This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Investigating Our Attraction to Aversion ~ Kim Allen. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Kim Allen at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Kim Allen, and I’ve practiced and taught here for a while. I’m happy to step in for Di this evening.
I want to start with a story that I heard, told by another insight teacher named Guy Armstrong. I heard it from someone else, so I might not have the details exactly correct, but you can just take it as a teaching story. The story is that Guy was practicing in Asia and was ordained as a monk while he was there at one of the monasteries. He was asked by the Abbot of the monastery—he’d been there for a while and was getting to know how things were going—and you know, that’s when Abbots start giving you little tests and little things to do as a monk. So he asked Guy to give some instruction to the other monks.
He was having this gathering with them, and he was teaching some new monks. He said to them, “So what would you do if you had a lot of anger come up in your mind?”
And the monk said, “I would note it.” This is a kind of practice where one basically names what’s going on in experience, a noting practice. We teach it here also, and you just sort of note in real-time what’s going on in the mind. “Oh, there’s anger.” “Oh, there’s a body sensation.” “There’s the breath.” You know, it keeps the mind on track. So they said, very dutifully and correctly, “I would note it.”
And he said, “Well, that’s great. And what if that wasn’t enough and the anger kept coming back?”
And they said, “I would note it again.”
He said, “Okay, and what if you’re sitting there and it just keeps coming back? Then what would you do?”
And they said, “Uh…” So there was sort of a dearth of options in their mind. Now, noting practice is very good, and also basic mindfulness practice that we teach, where you’re with the breath, except if something comes and distracts the mind, in which case you acknowledge what it is and then come back to the breath. These are all very good instructions and will actually take you very far if you follow them for a long time.
But there are other options, actually. In fact, it’s a fairly common question that we get as teachers, where people will raise their hand and say, “When should I just be with an experience, just be with it, notice it, note it, and then go back to the breath? And when do I get to actually do something about it?” And it’s usually people who want to do something who ask a question like that.
So, it’s fair enough. We don’t want to be like the monks that didn’t know any option except noting what was happening in their experience. It’s very good, it’ll take you a long way, and you don’t want to spend a lot of time doing other things. But sometimes those mind states just aren’t changing, right? They’re very distracting, and they’re coming back and coming back.
Sometimes we do take action. The Buddha taught a number of methods that we might apply in cases like that. But here’s the catch: we take specific kinds of actions in order to help deal with a mind that’s doing its antics, let’s say. Everyone’s mind—it’s very normal to have things come up again and come up again and come up again. Sometimes just repeatedly in a sit, you know, like, “My mind’s just really restless right now,” and so a lot of stuff keeps coming. Or other times, you notice over weeks or months that you have a similar pattern that keeps coming, sit by sit by sit, and you start thinking, “Huh, I’m getting a lot of that one recently.”
Either way, we have some kind of a recurring pattern, and it’s nice to have a sort of a toolbox of approaches to be able to work with different things coming up in the mind. Partly because that’s just normal, like the way we would have a number of different ways of interacting with people, right? Because there’s a lot of different kinds of people, so that’s useful not to just have one way. In the same way, we can have this toolbox.
But it can actually be a little bit more pointed than that also. From one of the discourses of the Buddha, he said, “Whatever a person frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of their mind.” Whatever a person frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of their mind. It’s true, isn’t it? So what we practice sticks over time. If we are frequently thinking a lot of irritated thoughts, we become more inclined toward being irritated. If we frequently think judgmental thoughts about ourselves, for example, or about the world, then that becomes the usual climate that we’re living in. That’s the weather we get every day if we practice it enough.
And it works the other way too. If we frequently think thoughts of gratitude and care for other people, then that will become the inclination of our mind. What kind of mind do you want to live in? So it’s important not to just dwell in unskillful thought repeatedly.
