More Fun with the Skandhas

Posted on February 11, 2019 by admin

Fun with the skandhas ? Are you kidding! Yes! No! … We have to have sense of humor about the human condition; otherwise we would all be nuts, because it is not always easy and not always fun. Sometimes life can be terrifying.

One of the problems for spiritual ‘seekers’ is that we tend to have a fantasy view of enlightenment/awakening and continue to compare our immediate experience to this fantasy. Nothing more frustrating and depressing then this side trip along the path. Observing the skandhas in action, just as they are, is seeing the human condition up-close and personal. No fantasy needed. Reality speaks. But keep your sense of humor to balance the inevitable anxiety/fear/terror that arises!
(For an intro to the 5 skandhas, see the earlier post linked here.)

The term skandha is a Sanskrit word means heaps or aggregates and refers to the various components of what we refer to as ‘consciousness’. In fact, the word ‘consciousness is used to describe the fifth aggregate, the integrated expression of the first four. The skandhas are not added together as much as entwined realms of experience. From simple to complex the five skandhas are: (1) the basic encounter of the spirit with the world of form at incarnation: (2) the immediate resonance with the world of form through sensation/perception; (3) an impulsive response/action to the sensation/perception;
(4) the story/memory/plans, concepts and schemes that organize our impulses in our relationship to a complex world; (5) the personality/egoic structure as an integrated entity.

We need the skandhas to function in the world, but they need to be functioning from wholeness, and not a sense of separation. Healing them is the goal of an embodied spiritual practice.

Skandha 1. The unbounded spirit incarnates into the limitations of the human form and the arrival into this realm creates a bit of a shock. There is a cosmic imperative for life to continue and flourish and to do so, it must survive. In an impermanent world, this is no simple matter. Thus fear is an inevitable and necessary component to the energy field of this new being. It needs to be able to identify danger and respond accordingly. However, the skills to do so have to evolve over time and in the beginning, the new being is totally dependent upon its caregivers. And the caregiviers are not always present and available, or even conscious of their role. This is especially true in utero.

In utero, the soul being is immersed in the physiological and emotional state of the mother and the emotional stability of her immediate environment. Any stress, fear, anxiety or trauma happening to the mother is immediately passed on to her unborn child, who, at this point in time, has no sense of a separate self. This comes much later. There is certainly no time, presence or maturity to quietly reflect on the current condition, so these fears become encoded in their tissues. If we look even more deeply, we can trace the traumas of the mother and father back through the generations, just as we can trace the genes.

Fortunately, the healing process usually begins immediately as well, as when (or if ) there is unconditional love coming through the mother from one of both parents, a nest of non-dual wholeness is created, and the emerging pre-natal being can temporarily relax and let go into the flow. The challenges and complexities of life doesn’t usually let these moments last very long.

The intensity of birth and the birth process, unfortunately sets up another set of traumas for this new being, and with the cutting of the umbilical cord, true separation or ‘aloneness’, arises. The biblical metaphor for this stage is Adam and Eve being ejected from the Garden of Eden for the ‘crime’ of becoming self-aware. A separation occurs, one is naked and alone in the world, and the life journey begins. Because at this stage in the infant’s development there are no words, ideas or concepts attached to the fear, the fear is absolute and primal. This is the wonderful world of the first skandha. This primal fear can be transformed and healed and this is the core of an embodied spiritual practice.

As in the pre-natal world, unconditional love from one or both parents, and others throughout life holds the space of wholeness and healing, but in life the traumas also keep coming. The word trauma is used here in a general sense to describe any experience that reinforces the feeling of being separate and alone and strengthens the egoic structures that are built on the foundation of separation. The acute trauma of violence is an extreme example of this and does far more long lasting damage than the smaller ones, but thousands of small ones add up in their own way.

In PTSD language, an embodied being’s response to this primal fear is to contract around the place where the fear localizes, (usually the heart and 1 or more of the chakras, or organs) and then to dissociate to escape the pain of the contracted fear. In dissociation, we ‘leave the body’, or more accurately, cut ourselves off from what the body is telling us. The first skandha is called “ignorance of form” or just ‘form’. Spirit, through its connection with its expression in the world of form known as ‘soul’, has to figure out how to integrate the reality of impermanence into its moment to moment experience.

