Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast, Insights at the Edge.
I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform, it’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org, and in advance, thank you for your support.
This episode of Insights at the Edge features Andrew Holecek, friend, author, meditation teacher and retreat leader. Andrew has a gift for making some of the deepest teachings within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition accessible, understandable practices. He draws out the practices that we can do and he takes us through them in a friendly way, practices in the area of dream yoga, sleep yoga and the art of dying. With Sounds True, Andrew Holecek has written a new book, it’s called Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom. Andrew, welcome.
Andrew Holecek: Tami, it is so great to be with you again, such a delight to spend some time. I really appreciate it.
TS: I’m going to start with a quote from Reverse Meditation. “Great meditators learn to savor hardship rather than avoiding it, because pain provides a heightened opportunity to accelerate the spiritual path.” Tell me about that. How can our pain accelerate the spiritual path?
AH: Right. Good one. Well, think about this for a second, what does growth feel like? I’m really interested in growth and transformation. What brings it about, what catalyzes it, what, perhaps, retards it? And I can tell you from my experience, I don’t grow when I’m fat and happy and sitting in the sun drinking my margarita on the Yucatán. There has nothing wrong with that, I like it as much as anybody else, but I would suspect that you, and many of people listening here, might agree that we really grow when we’re being stretched. And so when we’re being invited—and sometimes even pushed—out of our comfort zones, this is where the rubber meets the road, this is where growth really takes place.
And for people that are really interested in psycho-spiritual development, spiritual elites—and they don’t have to be, the aspiration is to make these sorts of practices available to us. These are the ones, especially in the alchemical traditions that really look forward to, savor, these moments of hardship because they can really stretch us out of our comfort zones and into the growth arenas, into the growth zones where transformation really takes place. So there’s so much to say about this, but maybe that’s a good start.
TS: I think, Andrew, there’s a lot of confusion because at the same time you hear people say, “Get involved in meditation because you’re in pain. You have a lot of anxiety, you have a lot of stress, you’re all caught up in the mind that worries. Meditation’s going to help you and it’s going to get you out of this distress.”
AH: Totally.
TS: And yet, now you’re talking about growth as this embrace of discomfort. So help me understand this paradox.
AH: Yeah, good one. So the first thing we need to do is understand that when we talk about meditation, this is a multivalent term. It’s a little bit like sports. So when we say sports, what are you talking about? I mean, there are hundreds of sports. And so in the West, usually when people think about meditation, whether they know it or not, they’re probably thinking about mindfulness. Fantastic. I mean, it’s an amazing practice. But meditation has so much more to offer than mere mindfulness, and just parenthetically here, really mindfulness sedates, it doesn’t liberate. And so in a world that’s on fire, sedating and chilling out, is a really good thing. I’m not dissing that at all. But what I might invite is a larger embrace of the entire meditative curricula where we can transcend and include something like mindfulness. And so in this particular journey, mindfulness is the platform practice, that’s where we start.
There has to be some level of so-called pacification, some level of relationship to the contents of our experience using that practice. But then, whoa, we are invited to go so much further, so much deeper, where we can in fact say yes, a kind of radical acceptance to whatever arises. And so I playfully talk about in this book, the cultivation of an industrial-strength meditation. Industrial-strength mind, and also mind and heart, same thing in both Sanskrit and Pali, same word. A mind and heart that’s big enough, open enough, to say yes to whatever arises. And if we can actually do that, throwing a welcome mat out to even the most unwanted experiences, this is where you can really accelerate your psychospiritual path.
TS: Now, you mentioned mindfulness as a platform practice, and in the introduction of Reverse Meditation, you start and you say, “OK, let’s familiarize ourselves with mindfulness, but then let’s go to open awareness and then we go to reverse meditation,” which is what we’re going to be talking about, but help our listeners understand the progression—
AH: Sure.
TS: —and why the understanding of this progression is important.
AH: That’s really key, because otherwise—the radical invitation of the reverse meditations are crazy! “Well, you’re asking me to do what? And you want me to go directly into my biggest physical pain, my greatest emotional hardship? I don’t think so.” And so, what I attempt to do in this book is create an infrastructure of understanding the doctrinal basis, drawing on a bunch of the world’s wisdom traditions that support this kind of approach. And then most importantly, this book really is a practice manual, or as I write about it, is a kind of repair manual, a way to repair our adverse relationship to unwanted experiences. And so in order to make these reparations and preparations, we start with the basic pacification practice of mindfulness, incredibly important. Without it, forget it, you’re not going to do this other stuff.
But then you take this, I think, amazing step into the practice of open awareness, which is a remarkably powerful practice that fundamentally allows us to create an atmosphere, a container, a holding environment that is really large and spacious and accommodating, and it fundamentally allows us to rest with a level of equanimity upon whatever arises. And so that practice itself I spend, I think, two chapters on this, because it is really key.
Developing this attitude, this is a wonderful statement. You may have heard it from Krishnamurti, I think it’s such a great statement. When he was allegedly asked in the latter stages of his life, 70 years of teaching or something, “What’s the secret to your unflappable contentment?” And he said something beautifully disarming. He said, “I don’t mind what happens,” That’s an amazing statement. And so the practice of open awareness cultivates it. It is the practice of, “I don’t mind what happens.”
And so with that in our platform, then we can progress finally into the reverse meditations where we say, “OK, I don’t mind what happens.” Well, let’s take this a step further and bring in voluntarily, volitionally, on our terms, and this is something where we can talk about the actual practice, how do you work with these things. Bring unwanted experiences, both emotional and physical, into our experience on our terms, and then basically establish this much more open equanimous relationship to it. And so these practices are a little bit more advanced, a little bit more graduate-school practices where you have to have, or are strongly encouraged that we have, these preparatory practices underneath us so that by the time we get to them, and then as we’ll discuss, there are four stages of the reverse meditations themselves, then we take these baby steps, then we can actually titrate, we can use on our terms, bring into our experience on our terms, levels of discomfort that we can relate to.
