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.

Guided Meditation

So hello everyone, and welcome to IMC's YouTube meditation session. For this morning, I'd like to keep the sitting mostly silent and invite you to put together what I've taught so far the first two days. Whatever happens for you during this meditation—whether it's your breathing that you're able to hang out with, sensations of your body, sounds in the area where you're at, emotions, or thoughts—recognize what's happening. You would know it by stepping back, not being completely entangled, involved with it, reacting to it, or judging it. Just know it really simply.

And then, with that ability to not be entangled or reactive, just to know it simply, come and respect it. Decide the right distance for your awareness to respect it properly. If it's a mountain lion in the wilderness, the respectful distance is really far. If it's a young child that is injured and you're putting on a Band-Aid, the respectful distance is much closer. So find the place and then linger. Stay connected for at least three breaths to whatever is happening, and then maybe return to the breathing.

That would be the rhythm where, in the silence of this meditation, you are meeting yourself. You're learning, you're experimenting with how to have simple presence and recognition with anything that happens. There's a meeting happening, and in a sense, you're meeting yourself. Maybe meeting yourself in a deep way, and how you meet your experience is what this meditation is about. Meeting it with a combination of mindfulness and concentration.

We'll just start. With no other preliminary, if you'd like to use a preliminary way of relaxing and settling in like we usually do, you're welcome to do that. Otherwise, you're welcome to just begin as you wish, but we'll keep this silence today.

[Silence]

For this meditation, instead of being lost in thought, or caught up in thinking, meet your direct experience one at a time, giving time for each meeting. Meeting with mindfulness and steadiness.

[Silence]

As we near the end of this sitting, for whatever is your predominant experience of the moment, your direct experience, step back from it a bit and know it with respect. Almost as if you bring your hands together to bow in respect to whatever is happening. Allowing it to be as it is. Knowing it, meeting it with respect and care.

And then, turn your attention outwards to the communities and people around you. Spreading outwards in your neighborhoods, counties, or provinces, and the people that you will meet knowingly, or you know about, or you don't know today. In the meeting with others, can you meet them with respect? Where you are independent, not entangled with them, but able to see them clearly, kindly, with respect. Independent, but always ready in at least your heart to bow in respect to whoever you meet, regardless.

For the people who are challenging for us, maybe we can imagine that one reason their behavior is challenging for you is because they have not received enough respect and care for their basic humanity. And perhaps without agreeing with them, or condoning what they do, being independent of them, offer them respect.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free. And may our ability to meet with respect promote this possibility.

Thank you.

Introduction to Mindfulness (23 of 25) Flower of Wisdom

Hello everyone, and welcome to this continuation of the introduction to meditation series. We're coming to the last week of it. I have two announcements: one is that I'll probably start a new series on Monday. Maybe it's Introduction to Meditation Part Two, or maybe we call it intermediate instructions, but I think it'd be nice to continue on this and build on what we've done these weeks.

The second is that there was a time we used to do community meetings on Zoom, usually on Fridays at the end of the week. I haven't had the chance to do that for a long time, but I do have this Friday. So I'll post a Zoom link on IMC's What's New, and I'll announce it again and post it in the chat on Friday. We'll go there right after this meeting on YouTube. For those of you who would like to come together, we will have some time for me to give some updates, maybe for you to ask me some questions, and maybe for some breakout groups so you can meet each other and have small conversations.

As for today, the continuation of practice and the deepening of mindfulness practice is greatly helped by wisdom. Wisdom is the quality of understanding that protects us from getting entangled or being caught in what our experience is or what's happening. We don't get reactive, attached, resentful, or hostile. Rather, it supports us to meet things with a profound respect. With a profound respect for ourselves, we can hold our seat, take our place in a clear, upright way, and be able to meet people with respect, with kindness, and maybe with wisdom, because we've taken the time to really know what's happening here and now.

One of the advantages of developing concentration with mindfulness is that concentration tends to quiet the thinking mind. As the thinking mind gets quieter, we see it better. When it does arise, we start seeing it in highlight against the silence, against the stillness. Often in daily life, we're so busy thinking we don't even know we're thinking—distracted from distractions by distractions. The thoughts might be coming so fast that we almost don't have time to really assess what's going on. But as we sit and meditate, there's a tendency to get calmer. Not always, but when we do, we can start seeing the thoughts as they arise. We see them highlighted, and we can start seeing the nature of some of these thoughts. We can start seeing them for what they are. In doing that, we become able to see things free of the lens of the particular concepts, ideas, or paradigms by which we're living. We can see with fresh eyes, see in new ways.

As practice develops, we develop more and more wisdom, where we understand better what's happening, and this understanding makes it easier not to get caught in it. So I want to do a little show-and-tell around this.

First, I'm going to hold up a flower. This flower is a little flower of sorts, a little purple and green. If you hold up just a flower, it's just a flower. There's a famous mythic story that the Buddha was in an assembly of people and he held up a single flower and didn't say anything, but one disciple smiled. The Buddha recognized this, recognized the awakening of that disciple, and gave him permission to be a teacher himself. This story is particularly told in the Zen tradition.

