August 2023

When we go on a residential retreat, we often hope that our meditation will result in a deepening of concentration: a quality of composure, collectedness, of settled attention. But unfortunately, we can’t force concentration to happen! We can, however, support the conditions that allow it to arise. This simple fact has been really helpful for me to remember. In our meditation practice, we often bring along the cultural baggage of an “I’m going to do this” mentality, and sometimes that attitude can get in our way. Concentration arises when awareness becomes continuous, whether continuous on a single experience like the breathing, or continuous on a flow of changing experience. We can’t force this continuity. We can, for short periods of time, forcefully hold our attention to experience, but this kind of attention usually results in brittle concentration that’s easily broken. So a useful support for our practice is learning how to create a container that allows concentration to develop without being forced. This tends to result in a more stable concentration. Relaxation is one of the important aspects of that container. Relaxation is actually one of the main supports for concentration! When I first started meditating, I thought that you had to force the mind to focus. The idea that one could relax to facilitate concentration did not penetrate my mind for quite a while. But relaxation is quite important. Relaxation in meditation does not mean spacing out! The mind can be both relaxed and alert. Relaxation can take time. Different people need different amounts of time to allow the body and mind to relax in meditation. Relaxation of the body and relaxation of the mind are mutually supportive; when the body is relaxed, it’s much easier for the mind to relax. We all need to find our own way to relax in meditation. For some people, starting with a relaxing body scan can be very helpful: consciously relaxing the muscles of the body in a systematic way. Once the body is relaxed, we see if we can relax the thinking mind. For others, meditating on ambient sounds can be helpful. Since we don’t control these sounds, turning our attention to them can sometimes allow the body and mind to relax very naturally. Setting up a container of relaxed attention is an important framework for the meditation. Once you find a balance of relaxation and alertness, you can learn how to open this relaxed attention to experience: Either directing attention to a particular experience like the breathing, or becoming aware of a flow of experience: of seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching, and emotions and thoughts. When we can learn how to attend to our experience and not lose the relaxation, the mind becomes malleable, and we can skillfully choose to direct the attention to support a deepening of concentration. At other times, we can get out of our own way, and allow the meditation to take its own course very naturally. I encourage you to take the time to explore what it means for you to have a relaxed attention: first of all to learn simply how to relax the body and mind, and then to learn what it means to apply this relaxation to an alert attending to your experience.

One of the great blessings of retreat practice is that we make space to set aside our usual worldly activities. On retreat our main work is to cultivate mindfulness and to practice meditation. We can engage with practice throughout the day, not only in formal sitting and walking periods, but also in the “in between times”: during meals, in our work meditations and sangha service, in having a cup of tea, while brushing our teeth, getting dressed, or even going to the toilet. All day long we have the luxury to explore: “How can I be mindful of this?” Cultivating mindfulness in all our activities supports a steadiness of mind, which creates the conditions for concentration to develop. Not cultivating mindfulness during the “in between times” on retreat is akin to putting a kettle on and off the stove; it takes much longer for the water to boil. With a steadiness of connection to each present experience, the mind is less likely to react to sights, sounds, smells, sensations, thoughts, or emotions, and instead can become interested in the experience itself. Understanding the value of continuity of mindfulness, we have to make some effort to support it. This effort needs the quality of gentle persistence to cultivate a moment-to-moment attention. The idea of practicing mindfulness all day can feel overwhelming, and it’s possible to wear ourselves out through over-efforting or gearing up to try to stay present for long stretches at a time. Effort that supports continuity of mindfulness has a light touch; just enough effort to be present for this moment. It doesn’t take much effort to experience half a breath, to feel the contact points of your hands, to notice a sight, a sound, or a sensation. We make just enough effort to connect with a moment of experience. And then we do it again, and again, and again. Supportive effort lies in connecting over and over again, rather than trying to hold our attention on experience. This kind of effort is analogous to riding a child’s kick scooter. To start you need to put your foot down and push lightly against the ground; just a gentle tap. You probably have to make several light taps to get the scooter going, but as momentum starts to build, you learn what it feels like for the momentum to carry you. You learn to recognize when you can ride for a while without tapping. Then, as the scooter starts to get a little wobbly, you make a few taps again to stabilize the momentum. The effort towards continuity of mindfulness is like that. We gently connect to experience: What is here now? And now? And now? This light touch of effort supports a momentum of mindfulness and we become familiar with the experience of this momentum. We begin to recognize when we can back off of a conscious effort to stay present, and allow the momentum of established mindfulness to simply receive experience: to know a breath, a sight, a sound, an emotion, a sensation. We also begin to recognize when the mindfulness gets “wobbly,” and can gently re-engage with the effort to actively connect with experience. This kind of gentle, persistent effort allows continuity of mindfulness to develop very naturally, without leading to exhaustion. As mindfulness becomes more continuous, we begin naturally to investigate and be interested in experience, and start to more deeply understand the relationships between different aspects of experience. For example, while cleaning a toilet, we might see the arising of a thought, see an emotion connected to that thought, and see how both impact the body. We naturally begin to understand that there is a cause and effect relationship between mind and body, and that there is a difference between a thought, an emotion and the body. In fact, as mindfulness becomes more continuous, deep understanding and insight can happen at any time, not just in the formal sitting and walking practice. Because the retreat schedule emphasizes formal sitting and walking practice, we might believe they are the most important of the retreat and that it is less important to be attentive throughout the day. Yet we miss a valuable opportunity that retreats offer if we don’t explore the gentle persistent cultivation of continuous mindfulness.

