Guided Meditation: Relax Here; Dharmette: Wisdom Awareness (1 of 5) Simple Discernment

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relax Here; Wisdom Awareness (1 of 5) Simple Discernment. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 31, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Relax Here

Good morning, YouTube community. Good morning, IMC Global Sangha^[1]. This is a sound check. Great, happy to be with you everybody. The sound is good. I'm delighted to see so many warm greetings in the chat. Since we're right at the top of the hour, we will go ahead and start the meditation.

I wanted to just say a couple of words introducing the practice this week, which is going to be on wisdom awareness. It's a practice that's been very helpful for me as a kind of cross-training with intensive mettā^[2] practice that I've done. With that, I'll briefly say that the first step in cultivating wisdom and awareness of wisdom is relaxation.

So, as you're ready, taking in the day, taking in this live stream, this global Sangha. Whether you are engaged or silent, you're warmly welcome.

Taking a couple of deep breaths. Allowing any excess tension, any excess stress to release with the exhale.

Inviting the body to feel a balance of alertness, wakefulness, and relaxation. Starting by attuning to your posture, making sure that there's nothing in the posture that's causing any extra stress or strain on this body.

Then bringing your attention to your head and inviting your forehead, especially the area between the eyes, to soften, maybe spreading slightly. Inviting the temples and the ears to relax. Inviting the eyes to relax in their sockets, softening them as if gently taking in a vast vista over an ocean or a mountain range. If they're not already closed and it feels all right, closing them.

Inviting the jaw to relax. Maybe opening it wide for just a moment and floating your jaw closed. Allowing the teeth to be slightly apart with the lips closed. Tip of the tongue at the palate, letting the tongue be soft.

Sweeping your attention down to the neck and through the neck muscles. Relaxing the throat and back of the neck, all the way from the occiput to where the neck meets the back. Letting the shoulders drop down.

Allowing breathing to massage the inside of the sternum, the rib cage, and the back. Inviting the abdomen and the diaphragm to be supple, noticing the gentle movement of breath there, perhaps. Letting the belly hang softly. The side waists relaxed.

Settling the attention into the hip points, the pelvic floor, and the hips, letting go. Softening the big muscles of the thighs and hamstrings. Your hands, perhaps touching those thighs, allowing the arms and hands to be heavy.

Then flowing your attention down through the legs to the lower legs. Allowing the shin and calf of each leg to be soft. The ankles and the feet resting gently on the earth.

Allowing awareness to fill your whole body, just as rain fills softer earth, softening all of the muscles within. And then inviting the heart-mind to relax. Be present.

Allowing your attention to settle in the simplicity of breathing, the sensations of breathing, or whatever anchor or object of attention feels most connecting, most soothing.

From time to time, checking with kindness: Am I aware? Graciously inviting awareness to turn.

In the last moments of our meditation together, noticing again: Are you aware of what's happening right now? Looking within, feeling within, is there more relaxation than when you started this meditation?

Noticing any ease, stability, glimmers of goodness, or contentment, no matter how small. Appreciating them, nourishing them with your attention.

Then turning your mind's eye, your heart outwards to the world—those in your home, those unknown, further away, those here. Wishing them well. Offering and sharing the benefits of this practice with others.

May all beings be happy, safe, peaceful, and free. Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Wisdom Awareness (1 of 5) Simple Discernment

Warm greetings to everyone who participated in this sit and joined a little later. No matter where you are, who you are, a warm welcome to you.

This week I'd like to introduce the theme, which is wisdom awareness, or cultivating wisdom awareness. It is a process that comes from Sayadaw U Tejaniya^[3], one of my root teachers in Burma, and also to me through teachers from the West. He is a teacher with a wide range of how he offers teachings to different people, so it's understood a little bit differently by different people. I'll be speaking from my own experience, as well as how this interrelates with the ancient teachings of the Buddha.

It is cultivating a simple, very present, broad, wise way of being in the moment. The Pali for this is sati-paññā^[4]. Sati is mindfulness, or I will use the word "awareness" often because that's how I was taught this practice. And paññā—or prajñā as many of you know—is wisdom. So this is awareness of wisdom and cultivating it through the practice of mindfulness. That's where we're going this week.

Today I'm starting by simply talking through simple discernment and distinctions. One of those is—and this is in the ancient teachings—that recognizing whatever wisdom or discernment is already present in your mind and heart is a foundation, a key for cultivating greater wisdom. You might be saying to yourself, "Well, I'm not wise," but usually there's at least a little in there. I'd like to define the term: wisdom is a little bit different than intelligence, although they are related. In the Buddhist teachings, wisdom is something that clearly emerges from embodied practice. That discernment grows over time through carefully watching, observing, and experiencing our minds and bodies.

