Liz Notes:
Methods for cultivating self compassion - Maitri
That’s why when we are doing the practice, we’re imagining a flow of care, acceptance, love, in the middle of feeling these difficult or challenging emotions.
“This is the most difficult practice you will ever do.” - Pema Chodron
“Yeshe Nga” - The Five Wisdoms. How the “Five Buddha Families” is rendered in Tibetan
Mirror like Wisdom - melong tabu yeshe in Tibetan
One way to think about Vajrayana practices - a way to teach the Dharma to our shadow side. The part of us that’s struggling, looking for healing. Because these practices open us up, they tend to get below our armor and below our conceptual beliefs about who we are.
We need to get below this in order to cleanse, purify, address, face into our shadow stuff. But in order to find freedom on this path is we have to be willing to face our shadow.
Using the conceptual mind as a way of opening ourselves to the non-conceptual experience. And then infuse these difficult emotions with loving kindness.
Often/usually, our conceptual mind leads us into suffering because generally it reinforces our stories about ourselves. But with these technologies, we can use it to open up and connect instead of walling ourselves off.
Vajra - indestructible, diamond
five spokes of the vajra
color blue, element water, dawn, east, winter, rugged mountains, icy rivers, simple modern design, monochrome colors, Japanese zen aesthetic,
Buddha is Akshobia. Means “immovable” Female Buddha “Lochana”? I think it’s Mamaki
Main distorted manifestation: aggression. Hot or burning anger. ICE - cold, calculating. Highly critical. Has to be right. Detached. Cold intellectual mind. Hyper vigilance. Always surveying the environment for danger.
Increased heart rate, cortisol, hyper vigilence. Hair trigger.
Hell realm both hot and cold.
Very hard to be intimate. Hard to express emotion. Not connected with emotions. Don’t really know. Highly reactive.
Clarified form
High intelligence. Can really see the situation. Have profound insights into areas most people can’t see. Understanding emotions with clarity, precision. Not muddy. Not messy. Clear ability to see into what’s happening, what’s causing suffering. Ability to maintain discipline. High integrity.
Pacifying. Calming down the waters. This is why the Buddha is called “immovable”. When things are pacified they are immovable.
The way anger is transformed into wrath - the energy without hatred or aggression.
Mirror like wisdom: Things as they are. No reaction. No judgement. Space to respond appropriately. Free of the ego’s need to control, assert. The wisdom that goes beyond conceptual.
Intro
Picking up on Lama Liz’s point about unearthing buried confusion, patterns, beliefs
Boston Harbor toxic waste. So tempting to leave it alone.
but it’s not sitting there harmlessly. It’s affecting us. We see it in the pain we cause others. We hear it when we listen to the ways we talk with ourselves.
And, as Lama Liz said, we long for sanity, clarity, love.
We long to be able to hold children the way that grandmother described this morning.
So what that requires is digging deep. Bringing up and processing the toxins. Probably find more than you thought were there!
Might take longer than you thought. I had a similar experience with a meditation teacher to Jem, and I’m still getting over it almost seven years and a lot of work later.
And we might not be able to do the work all the time. We might decide “Hey I know that’s down there but I’m just going to leave it alone for now. I will get back to it when I can.”
We talk about the neurotic or confused aspect of Vajra as “anger” but it’s important to be precise about what kind of anger.
All anger is not confused. Some anger is wisdom. Lama Liz called this “wrath” this morning. Anger without aggression or anger without hatred.
It’s complicated to parse out which is which, especially in the moment, while you are going through it, but my shorthand definition for telling the difference between confused anger and wisdom anger is “Does this feeling and my actions from it increase confusion and suffering, or decrease them?”
Here’s a little story about anger increasing confusion and suffering:
Raging Against My Son
I have two sons, Nelson, who is now 21 and Roy, who is 18. Here’s a horrible, bitter memory of my anger towards Nelson that I want to share because it illustrates how intense the emotion is, and how important it is to come to terms with as a force in our life.
