Open to One Thousandth at a Time

In What Am I Protecting? I spoke of areas of experience that were walled off for decades. This exchange from Anything Is Possible speaks to a dimension of that same territory—when something is not just defended, but unbearable.

When difficult experiences are walled off, a web of reactive patterns grows up around them. One of my patterns was the conviction that no one could be trusted. Because this ruled my life, seeking psychological help felt very risky. I tried once, as a young adult, and it backfired. The experience of placing trust in another person intensified the wound.

Over time, I noticed that my behaviour consistently produced results that differed greatly from my intentions. Nearly a decade later, I confided this to a friend who became my first contemplative teacher. More than a decade after dipping my toes in the waters of meditation practice, something in me was ready to approach experience in another way, and trust was no longer such a no-go proposition. By then, I had stumbled, quite unexpectedly, across Unfettered Mind, and Ken suggested I work with the five-step practice and with mind training. These gave me a way to begin forming a relationship with what had felt untouchable—not as a substitute for professional help, but as a way of making contact. Very gradually and slowly, I could allow attention to inch toward what had been too hot, too painful.

There is something deeply astute in Ken's observation that what we could not experience at the time remains as undischarged emotional reactivity. He is explicit that people generally need sensitive support to work with trauma, and that over-exposure can re-traumatise. That caution feels essential. A key is not to force anything open, but to form a relationship very gently, appropriately, as capacity allows.

To my surprise, in my sixth decade working with a therapist proved unexpectedly fruitful. Practice had not replaced therapy; it had made therapy possible. For others it may well be the other way around.

Forming a relationship with the experiences we have banished requires patience. And sometimes it begins with opening to only one thousandth of what could not be experienced.

From Anything Is Possible 2

Student: Connected to both what Bill said about healing, myself being connected to all of society, and also the talk about politics, I'm going back to what you said about memory, and when you gave the example of thinking of a mild irritation, and then switching over to saying, "I'm glad about it," and it disappearing, that worked very well for me, but when I start to think of more serious irritations like PTSD, which you raised, how is that? I'm not sure I have the question formulated except how can Buddhist practice relate to some wound that is so deep as PTSD?

Bill: What's PTSD?

Ken: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Student: And I just want to add to it that as a psychotherapist that works with them, a more appropriate label for that acronym or words for that, is post-traumatic soul disorder.

Ken: Well, even with PTSD, one way of looking at it, certainly not the only way, but one way of looking at it is something happened which we simply did not have the capacity to experience. So there's an undischarged emotional reaction. And that may be because of the physical trauma, that may because of the emotional trauma and whatsoever.

And in a certain sense, when that happens it's like a part of us is now unavailable to us and it goes back to Bill's idea of drawing a line around it. It's something that happened and we can't touch it. It's just too hot, too painful, or what have you. The approach in Buddhist practice would be gently and appropriately to start forming a relationship with that part. Now with a mild irritation that was very easily done, as you pointed out. With something that is deeply, deeply painful, it has to be done much more carefully. And there are two or three techniques with which I'm familiar.

One can apply the Anapanasati Sutra, the Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra to this. The Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra in using the breath and opening to, as you breathe, allowing yourself to move into however much of that experience you're able to and doing that very gently. So if you can only open to one thousandth of it, that's what you do.

Thich Nhat Hanh has a technique for this. It's a five-step process, which consists of holding that part, tenderly in attention, and even starting with just a very, very small amount of it so that you gradually form a relationship. And he knows of what he speaks because he comes through having been driven out of Vietnam from both sides, 'cause he was equally unpopular with the Americans and with the Vietcong.

There's another technique in the Mahayana tradition called mind training which is a way of forming a relationship with any aspect of our experience from which we are alienated. Because in that aspect of experience from which we are alienated, there is some suffering. And in mind training, you're taking that suffering and you give your own understanding and joy and support, and you just do this again with the breath, taking in the suffering, giving your own joy. And in this way you start a process of mediation with that which forms a relationship.

In the case of something as deep as post-traumatic stress disorder, I think it's highly advisable to, if one is undertaking those kinds of techniques, to do it in conjunction with seeing someone you can talk about it with. Because it's very easy to over-expose oneself to these experiences and thus re-traumatize. So I think one has to be quite careful here, but I've worked with a number of people with both of those techniques and it's been very helpful.

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What Am I Protecting?

