This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Transformation of Aversion - Ines Freedman. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ines Freedman at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
As Martha said, I was just asked to give this talk yesterday because Anushka was feeling ill. So, I just want to send my good wishes to Anushka, that she feel better soon.
The Buddha said, “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” In the practice, he points to these three roots of suffering that we all have: greed, hatred, and delusion. All our afflictive mental states arise from those three qualities. From greed includes all the desires we have, and from hatred, all the huge variety of ill will that we have in the world, from huge hatred to all the minor irritations we have. And delusion is our obliviousness to what’s really happening at any given moment, which anybody who’s looked at their own minds has found a lot of.
These deeply influence everything we do, how we respond to each other, how we react in the world. But the one thing is that within each one of these forces is the seed for transforming into wisdom. The desire that we have, the greed we have, is that same force that says, “God, I want to be free of this suffering.” So within each one, there’s that seed. The thing that pushes away everything, “I hate that, I don’t want that, that’s irritating,” that’s the same seed that allows us to see how to train the mind in being wholesome. And within delusion is the quality of, you know, you walk in, nothing matters, you step on the puddle, you don’t even notice your feet are wet. That has the seed for equanimity, for a very sweet state that notices the puddle but doesn’t get upset about it if we made a mistake. So in each one of those roots is also the healing of that root. Today, I’ll focus on the root of hatred and the transformation of hatred into wisdom.
I’ll start with a metaphor that many of you have heard, I know, but it makes a point that I really like to use. In Buddhist psychology, we often call these three personality types—greed, hatred, and delusion—the desire type, the aversion type, and the delusion type. It just means that in our personalities, those forces are a little bit more prominent. The metaphor we use is this: imagine that we’re going to a party of some wealthy people. The desire type walks in, and there’s this awesome, really beautiful view, and they’re just like, “Wow, this is amazing.” But within moments, the mind says, “I want that. I want to buy a house just like this where I can have that kind of view. Maybe I should change my job and get a better job and make more money…” and that view is no longer appreciated or seen.
The aversion type walks in, and they see the stain in the corner on the carpet. They look over at the food trays, and “God, it’s just full of junk food.” And the music is just, “Oh, how could they pick that kind of music?” And don’t get me started on the guests.
The delusion type walks in, kind of oblivious to everything, including the fact that there was a huge sign at the door that said, “Please take off your shoes.” And everybody else took off their shoes and they’re all in their stockinged feet, and they just walk right in with their shoes. So these are like stereotypes or these personality types; it’s way oversimplified, but we all have all of them in some way or the other, just sometimes some personalities predominate one over the other.
These roots are referred to as the torments of the mind, and they’re ready to torment us incredibly quickly. I’ll give you an example. Early in my practice, my husband and I had been discussing the topic of letting go of attachments after a dharma talk. We’d been discussing different aspects of it over a couple of days. The next morning, I woke up in a really good mood, looking forward to my fresh cup of coffee. I had it in my hand and was just about to take a sip when my husband just grabs it out of my hand. And like that, I went from a great mood to really pissed off. All three defilements showed up, right? I wanted that coffee desperately, I was really angry, and I was completely delusional, not seeing the huge grin on his face. He didn’t mean it; he was just teasing. That was his way of continuing the conversation about clinging.
So the first step for creating this transformation is recognizing aversion—hatred, ill will, all those different forms—when it shows up. It’s amazing how often we don’t see it. If we’re really angry, we kind of know it, but it can take so many forms, like just resistance. Just a simple resistance, walking into somewhere we don’t want to be. Resistance. We’re not happy. We can have very strong emotions, like getting pissed off over the coffee, or something’s just not warm enough. We have all these little things where aversion shows up. Those of you who just sat for the last 35 minutes probably had a little bit of aversion show up at some point. Maybe the breath wasn’t quite to our liking, and instead of just noticing, “Oh, that’s a rough breath,” we’re like, “Okay, let me make it better, let me fix it.” There’s something to fix. These habits of mind of resisting what’s unpleasant are very, very strong in us.
