Ep. 90 - Doubt and Aversion

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In one description of the Buddha's enlightenment, he's sitting under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, India. And it said that when he sat down, he sat with the resolve that he was not going to get up from his seat until he had achieved full realization. Imagine coming into the hall with that resolution. Some indication of the strength of his mind and I guess his good karma, fortunately that very evening.

So as the legend has it or the reality of it, as he sat under the tree and the night progressed, it said that different forms of Mara, Mara is the embodiment of illusion or delusion or ignorance. The different forms of Mara appeared in his mind. During the course of the night, they were terrifying visions of violence and aggression. And there were very seductive visions of heavenly and celestial pleasures.

And then in particular description, there's one line which for me captures the essence or characterizes the whole path of practice as a beautiful description of the Bodhi Satva's mind in this situation. So with all these forces of Mara coming to confront him, it said, and the mind of the great being was not moved. And it's just the image of that, sort of like a mountain sitting. The mind of the great being was not moved.

And not moved here in the sense that Gina spoke so clearly about last evening in terms of being non-reactive. The horrible things were arising, the beautiful things were arising, his mind remained non-reactive, unmoving. And this line can really be the reference point for all of our practices. As we go through the day and are watching and being with our various experiences in whatever posture we're in, in whatever activity we're engaged with, we can look and investigate what does have the power to move our minds.

You know, what does have the power to agitate our hearts? How does our mind get seduced by various experiences? This is what we can learn on the beauty of the silence and the retreat and the non-distracted awareness we really learn about ourselves. Now we experience agitation and seduction on both very obvious levels that we may be very familiar with, but also some very subtle levels of agitation and seduction.

You know, we're all familiar with being overwhelmed by different emotions at times. So that's, I think, a familiar experience for all of us at one time or another. We can get lost in, we could say, seduced by various moods that we're in, and become completely caught up in the mood or lost in and identified with the different thoughts that are running through our minds. And on the most subtle level, and this takes quite a bit of training and awareness to begin to see how we become identified with consciousness itself, how we create a sense of self, a sense of ego self in our very identification with knowing.

So there are all these levels, you know, to our practice. And as we deepen in our practice, we begin to explore these different levels. So in the teachings, the Buddha highlighted a number of these particularly seductive minds states. In a way, he made it easy for us, but because he pointed out he was very specific and very clear, these minds states have the power to seduce us, to trap us again and again.

And he called them the five hindrances. Many of you are probably familiar with them, you know, desire and aversion and sleepiness, restlessness and doubt. So it's essential in our practice that we learn how to recognize these particular states, because they are deeply ingrained habits of mind. I mean, for me, it's both, I would say it's both encouraging and discouraging at the same time that these very states that we all experience right here, you know, of wanting and restlessness and sleepiness and doubt are the very same ones the Buddha was talking about, 2600 years ago.

So these are universal patterns, you know, deep neural pathways in our brains. So we need to explore, we need to really learn about them, because otherwise they dominate our lives. So we want to both explore the nature of these hindrances. What is each one light?

How does each one manifest for ourselves in our own experience? And we also want to investigate what is it that makes them so alluring? Why is it that we get caught again and again and again? So we can see that we can really explore our own mind and discover this.

What's a very helpful perspective as we explore these patterns in the mind, these hindrances is to see that even though they may feel very personal to us, they are not personal, they are impersonal. You know, these are universal habit patterns of everyone's mind. And so if we see it, if we take it out of the personal, first it helps us to disentangle a bit. And secondly, it then provides us with the understanding that right in the time of experiencing one of these hindrances, that is exactly the place where we can see for ourselves, explore for ourselves what is ignorance, what is awareness, what is delusion, what is wakefulness.

Right in the time of their arising, if we bring mindfulness to them, we write at the heart of what it means to awaken, to wake up. If we have this attitude, then in a very surprising way and I've experienced this many times, we actually become happy to see the hindrances because we'd rather see them and understand them than not see them and act them out. So instead of being self-judgmental or thinking, oh, our practice is not good, every time we actually are aware of one of the hindrances, oh, good. This is a chance to understand something.

