Laura Bridgman: What is Capacity? What is Awareness?

So, my intention is to talk for about half an hour, but sometimes it's hard to control a talk, so that's my broad aim. And I wanted to talk about capacity. So as I was sitting with you just now, I could feel the silence and stillness. Yeah, I expect quite a lot of suffering was happening in the room. Am I right? Some degree of discomfort and suffering and... Yeah, so there's some stillness with the suffering, not as a, you should be still, but a development of capacity, the capacity to be with something uncomfortable. And of course, our capacity varies. We're with something uncomfortable in an ongoing way, so different ways we might have physical pain or even just today, where I imagine you've been with fogginess. Who's had fogginess today? Yeah, fog, just thick tiredness, which is uncomfortable. Yes, irritability. Yeah, yeah, irritability. Yeah, so when we're with something that's uncomfortable in an ongoing way, when actually meeting the innate way our systems want to move away from discomfort, I don't like discomfort. I want comfort. So we're not only with the discomfort, we're also with that innate movement in the system. I don't want this. I don't like pain. It's normal. Or just the mind state we're in, you know, the familiar parts of our personality, the one who worries or the one who doubts or the one who contracts, you know. So these are also, you know, these are where we meet our edge of capacity. I wonder if it's the same for you, but I still have this habit, even after probably having done hundreds of retreats, I look forward to the retreat, thinking it's going to be pleasant. Thinking somehow it's going to be pleasant, you know, but it's often meeting a lot of this stuff. I was contemplating this talk. I was remembering I did a retreat very early on in my practice, a month-long retreat. I think my first retreat was a 10-day retreat at Amarati. So quite a long day at the monastery. So starting at five, finishing about 9.30, 10-ish. Anyway, I did this long month-long retreat and the teacher, Ajahn Sajito, came up to me at the end and he said, did you experience any peace? And I said one or two moments. And I was kind of pondering, why did I keep going? You know, why? Hmm. Yeah, it's not necessarily rational, but there's one reason I can think. I can't fully remember why I kept going, but one reason I think was those one or two moments of peace. So I'd have moments of relief, but I didn't understand how I got there. And I think I believed in the possibility of learning, learning about that. Well, in fact it wasn't an I who got there, but learning how release is... supportive conditions for that. And one of the things I remember is a lot of learning about wrong effort. So on these early retreats I would... I'd just try too hard, I'd push too hard. I wouldn't listen to my system. I wouldn't listen to my body and my mind and what it could actually do or manage. So on this month-long retreat where I only had one or two moments of peace, in a way we all come with different legacies. We all come with different things we're holding. And that's why it doesn't really make sense to compare our practice to another person's practice. Because we're all unique in the particular experiences we're navigating in our lives and our histories. So the reason I only had one or two moments of peace was I didn't have much experience with practice and I was doing a month-long retreat. I was in the midst of a very sensitive home situation with my mother being very ill. So I was carrying a lot. And I was also not taking into account the particular makeup of my being and my history. Instead of being sort of led by... I'll just skip over that and I'll aim high over there. And my system kept feeding back to me. This doesn't work. Trying to get up at four in the morning, go at it all day. And my system couldn't do that. And it kept feeding back to me by crashing, by getting very contracted. Just resistance coming up. There's like... You know, you may want to go over there and do it that way and have that experience. But the more I override my system and just follow some idea of where I should be, then it doesn't work. So what is capacity? It is... well, one... I'll say different things about that. But kind of talking about awareness in a very simple way. Like just a very simple, ordinary knowing. It's the kind of knowing that... Even in the midst of the suffering also has some flavour of the space and the silence in the room. It's that. So it's not only when the suffering's out the way or the noise's out the way. It's with even... it includes it. It's within it even. So do you know what I mean? It's just the space that's always here. Like right now in this room. Do you know what I mean when I say that? So even though there's a certain busyness in the mind, in our minds or emotions, or there's just who and what we are. There's like Laura in this moment. There's also just this quiet space. And it's when I get busy trying to improve Laura or change or get somewhere, I can lose touch with that and get busy. So it's very simple, very ordinary. It's in the midst of experience. And we start to feel it more when we start to feel like... allow the simplifying or start to experience the simplifying. That's what these conditions support. They just really support simplifying. And it's easier to notice how this is also here. This is quiet. And you're all contributing to that as you sit with, practice with whatever you're with, whatever you're with, as it is, as you are, without believing that you need to move away from that or improve it or follow it. So today we've been making quite a few suggestions about turning towards your experience or making space for your experience. But sometimes we just don't have the energy for that. And we need to honour something in the different ways our system