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Guided Meditation: Here, Now

Good morning, good day, welcome. Each day this week, as we've been exploring the heart of practice, I've provided a sort of different welcome. Today, I'm saying that the heart of practice is here, now. Here, now, and nowhere else. Welcome to this moment, to this breath right here. I'll say in the Dharmette^[1] that some of the most advanced instructions that we provide in this practice—some of the most advanced, arcane, esoteric instructions that you'll receive from teachers at IMC^[2]—are very simple, and are the foundational instructions. At the same time, one of the most advanced instructions is simply "here." Here, being here now. Our most advanced instructions in this practice are the same as the foundational instructions: keep coming back to here, now. Sounds simple enough, but as we know, it's not easy.

So let's sit together today. The heart of practice is this idea of "here, nowhere else." I think I mentioned on Monday that I've recently seen that the word "nowhere" has in it "now, here." I like the formulation that we can say: now, here, nowhere else. There's nowhere else to get to, nowhere else to go. In fact, there's nowhere else we ever live; there's nowhere else we ever find ourselves in experience. So let's sit together, and then we'll explore that idea a little more in the form of a Dharmette. But first, a guided meditation where I'll try to bring some of this idea to the fore.

Bringing our attention inward and downward, bringing our eyes closed if that feels comfortable. Softening the gaze if we leave our eyes open. Connecting with the experience of the body, whatever form we notice that in first: the weight of the body on the cushion, pressure, any tension, any holding, bracing. We just notice what's here now. We don't need to do anything about it. Nothing needs to be pushed away. Nothing needs to be grasped onto. This showing up for all of us, showing up for everything that happens: this, we said earlier in the week, is the heart of practice. Finding our way back to this special place in the meditation where the mind can rest. This place here in the meditation, this is the heart of practice.

And in this here and now of the meditation, we can connect with the breathing. Today I want to suggest that as we connect with the breathing, however we do that, we are aware that we're connecting with the mystery of the breath. We call this process that's going on here in the middle of everything "the breath," but that's a generalization. That's a concept. What we bring attention to is the sensations that are present with this animating movement of the body: the rise and fall of the abdomen, the sensation of expansion or contraction, the shifting upward and downward of the shoulders, the movement of something passing through the nostrils, in and out. At the tip of the nose, we can notice the sensation of cool and quick, and then slower, warmer with each inhalation and exhalation. The words we use to capture these sensations—the breath, breathing, inhalation, exhalation—they're just names for these sensations that we can rest our awareness in.

So let's rest with these sensations: rising, falling, expanding, contracting, cool, warm. We do the same thing sometimes with other bodily sensations or sounds, for example. By connecting with these, linking our awareness and our attention to these sensations, these moving phenomena in our experience, we connect with the hereness and the nowness of our experience here, now. We can even do this with the breathing: we can note "here" on an in-breath, and "now" on an out-breath. Or "now" on an in-breath, and "here" on an out-breath. Here, now. Here, now.

Why is this here and now so important? Why is this present moment so precious? Because it's here and now, and only here and now, that we can be aware of suffering being added to our experience. And it's here and now that we can let that extra that we add to experience fall away. This here and now, this is the heart of practice.

Here, now. Keeping coming back to here and now. Why is here and now so important? Why is the present moment precious? Because it's here that we can be aware of suffering getting added to our experience. We can understand suffering, and it's here now that we can let that extra that's getting added fall away. Being with the breath as it arises for us, connecting with the sensations in the body that happen with the breathing, teaches us that like the breath, we can be fully present here and now. Just simply knowing direct experience without adding anything extra to it. This here, now. Letting all experience arise, let the simple knowing be it.^[3] This is the heart of the practice.

Dharmette: The Heart of Practice (4 of 5): Nowhere Else

Good morning, good day, welcome. This is day four of an exploration of the heart of practice. Each day we've been saying, "This is the heart of practice." Today, the heart of practice: here, nowhere else.