Buddhism teaches us that suffering and unskillful states of mind arise out of three basic roots: greed, aversion and delusion. While greed and aversion are often fairly easy to recognize in our experience, delusion is much harder to recognize! Learning about some of the different ways that delusion happens can help us recognize it. One form of delusion happens when we are disconnected from experience; we could say this kind is an absence of mindfulness. We might experience this as being lost in thought, or caught by sleepiness or restlessness. One of the easiest ways to get familiar with this form of delusion is in the moment mindfulness returns after the mind has wandered. In that moment there can be a lingering sense of what it was like a moment before, when the mind was disconnected, caught, or absorbed in its world of thought. This lingering sense gives us a little taste of what this form of delusion feels like. Many different states of mind can have this disconnected quality:  sleepiness, restlessness, dullness, spacing out, or daydreaming, to name a few.  But because it is possible to recognize these states with mindfulness,  they are not fundamentally delusional.  We could say we are habitually disconnected in these states. In becoming mindful of sleepiness or spacing out there is no longer disconnection! Another form of delusion happens when we are unaware of views, beliefs, opinions, agendas, or biases. Many of these unseen biases are based on personal conditioning, familial conditioning, social or cultural conditioning. We all have views about the world, other people, and ourselves. Often they are completely subconscious; we may not even know we have a view: we simply believe the view to be true. In this form of delusion, we can be aware even as we are unaware of biases that influence awareness.  We often meet experience through an unseen perspective that influences what we take in to experience, and how we take it in.  One form of this kind of delusion relates to what psychologists call selective attention. Our minds have the capacity to focus selectively on something and ignore other experience. This is a useful function of our minds, helping our minds stay on the task at hand. Yet quite often when we are focused we are unaware that our minds are ignoring other experience, and believe that our senses are accurately taking in what is happening around us. In one study on selective attention, participants were asked to watch a video in which people tossed a basketball to each other; they were asked to count the number of times the ball passed between the players in white jerseys. Most could do this accurately. However, most participants did not see a person in a gorilla suit walk through the basketball players. This not-seeing is form of selective attention, and is a natural function of our minds. However, when told about the person in a gorilla suit, and shown the video again, some participants denied that it was the same video!  This is delusion, the belief that our senses take in the world in an accurate way. Some beliefs or agendas, if made conscious, are easy enough to see through. For example, once participants are told there is a gorilla in the video, it is hard to not see the gorilla! But some of our views are so deeply entrenched that it is hard to see them as views, and it is difficult to see evidence to the contrary. Deeply entrenched views like this can create real suffering in the world.  For example, a pervasive view in American culture is “America is the land of opportunity. If you work hard enough you can achieve your goals.” This view denies differences of circumstance, opportunity and of oppression. It leads to a delusion in the dominant white culture that can’t see the way cultural systems give invisible advantages to white people, and corresponding disadvantages to people of color.  This view creates deep suffering in our society. Due to views, beliefs, biases, or agendas, our minds take in certain experiences and not others. We may not be able to prevent this, and yet we can become aware that our minds are influenced by such views. One way to open to this is through curiosity about beliefs, especially when we are struggling. We can ask ourselves: “What is being believed right now?” This simple practice can begin to expose subconscious views. Only when views become conscious can we begin to recognize ways they might be biasing our experience. A third form of delusion could be called human delusion:  deeply held views that human beings share. This form of delusion manifests as three basic misunderstandings:  we tend to take what is impermanent to be permanent, to take what is unreliable as a reliable place to find happiness, and to take what is not self to be self.  