Cultivating Wisdom
With Friendliness
Wisdom arises with friendliness. Friendliness is more often translated as loving kindness in Buddhism, but I prefer to call it friendliness. Loving kindness sounds a little formal and I think we can have fixed ideas about what kindness looks like in our society.
Kindness implies that we always need to be nice, which isn’t always that helpful. We’re all humans with complex histories, who encounter difficult situations. We all have weird minds and sometimes what we need most is to vent our rage or assert our boundaries. If we are being good friends to ourselves, then we can create some space around those things and hold a container for rage and anger to be expressed in a way that doesn’t hurt others. Perhaps we can do this for others, too.
Friendliness is a boundless state that is the active state of remaining open, even when we need to express or hold space for challenging thoughts and emotions. It is a way of opening to the world where we assume that we are all in it together. It buys us the freedom of expression that we feel around really good friends – we feel that we can be ourselves because there is enough love and understanding in the relationship that even if we don’t agree or align with the people around us, it’s not going to be the end of the world.
It allows us to accept things as they are. Even when things aren’t ideal, we appreciate our friends for their presence in our life. They make us laugh, we help each other through challenges, we enjoy the good times together.
We don’t invest in a friendship because we are hoping to get something out of it, we do it because we like that person and it is inherently rewarding to build a relationship with them. We enjoy cooking dinner for our friends, sending them thoughtful messages, listening to their stories and helping them navigate their lives. And hopefully we get the benefit of feeling some of that warmth in return.
We don’t expect our friends to be perfect, we value each person for the love and understanding that that person brings in to our lives and we learn to tolerate and sometimes even adore the things that can make them slightly difficult.
When friends talk about things, we are able to be curious and open-minded, which is the best state to be in to be learning. When we are with a group of friends and something goes wrong, we can approach it with a positive attitude of how we can work together to improve the situation or just enjoy it anyway.
At the heart of friendship is a sincere wish that you want the other person to be well and happy and be able to be themselves.
Wisdom arises when we are able to choose a skilful response to a situation. We can take in the information that is helpful and navigate a path that feels like a good way forward. Wisdom isn’t about knowing lots of facts or getting things right, it’s about having a good relationship between our hearts and our minds. This gives us the capacity to understand a situation and respond in a way that feels joyful and loving.
The biggest killer to wisdom is opposition. If we fall into opposition with life we put all our energy into defending ourselves or attacking what we are in opposition to, rather than focusing on navigating forward.
Fear and opposition leads us to focus on the negatives in life. It wants to keep us safe by pointing out everything that is going wrong in the situation or could be at risk. When we feel our safety is at risk, our brains take over and try and navigate us to safety by destroying our opponent or running away. Vital if we come across a lion, slightly unproductive if we are trying to have a conversation with someone.
Our modern world is incredibly confusing for our minds. We are physically safer than we’ve ever been but our minds feel less safe. We are constantly being triggered into a fight or flight state when we’re not in appropriate situations to release the adrenaline and physiological changes in our bodies that this is designed to do. We need to revisit some of the ways in which we have learned to protect ourselves, in order to rebalance our systems and find more ease in life. I talk about this more in the practices.
If we can cultivate our capacity to meet more of life as if it was our friend, then we reduce the amount of time we are in opposition with the world and increase the amount of time we are rolling with life, enjoying ourselves and growing as people. The ultimate wisdom is moving away from the idea of right and wrong and seeing that we are all in this together, just trying to figure out a way of getting home to a place where we all feel safe, loved and understood and have some space to express ourselves openly.
This is my longest practice guide as it the area with the most rich content for our modern lives. Feel free to drop in and out and take it one section at a time.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a really important capacity to develop in ourselves and the main concept that you need to be able to embody is that your thoughts, your emotions and your behaviours exist separately to each other.
Learning to distinguish between your thoughts and your emotions is one of the most powerful things you can do. One of the simplest ways I’ve found to do this is to write down situations that you find yourself in, in this format:
I think that the situation is….
This makes me feel like….
Which makes me behave like….
Which makes me think….
Which makes me feel…..
Etc. etc. Notice that it is a constant loop that feeds itself. The trick is to untangle them and see each part for what it is. They can go in any order, for example, sometimes the behaviour comes first, followed by the feeling, followed by the thought.
Give yourself permission to feel the thing without needing to believe the thought.
We can then take each piece of the puzzle and treat it differently. Behaviour is within our control and helping ourselves be more relaxed will allow us to choose wise actions. Feelings require a bit of care and we can meet them with compassion, kindness and joy. While thoughts can generally be taken as a bit of a joke.