And so this changes our relationship to these patterns. And the more we practice, the more we practice being with them and staying mindful of them, these strong, seductive emotions, the more stable our awareness becomes. It's as if we're actually in the stream of that line about the Bodhisattva. And the mind of the great being was not moved.

So maybe even if it's for a few moments at a time, as we experience different difficulties and our minds, somewhat less than great beings, are not moved. But we can taste it. We can get a sense of the potential. So tonight, I'd like to speak about just two of the hindrances.

There's a lot can be said about each one of them. I wanted to go into a little more depth, about two in particular. And that is the hindrances of doubt and aversion. So there are a couple of steps in working with all five of the hindrances.

And the first step is learning how to recognize them when they rise. Because often, these mind states will slip in and we don't even know they're there. They're so seductive that we get lost in them and just living in them and acting them out. And we're not aware that they're present.

So the first step is really learning to recognize them when they arise, to recognize the tell-tale signs of doubt and aversion and the rest as well. The reason this recognition is so important, because as we'll say, very often these hindrances come disguised. They come masquerading as something helpful, as something good, as something skillful. And if we are not on the ball, we believe that we fall for their disguise.

So this recognition, this is a very key point. We have to see them for what they are and not be deceived, because Mara is exceedingly ingenious. You know, the mind can fool us in so many ways. So doubt.

To begin with, it's helpful to understand that in English, the word doubt can actually refer to several different mindsets, one of which is actually skillful and another is not skillful, not helpful. So what's the skillful kind of doubt? Well, that is the mind that inquires, that investigates, that doesn't just fall into dogmatic belief. And so the doubting mind in that sense is really helpful.

It's like, what is this? What is this experience? What is it about? Not just assuming that we know or believing something without examination.

So that kind of doubt is good. And actually the Buddha encouraged that kind of inquiry. He said, find out for yourselves what is helpful, what is skillful, what is useful. I don't just believe, don't believe what I say, don't believe what's in the books, really tested and see.

So those are the good kinds of doubt. The unskillful doubt, the one which really is a hindrance, we might just use the term skeptical doubt. And this is the mind state of endless uncertainty or indecision. You know, it's the opposite of being confident.

It's like being at a crossroads and not knowing which way to go. And the mind simply goes back and forth. Is it this way? Should I go that way?

And we don't go anyplace. So in that way, doubt really stops us in our tracks. Of all the hindrances, of all the five hindrances, skeptical doubt when it's unnoticed is the most harmful. It's the most dangerous because it has the power to bring our practice and very often different aspects in our lives.

It has the power to bring us to a standstill of not being able to move forward. With all the other hindrances of desire and aversion and sleepiness and messlessness, we're still in the ball talk. We're kind of in the game. We're going through storms, but we're in there.

When skeptical doubt is strong, we're not even in the game anymore. That's the power of it. Because with doubt, this kind of doubt, it doesn't even give us the chance to take a wrong turn and then to learn from our mistakes. We're just frozen through indecision, through uncertainty.

Some of you may have read the book or seen the movie Life of Pi. The book was by Jan Martel. There's a wonderful line in the book which describes perfectly the debilitating power of doubt. He wrote, to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immovability as a means of transportation.

That's what doubt does. So although all of us have some degree of confidence in the Buddhist teachings or we wouldn't be here. So there's some level of confidence that we all have. But still, doubt can operate.

Even when we have a fair confidence in the teachings, doubt still can show itself in so many different ways. It can take the forms of doubt about the meditation practice. For all of us, at different times, difficulties are going to arise in our meditation. You've been here now full day, day and a half.

Has anybody been here without any difficulty at all? I really really, you know, disturbance in the mind or the body hurts or something or other. Difficulties are part of the path. They're an inevitable part of the path.

This is normal. But when these difficulties arise, if they're not correctly understood, they can lead to doubting thoughts. They lead to doubting thoughts about what method of practice we're using. Any kinds of questions, do you know, refer to a few of them as, what am I doing here?