And then if we do that on our terms, we become familiar with our relationships to this. I talk so much about contraction, maybe we can talk a little bit about that. But if we do that in the practice room, then when we enter the stage of life, we start to perform. And the really good news in my experience with these practices, personally myself, and then teaching them for quite some time is they are incorporated quite quickly. I think part of it’s because of the rather intense nature of these practices that they’re downloaded into our soma and quite literally embodied and incorporated more quickly. But again, the practice of mindfulness, the practice of open awareness, really important before we step in to the reverse meditation proper.
TS: Andrew, how did you first get introduced to reverse meditation?
AH: So I was introduced to them over 25 years ago in my three-year retreat, which is a traditional training in the Tibetan Buddhist curriculum. I was locked up in a monastery retreat center in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton in particular. And in a set of lofty practices that some listeners may be familiar with, called the Mahāmudrā Teachings, these are considered some of the highest teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist approach. I remember so compellingly when I was doing these practices, it was just a small little riff on reverse meditation. In particular there what they did, I remember—so, clearly the invitation was to create, voluntarily, as many thoughts as you possibly could, make your mind as wild as you possibly can. And I said, “Whoa, now this is new. This is something I can relate to.”
So here I go, I finally get to do, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, what I’ve always wanted to do in meditation, which is just like, wow, let my mind go, and I just found the practice like, “This is really interesting.” And then I started to explore it and I realized, “Man, there’s nothing else out there on this topic. Yes, there’s what are called charnel ground meditations. Those are somewhat similar.” The idea here, and again, it’s helpful because there is some further doctrinal and traditional underpinning here. A charnel ground is traditionally a place, as you know, in India, Tibet, or Nepal, that is archetypally represented as the most unwanted of all locations, so a place where cadavers would be put out rotting in the sun with hyenas and hawks. I mean, you can just imagine this horrific environment. And great meditation masters, including one of my main teachers, Khenpo Rinpoche, I mean, they would do a lot of meditation in the charnel ground as a way to work with these unwanted circumstances.
Today in the West, something would be, perhaps, an emergency room or the site of a natural disaster or some accident kind of thing, and so even those are slightly extreme instances, they are traditional practices within the Tibetan Buddhist curriculum. And so it was really in the three-year retreat that I was introduced to the term, I was introduced to the practice. And then when I came out and started really reading and working and teaching a lot on death and dying, that’s when I started to really see these practices, and I started to culturally adapt them a little bit, bring them into the arena of what are arguably the most unwanted experiences in life—old age, sickness and death. And I can speak with direct personal experience, and that’s where my confidence and conviction really comes from. Because even though I’ve done exhaustive literature analysis and study in also other traditions, my real confidence comes from my intensive exposure and practice to these.
And then the experimentation like, “OK, I wonder. Geez, let’s try it this way, try it this way.” And so I can speak very specifically about really intense physical—like kidney stones. Is there anything more painful than that? I brought these practices to bear on that, and it radically transformed my relationship. And when my first marriage was falling apart, that’s a pretty big heap of hurt, I was able to bring the spirit of these practices into that emotional turmoil. And then I started realizing, “Wow, in this day and age when there’s so much divisiveness, there’s so much contentiousness, there’s so much anger and just upheaval taking place, it’s like, wow, these practices could really help in this dark age.” And so that was the inspiration in trying to share these with others.
TS: I think you’re very right about the time that we’re in and how useful these practices are now. I noticed when you talked about we can formally practice them and we’re going to introduce the four steps and people can invoke pain on purpose. I thought to myself, “Most people, if they’re honest, can probably find something in their experience without having to do any special invocation.” I mean, you briefly used the term contraction. We can find some part of us that, perhaps, is feeling… I’ll use from my own experience and we can talk about it, but a little anxious about something, and I can sense there’s a quality of contraction in that I’m open and it’s porous, but there’s also some quality of wrinkling all in. So talk a little bit about the everyday contractions that we can bring to reverse meditation.
AH: Oh, Lordy, now we’re starting to get into it. And this, again, this is also a wonderful topic that substantiates, supports the importance of the practice of open awareness. Because what both mindfulness and open awareness do, but in particular open awareness, is they create successive contrast mediums that allow us to see things that we haven’t seen before. So very briefly, the stillness and the stasis of mindfulness meditation creates a contrast medium that allows us to better see the frenetic activity of our minds, and this is why as a meditation instructor— you’ve probably experienced this yourself—so many beginning meditators say, “Oh my gosh, meditation’s making things worse. I never had so many thoughts before.” Uh, yes, you did. You just never saw them. And so these practices bring these unconscious manifestations into the light of consciousness, where now we can start to relate to them instead of from them, and so open awareness does this even further.
By inviting our minds and hearts to be so open, we can better see how closed we are, so these practices are simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive. They will show us how contracted we are, how speedy we are, and then they will provide the antidote. And so therefore, if we have these within us, then we start to become increasingly sensitive and sensitized to things that we have never felt and seen before, so in this case, contraction. And so I don’t know, two, three chapters in the book on contraction. This is a big deal. And again, this has been a marvelous set of revelatory and sometimes painful discoveries over 20-plus years of doing these practices. Where I start to look, and I talk about these as the super-contractors, there are the contractors—like for instance, if you think about anger, if you think about fear, or even anxiety.
The invitation with open awareness and then supported really with reverse meditations is to take a really close look, and this is not just a cognitive look, this is a visceral examination. This is a somatic, felt exploration. Notice what you feel in your soma, in your body, when you feel these heightened adverse emotions. And so, then, what I do is I try to point out these ubiquitous, what I call omnipresent super-contractors, the ones that are really exaggerated in this day and age, anger, fear, oh my gosh, can you think of anything more contractive? You start to identify them and then you can start to relate to them, because if you relate to it that way, you can prevent the reactivity, that is no relationship at all. You can replace that reactivity with a plan, words, response-ability, the ability to respond.