I'd like to begin the Dharmette today by going back to yesterday for just a second. Toward the end of the chat yesterday, I noticed before I signed out that there was a comment where somebody said something about the longing to escape imperfection. Our shared longing to escape imperfection. I thought, yeah, that's a lovely little way to summarize an important aspect of our suffering, of how we add unnecessary stress and suffering to our experience. Maybe it's that longing to escape the inevitable imperfection of living that makes so many of us perfectionists. I don't know, just suggesting that may be part of it. But it's interesting. I was reflecting this morning that when I thought about that post in the chat from yesterday, this practice encourages us to embrace, as I said yesterday, the "good enough" as perfect. Another way to think about that is that in the practice we get to embrace the imperfect instead of turning away from it or running away from it.

It brings to mind, for example, the celebration of the imperfect in art forms that are associated with some Buddhist practice traditions, particularly Zen traditions. And it reminded me of a story. I don't know where I heard this or when, but some of you may be familiar with it. There is somebody new to the life of a meditation center or a monastery whose job is to rake leaves from a patio area. They first take up the rake on the first day of the job. They are quite focused on getting all the leaves raked up, and they get it pretty clean. The teacher comes out to take a look at the work and says, "Pretty good, but not perfect." On the second day, the person tries even harder to get every leaf, every speck, every twig, every mote of dust. They think that they've achieved that. The teacher emerges from the meditation hall, takes a look around, and says, "Pretty good, but not perfect." You probably know where this is going. The third day—it's always three—the practitioner works really hard to get every single mote of dust, stick, twig, leaf, and branch from the area, raking and sweeping and spending quite a bit of time doing it. The teacher comes out, looks around, and says, "Pretty good." And then reaches up, shakes the branch of a tree, several leaves fall to the ground, and the teacher says, "Now it's perfect."

Anyway, there are probably a lot of ways to tell that story, or versions of it. You get the idea. But I like the idea that maybe in our practice we're encouraged to embrace the imperfect, celebrate the imperfect, be comfortable with the imperfect, and maybe develop different metrics about what's important in our practice, what's useful, what's skillful, and possibly what's important in life.

Similarly, I think that there's a way in which we're encouraged to embrace mystery in the practice. I'd love to explore a particular aspect that came to me this morning as I thought about this. I don't prepare these talks far in advance. I like to try to do something that seems like what's coming up right now. This may be a little half-baked as a result. All of this may be a little half-baked, but embrace the imperfect. To me, and I tried to hint at this in the guided meditation, the breath is a mystery. Maybe there's a place for mystery in our practice. Maybe one of the reasons we connect with the breathing, and why that is so useful for us, is that it connects us with a deep mystery. It reminds us that in our practice it's not about getting something intellectually or understanding something in a cerebral sense. One of the reasons we keep coming back to the present moment, I think, is that we can be comfortable with things we don't understand fully, and we don't need to understand fully. That's a way in which there's an imperfection there that we're encouraged to embrace. We want to meet experience without struggling against it, without adding suffering to it. Part of the way we do that is meeting it as it is on its terms. And part of what's there is the mystery of it all.

I've got a very specific mystery in mind today, and it goes kind of like this. I think it's worth reminding ourselves—not every time we connect with the breath, but as a general thing—that for the vast stretch of human history, until very recently (until the late 17th century), and for sure for the vast majority of time that people have been engaged in Buddhist practice, beginning with the ancient teachings codified in ancient texts in the Pali^[4] tradition, the function of the breath in the human body was a total mystery. People didn't understand what it did the way we do. I suspect that most of us gathered here today have an idea of what happens when the breathing happens. We know that the blood is being oxygenated. We know that there's an exchange of gases: oxygen comes in, hits the bloodstream, and carbon dioxide is expelled. This understanding is new in human history.

I think the mystery of it is important to grasp. One of my little hobbies and habits is the study of late 17th-century England. It's there and then that scientists—experimenters, people in an experimental tradition associated with the Royal Academy, the Royal Society—established how the breath works in sustaining life through a series of investigations. Building on one another's work, they determined that venous blood is converted to arterial blood not in the heart, which is kind of what had been thought before, but by flowing through the lungs. Later, it was understood that what's happening in the lungs is this exposure to the atmosphere. Then, at a later time, it became clear that it's not all the air, but a particular component of the air—oxygen—that plays this critical role, and thus the breathing plays a critical role.