That's not an uncommon thought. What does sitting here, watching my breath or feeling the movement in a step, what does this have anything to do with all the suffering that's in the world? What is the connection? So that kind of thought can easily arise.

Or we might start comparing practices. Many of you have probably done different practices, different kinds. So maybe I should be doing Tibetan chanting. Maybe Zen, Zen really has it.

Yeah, no sloppiness there. They get right to it. Or maybe Sufi dancing would definitely be more fun. So as we're sitting struggling with the different difficulties that are going to come up in the practice, so these doubting thoughts are not uncommon.

You know, where we start comparing and wondering and doubting. Or even within one tradition, even just within this tradition, doubting thoughts can arise. On one three month retreat, there was one yoga. This was the most extreme case that in over 40 years of teaching I've ever come across.

For three months, this yogi could not make up his mind whether to do meta practice or the past not practice. And we tried everything. We said, oh, well, just do the past. Okay, we do it in the next interview.

Oh, maybe I should do meta. Okay, that would be great. It's a great practice. Do meta.

No, maybe I should be doing the past. This went on for three months. It was amazing. It was an amazing manifestation of the doubting mind.

You know, and just couldn't unhook from that in decision of some people. Well, should I be feeling the breath of the abdomen or the nose? Well, not the abdomen is better. Oh, no, maybe it's better up here.

So that's the doubting mind. Should I practice a narrow focus awareness on the breath? Or should I practice an open choiceless awareness? Should I be making a heroic effort?

You know, this is a rare opportunity to have these days here and like me in a bust. Or should I relax? Should I really just take it easy? I've been working really hard in my life.

You know, let me just chill out. All of these questions actually in themselves are fine. Each one of them, there's nothing wrong with any of those questions. It's when we get caught in the cycle of endless question, of endless down, never coming to a resolution, never resolving it for ourselves.

That's what's in a problem. That's what's in a problem because then we're not doing anything. We're not doing either one or the other. So when we see this happening in the mind, it's important to recognize, to label, to note how this is doubt so that we're not fooled by it.

We reckon this is the doubting mind. And in that moment, we're becoming mindful of it rather than lost in it. And right there, the mind has become free. Perhaps even more ingrained as a pattern than doubt about practices or doubt about particular techniques, even more deeply ingrained from many people is the habit of self-doubt.

We may have faith in the practice, in the technique, in the method, but we doubt ourselves. And this could take the form of, so it's like, am I doing it right or I'm not doing it right? Or I can't do it. It's too hard.

It's not the right time. There's so many other things going on in my life. So all of these thoughts come which are undermining, with doubting our capacity to do the practice. These external situations can trigger self-doubt or even feelings of unworthiness.

These can be so easily triggered, it's amazing how sensitive the mind can be and how easily it can fall into that form of self-doubt. So during the three-month retreat, we put up the interview groups and they're in four-day cycles. So people are seeing two different teachers every other day. So there's a chart.

And after each person's name, there's the time and the day. There's a letter. After some people's name, there's an A, some people B, some people C, some people D. I'm sure you can imagine, oh, there's a D after my name.

That person has an A after their name. Can drive people into a tailspin. All that the letters represented were which day of the cycle people were being seen. A and C were Monday and Wednesday, B and D were Tuesday and Thursday.

That's all the letter meant. But the mind has such a tendency to interpret without information. So that's just kind of another extreme form of self-doubt, you know, we might feel unworthy. We personalize what's impersonal.

It's really important to pay attention to all these forms about, but I think particularly to the different forms of self-doubt, because this can become a tremendous obstacle not only in our meditation practice, but in our lives. If self-doubt is strong and unnoticed, it really becomes a debilitating force in our lives. It undermines us, you know, continually holds us back. But it's just a thought pattern in the mind.

We can actually see it and understand it and be free of it. It's a very interesting phrase in English, you know, where we say someone is plagued by doubt. That's an interesting phrase, plagued by doubt. Exdoubt is like a plague.

