how’s everybody doing? a few days ago I shared some notes on how much I love the book Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation on twitter. resharing them here. enjoy!
bruce tift's book is one of my favorite books ever and is lowkey lifechanging. here are some things I'm appreciating about it:
attention is all you need...on your body sensations. it's funny how long we might spend meditating and still just refuse to go down into what the actual body sensations are like, without commentary, without trying to change them, without trying to bliss out, just being with them as they are
"enlightenment", whatever it is, is not going to fundamentally change your humanity. an enlightened human is still a human, and humans have the following tendencies: they experience all the emotions (including the "bad" emotions like sadness anxiety fear anger envy), they feel physical pain, they get disappointed by life, and they are forever capable of hurting people or behaving unethically
the book kind of feels like a spaced repetition exercise for embodied immediacy. on a surface level, he's kind of saying the exact same thing over and over again like a hundred times. but somehow, if you actually pay attention to it, you start to go, oh wow this is really doing something and it's hitting deeper and deeper every time
he asks you to approach the contradictions of life "without hope of resolution," without hope of "solving" your experience of being a human, because your experience is not something to solve but rather is an endless, ongoing, often-challenging process. life will continue to be challenging at times, forever
"without hope of resolution" to me also means, stop meditating with the hope of achieving something, with the expectation that it's supposed to make you feel good or you're supposed to be different in some important way on the other side of it. if you're meditating with the hope that you feel better, you are completely missing the point and are just playing an ego game.1 the point is to continue to build a tolerance for your experience as it is. "enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment"
whatever we may believe about "enlightenment", you will continue to undergo further development as a human for the rest of your life, if you choose to
PS I actually got into this book through The Field, and in particular the blog post A Simple Practice for Meeting and Metabolizing Difficult Emotions. I strongly recommend everything on that blog!
hold this view lightly, different people need different views at different times