So for most of human history, the breath was a mystery. People could see this: when a body's breathing, it's alive; when a body is not breathing, it's not alive. It's a very profound thing to realize: "Oh, this breath has to do with life. Life is about breath happening in this body." And this is why the breath comes to play such a central role in a lot of religious life, in a lot of wisdom traditions as a metaphor for life, but also in our Buddhist practice as a practical instrument and tool. We connect with the breathing and other bodily sensations, but the breathing in particular, because it captures something central about life. Life as it's lived, as it's breathed, with this breath here and now. This breath, and then this one. This is how life goes: breath by breath, here and now. Just this breath. It's just the next breath. And that's where our practice frequently focuses and finds its inspiration.

Let me just pause there to note that we can see in our language this connection between breathing, the mystery of it, and a life force. In any language that draws on Latin—like English and some other European languages—the breath lives in our language. In words like respiration, inspiration, aspiration, expiration, and spiritual, the breath lives in our language. It's also there in words that have the Latin root anima^[5] in them, like animal or animate. Animals breathe; that's what makes them alive. At least that's what was seen to be the life force by people before us. It's true in Greek too. The word psyche comes from Greek words meaning the breath of life. So our physical being, but in the Greek word psyche even our mental and psychological well-being, is bound up with this mysterious breathing thing.

There's a digression. I'm going to see if I can wrap things up in four minutes. I got a little carried away there, but that's because I find this really inspiring. The fact that breathing was a mystery, what it did in maintaining and sustaining life, makes it particularly powerful. It's a place to rest our practice. We can recapture, every time we return to the breath, some of this mystery by focusing not on the breath as a concept. In fact, I think the concept falls away when we bring attention to the sensations. That's part of what we're doing: leaving behind ideas about breath and life, and just focusing on the hereness and nowness of one breath after another, which connects us deeply with life going on. As I said in the guided meditation, when we bring attention to the breathing, the breath isn't adding anything extra. The breath doesn't need to be perfect; it is just doing its thing. It isn't concerned about the breath ten minutes ago or ten years ago that wasn't perfect. It doesn't have any intention or ambition to become a master breather. No, it's just right here. And when we connect with it, when we bring our attention to it, some of that attitude about life rubs off on us: "Oh, it's just the hereness and nowness of things that keeps us alive."

There are some other things that come up when we connect with the breathing. We don't have any control over the breathing. Oh, we can hold our breath for a couple of minutes if we practice, you know, but we don't have any fundamental control over it. We don't get to determine when it starts or ends, for example. This is of significant concern to us: we don't control life. So, when we connect our attention to the breathing, we enter a realm of magic and mystery, particularly if we let go of what we know about what's actually happening with the breath. Instead of thinking, "Oh, I need some oxygen so that the blood can circulate," it's nice to just go, "Oh, here's this life force. Here's this hereness and nowness. Right here and now is where life gets lived." And to that life, not a whole lot needs to be added.

I suggested one way in the guided meditation: sometimes it can be fun to put a "here" and a "now" on the in-breath or the out-breath, and do this kind of "here, now" thing to remind ourselves that this is what there is. This is what is knowable when we bring our attention down in a very refined way to what's going on.

I promised on Monday that I would explore the little mystery of how the word "nowhere" has "now" and "here" in it. I don't want to say anything profound or glib or silly about that, but just that I like the idea that "now, here, nowhere else" is a good thing to keep in mind. Now, here, nowhere else. Nowhere else is life lived. Nowhere else is the practice practiced. There's nowhere else to get to. This breath right here. And then this one. The in and out, the sensations, the rising and falling, expanding, contracting. This right here, right now, this is the heart of practice.

So, thanks for your attention. Tomorrow morning we'll continue. It just gets better. This is an inexhaustible treasure of wisdom, and the heart of practice just keeps beating away. Take care, all, until tomorrow. Bye.