That's the effect it has. You know, instead of allowing us to make the experiment, whatever it may be, whether it's in meditation or anything else in our lives, instead of allowing us just to dive in and make the experiment and see for ourselves whether the particular activity has value or doesn't have value. When self-doubt is there or different kinds of doubt, then we just get caught, you know, in this endless speculation, we're caught in a standstill. We don't do anything.

So these doubts then have a self-fulfilling prophecy because staying lost in self-doubt really is useless. And so it's just reaffirming itself. Yeah, this is useless. And it is useless because self-doubt doesn't allow us to move forward.

So it's likened to a thorn that keeps jabbing. You know, and if there's a thorn that keeps jabbing, what happens? The mind gets irritable, gets discouraged, you know, gets dissatisfied. That's the effect that doubt has in the mind.

Sometimes doubt comes from deeper feelings of unworthiness. You know, and this can be a deeply conditioned pattern for a whole variety of reasons, you know, in our lives where we don't feel worthy. So it's holding us the Dalai Lama had some really strikingly direct words about this. And it was actually he was visiting.

IMS, this was back in the 70s. And somebody asked them a question about this. It's unworthiness. I don't know self-hatred, things like that.

There wasn't even a word in Tibetan for that. It was so foreign to that culture. So he had to have it explained to him, you know, of all his men. And so the question was, I do not feel worthwhile as a person.

How can I work on this as a beginning meditation student? So this was his answer. And it was just so strikingly direct. You should not be discouraged.

Your feeling of I am of no value is wrong, absolutely wrong. You are deceiving yourself. So it's very striking because usually, you know, in his thoughts, it's kind of very soft and cuddly. But here he was just that thought is a wrong thought.

I'm of no value. So then later, there's another Tibetan teacher, a Sokni Rinpoche, who's contemporary teacher, younger and very skilled with Westerners. He was talking a little bit about this feeling of unworthiness, you know, that so many people feel. And he made an interesting distinction kind of building on what the Dalai Lama said.

He said, the feeling is real because we actually feel it. It's real, but not true. And I thought that was a very good way of understanding it. So we're not denying that the feeling is there because we all do have it at different times.

And it may be part of our experience, this feeling of being unworthy or not good enough without self-doubt. So it's real, but it is not true because we all have the potential for awakening. For liberation. The Buddha highlighted the importance of working with these hindrances.

I've been talking a lot about doubt, but this is true of all the hindrances. The Buddha spoke very directly to how important it is to bring mindfulness to them. He said, when we attend to the hindrances carelessly, they cause lack of vision, lack of knowledge, or detrimental to wisdom, tend to vexation and lead away from the Bana, from enlightenment. So he's saying, if we don't attend to these mind states carefully, if we're careless about them in our meditation, in our lives, that has consequences.

Of course, there's lack of vision, lack of knowledge, detrimental to wisdom, tending to vexation, to being upset, leading away from awakening. So given all that, we may wonder why is it that we get so caught up in them? If they have such a negative impact on our lives and our understanding, what is their seductive power? So if we take the first step of recognizing them when they arise, and this is essential, so I would really suggest and encourage you in your practice throughout the whole day, keep an eye out for the arising of doubt and the other hindrances as well, some of which we'll talk about, but really keep an eye out for their arising.

So you recognize them. Oh, that's doubt. That's doubt. So that's the first step.

The second step is then understanding why the doubt is so seductive. Why do we believe it? We begin to see that the great allure of doubt is that it comes masquerading as wisdom. We hear this very wise sounding voice in our minds.

It sounds so reasonable and so valid and so true that we believe what it's saying. What's the point of doing this? Maybe some other time. Aren't we already enlightened?

Or I'm so hopeless. I'm really hopeless. I can't do this on the world's worst meditator. It's amazing how wise sounding these voices can be as if they are telling us the truth.

So we have to be on the alert not to be taken in by the masquerade of doubt is wisdom. We have to see it for what it is. I'm doing a little letting me. I'm going on and on about doubt.