So once you’re sensitized to it and you literally get a feel for it, then you start to work your way down, and this is where it gets really interesting and really profound because it’s not like they say in the Hindu tradition, turtles all the way down, it’s contractions all the way down. And so once you get a feel for them, then you start to realize the other levels of super-contractors that are taking place. Every time you’re distracted, that’s a form of contraction. Every time you complain, that’s a form of contraction. And you start to realize, “Whoa, I had no idea I was so contracted.” Well, you can’t solve a problem you don’t even know you had, and this becomes key when you get to the reverse meditations proper, because what actually transforms simple pain into complex suffering is our contraction against it.
So if we can establish a relationship to it from these gross more overt levels to these increasingly subtle—and these Tami, maybe we can go through this later—they go really subtle and they go really profound all the way down to what I label the primordial contraction. And I’m just going to posit this out for our listeners just, perhaps, “What is the primordial contraction like? What is he talking about? What does that feel like?” Well, if you really take the time and effort to explore through the practice of open awareness, the actual primordial contraction, it feels like me. It feels like the very sense of self, and so if we can work our way down, turtle by turtle, contraction by contraction, all the way down into the primordial contraction, whoa.
Now, we’re not only liberating ourselves from conventional emotional and physical pain. Now, you’re able to liberate yourself all the way down the deepest levels of spirituality. And so this is where, we’ll talk about it later, the fourth stage of the reverse meditations come into play. Because they will take you all the way down to this primordial contraction and then replace that with this quality of expansive openness, and that is no small thing. That’s actually quite a discovery.
TS: Now, Andrew, I want to make sure that this is translating for our listeners, and I’m imagining someone who says, “I don’t get what Andrew means by contraction. I don’t get it. When he says that word, I don’t actually know what he’s talking about. What’s he talking about? What does he mean when he says it’s contractions all the way down? I got lost here.” Can you help us?
AH: OK. Are you ready? [YELLS] Did you notice anything? A little bit extreme, apologies. Pay attention, simply pay attention. And again, at first glance, because we don’t pay attention, we’re trained in the art of nonattention and distraction, these particular insights may not be available to us. And so therefore, on one level, like you’re saying initially, this can seem somewhat theoretical or maybe even philosophical. Well, here’s the kicker. It only may seem theoretical or philosophical simply because we haven’t experienced it yet, and so therefore, what you’re pointing out here is actually quite important. This is why the platforms of both mindfulness and open awareness are really quite key here, because I can do my best in an hour podcast with you, to try to point these things out doctrinally, through just talking about it. But the real traction of these teachings, the real traction, the real power of this book comes through these meditations.
I mean, everything literally comes to life and then even to death when we start to engage, and so I would simply posit to the listeners, take a look, take a look, feel into, reflect any moments of fear. What do you really feel in moments of fear, like when I bark that out? Panic. What do you really feel within your body? Anger. Anger. And this, by the way, just briefly, can really help us understand why when things are falling apart, and again, I see this a lot in the death and dying world, anger is such a common response. People will unleash on caregivers, they’ll unleash on loved ones. Why? Because when you’re falling apart, one of the most reconstituting of all emotions is, in fact, this anger thing. And so this has a lot of explanatory power in terms of our behaviors and a wild wide array of human experience.
But like I mentioned, just to reiterate, starting with some of the more exaggerated manifestations of this, and part of what makes it difficult is exactly where you’re intimating is the ubiquitous nature. They’re so constant. Outside of these overt moments of anger, panic and fear, these other, what I call super-contractors, what makes them so challenging is their constancy. We don’t have the contrast to see them or feel them until we do these types of practices. And then, like I mentioned earlier, this is when they come to light. Because now you have that new contrast medium, now you start to see, and more particularly, you start to feel. And the minute you start to feel these things, whoa, that’s where the growth takes place that we talked about before.
I mean, we change, we grow when we feel things. You can talk until you’re blue in the face. This is the really negative pejorative end of philosophy like, whoa. I mean, how far is that going to change you? You change, and I invite you look at growth, look at change. We change, we grow when we feel things, and so therefore, these practices are really very gritty, street level, somatic-embodied practices. They simply invite us to feel, to wake down into a more sophisticated relationship to both our emotional and physical pain, and then in so doing, radically start to transform it.
TS: Well, I have to say, Andrew, I really liked it when you had your explosive shout.
AH: Sorry.
TS: No, that was very enjoyable for me, so thank you. But I want to talk about what I was feeling as you were describing letting go of contraction at deeper and deeper levels all the way down to the primordial contraction, which is the sense of self. So what I started feeling was a type of endless spaciousness.
AH: Beautiful.
TS: And then I thought to myself, “Great, how am I going to live like this? I can’t live like this.”
AH: Yes, you can.
TS: I can’t live like this. Can you really live like that? I need to come back, and formulate, and other things. Don’t we need healthy contraction to operate as humans?
AH: Absolutely. Spot on, and high five. And so this is where you need an integral approach. This is where you need to realize, exactly like you said, that we need contraction to survive. I mean, on a biological level, our heart contracts before it expands. Our muscles contract in order for us to move. Our diaphragm contracts in order for us to breathe. If we didn’t have contraction, we would not be able to operate. So you have this incredibly healthy manifestation at the physical level, and you also have really healthy contraction at the behavioral, psychological, psychospiritual level, where the ability to contract is part of what discipline’s about. It’s a part of healthy boundaries. It’s a part of healthy saying of no, so the issue is really one of relationship. What we want to do is simply centrifuge out, and again, in an alchemical way, transform the lead into the gold.
If we let the contractions usurp their domain where they have a particular highly-applicable domain—as I mentioned in all these vectors of human development—but if these kind of vectors supersede their domain, that’s when the issues become problematic. So again, we honor and incorporate the healthy iterations of contraction. We need it, but then we also realize, “Hey, wait a second, these unhealthy manifestations, boy, they in fact are unhealthy.” And so I want to return to what you said earlier because it’s spot on. What you’re talking about is a really important topic both within classic Hinduism and Buddhism, where on one level there is this arc of openness, the arc of returning to whatever you want to call it, emptiness, dhammakaya in the Buddhist approach, turiya in the Hindu approach, really helpful to be able to open, to expand, to mix one’s mind with space, that kind of thing.
