This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Not Making Anything Up; Insight (24) The Art of Leaving Suffering Alone. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Hello everyone, and welcome. This meditation is part of a longer series that sets the context for today. More recently, the context has been a deeper engagement, reflection, exploration, and discovery of wise ways of practicing with suffering, stress, and the emotional tensions that we carry through our days.
There are a number of purposes for this. One is so that we can discover a profound, satisfying, and healthy happiness that can be an alternative to suffering and also a partner to certain forms of suffering that we have. Experiencing suffering is not a mistake. All kinds of emotional pains come with being human, but there’s also what we add. And it’s what we add unnecessarily that is a big part of what we’re working with in Buddhism.
One of the important areas of practice, and one of the opportunities with mindfulness, is to be able to suffer without making anything of it. To feel our emotional distress, our emotional pain, our physical pain, and the challenges we have. Of course, there are times we should adjust, change, and fix certain things. But when we come to meditation, one of the great opportunities here is to discover a kind of freedom that comes when we don’t have to do anything about it. We can just sit and not add any second arrows.
So, just to sit and not make anything up in relationship to the suffering—to let it just be suffering. Not be for or against it, not interpret it, not even have an attitude towards it that it’s undesirable. Not trying to protect it, just a radical leaving it alone. Not making anything of it, not imagining a future with it or where it’s going. Just radical simplicity.
Let it just be suffering. Let it just be sadness, just be anger, just be disappointment, just be hurt. Just be. One way that it’s been meaningful for me to think about this is that when we’re suffering, be a suffering Buddha. When we’re sad, be a sad Buddha. When we’re discouraged, be a discouraged Buddha. What that kind of language and image does for me is it allows me just to pull back and let it be. Don’t do anything with it. Don’t see anything as a problem. Don’t see suffering as a problem. Don’t even see suffering as an opportunity to find happiness. Just let it be. Don’t make anything up out of it.
So, assume a meditation posture.
If you’ve been meditating for some time, maybe you can feel the familiarity of the posture that you assume. Maybe it’s even a homecoming. “Ah, here I am. My body in a familiar posture of meditation.” Maybe the body is now becoming the meditation center, the meditation hall, the temple. Feeling the familiarity, feeling the goodness.
And also feeling the tensions, the holding, the parts of the body that are activated with emotions, energy, and tensions.
Gently breathe more fully as a statement, as a claim to presence here and now. As you exhale, a relaxing that is a definitive reminder, a statement, an act of being here now.
Letting your breathing return to normal. And as you exhale, relax, soften, and put your body at ease.
As you exhale, to whatever degree you can, set your mind at ease, easing up the tensions, the tightness, the pressure in the mind.
As you exhale, ease up in your heart area, with your emotional feelings and sensations. Be easy with how you’re feeling emotionally. Easing up.
And then become aware of how your body experiences breathing, the movements of breathing. The alternating sensations of breathing in and breathing out.
Then ease into your breathing, almost like your awareness can enter into the physicality of the body breathing.
As you get to the end of the exhale, let go. Settle in for a moment. Let there be a grounding deep in your body at the end of the exhale, where you allow yourself to let go of everything else—past and futures, thoughts, beliefs. Try not to make anything happen except grounding deep in the body with the exhale.
And the inhale arising from this grounding spot.
If you find yourself thinking, take a moment to see if you can recognize that you don’t need to be thinking what you’re thinking, unless it’s about the meditation on breathing itself in a simple way, remembering to do it. Nothing else at this moment requires thinking.
When the mind thinks things, it’s often making things up, constructing ideas, stories, conversations, judgments, commentary. It’s possible to feel the pressure to do this, a kind of subtle pressure of believing this is important to do, a certain desire or clinging.
At the end of the exhale, let it all go and find a rest deep within the body. The resting spot, the grounding spot. A rest below the agitation of thinking.
