Sunday Morning Meditation, March 8th

Dealing with Feelings of Regret

David Oromith

Hello, Hello, Hello. Good morning, everyone. Wonderful to see you all. Thank you all for joining this morning. I do hope you’re all well since I’ve seen you last. So lovely to see so many faces, really. So I think we’ll follow the usual format: we’ll begin with our meditation, then our short talk, and then our discussion.

So I invite you all to please find a comfortable posture and then we can begin our practice.

Meditation

We are immediately inviting our body to come to rest.

And as we find a posture that is comfortable and allows us to be relaxed and at ease, but also a posture that is alert, that allows us to be wakeful, vigilant. As we find that balance and find that posture, we can bring to mind our most meaningful motivation for this practice.

Really inspiring the mind to practice with a meaningful motivation.

With that motivation, let us then enter into the practice by dropping our awareness into the body. Connecting with how your body feels right now, your immediate experience of your body.

Aware of- yes – the raw tactile sensations as they are arising, but also any sense of tension, tightness.

Any particular moods mapping themselves across your body.

And just inviting the body to relax, to soften a little bit around those areas that are tight or tense.

If you notice at this early stage of the practice you need a little wiggle or a little movement just to help you release that tension, then we can do that.

Then once we feel settled, finding a sense of stillness in our posture.

Taking a couple of deep breaths, breathing slowly through the nose, into the belly, into the chest and breathing gently out through the mouth, feeling everything relaxed, just that little bit more soft, bit more at ease.

Do five of these in total: five slow, deep breaths, really extending the exhale as much as you can, comfortably inviting in the softness, the ease. Sense of release with the out breath. Whatever’s been causing you to tighten, to hold on, to grip – a sense of releasing that with the out breath.

Just letting your breathing return to its natural rhythm as you just watch and attend to the flow of tactile sensations in the body. The movements of the breath, any tingling, vibration, or any other kind of movement or motion, sensations of temperature.

As you maintain this full-body awareness: awareness of the outer surface, as it were, but also any sensations within the space of the body. Let’s continue to let there be this sense of greater and greater ease with every out breath, as if you are relaxing just that little bit more with each out breath.

With each out breath, let there be a releasing of any ideas or thoughts, memories: whatever’s going on in the mind, whatever’s troubling you, whatever’s very active. Almost like you were blowing it away with the out breath to release the entanglement, the involvement with any mental activity.

So coinciding with that, really giving yourself permission to be at rest, to be still, to not have to engage with all the planning and remembering and worrying. For now, we can set that aside. We can pick it up later.

But for now, this moment, we can simply be present: to be present with the immediate experience of our body.

Perhaps there are sounds in our environment.

Any smells you can be aware of.

If your eyes are open, or partially open – the visual appearances.

So just allowing ourselves to rest here, present with whatever is arising in our immediate environment by way of the five physical senses. For now, setting aside anything going on in the mind, purely mental activity.

Seeing if there can be this sense of ease with whatever is arising. Not seeing a particular sensation as unpleasant or a sound as annoying, for example, but just welcoming everything in equally, being aware of it equally.

If any tension arises: tension in the body; or tension in the mind; tension because of something happening in your environment – with each out breath. just let there be this ever-deepening sense of release: release of control; release of needing things to be different; releasing of tension, of craving, of gripping.

Easing into allowing your experience to be exactly as it is, being mindful of it, aware of it

So we can continue practicing this way with this awareness of the present moment: whatever is arising within the physical senses. Or, if you prefer a more narrow point of focus, you can turn your attention specifically to the sensations of the breath in the body.

Simply doing our best to remain with our objective focus.

If we do get distracted- we get lost in thinking, then just happily letting go: releasing perhaps with the out breath, bringing our attention back.

Again if you find that your mind has wandered, just inviting yourself to release that with no drama, no fuss: it doesn’t mean you’ve failed, it doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. But we notice, we happily let go and come back – either to this awareness of the present moment or whatever’s arising in your experience, or the focus of the breath.

