The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on July 9th, 2024.

Feel free to read just the bold words and skip the rest.

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Introduction

Having Covid this past week, I’ve felt low-energy and generally pretty lousy.  However, one dhamma teaching that has guided me through this time is this:

There can be suffering, but no one who suffers.

For a non-meditator, that sentence might sound like a riddle from a book of brain-teasers, but for a meditator, it’s a profound pointer to liberation, right here right now.

In today’s reflection, I’d like to share some practical instructions on how to realize this for yourself.

 

Starting with Spacious Awareness

As you read this, allow your body to relax.  Soften the muscles in your jaw, shoulders, tummy, and pelvis.  Allow your body to melt into gravity.  What you may notice as you relax is that a bodily sense reveals itself.  Some awareness that “there is a body.”  It’s not fixated, like focusing on the left foot.  It’s spacious.  There’s a sense of the whole, or at least many parts at co-existing.  Relax into this sense.

Added to this, notice that sounds are also happening.  You don’t need to fixate on one sound or another, but as if you were in a concert of the present moment, relax back and notice how a whole world of sounds are flowing through.

Likewise, allow your visual gaze to soften.  As if you were on a park bench overlooking a nature panorama, you take in the whole of the visual field — the images on the screen, the fact that there are words, as well as the images beyond the screen.

Most importantly, let your mind relax.  This means reminding yourself that this moment is allowed to be just as it is.  You’re allowed to feel just as you do.  Soften your resistances and your desires to figure this out or “do” relaxation.  Soften the striving.  Let all your thoughts and emotional energy be as they are.  If this is confusing, just take a deep breath and trust the wordless relaxation of the exhale.

When we relax any or all of touch, sound, sight, or mind, there is naturally a spaciousness that arises.  A sense of relaxation.  We simply notice the moment happening without fixating on any one thing.  We enter into what’s sometimes called “receptive awareness,” “open awareness,” “spacious awareness” or “natural awareness.”

This instruction is about learning how to rest in “being,” as opposed to “doing.”  It isn’t saying to pivot the center point from one thing to another, to “try” to notice a whole bunch of things, or to intently concentrate on something like the breath.  It’s about learning how to relax into a mode without a center point, taking in the whole flow.

My teacher would often say that there are only two things in meditation: awareness and objects of awareness (i.e. sights, sounds, touches, thoughts, etc.).  Many styles of meditation teach us to focus intently on one object of awareness, like the breath or a mantra.  In contrast, this style of meditation is about resting back into the awareness that holds all objects.

However, we don’t think our way into this!  We relax our way into it!

 

Noticing Fixation

In practicing “spacious awareness,” what you’ll notice is that whenever there is a fixation,* there is some stress/suffering.

For example, you’re resting back in the open state and then your attention gets fixated on:

• Body sensations; i.e. The discomfort in your lower back.
• Sounds; i.e. a traffic noise, song, or conversation in the distance
• Sights; i.e. a moving object in the periphery
• Mental activities; i.e. a seductive thought or a strong impulse to itch your face

You’ll notice that this experience of fixating on something involves a contraction, similar to going from an open palm to a closed fist.  You lose awareness of nearly everything but that center point.  If you look closely, you’ll see it doesn’t feel good. 

For many people, meditating is a process of near-constantly getting fixated on thoughts.  So then they make thoughts into the enemy that steals their awareness.  To fix this problem and make the thoughts stop, they try to concentrate on something, like the breath.  While there certainly is a role for concentration in meditation practice, the problem isn’t the thoughts, it’s the fixating.

In turn, whether it’s thoughts or anything else, the practice is that whenever you notice having fixated, you relax back into openness.  You don’t try to “remove” the object of distraction, but rather invite it into the whole.  Even the fixation itself isn’t a problem — it’s also just something to notice, relax, and invite into the whole.

Perhaps you wordlessly investigate “what else is happening right now?”  You’ll notice that around that one point of fixation are all sorts of other sights, sounds, touches, and mental activities.  In other words, the so-called distraction soon becomes one object among many.  There is again “natural awareness” with no one thing being “fixated” on.

If all of this feels too elusive or hazy, focus your attention on something obvious, like the feel of the hands or a particular sound.  The purpose of this isn’t to laser focus on that something obvious, but rather to use it as a stable anchor to open up more deeply.

To use an analogy, if you come from a bright room and look at the night sky, you’ll initially see only the brightest stars.  However, if you give it time and keep your eyes on Orion’s belt, as opposed to looking back indoors, once your eyes acclimate, you’ll naturally see many more subtle stars.

Similarly, if you start meditation with what’s obvious, and you stick with it for a time, your awareness will naturally open up to the whole field of subtler sensory experiences.  Eventually, the center point becomes unnecessary and you can stay in the more open state.

*I’m using fixation as a translation of upadana, aka clinging, attachment, or identification — what one could call the Buddha’s shorthand for suffering.

 

The Deeper Teaching

Ultimately, this whole essay is a contemplation of the Buddha’s profound teaching on “not-self.”

The most direct way that “I” experience not-self is that when “I” can rest in natural awareness, there is no center point called “me.”  There is just awareness and a flow of sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions, impulses, and other objects.  There is a profound capacity to let all of those objects unfold on their own.  The moment becomes spacious and easeful.

There may be suffering, but there is no one who suffers.

To be more concrete, right now, “I,” David, have Covid.  There is a dull ache coursing throughout the entire body, and accentuated in the head and chest.  There’s an energetic fatigue and a brain fog.  There’s a general feeling of restlessness that fuels all sorts of thoughts and impulses to make myself feel better.

However, by relaxing into spacious/natural awareness, the thoughts are given permission to flow through, similar to how bird sounds flow through the periphery of awareness.  The bodily discomfort is allowed to be here without adding all sorts of resistance.  And if a moment occurs where the mind fixates on a thought or gets identified with the bodily feel, as soon as “I” notice that, “I” relax back into the open receptivity where there is no center point called “I”.  Just spacious awareness and objects.

This doesn’t mean Covid feels good.  This doesn’t mean the body aches and the fatigue aren’t real.  This doesn’t mean “I” don’t exist.  This doesn’t mean that I can just “power through” and disregard the bodily state.

However, it does mean that the whole layer of suffering from identifying with the state and resisting it dissolves into nothingness.  As they say in Buddhism, pain is mandatory, but suffering is optional.  This pointer on spacious awareness & non-fixation is a direct teaching on experiencing pain, physical or emotional, without identification, resistance, and suffering.

The more we practice in this style, the insight into not-self gets engrained into our subconscious.  Even in moments of not being particularly aware, some deep part of our being knows there’s nothing to get worked up over — it’s all just impersonal objects of awareness.

This sort of insight becomes accessible all day long — not just while meditating, but while writing a 1,500 word essay, having lunch with a spouse also in the throes of Covid, or trying to sleep in a house without AC when it’s 100 degrees!   

In other words, we feel deeply okay in our skin, even if everything is turned upside down!

 

Conclusion

It doesn’t really matter if we are feeling unpleasant things like Covid, or pleasant things, like eating great food or experiencing peaceful meditation states.  The teaching is the same.  All of reality is held in the loving arms of spacious awareness, allowed to stay for a time, do a little dance, and pass away into the next perfect moment.

I probably could have written this whole thing using just the three words of my favorite book of all time — Relax & Be Aware.  If you can do that wholeheartedly, even for just 2 seconds, you will deeply understand the truth of this teaching:

There can be suffering, but no one who suffers.

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