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Guided Meditation: Seeing Entanglement

Hello everyone. I am delighted to be here with you, to greet you all, and to see many of your greetings in the chat. Thank you.

There is a fascinating teaching that maybe came from the Thai meditation teacher Ajahn Chah^[1]—I'm not sure of the origin of it—but it is the idea that has to do with sound, any kind of sound. The idea is that sounds never bother us, but we bother sounds. How I understand that is that sounds are just sounds that go through, but the problem, the botheredness where we get bothered, has a lot to do with our reaction to it, our reactivity, and our ideas around it.

There are exceptions to this, of course: people who are highly sensitive, or sounds that are just so glaringly painful that it seems like they hurt our ears or other things. But generally, there is this idea that sounds are kind of neutral. This is particularly true with the words people speak. The meaning of the words might not be neutral, but the words as sound are neutral. Somewhere in the ears that hear the sound, between the sound and the ears, there's something that gets involved. Something happens there: a meaning is assigned, memory about the words and the meaning come into play, the relationship we might have to the person who is speaking them comes into play, predictions of the future and what those words might mean... and then it becomes this complicated world, in the middle of which there is some place we get knotted. We get entangled. We're caught in it, hanging on to that branch on the edge of the river as we canoe down.

So to learn the art of not being knotted up, not being reactive to our senses, is one of the great arts of mindfulness practice. It doesn't, of course, mean that we are oblivious or indifferent to what happens in the world. It means that we can come into a kind of balanced place or a free place, where our response is a response, not a reaction. We can see clearly what our inner ideas, thoughts, and impulses are, and choose wisely how to act, including not giving in to knotting up or getting entangled with it all.

This is true with all our sense doors: the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the body. Today I'd like to focus on the body, and this ability to discern the sensations in the body, the knowing of the sensation, and the entanglement that we might get involved with.

To begin, you might just very simply close your eyes and find a neutral place in your body. Some of you have done this before, but please do it again. Find a neutral place in your body. It could be the hands; maybe the hands are touching each other, or the hands are touching your thighs or your knees. Find a neutral spot in your body, some place where you're not so likely to get entangled or have a lot of opinions or ideas, but where you can feel the sensations that are there.

Feel the sensations in that part of your body. If it's in the hand, feel the pulsing, the tingling, the vibration, the warmth, the coolness. Feel how the sensations might be different in the fingers, in the palm, in the back of the hand.

And then, as you're aware of the sensations in your body in this neutral place, how neutral are you? Are there judgments or ideas for or against the sensations or the attention with the sensations? Are there reactions?

Now, as you exhale, relax your whole body the best you can. Soften the body. Soften the mind as you exhale. Settling into just being here, putting aside ideas of what you have to do or should do in favor of the exhale, where you let go, relax, and settle.

Breathing in and breathing out, relaxing and softening. Maybe you can't let go of everything, but maybe you can soften the tensions in the mind. Soften the places of anxiety, of desire, of ill will, or maybe simply the strong tendency to think. On every exhale, relax, settle, soften. Doing it gently, even kindly. Relaxing and softening on the exhale.

Relaxing on the exhale, and seeing if you can be gentle and receptive to the inhale, with no ambitions, no standards that you're measuring yourself against, and allowing yourself to be aware of the inhale in whatever way it happens.

On the exhale, letting go into the exhale, as if you're letting go into the very end of the exhale to where things become quiet and still, before the inhale begins.

And as you're with your breathing, the sensations of the body breathing, notice if there are any ways in which you're knotted, or entangled, reactive, or caught up in some idea or preference about the breathing. Appreciate that that is your addition—the extra part to breathing. It's possible to breathe with no entanglement necessary. But if there is, know it as entanglement. Know it as a knot, gently, softly, non-judgmentally. Perhaps softening it as you exhale.