But, as you well know, there’s near enemies everywhere, and if you just hang out in that space, boy, that’s spiritual bypassing. That’s spiritual materialism, and that’s really a disembodied spirituality where in fact it can become pathological. And so with the backing of these incredible non-dualism traditions, then the invitation is exactly like you’re saying, Tami, or intimating. You take the spaciousness, you take that openness, which has now been actualized, nurtured within your being, and then you re-inhabit your form, you re-inhabit your speech, you
re-inhabit your body, you re-inhabit your action, and therefore this transcendent quality then becomes imminent, then it becomes embodied, and now your spirituality is complete. Because otherwise you’re just really halfway there. And this is a really common spiritual trap where people—I mean, it’s like Almaas said so beautifully, “When people start out on the spiritual path, they’re unwittingly setting out for heaven.”
They just want to feel good. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, but get back to me on how you bring that heavenly quality when your world goes to hell. Where’s your heaven then? And so that’s my invitation and slash goosing or challenging is, what do you do with these amazing beatific, blissful, so-called spiritual states of mind when your world is falling apart? Where’s your meditation then? Where’s your practice then?
And so, to cultivate this industrial quality of meditation, industrial quality of mind, then we expand, we stretch. We go, “Hey, let’s invite, let’s bring in everything. Let’s raise our gaze, open our hearts and minds to an extent that we can radically accept whatever arises.” Then we bring our insight, we take heaven, we bring it into hell. We mix dirt with divinity. Now, we’re talking real spirituality. Now, we’re talking about spirituality that is not only an expanded sense, but now it’s also much more complete. Because you no longer have to go into retreat armed with these types of skillsets.
Basically, you can enter a lifetime retreat within your everyday life because you have these embodied technologies that allow to bring even those experiences that you probably previously deemed anti-spiritual. I mean, spirituality is defined in terms of contrast, there’s that word. And so if we expand that horizon, this is like I mentioned in the introduction to the book, playfully, by putting your meditation into reverse, you will actually find yourself going forward. In other words, when these practices are embodied—and I can tell you from my experience—they accelerate the path, they catalyze the path because everything is now welcome onto the path.
Everything becomes grist for this mill. And boy, for me, this has been a game changer because when I left my three-year retreat, one of the great challenges and invitation was, “OK, that was a terrific three years of amazing meditative experience, but how do I stabilize this?” Meditation is fundamentally remedial work. The real practice, so to speak, is the performance of life. How can we bring these technologies, live them, embody them, bring them into our speech, into our actions, into everything we do? I think that’s the complete authentic spirituality, and the non-dual wisdom traditions seem to support this.
TS: All right. Let’s go into the four steps of reverse meditation.
AH: OK, cool.
TS: And we can imagine that somebody’s working with something either emotional or physical. I mean, you mentioned heartbreak, that’s a big one, how you worked through it. Physically, you mentioned kidney stones, so you gave us two pretty extreme examples. But I think most of the time someone in their life can say, “At this moment, I’m triggered by something. I feel reactive, or I have a neck pain, something’s going on.” Take us through the four steps with whatever—
AH: OK, you bet.
TS: —might be going on for the person at this time.
AH: Yeah. You actually said something quite compelling here in terms of the relationship of contraction to triggering, so this is another way to become sensitive to the omnipresent nature of these contractions. And one is when you’re triggered, notice—I invite you, again, kick the tires, take a look, find out for yourself, notice what you feel when you’re being triggered, I bet you’re going to find some level of contraction. And this is, again just briefly, the really cool thing about the contraction thing, once you start to become sensitized to it, you understand a little bit the narratives, so to speak, the thematic nature of these. You start to see these things everywhere. But in terms of the practice, so let’s get practical here.
So there are four stages to these practices, and the first one, and again, the nice thing here is you can stop at stage one. You do not have to work your way through all four stages. Each one, on this theme I mentioned earlier, transcends but includes the previous one. So each one goes a little bit deeper, gets a little bit more profound until we enter the fourth stage, which I’ll spend a little bit more time talking about where pain can really become truly spiritual.
So the first step is the observation. Let’s say you’re in pain, or if you wanted to take an example… So when I’m teaching these classes and doing seminars on reverse meditation, usually what I do is I will invite the person to do something that’s uncomfortable. So we do a little bit of mindfulness, a little bit of open awareness, we do their preparatory stuff, and then I say, “OK, we’re going to invite some unwanted circumstance into our lives on our terms.” And so I’ll say, “Gently bite your lip, gently bite your tongue, maybe dig your fingernail into your thumb,” something like that. Don’t chomp on it, man. I mean, if you do that, you might want to take a look at that. We’re not cultivating spiritual masochism here, but we want to initiate something that’s discord, dissonant, uncomfortable.
And so then the first stage is: observe it. Just simply cultivate this witness awareness. And so this allows us to differentiate, not dissociate, that’s the near enemy of differentiation, is this dissociation. That allows us to gain some space, some perspective. We get a higher bead on it. So step one, in a certain way, is we step out briefly before we step back in. All in the spirit of wanting to become familiar with our pain. Now, this is a very interesting term because in the Tibetan language, the very word for meditation is G-O-M, gom, literally translated as “to become familiar with.” That’s an amazing definition for me. Meditation is to become familiar with.
So in this instance, what it alludes to is we want to become familiar with an inevitable lifetime partner, which until we’ve done a practice like this, we’ve probably not spent the time doing it. Why? Because when we hurt, we want out. We don’t want to— “You’re telling me what? You want me to go in?” Yes, I do. So first step, briefly step back to get a better bead on it, observe it, establish a witness relationship to it, all kinds of interesting things will actually reveal if you do that, and some people will find, “Hey, this is great. This in itself is really, really helpful.” So if you want to go a little bit further, the next step would be, pull a little bit of a U-turn.
