Self As Story and the Experience of Freedom

This podcast explores the Buddha's teaching on Anatta.  Anatta is often translated as non-self or not-self. The Anatta teaching is not a doctrine of no-self, but a not-self strategy for shedding stress, anguish and suffering that comes with clinging to the mind's "selfing" stories that are at odds with the flow of life in the present moment.  One of the most compassionate insights that arises directly from experience in mindfulness practice is non-identification with the mind's story of self.  This starts with learning that we don't have to believe everything we feel and think.  And not believing the mind doesn't mean we have to try to stop feeling or thinking (this usually doesn't work).  Self stories can be useful maps as long as they are not confused with the actual territory, the experience of life itself.  

“To experience ourselves and the world as interactive processes rather than aggregates of discrete things undermines both habitual ways of perceiving the world as well as habitual feelings about it. ....understanding the philosophy of emptiness or inter-being is not enough.  Ideas need to be translated through meditation into the wordless language of feeling in order to loosen those emotional knots that keep us locked in a spasm of self-preoccupation” Stephen Batchelor in his book Buddhism Without Beliefs

"Herein, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus: 'In the seen will be merely what is seen; in the heard will be merely what is heard; in the sensed will be merely what is sensed; in the cognized will be merely what is cognized.' In this way you should train yourself, Bahiya. When, Bahiya, for you in the seen is merely what is seen... in the cognized is merely what is cognized, then, Bahiya, you will not be 'with that.' When, Bahiya, you are not 'with that,' then, Bahiya, you will not be 'in that.' When, Bahiya, you are not 'in that,' then, Bahiya, you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering."  The Bahiya Sutta, The Buddha

"Nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as 'I', 'me' or 'mine'" The Buddha