The principle, don't protect any area of your life from your practice, has become central to how I practise, but the first time I heard it, I felt cold fear and hot shame. I knew immediately that there were many areas I was protecting.

In the retreat, Mind Training in Seven Points, Ken talks about finding a method of practice for this. The method I’ve come to rely on starts with the question, “What am I protecting?” For me, systematic reviews using frameworks like the six realms tend to lead to procrastination or resistance, whereas simply sitting with the question or praying does not. From there, I work with the five-step practice or, more recently, taking and sending—turning toward the places I would rather not look. I “let practice work on me,” as Ken often advises, until something releases. And then I go back and ask, “What am I still protecting?”

I’ve come to recognise the rigidity Ken describes. Working with whatever tightens when attention turns toward it has not been easy. Some of these areas feel non-negotiable, defended, off-limits. It can take years, even decades, for a protected area to be recognised and then to soften and release.

However difficult it may be, I know in the marrow of my bones that this principle matters deeply. If practice doesn’t reach into the places I would rather exclude, then it isn’t really practice at all.

From Mind Training in Seven Points 6

NOTE: In this passage, Ken mentions the The Mind Training Prayer. His translation, made several years after this retreat, is called Opening a Path to the Sea of Awakening Mind. Another translation can be found in The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva.

Ken: Then the third principle is usually phrased in the negative. Don’t be partial in your practice. And as Kongtrul writes in here, some people are really good at getting along with other people, but they have no patience when they get ill. And other people are the other way around. They can bear illness very easily and patiently and very constructively, but they really don’t get along with anybody. And maybe you can do those things, but somewhere else you’re falling down. And as it says elsewhere in the book, it’s very important for mind training to touch every aspect of your experience.

Another way that I put this is: don’t protect any area of your life from your practice. The area of life that you protect from your practice is reinforced. Two things happen. When you protect an area of life from your practice, and you continue to practice, because you practice, the general level of energy in the system increases, because that’s what practice does. It raises the level of energy, because you’re cultivating attention. So, energy pours into that area that you’re not paying attention to, and it pours into the blocking mechanism. Both of those get stronger. So, that area of your life gets more and more walled off from your conscious attention, and operates more and more strongly.

The result is various forms of imbalance. And we have seen this time and time again. Various teachers who can be very, very capable in giving instruction and guiding people in certain contexts. But you put them in another context, their desire for sex, money, fame, power, or whatever, is just right out of control. And the way that you see this is that, when you interact with a person if you hit an area where they are rigid or inflexible, that is an area that they’re protecting from their practice. It’s a good rule of thumb to have in mind.

So, one of the suggestions—just a slight diversion here—but something I wanted to say this evening. From my perspective, this is a very special group. The quality of practice is very solid, and I was noting that again in the walking meditation. So, for the record, you’re doing very well. And for the record, don’t let it go to your head. [Laughter] But it’s very solid here. And because of that, I want to push you a little bit further. Just as I said before, I’m going to raise the bar. [Laughter]

Okay. Now, some of you have been working with some quite personal issues—and appropriately so—that are coming up in the taking and sending. And that is very important. At the same time, this third principle, of making sure all bases are covered, is also very important.

Now, in a question that came up, I think yesterday, I sketched out "a" framework of practice that I used in my own practice of taking and sending. Going through the eight hot hells, and the eight cold hells, and the four kinds of hungry ghosts, and the different kinds of animals, and the four major and the four minor suffering of the human beings, and the suffering of the titan realm, and all the different problems in the god realm, and the different types of gods, etc., etc. That’s one possible framework.

Now, from our perspective, all of those—that whole Buddhist cosmology—represents the total possible mind states that any of us might experience in our lives. So, by meditating on every one of those, explicitly, you’re actually covering the whole range. And that’s a very traditional method of doing so.

I have a prayer with me which Jamgön Kongtrül wrote called The Mind Training Prayer. It’s never been translated into English that I know of. And he just goes through every conceivable emotion. He goes through the six realms. Then he goes through the five afflictions. Then he goes through the—I can’t remember all the other things—but one category after another. So, if you know these categories—and Buddhism is a tradition of lists, as some of you know—they’re very useful because they give you a framework.

