This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: The Dharma of Challenges (1 of 5): Dharma As Refuge

Introduction

It is exciting to be here. We are in a storm here in the walking meditation hall at IRC^[1], and the acoustics are such that the sound bounces quite a bit. I think maybe tomorrow we could go back into the regular meditation hall. There were people there who were meditating earlier as we were setting up. The small echo gives a cathedral feel that is very nice.

Welcome to our Monday morning, to IRC instead of IMC for these two days. Tomorrow I think we'll set it up differently so it can be a bit nicer than this echo we have here in this room.

I want to start the meditation briefly with a story. It is a mythic story about the Buddha. On the night of his awakening, he was challenged quite a bit—perhaps one of the biggest challenges he had in his practice. He found that he couldn't rely on himself anymore. He had done all the work, all the efforts that any individual could do with his practice, but doing his own effort was not enough.

The story goes that he reached a hand down, touched the earth, and called upon the earth, or the goddess of the earth, to support him and affirm that it was possible for him to become awakened. The earth responded with an earthquake—probably a gentle earthquake, but a clear message of "Yes." With that, all the challenges that the Buddha had simply vanished.

The mythic story is a bit more elaborate than that, but the important point here is that sometimes in doing this practice, we rely on something outside of ourselves, something beyond our usual sense of self. That is expressed in the Buddhist language as going to something for support: going for refuge.

When we do this meditation practice, it's possible to do it with a certain degree of "I'm the one who's doing it, and I'm going to huff and puff, or focus and manage." But it is also possible to do it in relationship to something that is more than your own efforts. Maybe it is something within yourself, but it is something more than your own effort that you rely on for support.

A day will come when relying only on your own efforts is not enough. Then, there's a kind of humility, an openness, or a willingness to go to something else for support. A simple way for Buddhists is to go to the Dharma. We go to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

For this meditation, if it works for you, I would like you to consider that as you meditate, you have a support for being present, for being really here in the moment. There is lots of support. The few hundred people who are here on YouTube watching and meditating along are a support for all of us to be present. Those of us who are here are supported by the earth, by the natural world, in many, many ways. Our life depends on it. In a sense, life is here supporting us to be present. So, sit and meditate with a sense of support. Call on that support, knowing it is not just your own efforts, but that there are supports for you to be present.

Guided Meditation

Take a meditation posture and gently close your eyes.

First, feel the support of whatever it is that supports your weight. The gentle pull of gravity against your cushion, your chair. All of us are supported by the earth, and we never fall through.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths.

Certainly, our life is supported by the life processes of this planet. The plants that make oxygen, that make food, are supported here just in the breathing. Without breathing, there is no life for us.

Gently take a few long, slow, deep breaths. As you exhale, relax into a sense of support.

You are supported by the Dharma. All the meditating I have done is supported by 2,500 years of people who meditated. You are meditating; you are not alone. There is the dedication to show up, to be present for our experience.

Breathing normally. Going to the support found in your own care for yourself. The simple care of relaxing your body. The care of relaxing your mind.

The practice of being present here and now is a supportive practice. You are not alone. Rely on this sense of support—that reality wants you to be present for it, here and now.

In this Dharma practice, there is a mutuality or reciprocity of going for refuge, a call for support and protection in the Dharma. We are supported, and then there is the other side, which is that we become a refuge for others. We become someone who is safe and supportive for others as well. We don't just receive support; we also offer it.

In that reciprocity, we end up receiving more support. We don't lose support by supporting others in the Dharma; the two go hand in hand to support each other. That is why at the end of a meditation session, it is common to build on the meditation and expand the value of it by spending a moment dedicating the merit, the benefits. We turn around the way we've been supported and intend and wish support for others.

May it be that our practice together—maybe over 400 of us meditating collectively—means that as we go through our day, we offer support to others through our care and our love. May it be that we make other people's lives a little bit easier today.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all be free.

Thank you all. It doesn't really work to ring a bell on Zoom, so they bow in the sitting. Thank you for it.

The Dharma of Challenges

Most of these mornings that I come down to IMC for the last three years, the technology has mostly worked nicely. Sometimes there have been those challenges, but it's mostly working today. The standard of what works and doesn't work is optional, what we consider the standard. But I'm sorry to be a little bit late. Here we are at IRC, and there's some wonderful coincidence that we were challenged, and we received some help here at IRC and other places with Kevin setting up the Zoom room. Thank you.

