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.

Introduction

We'd like to welcome Amana to our IMC Sunday Dharma talk. A little bit about Amana: Amana Brembry Johnson is a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, and a guiding teacher for the center's spiritual teacher and leadership training. Four decades of contemplative practice in multiple traditions contributes to a form of teaching, meditation guidance, and mentoring that offers a diverse range of access to practice. Amana's life work emerges from the intersections of spirituality, social justice, body awareness, and intuitive creativity.

Thank you for joining us.

Remembering Our Innate Goodness

Thank you, Kevin, and welcome everyone. Thank you for putting the chant back on during the break; it's so soothing, I loved hearing it again.

Land and Lineage Acknowledgement

As we come together today, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the land where we are and the Indigenous people who live on this land. I acknowledge that I am on traditional, unceded land of the first people of Oakland, the Lisjan Ohlone people, both past and present, who speak the Chochenyo language.^[1]

I'd also like to offer a lineage acknowledgement of our practice of Buddhism, which is an Asian heritage and tradition. It comes to us through five hundred years of written language, of unwritten language, and was recorded in Sanskrit and Pali before other language translations. Let it be acknowledged that these practices were preserved, nurtured, and handed down for millennia before reaching Western shores and Western languages. In many ways, the people and cultures of origin can, and in many instances have been, erased, much the same way that the people who originally inhabited these lands have been erased.

So let us remember our ancestors and the ancestors of this land who survived pandemics, the destruction of their known world, and their ways of living. May we hold their names dearly in our hearts and minds. May this acknowledgement serve as a reminder of our inextricable connection to the practices we share and the places we inhabit, as well as a reminder of our connection to the earth across species and across time.

Solidarity and Mourning

Before I go into the talk, I'd like to share with you an excerpt from a public notice sent from the East Bay Meditation Center in regards to the rash of violence against Asian and Asian-American, Pacific Islander communities:

"The East Bay Meditation Center expresses our collective grief and outrage at the ongoing violent targeting of Asian and Asian Americans, and in the wake of the most recent tragic attack in Atlanta, we stand in solidarity with Asian and Asian Americans in beloved community. These violent acts of hatred are arising due to the current and historical oppression of Asian Americans in the U.S. They are the direct result of our nation's deep roots in white supremacy, imperialism, and xenophobia."

I'd like to invite you all to participate in a moment of silence as I recite the names of the beings whose lives have been senselessly taken during the Atlanta mass murdering spree, which happened just on Tuesday. You may choose to place your hand over your heart, or slide the eyes closed, or simply just be present.

Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng.^[2] And those whose names I do not know, names that have not been spoken, or names that have been forgotten.

The Triple Pandemic and the Dharma

Even in the midst of all this, it's so important to focus and bring to mind the beautiful qualities that exist in our lives. It's a pleasure to be here with you today and to share my experience of the Dharma on this first day of spring. It's a day of great significance as a time of birth and rebirth, of renewal and awakening with hope. May it mark the dawning of a new day that follows a difficult period of isolation, massive death, and deep internal grief.

We've been living in a difficult time of disease and hatred, living in a triple pandemic, really, on many levels. The most obvious is the coronavirus that has plagued the earth with a cloak of illness and death. The more disguised virus of white supremacy that has infected the infrastructure of systems and institutions all around the world with hatred of difference and the loathing for the natural diversity of life itself. And a third pandemic of untruths, lacking right speech—a blatant spreading of deceptions that have blinded and wreaked a scourge of mass confusion and metastasized delusion for so very many. We've been living in a time of massive individual and communal grief.

What is fortunate is that the Dharma is immensely vast and far-reaching, that it touches into every aspect of our lives—the seen and the unseen, acknowledging the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. There are many paths to enter the Dharma; some resonate sweetly within our hearts, and others present difficult challenges to overcome: the undoing of our harmful conditioning.

The Truth of Impermanence

Life has always been hard to pin down, but lately, the reality that we are not in control of our lives, our futures, our circumstances has been even more apparent. Right now, we're living in a liminal realm, a transitional, groundless place. Here, nothing is certain. We are at the threshold of an unknown. This invisible cloak of delusion—the delusion of predictability—has been pulled back to reveal the truth of uncertainty. Our lives today have brought into the open the instantaneous passing of each moment.