If we can be mindful of them, first of all, it’s good to know that. If we can be mindful of them, if we can really note them like those monks were saying, then it is actually okay. If you are mindful of irritation in the mind, you’re not driving the trench deeper and deeper, you know, the inclination deeper and deeper. If you can truly be mindful of it. But often we’re mindful of it a little bit, and then we get drawn right back in, and we’re like, “Yeah, that’s right, I am irritated about that. Oh, right, I’m supposed to be mindful.” And all the times when we’re not mindful, we are strengthening the irritation. So it is important that we have that mindfulness, and if we’re able to just stand back and be mindful, that’s a perfectly good practice. So we don’t need to jump at every, you know, be concerned about every flicker of aversion or desire or restlessness in the mind. If we’re noticing that that’s what’s happening, you’re good. Don’t worry.
But nonetheless, it is nice to consider some of these other actions we can take if we keep getting caught again and again. And there’s quite a few of them named in the suttas.1 So I thought instead of trying to do a general survey, it would be interesting this evening and maybe more meaningful to take a little bit of a deeper dive and just focus in a little bit. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about one technique that’s very useful, and then within that one technique, we’ll look at a particularly common instance of how to use it, one that I suspect we can all connect with.
The technique I want to share a little bit about is investigating the conditions that are behind a pattern or a tendency that we’ve noticed. So this is an alternative to just noting it, noting it, noting it. Why don’t we investigate what’s going on with that repeated pattern?
First of all, as I named in the general title of this, investigating the conditions behind an unwholesome pattern or tendency. So we have to be able to recognize that what’s going on in the mind is wholesome or unwholesome. And that’s kind of the top-level wisdom that we have to be able to apply. So what do I mean by unwholesome? That means something that is springing from what are called the three roots of greed, hatred, or delusion. Those are just kind of the names given to the places in our heart that these unskillful or unwholesome or negative kind of mind patterns come in from. And each of those is meant to be kind of an umbrella term that covers a lot of territory.
So, the umbrella term of the middle one, aversion—greed, hatred, delusion—hatred, let’s say, or aversion, covers any kind of a negative response to something, from mild irritation to resistance to anger to unkind judgment, all the way up to like rage and hatred. So it’s not just one thing; it has a lot of different shades. I kind of drew out that middle one because that’s the one we’re going to look at a little bit more carefully. But you can imagine then maybe what the spectrum around greed would be: attraction, compulsion, grasping, desire, these kinds of things. And delusion: confusion, uncertainty, ignorance, those kinds of things.
The other thing that I named about this technique is that it’s about investigating these unwholesome states. What do I mean by investigating? This is a word, you know, it’s one of those dangers we have in Buddhism is that sometimes we use a very common English word to mean something kind of specific within the Dharma practice. So I say investigating, but usually we think of investigating as a lot of thought and maybe a pointed probe at something, where we investigate all the way back into the past. You know, like, “Why did this pattern begin? Where back in my distant history did it get inculcated in me that I should think in this way? Oh, I remember it was that person who told me so many years ago,” etc. There’s a place for that kind of investigation. Often that’s what’s done in psychotherapy, for example, is to kind of tell a story about how we got to this state. And that can be valuable.
But I want to name that the kind of investigation that’s meant as a kind of a Dharma investigation, that we would do maybe during meditation with a repeated pattern, doesn’t really involve tracing the story back into the past. It’s like a present-moment investigation where we understand that if something is here right now, things don’t appear randomly in the mind. Or at least they may come in for reasons we don’t know, but they don’t hang around randomly in the mind. There must be conditions that are supporting them in this very moment. Kind of like the way if there are clouds in the sky, there have to be the conditions present right now for clouds, right? Otherwise, there wouldn’t be them there. So if we have a lot of irritation coming up again and again, there must be conditions in this moment that are supporting that. So we would want to look at those, and maybe if we understood those supporting conditions, maybe we could work with those instead of hammering at the irritation again and again, which doesn’t seem to be going away. What if we took away the conditions? This is a little trick in meditation and in Dharma practice in general, is you don’t always have to work directly with the thing. What if you could just remove one of the legs out from under a table? It will collapse, right? So instead of working so much with that, we could pull out one of the things that’s supporting it.
So it’s actually less important to know, in light of that, the whole storyline about how we came to be a person with a lot of judgment in our mind than it is to know that this particular instant of judgment is being supported by several conditions in the present moment.
