Through the Gateway: Meeting What We Avoid
January 22, 2025

Through the Gateway: Meeting What We Avoid

A través del umbral: encontrarnos con lo que evitamos

An exploration of how thoughts and intense sensations form the core challenges of practice, and how avoidance of a deep core sensation underlies our struggles. The session moves through dialogues on bodily contraction and resistance, the difference between vipassana's flowing attention and meeting a core energetic, the teacher's own experience of ego death, and the distinction between tamed familiar emotions and the untamed unknown beneath them.

thoughts sensations avoidance contraction sense of self vipassana fear ego death resistance boredom core sensation awakening
Through the Gateway
meditation
Through the Gateway
An invitation to turn toward whatever feels difficult in your experience and meet thoughts and feelings directly as a doorway to freedom.
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.