And if you’re interested, I can sketch out the eight hot hells, that’s about hot anger, you know, the explosive kind. The cold hells are about hatred, that cold anger which freezes you inside. And then the hungry ghosts are—and I detailed this in Wake Up To Your Life—the various kinds of obscurations, where you look and you never see that there’s enough in the world. And it brings up all kinds of greed. But there’s another kind of obscuration, you have everything you need around you, but nothing satisfies. And that’s also represented in the hungry ghost realm.

And in the human realm, the four major sufferings are: birth, old-age, illness, and death. The four minor sufferings are: being with people you don’t want to be with, not being with people you do want to be with, trying to get what you don’t have, trying to keep what you do have.

I remember working with a student in Southern California, and I presented these because he was doing his meditation on the six realms. He looked at those, just those four, and he said, “That’s what I spend my life doing.” And these are the four sufferings of the human realm. And so I can go into that if anybody’s interested.

But you can use another framework. One that I thought of in preparing for this evening’s talk is to go through every socioeconomic status that you can think of, right from a homeless person on the street to Bill Gates—the corporate executive elite—and so forth. And just go through every one. You’re going to cover all the bases that way.

And some of you may think of other frameworks, but what I want to encourage you to do now, is to come up with a framework which is going to cover the whole range of human experience, and start working through that systematically in your meditation. Deborah.

Deborah: [Unclear]

Ken: No, not really. The six reactive emotions cover most. And that’s just the six realms. Okay? But really getting into all of the different kinds of desire, different kinds of pride, different kinds of jealousy. But some framework, so that you cover the whole range of experience that you’re ever likely to encounter in yourself. This is a way of not protecting any area of your life from your practice. Janneke.

Janneke: [Unclear]

Ken: You can start at the bottom and work up. You can start at the top and work down.

Janneke: How much time [unclear]?

Ken: Well, that depends. I mean, we have eight meditation periods in the day. So take six of them and put one on each realm. Or put five minutes on each realm in each session. Either way is fine. And some people work better shifting the focus of the practice fairly frequently, because it keeps them awake and engaged in the practice. Other people do better taking one topic and really going into it deeply. And that’s individual variation; there isn’t a right or wrong there. So find the way that works for you.

But what I want to emphasize now is developing a method of practice for yourselves—and I can help you with this in the interviews if you wish—which ensures that you cover a whole range of human experience. Okay? Any questions about that?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: You’re not protecting any part of your life from your practice. For instance if you think, “I’m willing to do taking and sending with every aspect except control.” You know, “I like to have control of my life. So, I’m not going to give away control, and I’m not going to take lack of control.” Okay. That’s what I mean about protecting an area of practice. And god’s realm is a lot about control.

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Busy Doing Nothing

This passage comes from the Five Elements, Five Dakinis retreat, where Ken explores different qualities of experience through the language of elements and dakinis. The element here is void, and the corresponding dakini points to a way of meeting experience when familiar reference points fall away.

Ken speaks about void in very ordinary terms. For example, void shows up as space in a day, space between commitments, space where nothing is planned or scheduled. Without that space, he says, nothing new can come in.

In session 6 of the retreat, he described how we tend to react when that space opens. Void may not feel spacious or free at first. It often shows up as dullness, heaviness, or sleepiness—not because we’re tired, but because dulling out is a way of not having to feel groundlessness. When there’s no structure to support us, confusion and bewilderment surface. We don’t know what to do, or who we are. That disorientation feels deeply uncomfortable.

One way we try to escape it is by doing something—anything—that restores a sense of orientation. Living in a culture organised around usefulness and output, productivity becomes a reliable way to steady ourselves. This is why Ken is so blunt in saying that meditation produces nothing. It offers no task, no identity, no payoff, and doesn’t sit easily in a life organised around doing.

Void—emptiness or spaciousness—is what makes everything possible. But to encounter it, we have to be willing to stay when orientation drops away—not filling the space, not dulling out, not reaching for something to stand on. That willingness to rest in not-knowing is the practice. And without it, very little in our lives can genuinely change.

From Five Elements, Five Dakinis 9

Ken: Where is there space in your life?

One of the things that has taken me a long time to learn, but I actually do it now, is I space things out in my day. I space things out in my day so I very, very rarely have two meetings back to back. That makes a tremendous difference. I can have actually quite full days and never feel rushed.

Another thing which I’ve learned to do, which I’ve advised people—particularly if they are in high-pressured jobs where unexpected things happen all the time—is schedule unscheduled time. That way you always have time for something if it comes up unexpectedly.