This is where the classic mindfulness technique of ‘watching your thoughts float past like clouds’ comes in. Thoughts don’t belong to us and they are generally a load of rubbish, so it is super helpful if we can allow them to pass through us without getting attached to them. More on this later but please bear this in mind when reading the rest of this post. When I say thoughts I mean ideas and concepts and when I say feelings I mean sensations and emotions, the two can be distinct. Neither of these mean words or actions.
If at any point you feel strong emotions or sensations come up with the practices here, these require a slightly different approach. If this is happening, I would recommend reading my guide on developing presence. This has more information about meeting difficult emotions with compassion.
Cognitive Dissonance
Our society is a cognitive dissonance nightmare. It is flooded with things that constantly trigger our ‘danger’ signals: strangers, crowds, conflict, alerts, bad news, bullying, imagery of violence.
Yet we are mostly physically very safe. When our bodies kick into fight or flight it is actually good to let them do the things they want to do – run or attack something or freeze or shake – but our physical surroundings don’t support that and it would seem like a weird thing to do in the middle of an office.
By the time we’ve got into fight or flight, it can be too late to calm ourselves down in the situation we are in. Huge swathes of our rational mind shut down and we turn into angry lizards. We need to remove ourselves from the situation and give ourselves time and space to release what we need, in order to come back to ourselves. Exercise can help us release the physiological effects of fight and flight. Long deep out-breaths are the best way to calm your nervous system.
If we can create the conditions for us to feel safe, then we are less likely to end up kicking into fight or flight.
There are lots of situations in the world where people are still physically unsafe, too. We want to help ourselves get more clarity about what is actual danger and the good responses to that and what is perceived danger and how we can minimise the negative impact of that on our bodies and minds. This clarity will help us build a safer world.
- We are uncomfortable with strangers. We obviously have to encounter many strangers all day and just recognising the impact that they have on you, walking down the street, sharing an office, being in a shop, is important and can help us process this experience.
- If you are in a role as a facilitator of any group or meeting of people, ensure that everyone gets a chance to introduce themselves and ideally share something about themselves at the start. This small gesture allows everyone in the room to move out of high-alert ‘stranger’ mode and into ‘friends’ mode. This will have a huge impact on the mood of the group and the individuals within it. It can seem unwieldy for large groups, like a 60 person retreat, but trust me it will pay off in everyone’s ability to relax.
- Practice recognising the difference between mental safety and physical safety while you are not under threat. The more clear we can get on this when we are feeling calm, the easier it is to separate the two once we get into fight or flight.
- Take some time to define what you need in your life in order to be safe. What is the minimum income? How many friends do you need? What physical boundaries need to be respected? What values are vital to my being? Get really clear on these questions. If we feel we can still be safe with less resources, we buy ourselves a huge amount of freedom. If we know that something is vital to our safety we can protect it with more clarity and ferocity.
- Once this is clear make a list of things that your brain thinks make you unsafe but actually are ok. I have more practices later about how you can minimise or remove some of these triggers, but just being aware of them is a good place to start.
- When we feel unsafe, we actively look for problems and risks to prove ourselves right. The world news means that we will always have access to bad things going on in the world. If we look for negativity we will find it. Try and limit the amount of negative stuff you are consuming.
- Alerts and alarms trigger a small fight or flight response in us. Turn off as many phone and email alerts as you can get away with. Make them something that you go to look for when you want to, rather that something that demands your attention.
- Our brains and bodies distinguish much less between TV and reality than we think. Bear that in mind when watching violent or negative TV, films and media.
- We want to create safe spaces within which we can express our negative or challenging thoughts, it is not helpful to keep them trapped inside of us. But be aware that this is different to feeding them. Be really conscious of what you are choosing to put into your experience as this will shape your reality.
Balancing the Masculine and Feminine
We have an imbalance between the masculine and feminine, which is reflected in how we experience our inner worlds, how we behave and in our society as a whole. We need to recognise the ways in which we contribute to this dynamic so that we can build a fairer more balanced society, that will be better for everyone.
Wisdom arises from love and understanding. Both of these have a masculine component and a feminine component. We all hold both the masculine and the feminine within us.
When we talk about understanding, the masculine element is giving meaning to something and the feminine component is receiving the meaning of something.
When we talk about love, the masculine element is to actively love something and the feminine component is to receive the love.
In our society, we value the masculine elements more. We perceive the world as something we go out and do something to in order to create value. But receiving the world and the people in it, is equally as powerful and valuable.
In order for the world to be a safer more joyful place, we need to to balance these within us as individuals and as a society.
Understanding
A typically masculine version of understanding would be writing a book explaining a concept of the world. A typically feminine version of understanding would be listening deeply to what someone has to say and understanding the meaning behind it.
