This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation & dharmette: There’s more of our personality in our freedom than in our suffering. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So welcome, welcome folks. Happy New Year to you. It’s good to be together, good to practice.
One of the sangha members sent me this yesterday from James Baldwin. He wrote:
If it hurts you, that’s not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except in so far as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain. And in so far as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it. And then hopefully it works the other way around, too. In so far as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.
Then you make, oh, 15 years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships, and an exile of one kind or another, some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are. That is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.
This is the way our pain becomes valuable, more than trivial. And sitting is not merely about that, but it is about that. So let us sit and practice and feel our bodies and find a way to turn our pain into goodness.
Just know yourself as a sensory system. What we call our life will only ever be sensory experience. And so we breathe, relax, so as to sense more of what’s here, to begin saturating our awareness with the sense experience.
As you breathe, see where your breath reaches and where it doesn’t. Without straining, see if you can breathe in a way that unifies the whole field of your body, that doesn’t privilege the front of your body over the back, or your torso over your toes. Sensing the impact of your body breathing across the whole body.
Perhaps you gently rest the inner gaze on one spot, the blank mental screen. Our discursive thinking usually needs a kind of accompanying imagery, and sometimes our eyes move. So we just rest in a kind of simple, relaxed way. So we breathe and feel our body, unifying the field of sensation.
Whatever pain might be in your life, we’re invited to use that to connect us to others, to see its nature as not-self, to depersonalize samsara. We begin to articulate who Baldwin says you suspect we all are.
And the compassion can get very vast, very quickly. And don’t worry about the details, how to implement this intention or that intention. The suspicion that compassion can’t scale all the way, the sense of paralysis in the face of the endlessness of suffering—don’t let any of that close your heart. You can work out the details another time. But right now, we honor what’s shared. We use our pain to connect us deeply to others.
It’s almost like our breathing conveys the love to all the parts of our own body, radiating outwards. Just the deep honoring of the condition of sentience, that we can be at ease and we can suffer. How completely this is shared across space and time. All beings, it’s always been like this. In that love, fear and all the rest sort of just melts.
Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, I undertake the training precept to protect life.
From Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, the famous line: “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In the Buddhist tradition, unhappiness, maybe we say dukkha1, suffering, is charted quite meticulously. The varieties of suffering, the three species of suffering, the four types of clinging, the hindrances, the fetters, the subtle fetters, the ogha2, the asavas3, the subtle fetters, attachment to light—a million ways to suffer. The fever dream of thirst that is greed, and the heart on fire of hate, the foggy, bewildered indecisiveness of delusion, all these different ways that we can suffer, that we do suffer.
But ultimately, I might say it’s the reverse of Tolstoy. Suffering is suffering. Clinging is all of the same piece. It’s the expression of freedom that is highly varied. There’s more, you could say, of our personality in our freedom than there is in our suffering. Your spontaneity and aliveness and, we could say, uniqueness is found not in your suffering, but in your freedom. And everyone who suffers a lot reminds me of everyone else who suffers. But everyone who is free, they seem free in their own distinctive way.
And my pain, you know, it almost feels like, “Oh, that’s my brand, you know, that’s so intimately me.” It’s not. Same old story. It actually locks up our uniqueness. Ben Lerner said, “Nothing’s a cliche when you’re living it.” And that says something important about suffering, the kind of felt distinctiveness of it. Part of what Baldwin was trying to explode in that passage I shared. But yeah, the felt distinctiveness of our suffering. Suffering feels so uniquely ours, so particular. It could never be a cliche. My heartache could never be a cliche. No, no. And we’re so alone in it. That’s kind of the hallmark of suffering in a way, is the sense of disconnection, the sense of the absence of empathic connection with oneself. And we’re divorced from others and divorced from the sense of the shared human predicament. It feels unique, our pain feels unique, but it’s not. There’s more of our particularity in our freedom than there is in our suffering.