What I want to talk about are challenges. Our lives are full of challenges, and I think I'd like to do that for a while now in these morning teachings here.

Last year I taught on Satipaṭṭhāna^[2], and there's a way in which the teachings of the Dharma can easily give the presentation that practice is just an easy thing to do. Some of the classic models of the path and the practice that the Buddha gives don't really say anything about difficulties. You just sit down, go through concentration states, and things unfold very nicely. But in fact, for most people—maybe a lot of people—this practice that we do, and the life we live, has challenges. Lots of challenges.

The Buddha has this wonderful metaphor for human suffering. He said that all the tears that you have shed in all your many lifetimes are greater than all the water in all the oceans. That is a powerful statement about the nature of this life of ours, the challenges, the suffering, the losses, the griefs. So much goes on in this life that is difficult.

The Dharma practice has been designed in order to meet that, to work with it, to heal it, to move through it, and to discover freedom in the midst of this difficult world. So, I would like for a while now to talk about the Dharma practice in addressing the challenges we have. If I can do this well, I'd like to do it as a progression, building a foundation for really looking at what is most difficult in our lives and what's challenging in our hearts.

I assume that most people are carrying deep challenges in their hearts that sometimes are buried for a long time, and sometimes are very well known. To become really free in this Dharma practice is not to override those challenges or push them aside, but to discover our freedom in all of them, in everything within us. It is a lifetime journey, but it's a wonderful journey to be on.

Dharma as Relatedness

Last week I talked about five different meanings of Dharma: Dharma as relatedness, Dharma as action, Dharma as truth, Dharma as teachings, and Dharma as transformation^[3]. I'd like to use those same categories of the Dharma to talk more generally in an introductory fashion this week about working with challenges.

For today, the topic is Dharma as relatedness. Dharma points not so much to the suffering as suffering, but rather always asking the question: where is the relationship here? How are we relating to it? How is it related to us?

The first Dharma talk I gave on an Insight retreat, when I was still in training to be a teacher, was about the importance of looking at our relationship to our experience, rather than fixing our experience. Rather than focusing on the issue itself, we must really take into account how we relate to it. Sometimes I have said that there are only ever two things: there is what's happening, and how we relate to what's happening.

But for today, I want to say there are three things. There is what's happening, there is how we relate to it, and then, what is it that supports us to relate to it? What do we go to for support so that we can relate to things in an effective, useful, and healing way?

This idea of relatedness—asking "how am I relating to this?"—is crucial. If you have some challenge in your life, it's easy to get pulled into the dynamics of the challenge, the relationships, the issues, what has to happen, and the concerns. But we can also step back and see, "How am I relating to this challenge?"

If we do that, we might find out that we're relating to it with fear, and the fear is different than the challenge itself. If we don't see that, then the fear gets entangled with the challenge. If it is inseparable from it, it makes it much more difficult to deal with, because there are these two things going on. There's whatever the challenge is, and then there's the fear. Where do you put your attention? Do you deal with the issue, or do you deal with your fear?

For example, a simple situation is if you're out driving and you have a flat tire. You are able to pull over safely to the side of the road, so the challenge is how to get the tire repaired. But if there is fear that you can't do it, that you'll be stuck there and no one will help you, then the practical question of what to do about the tire becomes entangled with the fear we have towards it. The fear might be reasonable to have, but they are two different things.

Ask yourself the question, "What is my relationship to the flat tire?" If the answer is "Oh, the relationship is fear," then you can ask: Is that the most useful relationship to have? Is there another relationship that is more useful? Maybe the better relationship is pulling out your phone and calling for help.

When you ask and answer the question "What is my relationship to it?", you have a chance to question: "Is this the relationship I want to be acting on? Is this what takes predominance?" Or is there another relationship that might be more useful? Instead of being afraid, maybe I should be mindful. Maybe this is a time when my mindfulness practice really comes to bear—to really be mindful and present for the fear, so that there is a balance with the fear, rather than losing my balance with it.

The question "What is the relationship to the challenge?" can reveal a lot and begin to tease apart the challenge from how we are experiencing it and what we are doing with it. Not uncommonly, large life challenges are made much more difficult because of how we are relating to them.

