In the previous blog on Essence Love I said, ”Tsoknyi Rinpoche offers some exercises that when practiced rebalance our subtle body and reconnect or mend our sense of an underlying ‘all-right-ness’. A kind of background inner warmth that suffuses all our experiences”. Here I want to put my hand up and say the word ‘rebalance’ is my own - I don’t think either Rinpoche or Dan Goleman use it.
So why the confession - what’s the big deal? Well it’s really about my struggle with this concept. It’s not that I don’t think we have experiences of welbeing that seem to be deeper or more pervasive than our more volatile emotions - I do. But what I am struggling with is how both authors flip-flop between saying that essence love is an innate or intrinsic quality that is obscured by stress or is a particular psychological state that can happen naturally but which can also be increased and deepened through a variety of presence based exercises. The first is about uncovering as a path and the second cultivation. Finding something hidden beneath a stone or being a kind of gardener of the psyche. Which is it?
At first glance we might wonder does it matter? It’s just words. But when we remember that we have two basic types of practice - doing something and doing nothing - then it becomes important. Remember how this goes: doing something practices like the handshake practice and mindfulness of the breath etc. all cultivate a sustained calm state. It’s the gardening metaphor. This enables us to then practice the much more difficult doing nothing practices of simply resting in non-dual awareness, rigpa. To do this we must do what it says on the tin - nothing - trusting that this intrinsic awareness will be already present once we get out of the way. So here is the uncovering metaphor, what we find beneath the stone is what was always there. We did not need to make - grow, cultivate - it in anyway.
OK, so is essence love something that is already there, hidden somewhere within us, waiting for discovery or is it something, a particular state of basic welbeing, that with practice we can recognise and increase? From my reading it seems to me that Tsoknyi Rinpoche talks about it in both ways while Dan Golman and his references to neuroscience largely, but not exclusively, talks about it as something that can be cultivated and that cultivation actively creates new neurological pathways that deepen and stabilise the experience.
So, for me, it remains a muddle. Perhaps an observation of something that does exist but which has yet to be described accurately. What do you think?
NW. 3 July 2024
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