So I have to learn not to suffer. And I’ve spent so many, like 10,000 hours, I had that by the time I was 16. I think. And still, I will tell you this: Use it or lose it. You have to continue to do sort of your mental/spiritual hygiene in order to stay in a place of peace and happiness. I keep waiting for an enlightenment where I never go back away from bliss, right? But I don’t think that’s—well, I used to say that’s not going to happen in my lifetime. Now I’m saying it could happen in all our lifetimes.

But lately I’ve been really, really trying to get back in shape. And to do that, I’ve been focusing on a Sanskrit word, which I will now mispronounce. It’s satcitānanda. It is the combination of three different words and it means—I’m trying to get my reference up here—it means reality. They changed all the icons. Okay, “sat” means being or existence, but it also means the truth, the truth of whatever is. “Cit” is consciousness. So it’s awareness, knowledge itself. And “ananda” is bliss.

You out there who are good yogis and Buddhists and whatnot, who know how to say this, please forgive me. I am am self-taught. So satcitānanda means truth plus consciousness plus bliss. And it is supposedly the high state in which you live once you’ve achieved complete enlightenment. But I believe you can sort of drop in and touch it over and over even if you’re not enlightened, which I’m definitely not.

So the process is really simple. “Sat” means whatever’s real, whatever’s true. So right now, look around you. Whatever is happening is true. If you’ve got a migraine, that’s the truth. If you are grieving, that’s the truth. It is what it is. And you are only in this precise moment. You are in the room where you are, nowhere else. You are in the moment where you are. No remembering. No projecting into the future. This. Truth is what is now, one definition of it.

So that’s reality. Now you bring consciousness to it. So you look around at what is and you say, “Ah, I am aware of all this.” And if you’ve practiced it—I can feel my skin starting to tingle all over my body, which means that some of you, I think this means that some of you just went into consciousness observing the present moment. There’s an immediate shift in the sense of being what you are. You stop feeling like a product of your environment, like a victim of your circumstances, and you become this eternal consciousness looking at this very moment. So I can feel that some of you just did it, and I did a bit of it myself because I was talking about it.

 

And then you have the “ananda,” which is the bliss, the absolute highest, most fulfilling experience you can have. So it’s easy to do “sat,” like here we are. It’s pretty easy to do “chit”—consciousness—because the awareness is always available to us. But how do you get to the bliss of the present moment?

Well, there is a meditation teacher I love, his name is Shinzen Young. I’ve quoted him many times on The Gathering Room. And he’s a mathematician and a physicist. He’s a math professor, I believe, and he’s also a zen monk. And so he describes zen terms in connection to the way he thinks, which is mathematical. And something I learned from him that I will never forget, and it always works for me, is this: Resistance is the factor that you use to multiply any experience to get levels of suffering. So this is how it goes: Circumstance or pain times resistance equals suffering.

Now here’s the nifty thing—and even I can get this mathematical concept—you probably know that zero, whatever you multiply by zero, is zero. So whatever you multiply with zero resistance is zero suffering. Pain times resistance equals suffering. So you can have no pain and you can have no resistance to the moment. And it’s like, “Oh, this is really nice. I’m really enjoying this moment. There’s no resistance to it. Yay, I’m in ananda, I’m in bliss.”

Or you could be uncomfortable, depressed, tired. And if you sit in that and say, “Here’s the reality—”sat”—I am tired. I’m having a gloomy day. My mood is down. That’s what is. I’m conscious of it. I’m looking at it. And now I will multiply my pain by zero resistance.” So that means you stop trying to make this moment be any different at all from what it is. And when you can drop all your resistance and allow what it is to be, sure enough, in that moment you drop into satcitānanda, and there are these little breaths of pure bliss that give us a kind of preview, I think, of what it might be like to be enlightened.

So I had an interesting day with this. I was getting all ready to do The Gathering Room and everything, and then I went over to see the rest of the family and they were all getting dressed to go sledding. And I was like, “Ooh, I had not factored in sledding.” As I’m recording this, there is a blizzard blowing in to upstate New York and they’ve closed down all the schools and there’s a huge—like all the weather events this year have been major. So there’s this huge blizzard and there’s a lot of snow and a lot of cold. And I thought, “I don’t want to go sledding.” Because I remember sledding as involving quite a bit of suffering. There’s the cold. I was always out—as a kid, I was always out in my brother’s, two pairs of my brother’s cast-off Levi’s and like a blanket. I did not have proper snow gear. And then there were these incredibly long steep hills in the Rocky Mountain foothills where I lived. And so it was basically about getting completely soaked to the skin in wet cloth and then climbing a precipitous snow-covered hill 27 times. It involved suffering. Very small suffering but suffering. 

