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Guided Meditation: Letting Be - Wanting and Not Wanting

Good morning, afternoon, or evening. Let's go ahead and start with the meditation today. Just allow yourself to settle in for this period of practice, finding your spot. If you're comfortable doing so, allow your eyes to close gently.

It's often good to begin a period of meditation with just a quick check-in with the body and inviting some ease. Sense the body in the sitting posture. If you're lying down or standing, whatever posture you're in, just sense the orientation, the disposition of the body. Allow the attention to come inward just so that we have that connection with ourself right now.

Sense the place where you're sitting, your seat against the cushion or the chair. Sense how it supports you, the stability. Maybe take a moment to feel balanced where you're sitting. I sometimes even rock back and forth a little bit, or forward and back, just to find that center point or close to it where the body feels as balanced as it can. Typically that will be a feeling of uprightness, almost as if the head is being drawn upward by a string at the top of the head. Just let the body soften around that. Let the shoulders release, maybe the shoulder blades slide down the back. Let the arms rest and hang down comfortably from the shoulders. Let the hips and the legs soften.

Then invite ease even inside the body. Invite the eyes to soften in the eye sockets, even letting the brain relax, if that image makes sense. Sometimes if I've been thinking, I imagine that my brain has gotten a little bit compressed, and I just allow it to expand to fill the whole skull. And down through the chest and torso area, maybe also feeling some release and expansion. Let yourself fill the body from the inside.

Bring some attention to the mind. How is it right now? Does the mind feel a little contracted, a little excited? Is there some mood or emotion that's prominent? It's all fine. We're just checking in to see what's there. So the invitation is to touch into whatever degree of contentment you can feel right now. Things are as they are. Can we have some mental ease around the current conditions of body and mind? At least for this moment, you're sitting quietly. Touch into the sense of "it's enough for now," to whatever degree that's present.

It's often helpful to give the mind an anchor. Maybe the breath, or the body sensations, or for some people sounds are a relaxing anchor—just something to orient around. See if you can connect with that and just rest with it for a few moments.

When we have even just some degree of stability and ease in the mind, whatever degree it's present, that can serve as a reference point for feeling the ways that the mind and the body kind of pull away from that. Maybe there's a leaning toward wanting more peace or more ease. Or maybe there's a compulsive thought that keeps coming back: we keep wanting to plan something for tomorrow, or we want to review a conversation that happened yesterday and figure out what would have been better to say. Sometimes we fall into those and get on that train, and that's normal. Or maybe we really are wanting something to eat or to be outside right now. So just take some time as a simple mindfulness practice of resting where we are in our seat and noticing the pulls of the mind toward various things, if there are any.

If we have been able to see some of the ways that the mind wants things, or wants to move into things, or move toward things, or pull things into it, all of those are part of this movement of desire that we're exploring this week. And it's also helpful to see the relationship that we have to that. Sometimes in meditation, we react to wanting by not wanting it: "Oh, if only my mind would stop doing that." So it can get a little complicated if we begin to put wanting and not wanting under the lens, and then we combine it with wanting or not wanting those movements. But it's also helpful to see the way the world of wanting and not wanting is complicated. So the invitation is to let be. Not to get entangled, but not to try to resist. If the mind is pulling this way and that, what if we could just let those movements be? Let them be as they are.

If not wanting arises, we can let that be as it is too. They're really just different sides of the same coin. We always have that reference point of whatever ease or contentment we have at this moment. It's okay. It's just sitting here. Just let it be.

The breath that comes in and goes out... it comes in without us wanting it. It goes out without us wanting to get rid of it. Many of the movements of the mind come about without us really wanting to bring them into existence. If we just let them be, they will eventually end also. Just rest with the direct experience that wanting and not wanting are only partially related to what's actually coming and going.

Yes, we're able to tune in more often to a place of rest in the mind and heart and body. Even if it's just a little bit more than what we had before, there can be a very slight feeling of joy, of happiness of simply being in the present moment. Even if what we're experiencing is somewhat unpleasant. Suppose our back has gotten a little sore sitting here, or we're just not feeling well today, or any of the myriad things that occupy the mind and body. There's something about just being there for it, knowing it, letting it be, that has a very subtle kind of joy to it. The joy of being present for our life.

That's very helpful to tune into when we're able to feel it because it encourages the mind to stay present, and to allow the various wantings and not wantings to come and go, and to not have so much hold on the mind. Then we would have a choice about whether to act on them or not. We may begin to sense in our life that that centeredness that we can rest in, that presence where it's okay for there to be wanting and not wanting and we have a choice about acting on it—that's a gift to the world. That little space that we can open up through our awareness so that we can begin to more often make choices that will be good for us and for others.