Aversion is definitely worth investigating in our experience. That’s the one we’re going to focus on. Let’s focus on that middle one, aversion. Having aversion or irritation or hatred or resistance in the mind doesn’t make you a terrible person. Let’s just say that right up front. It doesn’t say anything about you as a person. These mind states just kind of come with being a human being. You’re born a human, you have the three unskillful roots in the heart, and we can work with them. The great thing is we have a practice, and we can deal with them. And we’re in a good position then to be looking at our irritation of various kinds.
The Buddha also said that dukkha,2 which is any kind of suffering—and definitely we know that aversion is some form of suffering—dukkha is to be understood. So if something is bringing us dukkha, like our anger or our judgment, then it’s worth looking at that. It’s worthwhile.
So I want to focus in on this aversion thing even a little bit more. This is a deep dive tonight, I said, right? Let’s look at the specific case of being attracted to aversion. And you might say, “What? These are the terrible things of the heart that are the unwholesome roots. I want them eradicated from my heart.” And yeah, we can get on board with non-harming and kindness and care. But actually, I’m going to suggest that there are ways in which we are attracted to aversion. We kind of like our aversion.
What’s going on there? It’s not often talked about really explicitly, but I certainly see it in myself. There’s ways in which I’m subtly supporting the aversion in my mind sometimes. And it’s also not entirely our fault. So again, if you’re starting to think, “Uh oh, I’m a bad person, I do secretly like my aversion,” consider that it is actually supported in our society. There are ways in which it’s completely socially acceptable to have all kinds of judgment and hatred. Look at social media. You get so many more hits if you write about something that you hate and how awful something is, or you point out how stupid something is that you saw, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, that’s right!” You know, they give you a whole bunch of likes for that. Or, in our public discourse, a little bit more seriously, there’s a lot of polarization right now, and it’s really supported. It’s considered okay and even acceptable, and you’re sort of a more robust person if you have something that you’re out there charging against and hating. Great. Not great, actually. Not so great.
And it’s important to be aware of attraction to aversion in ourselves and around us so that we can choose not to participate in it. It’s not good for your heart. It’s not a good thing to feed in the heart. You may not be convinced of that yet if you’re sufficiently attracted, but I’m going to keep talking about this, and we’ll see as we go along.
This is also not only our society. Let me say that one more time to emphasize: it’s not our fault. It’s not something we need to… it’s coming in from many ways. The Buddha was sometimes asked to teach what’s called the Dharma in brief. Someone would come to him and say, “Please teach me the Dharma in brief. I’m about to go off on retreat. Just give me some kind of nugget to practice with.” And I think it’s great they asked him to summarize like all of the Dharma briefly, but he did it. Each time somebody asked him that, he did give an answer. There’s over 40 suttas, or discourses, where he does this. And in one of them, he said it this way: “Let go of desire for anything that is dukkha.” That’s what he told the person before they went off on retreat. “Let go of desire for anything that is dukkha.”
So it seems that the Buddha knew about attraction to aversion, or desire for dukkha. Attraction to aversion would be one example of that. So how about in your own mind? Just take a moment to think, are there ways in which you actually feed aversion sometimes? Maybe just sometimes supporting it to keep coming back again? It does take some clear seeing to be able to see that in ourselves, and some honesty. So I hope I’ve set us up well enough that you won’t feel averse to doing that investigation and seeing if there’s a little bit of a “like” there.
One nun I knew talked about how in her practice, she would often see, in her language, she said, “I see a big fire burning in my mind, and I think, ‘Wow, where’s this fire coming from?’ And then I look just off to the side, and I see that there’s a part of my mind throwing wood on the fire, just offstage.” And I thought, “Yeah, this is true.” Are there ways that we’re throwing wood on the fire of aversion?
