Finding Truth in Our Own Houses: Opening the DiabetesSangha Retreat

Sep 29

Sam Tullman opened the DiabetesSangha three-day meditation retreat with these reflections on why we practice, how our minds create suffering, and how meditation offers a path toward greater ease and wisdom in our daily lives.

It's difficult to even fathom the different winding roads that landed each of us here. So many different lives lived, so many different experiences, and yet somehow we're all here together. In a sense, we're all here for different reasons. And in another way of thinking, we're here really for the same core reasons.

You don't end up on a meditation retreat because everything is just so fantastic, you have no problems, and life is just completely swell. All of us have some sense that it's important to be here, and there are two sides to that.

Letting Go and Picking Up

Ideally, we're here so we can let go of some of our unwholesome ways of being—some of the things we're holding onto that aren't helping us. We want to let go of ways that we're judgmental towards ourselves or others, or rigid to or avoidant of things going on in our lives. In some way, all of us have these patterns, and this weekend is a chance to let go of some of these.

By the same measure, we're also here to pick up some more wholesome habits, to strengthen or lean into things that are supportive—some non-judgmental ways of being, some wisdom, some kindness, some softness, some connection to something that is greater than our small, petty minds that we live with all the time.

While we might say it differently, these two sides of the coin are why we’re here: letting go of the unwholesome and picking up and maintaining the wholesome. This is exactly the traditional description of “Wholesome Effort” (or “Right Effort”) in Buddhism. So, we are here to make a Wholesome Effort.

Truth Within Our Sight

There's a beautiful quote by Lalla that captures the opportunity we have this weekend: "I went everywhere with longing in my eyes, until here in my own house I felt truth filling up my sight."

That is what we're here – to let truth fill our sight. In fact, the truth is already there, but it's blocked —it's blocked for all of us, myself included. This weekend we settle deeply enough to find that the things we're really wanting—not the things we want at face value, but the things we most deeply want: peace, security, ease, connection—those are right here, always accessible to us, even when they don't feel so present.

This house is our moment to moment experience, including our bodies. Creaky houses, these! Some creakier than others! And as creaky as these bodies are, we have even creakier minds, constantly not at rest with the way things are, constantly fighting circumstances which are already difficult, making them even more difficult. But it is only in our own house, our own bodies and minds, that we find what we're seeking. Here we can finally find that we don’t need to seek at all, we can just be at home.

The Five Aggregates: Understanding Our Experience

One framework that's been incredibly helpful for understanding why our minds struggle so much and where our meditation practice can make an impact comes from Buddhist psychology. It’s called the five aggregates (skandhas). These are what come together to form our sense of experience, this house which is sometimes a haunted house and sometimes a delightful pleasure house and everything in between.

Form/contact (rupa) is our direct sensate experience – vision, sound, touch/internal sensation, taste, smell, thoughts. Taking our physical experience as an example, it’s what's happening in the body right now. For example, as I'm speaking, I feel a little discomfort on the inside of my knee, something sharp and pulsing. Modern neuroscience tells us through predictive processing theory that we're constantly making predictions about reality based on information from our senses. Often, those predictions come out a little off, for example if we interpret them as much more threatening than they actually are—like when a minor work stress becomes the most important thing in the world. By staying close to our sensate experience (rupa) without getting carried away with the mind, we can continue to update our brains with clearer, more useful information.

Feeling tone (vedana) is our sense of whether things are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Actually, the word root of this term is really interesting – it can be understood as “a means of knowing” (veda-na). What is it we’re coming to know? What’s in it for us. Vedana is the foundation of judgment. We want more of what’s pleasant, less of what’s unpleasant, and we tend to ignore things that don’t immediately strike us as either. This often creates habit loops that don't actually serve us—chasing short-term pleasure that isn't supportive, or avoiding important but uncomfortable experiences. That said, it’s important for us to gather this information, because it provides some fundamental information about how things are going and gives intuition about how to respond. Vedana can also be more broadly understand is feelings in a similar way we use that term in English, but for the purposes of our investigation, we’ll stick with positive, negative, and neutral as our feeling tones.

Perception (sañña) or labeling is where we recognize (re-cognize – literally, recreating in our mind) and categorize our experience. This is where the link between memory and our present moment first occurs. It’s incredibly useful – we like to recognize familiar objects so we can react to them in ways that have previously been appropriate and useful – and it’s also a trap which keeps is stuck in old ways of being, and leads us to jump to conclusions. We see things as we've seen them before, rather than as they are now. Unexamined, this can result in us being less flexible, less responsive, and less wise with our current circumstances.

Habitual tendencies / Volition / Volitional Formations (sankhara) are our conditioned responses, what drives us to respond to the experience we recognize. These are ingrained reactions built up from our different life experiences or human biology. Some of these tendencies show up outwardly in our observable behavior, but many, many more show up internally, just between our ears. A Diabetes example of volitional formations building on each other: each time I check, my blood sugar is just as high as the last time, or even higher, despite me having given insulin. Every time I see the number, I have an immediate feeling (not a pleasant one!) and I recognize my blood sugar is high. I might stuff my anger about this for awhile, until eventually as the bad feeling builds up and gets even more intense, and I perceive a desparate situation, a different volitional formation comes out: the classic "rage bolus", just trying to make it all go away. Another one for me in close relationships is that when emotions get too big and intense, I might shut down and stop feeling so much rather than staying present. There are infinite varieties of these sankharas to the myriad situations life throws at us.