We were coming home from a family camping trip. We had canoed across this large straight of ocean water up in northern Maine and camped on this island. It was a long crossing, completely exposed, in two canoes. My wife, daughter Anna and son Nelson were in one canoe. Our youngest son Roy and I were in the other.
Every time I looked over at the other canoe, I thought Nelson was slacking off - not pulling his weight. Anna and Ruth were paddling hard. Little Roy was paddling hard to get across. Nelson was slacking off.
I was stressed about making the crossing, worried about the weather, concerned about passing boats, fearful of one or both of us tipping over. The wind was against us. I was scared but there was only one way across.
When we got to the shore and hauled our boats, the rage just overtook me and I yelled at Nelson for a good five minutes. “How can you slack off that way? Why didn’t you paddle hard? How could you expect Anna and Ruth to carry you across?”
I was fuming. Ruth tried to calm me down, but I couldn’t get ahold of myself. I was afraid of the crossing but I was also afraid that he would grow up to be a slacker, someone who takes things for granted.
But here I am, a 6’1” giant screaming at a nine or ten year old boy. Totally lost it.
Nelson and I love each other deeply. Always have and always will. Three things saved our relationship from that experience:
- I apologized. An hour or so later, when I calmed down and realized what an ass I was being, I apologized to him. Told him that I was wrong to act that way and that no one should treat him the way I did - especially not his father who loves him so much.
- This was a rare event. Thanks to meditation practice and these teachings, I have come to know my emotions better. I’m more skilled in processing, expressing and holding back my emotions than I was before I started meditating. This incident was rare in our family history. Despite what some people say, it’s not always good to express your emotions.
- It happened in a context of love. Nelson knew and knows that I love him deeply. I have shared that with him countless times. He knows that I make mistakes, that I try to own up to them, and that my actions have more to do with my issues than they do with his.
None of this is to excuse what I did, how I treated him. I still feel terrible about it, as evidenced by this coming up in practice this morning.
The confusion under the confusion. Under the anger there was fear, just like under the pride there is inadequecy.
I share this because it’s such a clear example of distorted Vajra energy. And because the more we can process, examine, apologize for and heal our distorted views of the world, the better a place it will be.
So this is not to say that if you practice meditation for thirty plus years, you won’t feel anger. Or that you won’t make a mess in relationships that you would give anything to preserve.
But I do believe that without meditation, without touching these distorted energies on the cushion and learning about them and their wisdom manifestations I would have made many many more messes in my adult life. And I would have been much worse at creating the loving environment that provides a container for us all to mess up in.
Vajra Wisdom
The description of Vajra Wisdom is sharp, diamond clarity. Imagine a scalpel or a razor blade that can slice through any confusion with precise, clean, dispassionate strokes.
Imagine that at any time, when you are feeling confused or overwhelmed, you could stop time, step back from the situation and look at it from a dozen or a hundred perspectives. Then you could choose the best approach, the right thing to say, for the maximum best result for everyone involved.
Let’s apply that diamond bladed scalpel to the thing that we hold dearest - our sense of self. Our deeply held belief that we are an independent, solid, actually existing thing.
Because one of the big traps associated with working with emotions is thinking that somehow these stories, even these energies, even everything around us is somehow ultimately real.
One thing we know from just a little bit of sitting and a little bit of introspection, is that our “self” is hard to pin down.
Who am I? is the existential question. Lama Liz asked it at the beginning of the retreat.
Am I the person other’s see me as? Am I my parent’s child? Am I the person my teachers graded or my coaches trained? Am I the person lying awake in the dead of night unable to sleep? That’s four distinct people right there in one paragraph.
When we are sitting in meditation, we see all those identities and more popping up, existing for a while and then fading away. Who am I?
Traditional Categories for Breaking Down this problem
In traditional Buddhist teachings, there’s a very effective categorization of self that helps us think clearly about this question.
