“It All Belongs” with Benjamin this Sunday

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

This Sunday, October 12th, Benjamin will lead a practice and exploration of “It All Belongs,” based on Ajahn Sumedho’s chapter “Welcoming Everything” from Don't Take Your Life Personally. Below are selected excerpts from the chapter (pp. 55-62):

People sometimes want to recreate blissful samādhi experiences they remember having had on past retreats. They try to make them happen again by attempting to suppress thought or control things. The point is, awareness includes everything, so it isn’t a matter of thinking you shouldn’t desire anything, that you should just sit there and not have any desires; that would be coming from an ideal again, an ideal of how things should be. So, in awareness, we are not operating from comparing the reality of this moment with an ideal, but rather of accepting and welcoming the way it is ― even if we don’t like the way it is. It isn’t a matter of liking, but of learning to welcome even what we don’t like and don’t want.

[…]

In the Theravada tradition we have this word ‘mettā’ (loving-kindness), and mettā is about welcoming everything. There is nothing divisive or critical in mettā. When you develop mettā, therefore, it is towards everything in the universe. You have mettā for the devils, the demons, the angels, the enemy, the friends, the mosquitos, flies, germs, birds, the precious little kittens and the beloved doggies ― everything. There is no preference. It is not a question of saying, ‘I want 90% of mettā to go to this person and about 1.1% to go to the demons’. You are not being picky about it. It is welcoming conditioned phenomena totally ― the whole range from heaven to hell, from the best to the worst.

[…]

So mettā allows all things because they belong. Everything belongs in this moment because it is here, it is like this. If I come along and say ‘this shouldn’t be here’ that is my personal sense of not wanting something. The reality of the moment, however, is that because it is here, it belongs.

[…]

Awareness, then, is just noticing the way it is ― the way your body is for one thing, and the way your mental state is ― so it is embracing, welcoming, noticing, but not critically. So being aware is being alert, awake, and intelligent; it is an alive sense of being, yet it is not passive or a negative acceptance of life through any kind of resignation to fate. You might have denied and rejected things in the past, but in awareness you include and open to them. Awareness includes even feeling that ‘it shouldn’t be like this’ ― it also includes that! There is nothing you can think or say or do that doesn’t belong at this moment. No matter how complicated your thought process might be, it belongs; no matter what state your body is in or your emotional state ― whether you feel successful and happy or depressed and a failure ― it all belongs.

All are welcome to join this exploration on Sunday! Registration and Zoom information available here.

With mettā,
Minneapolis Insight