This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation_ All of Us

Introduction

Good morning, everyone. Always a pleasure to see people checking in from around the world. Welcome one and all, and welcome to all of you. I know there are many people who don't chat, and welcome to you, too. Welcome to all of you. Welcome to all of us.

Going to wait just a minute before beginning. Good morning, good day, and welcome to everyone.

All right, it's 7 o'clock, and I'm going to repeat my welcome. And I invite you to listen to this welcome closely, because in English, we can do sort of a remarkable little thing that I've come to appreciate in the practice. I can say, "Welcome, all of you," or "Welcome, all of us." And it can have a couple of meanings. Welcome everyone who's shown up this morning to practice together, but also welcoming all of each one of us.

Something I want to talk about today is letting all of our experience be part of the meditation practice.

So happy to be with you. I'm David. I know many of you from previous 7 AM sittings to cover Gil. And I'm choosing as a theme for this week something I'm calling "The Heart of Practice." And today, this idea of excluding nothing from our experience in the practice. Not pushing away anything from the meditation, any part of ourselves that we don't like today. I'm saying this is the heart of practice.

But I'll say more about what I mean by "this is the heart of practice." Each day this week, we'll explore a different way to think about the heart of practice. I'll say more about that after we've sat in meditation.

Sharing the dharma is frequently most powerful when the mind has been meditating. So let's meditate first. I'll guide lightly and bring in this theme a bit, and then we'll take it from there.

Guided Meditation

Let me just get some different little screens out of my face. Always have to remember how to do this part of my practice.

So, let's sit together. As we bring our eyes down, if that's comfortable, as we get comfortable where we're sitting, as we adopt a posture for meditation that balances ease and alertness, I'd like to encourage us today to settle into the heart of practice. And today that means settling in with everything that comes up. Welcoming all of our experience into this meditative place.

And maybe now there's some quickness of the pulse just from getting to wherever we got to, to sit down. We can feel that. Maybe we can feel the pulse slowing, or some of the sensations that come along with settling down and into the meditation.

Can be attentive to the way, when we start to meditate, our attention shifts inward. Sometimes there's a sense of it shifting inward and downward into the body, into this effortless knowing of experience that body and mind bring to us. And sometimes even in the settling in, we can be aware of things we wish weren't here. Oh, there's some noise, some ambient noise. There's some problem that needs to be solved. If there's some discomfort in the body, there's some mental anguish.

And we can sometimes feel like we'd like that to not be here. That somehow that's not part of what meditation is about.

Today, I want to remind you, remind all of us, that in the meditation, we exclude nothing. There's nothing that's coming up that's not supposed to be coming up. There's nothing that needs to be pushed away. Nothing that needs to be excluded. This is a practice of welcoming, of being attentive, of being attuned to all of us, all of our experience.

And sure, uncomfortable things come up—discomfort in the body, troubling emotional currents, thought spirals, compulsions, urges. But none of that has to be pushed away. It can be held in this wonderful mindful awareness that we cultivate in the practice. And we can hold both this and that. We don't have to push this away to be in the presence of that.

We can have an attitude in the meditation of "both/and," and we can expand it beyond "both." Since our experience is rarely binary, we can expand it to "all." All that comes up can be held in awareness.

In this way, we show up for ourselves. In this way, we build resilience for discomfort. In this way, we take the first tentative step of compassion just by showing up for what's here now without pushing or pulling.

So, let's sit together for about half an hour, holding this and that. An attitude of inclusion, of holding all of us, all of our experience. Holding it with gentleness, holding it with care, holding it with fine attunement.

And about all of this more when we've prepared the mind for the dharma with some meditating.

So this way of meeting experience, where we show up for all of it, for all of us, being attuned, meeting experience with gentleness, with caring, but excluding nothing, pushing nothing away. This is the heart of practice.

There's a little mystery, a little secret, a little magic in here that if we let it all come up, if we meet it with tenderness, if we push nothing away, exclude nothing, we may notice that it just all keeps coming and going. It's when we stop the flow. It's when we hold on. It's when we push away that we get bound up. That stress gets added. That suffering gets added.

The more we cultivate this way of meeting experience in the meditation, the more we take some of that openness, that candor, that gentleness, kindness, into the world with us.

It's in showing up for all of our experience, for all of us, that we become more adept at meeting others, at showing up for all of us.

