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Friday Night Schedule
Friday nights, 7-9 pm. Doors open at 6:45.
1716A Linden Avenue (door on the right)
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Experiencing What Arises
When you've gone through a difficult period, when you sit down to practice, make your intention to experience what is arising in you. If you hold on to even a little bit of the intention to release the energy or the emotion, you will find yourself struggling in practice. It really comes down to sitting in the whole mess and not trying to change or do anything with it. This is hard, subtle and important.
As you continue to practice, release may take place with the arising. Again, however, don't make release the intention. Make the intention to experience what arises. No more, and no less.
There are two aspects here, and it's easy to confuse them:
1. Healing or resolving things so we can rest in natural awareness
2. Resting in whatever arises
When we don't get what we want, we usually move to try to make something happen. When we don't get a feeling in the body, or the level of awareness or the experience that we want, we experience frustration, and reactive patterns kick in. Practice consists of sitting in that whole mess without trying to make it into something else (cf., no distraction, no control, no working at anything, from the Mahamudra tradition).
Healing is often necessary in order to be able to rest in what arises, particularly in the early stages of practice. As practice matures, we will be able to rest in more and more.
We may well need to work at healing, but we don't practice the dharma to heal. We practice the dharma to experience what arises.
--Ken McLeod, Buddhist teacher and writer
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