This is the most insidious form of delusion: it is especially hard to see through because largely we all share these views.   As with personally conditioned views, we can be aware and mindful, and still completely unaware that these views are distorting how we meet and relate to our experience. Meeting experience through these powerful filters we do not even question the beliefs that underlie them. Mindfulness can help us explore these human delusions:  but rather than trying to adopt a view of experience as impermanent, unreliable, and not self, instead be curious about what seems to be permanent or stable, explore what seems to be reliable, and investigate what feels like “I”, “me” or “mine.” Investigating in that way, the underlying distorted perspectives start to reveal themselves.  The more curious we are about how delusion works, the more we can actually recognize delusion, in the moment, as it happens, particularly as we become aware of belief. Seeing delusion working begins to free us from delusion. Andrea offered a recent multi-week series on the topic of delusion. It is available at: http://www.audiodharma.org/series/2/talk/7928/

In mindfulness practice, we often emphasize accepting experience as it is, simply observing what is happening, without holding on to or pushing away experience. Yet, sometimes unseen beliefs or views can creep into “accepting”. So it can be useful to explore subtle, perhaps hidden beliefs even within the practice of accepting. Accepting is the possibility of opening to things as they are. To things as they already are. So often we want to get rid of, to change, or to fix, or to hold on to experience. When we like something, we want it to continue. When we don’t like something, we want to get rid of it. In my own practice, particularly being mindful of challenging or unpleasant experience and aware that I don’t like it, I’ve sometimes seen a subtle belief that an accepting attitude means that not-liking should be replaced by liking. That is, a belief that when there isn’t not-liking, liking will be present, and vice versa. An example from my daily life practice from a few years ago: I didn’t particularly enjoy going to the gym, yet I understood it was helpful, so I went. While working out, I sometimes found a part of my mind trying to convince myself that I liked going to the gym! “I like being here, this is good for me, it’s making my body healthy.” Accepting is not about either liking or not-liking. Our minds don’t usually orient towards this middle ground: what does it mean to neither like nor not-like an experience? We might begin to get a taste of that middle ground if we are simply willing to be with the experience of not-liking itself. Patiently aware of the experience of not-liking, we might have the opportunity to notice the ending of not-liking. At the gym, seeing the mind trying to trying to change not-liking into liking, the mind let go of trying to convince itself that it liked being at the gym, and simply noticed what was happening: “At the gym, and not-liking is happening.” And for a few moments, not-liking vanished. There was simply the activity of being. The ending of not-liking wasn’t the arising of liking! This is a middle ground that we don’t usually orient to: neither liking nor not-liking, experience simply unfolding. Another subtle belief that can be hidden within our idea of acceptance is that acceptance, or allowing, means non-action. So many of our actions come out of liking, not-liking, greed, aversion, confusion or delusion. When those mind states are active, they cannot fathom that action can come from any other place. It can be hard to understand that there are other sources of action. We might believe that allowing means sitting back and not taking action. We might think: if the mind allows or accepts what is, why would I ever do anything? Yet, opening to that middle ground opens a new possibility that is hard for us to conceive of. Wholesome action, equanimous action, compassionate action, wise action: these are a natural response of the heart that not contracted. From the middle ground of neither liking nor not-liking, wisdom acts, compassion acts. It’s a very different place of response. When the uncontracted heart sees suffering or injustice, the natural response is to respond, to take action to alleviate that suffering, without a hint of aversion or greed. Exploring the possibility of this middle ground of neither liking nor not-liking, perhaps we can appreciate that the teachings of the Buddha are not pointing us to creating anything or accumulating anything, but rather, endlessly letting go. Letting go, letting go, letting go.