So the Buddha just held up the flower. One of the things about the flower is the suchness of the flower; just the flower in itself. Many times we think flowers are beautiful and appreciate them. In Japan, they sometimes have a custom of displaying a single flower in a special place, in a tokonoma^[1], a special alcove in the wall. By having just one—not a big bouquet of flowers, but a single flower—it highlights the specialness of the flower, the thusness, the suchness, the flower in itself. When we put together a big bouquet, it's beautiful with colors and everything, but the uniqueness and specialness of each flower is lost in the whole bouquet. Just holding up a flower, maybe we appreciate that.

But then we can do something different. I can hold up a different flower. This new one is smaller. Now we can say something we couldn't say before: we can say that this flower is the large flower, and this flower is the small flower. That's pretty straightforward and obvious. If I asked someone to go get the large flower of the two, they would bring this one to me. It's very effective, if I have something particular in mind, to call this the large and this the small.

But now look what happens. I'll do magic in front of your eyes. Remember, this is the small flower and this is the large flower. Now I bring this flower, and the one that was the small flower before—the large one before—is now the smaller flower, and this white one is bigger. What was large is now small, right in front of your eyes.

It turns out that "large" and "small" are not inherent in the flower. Large and small involve the mental capacity to compare one thing and another. The flower in and of itself is neither large nor small; it just is what it is. Humans, with our capacity to compare, our desires, our preferences, and our desire to make things happen in the world, find it useful to compare the large flower and the small flower depending on the context. But comparisons don't exist inherently in nature.

It turns out that a fair amount of human suffering is, one way or another, born from comparative thinking. Many people suffer because of how their body looks, meaning they're comparing their body to other people's bodies—their hair, their nose, their fingers, their belly, whatever—or they're comparing it to some ideal we have about how it should be. It turns out the body parts we have can exist happily in their suchness. Many times they can just be; our hair can just be our hair. Our hair is content to be what it is, whether we have a lot or a little. It's because of our comparisons, our values, our fears, and the stories we have around them that we begin to suffer.

We compare histories and biographies, and compare people by what we've done and not done. We compare ourselves in our past to our present, and our present to what our imagined future is. We compare values. This comparison goes on and on. We have thoughts, and we think that's the most beatific, wonderful thought anybody's ever had. Then we have another thought, and we think we have the most awful thought that anybody's ever had. That involves comparison. Now, some of these comparisons have usefulness in order to get things done in the world. But it's also a way in which a tremendous amount of suffering happens.

If we sit in meditation, we might compare our breathing: "Yesterday I had a deep, long, sweet breath, and today the breath is shallow and tight," and we're comparing it. Through that comparison, we want yesterday's breath, or we condemn today's breath. The breathing is just like the flower; the isness of the breath is just what it is. A shallow, tight breath is just a shallow, tight breath. It's uncomfortable, but that's just discomfort in and of itself, with no comparison to how it could be or how it used to be.

There is something very profound that can happen when we see, "Oh, my reaction, my way of getting tight here, or resistant, or of getting mentally entangled, is born from the mental capacity to be comparing things." That's an activity of my mind. As we meditate and get quieter, that activity has a chance to quiet down, and we can see that it's somewhat optional. We don't have to always have these thoughts. Sometimes they're useful, but oftentimes they're a source of unnecessary suffering.

Meditation is a time where we try to give ourselves the gift of letting ourselves just be in our isness, the suchness. We are the flower. We are the single flower that's allowed to exist without any comparison to anything else, where the beauty, the uniqueness, the specialness of each of us as flowers is allowed to just be as it is. Regardless of the characteristics of our body, regardless of our belief systems, regardless of our past and the future, regardless of whether we're healthy or sick or have some limitation. All those things are something we can respect and care for at the right time, but to live caught in those or oppressed by all kinds of things is a major source of human suffering.

Think of meditation as the place where we are allowed to just breathe, to just exist as we are. To be the unique flower that we are, and for a few minutes put aside all the comparative thinking so that just to be alive is wonderful. Just to be here and now, free of all these comparisons.

Of course, that's easier said than done. Part of mindfulness practice is, when comparative thinking arises, to recognize it as such and step away from it so we're not entangled with it. Turn around and look at it clearly: "Oh, that's comparative thinking." And then meet it carefully. Study ourselves on that: "Oh, that's how it is." Maybe take a three-breath journey with "that's the mind that compares." Then maybe feel the physical sensations of what comparative thinking is like, feel the underlying emotion. Each of them is given their time, each is met with respect.

And perhaps you'll discover the gift of letting yourself be a flower. Letting yourself just be yourself. Breathing, meditating, just being yourself, practicing with that.

This is how wisdom can operate. As your practice goes along, there might be a day where this kind of wisdom becomes obvious and available, and it will support the further development of your meditation.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to meeting tomorrow.