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Guided Meditation: With a Foundation

Hello my friends. It's good to be here. One of the primary foundations of my life is the Dharma^[1], and Dharma practice. It's certainly nice to be able to share it, but it's also very nice for me that I have this time to sit here in my meditation posture and tap into the Dharma, express the Dharma, and live the Dharma in a way that is meaningful and connects me to what is, for me, this foundation. To be able to live close to this foundation through one's day, through one's years, is one of the great vehicles for a meaningful life, a peaceful life, a life that brings a lot of gladness and a lot of happiness.

Each of you who are here, whether it's the first time or you've been here since the beginning of the pandemic, are also here to tap into something within yourself that is valuable. Something inside of yourself that can be a refuge^[2], a support, a foundation that maybe you have some sense can bring you gladness, happiness, and a sense of satisfaction. Exactly what it is in relationship to what we do here is probably a little bit individual for each of you, but especially for those of you who have been here for a while now, I'm confident that you have something valuable and important that you tap into.

Perhaps as we go through today, especially as it's meditation, it is not the words that come from me that are important, but rather what you recognize in yourself. Underneath your challenges, underneath your sadness, underneath your resentments, hurts, pains, frustrations, and anxieties, there is a foundation that's deeper. A foundation that is enacted to be known, that is not something we search for, but something that we live. Something that we enact, that we practice, that we engage in. For people who spend too much time looking for a foundation, looking for something valuable, they miss the key thing: it's almost as if the answer is in the looking. If the looking, if the mindfulness, if the awareness is one of being available, being open, and valuing this capacity we have to know and to enact the knowing, enact the presence, the attention, the here-ness here.

Maybe this here-ness of your own can be a foundation. So to have a meditation posture—and one of the advantages of meditating ongoingly is that maybe the posture you find starts becoming part of this enactment of attention, of awareness, of presence. Maybe giving some care to your posture so it can be an enactment, it can be part of this engagement, bringing forth your beings, your bodies, your heart's capacity for being present.

Lower your gaze. Even if you have your eyes closed already, it might be possible to lower your gaze. If you lower your gaze a little bit, the eyes can relax in their sockets. Recognize that the eyes do not have to work when we're meditating, and then gently close the eyes. Slowly and gently take some fuller in-breaths, maybe three-quarters full in a slow, gentle way, and then exhale with a longer exhale than usual. When you come to the end of the exhale, maybe there's a way of relaxing that allows the exhale to continue.

Let your breathing return to normal. As you exhale, scan through your body to see if there are places you can relax: the face, the shoulders, chest, the belly, maybe the hands and arms. As you relax these parts of your body, see if in that relaxation, in the softening, there might be a little bit more sensation, sensitivity, awareness, aliveness in those parts of your body.

One analogy for meditation is that the awareness that we enact, the awareness that we abide in, is a bit like the ocean, broad and deep. All the emotions and feelings we have are like the dance of the waves on top of the ocean: sadness and gladness, happiness and unhappiness, fear or confidence, anger or love. They all have their place dancing on top of the surface. But rest in the depth, the fullness of your ocean. Rest in the depth in which things appear on the surface. Allow them to be there dancing on the surface without identifying or reacting to them, or needing them to be different. Don't base yourself on the waves; base yourself on the deeper embodied sense of presence, attention, awareness, mindfulness. Vast like an ocean. The ocean does not need to identify or be concerned with the shape and the character of the different waves on the surface. They come and they go.

If you're sitting here with some concerns, especially concerns that have an emotional aspect to them, for these minutes, think of them as the waves on the top of the ocean. They're there because of the winds, but you are not the waves. Here, the vast, profound ocean of awareness, of attention, of presence, of embodiment, aliveness. Rest in that ocean, and allow the waves to do what they do without denying them, and without believing in them.

As we come to the end of the sitting, in whatever way you're feeling, whatever way you are, maybe for these last couple of minutes you're allowed to be that way. But in that allowance, in allowing and being available, and maybe at the same time as you allow yourself to be as you are, you can allow for a greater sensitivity, greater awareness of others. With the eyes closed, it would just be bringing them to mind, but later today maybe it's meeting people in person. To feel or sense or know people from the place of depth within, the place where we enact a sensitivity, an attentiveness, a receptivity, where we feel something different about others than our opinions and ideas and stories.