The five skandhas (Sanskrit: pañcaskandha, "five heaps") are the components that we typically mistake for a solid, unified self:
- Form (rūpa) — the physical body and material phenomena; what has shape and occupies space
- Feeling/Sensation (vedanā) — the basic valence of experience: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Not "emotion" in the full sense, but the raw hedonic tone that precedes elaboration
- Perception (samjñā) — recognition and categorization; the mental faculty that identifies "this is red," "this is a friend," "this is danger"
- Mental Formations (samskāra) — the broad category of volitional mental factors: intention, attention, emotions, habits, karmic tendencies. The most complex skandha — sometimes counted as 51 distinct factors in the Abhidharma
- Consciousness (vijñāna) — awareness itself, typically parsed into six consciousnesses (five sensory + mental consciousness), though in Yogacara this expands further
These five categories are composed of other categories. They are called the “Five Heaps” or “Five Aggregates” not because they are solid things, but because they aren’t. It’s just like objects, molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons, and on and on. It’s basically space, energy and probabilities all the way down.
Remember that line from the Heart Sutra?
“No form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose no tongue no body no mind no appearance no sound no smell no taste no touch no eye dhatu up to on mind dhatu no mind consciousness dhatu no ignorance and no end of ignorance…
Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form, form is no other than emptiness…
So with that reminder, let’s try a little exercise:
The Sevenfold Analysis of the Self
From Chandrakirti's Madhyamakavatara (Introduction to the Middle Way), Chapter 6, the classic "sevenfold reasoning" asks:
- Is the self the same as the five aggregates (skandhas)?
- Is the self different from the aggregates?
- Does the self depend on the aggregates?
- Do the aggregates depend on the self?
- Does the self possess the aggregates (as one possesses cattle)?
- Is the self the collection of the aggregates?
- Is the self the shape or form of the aggregates?
Chandrakirti's commentary is well-treated in Mipham Rinpoche's Introduction to the Middle Way (Shambhala Publications, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group).
The Chariot Analogy
This appears in both the Pali Milindapañha (The Questions of King Milinda) and is formalized by Chandrakirti. The monk Nagasena asks King Milinda: Is the chariot its wheels? Its axle? Its frame? Its pole? The collection of parts? None of these? When you look for "chariot," you find only parts — and yet the chariot functions conventionally.
Applied to self: Is "I" the body? The feelings? The perceptions? The mental formations? The consciousness? The collection of all five? Something apart from them? This is a meditation instruction, not merely a philosophical puzzle. Trungpa Rinpoche uses a version of this in "Glimpses of Abhidharma" (Shambhala, 2001) in his discussion of the skandhas and egolessness of self.
Direct Pointing Questions (Mahamudra/Dzogchen Adjacent)
In the Kagyu and Nyingma presentation, Madhyamika questions become more direct pointing instructions:
- "Who is meditating right now? Find the meditator."
- "Where did that thought come from? Where did it go? Where is it now?"
- "Look at the one who is looking."
These appear in Mahamudra literature, particularly Dakpo Tashi Namgyal's Moonbeams of Mahāmudrā (Snow Lion, 2019, translated by Elizabeth M. Callahan)
The Analogy that Works for me right now
The best analogy I can come up with for my “self” is like a series of clouds. I can name various clouds, like “Quiet” “Angry” “Tough” “Perceptive” “Cooking” “Writing” “Swimming” and so on. But most don’t have names. There are dozens of clouds. They appear and disappear according to some mechanic I don’t understand. They overlap, run into each other. Sometimes they cause a storm.
When I look at a cloud for a while, I can see it move and shift. It’s not a solid thing itself.
Occasionally the clouds fade and there’s just the clear blue sky above.
There’s nothing solid that I can find about myself. I looked at my memories, the continuity of my memories, the story of my life as something I could call myself. But it’s amazing how unreliable my memories are. Talking with my mom, or my wife or my closest friends about events in the past make it clear that my version of events is often very different than theirs.
Interestingly, my version often stars me as the hero, and no matter what the storyline is, generally ends with me justified in my actions.
This is one thing that makes the self so hard to find…
But no matter what the storyline is, or the memories, or the truth of what actually happened, are those things really Who I am? I’m just a combination of previous events? That doesn’t seem right. That doesn’t give any weight to the things that I’m doing right now in the present moment.