So it’s interesting to open to this. We like to dislike things. We like to be judgmental of them and to protest their presence in the world and declare that they should be obliterated. Aversion feels powerful, doesn’t it? It has a power to it. There’s a strength that comes from knowing what you think shouldn’t be there and being able to say that. There’s also, kind of related to that, a kind of a crystalline clarity to aversion. It doesn’t have any muddiness about it when you stand up and say, “No, this is not the way it should be.” There’s a feeling of orderliness. It’s complete, it’s tidy, and it’s justified. So there’s a lot of this kind of energy can be around aversion, and it can be a pleasant kind of energy. It’s attractive to feel powerful and clear in the world. But does that have to come from aversion? No. There are other things that are powerful and clear also, wisdom for example, or compassion sometimes.
But I’ll offer just a specific example, since we’re talking about specifics, is that a very common pattern in our society that is supported is what I like to call “bonding through mutual outrage.” I’ve talked about this before, so if you’ve heard me say that before, please allow me to say it again. And if you haven’t, it’s a great one to learn. Bonding through mutual outrage. This is where two people know each other, and one of them says, “Did you read about such and such today? Can you believe what happened about blah, blah, blah?” You know, something that’s maybe just happened in the news. And the other person says, “I know, it’s just terrible, isn’t it awful?” And the other person says, “Yes, it’s just amazing that such and such keeps going on.” And there you go, you’re bonded together. You’re enjoying your shared values, all shared around the hatred of how awful this stupid thing going on is. Bonding through mutual outrage. Anyone participated in that ever? Yeah. [Laughter]
So, it’s very seductive. It’s very seductive when somebody that we like and that we’re connected to and that we care about baits us with this kind of conversation. We want to leap right in. “Yeah, great! I get to hate what I hate, and I get to be connected to my friend.” It’s like a double benefit. So it’s tricky. And it can take some strength if you decide you don’t want to be feeding that aversion in your heart, which you are when you participate in that. You need to find other ways to connect with that person. Something even needs to be said maybe in that moment, or you can try to divert skillfully. But bear in mind that there is a cost to that. And then later in meditation, you wonder why these aversive patterns keep coming up. Well, bonding through mutual outrage is one way that we feed aversion in our own heart, so it does keep coming back.
Another way that we like aversion is often people use anger as a motivator. They think, “Oh, you know, of course I have to be angry. I have to be judgmental about this. That’s how I go out in the world and do my work. My thing in the world is that I’m against such and such, and I’m trying to create a better world in this certain way, and that’s because I don’t like this thing happening. So if I didn’t have that, what would be my motivation?” I think if we do this repeatedly, maybe we forget that there ever could be any other motivation for taking action in the world, for making the world a better place, for standing up for what matters. But there are other things that are better, compassion being one of them, wisdom. So there are so many other things that could serve as a foundation for action.
The Buddha said anger or aversion has a honey tip and a poison root. And I think we can start to understand that in our relationship to it. So the honey tip is the part that we like. Of course, we’re attracted to the honey, but we don’t realize, we don’t maybe notice that down below it’s rooted in the aversive, unwholesome root in the heart.
So you’ll need to check out your own mind to discover which ways you’re attracted to aversion. But that would be part of the subject of our Dharma investigation. So we can look more clearly, if you think this pattern just might exist in you from time to time, you could investigate more directly in your own experience. “Okay, what specifically is going on for me in those moments where I’m attracted to aversion?” And we would want to do that kind of in the moment where it’s happening. We could think about it reflectively outside of meditation, and that would be okay. If you weren’t on the cushion, you could sort of ponder about that sometime. But it’s also nice to look in the actual moment and see, “Okay, the aversion is here, the clouds are here. What are the atmospheric conditions supporting it? The attraction to aversion is here. What’s supporting my attraction to that aversion in this moment?”
So I’ll offer, you know, basically, “What’s in it for me? What benefit am I getting? What’s the honey there?” I’ll offer some that I’ve noticed, and you can see. And I’ll also offer one or two ways that we could connect in if it’s not so clear to us how to do that.
A big one is kind of emotional comfort. If we are frequently thinking aversive thoughts, that’s kind of the climate in our mind. Remember I mentioned that’s how it can be. We actually just like what’s familiar. So we don’t really like the aversion, but we like its familiarity. That can happen. “Feels like me. Feels comfortable to be complaining. That’s what I do. I like to complain about this, not because I like complaining particularly, or maybe I do, but it’s comfortable. Feels like me.” So there’s actually some emotional comfort related to this.