As more mature beings encountering this primal fear of impermanence * in our practice, or in life, we can recognize that it arises because we have ‘forgetten’ that form and the formless are one, not two, and we have become ‘lost’ in the world of abstract thought that was created in the next few skandhas. To heal is to awaken to our True Self as unconditional love and unbounded spaciousness, spirit and soul, which is the source/ground of all the sane and crazy stuff we humans experience. * (This primal fear is known as abhinivesha, one of the 5 kleshas mentioned in Buddhism and Patanjali ( sutras II-2 – II-12))

The second skandha, vedana, is usually translated as feelings, but this skandha is about pure sensation and perception, before labels, judgment or interpretation arise. Emotions arise in the third skandha. The embodied being feels/hears sound, perceives tactile vibrations through the sense of touch, sees light, smells the odors of its environment, and tastes whatever it can get into its mouth. We live in a world rich with sensation, most never reaching the conscious level. Psycho-tropic substances highlight how much we miss because our ‘doors of perception’ are often very limited. There is a survival purpose to this, of course, as too much sensation can overwhelm the nervous system. Spiritual training helps expand our capacity to take in the vast majesty of creation safely. As Arjuna discovered in chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, absolute fullness is not so easy to digest! The second skandha involves life’s moment to moment encounter in the present moment, in and with the world of form or what Samkhya and Patanjali call Prakriti. A mature mindfulness practice takes us here and helps us find a stable ground. (See PYS I-12 – I-14)

The third skandha, impulse is where craving and aversion are born in response to the sensations and perceptions that arise and the underlying fear of impermanence. These sensations/feelings of the second skandha are quickly divided into ‘likes’, ‘dislikes’ and neutrals. This is totally natural and desirable, up to a point. To survive, the being needs to move towards safety, healthy food, water and air and away from danger. To grow and evolve, we need to seek out teaching and lessons that nurture our higher selves and avoid situations that drag us back into unconscious pathology.

Unfortunately, the sense of being ‘separate’ can distort a healthy action. The likes lead to craving, the dislikes to aversion and the neutrals to indifference. This separate ‘me’ begins to experience the world through these three lenses and impulsively reacts when triggered. Healing and growth are ignored for immediate gratification of the unconsciously terrified egoic self. ” I want my wall. I have to have my wall.” Not to point out the obvious, but we all have our moments like this. The magnitude of the delusion and the damage caused by Trump are extreme, but we are all needing to wake up to our own unconsciousness.

This stage is often described by the action of The ‘Three Poisons’ of Buddhism. These are often translated directly from the first three (of five) kleshas (see sutras II-2 through II-10 in Sadhana Pada of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras), as avidya or ignorance, raga or craving/grasping, and dvesa or aversion/avoiding/hatred. (The other two kleshas are asmita or confusion about the ‘I’, and abhinivesha or fear of death.) Raga and dvesha, grasping and avoiding are both expressions of avidya/ignorance and are the first two poisons in action. Frank Ostaseski pointed out in his book, “The Five Invitations”, and I agree fully, that in our moment to moment lives, distraction is really the third poison. Avidya comes immediately in the first skandha. So we will call distraction as the third poison.

In “The Network of Thought”, consisting of talks from 1981, Krishnamurti describes the trap of distraction. He observes that as humans begin to have more and more leisure time, are they “going to be absorbed in the field of entertainment? … Or are they going to turn inwardly, which is not entertainment but something which demands great capacity of observation, examination and non personal perception. These are the two possibilities. The basic content of human consciousness is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of fear. Is humanity going to increasingly follow entertainment?” One hopes these ‘Gatherings” are not a form of entertainment.” (The Gatherings’ are Krishnamurti’s famous public talks, many of them given here in Ojai.)