And I thought, “Okay, all right, I can do this. I’ve been thinking about satcitānanda all day, and I’m going to go out sledding with them.” And it turned out that I ended up being the only one to go sledding with Lila, the five-year-old, and it was her first big sledding trip. So first of all, I let go of all resistance to having to— not having to, sorry—to deciding to go sledding, come hell or high water. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going out to sled. Okay, I’m in the car with my loved ones. We’re going, this is fine. This is good. Drop all resistance to what is.” Dropped it. Oh, little puff of bliss. Get to the hill, Ro’s there, but she has to do something else. She’s on a call on the phone, business call. So I’m the one who’s running up a snowy hill with Lila and then running back down after her over and over. And I would not have thought I would enjoy that, but I kept saying, “Okay, I’m going to climb this hill for the 20th time, and it’s in deep snow, and it’s heavy going, and I have no resistance to it at all.”

And suddenly the crunch of the snow became beautiful and the kids around me, there were teenagers with their little snowboards on this little hill, and I started to feel their joy. There were a couple of other little kids there, and we were joking. The moms were joking with me, and it all became really, really blissful. So then I was thinking, does it work with actual pain? Because this is my whole thing as a coach that if a principle of living works when you’re in a privileged ideal state—which, let’s face it, is what I was in when I was going sledding with my kid. I was not in any kind of environmental suffering. It was a slight deviation from my plans. That is all it was.

But I did have a surgery where the recovery is considered pretty painful to the point where they threw every kind of painkiller known to man at me, and I was taking them all at the same time, and it still just took the edge off, barely. But probably because of a lot of the painkillers, it was a really good opportunity to practice satcitānanda. The first four days, the surgeon told me, would be really, really hard. And after that, I would just lie there. I broadcast The Gathering Room from lying down for about eight weeks because I couldn’t get up for eight weeks. So I lay there and there’s this tremendous amount of pain going on, and I would multiply pain by zero resistance. 

So I’d say, “This is the reality. My foot’s been sawed in pieces and pinned back together with metal pins that are sticking out of it. I’m in a lot of physical pain. I’m not going to be able to get off this bed for two months, and we don’t know if the surgery even worked. The bone has to regrow. And so there’s a lot of uncertainty in the future. There’s a lot of pain, physical pain in the present. There’s a lot of frustration for not being able to sort of live my life. Let’s take that as what is. Let’s become really conscious of it, and then absolutely drop all resistance.”

And I’ll probably eat my words the next time something painful happens to me, but y’all, when I went into the pain, deliberately just dropped into it and said, “It is what it is. I have zero resistance to it. In fact, as consciousness, I feel curious about it,” I went into the pain in my foot, and it became similar to having a really deep tissue massage where it can be painful, but I personally really like deep tissue massage. And so I was like, “Oh, this is a really deep experience of bliss. This has taken me someplace really, really exquisite.”

And this is what Shinzen Young says. He says if you’re in extreme physical pain, even to the point of fainting, like the most pain you can be in without fainting, if you can meet it with no resistance at all, you go into a state of absolute bliss. The pain/bliss equation. It’s like whatever level of pain you’re in, if you can meet it with no resistance, it becomes that level of bliss, which sounded so strange to me when he first said it, but after I’d been through that physically painful experience, I know this to be true. 

So lately, I’ve been going around, it’s been, we call it the “winter of our discontent,” which is a quote from Shakespeare. And the reason I call it that is because it had huge, massive snowstorms, incredibly cold temperatures, a huge icicle grew on our house, and is now pushing water backwards through the roof so that our house is melting as we sit in it. And they’re just like drips coming from everywhere. And it’s been gnarly, y’all. For an extremely privileged person, I’ve had a difficult winter. Nothing like what other people are having in other parts of the world, I know that. And even in other parts of upstate New York, for that matter.

But wherever we are, I’d like to do the Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation in a second, but first I want you to find satcitānanda. And I just repeat that word to myself. Once I learned it, I said it over and over all day: satcitānanda. Every moment where I remember to think it, I do these three things. I take my attention back from what is past and what is future, I bring it squarely into the present. I look at what is around me right now. I look at what is within me right now. And I don’t fight it at all. I just absolutely accept that that is my reality in this moment. I don’t have any protest about it. It just is.

Then I go into, “I’m a consciousness looking at this.” It is an apparently physical world and consciousness looks, and whenever I say that, I don’t know if this works for you, but I become intensely curious. I feel like someone from another galaxy who’s watching this and going, “Ooh, what’s this like? What’s that like? Ooh, this is cool.” I’ve never felt like I’ve been fully integrated with my human self. I’ve always just felt like there’s a consciousness attached to my body that is very curious about this supposed physical world. So I always go, “Oh yeah, this is what’s real. Only this. Let me be consciousness watching this.”

And then: Where is there suffering? Where is there attachment? Where do I wish things were different or I’m grasping for them to stay the same and they never will? They’re always changing. That’s part of the reality. And I just multiply that by zero resistance. I surrender to what is real, and it’s working now like it works every time.