The imbalance in our society manifests in us believing that we understand other’s experiences from the outside better than they can understand it from the inside. It is the idea that science is more true than our felt experience of the world.
A common personal example of this, is that when we feel something that resonates with us we immediately feel like we want to take that feeling and create something in the world with it. We don’t value the sense of resonance for what it is. We are often unaware of this process even happening and it can result it mansplaining – where someone says something that resonates with us and we end up automatically explaining it back to the person who evoked the resonance in us in the first place as if they don’t understand it. Brains are weird.
We can learn and grow equally as well from listening to what resonates with us as we do from learning about concepts. We already know a shit load of clever stuff, so we probably don’t need many more books. We need to be able to open to receiving life so we can get a sense of what all this crazy stuff means to us, what resonates with us and how we experience the world.
The feminine element doesn’t always have to actually be listening. It can be listening to our felt senses and expressing this to each other by sharing openly about what it feels like to be us. This can feel really vulnerable if we’re not used to it but you can trust that if it resonates with you, it probably resonates with other people, and it will help them to understand their experience better.
The feminine element is characterised by the ability to hold a space for someone to be and discover themselves in. We can do this for ourselves, we can do this for each other and we can go on a shared adventure in getting to know our internal worlds better together. It’s beautiful.
Loving
A typically masculine version of love would be to give someone something or do something for them that we hope will make them happy. A typically feminine version of love would be to appreciate someone for all their wonderful traits.
The imbalance in our society manifests in us believing that giving is a more honourable thing to do and receiving is a passive trait that takes no skill and provides no value. It is the idea that if we want to feel better we need to do something about it, we are to blame for our negative feelings.
This has some really dark manifestations in our society, including blaming rape victims, dismissing mental health problems and bullying ‘weak’ people.
If you give people a safe space to share the ways in which they have been oppressed and hurt and degraded by others, the examples will flood out of them. People hold on to these feelings because they cannot express them in the moment. Being emotionally open and sharing the ways in which we are hurt by others is seen as a weakness to be exploited or a tool that we are using to manipulate people, not as a valuable piece of information to be honoured.
This perception is absurdly integrated into our society; we are numb to how little attention we pay to our feelings and have become used to just ‘sucking it up’ when we are in situations that make us feel like shit. We basically have to do this for every modern job.
In order to embrace the feminine, we need to allow people to share the emotional impact that their environment and other people’s actions have on them. We need to learn to be grown ups and be able to listen to people when they are hurting, including ourselves, without reacting and appointing blame.
When people can share how they feel about something, it presents a much more honest picture of the true reality and we are able to create solutions that genuinely meet people’s needs. If we all pretend we are ok all the time, we will just keep creating environments that make us feel like shit.
It can also be a beautifully powerful and positive experience. Receiving the love of ourselves and others is an active role that takes skill to learn to do well. Compassion helps us transform some difficult emotions and feel less alone with others. We are only able to feel happy, if we can find and listen to the happiness inside of us and help other people recognise it in themselves too.
Creating Internal Safety
If we can increase the sense of safety that we feel in a wider range of circumstances then we increase our capacity to stay open and friendly. We do this by creating internal safety.
One of the biggest things that takes away internal safety is when we have internalised the trauma of having been abused. If we were in a situation that felt life-threatening, for example if we were abused or weren’t loved as a child, we can internalise the script that our abusers inflicted on us. This can manifest as an inner critic or a predator inside us. We either let this eat away at us or we turn it back around on the outside world, treating people in the same way we didn’t want to be treated.
It has created a split between our hearts and our minds. Our hearts want to be loved but our mind wants to be safe so it learns to mimic our abuser. We believe that the way that our abuser behaves is the ‘right’ way, as that is what was going to keep us safe. It creates a lot of black and white thinking.
Unless we are able to revisit the trauma and release the script, it gets stuck inside us and we repeat the cycle. If you have suffered serious abuse, I would recommend finding a therapist who is well-trained to work with you on it.
We all have this dynamic that plays out in small ways, no parents were perfect and we will also have picked up this script from mean kids in the playground, strict teachers and when we have been in situations where we felt powerless as adults. This dynamic create triggers where people’s behaviour will make us feel suddenly very unsafe and make us feel as if we are in opposition to the world. We either start to attack ourselves or we feel as though we are being attacked by people.
These practices help us explore this dynamic within ourselves and hopefully get a bit more space around them so we feel less at risk when we are in a situation that triggers us.
- When you notice a trigger within yourself, ask yourself what is at risk for me? Get an understanding of what you feel like is going to happen and offer yourself some compassion that it is clearly something that would be very hurtful to you.