Teachings

For this morning’s talk or discussion, I thought we could talk about dealing with feelings of regret, which can be quite uncomfortable- painful even. When we’ve done something or said something that we just feel, ‘I wish I hadn’t said that. I wish I hadn’t done that’- just that kind of feeling- ‘That was a mistake’, ‘That wasn’t right’ or ‘I got carried away there’or ‘I just wasn’t thinking properly’.

Whether it’s something recent or something in the past, feelings of regret can be something quite difficult to sit with, quite painful. I think these feelings come from a sense of a misalignment: a misalignment between our behaviour- what we feel we’ve done or said- and the kind of person we think we are or the kind of person we think we should be. Right? Our values. That’s why it’s uncomfortable: it is because they’re out of alignment or they seem to be out of alignment. And so we think, ‘That action, that thing that I said, that thing that I did. It doesn’t reflect the kind of person I thought I was’. You know? ‘I said something hurtful’ or ‘I did something stupid’ or whatever it was, and ‘That’s not something a kind or compassionate or intelligent person would do’.

And then we start to measure ourselves against it, right?- ‘Well, then I must not be a kind or compassionate or intelligent person. I must be a bad person. I must be pretty crap, you know?’ or ‘I wouldn’t have behaved like that if I wasn’t such a terrible person’.

And this is where what could be a healthy sense of regret or remorse slips into something unhelpful; it starts to spiral into this kind of self critical attitude and guilt and shame and a kind of a real assault on our sense of self, I think.

And as I was reflecting on this, I actually think it’s quite ironic, it’s quite interesting – the psychology of this – because I think it’s precisely the presence of regret and those uncomfortable feelings that proves you are a kind, compassionate, intelligent person. That uncomfortable feeling of regret is happening because you’re reflecting on behaviour and saying, ‘Okay, that doesn’t match up to what I think of myself or my values’. If you didn’t have such values, if you weren’t a compassionate, kind person, for example, you wouldn’t feel regret if you were a bit harsh or unkind or rude to someone you know. In fact, if you were rude or unkind to someone and had no regret, you didn’t care – it just means nothing to you, no uncomfortable feelings whatsoever, no sense of misalignment between your behaviour and who you feel you are; that would be evidence, perhaps, you could say, of being an unkind person. But the fact that we might feel any sense of regret or remorse shows that we are kind and we’re now uncomfortable because we did something we see as unkind. Does that make sense?

So I think it’s that presence of regret, of feeling uncomfortable about poor behaviour, shall we say, that shows you are the person you feel you are. What it shows is that you temporarily lost sight of your values, perhaps, not because you’re inherently evil or because you’re inherently a bad person, but because you’re human, right? We get carried away sometimes by our emotions. Emotions can be very strong. The impulses to behave in ways that can be unhelpful, they can be strong, they can be very compelling.

Our mental afflictions, as we call them in Buddhism, these mental afflictions that exaggerate and dramatise the situations that we find ourselves in. They start to twist them and make them seem even worse than they really are. I’m sure we’ve all had this at some point: where our minds spin things out of proportion, and then we act out of proportion, we act in unrealistic ways.

So those mental afflictions they’re very compelling. They absolutely convince you that the situation is this way and that you saying this or you doing this is what is needed and it’s proportionate to the situation. Then afterwards, we often realise, ‘Well, hang on, maybe I was a bit too much there’.

But that mental affliction isn’t who you are. It’s temporary. It arises and it passes. Once it passes, and you calm down and you reconnect with your wisdom, your compassion, your values and then you feel uncomfortable – that’s because your values reflect more about what kind of person you are than your mental afflictions.

So then, what do we do about those feelings of regret when they come up? I think- and I know many of you are familiar – there’s a quite practical process we can follow, taught in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, which I find incredibly helpful and meaningful. That when that kind of feeling, those uncomfortable feelings come up, we can channel our energies there. But it’s also very helpful generally to not run away from that discomfort either but to learn from it. The feelings are coming up for a reason. So we can learn from that discomfort of feeling ‘I shouldn’t have done that’ and so on: that can motivate our desire to become more self-aware and more in control of our mental afflictions and to manage our difficult emotions and so on. It can become fuel for that, rather than fuel for low self-esteem, and it’s going to feel uncomfortable. They are maybe even painful. They are uncomfortable feelings, and it may weigh heavily on us.