One of the great things about mindfulness practice is that there are no inherent distractions. Whatever we think is a distraction is simply something else to notice. At the beginning of a retreat, we often offer the instruction to settle the attention on the breathing to collect and quiet the mind. With that instruction, people sometimes have the idea that if anything pulls them away from the breath, it is a problem. The instructions that we offer are actually more inclusive: if we’re paying attention to the breathing and some other experience is pulling us, or it feels like there is a conflict around being with the breath, then we don’t need to stay with the breath, instead we can bring our attention to the very thing we think is the distraction. The sense of being distracted from the breath can happen different ways. For instance, we might be attending to the breath, and a sudden sound happens: someone coughs or sneezes, or a car door slams outside; the attention very naturally leaps to the sound and then the sound ends just as suddenly. People often say that such sounds distract them from their meditation. But what actually happened in that situation? First, the mind was paying attention to the breathing, and then a sudden sound arose and the mind paid attention to that. Often, right after the sound ends we start thinking: “Who made that sound that disturbed my meditation? I need to get back to the breath. I was so settled before that sound happened.” The sound is long gone, yet the thoughts continue. The thing actually disturbing us in that situation is the thoughts! If we can simply recognize that sound is happening, just for a moment, then when the sound ends, we can just notice the next experience: perhaps a body sensation, or an emotion. Or we might choose to reconnect with the experience of breathing, without adding any fanfare about how distracting the sound was. Another way we might experience a sense of being distracted from the breath: we are paying attention to the breath while another experience is happening simultaneously: a body sensation, a pain or an itch. We might notice the experience, consciously let it go, and come back to the breath. Yet the experience pulls us again, and again, making it difficult to stay with the breath. At times it might be possible to stay with the breath, but it feels like we’re forcing the attention on the breath. If there is a feeling of conflict between the breath and another experience, it might be time to turn our mind ful awareness towards that experience, what ever it is, and simply let go of trying to stay with the breath. Aside from assorted “distractions” at our senses, we sometimes feel disturbed by states of mind, like restlessness, dullness, sleepiness, or anxiety. We might have the idea: “I can’t meditate with the mind in this state.” We might think we have to change the state of the mind in order to meditate, or just give up the meditation altogether and wait for another time when the mind is less sleepy or anxious. If this happens, we might be holding to some idea of what meditation is: we might think meditation means being able to choose to pay attention to the breath and to stay with the breath. That is one form of meditation, but sometimes our mind is not in a state to be able to direct the attention in that way. For instance, if you have the thought “I’m too sleepy to meditate,” I’d like to suggest that you might have enough awareness to turn your attention to the sleepiness itself! Mindfulness is like a mirror; it reflects whatever comes in its path. A mirror is not impacted by what it reflects, it simply reflects; beautiful things, ugly things, large things, small things. Sometimes a mirror is coated with steam, and we might have the view that the mirror isn’t reflecting very well. In that situation, the mirror is not reflecting what we would like it to reflect; yet if we think about what is actually happening, the mirror is doing its job perfectly. It is perfectly reflecting every drop of water on the surface of the mirror; it is just not doing what we want it to do. Certain states of mind, like dullness or sleepiness are like the mirror coated with steam. Sometimes we can rouse some energy, which might shift the mind into a brighter state, which might be like opening the bathroom door to allow steam to clear from the mirror. At other times there is very little we can do about a sluggish dull mind, and it may not be possible to direct the attention to a particular experience, such as the breath. Yet it is possible, more often than we might think, to actually recognize the mind is dull or foggy. Mindfulness can clearly know dullness, much as the mirror perfectly reflects the steam. Does it feel like something is disturbing your meditation? Perhaps that very disturbance is asking for attention.