There is a sense of deep bliss. Shinzen Young calls this “the flavor of purification” where this three-step process, looking at what is, knowing that we are consciousness, and refusing or dropping all resistance—that creates this, he describes it like a grindstone that’s taking all the sharp stones of pain and resistance in us and grinding them smooth at a very, very deep subconscious level so that even our deeply entrained, deeply entrenched pain responses become smoother and then smaller. And then he says, ultimately they’re just like a fine sand and then they drift away.

So the flavor of purification, that sense of having a deep tissue massage to your subconscious, that’s what you can have moment by moment by moment if you just get that three step process going. Such so we’re going to do Space , Silence and Stillness, but I want you to precede it by just looking around the room: “This is what is.” Not what was a minute ago when I said it before. Look within you, whatever it is, not like it was when I said it a second ago, not what it will be in a second from now, but now. Consciousness watching it with great curiosity. And then zero resistance. Multiply the experience by zero resistance, go into ananda—bliss.

And now ask yourself the trigger question, not to answer it, but simply to pose a question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Repeat that to yourself a few times. Not the answer, just the question. Can I imagine the distance between myself and the screen I am watching or whatever else I’m looking at? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and my heart? Can I imagine the space within the atoms in my heart, infinite space inside the atoms of my heart? Can I imagine the space that makes up most of my physical being the vast majority of it? Can I imagine it continuous with all space? Can I imagine the silence that is holding all sound? Can I imagine the stillness under all activity? The stillness that holds my heart and the space inside my beating heart and the silence beneath the beat of my heart?

Thank you for that. It always feels so much more magical, magical when you’re here with me. It definitely multiplies the experience by many, many fold. So if anybody has some questions now, we will answer the questions. I don’t see any yet. Open my chat. Let’s see if there’s one there. Okay. Okay, Ro has sent some, she says.

[Question]: “Hello from London. Quick question: How to know if I’m ready to be a mom? I seem hesitant, but can’t understand if it’s because of the fear of the unknown or a gut feeling I should listen to. Thank you.”

One question: Do you want to be a mom? So just look at your heart. Be here in this present moment. Let your heart feel whatever your heart is feeling, be conscious of it without judgment. What are the desires of your heart? Everyone on this call, what are the desires of your heart? Because I really believe that is God’s handwriting in there. And if it’s love pulling you forward, ignore fear. If you did nothing but this one thing, every single decision you make, you make the decision that feeds love and not the decision that pushes away fear, you would make the right decision every single time. You would have the absolute best life you possibly could.

So do you want to? If the answer is yes, no resistance. There’s fear, I’m scared, what if I’m not a good mom? What if bad things happen? There’s the fear. Drop all resistance to it. I’m observing my fear. There it is. I’m conscious of it. With no resistance, the fear starts to just, poof. It becomes a different kind of emotion. It becomes something like that flavor of purification like, oh, going forward into this difficult experience, which would cause people to be afraid, justifiably. If I do it with no resistance, it becomes this incredible adventure. Like running up— from the sublime to the ridiculous—like running up a snowy hill for the 20th time. It’s like panting with your legs burning. You do that stuff without resistance, it all becomes bliss. So effort becomes bliss, and fear—what gave you fear—can become the source of bliss if you drop into this three steps. Satcitānanda, I’m not saying these things right. Sat-cit-ānanda. 

All right, someone else says, “I find it hard not to sit between consciousness and thinking to being in the moment. Is this normal?” 

Yes, consciousness and thinking are not the same, but you will notice that there is thinking happening. What notices that thinking is happening? That’s the consciousness. Consciousness is like a huge set of very curious eyes and ears, just going, “What? What? What? Oh, there’s thought going on. Okay. There’s self-criticism going on. Okay, I’m going to watch that. Oh, that’s not right. There are all kinds of emotions going off inside. Okay, I’m going to watch that too.” So there’s no resistance with consciousness. It’s purely descriptive. You’re not trying to make sense of it, you’re just watching it. And then when you drop the resistance to it, the bliss comes in from the side.

All right, someone says, “How do you balance being in this bliss and also taking action? I think of action as a spiritual practice, but also stillness.”

Yeah, the challenge is what T.S. Elliot said, “to be still and still moving.” So you start to move through the world. And at first it’s good to practice on activities where you can sort of bring yourself into the present. So one of my jobs in our family is that I always clean up after dinner, I clean the kitchen and I wash the dishes and everything. And it’s perfect opportunity to practice satcitānanda. You go into a kind of trance, feeling the hot water on your skin. It’s a really, really easy place for me to drop in. You can do the same thing, even if you’re in line at the DMV. It can be such torture, but then you remember that it’s only torture when it’s multiplied by some sort of resistance. Drop the resistance to zero: satcitānanda. 