Trying to attain safety or security in some way. If I resist this, push it away, I create a safe distance, right? And then there’s some emotional security in having that distance from what I don’t like. By the way, it’s not a very secure kind of safety. There are other kinds of safety that are a lot more reliable and durable, but we create kind of a weak, false safety through aversion. So we can be attracted to that not-very-safe safety.
Another thing that we do, which is really kind of embarrassing, is that we do entertainment. We entertain ourselves through being averse to things. It’s fun because whatever target we’ve chosen in our mind, like complaining to our neighbor or telling off our child or whatever it is, they’re not there to respond and react and defend. We just get the one side of the conversation, so why not? We can just go at it. Again, not a very wholesome kind of entertainment.
And probably the biggest one, though, is that we might notice in our investigation is that we’re bolstering some kind of self-image or a self-story about being a person who is opposed to this, and therefore I’m attracted to being able to set myself up as looking that way. Someone once asked me what it means to identify with an unwholesome mind state like aversion. I would say that it means that we wouldn’t know who we are if we weren’t in that mind state. There are people who would not know who they are if they didn’t have their hatred and their anger or their irritation or their judgment. And that’s pretty scary. So you’re avoiding—it’s not an attraction then to some positive feeling, it’s the avoidance of the fear of not knowing who I’d be if I weren’t angry. So there’s an attraction in a sense there, attraction to avoiding the pain of not knowing who I am. So check it out. If you’re resisting or pushing away or being irritated, do you think that’s who you are, who you just need to be in that moment?
That’s all that all could be somewhat cognitive. So I want to point out that a clue, instead of going too much into the thinking about it, is to bring it into the body. This is a way to bring together all the things I’ve talked about so far. In the body, we can feel the honey tip of the aversion. We can feel the sweetness of it and the power and the energy that flows. It’s a very bodily energy when we rise up and feel that aversion. So we feel the attraction really quite literally. But we also feel—the body doesn’t lie—and if we are willing to open to the whole feeling in the body, we will also feel the cost in the cost-benefit analysis. We’ll feel the poison root.
So in the body, we’ll feel that aversion is actually a tense state. It involves some closing down, some tightening up in some way. It also involves kind of a stress, a feeling of stress because we’ve set ourselves up against something. And then there can even be kind of a narrowing feeling in the mind or a darkening.
This is actually what Guy Armstrong told the monks to do when they kept saying, “I would note it, I would note it again.” He said, “Maybe you should try investigating if something keeps coming back and back and back.” And you can do that right on the cushion by opening to it in the body, you know, really feeling what that feels like.
So these patterns in our mind, things that are particularly sticky enough that we’ve become attracted to our aversion, for example—that’s kind of a tangle. If you have something that’s unwholesome, the aversion, and you’ve wrapped it in like a grasping to it, that constitutes the beginning of a tangle. And then there could be other threads in there, right? I named self-identification, I named fear coming in. So if we have these things that have gotten kind of bound up, the Buddha called it by the technical term a tangle or a knot. And that is one of the reasons that they keep coming back, either repeatedly in a sit or if you notice repeatedly over weeks or months or years for that matter. We might be dealing with what’s called a knot.
And so this investigation can be done gently and repeatedly. And maybe we would just look at one strand of it at a given time. So I’m encouraging you not to feel like, “Oh, that’s it. Now I’ve got to figure it all out in this moment. Kim said to investigate my attraction to aversion. I’m going to work that all out, figure out the puzzle, and that’s it. By tomorrow, I’ll be done with this one.” It might take a little longer than that.
But this gentle approach, where we have some ways of investigating in the moment, you know, some ways of looking in the body, considering the benefit for us, what’s going on with that, and then maybe going back just to being mindful. Just be mindful, name it, note it like the monks, be with it for a while. And then if it seems like, “Oh, maybe I could look at that again a little bit more carefully,” kind of a gentle back and forth is like the way we gently work on a tangled knot. You can’t just say, “Okay, that’s it, I’m going to rip it all apart.” We might have to sort of tug at it a little bit, be with it, hold it underwater, let it soften a little bit.
