Making Hostility Fuel for Love and Understanding

I’ve been practising meditation for 10 years, exploring various traditions. I’ve distilled a practice where I sit twice daily for 30 minutes: starting with breath awareness, then being aware of being aware, exploring consciousness’s stillness and infinity, recognising thoughts and feelings as consciousness itself, and finally letting attention range freely. This extends into daily life as continuous non-dual meditation. What could I add to improve this practice? Rupert says: ‘That’s a beautiful practice. There’s not much I can say to improve it. It’s the classic path. You start with the breath, which settles the body mind, then you taste awareness’s two qualities – stillness in reference to your inner life, unlimited nature in reference to the outer. Then you embark on the Tantric path, seeing that thoughts, feelings, sensations arise in awareness, are known by awareness, and are made of awareness. Your meditation then merges into everyday life. If you wanted to refine what happens after the bell, you could add two elements: love, which would be the expression of your understanding in relationship to people and animals, and creativity, which would be the expression of this understanding in your work and activities.’"

This has been an incredible week. I’m curious about what we’ll be missing by not attending next week’s retreat exploring Meister Eckhart. Rupert says: ‘Meister Eckhart was a 13th-century Christian mystic, who expressed one of the highest expressions of this understanding in the Christian tradition. I grew up in the Christian tradition and had to move away from it and go east to find this understanding. But more recently, I’ve come back to my Christian roots and been astonished to find the depth and clarity with which Meister Eckhart wrote. We’re just going to be exploring the same territory – reality. There’s nothing else to explore. We’ll be referring to it as “God” rather than “consciousness” or “awareness”.’

I want to thank all of you. Previously I thought I had to do serious work on my nervous system before I could dance freely without being self-conscious in public. Yesterday, I was almost the last one to leave the disco session. While dancing, I made a video for a friend showing myself dancing sober, saying ‘look at me, I’m dancing and I’m not on weed, and this cup in my hand is not vodka, it’s water.’ Thank you for the safe, loving space. Rupert says: ‘Thank you for sharing that. What a sweet and beautiful being you are. We’ve all been profoundly touched by being with you this week, and I hope we’ll see more of you.’

I want to express my deep gratitude to you and the group. For me, it feels like the end of my world. When I look, it’s just thoughts of being the body, the feelings of being. So, just being and love. Rupert says: ‘Thank you. The end of one world and the beginning of a new world. And not even the beginning.’

"I struggle with something I’ve experienced especially this week. I have prolonged days sensing deep oneness, where thoughts and feelings arise without someone behind them, but after several days, the pull of a separate ‘I’ returns with intense resistance. Is this normal? Rupert says: ‘Yes, Lukas, it’s completely normal. Because you’ve had this recognition of who you essentially are, it’s uprooted the separate self, but the separate self hasn’t completely come to an end. The old habit of thinking and feeling on behalf of a separate self continues through force of habit. There are two explanations: First, as you rest in your being more, you suppress feelings less, because you understand no feeling can harm you anymore. Second, the more you rest in your true nature, the more the separate self feels threatened and has to come back with a vengeance to reassert itself. The fact that you see the mechanism clearly enables you to remain in being and not be pushed and pulled by the antics of the separate self.’"

I’ve been practising being aware of being aware for a few years. The mind wants to partake of stepping back into awareness, which creates uncertainty about whether I’m resting in awareness or if it’s the mind efforting. How does one handle the mind as ‘interferer in chief’? Rupert says: ‘The mind does have some part to play. It’s the mind that introduces you to your true nature. It takes you by the hand all the way back to the threshold of your true nature. But there, the mind has to gracefully let you enter the chamber and remain outside. We can understand that the mind feels offended that it’s not welcome at the party. You have to turn the mind’s questioning back on itself and say, “You are so upset because you’re not allowed to come in. Well, what is it that is aware of this upset?”

Rupert, you seem surrounded by pure love, and from our conversation about ‘what you put out comes back’, that suggests there’s love and honesty within yourself. How do you stay honest with yourself on this path and not get entangled with the mind trying to claim this understanding? Rupert says: ‘Here I am surrounded by love, but out in the world, I receive my fair share of hostility. When anyone goes out into the world to represent truth or love, they draw out of humanity a resistance to it. You use all this for the fire of understanding. You transform it all into love. You notice if it upsets you on the inside – if it upsets you, you are established in your mind, not in your being. Any way where you meet hostility, judgement, criticism, where you would normally resist and defend, you do the opposite. You just open yourself, love more, resist less, so it becomes fuel for this love and understanding.’

I wanted to express my gratitude for the way you embody humility. When I said I’m grateful you’re my teacher, you said you don’t want to be my teacher, you want to be my friend. When I view you through the teacher lens, I’m afraid to get close to you as a human being. Seeing your humanity gives me a model for how I want to be. Rupert says: ‘Thank you, Katy.’

When you spoke about residual feelings and what Eckhart Tolle calls ‘the pain-body’, you said they’re not really in the body, they’re more in the mind. Could you say more about what you mean by the mind in this case? Rupert says: ‘I was referring to a deep belief in the mind that you should be traumatised, that you should be struggling with it. It is the mind that is keeping you stuck to the traumatised events that happened many years ago. The events are not happening anymore. They haven’t scarred your body, they’ve scarred your mind, but the mind is much more fluid than the body. It’s belief. The mind is beliefs and ideas. We often carry around an image of ourselves that’s a mixture of our parents’ ideas about what we should do in life. So, we build up this image of who we should be based on beliefs absorbed from our parents or broader culture. But it’s just a belief. Much of our trauma is in the same category – the mind not understanding, not realising that the event that traumatised us has come to an end and that we are free, we have not been scarred by it.’

I don’t have a question, but I wanted to share something I was going to sing. It’s in Spanish: Entre tu alma y mi alma, no hay distancia, solo calma, solo paz — Between your soul and mine, there’s no distance, only calm, only peace. I felt this unity with this community. Rupert says: ‘That was precious.’