This truth has been there all along, yet these current circumstances have forced an entire world to not only face but to embody the truth of the moment-to-moment change in every breath of our unpredictable lives.

The Buddha states that every life is marked by three characteristics of existence: impermanence, anicca^[3], the Pali word; suffering or dissatisfaction, dukkha^[4]; and egolessness, sometimes referred to as not-self, anatta^[5].

Our intuitive understanding and somewhat forced embodiment of anicca (impermanence) is the characteristic that opens the door to our release from attachments, which is the true source of personal, internal liberation from suffering. To release, to let go, to settle, to feel into the emptiness of this existence. As the truth of the unreliability of life continues to unfold, we can choose to embrace tremendous suffering by clinging onto old habits and familiar comforts, or we can welcome the stillness within us that holds the power of awakening.

Intellectually, we know that nothing in this life, in this world, will last forever, and that the longer we live, we will certainly see everything that we have come to know and love wither, die, and vanish into the intangible. However, true understanding of impermanence is non-cognizable; we can only know the truth of it in the unnamable, experiential terrain of our bodies, where there is a resonance of memory that is a part of our very being.

Sati: Remembering Our Innate Goodness

Sati^[6]—to remember. To remember it's there within us. You know, the ancestors are not out there somewhere; those who have come before us live within us. They move through our bloodstream, they're in the marrow of our bones. The chain of DNA in our bodies that gets passed on from generation to generation, the memories are there. Not only of experience, of loves and hurts and pains and traumas, but the memory of what we are. It is there.

But these memories are easily forgotten because we live in and are conditioned by a culture of memory loss, and we dwell in the immediate gratification of short-term memory and distraction. We move about barely present to the moment, enchanted by a world of rapid information bites, media, technology, and corporate marketing schemes that create a culture of attention-deficit beings. And now that the wheels have all but grinded to a stop, we are even more susceptible to the enticements of distraction, being out of our comfort zone, unable to move about in the ways that we've always moved.

The deep insight necessary to cultivate an easeful and fulfilled life in the midst of chaos and horror and the enchantments of delusion arises when the mind is still, silent, and unencumbered—aware. It's quietude that allows us to see the trappings that lead to our own destruction. It is stillness that throws open the doors to our discerning internal wisdom. A wisdom that is unempirical and immaterial, unquantifiable.

When the loud noise of want, desire, and dislike has been quieted, the unspoken wisdom contained in the deepest recesses of the body arises. The wisdom of ancient knowing, the wisdom of all that has gone before us, the wisdom held in the whispering earth—all become available to the conscious mind. This is a wisdom that reminds us, remembers to us, that we are all a web of connection that is unseen and unbroken, that there's really no space between us, that we are part of the space, the air, the void, that we are the pause.

Privilege and the Normalization of Harm

This is a time for remembering what it is that we have forgotten. Connecting with the memory contained within the body. Mindfulness of the body is no accident; it is the first door to awakening, the first of the foundations of mindfulness.

Our cultural default is wired to do too many things, move too fast, take on too many projects, and juggle too many jobs in our endless efforts to make ends meet or to acquire the things that we have been told and conditioned we need for a fulfilled life. Accompanying this normalized way of life are deeply seated feelings of overwhelm, overload, fatigue, and sleep deprivation. These are all systems and mental states that keep us from remembering that we are sacred in our very flesh, that we are light beings of infinite energy living forth just a brief whisper of a moment on this material plane. That we are interconnected to all around us, both animate and what is seemingly inanimate. I read just the other day that it's been noticed that trees have a heartbeat, so spaced out that it's hardly at all perceptible.

Everything we touch vibrates with the energetic charge of life, the same charge of life that is apparent in our senses when we allow the mind to settle and be with what is. Constantly juggling the balls, where do we find the time to reflect upon the moment? When do we stop to take in the effects of that incident that arose today, yesterday, on Tuesday, and before that? Where do we tuck away the horror story that we witnessed, or the daily infractions that got stuffed down, packed on top of the other, the other, the other unresolved stories now absorbed in the body, awaiting their time when attention will be turned in that direction? Living like this is to constantly stub the toe and not take the time to attend to it in the rush of getting to the next task.

