Dan Harris

And so if you're seeing the suffering of comparing, all right, well, that's a wake up.

That's an alarm bell right there to check it out.

And over time, you can kind of disincentivize the indulgence of that.

But it's still going to, of course, as I've said, it's kind of comforting to know it's going to be with us until the end.

Coming up, more audience questions.

What does it mean to step behind the waterfall and see your thoughts instead of getting lost in them?

And how do you work with powerful emotions like anger in real time?

Can you explain it?

Uh, so it's, it's from Jon Kabat-Zinn who is, um, another of the really senior teachers here in the West.

Um, uh, and we, what he means or what I understand is that if you think of the mind as like a nonstop, uh, a stream of consciousness, mostly me, me, me thoughts, uh, just rushing all the time, uh,

If you think of that as a waterfall, then you can think of what's in the rock face behind the waterfall.

There might be a little indentation or crevice from which you can observe the thinking mind.

And so every time you wake up from distraction in meditation and you notice, oh, wow, I've just been in the grips of mana or envy or comparing mind or, oh, wow, I've just been thinking about, wonder if they'll have pastrami at lunch or whatever it is, they won't.

Yeah.

whatever it is, then you are in that little nanosecond there behind the waterfall.

You're not caught up in the contents of your consciousness.

You're seeing it with some hopefully non-judgmental remove.

So does that make any sense, what I'm saying?

Well, I'd be curious to hear from the more experienced teachers on the stage about that.

But in that little glimpse where you're just watching it instead of inhabiting it, you are not attached.