And this doesn't mean that the meditation is easy or that challenging things don't come up. That's part of what's "all of us." There's discomfort in the body, challenging physical sensations, emotional currents, thought patterns, and thought spirals that we don't find comfortable, or that we find even more actively challenging.

But we can cultivate in this practice greater comfort with all of that discomfort. This is the heart of practice.

Reflections

So good morning again, everyone. Welcome to all of you. Welcome to all of us, and for anyone just tuning in now. This was a special welcome to all of us today, in that it's possible in English to find two meanings in the simple expression "welcome to all of us." We welcome all of you who are coming together to practice this morning, and encourage each and every one of us to welcome all of us into the meditation practice and into our practice.

This idea of bringing all of us into the practice today, I characterize as the heart of practice, and there are a lot of ways to express what that might mean. At the end, I said that cultivating comfort with the inevitable discomfort of life in a human body and mind—this is the heart of practice. That's another way of saying let all of us show up for all of us. Show up for everything that shows up in the practice. Excluding nothing, holding everything with care.

So this is the theme for the week: the heart of practice. And every day I'm going to say something different. I'm going to say, "This is the heart of practice." We only got five days here, but this could go on for a long time. I possibly could break Gil's record of I don't know how many sessions on mindfulness and samadhi^[1]. This is the heart of practice.

So let me talk a little bit about the general idea and then get into today's "heart of practice" idea. The idea that this is the heart of practice can be extended to a number of things. And today, I want to talk about this idea of meeting this and that, holding all of our experience, including parts that seem to contend with one another. The practice provides a container and helps us cultivate a container where we can hold it all—all the conflicting mess of our experience.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about this place, this particular kind of place we find and return to in the meditation. This is the heart of practice.

Wednesday, I'll talk about satisfactoriness. Sometimes we characterize the word or concept of dukkha^[2] as unsatisfactoriness. And I'm going to talk about the satisfactoriness of the practice. And I'm going to say this is the heart of practice.

Thursday, I don't know what it means yet exactly, but I've recently become aware that the word "nowhere" has in it the two words "now here." And I'm going to play around a little bit with that idea. For sure, I don't know what I'll say because it's not Thursday yet, but I'll say something like, "Here, now, is the heart of practice."

And Friday, I'll return to something that came up at the end of the guided meditation, which is this idea of being not only with the flow of experience but of the flow of experience. This is the heart of practice.

So, there's good authority and precedent for saying, "This is the heart of practice," and meaning many things, and that authority and precedent comes by way of the Buddha in the collection of texts called the Anguttara Nikaya^[3], a collection of texts that are ordered by the number of things, from one to eleven. In the section on ones, it's always fascinated me that the Buddha seems to say a lot of things are the heart of practice. I'll give you some examples here. I've got to check the clock because I could keep going. It's an interesting and long book of things where the Buddha says this one thing is the heart of practice.

For example, "Practitioners," the Buddha is quoted as saying, "I do not see a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities, or when they have arisen, makes them increase and grow, like wise view." When you have wise view, unarisen skillful qualities arise, or when they have arisen, they increase and grow. So here, the Buddha says that wise view is the heart of practice.

Elsewhere in the same group of suttas^[4], the Buddha is quoted as saying, "Practitioners, I do not know a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities or makes unskillful qualities decline like good friends in the practice." Good spiritual friends, Kalyāṇa-mitta^[5]. "When you have such good friends, skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities decline." So, spiritual friendship is the heart of practice.

Elsewhere, the Buddha says, "Practitioners, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities or makes unskillful qualities decline like pursuing good habits and not unskillful habits." When you pursue skillful habits and not unskillful habits, wholesome qualities arise, and unwholesome qualities decline.

I'm going to keep going for a couple more. Another time, the Buddha in the same collection of suttas says, "When one thing, practitioners, is developed and cultivated, the body and mind become tranquil, thinking and considering settle down, and all of the qualities that play a part in awakening are fully developed. What is this one thing? Mindfulness directed to the body." When this one thing is developed and cultivated, the body and mind become tranquil, thinking and considering settle down, and all of the qualities that play a part in awakening are fully developed. So here, mindfulness of the body is the heart of practice.