Is there any continuity between the one year old baby Matt, the high school lacrosse player theater kid, the college dropout hiking club kid, the business school student, the husband, the entrepreneur, the father?
Over 30 years of meditation, study, retreat, introspection… I can’t find anything I can reliably point to and say “This is me.”
That’s why the best analogy I can come up with is a series of clouds. They look like something from the outside, but, like when you are in an airplane, you can fly right through them.
So what is there actually to defend? What Self gets offended when someone ignores me or doesn’t give me the credit I feel I deserve?
To be clear, I’m not advocating that you let people walk all over you. Not at all. That’s not helpful for you or for them.
I am advocating for dropping this aggressive defense of an empty cloud bank. I’m saying that rather than wield your intelligence to lash out at people, information, feedback that challenge your view of the world, instead we just pause.
Step back. Sit down. Allow the turbulent water to settle, the mud to drift to the bottom and everything to clarify.
What we find, and you know this as well as I do because we’ve all had these moments of clarity, is peace. The cold clear world is peaceful. There’s a lot of open space. It’s glinting and alive, sharp and clear.
The battle that we’ve been fighting to defend our Self by lashing out at others, or lashing out at parts of ourselves, is unnecessary. There actually is nothing to defend really.
That’s all well and good, fine to say. A good working theory. But in reality, that’s not how things feel.
Maitri
So at this point I want to talk about Maitri. I mentioned this word in the context of “Maitri Space Awareness” which was the name for an intensified Buddha Family meditation practice.
But more broadly, Maitri means “friendliness to oneself” or “self-care” I’m not talking about facials and massages, although that might be good. I’m talking about a Maitri attitude, a friendliness attitude towards our experience.
When we are angry, it’s easy to lash out. It’s surprisingly easy to lash in also, blame ourselves or hate ourselves for feeling these strong emotions.
The Vajra wisdom in this case is to see through self-hatred as just another tactic for solidifying our “Self”. I am angry. I am pissed off at the world, at my father, at my teacher, my boss.
But instead of turning that anger outwards at the thing that’s “making me angry” or turning it in towards myself “I’m stupid for falling for this again” we just stop everything and feel the energy.
Feel the power of that anger. Feel the crispness of the cold air. Don’t do anything with it. Just feel it. Feel it. Touch it and see what it’s like.
There’s a river of freezing cold water flowing by. Put your hand in and feel the cold. Then pull it out. No drama. There’s a whole huge river of cold clear flowing water going by.
The world is so big. There is so much beauty and energy in the world. It’s so much bigger than any little thing going on within us. And actually we are a part of it. We are not separate.
It’s not like there’s me, a cloudbank floating along, and then the rest of the world. No.
The cloudbanks of me is floating in the world. Connected to the sky. Touching the trees. Carrying the water. Dissolving in the summer heat and steaming out of the ocean on an autumn morning.
There’s nothing to be angry at. There’s limitless energy in the world, but there’s no owner, no separation. No boundaries.
The flip from neurosis to wisdom is small, maybe a five degree turn. Like you are holding up a diamond to the light, and a slight shift turns a chunk of glass into a lighthouse of love.
Notes from Liz’s talk:
Vajrayana teaches to the shadow side.
“The More” that we are: the parts of ourselves below the level of our thinking mind.
Story about “They call that a tree” Can’t encompass the fullness of our experience with our conceptual mind.
Yi (mind) Dam (connect) practice - Binding the thinking mind to something that is beyond the thinking mind.
Uses the thinking process to bring us beyond the thinking mind.
Mirror-like wisdom
Akshobia is male Buddha, Lochana is female Buddha
Underneath the anger is a fear, hypervigilence. Over intellectualized. Disconnected from intimacy. Very hard to be connected.
Righteousness - sense of humor as the antidote
How is Vajra energy clarified? Like what is the process?
perceiving reality very clearly.
a perception that goes beyond the conceptual mind
powerful curiousity about reality
capacity to see through one’s own deceptions
Pacifying karma. Also mentions Destroying as a Vajra karma (but that’s really Karma)
eyes as a portal to the phenomenal world. All senses act that way.