A large amount of our life includes unpleasant experience, right? How much of the time do you go outside and the weather is perfect? You’re dressed just right, there’s no chill, it’s just the right temperature. You get more of that in California, but still, it’s like, “Oh, I should put something warmer on,” or “Let me turn on the air conditioner.” How many of us just turn on the air conditioner for the minor, minor unpleasantness sometimes, or turn on the heat when it’s just minorly unpleasant? We’re so in the habit of trying to always find the most comfortable.
If we look at our life, one of the things that I learned on retreat… on insight retreats, we usually have a work meditation. My first several retreats, my work meditation was chopping vegetables, which I really enjoyed. But the next retreat was cleaning toilets. And it’s like, “Oh, what a bummer.” I just wasn’t happy about it, but it was one of the most wonderful practices. Because you’re committed to being mindful, to doing the job mindfully. And it’s very, very different if we clean a toilet resentfully. We clean it like, “Okay, let me do it and try to get it over with as quickly as possible.” Or you clean it mindfully, to the point where, “Wow, this is really fun. I’m enjoying cleaning the toilet.” I didn’t think that was possible. And it completely changed my relationship to the things we do at work. It’s not that there wasn’t sometimes an unpleasant smell, or it was awkward, or there was something I didn’t like about it. But there was a way that we can show up for that that doesn’t darken our hearts, that doesn’t contract us. We can be doing the same activity and do it happily or do it miserably.
Ill will can be described as an unfriendly or hostile disposition. It can be towards anything at all. We often think of it as towards people, but we hate ideas, right? There’s lots of ideas these days we hear on the news that hatred can arise. We hate emotions that we don’t like, we hate physical sensations we don’t like, and we can hate objects. An example: decades ago, a potter gave me a head, and it was kind of ugly and devilish-looking, but it was kind of interesting. So I put it on the mantle. Another friend came over, picked it up, and went “Ugh!” and they dropped it and broke it. They were so repelled by it, they had so much aversion that they dropped it. But we respond to objects that way too. It’s amazing, we can hate anything.
Another way the aversive mind tends to work is to focus on what we don’t like, on what we disapprove of. But it also tends to give that too much meaning. So we can notice the stain on the carpet, but we make it really important. We can notice junk food, but we don’t have to contract our hearts around it. An example that for me is very poignant of how we do that: when we’re teenagers and you get a pimple, a little pimple on the face. Just this one little pimple, and you look in the mirror, but what you actually see is 95% pimple. I know that from experience. So we overemphasize what’s wrong with things, the unpleasant.
For some of us, aversion arises most easily with physical pain. But I’ve seen minor discomforts be just as irritating, as we push against them. An itch. I hope you’ve all had the privilege of experiencing a really strong itch and living through it. But also living through it mindfully, with a sense of, “Oh, that’s unbearable. Well, let’s see if it is unbearable.” And really not scratching it, just hanging with it and watching that strong, strong sensation that feels unbearable move through us. That’s really the heart of the practice. You can do all of the practice of working with hatred in the way that we can with an itch. If we can’t do it with an itch, we’re going to have a really hard time doing it with anything else, anything really big. So can we do it with an itch before we try to do it with maybe some political figure we have less than friendly feelings towards?
The other thing about anger is that it can sometimes be a motivator. It brings up a lot of energy. And so sometimes people get, not only anger but aversion, the whole realm of hostile energy, and it can motivate us to do things. But it’s not a healthy source of energy, and it actually ends up exhausting us. It’s hard on our bodies, and it’s also not a sustainable energy. But we might be in the habit of using that to get our energy, using stress to get our energy. It’s a little bit like when I was in school, I’d wait till the last minute to study because I’d be so stressed. All the hormones were going through my body, I had lots of energy to study. Not the healthiest energy, but that’s what I got used to. But we can get even better energy, much better energy, from inspiration, from enthusiasm, really wonderful feelings. So there is another source for that strength in us. Anger makes us feel strong when we feel weak, which can be really helpful when you’re fighting the tiger, right? You want that extra physical strength. But when we’re just living a life, living in a city like this, with family and friends and work, we don’t need that level of anger to get our energy.