And here's one more. This is several suttas that come together, and they all begin like this: "One thing, practitioners, when developed and cultivated, leads by itself to disillusionment, dispassion, cessation, peace, clear seeing, awakening. What is this one thing?" Then he lists about eight things: Recollection of the teaching. Recollection of the Sangha^[6] community of practice. Recollection of virtuous conduct. Recollection of generosity. Recollection of breathing. Recollection of death. Mindfulness of the body. Recollection of peace. "This one thing when developed and cultivated leads by itself to disillusionment, dispassion, cessation, peace, insight, awakening."

So the point here is a lot of different things are listed in these suttas as the "one thing," a one thing that leads us forward. And in this last one, it's interesting—it seems like a lot of things, but maybe it's the recollection that's the important thing, that's the one thing. Recalling mindfulness, bringing attention to these things, is the heart of practice. And I'll explore that particular idea of recollection, which is another way to say mindfulness, another way to translate the Pali^[7] word sati^[8]—recollection—I'll talk about tomorrow.

So, going forward this week, we can say, "This is the heart of practice. This is the heart of practice. This is the heart of practice." These can each of them be true all at the same time. We don't need to say, "This, too, is the heart of practice," or "All of these things are the heart of practice," or "The practice has many hearts," which would be weird anyway. We can just follow the Buddha's example and say, "Ah, this here, this is the heart of practice."

So, for today, the heart of practice is this idea of "both/and," holding all of our experience, not excluding anything, letting the mess be messy, and holding it in a way that has care in it, has kindness in it. What all these different statements by the Buddha about what one thing is worthy of cultivation in our practice imply is that the practice provides a way to hold conflicting emotions, contending thoughts, the mix of physical sensations that we bring attention to, pleasant and unpleasant, comfort and discomfort, all at the same time. We don't have to exclude.

We don't have to exclude anything that comes up in order to hold on to another. In fact, it's by letting everything come up and pass away again that we find the heart of practice.

So this is an interesting idea: we don't have to exclude the unwholesome in order to cultivate the wholesome. We can hold the unwholesome in the presence of wholesome awareness, and the mind naturally inclines toward the wholesome when it's exposed to it, when it knows it, when it feels the peace and ease of it. We don't have to make anything happen except to provide these conditions. Sometimes that means that we have to stay with the challenging holding of the multiplicity of experience—the this and the that. Sometimes the only thing we have to do is become more comfortable with the discomfort that comes up.

So maybe this is a way to say the same thing. This is the heart of practice: becoming more comfortable with the inevitable discomfort that life presents us with. Can we hold discomfort with greater ease, greater comfort? Can we hold both comfort and discomfort? And can we hold discomfort with comfort? Can we become more adept at meeting the inevitable pains and challenges, anguish, and physical pain of life with a mind that doesn't get pushed off balance with it all?

Sometimes I think we want our practice to be focused on ambitions that are lofty, high and mighty concepts like resilience or compassion. But maybe another way to express those things and to cultivate resilience and compassion is to become more comfortable with discomfort. Isn't that what resilience is all about? Isn't that what we mean when we talk about resilience? And maybe we could say too, isn't that what compassion is all about? Meeting discomfort with greater comfort.

This, I propose today, is the heart of practice.

And perhaps there's a very profound and somewhat paradoxical meaning of this that goes into the core of how we understand the teachings. And that is that the agitated mind can be known by an unagitated knowing. Can be held by an unagitated knowing. The troubled heart can be held and understood by a simple, caring presence that we can cultivate in the practice. Our pain, the inevitable pain of finding ourselves in a human body and mind in this life, can be held by an awareness that's free of suffering.

So this capacity to hold this and that, to be present with everything, to exclude nothing, to let everything come and go in our practice—this is the heart of practice.

This attitude toward meeting experience has a really interesting and important allied teaching in it, which is simply that we create the conditions for freedom to happen. We don't make it happen, and that's why excluding things from our experience doesn't work. We establish the conditions—in this case today, this idea of just being with all our experience with ease—and instead of making freedom happen, we make it possible that it unfold for us.

So for today, this is the heart of practice: being with our experience, being with the pain that arises without adding suffering to it. This is the heart of practice.

So I'll leave you with that today. Tomorrow I'll say something completely different, but aligned with this teaching today, much as the Buddha in the Anguttara Nikaya says this one thing, practitioners, is the heart of practice.

So take care till tomorrow. Look forward to seeing you all again, and keep this in mind today. Don't push things away. Don't exclude. Welcome all of us. All of us have a place in this practice. No part of us needs to be pushed away or excluded. We can hold it all. The practice can hold it all. Take care.