1989-06_17 Anapanasati_ Full Awareness of Breath Series - Tape 15 - Q&A 2

Talk: 19890617-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-anapanasati_full_awareness_of_breath_series_tape_15-33818 Start_time: 00:58:52 Display_question: May I share an insight related to deep trauma? Keyword_search: deep, pain, trauma, relative, beginning, perceive, hold, holding, outside, grasp, author, determinant, memory, event, condition, cause, tightness, surface, impermanence, present, past, reveal, retreat, purification, free, energy, invest, bank, practice, operation, inside, outside, created, closer, deeper, author, internal Question_content: Questioner: I saw a very, very deep matter for me that I was holding onto pain, and I can see that I’m just beginning to perceive it. It’s the relative beginning, but I’ve seen something that I’ve never seen before. When I was very small, I remember different things happened to me: an operation, and different things in which pain came to me. And I’ve always had this nameless pain and a nameless terror. But, as I sat there, I began to see that I was holding onto it. You know, it may have come in from the outside, but I also created it. It was an incredible thing for me, and I have lived so deep for me that it was just as though I was just moving closer and closer and deeper and deeper into the point at which this occurred, whatever is was began to take place. And that I was the author of that. And then I just began to see that seeing the grasping and seeing that I was the author of it that it doesn’t necessarily lead to be that I was the determinant. Larry: Did any of it come up as a memory? Questioner: It came up, not in terms of an event. I’ve only been told certain things happened to me and I haven’t ever known the cause of the condition but I came up simply with the internal sense of this occurring because the grasping and holding onto and the tightness. Larry: Yes. Questioner: But seeing that with my inner eye, I guess, is like something because I began to identify with something that I always felt was outside. Larry: But you see, also factually, that event is over. Right? It ended a long time ago. But the memory of it can be held onto. And it can get between us and the present time. And so that’s another, again, that’s resisting the way things are. So, impermanence also has good news sometimes. The pain ends. That pain ended really. But the memory of it is being held. And, of course, that’s a powerful effect. We all have traumas like that. Break_line: Now, the practice, it comes to the surface. To sit is an invitation for things to start to reveal themselves. If you don’t want to know about this stuff, please don’t meditate. Please don’t fold your legs, don’t come here because this place is an invitation for “Okay, I’m ready now. Let it come.” And, little by little, at its own rate, depending on how you practice and what it is, how much fear there is and so forth, your willingness to work with fear, energy level, it starts to come up. And so the whole point is for it to reveal itself. It’s the only way we can get free of it. Break_line: So it’s a purification process. It has to be dredged up, observed, understood, assimilated and let go of. And then the energy that’s held captive in that process is then yours. It’s free energy now, again, to be used as you see fit. You could use it again in some other goofy way or you could use it in some—now, what I would suggest is reinvest it in the practice. You could use it to reinvest in your bank account. I would say reinvest it in your practice. Of course, I do have a bias. If your bank account is that great, then by all means, do that. I haven’t found it to be that great. It’s okay to have some but… Anyone else, just in general about this impermanence contemplation? Anything you could say about it, give me some sense of how it is going for you. End_time: 01:03:19