Sometimes we relate to things wonderfully. Sometimes there's a sense of being counter-phobic—we step towards the difficulties we have. We are curious, we say, "Let's find out what's happening here. Let me use this challenge as a place to understand myself better, to learn how to be more patient, to learn how to be more compassionate, to learn how to be more wise or discerning, or less caught." Then we are bringing the relationship of practice to it.

We can point a finger back to ourselves and see how we want to relate to it. I want to take it as practice. And the practice is what I trust.

Going for Support

In the Dharma practice, we talk about going for refuge. There's a third element: there's what's happening, how we're relating to it, and then what is it that we want to support us? What is relating to us?

The Dharma, in a sense, is available as a support. One of the clearest ways of experiencing that is the practice itself. The practice supports us. The practice has a relationship to us. This may be a little bit counter-intuitive because it can feel like I'm the one who's practicing, I'm the one who's applying myself. That is true, but when you apply yourself in practice, the practice responds. Something inside responds to the honesty, to truth, to presence, to care, and to the compassion that we bring as we practice. Something responds, and that response is something that's going to support us.

There are times in life when we can't figure out what we can do for ourselves. Everything seems so difficult, so hard. That is a time when Buddhists will sometimes go for refuge. We will go to the support of the Dharma. It can take the shape of: "This is hard. I'm not sure I can manage this, but I trust the practice. I trust the Dharma. So I'm going to go for refuge to it. I'm going to rely on it."

It doesn't mean that we become passive. It means that we still offer our practice to it, but we are not caught or frozen by "I don't know how to do it," or "I don't know what's supposed to happen," or "This seems impossible." We trust there is a larger wholeness.

It is not always obvious what that larger Dharma support will be, and it can be many different things depending on the circumstances. But it is phenomenal for me in my life how often I've been challenged where I didn't know what to do, I didn't know what to say, and I took refuge in the practice. I took refuge in mindfulness, to show up and be present.

So much so, that one of the greatest gifts over time for me of doing this mindfulness practice, insight practice, is the phenomenal trust that I have in the mindfulness practice itself. I trust the practice more than my own mind's ability to understand something, figure things out, or solve all the problems. I certainly do my best, but mindfulness means I will show up and stay present. I will stay with it, try to be honest, try to feel and be present, recognize what's happening, and stay in the present moment with this. I really take in what's happening. I don't turn away from what's happening, but I also don't attack what's happening. I don't shut down, I don't despair, I don't collapse. I simply show up and trust the mindfulness.

In the Dharma practice, we're in a relationship. We're in relationship to ourselves, in relationship to our challenges, in relationship to the broader world, and it is in relationship to us. In something like the Dharma—the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha^[4]—or, if that's language you don't care for, the mindfulness practice itself, there's a reciprocity where we offer ourselves to the practice, and then the practice supports us.

It is a very fortunate thing, because if it was all up to our own abilities or our own intelligence, it would probably be impossible for most of us to really work with some of the huge challenges of life and death that this human life brings us. The degree of loss and betrayal that we go through in this life can be huge. So how do we practice with it? What is our relationship to it? And what do we go to for support so we can relate to this in a way that supports us?

This belongs to the world of relatedness. It is a protection against getting solidified or frozen in the notion that "It's all up to me, it's all happening to me, it's all about me, it's all about them and what they're doing." There is something bigger going on here that belongs to the world of relatedness and interrelatedness that we all live in.

If you have a challenge today, whether it's small or large—even if it's so small that you can just kind of bypass it and not think about it—ask yourself the question: "How are you relating to it?" That relationship is not really part of the challenge itself. Even if the challenge is internal to yourself, how are you relating to it? What are the beliefs, the attitudes, the desires that are coming into play in relationship to it? The emotions?

Then, is there something that will support you, something that is relating to you? Maybe the practice, maybe mindfulness, maybe the Dharma, maybe the earth, or something else that supports you that makes it easier for you to go through it. You're not doing it alone; you have the support of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

I call upon all of this for myself today, a little bit, because I felt a little bit confused sitting down here making all this technology work. But I trusted that the Dharma is here and we'd find our way, so here we are.

Thank you. We'll see if we can make it a little bit easier tomorrow, and if not, we'll just do it this way again. By Wednesday I should be back at IMC. Thank you all.