- Make a list of your biggest fears in life and what the feeling is underneath them. Firstly offer up some compassion to the part of you that is afraid. Then come up with ways you can mitigate those fears, this will give you confidence in your capacity to deal with stressful situations and reduce the life-threatening feeling of them.
- Get really well-practiced at engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. Take long slow out-breaths throughout the day. This will help us to remember that we have access to a calm state when we need it.
- Vent all your worst thoughts. One of the best ways to get rid of an inner critic is to let it loose. Give yourself space to stream all the worst possible thoughts you can imagine thinking. Keep going until you feel like you’re done.
- If there are strong emotions or sensations that are arising with your thoughts, I’d recommend reading my practice guide on Developing Presence. This has more information about how to make space for feeling big feelings and processing bodily trauma.
- Bring conflict into the fold of your friendliness. We all have inner conflict – approach yours as if it is a joke and it will help give it some space around it.
- Notice when you are being critical of yourself or others. Imagine if a close friend came to you and told you the thing you are being critical about yourself for. What would you say to them? Offer yourself the same kindness.
- If you want to dig deeper into this dynamic, I would recommend listening to the recording of Ken McLeod’s retreat ‘The Warrior’s Solution’. It has amazingly transformative Vajrayana Buddhism visualisation exercises that will take you through the process of finding these splits within us and destroying them.
Meditation Practice – Opening Our Hearts and Minds
It is having open hearts and minds that allows us to be engaged with the world in a friendly way. These practices help us with that.
Metta Meditation
Metta (or loving kindness/ friendliness) meditation is traditionally done by imagining a series of people, starting with our loved ones, and saying scripts in our minds like, ‘may you be happy, may you be well’. This works for some people, but I find it a little formal.
I prefer to relax into a state of friendliness. Thinking about children that I love or animals that I find cute is a good way to access this state. If you’re feeling tense, looking at pictures or videos of some cute animals before you start can really help. Place your awareness in your heart space if you can and enjoy embodying this state of being relaxed and open.
During walking meditation or in daily life, I sometimes just say ‘hey’ to things in my mind to remind myself to open to them in a friendly way. Like, ‘hey tree’, ‘hey snail’, ‘hey stranger walking down the street’ etc. etc.
While you are meditating and in this state you can also imagine some people or situations that you find more challenging and see if you can retain a feeling of relaxed friendliness. We are trying to ‘wear in’ the feeling so that we are more likely to be able to stay in it during our days.
Impermanence
Meditating on impermanence helps us open our minds. Instead of fixating on things, we are allowing things to pass through.
For this meditation we are focusing our concentration on the continual changing nature of everything. Seeing thoughts, sensations, emotions and feelings arise and pass away in our experience.
For example, if you focus on the breath, you can notice that each of the small sensations that makes up a breath are arising and then passing, never to come back again. Every sensation only happens once and then it disappears.
If we develop our concentration enough we can notice that everything is a series of sensations that is arising and passing at a really fast speed and we can start to dissolve our awareness into the space around us. We notice that our minds don’t exist separately from it.
If you would like to learn more about this practice, I would recommend Daniel Ingram’s book, ‘Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha’.
Pure Heart, Dirty Mind
Our mind’s job is to process everything that is going on in our experience into something we can understand and to come up with creative solutions and ideas.
Our thoughts don’t belong to us. They are arising from all sorts of different places: our history, our environment, our genes, our animal-nature, other people’s minds.
In spiritual practice there is the concept of the still, pure mind. I love my creative, interesting brain and I have only ever managed to tame it by taking the life-force out of it, which has not been worth the pay-off. I like to embrace the idea of the mind as the hell-realm. Here are some practices that help me do that:
- Learn to observe the the dark stuff that arises in our minds and take it as funny or interesting.
- Release the grip of fearing fear itself. Fear and excitement are physiologically exactly the same, it is our minds that distinguish between the two. If we can learn to convince ourselves that something is scary in an exciting way rather than a life-threatening way, then it can be fun.
- Spend some time thinking about what the worst thoughts you can imagine having are. Realise that they don’t have a power over you.
- Creativity is connecting new ideas together. This is part of what our brains are here to do. Accept that sometimes, that shit’s going to get weird.
- The best ideas often start life as the most ridiculous. Don’t reign your mind in too much as that is what stifles creativity.
- Thoughts are arising as shared experiences between two people more often than we realise. Cut yourself some slack if you have weird or bad thoughts about someone – they might be thinking the same about you.
- We don’t need to feel bad about having ‘bad’ thoughts about someone, as long as our behaviour is appropriate.
Growth Mindset
Having a growth mindset allows us to stay open even when things aren’t going as well as we’d hoped.