When I meet people on the path, you know, in a retreat or talking in some context, I try to attune to the particularity of their heart, the kind of shape of their heart-mind. And, you know, I was sort of, yeah, trying to use the Carl Rogers language, to inhabit the world of the other as if it were your own, without losing the “as if” condition. And that empathic attunement, sensing into the suffering, it always, maybe not always, but it almost always feels familiar. Kind of familiar. Even if our lives have been very different, even if one of our experiences of suffering may be less intense, more intense, there’s some access, some sense of sharing in the pain. It feels familiar.
But it’s your freedom that I find startling and novel. And it’s very lovely to follow along in the lives of practitioners and witness the kind of growing freedom, to follow along maybe over a period of many years. And it’s lovely and inspiring because I’m often detecting some flavor of freedom in you that I don’t have, that feels new, novel to me. And it’s a delight to become the student. You might not even know when it’s happening for me, but it is.
There is this Noble Truth about the cessation of suffering, the complete fading away and cessation of this craving, its abandonment and relinquishment, getting free and becoming independent of it. And we notice that the Buddha speaks much more about what we’re freed from than how freedom manifests. Right? The Buddha speaks much more about being freed from greed, hate, and delusion. But what does that look like? Would that be like a super chill, unemotional person? What would one’s ethical life look like that’s freed from greed, hate, and delusion? Would they be awkward or funny or what? What would you look like, freed of some of these species of pain, freed up of some of your neurosis?
We talk about no-self, but other traditions talk about true self. And I don’t know if this is reasonable, but maybe we can say that suffering involves the false self in some way, the alienation and performative negotiation of a role, the melodrama of suffering, me as the protagonist, center of it all. The psychoanalyst Winnicott4 associates the true self with the spontaneous gesture. And it’s our spontaneous gesture that feels distinctive, that feels uniquely ours. Everything else somehow feels like some weird dress rehearsal. Our suffering feels performative, and it’s only in our freedom that we actually express ourself at a deeper level. A freedom, in other words, frees you up to be yourself, to express your particularity, your aliveness, the spontaneity.
And so as we become more free, as we begin to shed, at least in moments, some of the greed, hate, and delusion, our personality does not undergo some radical transformation, but it’s freed up of some of its compulsivity. The personality can be a kind of appendage of the neurosis. It’s like performative leakiness. And we start to let go, and what’s left in the wake of letting go is your own spontaneity, your particular goodness, your quirkiness, your unselfconscious particularity. And that’s what’s distinctive.
The Buddhist teacher-therapist Bruce Tift5 said something like, “I treat every patient as if they’re already enlightened, just pretending not to be.” It’s very, I’m sort of touched by that and reflecting on that. Treat all patients as if they’re already enlightened, just pretending not to be. And yeah, how do we attune to the dimensions of freedom in ourselves, in others? How do we actually sense the particularity, the uniqueness of the other that is offered by the portal of their own freedom? And how do we, as we practice, as we grow, let go, how is it that we become more uniquely ourselves?
So I offer this for your consideration and please pick up whatever is useful. Okay, so thank you. And yeah, welcome to 2025. Happy to be living together with you all. May we be well. Okay, folks.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a foundational concept in Buddhism, referring to the inherent suffering in all conditioned existence. ↩
Ogha: A Pali word meaning “floods.” In Buddhism, it refers to the four floods of sensuality, existence, views, and ignorance that overwhelm the mind and keep beings bound to samsara. ↩
Asava: A Pali word for “cankers,” “outflows,” or “defilements.” These are deep-seated mental biases that corrupt the mind, including the cankers of sensual desire, becoming, and ignorance. ↩
Donald Winnicott: An influential English psychoanalyst known for his work on object relations theory and the concepts of the “true self” and “false self.” ↩
Bruce Tift: A psychotherapist and Buddhist practitioner who integrates Western psychotherapy with Buddhist teachings. ↩