So consider this kind of investigation a long-term project, not something that you’re trying to figure out, but a long-term project where you let the Dharma kind of help you work on it. Be with it, look at it a little bit, then go back. Go back to the breath, note it, note the breath, maybe look at it again. Maybe we’ll look at it next retreat. Slowly over time, we are empowered in our practice to take on even some pretty big tangles, even the fact that we like our aversion and hence we don’t really want to get rid of it right away.
So I hope this has helped you to have a sense that there are many options with how we work with our mind and that some of the stickier patterns that might have several different strands to them can be slowly untangled over time, as long as we have a bunch of tools in our toolbox. And I hope I’ve offered several tonight that might be of interest if you have this particular pattern of attraction to aversion, which is common in our society. The world needs people who are not as attracted to aversion.
It’s nice to leave some time for discussion, especially with a topic like this that I hope connects with. I saw some nods about this one, so I’m curious, what did this bring up for you? Do any of you have attraction to aversion? Have you worked with it in certain ways? Do you have questions about what I talked about?
Questioner 1: Is there a skillful way to not like something? Because I know for me, at a certain point in my life, I started a 12-step program. I really didn’t like the fact that I was acting addicted, so it drove me to 12 steps, which saved my life. So is there a skillful way to not like something?
Kim Allen: Well, definitely we don’t have to like everything at all. Sometimes there can be an impression in spiritual practice that we’re going to eventually come to just love everything and approve of everything and accept everything. Well, there’s a way we have to accept everything, but we definitely don’t have to love or like everything. One way is that I said at the beginning there was this distinction between wholesome and unwholesome. And things that are genuinely unwholesome, then we have these ways of working with them. We’re still recognizing that they’re unwholesome. So that’s actually wisdom, is to know what’s wholesome and what’s unwholesome. Being addicted to substances of any kind is definitely unwholesome. We wouldn’t want to decide that we like that in some way.
But there’s, maybe you discovered some subtlety through the 12-step program, is that you can accept, through the practices that are offered there, you can accept that there’s this addiction that’s somehow gotten into your being. And yet there are empowered actions you can take that put you on the wholesome side of that. So you’re definitely not approving of addiction as a way of being, but you’re instead finding a way to then turn the mind towards something positive, empowering, a way of being in the world that doesn’t rely on that. So I think you did it.
Questioner 1: No, what drove me to it though was the intense dislike of what I was doing. That was the… so what would you call that? What would that be called?
Kim Allen: I see. I would call that an early form of wisdom where you realized, you knew it was unwholesome. And so the mind, the deeper sense was the wisdom of, “This is not working. I can’t keep doing this.” And you didn’t yet know the skills of how to deal with that in a way that was wise, let’s say, or that was positive. So what your mind did was it produced an aversion that got you to something better. So there is wise turning away from things, and that’s what you were doing. So I call it wisdom turning away, wise turning away.
Questioner 1: Wisdom, compassion, renunciation has a flavor of this. So, but is that a dislike or is that not a dislike?
Kim Allen: Wise turning away is wisdom. Yeah, these English terms like “like” and “dislike” are fairly vague terms, so I would put a little more precision on it to say that was wisdom. Yeah, good job.
Questioner 2: Thanks for your talk. I really resonated with recognizing the pleasure of aversion, and I’ve examined it a lot in my practice. And I’ve noticed that maybe two things. One, the motivating force is related to, as you said, distancing from something unpleasant, a false or weak sense of security from something that is not pleasant. And that the feeling of aversion is very closely tied or almost superimposed with the unpleasant feeling tone of a stimulus, an otherwise benign stimulus, a sound, a sight, has a feeling tone that is unexpectedly unpleasant, or it shouldn’t be. It’s a benign stimulus, but it has an unpleasant feeling tone. And then with the unpleasant feeling tone, there’s an immediate superposition of “this shouldn’t be there,” the aversion. And as you said, the aversion is a way of managing the unpleasantness. That’s good investigation. So thank you. The question is, ultimately, is the goal to dissolve the unpleasantness of a stimulus? Or is unpleasantness just… some stimuli are unpleasant, and the practice is to accept that?
