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Introduction

Okay, good morning folks. Warm greeting to my fellow lurkers. I know you're there. I can't see you, but I know you're there. Yeah, happy to be with you. So I'll guide a meditation in a minute, but I did want to solicit questions. So maybe if you have something on your mind, a sentence or two, chat it in. And then if you see a question that strikes you, repeat a word from it or their name or something so that I get a sense of where the center of gravity is, doing our best on the YouTube chat line. You can't exactly upvote things, and we're on like an 8-second delay, too. So, you're literally looking at the past. Nice. Okay, that's helpful. Good. I will find some way to try to speak to some of that. All right, let us meditate.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing into Kindness

Just letting the words go. Most good words point back to the radical possibilities of wordlessness^[1] of this. Just relaxing whatever tension can be relaxed. Just letting your mind fill your body, your relaxation fill your mind.

Just for a moment, we put down all notions of my life. Or maybe we say we come to care even just for a moment more about awareness than my life, its conditions, and our intention. So maybe just the slightest preference for being here over being away, for our breathing this moment over thought and rumination. It's just the slightest preference.

And we know that our intention and attention is only part of what happens in dharma^[2] practice, that there's goodness here already that we do not govern, that we do not have to prop up, that emerges just from this subtle willingness to stay. Dharma practice is a progressive sensitization to goodness. That loving-kindness begins with the experience of being moved by your own goodness. Not a sense of specialness, but the ordinariness of goodness.

Every movement of your mind testifies to that love, longing to be safe, at peace. Everything we've ever done in some sense has been an expression of this longing for peace. We don't always know how to go about it, but the innocence of our longing is evident. We come to be moved by that.

And when we let go of the melodrama of self, the arrogance and grandiosity, self-harshness, self-diminishment, and we let go of all of that, we're left with a very simple, quiet, but deep wish: May I be happy and be at peace.

Maybe using some words or images to remind yourself of the necessity of love. Maybe a sense of radiating out from the heart center. This kind of glowing warmth. The heart resonating at a certain frequency that feels a little like love. And the goodness overflows the bounds of our own heart, naturally begins to reach more and more of this world.

That love does not resolve every complexity of being human need not cast a shadow whatsoever over the necessity of love, of our heart being softened by life, of offering love infused with wisdom to all that we encounter. And where we cannot love, we recognize that the practice continues. We don't have to like everything, but we can open our heart to the fullness of human experience.

Dharmette: Dharma in Our Interpersonal Life (5 of 5) Feeling, Loss, Letting Go & Love - Crowdsourced Questions

Okay, that's good to practice with you. So, yeah, it seems like maybe the center of gravity in the chattered questions is something in the realm of feeling, grief, and love. So, where to begin?

We're coming to be unintimidated by our feeling life. That's a big part of our training on the cushion, is to be unintimidated by our pain, our longing, love, and feeling. It is said we're in the age of affectivism. Affect, feeling, urgencies, behavioral tendencies, emotion, mood—all of that is the age of affectivism. This is kind of dominant in how we are thinking about humans in this phase. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe I've just been affected by that.

But feeling, to me, is at the heart of our Buddhist practice. Because our suffering constellates—what the Buddha said, the path is about suffering and the end of suffering—that is largely an affect, emotional experience, and peace is the kind of resolution of affect. And so we're coming into this deep relationship: like, can I not be disorganized, not be destroyed by my feeling life? And over time we develop more and more courage to trust that the winds of feelings will blow, but they will not blow something over inside of us. That's a confidence we develop.

Ajahn Sucitto^[3] was talking about the deeper reaches of enlightenment, and said that what comes, what is necessitated, is a more fundamental reorganization of our relationship with pleasure and pain. That simple. And feeling—the feeling that we live with moment by moment, this sense of arousal and valence (positive, negative, neutral)—the arousal and valence that we live with, we're coming to have a very clear relationship with it, and one of deep permission for that to be what it is.

And this equanimous relationship with our feeling allows us to move through life in a less brittle way. It allows us to love more deeply, fervently. It allows us to care and to invest in that which is impermanent. Even knowing that the process of letting go will be deeply evocative. And yet we allow anicca^[4] to actually inform our love.

And as I was saying yesterday, that is a kind of process of real gratitude. Real gratitude that we are no longer living in the illusion of permanence. And that at some deeper level, the assumption of this will go on forever—some of that spell is broken. And what we break into is like a kind of amazement. Awe of just like, this is here. We have been born bookended by eternity. And yet in this little geological blink of time, here we are. And that breeds a measure of amazement. And so what else are we going to do when we know that deeply, other than love? What else are we going to do?

We're practicing in such a way that hatred becomes less and less tenable. That just gritting our way through becomes less and less tenable. A friend of mine early in practice said that he felt like he was living a dress rehearsal for his life. And, when's the show? This is it. That's it. This is not a dress rehearsal. This is our life. This is all we know we have, is right here. And that, to me—even as I say that, I kind of feel a little teary. This is it.

And the love and the grief feel kind of woven together. The poignancy of having been born, of having found a path, of having created a life that feels suspended in networks of care and respect and love, dharma, sangha^[5]... that is very touching. And we don't always need to be crying. We don't always need to be moved by the poignancy of anicca. I would not counsel everyone to always be reflecting on the tremble at the center of all things. That's not always medicine, but it should never be too far. Should never be too far.

And when it's not too far, this contemplation of anicca—some people take every day recalling that all is of the nature to change. Everything that I hold dear is of the nature to change. I cannot avoid being separated from it. This is a way, to my mind, of actually pre-grieving, of a certain kind of anticipatory grieving that is not defensive in nature. Sometimes anticipatory grieving has a feeling of an unwillingness to love, to lay one's heart on the table, to put it all on the table. But this anticipatory grieving is more a kind of knowing: like, yeah, the enormity of grief, that actually I have to acclimatize to that over time. Over months and years, maybe decades, we acclimatize to the enormity of the loss. And we just take maybe homeopathic doses of that day by day. Okay. Yeah. This cannot last. And that engenders not actually fear, but more love.

I said yesterday that the only redemption for grief is something like love and art. And I feel that in art sometimes, it's like, oh my goodness, that's redemption. Yeah, but I'm not an artist, and so I've only got one choice. [Laughter]

So we vow to make our love vaster. For it to be so thoroughly infused with the teachings on dukkha^[6], on anicca. And as we come to be more at ease, unintimidated by our own pain, by our feeling, by our longing, that opens a space in which more radical kinds of love can grow. And that is the lesson of grief. It's actually not even about loss. It's about the necessity of expanding our love such that it becomes even more radical, and we take the legacy of the person we have lost, that which we have lost, and our eulogy and tribute and memorial takes the form of a kind of more radical love.

And we also look beyond the horizon of our own life. That we're part of a lineage that extends before we were born and after we die. And the unit of measurement for love is not even one lifetime. But may our lives contribute to the lineage of care, sensitivity, safety, and love that existed before we were born and will continue on. We vow in our own idiosyncratic way to contribute to it.

So I offer this for your consideration, and tender to be together in all of this. Okay. You all take good care.