With mindfulness, the attention hanging out with your breathing, if there's any reactivity, any ways that you are caught or entangled in breathing, bothered by breathing, bothered by anything—let that be part of the bigger picture of what you accompany as you accompany the present moment. As you accompany breathing, not being bothered even by being bothered. Just knowing it and breathing.

If you are lost in thinking, chances are that there are some kind of subtle or big ways in which you are caught in it, entangled, knotted. Can you relax the knot? Untie it? And if you can't, that's okay. Just know it. Just know that you're knotted and caught, and continue breathing with it, through it. Let breathing be your support to either free you from being caught, or gently highlight that you are. And if you are, don't be bothered by it. Breathe with it, gently, softly.

Sooner or later in the practice of meditation, we can become mindful enough to notice how we get caught up in things, entangled and reactive to things we see, things we hear, things we smell, things we taste, things we feel in the body, things we think, things we emote.

At some point, we begin having a new relationship to those entanglements, those attachments, the way we're caught up. That is one where we don't necessarily any longer believe in the value of being entangled and caught. We know there is something better, and we know it doesn't work to get entangled in our entanglements, to be reactive and bothered by the ways that we are bothered or reactive.

This begins to give us a taste of freedom: the freedom of leaving things alone and not being further entangled, just knowing what's happening. And this ability is invaluable in our social lives—to be able to not give in, or stay caught, or behave or speak from our reactivity, but to see it and be able to stay balanced, relaxed, and clear.

If we can do that, or as we begin doing this better and better, it becomes clearer, more obvious, that the practice we're doing is beneficial for others. It frees them from our reactivity. May it be that this practice that you do does in fact support and help others, maybe all beings. May it be that this community of ours, with so many people coming here to the 7:00 a.m. sitting, collectively makes a difference in the world—that in known and unknown ways we spread peace, safety, happiness, and freedom.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free, and may each of us contribute to this being possible.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (55) Sense Doors: Body

So my friends, there is a delightful little teaching in Buddhism that it's possible to become omniscient. But it's not what you might think, that it's possible to know something about everything. What is this omniscience? It is that it's not worth clinging to anything. So now we know something about everything. It's a certain kind of omniscience.

Continuing on this theme of some kind of omniscience, for our human experience, all human experiences we have, no matter how sophisticated and complex they are, have a common denominator: we know it through one of the six sense doors. The ancient analogy at the time of the Buddha was that if you had a walled city with only one gate coming into the city, then a guard would stand at the gate and could watch everyone coming and going, and would decide who can come in and who can go out. If there were six gates, then there might be six guards doing the same thing.

We have six doors, six gates, through which all experiences that we process, that we take in, that we use to understand our life come. Those six doors are seeing (the gates of the eyes), the ears, the nose, the tongue, the tactile body, and then the mind (that from which we observe or know what's happening in the mind).

So we take in the sense data, the experiences, and then somehow we process it, we do something with it, and sometimes we build whole universes with it. There's a Chinese Zen story of a very realistic painter. He was up close painting a tiger, involved in the details, but at some point he stepped back some feet to look at it, and it was so realistic he became frightened and he ran away.

We ourselves construct stories, ideas, memories, predictions of the future, meaning, elaborations, creativity, poems, songs, and all kinds of things our mind creates, and we can live in that inner world and get lost in it. But in Buddhist practice, what we're trying to do is live at the doors. Be mindful of things as they appear and occur in the present moment at each of the sense doors. The reason for that is if you do that, then you know something about everything. You know the common denominator. Everything that's going to happen is going to be built on those things coming in from those sense doors.

If you can be there and see at that point what the reactivity is, the clinging, the resistance, how we relate to it, it gives us a tremendously wonderful vantage point from which to live a wise life. To not get caught up in the entanglements and reactivity and build universes of tigers that frighten us because we are just not there at the starting point.

In some ways, our life is always beginning over. To bring ourselves into the sense doors and really be present for it, we're there at the start of life. It's always starting in the present, starting over again and over again. So to be able to get right there and see it.

