Guided Meditation: Stillness and Movements in the Midst of Everything; Dharmette: The Story of Dipa Ma, the Living Dhamma

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Stillness and Movements in the Midst of Everything; The Story of Dipa Ma, the Living Dhamma. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 11, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Stillness and Movements in the Midst of Everything

Welcome to a Friday morning here at IMC, the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. I'm welcoming you all from my own home, which is about half an hour away from IMC. It is so good to see the chat messages flowing in. They're so sweet. Having been with you this whole week in the mornings, I'm just enjoying reading the chat messages and feeling a sense of a global Sangha^[1] here all together.

We will begin momentarily diving into our meditation. If you'd like to join me, please find a posture that's supportive of a meditative practice for about half an hour.

To begin, maybe if your eyes are still on the computer screen, just allow the chat messages to flow through, soft-eyed. Feeling a sense of a Sangha right here, now we're practicing together as a community in an ancient tradition. When you're ready, you can gently close your eyes or look down softly.

Allow our energy in thinking and planning to turn inward. This meditation is an explicit form to gather our attention, to collect our attention. We're entering into the here and now. Deliberate and kind.

Feeling and sensing the global sense of the body sitting or lying down. The different dimensions of our being—heart, mind, and body—begin to come together as a whole. Maybe a sense of it all gathering into and through the posture we're taking.

The pelvic floor, the lower half of the body, feels steady, settled, grounded. Earthy; the body resting on the earth. From a grounded place, there is a natural uplift in the torso, all the way through the neck and head. It feels as if all aspects all around, within ourselves and outside of ourselves, are gathering here through the body.

What a wonder that the earth element is naturally grounding, settling, and relatively unmoving, offering grounding for our heart and mind right here. The stillness in the body is felt right here.

Borrowing an image from my teacher: like stones in the riverbed, quiet stillness is felt. Maybe there is a hint of it, or just a hint of a possibility, however it may show up for you.

Stillness in the body naturally highlights the movements. Without looking for or searching, it's natural for the movements of the body to be known. Movements of the breath. The vibration of sounds. Tingling sensations, maybe on the fingertips or palms. In areas of stillness in the body, there is movement in the body.

Feeling and sensing the movements. Feeling and sensing is raw, direct, without the need for words or ideas. Whatever you feel is just right.

Letting go of judgments, comparisons, evaluations. Resting in the simplicity of your experience.

Noticing, rather than knowing. The capacity or the knowing of the movements can be quiet and still.

Emotions and thoughts may pull through. You may feel it somatically, energetically, as some sort of movements, wavelets in the body, or just in the energetic field. There is a stillness, a silence, in the knowing, in the feeling, in the sensing.

Emotions can be strong, or mild and soft. However it is, quietly, lovingly receiving them. Being available. Shifts, changes in the inner ecology of our being.

This stillness and quiet that you feel do not need a location. They may feel pervasive all around, while the movements in the body, mind, and heart are happening.

If the mind becomes busy, this body is a refuge. You can always return to the felt sense of the earth element. Stones in the riverbed. Movements of the breath. A quiet humming in the body.

Being available to feel and sense deeply.

There is this line that my Dharma buddy said in a past retreat that stayed with me: "Our practice is not about feeling good. Instead, we are cultivating a capacity to feel deeply." To feel and sense the depth of our being, the vastness of our being.

Noticing that the stillness and the movements have no boundaries. Just a flux of happenings. The center of stillness is everywhere.

Maybe this is a hint, just a hint of a possibility. Just being easily satisfied with however it is for you.

The dance of our lives happens in all forms, all kinds of shapes and textures. Being available. A warm welcome to all forms. A warm welcome to all forms and all beings.

Deep bows to each other, to ourselves, into the possibility of a boundless, loving, quiet heart.

Dharmette: The Story of Dipa Ma, the Living Dhamma

It is time for me to transition into a Dharma talk, the dharmette. Today I brought a story of a modern-day giant in the Theravada^[2] tradition. I use the word "giant" to describe how she was a human being with immense heart and mind qualities, immense goodness in her heart and mind, even though physically she was quite small. This is the story of Dipa Ma.

I'm going to show a picture. Some of you might know her, or know of her, or maybe have read the book or heard stories about her in various Dharma talks. Why Dipa Ma?

I want to start with a story told by Maria Monroe, who is one of the senior practitioners in the Western Theravada scene.^[3] This was a time when Dipa Ma and Maria were on an airplane coming to the United States from India. The flight was very turbulent. At one point, the plane hit an air pocket and dropped, and drinks and things all flew up to the ceiling. It took a moment for the airplane to finally settle into stable air. Maria screamed a bit, and Dipa Ma was sitting right across the aisle from her. Dipa Ma reached out, took her hand, and just held it. At some point, Dipa Ma whispered to her, "The daughters of the Buddha are fearless." This is Dipa Ma, the fearless daughter of the Buddha.

So what was her path? How did she come to this possibility of fearlessness?

She was born in 1911 in India and passed away in 1989. Her life actually overlapped with mine, and so there is some sort of warmth in my heart connecting to this. She got married when she was twelve years old, as maybe that was just the way back then. She moved with her husband from India to Burma because he had work there.