Kim Allen: That’s a good question. The feeling tone of experience is what you’re talking about: pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant nor unpleasant. I’m sorry to say that we continue to have all three even after we’re fully awake. I don’t know that personally, but the Buddha had back pain, for example, which I assume was an unpleasant feeling tone for him because he would say, “My back hurts too much, you give the Dharma talk tonight.” He would say sometimes to his monks. So I think the unpleasant feeling tone is going to continue, and that definitely our aim then is to be able to relate to all three feeling tones in a way that we don’t get entangled with them. So when the mind jumps on aversion, “that shouldn’t be there,” that’s an unskillful relationship with an unpleasant feeling tone. So there are various approaches to trying to change that because you’re suffering when you start saying, “That shouldn’t be there.” It is there, right? So the first one that we’re usually taught is acceptance. So at least start with, “Okay, you know, accept the unpleasant feeling tone.”
Questioner 2: God, thank you. Yeah, I wish I could say that it’ll end up being completely pleasant. I don’t think so. I guess I just wonder because it’s an unpleasant feeling tone associated with benign stimuli, things that maybe have an arbitrarily negative feeling tone.
Kim Allen: The negative feeling tone is not the unskillful contribution. The negative feeling tone is just the world. The unskillful contribution is the aversion in this case. You’ve put aversion on top of an unpleasant feeling tone. So the nuance that comes is that our feeling tone is coming actually in your mind. It’s an interface, but there’s nothing inherently, you said benign, right? There’s nothing inherently unpleasant about that. So your mind’s decision that that’s something unpleasant, can that be worked with? Not really directly. We get feeling tone right with contact. So who knows why your mind decides that’s unpleasant? The person next to you might think it’s pleasant. We don’t get a choice about that necessarily. But over time, we do generally have a shift through practice, is that the mind starts deciding more things are neutral than it used to. But we don’t really get to choose that. It’s not an area that we work with directly. Great, thank you.
Questioner 3: Thanks, that was a good talk. I liked how you were picking apart the various reasons why we might have this feeling of aversion. And the reasons that you gave for those made sense. It’s something that’s bonding us with other people, it’s making us…
Kim Allen: The attraction to aversion, yeah, why we have the attraction to it.
Questioner 3: Yeah. In reflecting upon some of my own aversions, one of the things that I noticed is that I can sometimes have an aversion to something someone else is doing because it’s a reflection of something in me that I’m uncomfortable with, and kind of this self-loathing. And I was struggling to come up with what’s a good reason for that.
Kim Allen: So that would be part of the one where I talked about the self-image. So you’re actually just talking about aversion, not necessarily attraction to aversion. Well, it’s you’re protecting a self-image. So you have a self-image of, “I don’t want to have this part of myself. I’m trying not to see my shadow, essentially.” Somebody else is making me see my shadow by enacting it, and then it resonates, and I know that shadow is there, but I don’t want it to be. So if I’m averse to them, I get to… it’s just the same as being averse to that part in myself. I get to kind of pretend that I’m pushing it away. It’s this safety through distance kind of thing. And you’ve tangled it up with a self-image, so it’s got two of them in there. That’s why these things are called tangles. Yeah. But the way to work with it is, now that you’ve figured… the figuring out part is really only at the cognitive level. So touch into that in the body. Like, what does it feel like in you when you see that being enacted and you know that’s part of you? Can you actually, instead of worrying about them, turn that lens around and be like, “Wow, let me look at that part in me. What happened? What is with that part? Where’s the friction with that?” Maybe you start to have compassion for that part, or at least feel the pain of rejecting it within you and not be willing to put up with that pain anymore. Yeah, I would say go to the body. Yeah, thank you.
Okay, good. All right, thanks everyone.
Sutta: A discourse or sermon of the Buddha or one of his disciples. These are collected in the Sutta Pitaka, one of the main divisions of the Pali Canon. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain inherent in mundane life. ↩