Distraction is a very common expression of the third skandha, ‘impulse’, where our moment to moment strategies to avoid the locked up fear and pain mask as something ‘useful’. Entertainment is a tricky example of this, as one can be ‘entertained’ while abiding in a place of wholeness, and experience a sense of joy, delight and learning in the creativity of Mother Nature, or possibly writers, artists, athletes or entertainers. So we are not saying the entertainment is a problem. But if its pursuit stems from a forgetting of our True Self as infinite Love and leading a life of continuously avoiding the inner pain and conflict we all carry around, then that is unhealthy, from a spiritual perspective.

Impulsive behavior is just that, so the emerging ‘egoic self’ needs to organize these impulses, crave, avoid, distract, into coherent action. Therefore, the fourth skandha, concept, develops, where we create memories and habits, concepts, and strategies that enable us to live our lives within a coherent framework which may or may not be based on delusion. All of the mental processes oof the first four skandhas, taken together as they arise moment to moment, comprise the fifth skandha, consciousness.

In “The Untethered Soul”, a beautiful and powerful book on the enlightened state by Michael Singer, chapter 11 is titled ‘pain, the price of freedom’. Without using the term ‘skandha’, he nails the process of the skandhas precisely. The chapter begins…

” One of the essential requirements for true spiritual growth and deep personal transformation is coming to peace with pain. No expansion or evolution can take place without change, and periods of change are not always comfortable. Change involves challenging what is familiar to us and daring to question our traditional needs for safety, comfort and control. This is often perceived as a painful experience.

Becoming familiar with this pain is part of your growth. Even though you may not actually like the feelings of inner disturbance, you must be able to sit quietly inside and face them if you want to see where they come from. Once you can face your disturbances, you will realize that there is a layer of pain seated deep in the core of your heart. This pain is so uncomfortable, so challenging, so destructive to the individual self, that your entire life is spent avoiding it. Your entire personality is built upon ways of avoiding it. Your entire personality is built upon ways of being, thinking, acting and believing that were developed to avoid this pain.”

This ‘personality’ Michael Singer describes is the ‘Network of Thought’ of Krishnamurti, and the action of unhealthy skandhas. It takes over the mind field and spins a web of delusion using grasping, avoiding, or distracting. The mind demands something to do, so it can avoid the existential terror, and at the same time validate its own existence. It uses fear to create a smokescreen so the reality and perceived pain of emptiness cannot be seen. (Sounds like Trump and his demand for a wall! Spirituality and politics are inextricably intertwined.)

A somatic meditation practice offers an opportunity to go back into the body, being present to the pain residing there and just holding it in loving kindness, like a parent would do with a suffering child. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, in the Embryology Workshop I attended last August, described bringing your attention to the place of interest and staying there (samyama) as the only action (yang) required. The innate wisdom of the body does the rest (yin). Being this receptive is not easy in a culture where the yang-doing dominates. The restless mind wants to ‘do something so it can avoid actually feeling the intensity of the stored pain.

Pschotherapist and spiritual teacher John Welwood coined the term ‘spiritual by-pass’ to describe the ways in which we can use a ‘spiritual practice’ as a distraction from this deep unresolved pain. I believe this is a natural outcome of our yang culture which is so invested in ‘doing’ the practice’ that there no space or time for pausing, listening, waiting or allowing is created. This is why slowing down and feeling the moment to moment reality of the soma is crucial for practice.

Practice

Of course, to feel and experience the skandhas in action, we need a meditation practice, or at least the capacity to be a still and silent witness to your own mental movements Patanjali calls the citta vrittis and how the soma/body responds to these movements. Sitting is the best way, and if your practice matures, you will be able to keep healing the skandhas as you go throughout your day. Find a comfortable pose, balanced and relatively relaxed. Begin the mantra: Pause – Relax – Open – Allow.

For a beginner in meditation, both the body and mind are infinite sources of distraction. Sitting can be painful for a novice in embodied presence. Use a chair, cushions for support, a wall, (not that one !) or anything that allows you to relax enough to begin to feel and follow your breath. All it takes is one conscious breath. Just one. Then you begin again. Relax, find the breathing and follow it in and out, not trying to change anything. Just receiving.