Now, you start to actually enter it, and so the second step is simply be with it. Sidle up next to the pain, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s physical. Basically embrace it, embrace it. The trick here is not to indulge it, and you notice this starts to happen when the discursive commentary starts running in, all kinds of chatter’s coming into play. Initially, that’s completely normal because everybody stumbles when they first do this. Everybody’s faking it, “What am I doing here? Am I doing this right?” Because we’re so unfamiliar with this kind of new relationship, we are walking into new territory here. So I want to say at the outset, we want to be kind, patient, curious. In fact, I would argue that this is one of the kindest practices you can do for yourself, and by that, what I mean is one of the kindest things you can do is speak and live the truth. And when you’re feeling pain, one of the best things you can do is be true to that pain. Pay allegiance to that.
So step two is be with it, sidle up next to it. Start to wrap your mind, your heart, your arms around it, just to get to know it a little bit more. Know the enemy, as it says in Sun Tzu, The Art of War, “Know thy enemy.” The next two steps is really where we start to ramp it up—or ramp it in, I should say.
So the third step is you start to examine it. You start to look at it. Now, this is interesting. It doesn’t mean you pop all the way back out to the observational thing. No, this is a type of investigation or examination that takes place somatically, it takes place with your body. So yes, you’re helping with a question you can ask yourself, and these questions actually send the mind in this direction. “What is this thing called pain?” Really, have you ever bothered to take a look? And when you do that, you’re sending the mind in the right direction.
You’re sending it in. “What is this pain made of? What exactly is this thing that I have spent so much of my life trying to avoid?” And so for the analytic-type people, scientists, academic types, they groove on this because they can bring a little bit of that. They dance back out. They have this investigative lens, but again, the difference here is this is a somatic, embodied, visceral examination. You really want to start to look into it, feel it like, “What exactly is this thing?”
And so the last one, and then I’ll pause, we can centrifuge talk about any of these in much more detail. The last step is really the crowning jewel. And so this last step is when you completely unite with the pain, you become one with it. And so the difference between this and step two, step two is be with the pain, step four is be the pain. Because step two is still dualistic, and even step three is still dualistic. I’m examining the pain, I’m feeling the pain, I’m witnessing the pain. Each one is more intimate, more non-dual, but it doesn’t become non-dualistic until stage four.
And at stage four, this is where it gets extremely interesting and really profound. It’s so difficult to talk about non-duality. I mean, basically it’s impossible, so putting this into words is not the easiest thing to do. But paraphrasing an amazing line from Sogyal Rinpoche in his legendary introduction to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. When I first read this 20 years ago, I was just floored where he says, and extrapolating a little bit, but fundamentally, “If you become one with your pain, there’s no one to hurt.”
Another way he put it is, “The absolute experience of duality is the experience of non-duality.” Now, this is a big one, this is a big one, and this is something that only can be sussed out when you actually take the time to do this. The absolute experience of duality is the experience of non-duality. By becoming one with your pain, there’s no one to hurt. Then what are you left with? Well, you’ve deconstructed not only suffering because that’s a construct, you’ve deconstructed not only pain because that’s a construct, you’ve returned it to what it really is, intense, raw sensory awareness, and what that feels like is ineffable.
It’s really hard to put into words because on one level it doesn’t feel good, conventionally good, unless you’re talking about something like basic goodness, but here’s the kicker, it also doesn’t feel bad. It’s just this ineffable intense, raw, sensory awareness, devoid of both the experience and the experiencer. So this last step, and then I’ll pause because I know, woo, we’re going into the deep end here. This last step is yoking with it, uniting with it. And so if you look at the acronym here, it’s O-B-E-Y, observe, be, examine, yoke. OBEY, a new order of relationship to unwanted experience. So I’ll pause to come up for air, so we can take this anywhere you want to.
TS: Thanks, Andrew. I want to see if we can deepen our understanding of how to do these four steps. So I think that the first step, people get that. That’s my sense. Like, “Oh, I’ve been trained enough,” if they’re with us in this conversation this far, and they haven’t gone off and said, “I want to do something else.” They’ve understood this notion of being a witness to whatever’s going on, whether that’s thoughts, feelings, physical pain, “I can witness it.” All right.
Step number two, “I can be with it and I can be with it at the level of sensation. Oh, I’m with it. I feel the heat, I feel the strange tingling quality,” whatever it might be, “I can start to be with it without a story.” I think people can also have experience of that. Now, we get to step three, examine the pain. And use some of these questions like, what is the real nature? And I know one question that a teacher I was working with asked me recently, “Who’s feeling this right now?”
AH: That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.
TS: “Who’s feeling the pain?” And the answer I felt like because it was a very painful experience was, “F you. I’m feeling the pain. I don’t know who’s feeling the pain. Shut up. I’m sitting here feeling the pain.” So how do we deepen into this analytical meditation if we’re not used to doing an analytical meditation?
AH: Spot on. These questions are so great, Tami. So a couple of things is, one is you can spend a little bit of time becoming familiar with the basic practice of analytic meditation, also known as Vipassana, a form of insight. This is a classic practice where you take anything. Let’s just say we’re talking earlier about anger, fear. What you do with classic analytic meditation is, let’s say anger. There’s so much anger in the world today. You simply take a really close, like a good investigative reporter, a good scientist, you take a really good close look at this phenomenal arising to which we append the label anger, fear, and you examine it. In this case, it’s more a conceptual examination, so this is a little bit more conjoined with what we would call step one, classic investigation, conjoined with step one. You look at anger, you start to investigate it.
