Meditation Without Effort: Aversion, Ease, and Presence

On November 8, 2026, a weekly free online gathering called the Meditation Town Hall gave its seat to a guest: Eddie Hauben, a longtime meditation teacher and old friend of Lama Surya Das, who had come straight from a seven-day silent retreat at the Insight Meditation Society's Forest Refuge in Barre, Massachusetts. What he offered in the hour-long session was less a technique than a posture toward practice, a way of meeting restlessness, discomfort and aversion without turning meditation into one more contest. He built it from the lineage teachings he honored at the outset, a few lines from Thich Nhat Hanh, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and a Thai meditation master, and one personal insight about why the body so often refuses to sit still. The result is a teaching that is simple to state and surprisingly hard to practice, which is exactly why it rewards a close listen.

How does a town hall become a retreat?

The session opened the way Hauben's practice seems to: with a room being brought back to the body. Before any reading, he asked participants to find the center of their energy, take a few breaths, and notice breathing in and breathing out. "There's no place to go, nothing to do," he said, settling the group in what he called this time, space, heart and mind. The phrase would return again and again, and by the end it had become the spine of the whole hour.

There is a craft lesson in that opening. Hauben did not begin with ideas. He began with gratitude for the practice, for the teachings and for the people in the virtual room, and he framed the hour against a week he described plainly as a lot to hold, the Halloween weekend and the elections among it. Practitioners often rush past the first minute. Here the first minute was the practice.

Why start with gratitude and a dedication?

Hauben framed the session with two sources of authority: the lineage and the friendship. He acknowledged Surya Das and the lineage of Surya Das's own teacher, and then brought in a passage from the introduction Thich Nhat Hanh wrote for Surya Das's first book, Awakening the Buddha Within. Hauben read it aloud, and the line that carried the most weight for the room was about how a Western teacher carries the Dharma into a new setting:

"Mama Das uses the appropriate language that can communicate the wisdom and experience of Buddhism to the people of the times and environments. To me, this is a great achievement and I feel deeply grateful for it."

— Thich Nhat Hanh, introduction to Awakening the Buddha Within, read aloud by Eddie Hauben (about 4:38 in the session)

Hauben then offered his own dedication, which he uses at the start of practice: "May I who am loving awareness look inward. May I who am loving awareness see things as they truly are. May I who am loving awareness be liberated in this very moment." The three lines do a quiet bit of work. They move from turning attention inward, to seeing clearly, to freedom, and they name the practitioner as awareness itself rather than as a self who needs to achieve something.

Can you practice without trying to get somewhere?

The central idea of the evening is a reversal that most meditators have to discover the hard way: much of what feels like effort is actually the obstacle. Hauben returned to a passage attributed to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, read aloud near the twelve-minute mark:

"Mind creates both samsara and nirvana. Yet there is nothing much to it. It is just thoughts. Once we recognize that thoughts are empty, the mind will no longer have the power to deceive us."

— Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, read aloud by Eddie Hauben (about 12:22 in the session)

Notice what the passage does not say. It does not tell you to stop thinking or to clear a space for something better. It says that the power of thought lies in our taking it too seriously, and that recognizing thoughts as empty dissolves that power. In Hauben's hands this becomes a practical instruction: when the mind wanders, that recognition is itself the moment of mindfulness. You do not need a longer, deeper session to get there. You need to notice, and then return.

He pushed the same point through a second image from Dzogchen-style teaching, the sequence of "the view like the sky," "the ground," "meditation unmeditation like a mountain," and "the fruit, action, conduct like the ocean's waves." The phrases point toward a practice in which awareness simply rests as it is. Hauben's phrase for the posture was "meditating unmeditating awareness," a way of describing attention that is present without being manufactured. For a listener who has spent years trying to make meditation work, the shift from doing to resting can feel like losing ground. Hauben's implicit argument is that it is the reverse.

What is aversion hiding inside an uncomfortable body?