I know for myself, in the past, when I’ve done things that I regret, it tends to sit very heavily on my mind, and I can’t have much peace, and it just weighs there. Every time you distract yourself, it comes right back and

it can be like that for a while. So we learn to honour those feelings, work with that, and channel that energy into something positive if we can. So the positive process that I referred to from the end of the Tibetan tradition- I can refer to it briefly here. There are four Rs in English, and the first is precisely that sense of regret:

Regret

So that healthy sense of… ‘Probably wasn’t the best thing to do’. That sense of… ‘Okay, it caused harm to myself or others’. Maybe a sense of ‘Shouldn’t have done that’ or whatever. So a healthy sense of regret or remorse, it’s a very healthy psychological function. Without it, we wouldn’t recognise bad behaviour and we wouldn’t make meaningful change, so it’s important that it’s there: it’s a good value. Guilt and shame and self criticism and all that stuff – maybe not so much. But a healthy sense of regret, so we start there.

Rely or Remind

The second is the two words, either rely or remind.

If you’re someone who’s perhaps following a spiritual path, such as this one: the Buddha, Dharma and the Sangha or if you have religious beliefs in a god, something like that. The ‘Rely’ means to look at those higher spiritual values, right? You might look to God, you might look to the Buddha, you might look to your spiritual teachers or something like that, and you rely upon their guidance. You rely upon what they’ve taught . The other word is you ‘remind’ yourself of the values that you are aspiring for, right? If it is kindness, if it is compassion, if it is patience and understanding, you remind yourself, ‘Those are the values that I want to align with’. So we have first, that sense of regret, then a sense of relying on, something to help us or reminding ourselves of the values that we aspire for.

Remedy

And then third is the remedy. And this could be very practically, picking up the pieces, you know, and the apologising and doing whatever we can to rectify or remedy the situation. But it also entails cultivating – in the Tibetan, the Buddhist tradition, we talk about ‘cultivating’ the opponent force, the opponent power. So let’s say that the behaviour that you regret came out of anger, well then you would cultivate compassion or you would cultivate patience. So you fill your mind up with whatever it is that would counteract the thing that’s caused that behaviour.

So you train, you try to train yourself in whatever that is.

Resolve

And then the fourth one is very practical, is a sense of resolve: ‘No, I am not going to engage in that behaviour again for the rest of the day’. Or ‘I’m going to do my best not to shout at so and so in the office again for the next hour’. I don’t know. With the resolve it’s good to be realistic, because if it’s going to be ‘I am never going to get angry for the rest of my life ever again’, well then we’re probably doomed to fail, aren’t we? But we can make a resolve that’s realistic for us, something we’re going to work on.

I find this process personally very helpful because you get that feeling, that uncomfortable feeling, you’re then channeling it into something practical, and you feel like you’ve done something about it because you have the feeling of regret has come up. You’ve reminded yourself of what you really value and what you’re aspiring towards. You’ve done what you can to fix [remedy] it, and you’ve resolved to work on that behaviour.

That way, when the uncomfortable feeling of regret comes back and tries to say you’re a bad person and this and that, you have something to fall back on. ‘I’m doing my best- I’ve followed this process. I’m trying to work to some meaningful change’, and so you’ve got something that your self-esteem can fall back on.

What I really wanted and hoped to get across here, from my reflection that I had done, is that sense of being kind to ourselves, right? Giving ourselves a bit more grace than we usually afford ourselves. To see the presence of regret as actually a positive thing that reflects positively on you. As evidence of you being a good person. That it says good things about you, that you may have this feeling of regret. It shows you are a good and kind and caring and intelligent person. If you didn’t have it, then that would be something to worry about.

And behaviour is not who we are, Behaviour changes all the time, and it’s influenced by so many different variables: it can be influenced by the fact that you’re a bit too tired; hormonal changes; the fact that you haven’t eaten properly. Your energy loss so much can influence your behaviour. Especially, it can be influenced by the mental afflictions. But behaviour can be worked on, and we can follow a process like this to work on those things that we feel aren’t helpful and make meaningful change.