At the end of a recent residential retreat, someone asked me for a simple practice to engage with in daily life. I offered the practice of becoming familiar with what it is like to be aware and mindful. When we more readily recognize the sense of being mindful, the many moments when we are spontaneously mindful start to stand out to us. At times throughout the day, mindfulness happens effortlessly, often for just a moment. This occurs more than we realize, but we rarely notice it. Typically, there is a moment of knowing what is happening, and then we are pulled into thinking, planning, or reacting to it, or we are distracted by something unrelated. We see a snack and next discover we are eating it. A friend says something and we rush in with an opinion. We hear water dripping in the sink, so we shut the faucet off. We notice a stain the linoleum, so we stoop to clean it. In all these examples an initial recognition is overshadowed by a reaction, or even simply by a natural response to the situation. We rarely appreciate the mindfulness required for this recognition. The Buddha understood the value of mindfulness. Mindfulness is not esoteric or mystical; it is simply an ordinary aspect of the way our minds work. The brilliance of the Buddha was to notice it, to highlight it, and to say: this quality is worth cultivating. As we become familiar with the experience of being aware, spontaneous moments of mindfulness become more apparent to us. We then have a chance to appreciate these effortless moments of recognition. By becoming familiar with the act of mindfulness itself, we can recognize that we are mindful more often than we realized. One of the best times to explore what it is like to be present, aware, mindful, is the moment when we recognize we have not been aware of what is happening. In sitting meditation, this moment happens over and over again. We intend to be present for our experience, and then notice we have been lost in thought. The moment we notice we have been lost in thought is a moment of mindfulness; the simple recognition that we are now aware is a way to appreciate the sense of being mindful. In our daily lives, we can also become aware of this moment of remembering. For example, we might be in the midst of reaching for a glass when mindfulness arises. We can then simply pick up the glass mindfully. The act of being aware can become at least as important as what we are doing or thinking. Noticing when we have just been lost in thought, whether in sitting practice or in daily life, is a valuable opportunity to appreciate what the noticing itself is like. We can explore the difference between the mind that was lost in thought and the mind that is present and aware. We can’t really know what it feels like to be lost while we are lost, but when mindfulness returns, there can be a lingering memory of what it felt like to be lost: confused, spinning in thoughts, hazy, or disconnected. When mindfulness returns there is a clarity and brightness to the mind, which is pretty obvious once we start recognizing it. Once we start seeing this clarity, it becomes ever more apparent to us. While we seldom notice awareness itself, it is not something foreign to us. Because it is a natural part of our experience, something within us is familiar with it. If you know you are reading this article, then awareness is already there in your experience. Don’t look too hard for it. Just explore how your experience feels when you know you are aware. Over time, the experience of being aware can become as clear as what we are aware of. As you become familiar with the experience of mindfulness, you will notice yourself coming back into mindfulness many, many times throughout the day. In the midst of an activity, you will suddenly recognize that you are aware of what is happening. You might be reaching for something, walking across the street, finishing a meal, or driving the car. Appreciating these moments creates the conditions for you to recognize these moments even more frequently. You don’t have to wait; you start now.

As we settle into a retreat, from time to time we might experience states of calm, peace, happiness, and joy. Leaving retreat and returning to our daily lives, we sometimes feel that these states are very far from our experience. In your daily life, let yourself be open to the possibility that this kind of mind state does happen throughout your day, perhaps in small ways. We can start to realize that beautiful mind states are more present than we thought they were. Noticing even small moments of happiness and calm will start to have a cumulative effect. That’s the way mindfulness works—in being mindful of small moments of happiness, conditions are created that encourage such states of mind to arise more and more frequently.

In every moment of experience our minds are attending to something. Attention is an interesting factor of mind, partly because it is amenable to conscious control as well as resulting from causes and conditions. In a way, it is like the breath: we can consciously control the breath, or we can settle back and let the breath breathe itself. Similarly, we can consciously direct the attention — for example, we can choose to pay attention to our hand, our foot, our breath, and so on. It is also possible for the object of our attention to be the result of causes and conditions, rather than being consciously chosen. We could say that when we are not consciously choosing what to pay attention to, our habits and conditioning are choosing for us. To illustrate this, when we first learn to drive, we have to consciously pay attention to many things: seeing all the other cars on the road, checking the rear-view mirrors, reading the road signs. Over time those choices become more automatic, and we don’t have to consciously think about them anymore. The forces of training, habit and conditioning direct the attention for us. This is a natural and very helpful part of the way our minds work, especially for learning a skill. The mind can attend to things much more efficiently and quickly when we don’t have to consciously think about them. The more we train in a skill, the more natural and effortless it can feel. Training allows attention to flow without the intervention of conscious choice. Yet the mind is still attending to many things while doing that skill, whether or not we have consciously chosen the object of attention. The factor of attention is quite important in our meditation practice. Often, we train our minds by choosing to direct the attention to an experience such as the breathing. When we notice our attention has wandered off of the breathing, we choose to connect the attention with the breathing again. In this way we gain some mastery over our often unruly minds. In this practice the factor of attention is highlighted, and the meditation unfolds by using attention consciously. In fact, sometimes people assume that meditation means choosing what to pay attention to. In the practice of open awareness, rather than choosing what to pay attention to, we settle back and observe–or receive–what the mind is already attending to. We sometimes call the practice of open awareness “choiceless awareness” because we are not consciously choosing an object of attention. Instead, we watch the unfolding of causes and conditions that draw the mind to one experience over another. So many things happen in every moment, and the mind makes choices about what to notice. When we settle back and allow a receptive awareness, part of what we see is that our mind is drawn to some things and not to others. For instance, when I first started practicing open awareness, pretty much every experience that I noticed was unpleasant. It was an interesting lesson to see how strongly my mind oriented towards unpleasant experience. I said to my teacher, “This can’t be a completely choiceless awareness! Surely if it were really choiceless, the attention would be drawn to pleasant experience sometimes.” Withthatveryfirstexerciseinopenawareness,Icouldseethatmymindhada strong bias. I wasn’t consciously choosing to notice unpleasant experience, but the habits and conditioning of my mind were orienting the attention towards the unpleasant. So, in open awareness, rather than directing the attention with conscious choice, we settle back and watch what the mind chooses to pay attention to. This reveals to us that many processes in the mind are operating automatically, based on habits, causes and conditions. That can lead to a deepening understanding of how our minds work. In our practice, it is helpful to become familiar with both ways of relating to attention, directed and receptive. At different times in our practice, either directed or receptive attention may be what supports us. Sometimes the most helpful and skillful way to settle our minds down is by choosing an object of attention. And sometimes the mind is more relaxed and present simply watching the unfolding flow of experience. Both will teach us a great deal about ourselves!