For the early years—perhaps for a couple of decades—she wasn't able to conceive and have babies. It wasn't until her mid-thirties that she began to be able to conceive. That was a daunting period as well. She lost two babies early on, shortly after birth, and was only able to keep one daughter. This daughter's name is Dipa, and so she became known as the mother of Dipa, which is why she is known as Dipa Ma.

You can see this was immensely painful for Dipa Ma. She got very sick; she had heart disease, high blood pressure, and other issues. She was bedridden for many months and couldn't get out. Her husband was a very kind soul, very gentle, kind, and loving. He not only had to take care of Dipa Ma and Dipa, but also had to work overtime in order to keep the family going. One day, he came home not feeling well and died.

This was a breaking point. Dipa Ma was in her early fifties, without health, work, or support, and had to support her young daughter. Without her health, she didn't know what to do anymore. Ever since she was a little girl, she had always wanted to meditate. She decided she had to go visit a meditation center in Burma; she didn't know what else to do. She sorted out all her belongings, gave them to her neighbor, and asked them to take care of Dipa. In her own mind, she thought she would probably never return. And so she went on her first meditation retreat.

When she arrived at the center, she was offered some basic meditation instructions and a room, and she began to practice. Very quickly, she got very concentrated. She was so concentrated that one day she didn't realize a dog was biting her leg. She just thought she couldn't move her leg, but she wasn't aware that the dog was biting her until she turned around and looked at it. The dog bites made her very weak, so she was sent home. She didn't complete her first retreat.

And yet, just with those basic meditation instructions, she began to practice at home whenever and however she was able to. She also had an opportunity to meet a teacher who spoke her own language from her home state. I didn't mention that while she was living in Burma, she didn't speak the local language, which was yet another challenge. This new teacher, Anagarika Munindraji,^[4] taught her meditation. With his instructions, she progressed rather quickly and dramatically over a short period of time.

The Dharma began to transform her in ways she could never have imagined. First, her high blood pressure was gone. She was no longer sickly all the time, and she had much more energy. This offered such immense trust and faith in the practice, and she quickly had deep insights into the Dharma. She just gave herself completely over to the practice.

As it is described, even as a widowed single mother trying to undertake her spiritual path within the confines of a patriarchal and hierarchical Buddhist monastic system, Dipa Ma never doubted that she could reach the highest goal. At that time and place, there was no such thing as the women's liberation movement. Dipa Ma simply liberated herself. She once remarked, "I had no fear, and I am at peace now."

That was the immense transformation that became possible for her, right in the midst of the ups and downs and turmoils of her life. Indeed, Dipa Ma continued to face all kinds of challenges. After her period of life in Burma, in 1967, when she was 56 years old, the Burmese government asked all foreigners to leave the country. She had to leave with her daughter to go back to India. They moved into a tiny apartment in Calcutta, and that's where Dipa Ma began her Dharma teaching career.

Perhaps one of the most significant qualities of Dipa Ma was how she embodied the Dharma. She taught her students: "Whatever you're doing, be aware of it. Ironing, nursing, cooking." Nothing is outside of the practice domain. One of her students said she's the patron saint of householders. This was very uplifting for me. In a way, she's a superhero woman in my heart, if I'm allowed to have a superhero in my field of consciousness.

Her teachings, in some ways, changed how I practiced. I remember shortly after giving birth to my son, I realized that my life was more or less turned upside down with diapers, bottles, sleepless nights, hormonal changes in the body, and all sorts of things. It was a phase of my life where I had so much enthusiasm for retreat practice, and it became very clear that I couldn't do the kind of retreat practice I used to do. That was devastating to me.

But I remembered Dipa Ma, and how she taught nursing mothers to practice while they were nursing. She taught busy students to practice when they were in school. Somehow, remembering those stories opened me up to a whole new way of practicing that I had never imagined. I began to realize that there might be new possibilities for me here, and I decided that I wasn't going to wait for the next retreat. The practice could start right where I was.

That was a turning moment for my Dharma journey, and my practice began to expand gradually, little by little. I emphasize the word "gradually" because it wasn't life-changing in a single moment. It was a gradual process, and it's still unfolding even to this day. But as I opened to all these different forms of practice in my life, it enriched and deepened my practice, and I found so much confidence and trust in it. These were the teachings of Dipa Ma, a profound householder Dharma teacher.

It was said that her path wasn't attached to a particular place, teacher, lifestyle, or the monastic model; the world was her monastery. She was a teacher to many. She taught some of the senior Western Theravada teachers in our own lineage: Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg.^[5] She even taught a three-month retreat at the Insight Meditation Society.

I want to wrap up this week's stories of great women disciples of the Buddha by saying that stories are not meant to intimidate us or ask us to become them. I'd like to read the afterword in this Dipa Ma book that I was showing, written by Jack Kornfield, who summarized the point I was hoping to make much better than I could. This is what he said:

"Simple beings, whether they are the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Dipa Ma, or a thousand unknown simple beings living among ourselves, share the same fundamental characteristics of selflessness, great compassion, and peace. Each one of us can carry Dipa Ma's legacy in terms of having that much peace and love. It takes its own time, yet it's possible for anyone. In the end, the point is not to be like Dipa Ma or some other great yogi or saint you might read about or hear about. The point is something much more difficult: to be yourself, and to discover that all you seek is to be found here and now in your own heart."

Thank you, everyone.

It was so good to be with you all this week. You will be accompanied next by Diana Clark, my Dharma sister, so you'll be in good company. Be well, everyone.