The ability to be mindful of oneself also gives us the ability to be mindful of others, with the humanity of others, for the ways that others suffer and are happy, challenged and successful. May it be that our capacity to feel and know and enact mindfulness allows us to have deeper, richer respect and care, even reverence, for others. May we live offering our attentiveness, our care, to others. May the expression of this practice in the world be wishing for the welfare and happiness of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may our life contribute to that possibility.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Finding our Way (2 of 5) With Gladness and Sadness

Good morning. Continuing now with this week's series theme of the appropriate and inappropriate: different states, polarities that exist often in relationship to each other, and the healthy expressions and unhealthy expressions of these things. Today the topic is gladness and sadness. There are beautiful, inspiring forms of gladness, and there are forms of gladness which are not so beneficial for us to experience. There are profoundly human and very important experiences of sadness, and there are unhealthy ways of being sad, ways that are debilitating.

To be able to begin teasing apart and seeing that these can take a different shape or form is helpful. Often enough, I believe, when people feel sad, just because it's uncomfortable, they'll often just take it as a bad thing, a wrong thing, something that shouldn't be there. Or when they're glad, they think, "This is great, I'm on top of the world, and this is fantastic." But in fact, just because it's gladness or sadness doesn't mean that one is just good and one is just bad. One is healthy, and one is not healthy. They both have their healthy versions, and both of them have their unwise versions. To be able to see those is helpful. The unwise ones, the ones that are not so healthy to have, tend to live together. As a pendulum swings, they tend to rebound and react to each other, and live in relationship to each other. For example, a person might feel a lot of hope and be really glad and delighted by the possibility of something. Then whatever they're hoping for doesn't work out, and so the pendulum swings, and then they feel really sad and sorrowful and grieving.

To say it that abstractly does maybe get it across, but let's say that you really had a lot of hope in the lottery numbers you chose. You think, "Certainly, this is the number," and you're so glad that you finally had a strong, good feeling that these are the numbers that are going to win. And then they're not the numbers that win the lottery, and so then you feel really despairing, discouraged, especially because you put a lot of money into that. Here, these live in relationship to each other.

It might be hope around another person, hope in a relationship. "If only that can happen, then... yes, that's going to happen. I hope for it and it looks like it's going to happen with that person." And then it doesn't, and then we crash. Because we were being energized and pumped up in the energy of hope, when it doesn't work out, we crash. These kinds of things exist together. Some of these that exist together have a lot to do with self, self-identity issues, definitions of ourselves, or judgments about ourselves. If we get praised or we do something that we think others will approve of, then perhaps we feel kind of glad and happy and energized. But it turns out that what we did wasn't approved of or appreciated by other people. In fact, they were discouraged or upset with us, and then we crash.

There might be a natural kind of feeling of some gladness and sadness that is not so tied to our ego, but a lot of it is tied to the ego. The ego is a fragile thing that can be involved in these swings back and forth. Begin not just looking at the particular forms of gladness and sadness that we might have, but to see how these live in relationship to each other. Maybe begin deciding that you don't want to live dependent on things that are fragile, things that swing back and forth from one end to the other. You want to find another way of living.

There's a gladness and sadness that comes from another way of living. We feel glad that we have stability, that we're not so pushed around by the opinions of others or fear of rejection from others, that we are kind of centered and stable here, content just to be present and not needing a lot. That gladness, knowing that we're kind of free from a lot of the social drama and games that maybe we were caught up in earlier, can feel like a gladness that isn't necessarily so much a part of a pendulum or polarity of two different states. It can just be gladness^[3] itself. Maybe it's a gladness that comes from relief: "I used to be so attached to things and wanting things and spinning out, and now I'm not." This new state is really good, and there's a gladness to it or a satisfaction in it.

Then there can be a sadness that is just part of the deep part of human life, that is just there because there's been loss, because of change that touches us in some deep way. There might be sadness that we disappointed ourselves. Sadness that, "Yes, I was in touch with some deeper way of being and integrity and honesty and inner goodness, and I got distracted, or I got afraid, and so then I did something that I never would have imagined I ever would have done. I hurt a friend. I lied. I did something, and now I'm sad and disappointed. I hurt someone." That sadness is just there because there's been pain. Maybe we caused pain, and that's not necessarily a problem. In fact, it might be a sign of our healthiness that we feel certain kinds of sadness. A life without sadness maybe is not a life; there's a time and place to feel sad.