If you’re suffering in any kind of way—distressed, troubled, uncomfortable emotionally with anything—notice if that suffering arises out of how you’re thinking. Notice how the suffering feels in your body. Notice if your suffering affects how you’re breathing. Maybe the suffering is even very mild stress.
And as you know it, as you feel it, leave it alone. Not making anything up. Not building any conclusions. Not adding the ideas and judgments of thinking on top of it. Without interpreting it, just let it be. Leave it alone, with the exception of maybe breathing with it, or dropping down to the grounding spot deep within the breathing, below the suffering, and radically, unconditionally leaving your suffering alone.
Nothing to do about it, nothing to fix, no conclusions about oneself. It can be so simple that all that’s left of suffering are the immediate sensations associated with it. Thinking not needed.
And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, what might you have learned? What could you learn here and now about leaving suffering alone? Not making anything of it, not making up anything about it. Suffering is suffering in and of itself. It’s bad enough. Don’t add anything. Don’t make anything of it.
And can you find in that simplicity, in leaving it alone, some freedom? Maybe breathing room with the suffering. Maybe a sense of ease or peace that’s deeper within you or which surrounds everything.
Can not making up anything, not trying to do anything, give you a sense of ease that can exist together with whatever stress or dukkha1 that you have?
And then, holding this ease and unease together, may we appreciate or understand that others have dukkha, others have unease, suffering, and they have the capacity to have ease, to find freedom. And may our own suffering help us to have a greater compassion, patience, and love for others. And may our own freedom from suffering, our own ease, be the source of goodwill and well-wishing for those we’re with.
With whatever ease and well-being we have, may we live with goodwill. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to this continuing series on insight. For the past few days, we’ve been focusing on having insight—a deep understanding and recognition—about suffering. It’s a big word, and an alternative word that I like is “unease.” When I was younger, I was aware of some writers who wanted to translate it as “dis-ease,” with a hyphen between “dis” and “ease,” to convey that somehow there’s a deep unease. The value of this emphasis on uneasiness is that it may be a little bit easier to understand the broad range of what Buddhism refers to as dukkha1. There can be an uneasiness with just the mildest little thing, and it can be quite big and large.
One of the really important teachings that we teach, and I taught about it yesterday here at IMC and on YouTube, is the idea of the two arrows. If a person is injured by an arrow that’s shot at them, that’s painful. There’s no doubt about it. If a second arrow is shot at the person, it’s even more painful. The idea from the Buddha about the simile of the arrows is that the first arrow is just what life brings us. We get sick, we get injured, we get old, we die. There’s loss. We break a cup; it falls on the floor and it breaks. Maybe we didn’t even drop it; perhaps the cat pushed it over the edge of the table, or there’s an earthquake and a precious family heirloom falls and shatters. The first arrow is what life brings us. We sometimes have very little control over these first arrows. Maybe we try the best we can to prevent difficulties and challenges, but the first arrow is just what comes, and we’re not responsible for it.
The second arrow is the one that we add to the situation, and that’s when we make things up. We interpret it, we judge it, we dream up scenarios of frightening futures—”because of this, this will happen now, and that’ll be terrible.” We cling to how we want things to be, or how they should be, or how they shouldn’t be. It’s bad enough to have the cat knock the precious teacup on the floor, but don’t make it worse with the second arrows that we add.
We might not be happy with what’s happening on a political level, and maybe politicians are spreading fear and hate and anger. Then we get afraid and angry ourselves. In a certain way, the first arrow is what the politicians do. The second arrow is what we add to it—add to the world, but also add to ourselves. In some ways, it’s very sad how much added suffering we inflict upon ourselves when the first is bad enough. When, for example, politicians are filled with fear and anger, as is commonly done to get elected, and then we do the same, we’re just adding to the accumulation of this terrible, ugly way of being in the world. We’re not the solution; we’re just making the problem worse.
So it’s very hard to imagine leaving things alone, to think it’s okay to do that—not to add to suffering, not to add second arrows. Of course, we think, “We have to do something! We have to fight the good cause.”