This is about learning to see the gap between where we are and where we would like to be as an opportunity for growth, rather than a negative reflection on us.
- Understanding that lots of life is largely out of our control will help with this. Our brains like to think that it is their job to be in control of situations and it can make us feel like failures when this illusion is shattered. Try and enjoy the company of uncertainty. See it as an exciting and interesting part of life.
- What is in our control is how we choose to respond to things. One of the best responses we can have is to cut ourselves and other people a load of slack. Unless their behaviour is genuinely unsafe, then people can act out and do stupid things and make big mistakes and it is not the end of the world. Sometimes those mistakes work out for the best, so accepting them with a light-hearted attitude and an open-mind will help us weather the storms.
- Curiosity is an amazing tool for cultivating a growth mindset. During the peak of my psychosis and spiritual awakening I was probably asking the Universe a thousand questions a day. I was fascinated by everything in my experience and wanted to learn about it. Don’t worry about whether you find the right answer or even a sensible answer, open your mind to just being curious and not knowing again.
- People’s fear of looking stupid is one of the biggest thing that holds them back. Being willing to take a risk and not be afraid of looking dumb or silly is hugely liberating.
- Greet new information and experiences as if a good friend was delivering it to you. This will help maintain a relaxed attitude and open mind.
- Negative thoughts and voices are welcome in our experiences too. They can provide really useful information for how we need to grow or change or ideas of how we could do that. Learn to listen to what they have to say, without buying fully in to it.
- Befriend challenge and hardship. Remember times in your life when you’ve been through something hard in the past and felt good about it afterwards – a sense of satisfaction or relief that it was over. See these as life giving you opportunities to learn new things and grow.
- Remember that you have to be willing to be bad at things in order to get good at things.
All of Life is an Emotional Connection
We have this concept that we are able to categorise our relationships. Certain people are colleagues, certain relationships are transactional, we love our families and we like our friends.
The reality is much more fluid than this. There is a saying in Buddhism that everyone you encounter is a teacher. There is quite a lot of truth in this, we are constantly modelling ways of being and learning from each other. But it is more true that everyone and everything we encounter is an emotional connection.
There is no way of extracting the emotional impact that every moment of life has on us. This is much easier and more fun if we see it as a friendly relationship and can be playful with it.
- An important thing to recognise in life is that all adult relationships are voluntary. We are in them because we choose to be there. There is a lot of shame in our society around walking away from certain relationships, this is largely because we have evolved to feel like this is a massive deal, but you need to be able to feel free to protect your own wellbeing. If a relationship is having a negative impact on your wellbeing, you can walk away from it. If you feel that you can’t, this is a sign of abuse within the relationship and I would recommend getting help.
- We don’t have to take responsibility for our friends’ suffering or difficulties. We can feel a sincere wish that we want them to be well and we want to help them where we can but our wellness and safety is not tied up in theirs. Aim to cultivate this sense of spaciousness around your relationships.
- Status kills wisdom. Wisdom arises from an open-heart and an open-mind. If a sense of status is more important to us than an emotional connection, we will choose defending our status and protecting what makes us right over receiving the situation with an open mind. We see people as threats rather than as friends with useful information.
- Hierarchy creates safety and clarity and it comes with a certain necessary degree of status. It is important when there are people who need to be kept safe, like children and vulnerable people. But when everyone is an adult, the looser a hierarchy can be the more wisdom that can be found in welcoming ideas from everyone and valuing them based on their merit, rather than the perceived merit of whose mouth they came out of.
- We are all emotionally invested in the environments we find ourselves in. Give everyone space to share what feels important to them and you will find that everyone’s hearts and minds hold important pieces of the puzzle. We can’t make wise choices while peoples’ voices are being oppressed.
- Wisdom isn’t about you dictating your ideas on to the world. It’s about getting a good understanding and felt sense for the situation that you find yourself in in this moment and considering how best you can respond to it.
- Dana, the act of offering teachings in return for donations, is a beautiful expression. It is representative of how the teachings aren’t born from a transactional relationship. You can’t buy awakening from someone, the teachings are freely offered and you can express your gratitude with donations. This is a really helpful way of opening to our wider lives. In friendship everything we offer is freely given, we do it because we care and it feels important, not because we expect to get something in return. The more we can cultivate this attitude in our wider lives the more freedom we will find.
- You can’t extract the emotions from our interactions just by classifying our relationships. Teachers, colleagues, managers, strangers, people providing a service, we are all always emotionally connecting and impacting on each other. Recognising this is really important and the more friendliness you can cultivate in all these types of relationships, the more fun and relaxed life becomes.