This is also good for one’s personal life. There’s a person I used to work with who had something on his social calendar every night of the week. That’s how his partner liked to live his life, and my client was just being run into the ground. So I said, "Okay, take out your calendar get a red magic marker please. And I want you to put an x through two nights of every week."

And he went, “I can’t do that!”

I said “Yes you can. You simply take your hand and you go like this.”

And he went, “Mmm, but what if somebody calls?”

“You tell them you’re busy. You are. You’re busy doing nothing that night.” He said it made all the difference.

So scheduling time where there is nothing in our lives is very very important. Meditation time is a time where there’s nothing in our lives. I’ve started to work with a group of people in their 20’s and early 30’s. And, what do you produce when you’re meditating?

Nothing. You produce absolutely nothing when you practice meditation. So in terms of a life and a culture and a society which is bent on being productive, meditation is a complete waste of time. It produces absolutely nothing. For this reason it is impossible to reconcile meditation with a productive life. And if you try to squeeze meditation into your life, it will be squeezed out because it’s not productive. The only way that you have a meditation practice is if you say to yourself, “I want this time to do nothing.” And you make it a priority along with everything else in your life. Nothing else works. But if you approach meditation from the idea of being more productive, wave good bye to your meditation practice.

So we need space in our lives because if our lives are full nothing new can come in. It’s as simple as that.

In relationships you need space. If you’re a guest your host needs space. A good guest knows how to get lost for periods of time, so there isn’t a constant demand on the host.

So study void. Void is what makes everything possible. If there is no emptiness or open space in your life then very, very few things are possible.

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The Activity Of Awakened Mind

The story of Ananda's awakening at the First Council touches me deeply. He is excluded, turns away in sadness, and then responds without hesitation when his name is called. There’s no deliberation, no strategy, no attempt to prove anything. Just a simple, immediate response: “Yes?”

Ken describes this as the activity of awakened mind—doing what needs to be done without preconception or self-reference. Mundane and ordinary though it may seem, Ananda's response inspires and sets a direction: to be present enough so that when life calls, one can respond without rehearsal—not from habit or identity, not from a need to help or fix, but simply because that’s what the moment requires.

Ken connects this way of living back to rituals, not as performances, but as training in attention. Offering torma to gods and demons acknowledges what pulls us into reactivity. Offering to dakinis and protectors nourishes the capacity to respond without thought, without delay, without “me” in the middle.

Seen this way, the activity of awakened mind is something we already touch, many times a day, and perhaps don’t notice. The practice, as Ken often reminds us, is about removing what gets in the way, so that when the moment comes, turning and saying “Yes?” is possible.

From Mind Training in Seven Points 5

Ken: Tibetan Buddhism, by and large, places a very heavy emphasis on ritual. You had rituals and ceremonies for almost everything. Any time anything went wrong in your life—for that matter any time anything went right in your life—you did a little ritual. So, these torma offerings are rituals, in which you prepare a bunch of stuff, and you recite a liturgy, and you do a visualization, and make an offering.

What is being acted out in the ritual is, in the case of giving torma to gods and demons, you are giving your attention to those things that hook us into reactive behaviors. Gods and demons are symbols, essentially, for those aspects, or those things that arise in our experience which feel good to us—those are the gods—and those things that feel bad to us—those are the demons. And ordinarily, when something feels good, we just feel good, and we attach to it, we want more, we’re attracted to it, and so forth. When something unpleasant happens, then we want to push it away, get rid of it, kill the messenger, and so forth.

By doing these little rituals, what you’re in effect doing is acknowledging, “Oh, that happened,“ and “Oh, that happened.” So you’re just noting it. And disengaging from the habituation which causes us to make a big deal, one way or the other, out of it. That’s the essential idea here. I’ve thought about this for many years, and I’m still at a loss as how to translate that ritual-based practice into the way we live life here in the West. If any of you have any ideas about that, I’m very open to them.

And then, offering torma to dakinis and protectors. Dakinis and protectors are symbols of the activity of awakened mind. And what does this phrase, the activity of awakened mind, mean? It means when we do something naturally from just knowing what to do without any preconception. We do this all the time, actually, we just don’t notice it. The story of Ananda’s enlightenment is relevant here.