More often, we can choose among the things we want the ones that will be beneficial. We can choose among the things that we feel "not wanting" toward, we can move away from the ones that are actually harmful, and help others to do that too. Far from being self-serving, contentment and ease and the ability to not want and not want is a huge gift. So valuable for this world that is so busy rushing here and there. So we bring in a beautiful kind of desire into the mind: the wish for happiness for ourselves and others. The wish to be free of the grip of unhelpful wanting and not wanting.

May it be so on this day as we go forward into our lives a little bit later, or tomorrow if we're going to bed soon. May we bring our contentment for the benefit of the world.

Dharmette: Desire and Letting Go (2 of 5): Sensual Desire and Pleasure

Okay, so this week we're talking about desire and letting go. We learned yesterday that desire has a lot of different manifestations in human life. It's a big part of life. Just to review the vocabulary for this week, we're using the word desire as a general term that just means our mental movement toward something that we want to move toward. It can definitely be unwholesome—lust for power, lust for sex, addictions. But it can also range into just the needs of the body (hunger, wanting to eat), and all the way up into aspirations and good intentions, and even the wish to awaken. So I'm calling all that kind of this space of "moving toward," or desire.

We can feel in ourselves that different kinds of desire feel very different, and that's important. We need to gain some understanding and also some strength of heart around handling desire, so it's an important area of Buddhist practice. Today we're going to look particularly at the Pali word for it: kāma^[1], which is the realm of the senses. Just to be clear, that is a different word than karma, which is also called kamma^[2] in Pali. This one has a long 'a': kāma. I'll try to be clear on that.

This word kāma has two different sides. It has an objective side where it represents the sensual pleasure or attractiveness that's out in the world or that we think is out in the world. And then it has a subjective side that's related to the sensual desire and also the attachment that we generate in our mind around sense objects. I'll mostly probably call it "sense desire" or sometimes "sense pleasure," but it's multifaceted like that.

I should probably keep repeating this all week, which is to say: is all desire bad? No, it's not. But some are clearly more wholesome than others. As a refinement of that, we also need to check if there is attachment coming along with a certain wish. This is a little bit of a refinement. It's totally fine to want a cup of tea and head into the kitchen to get it. But if our partner has finished the last of the tea and we get there and there isn't any, do we get angry about that? The desire was fine, but if there's attachment to it, then there will be suffering if it's not fulfilled. We have to watch that, particularly in the realm that we're talking about today: kāma, sense desire or sense pleasure.

Sometimes this refers to the five physical senses—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching—i.e., pleasure at any of those sense doors or desire for pleasant experiences there. I think we're all very familiar with that. Sometimes it also includes the sixth sense in Buddhism: the mental sense. Like wanting pleasant ideas or having a desire for pleasant thoughts. We have that too; we sometimes spend time honing our views or philosophies or creating appealing stories, etc.

The Buddha used the word kāma differently on different occasions, so sometimes only the five senses, sometimes all six. But when we relate this to the different types of desire I talked about yesterday, it isn't just one of the five; it connects into several of them. Just as a review, the five that we talked about were: taṇhā^[3], which is grasping desire; the second one was our basic bodily needs like hunger, thirst, and needing to pee; then the various wantings associated with living a human life; the elevated wishes for well-being and peace; and the fifth is the aspiration to awaken.

When kāma (this sense pleasure) is very strong, it's part of that first kind of desire. When there's a lot of attachment to it, it's grasping desire or taṇhā. When it's milder, it relates more to the next two: the simple bodily needs of wanting to keep the body comfortable, and then the wanting associated with creating a human life, so wants around livelihood, family, and community. In those latter two cases that are in the milder form, we tend to regard sense pleasure as very important, useful, and justified. And of course, we have to do those; we have to create our life. But it's very interesting to see how the Buddha talks about kāma in the teachings that we have from him.

I thought it would be honest to go over some of those. To put it frankly, kāma does not come off well in the Buddhist teachings. As we read and study the teachings, we have to acknowledge that. He gives a series of very stark and graphic images for sense pleasure in a number of different teachings. I won't go over all of them because there's a lot, but just as an example, one of them is that it is like a meatless bone that a very hungry dog comes to gnaw on. It gnaws and gnaws, but it doesn't get any nourishment from the meatless bone. Another image is a bird that has found a scrap of meat. It picks it up and flies off with it, and then it's attacked by other birds because they see that it has something good. They attack the bird that has the meat, and if it doesn't drop it, it's going to get hurt. Another image is going against the wind with a grass torch. If you go with the wind, the smoke will blow away from you, but if you go against the wind, the smoke and the fire from the grass torch will blow right onto you. I'll give one more, which is that sense pleasures are like a dream world where we imagine lovely parks and lovely groves and beautiful streams, and then they go away like "poof" when we wake up.

I could go on, but I think that's enough to get the idea. We say, "Wow, that's pretty stark." Each one has a different focus, right? Each one highlights a different aspect of sense pleasure that is painful or troublesome. The meatless bone shows unsatisfactoriness—ultimate unsatisfactoriness in the end. The bird with the meat shows other people's envy; when we have a lot of nice things, that can be a problem in human life. A dream world is like there's something deluded about thinking that these things are so wonderful. Maybe we've had that experience of thinking that something we were going to get was going to be really, really wonderful and great, and we get it and maybe we like it for a little while, but then we realize it isn't quite as good as we thought.