Even after the body becomes relaxed enough that the urge to immediately get up and escape the discomfort, following the breath is still very challenging. Our attention usually wanders off to some’thing’ else that is happening, probably thoughts or sensations. In that case, stay with any of the physical sensations as they come and go (2nd skandha), not the thoughts or stories (skandhas 4 and 5). After a few moments, return to the sensations of the breathing. Repeat. when you discover the mind has wandered because of the unconscious pull of the third skandha, rejoice in your discovery as this is what awakening is all about, and gently and compassionately bring your attention back to the breathing.

This process is known as ‘samyama‘, described in the third chapter of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Samyama is the simultaneous practice of limbs 6, 7 and 8 of ‘Ashtanga Yoga: dharana – bring your attention to the point of your attention, hear the breath; dhyana – remain there through disciplined resistance to the impulsive desire to wander; samadhi – remaining there effortlessly because you are totally absorbed in the process. Samyama practice recognizes that you will be distracted sooner or later and ask to just begin again, over and over, compassionately and kindly.

If the breath can relax and you can stay in the flow, begin to notice the natural pauses that appear. The pauses are portals to what might be called ’emptiness’, groundlessness, or ‘no-thing’. A taste of this may be temporarily relaxing, but in the beginning our attention cannot find ‘ground’ there and inevitably returns to ‘something’, as opposed to ‘no-thing’. Rarely, the primal fear may arise, as a PTSD moment. If this happens, Pause, relax, bring the breath down into the lower dantien. If it is too intense, get up and move to keep the qi flowing

If your breathing can stay relatively relaxed and easy, try to let your attention rest in the pauses and let the breath fade into the deep background. Feel the ’emptiness’ as a vast opening into larger dimensions of consciousness. Do not try to grasp anything. Pause – relax – open – allow. If your ‘mind’ will not let this happen, slow things down if possible and notice the process of the skandhas. Dharana … dhyana …

For most of us, the core of the practice is continually returning to skandha 3 when you realize that the mind has wandered away. In the beginning, it happens so fast, we do not notice. We just suddenly realize, oh, my mind has wandered. With gentleness and humor, bring your attention back to the breathing. If distraction (the vikshipta mind described by Vyassa in his commentary to the very first of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras) is strong, as it is for most of us for a long period of time, the usual instruction is to give the mind something regular and repetitive to follow.

The breathing is the most common ‘seed or bija‘ to use, but it can be a simple mantra or phrase that is repeated over and over again. A favorite of mine is from Thich Nhat Hahn: ‘Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I smile.” Counting the breaths to 10 and then repeating is another simple way to focus attention. This is dharana – dhayana of the 8 limbed Astanga Yoga of Patanjali, preparation for samadhi and deeper states.

Perhaps the distraction is not so subtle. Maybe you are jsut settling in when the neighbors car alarm goes off. Or you forgot to turn your phone off and it starts beeping or ringing. A simple sensation (skandha 2) evokes aversion. Or perhaps you can notice the sound, and notice the psychological reaction to the sound, or the physiological/somatic reaction to your psychological reaction, from a space of open curiosity. Or maybe some tasty smell wafts your way from the kitchen and you think, ‘I want some of that. How much longer do I have to sit here. By the way, that reminds me of a dinner we had ….blah blah blah .. oops …lost in thought…pause, relax, open and allow.

If you are experiencing some mild pre-natal PTSD, you are meeting the first skandha. This seems to be a common occurrence in the world of spiritual practice these days.The trauma of gestation and the birth process is stored deep in the non-conscious levels of the mind and long sustained practice of opening and unfolding eventually gets us there. Working through and healing this trauma somatically is a major goal for those of us in the evolutionary field.