The way we practice with this in meditation is when those feelings arise—any feelings of aversion, of irritation—there’s usually a story. There’s something that irritated us or something that we’re angry about. We turn our attention away from the story, not rejecting it or pushing it away, but just shifting the attention to how we feel in the body. What’s also happening in the moment? What is it like to be angry at this moment? It’s not always the same. It’s not an intellectual thing, “Okay, I know what happens when you get angry.” But in this moment, what does it feel like in my gut? What does it feel like in my body? Some people, their hands just tighten, they grasp their knees. Some people, their bellies get really tight. A lot of things get tight. So what is the experience like in our bodies? What’s the experience of sadness in our bodies? What’s the experience of any strong emotions we have in our bodies? If we don’t need to feed that story, we feed the body that’s being present with what’s happening. The stories are a fuel to the unwholesome emotion.
Joseph Goldstein said, “Aversion is transformed by interest. You can’t push away what’s happening and take an interest in it at the same time.”
Here’s another example. Many years ago, a friend was supposed to pick me up from work, and they forgot about me. I’m standing out there, it’s getting to be dusk, and they’re not showing up. Of course, it was the days before cell phones, so I couldn’t text them or reach them. I was really angry. I got really, really angry. After my anger subsided a bit, I started thinking about arranging to get a ride home. I found a place to make a phone call and I took care of it. By the time I got home, I was pretty mellow. I forgot all about it and started puttering around the house, doing stuff. But when my husband got home much later, I told him what happened, and I got just as angry as when it had happened, just retelling the story. Retelling the story. And then, really consider how often we retell stories about our childhood, or regrets, or things that just happened. How often do we do that in our minds? So when we see that we’re telling ourselves a story that’s triggering these unwholesome feelings, it’s just a habitual story. This is just as real, this is just as authentic. The story is not any more real than what’s happening in our bodies right now. So the instructions are simple: drop the story, go to the body.
Humans tend to have a negativity bias. We have the tendency to notice what’s wrong with things, and that’s partly what helps us survive. If we’re out for a walk and see a beautiful sunset and we’re really enjoying it, and there’s a tiger, we want to focus on the tiger, not on the sunset. That’s dangerous. So we tend to have that little bit of a negativity bias, but it often kind of bleeds into the rest of our lives. We meditate and we focus on what’s wrong with our meditation, what’s wrong with us, instead of, “How am I right this moment? What’s happening right now?”
The kind of attention we give these negative experiences is what transforms the practice. We can give very kind attention. I like the term “affectionate curiosity.” So when anger arises, it’s not pretty. It’s not pretty to see anger, to see hatred in ourselves. But what happens when we give it affection or curiosity? “Ah, this is what anger is like. Oh, it hurts. It hurts.”
And this is actually a tool for developing wisdom. The ability to see what’s wrong is an important aspect of the mind that sees the tiger, it sees the sunset, it sees the difference. It’s not oblivious. In Pali, we call wisdom paññā.1 It refers to the deep understanding of reality, a very deep understanding that’s not an intellectual understanding, but an insight that comes from practicing deeply. It’s an understanding that frees our hearts, that actually allows us to be really at peace with our lives and be at peace with the world.
One aspect of wisdom is the ability to see in any situation what decisions we make that are going to be helpful and move us towards happiness, and what decisions we make that are not helpful and move us towards further suffering. That seems intellectual, it seems pretty obvious, right? But it’s amazing how often we make the choice of moving towards more suffering, the habits of mind that make continuous suffering, that feed our suffering. Like doom-scrolling, right? It’s not a habit that makes us happy, and yet a lot of us are stuck on those little devices, supporting and strengthening our ability to suffer, our ability to be unhappy.
Aversion tends to divide things: what I want, what I don’t want; what I like, what I don’t like; them and us. When we give too much attention to what’s wrong with “them” than to other aspects of them, that dividing of things creates more tightness and contraction in our hearts. But the same ability to see the differences between things can also mature into what we call discerning wisdom. So instead of saying, “That’s what I like, that’s what I don’t like,” we change the quality of that to, “Oh, this is helpful and this is unhelpful.” And that’s huge. That little bit of difference is huge. It’s a heart that’s at peace. It’s like, “Yeah, we’re in a difficult situation, a challenging situation. How can I help? What can I do to help right now?” And we drop what’s unhelpful.