In our meditation practice we often emphasize exploring our inner, personal experience. Through our practice we begin to open to the personal suffering that each of us experiences based on the conditioned patterns of our lives. Yet as our exploration of our personal suffering deepens, a question can naturally arise: “How can this practice help me deal with the broader suffering of the world?”  Can we use this same practice to meet and explore suffering that is happening on a larger scale?  With racism, war, famine, global warming, religious persecution?   There is, of course, a lot of personal suffering in conjunction with these events, but there is also what we could call a collective suffering, which is broader than the suffering of a single individual.  Can our practice help us to transform such collective suffering? I would like to offer some reflections about how our practice might support transformation around one issue that has been prominent in the news recently, that of racism.  For many people of color in our country, the suffering of racism is a daily experience.  For many white people in our country, the suffering of racism may seem abstract, not relevant to their personal experience, invisible or easy to ignore.   And becoming aware of what we typically don’t see is one of the functions of mindfulness.  In meditation practice, as we explore personal suffering our eyes start to open to the depths of ignorance and delusion that perpetuate that suffering.  For example, before I started mindfulness practice, I considered myself so capable and healthy, I never expected to find a thread of self-hatred in my mind. After I began meditating I started to see this pattern of self-hatred, and it surprised me how much ignorance and delusion had obscured it in the past.   As we open to and begin to be aware of parts of ourselves that we have ignored or repressed, we might think that mindfulness practice is making things worse!  But opening to experience that has been repressed paves the way toward transformation.  Our first response might be confusion, anger or fear: we don’t like it, and we don’t want to experience it.  We might even think that mindfulness is causing the problem.  Yet if we stick with the exploration, we see instead that we are opening to something that has been operating subconsciously.  Now that we are aware of it,  delusion can no longer run the show, and the wisdom that grows through awareness helps to heal and transform what has been repressed. Analogously, in our collective community we can also explore separation, ignorance, and repression. One aspect of the collective suffering around racism is a separation into us and them.  For some, this separation creates a distance that allows them to feel what is happening to “those other people” is not important for themselves, a sense that “it is their problem, not mine.”   For example, those not living in Ferguson might feel the events there don’t have a direct impact on their lives.  Such separation and distance allow people to ignore the issues of others, keeping those issues at a comfortable remove. In exploring collective suffering, I think the first thing we need to recognize is that some people in our communities feel or express the suffering more clearly than others.  When there are divisions into us and them, one group is usually more dominant: having more power and privilege than the other group.  For those in a dominant group, the advantages of their position are often invisible.  For example, many white people would not be afraid if approached by a police officer while filling up their car at a gas station. In fact, they probably wouldn’t even notice the lack of fear. On the other hand, an African-American may feel unsafe in the same situation, given the recent shootings of African-Americans at gas stations. The lack of fear that white people may have in such a situation can be considered an invisible advantage.  Many such invisible advantages and disadvantages delineate the racial divide, creating stark differences in the experience between people.  Those in an advantaged group often don’t actively feel the collective suffering, while those without power or privilege feel the full brunt of the suffering of oppression. Much as the ignorance of unawareness fuels repression of parts of our own psyche , the dynamic of racial separation and oppression is also fueled by ignorance.  Those who are not experiencing the collective suffering are in what we might call a state of collective ignorance.  This ignorance is a form of delusion, which is all the more powerful because it is shared ignorance: people tend to spend time with others who share their world view, creating the illusion that this world view is reality, rather than cultural construction. As we turn towards the racial divides that exist in our communities, those associated with the dominant group may think that noticing the divisions somehow creates them.  