Today, in the quiet of our homes—for those of us who have homes—we get to turn over this rock where the slippery lizard of privilege remains hidden from sight. Lately, we've heard a lot about white privilege. But privilege is not only white; each one of us has a degree of privilege that others do not have. If we are listening, the current circumstances can help us tremendously to bring our awareness to where we fall on that scale. Where do we stand when placed amongst those who experience these dire circumstances as a continuation of the threat of death that has always been there?

Before the pandemic hit, I noticed there were more and larger tent cities everywhere, all over the place, as I turned the key to come into my home that I've made comfortable and a beautiful refuge, safe from the outside world. Now, on the few times that I leave the house and drive down the street, the tent cities are still there, but they're much smaller. What does that mean? I think it means that I've had the privilege of being sheltered away from death and disease for a few moments, and that there are many who had no shelter, no shelter in place, no access to medicine.

Reimagining a New World

These words that I'm sharing with you are about memory and what it means to remember. What it means to turn a kind attention to all about us, all around us. To wake up to see, to remember all that it is that we have forgotten.

As the vaccines take hold and our lives begin to open up a bit, can we remember what it was like to stop and bring awareness to our stubbed toe? Will we choose to return to the abnormal life of rushing to make plans and cramming as many tasks as possible into the timeframe of each moment? Will we examine the ways in which we ourselves contribute to systems of harm in the world through our livelihood, our speech, and our actions? And should we choose to engage in those examinations, will we ask ourselves for forgiveness for the ways we've been complacent in contributing to systems, institutions, and ways of life that are harmful to all beings and to the earth? We all have a part in this.

Perhaps as our world reopens little by little, we will welcome with open arms the innate compassion that has been waiting to fully emerge from within. Have you felt the beautiful qualities knocking at your heart's door? Qualities that have been waiting to be shared with others, even those beings outside of our chosen beloved communities. Maybe this life experience, this trial, just maybe has shaken us up a bit out of our conditioned trance in a way that we might cherish the pure gold of this breath, of this time, this very brief time of our lives. Maybe we will deepen the practices necessary to explore the essential parts of our being.

The time is now. It's always now, but the time is now to draw upon our deepest, most precious resources that we have been practicing and saving up especially for this occasion. What have we been practicing for? To re-imagine. To draw upon all of our intuitive wisdom, to remember the wisdom of the ages that flows through our veins. We recognize the truth when we hear it; it resonates in our bodies, it perks us up, because it's there.

This is the time to re-imagine a new world. Not a remaking of the old world, but something never before seen. To envision how we can live in the deepest, most beautiful way possible. I want to share this quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estés^[7]:

"My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is, we were made for these times."

She goes on to say that when a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there is no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for. Let us not forget that we are great ships.

So on this first day of spring, let us join the prayers of many in the Northern Hemisphere who honor the spring equinox and plant during the time of the growing moon, and set a collective intention to create, to fashion a better world with our words, with our actions, with our deeds. To bring the ethics of the Dharma, of our practice, into these areas of our lives. To create a world free of hatred and the violence of terrorism. This starts in here, because we are the contents of the world. It is an internal work—as Sylvia Boorstein^[8] says, "It's an inside job."

Reflection and Dedication of Merit

Thank you for your kind attention. I'd like to just take a moment to let the words fall away, to bring your awareness to the resonance in your body. To notice what is activated or what has arisen there. To drop the storylines, the questioning, the judgment, the interrogation, to free ourselves of anything that we don't need, and simply listen to the wisdom of our bodies.

And as we close, I'd like to bring a dedication of merit.

Today we have generated good deeds that entitle us to a spiritual reward. As an act of generosity, we offer the merit generated from our actions today to radiate outward into the world at large and to land upon and rest with those who are less fortunate than we are. May it reach its long tentacles through the illusion of space between all that there is and defeat the enemy of wrongdoing. May it land in the hearts and minds of those who are steeped in suffering, those who are stalked and hunted, those who are hungry and imprisoned in the trance of ignorance.

We offer the fruits of our merit to all living beings who crawl on the earth and swim in the waters of this world. All who fly and hop, who walk and climb. All those who see without eyes and hear without ears. We offer the merit of our practice to all creatures above us, below us, to the right and the left, seen and the unseen, the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.

May all beings, all beings be free.