This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
Linda came to Buddhist meditation during one of the hardest periods of her life. She had just survived a near-death experience, and shortly afterward her eight-year-old niece died. The teachings she encountered at that time — that the views of self and other, fate and destiny, were erroneous views — landed with real force.
She had come from years of Chinese medical astrology, from psychics and readings, from elaborate maps of who she was and what her life was going to be. Being invited instead to simply look at her experience, rather than immediately turning it into a belief about her identity or her destiny, felt like setting something heavy down. It was liberating. She still remembers it.
Error correcting
Years later, she’s in a different relationship with that same teaching. Not rejecting it. Refining it. She thinks of this as error correcting — a process where the teaching enters experience, and experience gently adjusts the teaching.
What she’s found is that when she looks honestly at her life, self and other are present all the time. And most of the time, they aren’t a problem at all. Self and other give us companionship, support, the comfort of not being alone. They allow us to be companions to one another, to ease loneliness, to offer care. Even when she’s alone, she notices something like self and other operating inside her own experience simultaneously.
She also knows the pain that comes from the opposite direction: from a sense of self and other that ruptures, dissolves, or dissociates. That’s its own form of suffering. So the teaching can’t simply be that self and other are the problem. Something more nuanced is going on.
The question that helps
What Linda has landed on, through years of sitting with this teaching and through a particularly instructive recent experience with her eye surgery and its complications, is a simpler question: is the self and other that’s arising right now coming with dukkha?
When her eyes didn’t heal as expected, when an infection developed, when she found herself caught in cycles of worrying, waiting, and wondering — something happened that she recognized. Her identity around the experience started to solidify. This is how my body is. This is the kind of person I am. I know this from my history. And alongside that, another self appeared: the one who wanted to be different, who wanted to heal quickly, who didn’t want to be in this. Neither self could be wished away. Neither was entirely wrong. But both arrived with suffering.
That’s when she became more alert to what was being constructed. Not as a failure — she’d done this before and would do it again. But as information. When the stakes feel higher, when things feel more real, when defense and justice and I, me, mine come online in a particular heightened way, that’s a signal worth noticing.
Selfing as a verb
She brings in a useful formulation from a teacher she encountered early in her training: the idea that the self is not a noun but a verb. Not a thing we are, but something we do. Selfing. And by extension, othering.
In the early days after this idea circulated in meditation communities, she remembers people trying out the literal language: rather than I’m angry, anger is happening. Rather than I’m storying, there’s story-making. Everything got turned into a verb, and there was something illuminating about it — noticing how often we insert ourselves into experience, how quickly a process becomes a fixed thing. But when the language was adopted without going deeper, it could become a manufactured way of distancing from experience, a way to make the I disappear without actually understanding it. That wasn’t the point.
The point, she thinks, was to notice the selfing as it happens — to catch the process of constructing a fixed, solid, permanent me or you, especially in moments when the construction is causing harm.
Making a teaching your own
She ends with something she finds genuinely important. Making a teaching your own doesn’t mean changing it until it agrees with you. It means allowing it to encounter your actual life.
The teaching she received — that self and other are erroneous views — was genuinely helpful at a moment when she needed to stop organizing her experience around fixed beliefs and destiny. That remains true. What experience has added is more texture: self and other are not always the problem. They become the problem when they arrive with dukkha, when they solidify in ways that create more suffering rather than less. And the practice is learning to tell the difference — not by eliminating the self, but by knowing it more closely.