So you can ask, "Wait a minute, why does the Buddha do this? Why is this the most common way that he talks about kāma? Is it really so horrible to enjoy a good meal, a sunset, my comfortable bed?" And of course, the answer is no. I'll have to keep saying this: it's not horrible. We don't want to replace pleasures that we like with aversion or with guilt. That doesn't help.

So then we're left with the question, what is the Buddha doing? I think the Buddha makes a big deal out of the underlying unsatisfactoriness of sensual enjoyment because it's so hard for us to see it. We often have not just the simple enjoyment of these pleasures, but we have attachment on top of that, and we don't really want to see the other side of these. It's fine to enjoy things when they're present, but if there's attachment, then we start getting into these problems. So he's getting our attention. The Buddha wants to wake us up for a moment so that wisdom can come in.

The Buddha actually knew that it's hard for us to see the disadvantages of sense pleasure because even he had a hard time. This is also in the suttas^[4]. You might remember, if you know the story of the Buddha, that he had a wealthy upbringing. He had plenty of sense pleasures. In one sutta, he actually says that he was "intoxicated"—he uses that word—with youth and life and health, and hence he just got lost in all the pleasures. This was before his awakening. And then at some point, still before his awakening, he realized that it would be good if he weren't so infatuated with sensuality, but he still couldn't give it up.

I'm reading a quote now of the Buddha speaking: "Even I myself, before my awakening, when I was still an unawakened bodhisattva^[5], thought: 'Renunciation is good. Seclusion is good.' But my heart did not leap up at renunciation. It didn't grow confident, steadfast, or released, seeing it as peace. And the thought occurred to me: 'Why is it that my heart does not leap up at renunciation, doesn't grow confident, or steadfast, or released, or see it as peace?' And then it occurred to me: 'I have not seen the drawbacks of sensual pleasures. I have not cultivated that insight.'"

This is the Buddha before his awakening! So if he had to actively look for the difficulties behind sense pleasures, I would guess it's going to be the same for us. So he gives us these images for our contemplation so that we can become more wise, so that we can back away from the attachment and the idea in our mind that these things are the whole point, and if we just get enough of these, that's what life is about.

I think we know many people who come to meditation have realized that it isn't quite enough just to have all the things that society tells us we should have. It doesn't feel quite satisfying in the end. So it gets pointed out to us: these are temporary, and they're also not really controllable. We might have gotten lucky and gotten a bunch of them in our life, or enough of them at least, and that's good because that's supportive. But do you really have complete control? No, we don't. And they can also cause problems with other people. Sensual desires lead to all kinds of conflicts, so they're bound up with all kinds of unskillful mind states. I acknowledge that it's hard for us to see this, hard for the mind to see this, because we feel like we'll be left with nothing. If we have no other source of happiness besides comfort and material pleasure, then it would feel terrible for those to be taken away. So it's understandable, and the Buddha is being careful but also pointing to the truth.

I did slip a word into that quote that I read. You might have heard it: it was renunciation. That's not a good word in Western English understanding. We're going to talk more about what that word really means in the Buddhist teachings. It's actually quite a positive word, but we have to let go of some of our associations. So maybe just for now, we'll substitute the phrase "letting go" as something better than the word renunciation for us, until we've had a chance to explore it.

I want to end on a practical note today. What does it mean for our life if we start to question the value of just pursuing sense pleasures? If that's all we did, what would happen if we started to question that? I would guess that many of you have already done some reflection in this area because it's common for people who are interested in meditation to also be interested in some degree of material simplicity—some understanding that getting more and more stuff isn't the answer to happiness. Usually, simplicity is somewhat valued in our lives.

One realm for simplicity that we can have is material simplicity, the physical stuff in our life. We can begin to realize that stuff takes effort to get, to maintain, to organize, and to remember. We start to realize, "Ah, it would be easier if we had less." So I'll offer a little reflection: is there something that you have that it would be easier if you didn't have it? Something that you have to manage or look out for or deal with in your life? And what would it be like to let that go?

It's interesting; letting go often brings a kind of ease to the mind. When it's a clean letting go—when we actually were ready to release it—there's peace in the heart. There's no sense of deprivation. We need so little, really.

Tomorrow we're going to talk about this willingness to let go of things that we're genuinely ready to let go, or that genuinely aren't necessary in our life. We don't have to let go of things that are necessary for our support and for our nourishment. I'm going to go so far as to say that letting go is a heart quality, and that the ability to let go of sense pleasures that are not necessary or even that are causing harm is a heart quality and something that we can do out of wisdom and out of care. So that's the focus for tomorrow, and I hope to see you then. Be well.