We may not like the pain in our back. They say one out of four people have chronic pain in any given moment, so I know that some of you have experienced some pain this last sitting. But we can see that when we pay attention, our resistance to it, our aversion to it, the bad mood—it doesn’t help at all. So the pain can be there, and we can give it kind attention, and it actually improves the sensations of pain. They found that when the mind is at peace, the sensations of pain are decreased.
A different aspect of aversion… again, this is a personal story from my very early days of practice. I was at a board meeting. Board meetings were not my favorite thing to do. But I was always really good at noticing what was wrong with a plan. People would bring up plans, and I’d always notice all the faults in it. And I wasn’t shy about expressing my opinion. But it seemed to me that my role often was to burst someone’s bubble. People would come up with these enthusiastic, great ideas that were really full of holes, and of course, I would point out those holes. It didn’t make me very likable. And I felt resentful about it, contracted, righteous. I rarely left those meetings feeling good.
But as I got to become more familiar with the inner workings of my mind, I began to see that it’s really good to be able to see the holes in things. It’s really good to be able to see what’s wrong with things. It may not be a tiger, but that plan is going to fail if we do it that way. But I didn’t have to do that with a contracted heart. I could do that with a lot of kindness and equanimity. And with time, I learned to express myself in a way that was useful, but it also made collaboration fun, which I’d never experienced before. I’d never gone to a meeting or been involved in something like that that was actually fun. And I love collaborating with others now. It’s really great, different ideas pushing back and forth, “No, not that way, this way,” but done with a really friendly, open heart.
In insight practice, we call that tool that we use to notice what’s helpful and not helpful “investigation.” We often talk about investigation in insight practice: investigating the moment, investigating the breath. For instance, a really obvious, practical thing is it shows the difference between when the muscles are relaxed and when they’re tense. It’s the investigation of the moment that lets us see. I remember when I first started meditating, I realized I’d been sitting for like 15 minutes with my shoulders like this. Maybe some of you have had that insight, the insight into how we hold our bodies. The tension in the face, the frowning, and all these habits. So we slowly use that tool of investigation: “Oh, what’s really happening here? Oh, that’s not helpful, I can drop that. Oh, that’s helpful, I can do more of that.”
In particular, how many of you have gotten distracted in meditation? Sometimes I’ve gotten really lost, and then I kind of see what I’m getting lost in. It’s like a fantasy I’m really enjoying, and I want to keep going. So I’ve caught it, but I keep going, I’m so seduced by it. And the investigation says, “Well, you know, here I am meditating. What am I doing? Let’s go back to meditation. You can fantasize anytime.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay.” But that’s the practice. That’s what we address. The root of all our suffering is that clinging, that clinging of “I’ve just got to keep going in that fantasy.” That’s what we’re addressing in practice. And that flexibility of dropping the story and going back, and doing it in a kind manner, not putting ourselves down that we just got distracted, that we just spent the last 20 minutes of the meditation planning a vacation. So we’re back. Great. Wonderful, kind attention. That’s what the clinging does. We see how our minds work.
It’s really easy to investigate the quality of our minds at any given moment. Are we having a kind attitude or an attitude of ill will? For a really long time, longer than I want to say, every time I came back to my breath when I was distracted, I would feel like I had just failed. So my attitude was like, “I blew it. I blew it. Back to the breath. I blew it.” And it never occurred to me that that journey between waking up and getting back to my breath was really essential. It was reinforcing something really unwholesome in me. So I started taking that journey differently. Waking up, “Oh, great, I’m awake.” And I’d come back to the breath with just a lot of kindness, in a warm field. “Of course, that’s what the mind does. That’s why I practice, because the mind wants to play or delve in the mud of the things we don’t like,” or whatever things take us away.
There are two ways that we primarily develop wisdom. Sometimes we call them two wings. One of them is the idea of letting go when something unwholesome is happening, and the other is the idea of cultivating whatever’s wholesome. Just by meditating daily, we learn to develop some calm and some tranquility. And calm and tranquility allow us to see. We have so much more room to see when aversion and when any of the defilements show up, any of these torments of mind. And so we’re able to see them, and it takes the nourishment out of them. Any moments of calm and peacefulness are moments where we’re not feeding those roots, where those roots start shrinking.