That happened to me at the DMV once. It was hilarious. I’d literally been there since five in the morning. It was like afternoon and I was not happy. And I dropped my resistance to being in that moment, and immediately everyone in the room seemed really beautiful to me, including the one woman who was serving almost all of them. So when I got up to the desk after waiting for seven hours, I was like, “I can’t even imagine what kind of day you’re having.” And she said, “Five months ago, I had a heart attack in this chair.” And everybody around was like, “Oh no, really?” And suddenly the whole group became—we were all together in this, including the lady who was trying so hard to please everyone. So it spread really quickly to everybody else. And I’m not saying I did all that, but I sure noticed it because I did this little practice. 

All right: “What advice could you please give me some four weeks since my 83-year-old mom passed away? I’m still meditating, but would love your thoughts. Thank you.” 

Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry. And there is a depth and sweetness to grief. I would not choose it for you. I would not choose it for myself. But if you have to be in it, and you are, that’s reality. That is “sat,” that is truth. “Chit” looks at it and says, “Oh, beloved. Oh, beloved, you have lost your mother. Of course you need to grieve.” As surely as I needed to lie down after that foot surgery. And then you go deep, you allow the grief to come up and you multiply it by zero resistance, grieve to the limit of your grief, let it flow through you. And it is intolerable until it starts to become—I remember at times in my own life when I was grieving so hard, I just thought I would vaporize. And I remember thinking, “This is so terrible, it’s almost sweet.” And then I had some really beautiful experiences later on in life, and I said to myself, “This is so beautiful, this is so sweet, it’s almost terrible.” So there’s this weird thing where if you encounter the so-called negative emotions like anxiety, grief, depression, even, and you have no resistance at all to them, they become the ingredients of something very sweet. And there’s glory in that.

My friend Jill Bolte Taylor, who had a massive stroke and then built her brain back, she lost both her parents in one year and she was close to both of them. And she said, “I knew how beautiful it was to be able to grieve.” She told me. So she just went to live on a boat in the middle of a lake and just allowed the grief to consume her and just carry her away, but not in any kind of self-harming way. It was because she knew there was glory and love when we think we’ve lost something. There’s a beauty in there that goes so deep and ultimately connects us to the ones we’ve lost. So I would really, really recommend that. 

Lots of questions. “I’m losing my vision, and for the first time, did the SSS meditation eyes open and tried to stop my resistance to vision changes.” Wow. Tears. “Can you talk about eyes open or eyes closed meditation?”

 There are two ways I meditate. One is with eyes half closed, and I sort of look down and choose a focal point and don’t move my eyes at all. And the other way is to look up and find a point that is in the center of my visual field and then allow my attention to broaden. And you can try that right now. If you’re looking at a screen somewhere or your phone, whatever, look at it. Don’t move your eyes and open the field of your vision as much as it can. I had some rapidly advancing cataracts that took a lot of my vision for a short time, and it was hard not to be frightened of it. And when I did the eyes-open meditation, it felt like consciousness was seeing rather than my eyeballs seeing. It felt like it shifted to a different kind of vision. And actually, there are people who have no eyesight, who actually—there’s a Turkish painter named Eşref Armağan, who was born without eyes and who paints really realistic portraits and things because he’s watching people with his consciousness. So this is a tragedy and an opportunity, and whether you meditate with your eyes open or closed, it is when consciousness starts to look out from your body that you begin to experience satcitānanda. So great love to you and I wish you all the best.

Okay. Someone says, “How can we translate this state of wholeness into rather stressful work situations?”

 It takes a few breaths. It takes, “Okay, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to do the satcitānanda right now. I’m going to just have my fingers on the keys of my computer and I’m going to look at the screen, but I’m going to take three breaths as if I’m reading something on my screen. This is the work situation. I cannot stand that man over there. They’re working us way too hard. Wow. That’s what is real. I’m conscious of it. What a difficult situation. How is my human going to handle this?” Zero resistance in that moment, and you’ll drop in. And then you’ll have to go back into this really stressful situation and you’ll lose it again. But that’s the whole point. It’s like, as I always say, you lose your grip and then you push yourself back into satcitānanda. You lose it, you push yourself back in. That’s what builds the neural pathways that take you back into that state. And the more you go into that state, the more easily you go into it and the more deeply you can sort of root into it.

 Okay, I am going to stop answering questions because we’re out of town. What is wrong with my mouth today? We’re out of time, but we’re also out of town because we’re actually on the interwebs. So we’re in that other town in the sky. So everybody in the Wilder community, remember we have a group meditation at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, US Eastern Time.

All of you all over the world, I’m so grateful that you came “out of town” to visit with us here. I wish you all great joy and just remember that to go into satcitānanda over and over and over until we meet again on the next Gathering Room. Thank you. Bye.