- Friendliness is ultimately a way of opening to receiving the world that doesn’t assume that others are in opposition to you. This can extend even when there is a misunderstanding or a disagreement. You can agree to disagree.
- With our friends, the most important thing is connecting with that person in a beautiful and productive way. We don’t care about being right or wrong. The more we can extend this attitude out to our wider lives the better. The wisest responses – a well-timed joke, a compassionate understanding, a softly worded explanation of why something is important to you, changing the subject – flow naturally out of us when we are in the company of our friends. If we can open to the entire Universe in this way, then we become full of wisdom.
Radical Friendship
I am a huge fan of the idea of radical friendship. Rethinking our ideas of what friendship looks like and who it’s between. The idea is to move beyond the obvious friends you find, which is normally people of a similar age and background and people that you know really well and spend a lot of time with.
Ultimately, we’re all just trying to muddle along together and if we can find ways to build small friendships with more people, it will make our humanity stronger and more resilient.
- Are there relationships in your life that you ignore or treat as transactional or formal? Is there a way you could be more present in them?
- Asking one slightly informal or more personal question and genuinely listening to the answer can shift the mood from a more formal attitude to something more human.
- Are there people that you see regularly in life that you could create a ‘thing’ with? ‘Things’ are one of my favourite things in life. It’s like a little in-joke, a knowing glance or a small ritual between you. With some people, they have to be quite repetitive but the best ones are constantly shifting and indefinable. It encapsulates something that exists outside of the individuals, it’s created by capturing a sense of the elusive essence of your relationship.
- Sometimes ‘things’ are a one-off. A magical moment that you share with a stranger never to be repeated. This is like gold dust to me.
- Acknowledge that relationships are always fucked up in one way or another. Taking one person’s fucked-up-ness and adding another’s, there are bound to be weirdnesses. Adopt the mantra, ‘I’m weird, you’re weird, and that’s ok.’
- Can you befriend your inner monologue? What is its personality? Do you tend to ignore it, in which case can you let it in a bit more? Or do you tend to listen to everything it says, in which case can you give it a bit of shit back?
- Are there any objects in your life that you could make friends with? When my laptop goes wrong, treating it as if it is a friend having a melt-down is more productive than being pissed off that it’s a functioning object that is failing.
- Do you have any frenemies? It’s like enemies that you secretly have an underlying affectionate feeling towards. Can you learn to love your enemies a bit more by seeing it as a bit of fun.
- Can you adopt a friendly attitude when people are being unfriendly towards you? Can you meet it with patience and tolerance and maybe a slightly amused demeanour if it’s not going to piss them off too much?
Harnessing the Thinking Mind
The thinking mind gets given a bad rap in meditation and spirituality. It is often demonised and I think a lot of practices aim to repress it. I prefer to consider how I can direct all that demonic life-force into something that feels good and does good.
Our minds are the places that can take us away from our bodies and our present moment. We over-do this in our society, so this is often considered a ‘bad’ thing in spirituality, but once we have learned to come back home to ourselves a little bit we can realise the potential behind this amazing capacity of the mind.
It’s good to be able to be more present in the body and in the moment. It’s pleasant and helps us realise that we only ever have this moment to experience life. Another reason is because it actually gives the chance for the mind to rest, which makes the mind a more effective and fun place to be when it is online.
We are constantly multi-tasking and its one of the worst things we can do for our brains. It’s like having hundreds of browser tabs open all running automatic videos and music. It’s a nightmare. If we can learn to close some of the tabs, by letting those thoughts flow through us and out, then we can create a bit more of a spacious and pleasant space in our heads.
- Accept that our minds are constantly full of shit. This has been the biggest tool for helping me sit back and watch the show, as mindfulness teaches us to do. We can’t control our thoughts, a bunch of them are going to be weird or ‘bad’, so it’s better to make space for them and be curious about watching it unfold.
- Accept that our minds are often too full to give our full attention to something. You can either push through and get the thing done that you need to get done (adding more stuff to your already busy mind) or sack it off and go and lie down for a couple of hours to let your mind rest. The more you are able to choose the latter, the easier mindfulness is.
- My mind can be a beautiful, creative refuge. I find daydreaming deeply relaxing and pleasurable. It’s not something we value much in our society but I find it lovely and also good for resting my mind and sometimes coming up with cool ideas. Although the purpose is just to do it for the sake of it.
- When we resist thoughts, they persist. The more you can allow them to flow freely through you the less sticky they will be. If you’re really resisting a thought, ask yourself what is at risk to your belief system or being if you allow yourself to think it? Find some time when you are alone when you can unpack the thought and what it means to you, perhaps by writing it down. Thinking something does not make you more likely to do something.