You’re like, “What exactly is it made of?” Sometimes even in traditions, it’s slightly contrived, but you get the idea. The traditional text, because this is a classic practice, will say, “OK, what is its color? What is its shape?” And sometimes the questions are like, “Well, really?” Well, they’re designed to basically allow you to come in, to investigate, to take a look. And because for many people, this is somewhat new, we’re not familiar with it yet. There’s another iteration of that definition. This does take a little bit of time, but I would recommend that people, perhaps, examine something a little bit more over-the-counter that may not be quite as crazily charged as what we’re talking about here. Where again, anger, any emotion, even passion, desire, doesn’t really matter. Just take a closer look, like, “OK, exactly what is this? Is it energy? is it…? What is this thing, man?”
And so the traditions, interestingly enough, will not give you the answers initially, when you’re doing classic investigations like this, almost like a koan, really. This is a little bit like a koan. They don’t give you the answers. They want you to go out there, or in there in this case, and find out for yourself. So that’s what I might recommend as a preliminary practice here for step three, is to work even irrespective of this four stage schema. Just take any experience in your life, any emotion, whatever, and like a good first-person scientist, just take a good close look, start to ask some questions. Once you have that, then you can reenter it in this more charged environment within the context of the reverse practices, bringing that little bit of proficiency and familiarity with you that makes it a little bit more digestible for people.
When the teacher asked you, “Who is feeling it?” And you said, “Well, F you, I’m feeling it.” Another invitation for taking a look at contraction, because what brings about the illusion, and it is an illusion, it’s a construct. What brings about the illusion that I am feeling that, is in fact a contraction. It is one contraction giving birth to twins, self and others, so now this is a brief interjection back into stage four. I invite you to take a very close look. What is it that actually creates the sense that I am feeling that? Underneath it all, there’s a contraction, there’s a referencing taking place, and Tami, it happens so fast, so constantly, that’s why we don’t see it. And to give you one intimation of how fast it is, how fast the mind is, let’s take my voice. What’s basically happening here is neutral compression and rare fraction waves hitting your ear.
So for instance, if I was to just blah, blah, blah, there’s no meaning there. That’s just sound waves. But try listening to your native language, try listening to my voice as if it was a foreign language, it’s almost impossible. That’s how fast the mind is. I say a word like, “Word,” and you don’t hear it as denatured compression, rare fraction waves as sound, it immediately brings meaning. That’s how fast the mind is. And so, this again, is what you start to see when you slow down in meditation. You start to actually see this space between the phenomenal rising and the imputation of meaning. In this case, the very sense that, “I am feeling the pain.” So I understand, whoa, this is super subtle. This is graduate level. This is the highest reaches of both open awareness and the reverse meditations. And this is, in fact, where these practices truly become non-dualistic and spiritual. But again, I don’t want to spend too much time there unless you want to go there, but this is worth throwing into the mix because, man, is it revelatory. It will show you what’s really going on.
TS: I want to continue to give our listeners—and myself—more good tips on how to get all the way through all four stages. So in this third stage, one of the things I’ve noticed is this tendency to bounce off. Like I’m asking questions like, “What’s the shape? What’s the color? Who’s the experiencer of the pain?” And it doesn’t take very long, and I’m like, “You know, I think I’m going to go get a bowl of granola or something.” I leave very quickly, and I wonder what helps us stay with this?
AH: Well, one is exactly what we’re talking about here, establishing the right view. And actually what you’re saying is lovely, it’s quite sensitive. That this is, in fact, the way it works, is you’re actually pinging off these, especially with stage three. And this is why stage three and stage four, as I mentioned earlier, this is where this practice really ramps up. This is where it gets really interesting and profound. So yes, at first, again, you’re flickering between this directionality suggested by the questions themselves. They’re pointing the mind in a particular direction, and then you actually temporarily release that. It’s like shooting an arrow, sending the mind in the right direction, and then you simply see where it goes. And then if you find yourself getting foggy, losing your way, it’s like, “What am I doing here? Am I really doing this right?”
Then you come back out and you reinstate the question. And so when I’m doing this in a guided way, this is what I’ll say. It’s a little bit like hitting a gong. You hit the gong, that’s the question, then there’s the inquiry. And because again, it’s so new, it’s so unfamiliar and it’s like, “What?” It just takes a while to get the hang of it until you start to hum with it. So you strike the gong, you ask the question, you look, and then when it fades, you usually find the mind gets a little bit loose, sloppy. That’s when the thought comes in, “Oh, I think I’d rather go have granola,” or whatever else, and you hit the gong again, and you play with this, you know this classic maxim, Tami, not too tight, not too loose. This is so important with not only this stage, but with every aspect of these reverse practices.
And at first, because these practices are so intense and so unusual, if you’re going to err, I err on the side of being too loose, so that you don’t become some Type A spiritual masochist, but it’s just a matter of finding our way. It’s like we ping off extremes. I mean, it is like a pinball. We ping off extremes, and then eventually we find our own way. And that’s the other thing that’s so beautiful about these practices, is they’re highly empowering. They’re suggestive. They send the mind in particular directions, journeys within, but then as an intrepid explorer, psychonaut of the heart and mind, you’re the one that’s making this journey. You’re the one that’s tripping and falling. You’re the one that’s making these discoveries for yourself, and that’s where this stuff gets so profound. And again, for me, this is what really brought it to life, is when I started having these intense life experiences, and I was not taught this in retreat. I learned this stuff through trial and error, man, pinging and falling and faking, and stumbling and whatever, but slowly I started to get the hang of it.
And then because you’re actually heading towards a truer relationship to these phenomenal risings, it becomes increasingly more natural. It only appears unnatural at first because of our contrast, because we’re so habituated to these avoidance strategies. And so, for me, I can tell you, after doing this for 20 years, these practices are now automatic for me. I mean, case in point, I stubbed my toe this morning, like, really hard, and instead of the usual, “Oh crap,” reactivity, it was, “Oh…meditate,” in other words, “Oh, open.” And so I’ve done this so often, and even last year when I was going through some really intensive diagnostics and tests and surgeries, I mean, not a day at the beach, I cannot tell you how often this practice was at my side. That’s actually what gave me even additional confidence to, “Hey, we’ve got to get this out there. We’ve got to get people to know.” So I’ll pause to make sure I’m hitting your sweet spot here, but it’s just a matter of familiarity.