Consciousness (vijñana) is where everything comes together into our cohesive sense of reality from one moment to the next. Most of the time, we don’t perceive the other aggregates just mentioned; we just have our nearly-third-person sense of what’s happening from one moment to the next, which incorporates the sense information (form/rupa), our immediate feeling reaction (feeling tone/vedana), what we perceive (labeling/sañña), and our reaction (volition/sankhara), which often is an internal one that we don’t even person as reaction but may perceive as spontaneous and unprompted. In consciousness we have more of a sense of “I”, and can relate each of our senses to each other more (principally through extremely short term memory, on the order of milliseconds). Our consciousness of this second impacts our consciousness of the next second by cycling back through these aggregates endlessly. As we settle into meditation, we can slow this process down and work with it more.

Breaking the Cycle

Each aggregate leads into the next in a cycle. You feel something, it registers as good or bad, you perceive it as something familiar, and you react accordingly. We get stuck acting the same ways over and over that don't quite work.

Our meditation practice helps by overriding these habitual tendencies, and rewiring our reactions to the parts of the cycle we experience. By relaxing the body, being gentle with ourselves, and sharing kindness, we develop different signals in our body and mind. We can feel unpleasant things differently through compassion or forgiveness. The feeling tone changes immediately when we bring softness and kindness to our experience.

Research with Tibetan Buddhist monks who had practiced for tens of thousands of hours showed that their brains actually responded to fear-inducing stimuli in a way that was profoundly different than the average person. There was less activation in the amygdala (fear center of the brain) and more connection between the amygdala and other parts of the brain that also lit up when they were experience heightened compassion. These other brain areas regulated their fear or survival responses, so they weren't so hijacked by fear all the time.

Your Internal Teachers: The Five Hindrances

Along the way, you'll encounter internal teachers called the hindrances. These aren't obstacles to avoid—they're teaching you about your practice and your mind.

Aversion feels like pushing away from what you're experiencing. It's teaching you that you're too tight in your mind, leaning forward toward some goal instead of being present. When you feel this, practice leaning back into your experience, letting go of your desire for things to be elsewise.

Craving manifests as wanting something else—food fantasies, thoughts of loved ones, sexual fantasies (completely normal), or other future rewards. This tells you your practice is too dull, or in other words you're not enjoying your practice enough, so you’re having to look elsewhere for fun. When I was in middle school, I was very uncoordinated but really wanted to learn to play basketball with my friends. So I worked at it. For a while it wasn’t very fun! Similarly, meditation can feel like work at times, but we learn to relax into it and let it feel enjoyable.

Sloth and torpor—dullness or sleepiness—often comes from exhausting your mind by constantly pushing forward. Your mind collapses from this effort. The remedy is to settle and gently steer toward a brighter mind by connecting to why you’ve come to practice, positive affirmation or recitation of poems, quotes, or passages that inspire you, breathing in or imagining light, and if absolutely necessary, moving your body. Once you have more energy, be careful to treat it more preciously, and not fall into aversion and delayed gratification again, which is one factor that ends up landing you in sloth and torpor.

Sometimes, you’re just downright sleepy from sleep deprivation, and need rest or caffeine!

Restlessness usually develops when craving or aversion persist. We get antsy and want to do something else because we're not enjoying what's here.

Doubt will plague you, and is often the most convincing and insidious of all of the hindrances. It can be a harsh teacher, but the one you stand to learn the most from. You'll think: "What the hell am I doing? Am I doing this right? Is anything happening?" These are normal thoughts, and are just habitual patterns (sankaras – see the above 5 aggregates) that happen when something doesn't seem to be going well. Remember always that millions of people have done these exact practices and benefited, even in the most inhospitable of circumstances.

At its root, doubt is a difficulty in distinguishing the wholesome from the unwholesome. When you see it for what it is, the first step as always is to relax and settle into that uncertainty. But then you can intentionally, briefly reflect on what feels wholesome or helpful from your meditation practice, and what might be downsides, and make a thoughtful decision about how to proceed.

Just Showing Up

There's a quote from the Zen tradition that I love: "No matter who tries to leave their mark, the hills and the dales are not impressed." This was written by a farmer in ancient China known as Layman Pang about his meditation practice. All these experiences come and go—pleasant, unpleasant, love, hate —and at the end of the day, we're still here, just showing up over and over, like unchanging hills and mountains.

The core of our practice is simple: relaxing, touching into kindness, letting that flood and pervade your body, letting your body be at ease and safe and loved, and sharing that with this room of beautiful people and beyond.

However this feels like it's going at any given moment, just hang in there, relax, settle into your experience, and be kind to yourself. Each moment is a teaching experience, and you are your own teacher. Be a good teacher to yourself.

Peter Friedfeld