When PTSD kicks in a stronger form, it is more then just simple aversion. It is acute panic in the nervous system with terror and dissociation fighting, like trying to jam the brake pedal while the car engine is racing at 6,000 rpms. If you have had some experience with Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, you know the first step is to identify the present moment: this is PTSD in action. It is a somatic memory arising in the present moment and I am perfectly safe and totally loved right here right now. This is called changing the narrative. Then call upon your resources that you have developed in your home practice; Pause, get up and move to keep the qi flowing. Get out into nature if you can. Feel where in the body you feel the ‘freeze’ or closing down and invite the breath to soothe this area. Repeat a mantra. Find someone to help hold the space.The body naturally wants to complete this experience, heal and move on. The body will do this if we understand the process, although it will take time.

You should seek professional support with a somatically trained psychotherapist if your resources are totally overwhelmed. Fortunately for all of us, this is a field co-arising and growing with he increasing number of people engaged in spiritual practice.

Just remember, as this vulnerable being, you, me and everyone else, becomes conscious and begins to interact with the world of form, it begins to notice that the nature of the world of form is impermanent and ‘other than me’. It thus feels separate and alone and forgets that the emptiness and the vast groudlessness in the background is actually unconditional love continuously giving birth to form. Duality is born, a certain level of fear sets in and the being contracts. “Make the smallest distinction, however and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.” (Hsin Hsin Ming)

But ultimately, this is the process of life awakening. We are all held and supported by infinite love and the wisdom of all of creation. Let it all flow through you as you move and are moved through your day. Be the expression of your soul’s wisdom that brought you here in the first place and join in the celebration of the moment.

The Body-Mind Continuum

Posted on December 28, 2018 by admin

There are two books on my mind as of late: “The Network of Thought” by Krishnamurti, and ‘The Body Bears the Burden” by Robert Scaer, M.D..

Krishnamurti was the consummate jnana yogi whose engaging dialogues with his students/audience are well documented in many of his books. The basic premise of ‘The Network of Thought” is that ‘thought’ or thinking is like the limited programming of a computer, and throughout history, humans have been programmed to create a self sense through thought. I am a Hindu, I am a Buddhist, I am an atheist, I am a liberal … whatever flavor the culture of your time and place may provide, an identity is created and sustained.

If we look more deeply, as Krishnamurti would advise, we can see that thought creates all of what passes for ‘reality’ in our experience. Words, the language of thought, are abstractions that are highly limited at best. When reality ‘rooted in abstraction’ is mistaken for the ‘Ultimate Mystery’ of Reality, fear, anxiety and conflict inevitably arise, within oneself, and within the larger communities we find ourselves. “I am inadequate/flawed/unworthy/fill in your favorite inner commentary” always sit in the background, conscious or non-conscious, driving the bus of our lives.

From the perspective of the skandhas, words and abstraction are the foundations of skandha number 2. Here, when the small self glimpses the infinite and the recognizes that it too is impermanent, it spins a web of delusion known as likes and dislikes, or raga and dvesa as they are called in the Yoga Sutras. Life then becomes an endless pursuit to escape difficulty and acquire pleasure. On the surface, avoiding unpleasantness and finding pleasure make all kinds of sense. The problem is that if this is the whole story of your life, then there is no escape from the deep sense of unease that stems from the reduction of your infinite potential to an endless series of abstractions. To open to Ultimate Mystery, to open to an infinite ocean of creativity, love and wisdom, you have to change your fundamental orientation to impermanence.

The Zen Poem, Hsin Hsin Ming, (read the whole poem here), attributed to the Chinese Zen Master Seng T’san and written somewhere in the 6th – 8th centuries CE, is an exquisite unfolding of this insight. This translation of the first few verses is from Elliott Teters, and I prefer this one because many translators use ‘love and hate’ in line two instead of longing and desire. From my perspective, love is a word pointing to non-dual wholeness and completeness and is not the opposite of hatred or aversion. Longing or grasping capture the essence more accurately.

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
Let go of longing and aversion and it reveals itself.
Make the smallest distinction, however and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth.
If you want to realize the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything.
Like and dislike is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning (of the Way) is not understood
the intrinsic peace of mind is disturbed.

As vast as infinite space it is perfect and lacks nothing.
Indeed, it is due to your grasping and repelling
That you do not see things as they are.
Do not get entangled in things;
Do not get lost in emptiness.
Be still in the oneness of things and dualism vanishes by itself.