I want to get to a version. I just think it's just one more thing. If we can learn to really recognize it and see it and not be fooled by it, right in that moment in the moment of seeing doubt as doubt. This is a doubt in thought.

Right in that moment we are awake. Right in that moment we are aware. We see at least for that moment the empty insubstantial nature of doubt. And that's tremendous deliberating.

And maybe at first we just see it for a few moments and then record again. But if we keep practicing seeing doubt as doubt, we can really free our minds from this particular pattern. And it's tremendously enlivening, not only of our meditation, but of our entire lives. Okay, so another state that is very powerfully conditioned in our lives is aversion.

And we experience aversion in a wide variety of ways that has many flavors. Anger, hatred, annoyance, irritation, fear, ill will, the judging mind. All of these are just different manifestations of aversion. And they're all conditioned reactions to what we find unpleasant.

As Fino was talking about this morning, something unpleasant comes and our conditioned reaction in one way or another is to feel aversion to it. So this is the habit pattern. But as with doubt, we can learn to recognize this response. We can investigate the nature of each of these mind states of anger, of hatred, of fear, of ill will, of annoyance and see why they have such a hold on our minds.

Now, aversion arises in some pretty predictable ways. One of the most obvious, which I've already been talked about and you've seen probably many times today, it arises very easily with regard to physical pain. You know, we're sitting or moving about or just in our lives, this pain in the body. It's a rare individual who's, oh, good.

Maybe now we have a few days of practice, you can do that. But mostly the conditioned reactions, I don't like this. And so we feel the contraction of pushing away, the aversion towards it. Dislike of it, even sometimes the hatred of it.

And we can pick up the aversion, we can notice the aversion, even if we don't catch it immediately as a mind state, but you can feel it or signal that it's there is when you feel that contraction of the body in response to pain. Don't you feel that there's some kind of pain? And whether I'm obvious or subtle level, it's like we tense against it. We don't want to let it in.

We don't want to experience it to feel it. That's an indication of the aversion in the mind, not liking it. So one little meditative hint. What I'm about to say can save you lifetimes of suffering.

And this is... When you're struggling, whether it's in meditation or in anything else, struggle means one thing. Struggle means that something is going on that in that moment you're not accepting. Because if you were accepting it, you wouldn't be struggling.

Now, you don't want to misinterpret this in the sense acceptance does not mean not doing anything about it. Acceptance means we're there and we are connecting with what's there in an open way. We're actually feeling it, experiencing it, and then seeing what should be done about it. But the sense of struggle itself, and this comes up and I'm speaking a lot about meditation because it comes up so frequently when you're sitting or even walking and you feel like you're struggling in your practice, take a look, just settle back and ask yourself the question, okay, what is it that I'm not open to?

It might be a physical pain. It might be a certain unpleasant emotion. It might be the fact that your mind is wandering a lot. The mind is struggling because it's not accepting of that.

There's a youngish Burmese teacher who's become quite popular in these last years in the West. His name is Saita Avotasia Nia. And he has a very down-to-earth and common sense approach to meditation. He says you have to accept and watch both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.

You only want pleasant experiences. You don't want even the tiniest unpleasant experience. Is this fair? Is this the way of the Dharma?

You know, Saita's just pointing out that life consists of pleasant and unpleasant. And our practice, and it needs practice. We need to practice it, is being willing to open to both. Because otherwise, we're in a place of struggle.

Otherwise we're reinforcing and strengthening the pattern of aversion, of anger, of hatred, of dislike, of irritation, of annoyance. So in working with the physical pain in the body. And it takes practice. When I first started sitting, when I first went into this, it was a million years ago, I couldn't sit for five minutes, of course I could.

The pain was so intense and I didn't have any concentration and I was struggling a lot. It took a long time to really settle in and slowly the ability to be with unpleasantness. That ability slowly and gradually grew over time. There's still a lot more to do as well.