- When we feel emotionally and physically good our thoughts are more likely to be pleasant. Make space for the other practices in your life so that your mind is built on a good base of presence, joy and acceptance.
- Ask a thousand questions like a child, not even necessarily to get an answer, just to practice being open minded.
- Curiosity is the beginning of wonder. Our minds have the amazing capacity to reach outside their boxes through visualising and imagining and creating ideas. Let it wander and see where it ends up.
- Believe that everyone is creative and you will discover that they are, including yourself. We put the reigns on our minds because we are afraid of looking stupid or not knowing or because we believe that we already understand something. Allow yourself some freedom to start a line of enquiry that you are interested in and follow the thread to see where it goes.
- Your mind may meander through a load of weird and unhelpful ideas and thoughts, but this is part of the process of creativity. At some point it will hit on something that resonates and bring that back into reality to share or turn into action.
- Find the things that spark an interest or a sense of fun in you and follow this thread. This is how all the great inventions and discoveries and pieces of artwork came about.
Impermanence in Life
Having a felt sense and perception of impermanence allows us to keep an open heart and mind to the situations we find ourselves in. Recognising that how things are now is not how they will always be helps us to avoid feeling overwhelmed and to find a freedom of expression.
When things are bad, it is useful to think about how things have been bad before and how they will be bad again. This is just one phase of bad in a series of changing circumstances. Equally, when things are good we can learn to appreciate them for how they are now as we know things will change.
This impermanent nature of things is interacting at all the different levels of our lives. It could be a momentary feeling, the mood of our day, how our decade is going or the current global situation.
Another important part of embodying a sense of impermanence is coming to terms with death. Remember that fear is the biggest enemy to friendliness. So if we can spend some time contemplating death and coming to terms with it, it buys us some freedom.
We all only have a given amount of time on this earth. Accepting that you and your loved ones will all die someday means that you can approach even this fate with a certain amount of friendliness and welcoming.
There is some truth in the Buddhist notion of escaping the death and rebirth cycle. If we really show up to our lives whole-heartedly and give it everything we’ve got, we will find that one lifetime feels like quite enough. Partially because we are able to appreciate the moments and blessings we are given in this life, but also just because it’s really hard work and I wouldn’t want to do it all again.
Reaching Interesting States of Consciousness
There are many varied states of consciousness that we are able to open to in practice. Lots of traditions see them as the highest forms of realisation that you can have, but I prefer to see them as different and interesting ways of experiencing reality.
If we have an open mind about these experiences this gives us a friendliness towards them that means we can reach them with more of a sense of ease and we can more safely adventure into them.
Lots of people claim to have the ‘one way’ of reaching certain states. It is true that there are specific practices that we can do that will help us open our hearts and minds so we are more likely to experience the world in a certain way.
I find it more useful to perceive these states like a friendship. They are not something we can ‘get’. We give ourselves to the practice because we are developing our relationship with our own consciousness and if we experience something pleasant or interesting as a result, we can appreciate that. We can build a stable relationship with certain states where we feel we know them well and can access them more easily.
Balancing the masculine and feminine of love and understanding within us really helps with these. The more you can feel things and let the meaning of things resonate through you, the more you will be able to experience and appreciate the beauty and insight that these states can create.
I won’t go into details of all the different states here, I may save that for another day. But some of the things that I am talking about are the jhanas, shamanic journeying, emptiness, feeling like you are love, dissolving our bodies into pleasant sensations, meeting demons and entities, unity consciousness and feeling the whole of reality as vibrations or energy.
All of these are fun in and of themselves to experience. They can also give us access to deep insight and meaning in life, but the more we can let go of the idea that we are there to ‘get’ those things, the more we can appreciate the process itself.
These are all part of my relationship with life and the Universe. They are a way for me to understand it better and find more intimacy with it. Deepening this relationship naturally gives me insight and changes me as a person, like any close relationship.
I enjoy the opportunity to open into the mystery of life. A lot of it is inexplicable and can only be expressed through poetry or words that convey a meaning and a resonance, rather than the details of what I experience.
These states can also increase our capacity to see the world as a friendly place. When we can see deeper into the nature of reality, we realise that things aren’t always as they seem. We have access to fundamentally different ways of experiencing the world that can reduce how attached we feel to our thoughts and perceptions. We can also find a sense of fundamental soul safety, where we get a felt-sense of our life being part of a greater whole; even when there is tragedy and difficulty it is contributing to the story of the Universe.
Psychedelic drugs also give us access to these states. The benefit of reaching them through meditation is that we are more likely to be able to bring back the insights and meaning into our daily lives, because we have opened the pathways in our hearts and minds in a sustainable way. However, safely taking psychedelic drugs can be a profound and useful experience for deepening our relationship with the world, experiencing new ways of looking and having some fun.