Now, remember that in these teachings that we're doing now on the six sense doors and the entanglement to them, we're coming near the end of a long series of practices of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[2]. So this is not a beginner's practice. This is something that we can begin to do when we've gotten quiet and still enough, or focused mindfulness is strong enough, that we can really stay there and see it.

The advantage of doing so is like this. If we have a garden with garden beds—I'm kind of responsible for them right now because my wife is away; she's usually the gardener. One of the flower beds is overgrown with maybe a foot and a half tall oat grass, or some kind of tall grass, and all kinds of other weeds, and it's packed in the flower bed. The bed must be very fertile because it's just bursting forth and overwhelming, full of weeds. We have another bed where there are some onions and some lettuces and things, and there are almost no weeds at all. The lettuce and the onions are growing nicely, and there's space between them. There, if a weed arises, I see the little weed coming up out of the soil, and I'm not overwhelmed by that. I come over and pull it out, and it doesn't grow to be a big weed to crowd out what we're trying to grow there.

The same thing happens with our mind. If we haven't weeded our mind for decades, it can be crowded and overgrown with all kinds of weeds. It takes a while to relax and settle and calm down to the point where we start seeing the beginning of a weed, the beginning of the entanglement. And if we see its first arising, then we could let go of it. We can pull it out by the roots and put it in the compost pile.

This is part of how practice deepens. As we have the ability to be much more present, and we trust being present more than we trust the thinking, predicting, planning, remembering, reviewing, having conversations, or having fantasies, things become clear enough. Our flower beds become clear enough that we see the beginning of a weed arising, a beginning of a reaction or reactivity arising. That is a powerful place to be, because if you see it arise, then it's easy to let go of it, or not participate, or let it be. It's possible to let it be and let it go and know you're not going to pick it up again.

This is the instruction for this particular part of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. It is to know the sense door. Know—like today we're talking about the body—know the tactile body. Know the sensations of the touch, the object of the tactile experience. Know the arising of an entanglement, know letting it go, and know that you're not going to pick it up again. That's really the exercise of this part of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta: to be able to be present for the sense experience, and to see the beginning of attachment, the beginning of clinging, and to be able to put it down. If you can't put it down, it's powerful to just let it be. Don't pick it up, don't get involved, and then know you're not going to get involved again, at least this time around.

This keeps us in this beautiful, wonderful place of freedom. It keeps us in a place where maybe we're kind of amused, or delighted, or relieved when we see an attachment or clinging or entanglement arise, because we know we're not going to get entangled in the entanglement. We're not going to react to the reactivity. Rather, we're going to see the beauty, the wonderfulness of being aware of its arising—that there it is. For some people, it can be kind of amusing, kind of delightful. It can give birth to a lot of faith and confidence. "Oh, here I am starting to get annoyed. I'm starting to be frustrated. There it is. Here's me wanting it to be different. Here's me wanting it to stay forever." There's that little clinging going on, and we say, "Oh wow, there's the clinging." There's a kind of joy in knowing we're not going to get involved, and knowing that there's freedom and space around it. It's a very different relationship to clinging and reactivity than, "Oh no, this is terrible. I shouldn't be doing this."

So today I talked about the tactile sense door, of things touching our body. That can be physical things outside, but also from the inside out, there's sensate experience the body can reveal. So today I would encourage you to spend more time with mindfulness of your body. Discover the delight of being grounded in your body, maybe. But more importantly for this exercise today, look and see how you're entangled: judgments, expectations, disappointments with the body, how you compare your body to other bodies, or to how you were before, how you might be in the future. See all the ways you get entangled.

See if you can notice the entanglement with such clarity that maybe you're delighted or amused, or maybe relieved that you see it. See if you can find a different way of relating to the bad news of being reactive and entangled, where clear mindfulness brings a different way of relating to the body. It's a way of becoming friends with your body when you stop the reactivity.