So you want to understand it as a practice, but as an essential practice. This is part of what we're doing here. So we can see a version arise very clearly with respect to physical pain. We can see different forms of aversion arise when we think about unpleasant situations, or things that have happened in the past that were unpleasant.

Some event. We think about it and then we get angry or annoyed or irritated. This is common. You're just sitting here, minding your own business, feeling your breath.

And then all of a sudden you'll remember something that was difficult. You don't mind all of a sudden, your version is there, the anger is there, the ill will is there. What's really happening in that moment? We're getting angry at a thought.

We're not in the situation in the moment. What's happening is a thought is arising and we're getting angry at the thought. So my first teacher, Minindra G, he had a wonderful line. He said, the thought of your mother is not your mother.

It's a thought. The thought of anything is not the thing. It's a thought. And this is not to say the thoughts are unusual and we use them and we can use them skillfully and we need to, but we want to understand what they are.

We can also get angry at imagining things, imagining things in the future. It happened, happened. I had the most interesting example. This is quite a few years ago.

We were about to have a board of directors meeting and there was some contentious something. I was president of our board for a while. I don't know if it was during your time or not. But anyway, it was just one of those meetings where I knew there was going to be some disagreement.

So I was walking the loop. I was just going for a walk around the loop and I was anticipating this discussion. So I would have this thought in my mind and it was so amazing. It was the thought of the anticipated discussion in that moment, anger, rose in my mind.

And it was so surprising to me of just what's going on here? How did this happen? That I kept repeating purposely having the thought just to watch the anger rise. Because it was fascinating to me just this connection between thought and emotion.

What's going on in our systems? But here there's a thought and just in the moment a contributor of very strong emotions. So it's really interesting to watch that and to see how in many cases we are getting angrier upset about things that have not even happened. We're just thinking they might happen.

So in talking about all this, it's also extremely important. I know you know this very well is to understand that powerful emotions can sometimes be conveying very important information for us. So it's not to say that we shouldn't be having them. That's not what this is about.

Sometimes there may be a strong feeling of anger or outrage, you know, and injustice or out of pressure or about a lot of things that need a drawer, you know, some situation in our lives where boundaries need to be set in some way. So sometimes these strong emotions are actually conveying important information for us. So we want to understand that. But can we be mindful enough of our experience, mindful enough of the emotion of understanding it so that we see it, we take the information, but are not overwhelmed.

We don't drown in the emotion so that we can actually act effectively, act in a way that's not harmful to either ourselves or others. There's a lot of subtlety in terms of understanding especially this particular hindrance of a version or anger and to see those situations when there's something we need to pay attention to, but then to use it, use the energy of it skillfully and wisely and compassionately. So there's a lot here. You think you're just sitting here in and out in and out, but really sitting here, it's your whole life.

It's your whole life is manifesting. You know, the life of your body, the life of your heart, the life of your mind and the beauty of every treat is you have nothing else to do except to observe it all. I mean, what a gift. It is a real privilege in this world to have the time to be doing just this, to be understanding these elements of ourselves and our lives in such a careful way.

You know, we can get annoyed, irritated just by little things on retreat. You know, if we are going through a difficult time and maybe we're feeling grumpy or discouraged, the littlest thing that somebody else does can irritate us no end. There's something, there are two opposing patterns that often arise on retreat. On the one side, there's often the vopassana romance where people just fall in love with somebody.

They don't even know them, they haven't spoken to them, but already in your mind, you're married, you have kids. The other side of that is the vopassana vendetta, where there's one person or more on the retreat which just drives you crazy. You know, you don't like the way they walk and you don't like anything. You know, whatever they do, you get irritated.

Again, you don't know them, you haven't spoken word to them. It's all a projection of one's own mind, but it happens. And so this is also a good example, not to get caught by these patterns, but oh, that's a version, that's ill will. So we begin to see and understand it, so we're not identified with it.

We see it as just a passing thought in the mind. We really can free ourselves. Okay, one that this is, I hadn't planned to talk about this, but it's one little exercise you could do and ties in to working with this kind of a version. And I was on retreat, I've done many retreats here, you know, as a yogi.