The Great Way, Ultimate Mystery, or Truth, is uncapturable in words, imagery, ideas or beliefs, but can be seen directly in the silence of meditation when thought, temporarily, pauses. Pause – Relax – Open – Allow.

The last few verses from Seng T’san:

Emptiness here, Emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes.
Infinitely large and infinitely small;
no difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen.
So too with Being and Non-Being.

Don’t waste time with doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this.
One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction.
To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.
To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with trusting mind.

Words! Words!
The Way is beyond language,
for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.

“The Body Bears the Burden” is about trauma and its effects on psychology, physiology and brain function. As a neurologist, Robert Scaer ties together the research done by trauma pioneers like Peter Levine and Bessel Van de Kolk and others with his own clinical experience to unfold the hidden side of trauma in all of its many manifestations. And there is always a ‘story’ entangled in the trauma, usually one filled with self-recrimination and shame, as well as fear. Words entangled in the trauma!

What is fascinating to me is that my own personal experience with PTSD, triggered by the Thomas Fire which surrounded Ojai last December, is being re-triggered by my various encounters with the medical world, and this began before the cancer diagnosis. I had a challenging childbirth, in a hospital, with some medical intervention to the natural process, so it is not surprising that I have some issues to work through here. When my PTSD is activated, the physiological ‘freeze’ response, where the accelerator and brake of my autonomic nervous system are being activated simultaneously, is also accompanied by a ‘network of thought’ layered with meaning making interpretations.

Fear, anxiety and shame are my three big ones and they are entangled in this body/mind web of physiology and thought. So I have to dis-entangle the physiological energy trapped in a holding pattern from the story attached to it for true healing to take place. This is not pleasant or easy and my first response is always ‘take this away .. get me out of here’. This only makes it worse.

One of the challenges of a somatic meditation practice is that the body stores trauma, large and small, as as you move into more and more openness, you are liable to uncover some un-resolved or blocked energy. When the story is activated, it tends to re-stimulate the trauma, creating a self-perpetuating feed back loop. Often the response oscillates between hyper arousal/fear and dissociation, dissociation being the ‘escape’.

In ‘Somatic Experiencing’, the trauma resolution therapies based on Peter Levine’s study of mammals in the wild, healing requires the building of somatic resources that can contain, process and integrate the bound energy without the activation of the self-perpetuating loop. Titrating, or taking one or two drops of trauma energy at a time to resolve, while sustaining an energetically stable and flexible state (sthira and sukham) is done with the help of a trained SE practitioner who helps hold the fluid/stable space.

Meditation practice allows one to be both the therapist and the client, as the spaciousness is a primary resource. It begins as a ‘witnessing’ of what is arising, which is all well and good if random thoughts are all that arise. But when you open to a traumatic energy pattern, your sthira and sukham are seriously challenged. Gravity and coming into the felt sense of weight in the body is another resource, the yin to the spacious yang. Does the energy want to descend into the earth and discharge there? Are your bones alive and vital? Mother Earth’s energy field can handle our physiological energy easily if we can learn to drop into her. Does the energy want to expand up and out, into the sky, the heavens, the sun, moon, stars and planets? All can offer healing to us. The Qi wants to move, in harmony with heaven and earth. We are heaven and earth.

At some point, heaven and earth, yin and yang, weight and lightness dissolve into wholeness, not two-ness. And then the terrifying abyss of impermanence also dissolves, for the time being. Until the next trauma is triggered. We all need trigger warnings! The abyss of impermanence is terrifying. Only the strategy is not to avoid facing it, but to see it is ultimately based on being afraid of our own mental creations, our own abstractions.

The body bears the burden of our confusion by locking down energy, but it also offers a way to freedom. The body is an expression of Divine wholeness, even as it flows through and as continuous impermanence. It thrives on impermanence, which allows the organismic intelligence to grow and relate and evolve. Falling down is OK. Being lost and confused is OK. The depths of love, wisdom and creativity are always present, in all situations. We just have to remember. Being without anxiety about imperfection! Impermanence as a path to healing. Wow. How delightful. What a great story! How challenging!

