depths beneath them, the nature of compassion, and how spiritual seeking can itself become avoidance.
Chasing Illusions and Facing What Is Real
dialogue
Chasing Illusions and Facing What Is Real
A student expresses frustration at having pursued an imagined version of awakening, recognizing it as a distraction from the real emotions and patterns demanding attention in his life.