The most useful passage of the evening was Hauben's own story, which he called an "insight 101" moment from a past retreat. The experience will be familiar to anyone who has sat for more than a few days: attention drifts to discomfort, the body becomes irritating, it will not settle, and the sitting turns into a battle. He described his own version of this as one of effort and energy rather than ease and gentleness.

Then came the turn. After sitting with one of these episodes, he saw that awareness was in the present moment, but the mind was averse to what it was experiencing. Its intention was to push away. Once he recognized that aversion as aversion, he said, the recognition itself loosened it, and in the next few sittings "it all went away." The ease that followed allowed relaxation and a mind that was clear and steady.

This is a subtle distinction, and it deserves a plain explanation. Pain or discomfort is not the problem. The problem is the second layer of reaction, the wish that the sensation would be different. Hauben's point is that this second layer is visible if you look for it, and that seeing it is often enough to change the quality of the sit. You do not have to fix the knee. You have to notice the pushing.

How do you let go a little, a lot, or completely?

To make that point land, Hauben turned to a Thai meditation master whose teaching he read aloud. The image is of a clear forest pond: if the mind is still, rare animals come to drink, and you can see the nature of all things, including the many strange and wonderful things that come and go. You remain still while they pass. Then came the passage that gave the evening its most quotable line:

"If you let go a little, you will have a little happiness. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of happiness. And if you let go completely, you will be free."

— a Thai meditation master, read aloud by Eddie Hauben (about 20:17 in the session)

What makes the teaching work is its gradualism. It does not demand total letting go as a precondition for practice. It treats each small release as a real measure of happiness, which removes the pressure that so often makes people quit. Hauben's own pivot from struggle to ease is a small-scale version of the same arc.

He also drew on a phrase that could easily be misread as passivity: "let the meditation do the meditating." In context it reads as trust rather than neglect. The practitioner's job is to establish presence, notice what arises, and stop interfering. Thoughts, sensations, feelings and consciousness itself are all included in the field of attention, and all of them, he suggested, arise and fall away like clouds in the sky.

How does loving-kindness reach a difficult person?

The second half of the session moved into the Brahmaviharas, the sublime states of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity that Hauben had named in his opening. He guided a familiar sequence. First, attention to oneself, with wishes such as "may I be well and strong" and "may I be joyful and happy." Then a benefactor, a person who has been kind, offered the same wishes. Then a neutral person, someone recognizable but not intimate. Then, in the most demanding step, a difficult person.

Hauben's instruction at that stage was gentle and precise: bring to mind someone who is difficult, notice the reaction that arises, and keep your heart open while you offer the wish "may you live life at ease." The discipline is not to pretend the difficulty is gone. It is to let the wish sit beside the resentment long enough to see that they can coexist. The sequence then widens to all beings, the same wishes extended outward until the room of listeners was included.

The loving-kindness section makes a useful bridge to the aversion teaching. Both are about relating to experience without a war. The same mind that pushes away a painful knee can push away an annoying colleague. The same recognition that softens one can soften the other.

What does the close of the session leave you with?

Hauben ended with a dedication of merit and a wish for freedom from fear and suffering for all beings, which he framed within the teachings he had been carrying all evening. The closing was spare. There was no summary, no list of takeaways. The room had been asked to notice, return, and let go a little, and the final words simply offered that practice to the wider world.

For readers who did not attend, the most useful way to take the evening is as a small experiment. Next time you sit and feel the body push back, pause for one breath and ask whether the mind is trying to get rid of what is happening. If it is, notice that, and let it go a little. Then notice what remains. Hauben's claim, grounded in his own retreat, is that what remains is often ease.

Where to go from here

The Meditation Town Hall is a free weekly program, and Lama Surya Das leads the following week's session. To register, or to make a dana donation, visit Dzogchen.org. If you are new to this kind of teaching, the best starting point is the one Hauben returned to repeatedly: sit, breathe, notice when the mind is pushing away, and return. For a deeper read, Surya Das's Awakening the Buddha Within, which Thich Nhat Hanh introduced, is the book Hauben quoted from at the start of the session.