Playing With Untangling the Mind

Even when my intellect and emotional life feel like they’re in tune, I still have so many old, internal, tangles in my mind. And in any given moment, those tangles can cause me to tense up, grab hold, or turn away. 

My tangles were probably formed a long time ago. Daily practice helps me to see them more clearly, and to begin, slowly and playfully, to untangle them. Practice that’s oriented towards connecting with and generating good will for myself and everyone, feels especially helpful. 

Which means, practicing with the notion that everyone is basically the same: that everyone wants to be safe, happy, and healthy, and to live with ease. This is no big leap, really. At some level we know it’s true. But practicing with it as a notion, keeping it front and center, training the mind to remember we’re all in this together, training the heart to remember that we’re all connected? That feels like a commitment. A playful one, if we let it be, but a commitment. 

It probably won’t change the world (unless it will). But it does feel like a good way to practice, and live. 

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 496. Today I thought I’d start to share about the metta retreat I sat a few weeks ago. And the first thing I want to say about the retreat is that, like all retreat practice I think, it was essentially a nine-day invitation to untangle the mind.

The retreat was at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. There were pretty much no external distractions (although if you’ve been on retreat, you know that the mind gleefully generates plenty of internal distractions, which I’ll say more about in a minute). And it was all practice. In addition to formal practice, we were invited to practice as we ate, showered, fell asleep, woke up, did our yogi jobs, rested: to practice, all the time. 

And since it was a metta retreat, the practice was metta. I talked earlier this year about metta, which is the first of the four Brahmaviharas, or heavenly abodes – called that because it feels heavenly to abide in these states of mind, states of heart. The four again are metta, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Brahmaviharas have easy, one-word English translations but I’m using the Pali word, “metta” for the first Brahmavihara because that word gets translated differently by different teachers: as love, lovingkindness, unconditional friendliness, positive personal regard, and in other ways – something for another Wake Up Call.

Practicing metta is systematic, just like practicing insight meditation is systematic. With insight practice, the invitation is to follow the breath and when the mind wanders, to kindly return to the breath. Or to follow and return to sound if the breath isn’t supportive. 

With metta, the invitation is to incline the mind in the direction of lovingkindness by repeating a set of well-wishes for different populations, starting with yourself. In the ancient teachings it’s said that you can search the whole world over and not find anyone more deserving of love than yourself, plus we know from psychology that whatever attitude we hold towards ourselves is the attitude we hold towards others and the world. So the invitation is to develop an attitude of kindness and positive regard towards ourselves, and then let that flow out into other populations and into the world.  

The classic phrases, which we’ve practiced together here and I’m guessing many of you have had other opportunities to practice, include wishing ourselves and others safety, happiness, good health, and ease. But before reciting them, the practice is to generate a wholesome desire for them to be true. Sometimes metta can be offered as a kind of fake-it-till-you-make-it practice, but adding in this first part of generating a wholesome desire for the well-wishes to be true, shifts things, or at least shifted me, towards a much more genuine and authentic practice. 

To generate that wholesome desire, we first call to mind a being for whom it’s really easy to have good wishes. That could be a dear friend, grandchild, grandparent, pet, religious figure, here or long gone – any being for whom, when we bring them to mind, we feel an easy, uncomplicated, love. Once we have that being in mind, we then turn that love toward ourselves and others, starting with a dear friend, then a stranger, a difficult person (but not the most difficult one – and the teachers on this retreat said, “no politicians!” for our difficult people), and finally for all beings. And I feel like it’s good to include the earth, too. And so all day and night we recited the wishes, “May I (or may you) be safe, happy, healthy, and live with ease.” And whenever the mind veered off, the invitation was to come back with metta, with love.

We know enough about neuroscience now to know that what the teachings say is also true from a scientific perspective: that whatever we think and ponder becomes the inclination of the mind. The idea is that if we intentionally and consistently incline our minds in the direction of kindness towards one person or population, we are carving neural pathways that make it much more likely, and eventually highly likely or even certain, that when we encounter that person or population again, our minds will automatically enter into the encounter with kindness. But that without intentional practice, quite a bit can get in the way of doing that. 

Tempel Smith, one of the retreat teachers, talked about being intentional versus what can get in the way, as practicing to “untangle the mind.” He referenced a teaching where someone asks the Buddha, Tangled within, tangled without, these people are tangled in tangles. I ask you: who can untangle this tangle? And the Buddha replies that a person “developing the mind” can untangle the tangled mind. 

This resonated for me as the days went by. I noticed that my mind was tangled around a number of things: past events it imagined it could magically change, future events it whispered it could magically make happen or not happen if only it wound around them tightly enough and for long enough, wishes for myself and others that it claimed it could conjure into being if I “put my mind to them.” So many tangles! For the first few days it felt like most of what I could see was tangles. 

What Tempel was saying was, while you’re here on retreat, where there are so few external distractions, you can see the internal distractions the mind generates – the tangles - more clearly. And you can also, over time – over the retreat, over a lifetime – practice lovingkindness (and other practices, too), to support the untangling of the tangles. 

This was a very cool thing to watch, and to help along. It wasn’t like untangling the string of a hoodie, where you dig in and try to push the cotton through the tangle. It was more like untangling a thin gold necklace or the fine hair of a small child: it felt like it had to be done not with pushing or digging but gently, and with love.

Doing the untangling with love, I could see a few tangles loosen – essentially, see the metta phrases, work their true magic, of softening the heart and clarifying the mind. And I could see, too, that this is probably all that anyone is ever doing or trying to do, whether they’re practicing or not, whether they’re doing it with an attitude of kindness or not, whether they’re pointing at wisdom or not, with hate or with kindness, violence or peace: over and over, pushing or digging or gently and kindly, trying to untangle the mind. And how fortunate we are, to be able to do that together, with love.

Let’s sit, and let’s do some untangling practice, aka metta practice.