Sounds True is happy to offer two free inspiring teachings from Adyashanti: a special video teaching from Resurrecting Jesus, and an excerpt from Falling into Grace. We hope you find them helpful on your own path of healing and awakening.
Learn more about Adyashanti’s new book Resurrecting Jesus here.
Enjoy!
Tami Simon speaks with Matthieu Ricard, an author and photographer who earned a PhD in cell genetics. He is also a Buddhist monk who has served as the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter since 1989. Matthieu has written several books, including The Monk and the Philosopher, The Quantum and the Lotus, as well as The Art of Meditation. With Sounds True, he has released an audio learning program based on his book Happiness. Matthieu speaks about the skill of happiness, as well as the conditions for happiness. He also discusses the physical and psychological effects of meditation, along with the ways to track the progress you make in your spiritual practice. (37 minutes)
Robert Thurman is a prolific author and professor at Columbia University, where he holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies. A close friend of the Dalai Lama, Robert is a cofounder of Tibet House in New York City, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the fragmented culture of Tibet. In this rollicking installment of Insights at the Edge, Robert and Tami Simon discuss how bliss is a fundamental component of our being, as well as how we can tap into that bliss in our everyday lives. They speak on how people can choose a career that keeps them close to their spiritual tradition and some of the pitfalls involved with becoming a full-time spiritual teacher. Finally, Robert and Tami talk about what exactly continues after reincarnation, and Robert clarifies some of the Dalai Lama’s recent comments about his next life. (90 minutes)
Dr. Friedemann Schaub is a physician best known for his breakthrough programs for the treatment of fear and anxiety disorders, which combine his medical expertise with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Time Line Therapy™, and clinical hypnotherapy. He is the author of the Sounds True book The Fear and Anxiety Solution. In this second half of their two-part conversation on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Friedemann discuss cellular memory, our “blueprint for wholeness,” and how to root ourselves in our essence instead of continual, low-level anxiety. They also talk about the inner protector at the root of our negative self-talk and a “Parts Reintegration Process” for working with this sometimes fractious guardian.
(62 minutes)
What Is Pain?Pain is a normal part of human life. And pain hurts. Although pain feels like a threat, pain is not attacking us. Pain is designed to help us survive. Pain and pleasure are signals. Pain is a signal that something is out of balance in your emotional, mental, spiritual, or physical life and that something needs attention. It is meant to be unpleasant, for a good reason: to bring our attention to a potentially dangerous situation until the issue is treated. The sharp, unpleasant signal is designed that way to make sure we drop everything else and attend to the situation immediately. When pain continues unabated after our best healthy efforts to tend to it in a physical way, we look for ways of stopping it, reducing it, or escaping it in any way we can.
For example, if you’re walking barefoot, thoroughly engaged in a conversation with a friend, and you step on a piece of wood and get a splinter, the strong unpleasant pain signal is meant to get you to immediately stop all other interests and attend to the wound. If you had a sharp piece of wood in your foot and it didn’t cause pain, you might not bother to take it out, resulting in infection or worse. Once you take care of the immediate problem, or source, the nature of pain is to eventually go away. Pain by itself is not an entity or an enemy that has any motivation of hurting you. It is an important survival mechanism of our body—a communication tool.
By way of our senses, we have contact with experience in and outside of our body that tends to feel either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We tend to like pleasant sensations, which leads to craving what we like and trying to get more pleasure, and we tend to dislike unpleasant sensations, which leads to rejecting what we don’t like. When that strong craving or rejection happens, there is a contraction of our greater sense of self into a specific identity of “craver” or “rejecter”: we configure our consciousness into a “me” that is a “thinker” or “manager” that has a strategy to get its goals and desires met, and believes that that strategy is real and right. Craving and rejection are a normal part of our physical survival, like craving food when we’re hungry, but they also become our primary source of suffering when they become our identity.