signals to us. I need actually to not turn towards that. I've got the mental, emotional energy to do that right now. And the paradox is that when we're caught up in irritation or the tiredness or whatever's happening for us or maybe just in the space of the practice, it's very natural that things from our past that need to be held more consciously naturally come into that space. And maybe we're just not quite ready to fully hold them. So maybe we will often have these moments where we just feel we haven't got capacity. And one aspect that is a big player in this is the inner critic. Inner critic can have quite a lot to say about where our capacity should be after 50 years of practice, what we should be able to handle, after 10 years or 5 years of practice. Or if we're feeling somewhat overwhelmed, inner critic adds more by attacking us for being overwhelmed. Here you are again. So what really affects capacity are our beliefs. Beliefs. So we can have a belief about progress. So the progress is incremental, so capacity is incremental. You're just supposed to get better and better. We can have experiences of very even getting to places which are quite subtle experiences of meditation. And then some vulnerability will come in. And we lose that centre. And it's like the inner critic, I've got it wrong. I'm not good enough or I haven't made the right effort. Whereas it just might be the truth that that particular level of presence allowed that vulnerability to be, to surface, to be more known in consciousness. So another belief is if we came with any expectation, sometimes even to the meditation, what do I expect myself to experience here? I had it, it's going really well this afternoon. Where's it going now? For the retreat, this retreat is going to be like this. And then something completely other comes in. One of the things we were saying about the nature of flow, deep flow, is when it's possible to feel this awareness, it's different degrees that that space can allow the movements that are happening just to have their movement. So we thought it was going this way, oh it's going this way. And it can just have the movement it's having. So another belief about capacity is I should be clear. I should know what I'm doing, I'm very clear. Have a map, apply the map, follow the map, get where I'm supposed to get to. And this can bring a lot of doubt. You know, when it doesn't work according to plan, it brings a lot of doubt. Well it worked before, and then it's not working now. So we lose our bearings. And then doubt is particularly easy to get caught in. But the solution is always trusting exactly what's happening. So in that moment right what's happening is I don't know. I'm not clear. And I know that's difficult in life to always allow, but in this retreat we've come to experiment with, I've lost my bearings, can that be okay? So the conundrum with when we don't feel we have capacity is that we often use this word backing up. But actually when we're really caught in something, backing up isn't so easy. You know, actually it's a paradox and then when actually something's got a hold of us. So it's more like a sort of indirect invitation. We might feel like something is pushing us to struggle with this. Just know that and allow, I want this to change. I feel a bit afraid of it. And then that sort of general invitation. I'm just going to see what it's like to lie down and just soften my attention. Maybe open my eyes. Do not directly backing up, be sort of inviting the system to indirectly disengage, soften, sit on the bench, gaze at the horizon. And slowly, slowly you discover what actually feeds this jitter, this heart-mind. You actually discover this unique heart-mind is fed differently to this heart-mind. It may be common at ground but it's unique. So there's this teaching in the suttos called the Simile of the Cook. And there's this monarch and they are sitting at their dinner table. They've got two cooks who offers them different dishes to eat. And the first cook comes and offers different dishes and they just peek around the door just to check what the monarch eats, what they eat and what they leave. And the second cook prepares the food but they don't check what the monarch eats. So it's so easy in this practice to... I don't quite know what I'm doing, I better read more. I better get more information. And actually turning towards what is your body signal? What is your heart signal when it feels met? When it feels like you've listened and responded? Even if it doesn't fit the textbook? Even if it doesn't fit what any of us say? If it's got a response from your jitter then it's got some truth in it. So what I've found over my time of practice is as I've learnt to listen well and trust that in a guidance there's been a very, very slow development of capacity. And we meet so many wide range of experience, such a wide range. And it's a process of discovery how to be with each of them. The worried mind, the love, the hate, the extreme fear, the tiredness, the fogginess. And it's this ebb and flow of also listening. When it's my system signaling, this is enough now. I need to rest. How much I rest? Very, very common, very, very common where losing balance is pushing too hard. So that's one of the main things. Actually it's easier to hear the silence when we're making less effort. So even when we are backing up, there's still some awareness there. It's only when awareness is completely gone that we are just in our habit patterns. So it's not so much about what we're experiencing as this simple knowing, just cultivating this very simple knowing that's always here. This awareness is always there in the mind, but we're usually paying attention somewhere else. So just over half an hour. So let's pause for a moment, just see wherever or however this is landing for you. We'll just pause for a moment and then we'll have a shift.