One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction.
To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.
To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with trusting mind.

Love, Death and the Skandhas: part 3

Posted on December 6, 2018 by admin

The Four Flavors of Love

Some of the greatest advances in modern neuroscience include the expansion of our understanding of the origins and mechanisms of trauma and other modes of emotional disregulation, and the pathways toward healing these wounds. Books by Dan Siegel, Daniel Goleman, Rick Hanson, Allan Schore and others have presented these new insights in a variety ways. * (see below) But, amazingly enough, some of the most profound healing practices for this realm date back to the early Vedic times, 2500 years or so ago. Known as the Brahma Viharas or the four abodes of Brahma, these practices are expressions of the most divine of the emotions, love.

As mentioned in the previous post, practicing the Brahma Viharas is a crucial aspect of preparing the mind and emotions for dealing with death, illness and other challenges and awakening to the depths of love that abide in our natural state. Buddha made these a key aspect of his teaching and the modern Theravadin Buddhists, as exemplified by Western Buddhist teachers Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfeld and others have done an amazing job of bringing these practices to the 21st century.

For the yoga students, the ‘abodes of Brahma’, or ‘frolics in God’, as my first Sutras teacher called them, appear in the Samadhi Pada as sutra I-33. They are a direct antidote to the terror of the first skandha and thus are essential for cultivating a strong and open heart. Patanjali doesn’t offer details of ‘how’ to practice the Braahma viharas, so we will introduce those later. The following paragraphs are taken from my Sutras translation and study guide found elsewhere on this site.

I-33 Maitri karuna mudita upekshanam sukha dukha punya apunya vishayanam bhavanatash citta prasadanam.
(The mind becomes purified by) friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference (equanimity) (respectively) towards those who are successful, suffering, virtuous and unvirtuous.

“Patanjali continues the discussion of eliminating the distractions to samadhi consciousness by addressing the emotions. Because the emotions are so crucial to bringing stability to the mind, this is one of the most important sutras. This sutra also is recapitulated in sutra II-33 where pratipaksha bhavanam, cultivating the opposite mind state, is reintroduced as a means to overcoming negative emotions. These are practices of the heart and are very important in the Buddhist teachings as well.

Friendliness, or loving kindness as it is commonly called in the Buddhist world, is the easiest and most natural positive emotion to cultivate. We all know what it is like to have a friend, to feel the love, warmth and openness that comes when we are with a friend. But also, it is not uncommon to feel envious or jealous over other people’s success or good luck. Practicing maitri (metta or loving kindness) by remembering and recreating these feelings of love, when feeling jealous or disappointed, helps to keep the mind calm and the heart open. And practicing simple kindness in general, like eating good food, nourishes and strengthens the heart. Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg has been instrumental in promoting ‘metta practice’, metta being the Pali term for maitri, Pali being the language of the Buddha.

Compassion, karuna, goes right to the heart. When we see others suffering we may either turn away to avoid the depths of feeling, or perhaps take some cruel delight if it happens to be an enemy that is suffering. Choosing to remain compassionate (karuna) in the face of suffering keeps us in our hearts and grounded in being. Being compassionate towards ourselves is also an important and challenging practice. Literally meaning ‘to feel with’, compassion is a profound experience of love and support to another being.

Appreciative Joy: Joy is all around us. From the simple joy of children at play, of lovers in a gentle embrace, to the blooming of flowers and the delight of pets with their owners, life at its core exudes joy. But we do not always feel joyous ourselves so we need to build up a ‘bank account’ of joy. Others may make us feel inadequate, less than worthy, insecure in our selves, if we are prone to engage in comparison. Remembering the joy or delight (mudita) we have felt form others allows us to touch our own joy, and thus strengthen our own joyful, open-hearted self sense. Seeing joy in someone we dislike can also set up feeling of anger and resentment. At a deeper level, life at its essence is joyful. Can we feel appreciative joy at the song of a bird, a flower in bloom, of the night sky?