I remember a story I read many years ago about someone who struggled with a lot of sadness, and the teacher told this person at some point, "Well, be a sad Buddha." After a long period of time trying to sort out and figure out and escape and fix this sadness, this little teaching—"be a sad Buddha"—allowed the person just to relax and say, "Okay, a Buddha can also be sad, so I don't have to fight it or judge myself for it. There's a time and place for it."

Just because we're sad doesn't mean that something is wrong. It actually can mean that something is right. Sometimes sadness is a fallow time, where something is being prepared inside of us for a new way of being, for a new direction that we're going to go. So a little bit, sadness and gladness belong to the world of evaluation, of figuring out the value of something, the importance of something. It is a kind of a higher intellectual state than some of the deeper spiritual states that we can experience. But we have to be very careful what we're evaluating, what we think is important.

A foundation for healthy forms, a foundation for all forms of sadness and gladness we might experience, for Buddhists, is what can be called refuge. We have a refuge, we have an orientation, we have an understanding, we have a way of seeing, we have a practice that we trust. We have a presence, an attentiveness that we trust, that protects us, that informs us, that guides us, that points us a way, that shows us there's a way through everything no matter what is going on. Refuge means there is a way. You might not know what the way is, but if you practice mindfulness, practice meditation, just keep practicing living ethically, the Dharma, your heart will find a way.

This idea of refuge, the ocean of refuge, the ocean of stability that's underneath the surface waves that come and go. Sometimes there's a high wave, sometimes a low wave, and these are all just a surface manifestation. They're important parts of the ocean. Some people will spend wonderful time and difficult times playing and struggling with those waves, but there is a deeper place of refuge, the foundation for it all. If you remember that you have a refuge, if you remember you can trust your practice or trust yourself in a deep way—that you don't have to know the way to know that you'll find your way—then you won't have to be so troubled by the waves. You can allow the waves to be there. You can study them, see them carefully, learn from them, learn which ones are healthy and which are not, which are dysfunctional and which are functional. It's a really important human skill. You can learn to ride the waves. You can learn not to identify with the waves so much, and learn to trust that there's something deeper here than the waves. There's the refuge, and there's a certain stability, a certain home, a certain companion that always follows you along, that is there to protect you, support you, guide you, even when you don't know what's supposed to happen. You have a refuge, and that refuge can give a lot more clarity and ease around how we navigate and experience the comings and goings of things like sadness and gladness.

You might want to look today, as you go through your day, at the small and large versions of sadness and gladness that come up for you. You might not use the word gladness very much; maybe a certain kind of mild joy, delight, a kind of pleasant aliveness. Sadness can be a whole range of things, from depression to still sorrow to sadness. Just kind of see how these work for you. Without judging yourself and making it worse, without the ego coming in and with the swings, can you start to see it? Do you think that the way you meet^[4] this sadness and gladness is really healthy, or does it have a good foundation? Or is its foundation fragile and weak, and maybe even a little bit deluded^[5], like with a lottery ticket, for example? Spend some time looking at this, but remembering to do it from this foundation of trust where you appreciate that it's valuable to learn about yourself. Be happy that you're learning about yourself. Trust this learning process more than the judgments—"Oh, I'm wrong, I shouldn't be this way." If you see how you are, then you're on the path.

Study your sadness and gladness, and see if they live in relationship to each other like a pendulum. Or see if there are deeper or healthier forms of sadness and gladness which are not a problem, or are actually healthy to experience, appropriate, and are not triggering one another, but that it's part of the richness of life, the fullness of life, and the depth of life. Then can you allow for that? Maybe that sadness needs its time with you, and you might appreciate very much that that's the case. It can be the case for gladness and the family of glad things, but you might not appreciate that for sadness. There's a time for it. Go for a walk. Sit and have tea. Allow for it. And then underneath it all, the refuge. And if the word refuge doesn't mean something to you, maybe what is it that you trust? What is a deeper trust, a wellspring of wellsprings that you can trust, that allows you to not be so caught in the waves?

So thank you, and we'll continue this tomorrow.