TS: Let’s go into step four, which is—
AH: My favorite.
TS: —this dissolving of the experiencer into the experience, yoking to the experience, and to help us have a deeper appreciation of what this is actually like. Take me into it from your own experience. Like, you stubbed your toe this morning, what did step four, what was that like with the pain. Because a stubbed toe really hurts for a little bit. What was that like, describe it?
AH: So I have to say that these instantaneous iterations are actually a little bit more difficult than the more sustained life, so I will address both. On one level, it’s actually a little bit easier when you’re experiencing a chronic condition, whether it’s heartbreak or whether it’s physical pain, because you actually have a little bit more time to wrap your mind or open your mind to these. But again, with some familiarity there, what happens to me in levels of instantaneous like stubbing my toe is, at first, there is this still residue of survival level, like, “Whoa, you know, bang,” and I do feel that contraction absolutely positively. And there’s no doubt whatsoever at first, even though I may not say it, excuse me… There’s, at first, this absolutely authentic, honest, like, “I am in pain,” for sure. I mean, I’m not that proficient in these practices yet, but because I’ve done it so often, I feel that contraction.
You see, that’s the kicker, Tami. I feel that contraction, and I feel the localization that comes from it. Because I’ve done this for so long, I feel the simultaneous generation of me and the solidified, reified status of the pain, for sure. But because I’ve done it so long, then what I do is I go right to stage four, and I allow myself to die into, I allow myself to dissolve into, that intense sensory awareness. And in so doing, it’s just like I’m saying, it’s because these two co-emerge, a sense of self and other, subject and object, I experiencing that, they co-emerge, they arise together. Stage three by the way, can help you deconstruct this in this more analytic way, but fundamentally, if I go deeply into the experience or deeply into the experiencer, you see, it doesn’t matter because they lean on each other.
If I go 100% into one or the other, because they lean on each other, they collapse into each other. And again, it’s like, “What is this guy talking about, man?” Well, I’m trying to put non-duality into dualistic terms, and that is impossible. It doesn’t work. Non-duality doesn’t fit into dualistic mediums. So the best I can do is throw noodles against the wall, finger paint, and then invite you to take a look for yourself, armed with a little bit of experience, a little bit of patience, a little bit of curiosity to see, in fact, what happens when you make this journey for yourself, and you start to literally dis-cover these types of experiences. So I’m not sure that’s entirely a satisfactory answer.
TS: I’m not satisfied yet, Andrew. So I’m going to ask my question one more time.
AH: Fire away.
TS: You stubbed your toe, it feels all like prickly and hot. And there’s this—
AH: At first—
TS: —”Ow!” quality coming. What happened in stage four? What happened to the me who was going, “Ouch!”
AH: Well, at first it feels like everything you said. All these labels, I can append to that experience, for sure, and that is in fact indicative that I haven’t gotten to stage four, you see. That is in fact characteristic that, I’m still experiencing that, I can append these labels to it. I can have this traditional relationship to it. But the invitation and the trick, so to speak, is, perhaps, recognizing that, noticing the very subtle contractions and distractions that, that provides, and then literally just trying to just dive in.
I’m trying to think of, here’s an example. This comes from T.S. Elliot. It’s really quite beautiful, where he writes in one of his beautiful writings, “Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all,” and so maybe one way to gain an intimation of this is when we look at other experiences that could, perhaps, be a little bit more on the pleasant spectrum. When you’re completely enraptured by something like music or even tremendous beauty and art, you actually have at that moment, it’s as if the music hears itself, music heard so deeply, it’s not heard at all.
And so that could be a little bit more over-the-counter example of these types of experiences, but again, even there, it’s subtle. Because I mean, if it wasn’t subtle, we’d all be enlightened. We’d all have this non-dualistic relationship to whatever arises. But there are instances when we’re madly in love with somebody—not romantic, passionate love, but unconditional open love, where we know we lose the sense of self in the other. And so, perhaps, until someone gets more familiar with these untoward, seemingly untoward experiences, we can gain intimations of this kind of process and more conventional experiences. And so I still know, I realize this in itself is not particularly satisfactory, but again, the invitation is: find out for yourself, explore these things for yourself, and then come back and you try to put it into words.
TS: I felt somewhat satisfied when you started talking about the experience of listening to music, I could melt into that. OK, two more things I want you to address for our listeners. One is, you talked about how one of the ways we can become sensitive to contractions in the form of our reactivity, is to take on a practice of not complaining.
AH: Oh, yes.
TS: And I think that might be even harder than stage three and four of reverse meditation, so tell me how you do that when you feel like complaining? And there’s plenty of course, in any given day to complain about, what do you do?
AH: Oh, I’m glad you brought that up because, talk about applicable. I mean, how many times does this happen in a day? And this is also fairly early in the book, so as you know, because you read it, there are dozens and dozens of these little micro-meditation snacks, these little practices, contemplations starting from Chapter Two as a way to work your way into the deeper dives. And so relatively early on, I bring on this anti-complaint meditation, and I use this all the time. And so simple, simple doesn’t always mean easy, but simple: the next time you feel the urge to complain, no shortage of grist, no shortage of material there, pause for a second, reverse your strategy, so this is a micro reverse meditation. Instead of expressing yourself with some expletive or whatever, pause. Sometimes I’ll literally be opening my mouth going, and I’ll stop. Pause, look within, that’s the reverse strategy, and here’s the investigation, “What am I feeling right now that I just don’t want to feel?” Stay with that.
And I promise you, take a look, you’re going to find some level of contraction. You’re going to find some level of dissonance or discord or unwanted experience in your body, that’s what creates the urge to express yourself. So to me, this probably kept me out of a lot of trouble. You feel the urge to complain, pause, look within at stage three, “What am I feeling? Not thinking. What am I feeling right now that I just don’t want to feel?” And then what do you? You stay with that.
