Dear Friends,
Yesterday, I shared Christina Feldman’s idea that with mindfulness, we “turn towards” experience, and then with kindness, we can “stand beside” it. (Some of us may remember Jeanne sharing teachings on this approach too.)
With this attitude, aversion doesn’t have to go away – wow!
Christina says, “we learn to bring an attitude of kindness to the experience of aversion itself, rather than making aversion into the “other” that we cannot accept.” (p.19)
She uses this lovely phrase, “affectionate curiosity”, which she attributes to Ajahn Sucitto, in approaching aversion:
What does aversion feel like How do we sense it in the body? Can we stand next to it without flinching? How does aversion feel in the mind/heart? Is there a sense of agitation, tightness, or contractedness in the landscape of aversion?
page 19
When I googled for “affectionate curiosity”, I found a page from a course on Mindfulness Meditation from Audiodharma. They share what the phrase means in the context of investigation:
It comes out of caring about ourselves and others, about this life and about this world. It is not a cold, superficial analysis; it’s affectionate, it’s warm, it’s intimate. We want to bring a quality of openness into our life and fully experience it without without resisting it, without being for or against our experience, without grasping.
https://sites.google.com/a/audiodharmacourse.org/mindfulness-meditation/week-2-body
The course link also includes an instruction page on mindfulness of the body, which you might want to make your practice today, with affectionate curiosity for whatever may arise, even if it’s aversion:
https://sites.google.com/a/audiodharmacourse.org/mindfulness-meditation/week-2-body/practice-instructions-second-week
Do you notice a difference when you practice with this intention of kindness? Feel free to share your reflections on the blog!
With warm wishes,
Andrea
This is the challenge isn’t it? It really begs the question of how time impacts consciousness. Most craving and most aversion comes from a sense of history… of a before and after… of what I always thought it should be based on who I was…or my fear of becoming what I always feared I would become. In the moment.. in this moment.. if I can truly allow myself to sit in it.. there is no before … no after…. the past and the future become chimeras… stories I tell myself… and I can contemplate them with affectionate curiosity…. i touch this… I approach this… I know this…. I need to find the presence of being to let it all expand… to enter that spaciousness i have always known but always forget…
R
Thanks for this reflection Robbie. I appreciate curiosity that you bring to the practice!
Hi Robbie,
When you say There is no before, no after the moment, are you saying that each moment is so very new here, only now, you never experienced this moment before, so there can no chimeric stories (or judgments/feelings) attached to it? Where you can be just curious about it as if it were the first time you ever saw such a thing –when you look with affectionate curiosity?
Interesting that you experience it as a sense of spaciousness. I hadn’t felt that, but I now see that bringing this affectionate curiosity can indeed bring with it a sense of spaciousness.
Cheers!
Geralyne