And on one retreat, I noticed that every time I walked into the dining room for a meal, my mind would have a comment about every single person's. And mostly judgmental. You know, whatever. But it was ridiculous.

I mean, it was totally ridiculous, but that's what the mind was doing. So then I realized that all of that, all of those kind of aversive type thoughts, they were all being triggered because I wasn't being mindful that I was seeing, because all of those thoughts came from making, I was seeing different people. So what I decided to do, every time I went into the dining room, all I would note was seeing, seeing, seeing, seeing. So I was just staying very mindful, just of the bare seeing those judgments all disappeared.

It was amazing. Something that felt like such a strong habit pattern of mind. As soon as I saw what the cause was, what was feeding them, this is what we can explore. We actually can free our minds from these patterns that cause so much suffering, the big or small, you know, to ourselves and others.

So a question after we learned to recognize the various forms of version take for us, and they're quite individualized. We have to see each one for ourselves. What form does our version take? But then it gets interesting to ask the same question as we did without, why is it so seductive?

It doesn't feel good, you know, to be angry or to be filled with ill will or judgment. So why are we seduced by it again and again? So one of the great seductions of anger and of ill will, not in every case, but this is one of the big ones, is the very sweet feeling of being right. We justify the anger to ourselves because we feel right.

Look at what that person is doing, you know, and we're so caught up in our own sense of rightness. The Buddha describes it so beautifully. He said, anger with its poisoned source and honeyed tip. It does have that honey tip.

You know, and we're feeling kind of self-righteous in our anger. It's kind of, you know, we feel energized by that. But we're not seeing the suffering of the source. When we're filled with anger, even though we're justifying it to ourselves by that honey tip by being fulfilling right, we're missing the fact that we're the ones who are suffering.

It's like holding on to a hot burning coal. My first day at German energy would often give three-hour domicops, and I hated them. So I am very conscious. There's definitely another hour here.

Okay, so I'll wrap this up. One of the things we need to be watchful of as we're working with aversion, first to see how we can feed it, you know, by this feeling of being right and justifying it to ourselves and missing the suffering that's really there. Another way we feed the aversion in us is by having aversion to it. So if we're judging the anger, judging the ill will, you know, we're having aversion towards the aversion, that's not a very effective strategy, because we're just feeding it.

We're just strengthening it. And so we have to really become aware of our attitude about the aversion when it rises. And remember, a virgin can take many forms, anger, hatred, fear, irritation, annoyance. It's all range.

What's our attitude towards these feelings? If you hate these feelings. And if you have aversion to them, if you want to get rid of them, you are strengthening them. So you need to check the attitude as these feelings come up.

Oh, fear feels like this. You want to be investigating it. Anger. Oh, this feels like this.

This is what it's like, you know, rage feels like this. So we're not condemning it and we're not identifying with it. We're just exploring its nature. And in that we begin to see its very impermanent nature.

It's there out of conditions and it passes away. Just want to read Tiknat Khan. You know, he writes so beautiful. The Vietnamese Zen Mastin piece activist.

He writes so beautifully and speaks so beautifully. He says, the Buddhist attitude is to take care of anger. We don't suppress it. We don't run away from it.

We just breathe and hold our anger in our arms with utmost tenderness. The anger is no longer alone. It is with our mindfulness. If you keep breathing, mindfulness particles will infiltrate the anger.

If you keep shining your compassion and understanding on it, your anger will soon crack and you will be able to look into its steps and see its roots. So that's how we have to hold them. And that's how we can come to understand it. So we'll be talking more about this meditation practice and the other hindrances.

But I hope you have some sense of how important it is to really be open to and understand and investigate these powerful tendencies of mind. Because if we don't, then we're just acting them out in our lives. And causes a lot of trouble and suffering for ourselves and for others. But when we can be mindful of them, they're going to come.

These are universal forces in the mind. We can be mindful of them. They actually become the path to our awakening. And that's really what our practice is about.

Thank you.