While all these meditative states do need to be treated with respect, I don’t believe that being secretive about them is particularly helpful for anyone. People experience these things by accident in their daily lives and often in meditation without realising it. It is important for us to be able to find a way to connect with our experiences and make sense of them in a way that is meaningful to us. Without a safe space to hear and talk about them, people will repress their experiences and be much more likely to be disturbed by them.
The resources that I have found particularly helpful when approaching and understanding these states are: Daniel Ingram’s book ‘Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha’, Rob Burbea’s recorded dharma talks on imaginal practice and Michael Taft’s podcast ‘Deconstructing Yourself’. All of these are very open in the way they talk about their topics and allowing and friendly towards altered states of consciousness.
Daniel and I also recorded a conversation in which I speak very openly about some of my altered states of consciousness and we discuss and describe the best ways for people to support others who are accessing these states so that they feel safe and rewarding. It is the first part of the first conversation Daniel and I recorded.
Resonance
There are things things that resonate with our bodies, things that resonate with our hearts and things that resonate with our minds. It is good to get in touch with these things and befriend each for the useful information that they provide in making wise choices.
Things that resonate with our bodies, like music, our physical wellbeing and our environments will shape our thoughts. If we are stood in a beautiful landscape our bodies will feel different to if we are standing somewhere stressful for our bodies, like a noisy city street corner. It is worth being aware of this as it will shape our perceptions of the world. We could be thinking about the same idea and attach completely different valence to it if we are in a pleasant situation compared to if we are in an unpleasant environment.
When something causes a strong resonance in our bodies, like listening to music, we will attach thoughts to this resonance to help us understand and process it. See if you can notice this happening and open to the information it is providing.
The heart’s resonance are the things that really move us. It is what we feel most deeply and enduringly, the things that make us feel like we are coming home. Sometimes we find this in a person or place or activity where we can sustain this feeling or sometimes it is something like a poem or song that touches on something in the core of our being. It can cause us to cry or smile or laugh.
If we aren’t comfortable with feeling this resonance directly in our heart, we will overlay thoughts so we can understand the experience. See if you can notice the feeling more directly and enjoy it.
The mind’s resonance is more like a fleeting moment of inspiration. It’s the moment where we recognise ourselves in something. Like seeing an on-point meme that we can relate to and smiling to ourselves. When we are being creative, letting our minds wander until we hit on a moment of resonance is really useful.
Learning to distinguish between the heart’s resonance and the mind’s resonance is one of the most powerful things you can do in life. The mind’s resonance isn’t going to give us any long-term sense of happiness or fulfilment, it is very fleeting and not something we can chase, it comes to us. If we buy things or buy into ideas or make decisions based on what our mind wants, we will find that the happiness soon fades. It is where addiction comes from and it is what Buddhism talks about with the concepts of craving and aversion. We are chasing a high, instead of allowing ourselves to be open and waiting to receive these gifts from life.
Investing in the things that resonate with our hearts is how we create joyful and meaningful lives. Understanding the hearts deepest desires and dedicating your life to these is what matters most in life.
Being aware of these different types of resonance happening within us and befriending each for the information it is giving us, helps us use them to make wise decisions.
Befriending the Universe – A Reflection
We are only ever in this present moment, so wisdom comes from seeing the information we have available to us now and finding a good response to the situation.
Ultimately, the way to wisdom is through embodying a relaxed and open state. When we are in a friendly state we can relax, allowing information in to our heart-minds and trusting our decisions and words to naturally flow back out of us without overthinking them.
We want to cultivate a feeling of friendliness towards as many situations and people as we can. Sometimes this means revisiting the ways in which we have internalised abuse, in order to release the rage that lives inside of us so we can relax more deeply and easily on the other side.
Friendship is not about trying to get something, it is about giving yourself freely and enjoying the relationship that you build. In the same way our relationship to life and the Universe is like this. We are here to give ourselves to our lives and to enjoy the world for what it is, not to try and dictate how we think it should be.
I hope that you are able to befriend the entire Universe, it’s a lovely experience. Here are some questions to help you reflect on whether these practices are working for you:
- Do I feel safer in life? Have I reduced the amount of fear-based decisions that I make?
- Am I able to relax and be more open in a wider range of situations?
- Am I a better friend to the Universe? Do I give myself to my experience without high expectations of what I feel I should get in return?
- Am I able to enjoy situations more?
Links to All Practice Guides
It is helpful to start by reading the introduction.
The states build upon each other, so it can be useful to read them in order.