The other side is the side of letting go. The standard metaphor is if you’re holding on to a hot coal, you’re just going to drop it because you recognize it. You don’t have to think about it, “Maybe I should drop the hot coal? What do you think, is that wise or not?” We’re just going to drop it. And the same thing happens in our minds, but often we just don’t recognize that we’re holding on. We don’t recognize how tight we’re holding on. So we can lean in the direction of letting go, but we can’t force ourselves to be calm, and we can’t force ourselves to let go.
Maybe you’ve had this experience in meditation where the teacher says, “Let go,” and nothing happens. We’re just still all tied up in knots. I remember early in practice, one of my sittings, I just had an argument with a friend right before coming to a group like this. I was really agitated. I spent the first part of the sit just thinking about all the justifications and all the things I should have said and that I can still say. And then the teacher is doing a guided meditation and they’re going, “Relax the body, relax…” and it’s like, “How do you relax? I can’t let go.” How do you relax when you can’t let go? How do you let go when you can’t let go?
I practiced with this many, many times. But as I continued to practice with it, I saw that I could incline my mind towards letting go. It wasn’t going to let go instantly, but I could incline in that direction. And what it meant was that when I had a choice of spending the next five minutes rehearsing my arguments, I could choose not to do that. And still, there’d be this tightness in my heart, but I’m just inclining the mind. And I saw that part of the nature of the mind is that a lot of the work of the mind happens underneath. For instance, maybe you’ve had the experience of having to get up really early in the morning, much earlier than usual, and setting an alarm clock, and then waking up right before the alarm clock. It’s happened to me many times; I stopped setting alarm clocks. The subconscious is doing the work. So when we incline the mind, we can begin to trust that that’s enough. Sometimes that’s what we can do right now.
As I said, we can’t force ourselves to let go. The metaphor is a flower blooms in its own time. You can’t pull the petals open, but they’ll open if we nourish them, if we water them. And we nourish them with our intentions. We nourish our hearts with our intentions. My intention is to let go of suffering. My intention is to let go of the anger, of the story, so I can see it clearly, so I can respond with an open heart, with an easeful heart.
Wisdom arises naturally when we pay attention. Everything there is to know that’s important in our lives is right here. It’s right in these bodies and these minds and these hearts. And by paying really close attention and developing our attention, we can release these roots and allow them in their own time to free themselves. As we settle the mind in meditation, we start seeing things much more clearly, instead of being filtered by preconceptions, by our ideas, by our judgments. We start really seeing the process of how our minds and bodies work.
But what’s really the deeper aspect of this practice is that as mindfulness becomes more penetrating, as we train the mind, we’re really able to see the nature of reality. We can see intimately how experience comes and goes. We all know that everything in life is impermanent, right? We’ve known that for a long time. Nothing lasts. But this is an experiential level we can get to where it’s deep in our bones. When you really see that nothing, nothing, nothing lasts, there’s nothing you can hold on to. In the intellectual area, we still try to hold on to everything, right? We’re going to keep that relationship, we’re going to keep the fridge full all the time, whatever it is that we grab on to.
And it becomes clear that no experience we ever have is going to give us lasting happiness. It’s not going to give us any kind of sense of lasting satisfaction. So our experiences in our life, no matter how wonderful the trip is, no matter how wonderful the relationship is, no matter how wonderful the vista is, it’s never going to give us lasting happiness. To look for happiness in the conditions that change all the time, that won’t fulfill us—to keep looking there is the recipe for suffering, for continued suffering.
And then we can still see our limitations or imperfections, but we don’t have to believe that they define who we are. They’re just part of the changing landscape of our lives. And we can begin to know a happiness that doesn’t insist on things being just right, that doesn’t insist that things be the way we want them. And that’s the fruit of this practice: being really at home in this world, in our lives.
And the last thing: this kind of wisdom comes from here, from within, from ourselves. Even though a teacher might say some wise words, and the dharma, the books, talks, everywhere we get tremendous amount of wisdom, but still, it all comes from here, from developing our own hearts and minds with the practice, from freeing the heart and mind.
Thank you very much for listening.
Paññā: A Pali word that means “wisdom,” “understanding,” or “discernment.” It refers to the direct, intuitive insight into the nature of reality, as opposed to mere intellectual knowledge. ↩