Ananda was excluded from the conference following Buddha’s death, the conference of the senior students who were all arhats—a degree of enlightenment—who were going to decide what was going to be preserved of the Buddha’s teaching. It was very unfortunate Ananda was excluded from this, because he’d been at all of the Buddha’s teaching throughout the whole life of Buddha Shakyamuni, and he had a phonographic memory, so he had it all. And the story is told—this is the Zen version of the story, the Theravadan version is a little different—that Mahakashyapa, who was one of the top arhats, said, “No, you can’t come in because you’re not enlightened.” Ananda turned away very sadly, and Mahakashyapa said, “Ananda!”

And without any thought whatsoever, Ananda just turned around and said, “Yes?” And those kinds of simple responses, where we’re just right there, that is what the dakinis and protectors are symbolizing. You walk into a situation, and you see what needs to happen, and without any thought you just do it. That is the manifestation of the awakened mind. There is no sense of, “I am going to do this for this person.” It’s something that just happens like that. [Finger snap]

So, what you’re doing here, again, in these little rituals, is nourishing that quality in your own experience. In essence the offering of torma is an offering of attention to, on the one hand, those aspects of experience which pull us into reactive patterns, and on the other hand, those aspects of our experience and activity which are an expression of being awake.

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Three Components of Emotional Reactions

Ken’s description of the three components of a reaction—physical sensation, emotional tone, and the stories that arise—feels spot on. For me, the body and emotional sensations usually arrive together, almost as one movement: for example, a pounding or trembling with fear, a hollowness in the belly with shame, an ache around the heart with grief. Those cues show up before any story rushes in to explain what’s happening.

When I first heard Ken talk about these, I suddenly understood how strongly I was influenced by stories and how utterly convincing they were. My fabricated narratives felt immediate and unquestionable: "She thinks this," "He wants that," "I must have done something wrong." But with practice the stories have become less elaborate, and have much less authority. Body sensations and emotions are now far more accessible than they were before.

Ken emphasises that the story is the least reliable part of a reaction. In one talk he recommended using Byron Katie's four questions to pull the rug out from under stories:

Is this true?
How do I know it is true?
How do I feel when I hold this view?
What would life be like if I let this go?

The practice of pausing to ask these four questions has helped me see that my stories are attempts to manage discomfort, rather than a window into truth. And when I can stay with body sensations and feelings without rushing into interpretation, the reaction becomes easier to meet, and the sense that it is “caused” by someone or something else loses its grip. There's more space around the whole experience, and more choice about how to respond.

From Five Elements, Five Dakinis 3

Ken: All reactions have three components. How they manifest physically in the body: typically there’s a kind of tensing or contraction. There can be actual physical sensations in different parts of the body. Your stomach feels churned, or like it does butterflies. There can be a constriction in the throat. There all kinds of possibilities—your heart can beat faster. There are always some—and sometimes some quite strong—physical components to the reaction. And most of the time we aren’t aware of them, which means we aren’t really aware of the reactive process taking place.

So in this set of practices that we’re doing, stay very much connected with your body—what is actually happening in the body. Again you don’t have to analyze it or explain it, but be aware of it and actually experience it.

The same is true at the emotional level. Maybe looking into someone’s eyes triggers fear, maybe it makes you anxious. Maybe you feel squirmy. The sense that someone is seeing you without any judgment may make you acutely aware of your own judgment.

I think one of the things came up earlier is the feeling of being special. And I have one student in L.A. who’s working with that particular issue at this point. She’s very chagrined about it. Because she sees how much of the way that she relates to the world is coming from holding a feeling that she is in some way special. So it allows her to negotiate a lot of situations very easily. But at the same time there’s a certain pride and feeling of superiority. So that’s something you may watch for. Maybe a feeling of being naked, revealed, exposed. And there could be a whole other set of reactions connected with that.

And there are the stories that come up, which is the third component of reaction. This is the component of reaction that we most often notice and believe immediately. We don’t question it at all. And again someone looking at us, really seeing us and seeing us without judgment, we may say to ourselves, “What do they know?” Or, “What does she want?” These are what I mean by stories. And again those thoughts come up. We don’t even question them—we just take them as fact.

But if we’re in touch with the physical and the emotional we may appreciate the fact that these are simply thoughts and ideas and may not have that much grounding in reality. And so now we can experience things very, very differently and experience all of that as, “Oh, this is how I’m reacting to this possibility.” All the discomfort, all the stuff is in me, even though there's a tendency to project it out there.

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