Mistakes are inevitable. When we screw up, we have to learn to apologize clearly and authentically. But let me share a teaching, closely related to these Five Buddha Families, that has dramatically reduced the number of times my distorted energy has caused harm in the world.
The Four Karmas
Each of these Buddhas, each of these Buddha Families, has a style of Action aka Karma. This is picking up on a question from yesterday about how to deal with a dinner party guest who is taking advantage of your generosity:
- Pacify - calm people down. Relax them. Like mud settling out of water. Allow the distorted emotions. Relating with your thoughts via the Pacifying karma is being super gentle with them. Popping the thought bubble with a feather. "Thinking". You can even talk with yourself in a gentle and pacifying way... "I know you are frustrated. I get that you are angry. You are safe here. It's going to be ok." We are not very kind with ourselves. It's incredibly powerful to examine the tone of your voice as you narrate your life and modulate it to show yourself more kindness. This is the enlightened or clarified wisdom activity of Vajra.
- Enrich - help people feel worthy. Encourage them. Help them laugh. Make them food. Serve them. Take off their shoes and give them a foot rub. Praise them. I would make them feel special. This is a great approach when we are feeling down about yourselves. When we have a lot of negative self talk, when our inner critic is just out of control, we can enrich ourselves by calling out our good qualities, remembering the ways we have benefited others, or the challenges we have overcome.
- I used to think that this kind of self-praise was ego re-enforcing and by doing this I was moving away from becoming enlightened, but now I think that's stupid. The ego will use everything in its reach to re-enforce itself - which includes negative thoughts and self flagellation. So speaking with yourself from an Enriching point of view can be really helpful. This is the Ratna wisdom activity.
- Magnitize - We are going to talk more about this style tomorrow in Padma, but if I was to relate with myself with the "Magnetizing" action, I would invite myself in. I would get to know myself as I really am - warts and all. Sometimes Magnetizing seems like charisma and seduction, but it's actually more like acceptance. "I see you. I see how angry you are. I see how jealous you feel. You don't have to change. You don't have to calm down. We can sit here together with these feelings just as they are. We can see them clearly, individually. There’s no problem with that.”
- Destroy - This is clarified, purified wrathful energy devoid of hatred. This is wisdom anger. This is anger that reduces confusion and suffering. This is anger coming from a place of love. But fierce, powerful, intense. Relating with your thoughts via the "Destroying" or "Cutting" action is just to cut through. Just simply cut. The thoughts stop, the story stops, the drama stops. And you are just sitting there with your plain naked experience. Then you hang out in that space for a while and see what happens next. This is closely related to Vajra and anger, but it’s mostly associated with the Karma wisdom activity.
ALWAYS START WITH PACIFYING
The crucial point here, and bringing it back to my story of Nelson, is that skillfully working with yourself and with other people ALWAYS START WITH PACIFYING.
First try to calm the situation down. First step back, allow space.
That usually works. But if it doesn’t move on to Enriching.
That usually works too. But if it doesn’t, move on to Magnitizing.
And finally, if all else fails, or if it’s an emergency and there’s no time, rouse your Wrathful energy and cut.
Also, always start with yourself… If I hadn’t gotten so wound up on the canoe crossing, I would have pacified myself first - “It’s ok. We are going to make it. The weather is good. Stay calm.”
If that didn’t work, I’m still feeling agitated: “He’s trying the best he can. He’s just a boy. He’s amazing for a nine year old. You should be proud of the son you’ve raised. You’ve done a great job with him.”
If that’s not helping, go to Magnetize “I see you. I recognize these feelings. I get how you are worried, afraid. You can feel that way. I’m not judging. Feel that energy just as it is.”
Finally, if all else fails, cut. “Stop it. You are being ridiculous. Your emotions are ruining the end of a fantastic family trip. Cut it out. Drop it NOW.”
If you can do this progression with yourself enough times, you can start to work with other people in this way too. At some point along the path (so I’ve heard) the Action becomes effortless. Compassionate activity just flows out constantly, with nothing to get in its way.
Because that is who and what we really are.