Equanimity: Seeing suffering and injustice can easily evoke anger and fear. The Sanskrit word upeksha literally means indifference. Here, indifference to suffering and injustice does not mean inactivity or apathy, (See Bhagavad Gita) but a state of non reactivity so that anger and fear do not disturb the mind field with a torrent of negative emotional energy. The Buddhists translate upeksha (upekka in Pali) as equanimity and I like this word much better than indifference. Again the point is to be present to suffering and injustice without falling into emotional turmoil. Then appropriate action (dharma) can be taken with a clear mind and open heart. One of the important lessons from the workshop around care-giving was to watch for ‘pathological altruism’, where our responses to someones suffering are attempts to avoid our own inner suffering and distress that are being evoked. The practice of upeksha can help with this.

Equanimity is the anchor of the four Brahma Viharas as it acknowledges reality. There is suffering. There is injustice. As much as I would love for it all to go away, life is what it is. And this is difficult to accept. Equanimity is the ultimate emotional stabilizer.

The Four Flavors of Love

Frank Ostaseski referred to the Brahma Viharas as the ‘Four Flavors of Love’, and both he and Joan Halifax pointed to Sharon Salzberg as the one who impelled them to start working with their own metta practice, which involves repeating specific phrases over and over. The metta phrases are relational, heart centered, and very effective if practiced with sincerity and diligence. Metta practice plants seeds of health and well being into the mind field and opens and strengthens the heart. It is the foundation for working with the other Brahma Viharas.

The traditional phrases have five targets, beginning with yourself. Most of us have a much easier time sending love to others than to ourselves. This is not an egoic action, but one that flows from ultimate mystery. Over time you add: a benefactor or close friend: a neutral person: someone you really dislike: and finally all beings. For the practice to work, it has to be heart-felt, not superficial or dismissive. “Sure, I’ll send love to Donald Trump” (not!) Which is why we keep it simple and easy in the beginning. The most commonly seen phrases are as follows:

May I be happy.
May I be at peace
May I live with ease.
May I be free from suffering.
May you be happy.
May you be at peace
May you live with ease.
May you be free from suffering, etc

There are many ways to modify and adapt these so that they are personally meaningful to you. In the Love and Death workshop, we began in a way that was very helpful to me, as the verses Frank taught us were:

May I (we) be safe and free from danger.
May I (we) find happiness.
May I (we) be filled with loving kindness.
May I (we) find ease in our lives.

The root of all painful emotions is fear, so right away we set the intention to be safe, to know we are safe, and to keep reminding ourselves again and again, until we really feel safe. This was the practice I used to help me get to sleep when my PTSD was acting up after the fire last winter. May I be safe! I still use this everyday, sometimes when I am clear, sometimes when I am struggling with my inner confusion and fear. This helps reconnect with our ‘basic goodness’ so we can root ourselves here. You can practice as part of your sitting practice, or anytime in the day when you can pause, relax and go through the phrases several times.

There are similar phrases that can be recited to cultivate karuna, mudita and upeksha.

Karuna:
May you be free of your pain and sorrow.
May you find peace.

Mudita:
May your happiness and good fortune not leave you.
May your good fortune continue.
May your happiness not diminish

Upeksha:
All beings are the owners of their karma; their happiness and unhappiness depends upon their actions, not on my wishes for them.
I care about you, and I’m not in control of the unfolding of events. I can’t make it all better for you.
Things are the way that they are.

An excellent and well detailed resource on working with the Brahma Viharas can be found here: https://dharmanet.org/coursesM/16/bv0.htm.

Books:

Dan Siegel: “The Developing Mind”, “The Mindful Brain”, “Mindsight, “The Mindful Therapist”, “Aware”

Daniel Goleman: “Emotional Intelligence”, “Social Intelligence”

Rick Hanson: Buddha’s Brain” (with Richard Mendius), “Just One Thing”

Allan Shore: Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self” (very technical, for nerds only, but I discovered some major insights on my shame and panic attacks in this book.)