Rather than reacting to the pain, we must treat the underlying condition that is causing pain in order for it to subside. It is important to first check out the cause of the pain in every way possible so as not to ignore, overlook, or deny a potentially dangerous condition. In some types of chronic pain that we know the cause of, like arthritis or sciatica, the nerve signal system is alerting us of an issue, but there’s no splinter to be removed from our back or foot. If we’ve attended to all the medical and alternative diagnoses and treatments, and the pain still persists, we still have the opportunity to learn some approaches using our own consciousness to relate to pain differently. Effortless mindfulness is a wonderful approach that does not in any way attempt to replace or deny diagnosing the cause of pain and working to cure it through any and all means. I am simply sharing this practice as a suggestion of what can be done in conjunction with any medical treatment.
With effortless mindfulness, we can learn to become present with the unpleasant—an important skill that we often avoid learning until we experience inescapable pain. We may already have experienced, through effortless mindfulness, how chattering thoughts recede into background awareness or can be met by open-hearted awareness. The great news is that we can do this with pain signals as well! They can become like thoughts and go into the background of awake awareness. When the pain signals recede to the background or significantly lessen, we no longer have to suffer silently or try to escape the pain through behaviors of shutting down, numbing, addiction, or acting out. By changing how we relate to pain, we can find a doorway to a freedom that allows us to respond to pain from courage and intimacy. We can learn to be present with the unpleasant, remain sensitive without being defensive, and be responsive but not reactive. When the intelligence of awake awareness knows directly that there is no immediate danger, the pain signal can go into the background.
In this video below, join me as I guide you through this practice of using effortless mindfulness to help you be present and work with your pain for lasting relief.
This is an excerpt from The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide for Living an Awakened Life by Loch Kelly.
Loch Kelly, MDiv, LCSW, is a leader in the field of meditation and psychotherapy. He is author of the award-winning Shift into Freedom and founder of the Open-Hearted Awareness Institute. Loch is an emerging voice in modernizing meditation, social engagement, and collaborating with neuroscientists. For more, visit lochkelly.org.
My husband and I recently attended a talk that Bruce Tift gave at the Shambhala Center in Boulder titled Relationship as a Path of Awakening. Bruce Tift, LMFT, is a private-practice therapist and instructor at Naropa University here in Boulder. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that Bruce is also a Sounds True author with an amazing audio program titled Already Free.) In his talk, Bruce discussed at length the both magical and disturbing nature of intimate relationships and how important it is to continually nurture and accept one another, while simultaneously and unabashedly encouraging growth. He highlighted common relationship patterns that he often sees in his private practice and helped trace them back to childhood—namely survival skills that we established upon first connection with our mothers, which no longer serve us. It should be noted that Bruce was not talking about survival skills which could be considered obvious reactions to abuse or neglect from a parent. Instead, he was referring to seemingly innocent details, such as our mothers’ own self-confidence, and how those nuances come to fruition in our adult lives and inform how we ultimately view the world, connect in intimate relationships, parent our children, etc. For me, discovering how much our lives are perpetually infused by even the minutest aspects of intimate relationship was both a beautiful and terrifying realization. How can we ever be fully aware of the implications of our behavior?
In his talk, Bruce also emphasized the need for couples to develop what he calls “healthy intimacy,” which involves building a strong connection, while at the same time fostering a sense of healthy separation. In Bruce’s opinion, the juxtaposition of connection and separation encourages couples to build a sense of individual independence and to shed their own self-limiting behaviors, while also fostering a depth of adoration and understanding for one another and their collective experience. What most resonated for me in Bruce’s talk is that individual development is only as effective as collective development—for in intimate relationship, the two are ultimately one. No matter how much progress we may make individually, if we’re not progressing in step with one another, our collective experience will be perpetually fractured. While this has always been obvious to me when it comes to goals and alignment related to our outer life—finances, health, travel, family, etc.—I’ve never viewed our inner spiritual goals as those that require the most attention and ultimately make our relationship work.
As relative newlyweds, my husband and I are continually exploring relationship and the role that intimate relationships in particular play in one’s practice or personal growth. While people typically rely on those closest for nurturing and support, it is also those close to us who are best equipped to cast light on all our shadows. But how do we strike the balance between building the nest and deconstructing old patterns? How can we encourage one another to be vulnerable and to break our hearts wide open in relationship, while simultaneously using that same openness to examine and cast each others’ skeletons out of the closet? How do we prevent the very delicateness that we create within intimacy from also being used against us? In Bruce’s words, how do we negotiate the hard fact that our most beautiful and unconditional relationships can also be the most disturbing?
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