It is helped by being relaxed, so that's where we started in the meditation today. One of the most simple distinctions that you can make is to notice: am I relaxed or tense? It's so simple. Notice now in your body: relaxed or tense? Then in your heart and mind: which is more present there, relaxation or clenching contraction?

Noticing simple distinctions in the practice becomes a foundation that builds capacity to notice more and more. This is excellent cross-training for mettā practice or the other brahmavihāras^[5]. As we go through it this week, it's also a wonderful practice in that it is portable and seamlessly integrates with daily life.

So the first instruction is to relax, and the second instruction is to start here. Start where you are. Right now, notice whatever you're paying attention to. If you're meditating, notice whatever anchor or object of attention you already use. It's nothing more than that. Maybe notice that you're breathing or hearing right now. And then notice what else is present. It's not a trick question, but just notice right now what else is present in your body and in your mindfulness.

I'd like to point out that if you're noticing something—anything—and you know you're noticing it, awareness (or sati) is already present. In other words, there's the meditation anchor or object, and there's the awareness of it.

I'm going to do a little demonstration here. Let's say you're paying attention to a bell striker. You're very focused on the striker, and that is the object of attention. But I'm kind of clenching it in my hand, so I'm a little bit tight around noticing this. If I'm strictly noticing the object, I might lose sight of the fact that I'm gripping it really tightly. However, awareness—represented here by this stuffy bird—is also present. [Laughter] So you've got two things: you've got what's being observed, and you've got the process of the awareness happening. If you notice the process of awareness, sometimes you can notice the tension and hold things more lightly.

To notice that you're aware is nothing more mysterious than noticing that mindfulness is present. Not only do we know that we're seeing or observing, but we know that we know. As might be evident from me using a stuffed animal for humor, holding things lightly in this practice is really helpful.

The other distinction I'd like to introduce today is thinking about something versus the direct experience of it. I could be focused on this striker, or my breath, but mostly be thinking about it. "Oh yeah, this striker, I got it at such and such a store, and it makes such and such a sound, and it sounds really good with this bell." That's thinking about it. However, I could also be focused on the direct experience of the breath—for example, the texture, the pace, the places in the body where it's happening. This direct experience is what I call noticing what's in this moment. Thinking about it is that other thing over there: the commentary, the judgment, the evaluation.

There is a place for making discernments, but when I use the word judgment, we're talking about something extra coming along that's maybe not so helpful. "I can never stay with my breath," "That breath doesn't feel very good at all," "What's wrong with me?"

Noticing this direct experience is helped by using what I call insight koans^[6] or vipassanā koans. Some of these that I'll introduce are from Sayadaw U Tejaniya, some are from Andrea Fella—a mentor and now colleague of mine—and a number of them came up in my own practice. If this sounds like a novel practice in the insight meditation world these days, it is actually closely based on the third foundation of mindfulness in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[7], the discourse on the foundations of mindfulness.

A few words about working with insight koans: use simple words, phrases, or very simple questions. You ask a very simple question and drop it in to see how it resonates in your being—in your body, your heart, your mind. It's not an invitation to think about what's going on, but rather an invitation to a full-system response, mostly nonverbal. It's kind of like dropping a pebble in a wishing well or a little branch in a still pond; notice how it ripples through. In terms of frequency, the suggestion is not to do it that often, otherwise it can get really noisy in there.

These two questions to start with that you've already heard: "Are you aware?" and "Relaxed or tense?" Notice what it felt like to be aware of awareness, to be aware of mindfulness. Then the second question: is the body, heart, and mind relaxed or tense in this moment? It's that simple.

With the first question, "Are you aware?", it prompts the return of mindfulness. It points to another dimension of the word translated as mindfulness, sati, which is to remember. To recollect. More and more moments of mindfulness become more and more continuous, like rain forming puddles. It first forms little puddles, then bigger puddles, and that is through the process of remembering to be mindful, remembering to be aware.

Wisdom builds on such simple distinctions. These distinctions begin to re-educate your heart, your mind, and your body in what's most helpful in being present.

So notice today as you go throughout your day: are you aware, and is your system relaxed or tense? Thank you very much for your kind attention. It's beautiful to be with you, and I look forward to exploring this with you this week. May all beings benefit.