Similar to the process of recognizing the repression and division in our own psyches, at first we may wonder why it is helpful to be aware of the collective divides.  One result of becoming aware of the divisions is that those with power and privilege start to feel the suffering of the separation.  Awareness of the separation does not create this suffering.  Rather it reveals suffering that is already present in the community as a whole. Recognizing the suffering of the racial divide can give rise to many reactions.  We may experience confusion, anger, shame, or denial.  Instead of retreating back into the ignorance of separation, right here we can use our practice to explore those reactions. There is something for each of us to work with, personally.   So the collective and the personal integrate and inform each other. As more people open to the suffering of the racial divide, there seems be an interesting dynamic at work.  When more people in our communities hold this collective suffering, the suffering tends to decrease for those who

What is the mind doing, right now? Is it thinking? Is it being aware? Is it searching? Is  there ease or struggle? Whatever is happening in the mind, it can be known. Is it noticing  body experience? Is it noticing feelings, emotions? Any experience, every experience can  be known. No experience any more or less useful for wisdom to arise than any other.  We practice awareness with whatever arises. Sometimes we experience an easeful kind of  awareness, continuity and momentum, when less personal effort needed. It can feel  almost like awareness is doing itself. We like this. We can easily get attached to this  easeful experience of awareness simply happening, and if we’re attached to it, we might resist making the personal effort when it would actually be helpful.  Different kinds of effort may be called for at different times. Sometimes we can settle  back and let awareness do its thing, but often some level of personal effort is needed. The  most basic kind of personal effort is just reminding ourselves: Am I aware? What’s  Obvious? This kind of effort is helpful when the mind is not so settled, when it is  agitated or pulled away in thoughts or ideas. We also might even intentionally connect to  a particular experience such as to breath or body sensation, just to ground the attention if  it’s really scattered, if it’s not connecting easily with experience.  This is our basic practice, reminding ourselves to be aware. The level of effort is  connected to how frequently we remind ourselves. We can tune this level of effort also: a  slightly lighter touch to the effort is simply checking in: Aware? Is there awareness  already? Aware. Not trying to do anything additional about connecting to objects in  particular, but trusting that they are already known in awareness. Sometimes this level of  effort is sufficient. Aware? Perhaps: already aware, as a simple recognition of  awareness that is already happening.  Another support for effort is engaging the sense of curiosity, by using questions. What  am I missing? What else is here? What purpose is this thing that is arising  serving? When the mind is curious about experience, the awareness can be less effortful,  because the curiosity naturally motivates effort.  Sometimes we simply can remind ourselves of wisdom, acknowledging the wisdom that  may be relevant for whatever’s happening. This is impermanent. This is dukkha. It’s just  an experience, it’s just an object. These are just conditions unfolding. This is  nature. When we reminding ourselves of the wisdom, sometimes a natural effort arises, a  more easeful effort. Sometime effort comes along for the ride as we touch into wisdom.  Sometimes wisdom combined with confidence supports effort. When we are confident  that it is possible to meet anything that arises, this can also support a natural, easeful  effort. And even when the mind feels scattered, confused, searching or exhausted or  frustrated, if there’s a moment of not resisting that truth of the moment’s experience, the  mind can relax and a natural effort again can arise supported by confidence and wisdom. Sometimes we think we have to make the effort for wisdom to arise. It sometimes  happens that way, but other times when we stop resisting the truth, when the mind can  fully recognize: This is what’s actually happening, the mind can relax and understand  more naturally. Resistance to experience ties up our energy, and when the resistance  releases energy is freed up, and a very natural continuity can happen, if even only for a  few moments.  What kind of effort is helpful? Is personal effort helpful right now? Reminding ourselves  to be aware? Is curiosity helpful right now? Is wisdom helpful right now? Understanding  the level of effort that is appropriate requires honesty with ourselves, because we do  prefer some kinds of effort over others. Honestly opening to experience right now, not  resisting the truth of this moment’s experience, and not resisting the truth of the level of  effort that would be most helpful.