Lama Shenpen in conversation with a student about working with their experience in relation to desire, aversion and indifference.

A student writes:

“So as we begin more and more to see that we are continually responding to our experience by grasping, pushing away or being neutral what do we do next?”

Lama Shenpen:

Well it is not so much what do we do as what we don’t do.  We experience something and we grasp at it as something we like or dislike or are indifferent to.

Yet what we are grasping is not graspable.  That is what we have to notice – that is an Ah-ha moment. That is something very, very different from grasping – it’s worlds apart! – not just a little trick to succeed at… It changes us at a very deep level…