Meditation is a very special place. It’s a place where we step out of the ordinary world. It’s like going to a library in the old days. You go to the library, and it’s a quiet place, a sanctuary, a peaceful place. People leave you alone for the most part. People are quiet. Maybe some people are talking softly, but it’s its own unique place. We go into the library and participate in the culture of the library. Meditation is like going to a place like that, where there’s a different culture, a different understanding, a different possibility.
One of those possibilities is to learn not to fix things, not to judge things, not to make up any stories or interpretations, not to live in the future and past about things, not to tell stories about it. But rather, to leave things radically alone. Just let each thing be itself. And what that means is we’re not adding second, third, or fourth arrows. Sometimes these arrows that we add become the foundation stones for building bigger and bigger buildings of suffering, buildings of stories and interpretations of life, ourselves, and our identity.
When our world, our self, and our relationships to others are built on all these accumulated arrows landing on top of each other, they’re not very safe. They’re not stable. They’ll blow over; they’ll fall over. When they get tall enough, they will definitely collapse.
So this idea of meditation being its own domain to leave things alone, to just breathe with things, to just know it. Know it, don’t construct it. Know it, don’t add to it. Don’t make it worse. And find some ease in the knowing of, “Oh, wait, there’s stress, there’s pain, there’s unease here. Let’s just know it in the simplest possible way. Let’s just feel it in the simplest possible way. Let’s be careful we don’t add to it with stories. Don’t make up anything about it. Don’t make anything of it.”
One of the fascinating things to discover from doing this, or trying to do it even to a small degree, is that at some point we start recognizing how the source of some of our suffering—the immediate, experiential source, the place where the tension and unease arise—is not from the events in the world, but rather from the way we think about it. So the cat knocks over the cup, and in and of itself, that doesn’t have to do anything in the mind. But then the mind immediately narrows and focuses on, “Oh, that was a gift from my best friend, and my best friend will be upset with me because that cup is now broken. Maybe my friend will think I was disrespectful and that I’m a careless person.” If you’re watching all this, you can feel how much suffering, tension, and unease is rising in the wake of these thoughts.
Then at some point, we can also see that our unease is the very source for more of this kind of thinking. The tension that we carry within us becomes like a toothpaste tube without a lid. If we keep pressing it, the toothpaste will just keep coming out. As long as the pressure is there, the thinking will just keep pouring out; stories will keep being made because of the tension we have in the mind.
To learn to leave things alone, to leave our suffering alone, is a dramatic step. It’s learning a radically different way of not adding more arrows. Even if you have ten arrows being fired at once, rapid-fire, we can learn not to add the eleventh. Don’t add one more. Just let it be.
At some point in this practice of the dharma, it’s almost necessary to learn the art of leaving suffering alone. If we have a whole series of made-up suffering and reactivity that we live under, at some point we need to learn to stop at the 30th generation of arrows. This stopping means that at some point we have to be willing to be at ease with suffering. At some point, we have to learn to just say, “Okay, now there’s a different way. There’s a different culture. Now I’m in the library. Let me just be here without making anything up, without talking loudly about it, without yelling. Let me learn how to suffer without adding an arrow. Let me learn how to suffer without having thoughts, ideas, and reactions that just add more and more.”
The marvelous thing that can happen is when we learn that stopping, learning to just let suffering be very simple and not making anything of it, then the edifice of tension, the edifice of all these arrows, begins to collapse, fall away, and relax. But if we think we always have to react, always have to do something with it, always make something of it, always define ourselves, always see our problems as reflecting back on who I am, then that just gets perpetuated more and more.
So whether it’s the second or the hundredth generation of arrows that you’ve been slinging at yourself over a lifetime, at some point, just stop. Stop and look better. Stop and see more clearly what is there. And one of the things to clearly see is the stopping, the not adding, and in doing that, finding your ease. Ease on the path to freedom.
So thank you.