And then very briefly, I have to throw this in because it’s so compelling, the neuroscientists will tell you this, within 90 seconds, the biochemical markers for an emotional eruption will be self-liberated within your body.
Your body knows how to purify the stuff, the innate wisdom of the body will purify this thing. And so this is helpful because if you’re in a funk all day long, or you’re in a nasty, pissy mood, you’re the one that’s doing CPR on this thing. You’re the one that’s keeping it alive long after it should be dead. But this, to me, this has been such a helpful practice. Pause, look within, “What am I feeling right now I don’t want to feel?” And stay with that. A powerful preparatory practice for the deeper dive into the reverse meditation. Make sense?
TS: It does. Very good, very helpful, very accessible.
AH: Totally.
TS: Now, one final question for you, Andrew. I would say you’re a scholar. You’re very well-read, and you have access to a lot of ideas, critical thinking, and yet you write in Reverse Meditation very clearly that “conceptualization is a form of contraction.”
AH: Oh, for sure.
TS: That’s a quote, from the book. So how do you think in a way that is open, productive—
AH: Oh, beautiful.
TS: —healthy. As the scholar that you are, how do you relate in a healthy way to your conceptual mind?
AH: Oh, that’s such a great question. Well, first of all, again, like with contraction, it’s understanding the promise and peril of this aspect of the human mind and the human condition, the intellectual faculty. And very briefly, parenthetically, some scholars estimate that this is the new kid on the block, our ability to rationalize and think conceptually maybe goes back 30,000 years, much deeper is mythopoetic capacities relating to the reality in non-rational and mythic ways. So the conceptual thing has tremendous power. There’s nothing wrong, just like with contraction, nothing wrong with thinking, there’s nothing wrong with concept. We want to use our thoughts. We want to use our concepts. We don’t want to allow them to use us, and this is obviously what happens with such deleterious effects in this environment. And so there’s a difference in my languaging, there’s a difference between cursive and discursive thinking.
So cursive thinking is thinking in concepts that are on track that’s kept in line. This is really important. We couldn’t function in the world without it. And honestly, the reason I have all these books behind me, and the reason I read all this stuff voraciously, part of it is really to increase my skillset in learning how to relate more effectively with others. And so conceptuality can therefore be used in a really healthy way as an upaya, as a way to meet others where they’re at. And so I roll a lot in the academic, scientific community. I work with scientists all the time. I hang with these peeps. I’m just with this community a lot. And so if I can’t speak their language, man, they’re not going to listen to me, so that’s one reason I do it. There was something else I was going to say around this.
Oh, yes. That when you actually look at the nature of thought itself, there is such a thing as non-dualistic thinking. You know this, thinking in and of itself is just the play, the shine of the mind. Thinking is never the problem, inappropriate linking thinking is the problem. Linking concepts, that’s the issue. And so there is such a thing as non-dualistic thought. This is thought that arises devoid of the superimposition of another thought. In other words, it’s a ventilated thought. So very briefly, because boy, this is a big topic, think of a thought like a campfire spark flying out in the nighttime sky. Well, in an open mind, that spark dissolves harmlessly in the background of space. You could relate that to a non-dualistic expression, a thought arises non-dualisticly. What creates dualistic thinking is that same thought arises, it doesn’t dissolve into background space. It lands on a vat of gasoline, and then you have this incendiary relationship to the contents of your mind, and all the explosive deleterious effects that arise from that inappropriate relationship, so something like that. Does that make sense?
TS: It does, Andrew.
AH: Say yes.
TS: It does, actually. And to conclude our conversation, you talked about how reverse meditation is a meditation for our time.
AH: I think so.
TS: What’s your vision of how more and more people might become familiar, to use that word, with naturally doing reverse meditation and the positive healing impact that could have at this particular time? What’s your vision of that?
AH: Oh my gosh. What a beautiful question. Well, I have an open-ended vision. I have aspirations, it’s why I write, it’s why I wrote this book. I have aspirations that maybe these skillsets will be as beneficial to others as it’s been to me. And again, I want to restate this again and again, that’s why I wrote this book. It’s not because of all the doctrinal underpinning and everything else. It’s because of my direct experience over, at this point, decades.
And it’s like, “Hey, man, if I can do this, anybody can do this.” So my aspiration around this, Tami, is somewhat open-ended. It’s like what Alak Rinpoche says, “Expectation is premeditated disappointment.” I have a very open aspiration around this that like throwing seeds, on one level, you know this from the Lojong training slogans in Tibetan Buddhism, “Don’t expect applause.” One just does the best that one can, one throws these seeds out, whether they take root or not, hey, I’m not responsible for that.
The best I can do is, perhaps, plant some seeds and see what happens. But with your kind generosity, with Sounds True standing behind this book, which means so much to me, the capacity to reach a wider audience and share with them a skillset that again, has been of such an inestimable benefit to me, and just very briefly, again, I’m not foreign to this kind of stuff. I was a dentist for 35 years. I know all about the psychophysiology and the pharmacology of pain. I’ve written probably 50,000 prescriptions. This stuff is not unfamiliar to me. I have spent decades in the pain business.
And so in somewhat skate, I’m sliding around your question. I know a little bit what I’m talking about when we’re dealing, especially with physical pain, and these skill sets to me with the patients when I was working with them, augmenting medication with meditation, playing on that, perhaps, in this day and age when people are in so much pain, again, this is when we grow. You go to a bookstore, you’re in a heap of hurt. You look at a book that talks about reverse meditation and breaking hardship and pain, and you’re in a lot of pain, you might want to pick it up and say, “Gosh, I wonder what this book has to say,” that’s the best I can do. It makes me happy.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Andrew Holecek. He’s the author of the new book, Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as The Doorway to Inner Freedom. Thanks everyone for being with us. Sounds True, waking up the world.
AH: Thanks, Tami.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
