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Guided Meditation: Relatedness

Greetings on this first Monday of the year 2023. We made it this far, and I'm happy to start this year this way with all of you, as I have these last two years now. Two Januaries. It's remarkable that we've had this time together and a chance to do this kind of teaching and practice. So thank you for this chance and opportunity for me.

One of the things that I want to emphasize today is relatedness. I just evoked our relatedness through this 7 A.M. sitting this early morning. There's a relationship that is here. Even if you're here for the first time—welcome—you're somewhat in relationship now to what's happening here, to my teaching, to me, and me to you. Without that relationship, what's happening here today would not happen. One of the key elements of Dharma^[1] practice is, in fact, to focus on relatedness. Not in some large abstract way, but in an immediate way here and now.

We don't often focus on the relationship that exists; we often focus on the things of the world, objects, and people. So there's an object of our thoughts, an object of our concern, and we're focusing on that person who said this, and that was wrong or that was great, or that person's doing that. Or we're focusing on ourselves as an object: "Me, I'm the victim," or "I'm the wonderful person," delusions of grandeur perhaps, but "I'm here, and things are happening to me." And I'm measuring what's happening to me about whether it's good for me or bad for me. I don't want to diminish the role of that; there's a place for that kind of thinking for sure. But when we enter into the Dharma, there's a new orientation. What takes precedence is how all these objects, including oneself, are relating to each other.

Between you and me, there's a relationship. Between me and my breakfast, there's a relationship: that breakfast supports me, I take interest in the breakfast, and between the two, the breakfast occurs. A tremendous amount of our immediate life is occurring because of what's in relationship to us, what's in relationship to this mutuality. Our life is related to the oxygen that's around us; without that, we wouldn't live. The way that we interact with oxygen is crucial for us to be alive. There's us, there's oxygen, and how we relate to it is the connection. You can go through a whole list of things like that.

One of the important aspects of Dharma practice is to stay close to that place of relatedness. What is that relationship? Sometimes that relationship is our doing: we like and we don't like; something we want, we don't want; something we're open and aware of, or we're shut down, or we're asserting ourselves on something. So it's how we're relating to it that is important.

How are we relating to ourselves? We have a not-so-nice thought, and then what's the relationship we form to that thought? We judge ourselves by it, or we attack it. Or we have a wonderful thought, then we take pride in it and want to show off to other people this wonderful realization we have. What is that relationship? How to keep that relationship a free one—that's where freedom is found. We're not necessarily becoming free ourselves; we are freeing the relationship between us and all things, including ourselves.

Freeing ourselves from this preoccupation with self, measuring everything from the vantage point of "me, myself, and mine," and instead looking at the relationship, the relatedness. Is that relatedness skillful or unskillful? Is it helpful or not? Is it healthy or not? To keep it really simple: is there an "ouch" in that relatedness, or is there an "ah"?

I'll talk more about this, but for now, take a meditation posture and gently close your eyes.

Just sitting here quietly. In what way are you activated in your mind, your emotions, your heart? That could be seen as a way of relating to something, or a way in which there's a relationship with something outside of you and yourself. The relatedness between.

Sometimes it's initiated by what's around us, sometimes what's within us. When I came to IMC today, I was being related to by the cold, and I had a relationship to that cold.

So what is the relatedness that's operating most for you now? Relatedness is not necessarily what you do in relating; something might be relating to you, impacting you, having an effect on you. The cold. The warmth.

Perhaps you can take a few moments to relate to your body with a gentle, tender appreciation. Probably your body is doing the best it can with how it is. We can take the body for granted in so many ways. To appreciate the body. And the appreciation is a relatedness. Maybe it's more important, that appreciation, than it is you doing the appreciating. Just let there be appreciation.

Then there's your body breathing. There's a significant impact on you that you breathe. Breathing relates to everything about you that is living. Everything you can experience, everything you have an experience with in your body, depends on breathing to keep the whole show going.

How are you relating to the breathing? Can you adjust that relatedness, do something that's allowing and easeful, appreciative? Is there some appropriate way that you can trust the body breathing? And with that trust, to accompany your breathing. The rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. And if anything takes you away from your breathing, chances are it's because of the nature of some relationship to something. Not the "something," but the relationship you have or it has with you.

One way or another, you are relating to something. Is that relating supportive or unsupportive for you? Is it beneficial or unbeneficial? Could it be more beneficial? Could there be a right effort in the relatedness?

There is always relatedness. How are you relating? Or how are you receiving what is relating to you?

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, imagine that the way you are relating to any other person at any given time, or group of people, is not invisible. Like a musician has a musical instrument, and as they're playing the instrument, in relationship to those two things, there comes music. For you, if there are persons you're with, and if the way that you related came out like music that people could hear, or came out as colors that people could see, or smells that they could smell, how would you think that the way that you relate would appear to other people? Would it be beautiful? Would it be not so beautiful? Would there be a sense of harmony, balance, or would it be discordant?

To offer goodwill, kindness, maybe is the way to bring beauty in the relatedness. Beautiful music, beautiful colors, smells. It's a way of beautifying this world. While people do not necessarily see with their eyes literally, the way we relate to the world has a big impact on ourselves and the world.

And at the end of the meditation is a valuable time, because maybe, just maybe, you have more of an opportunity to have a healthy and sincere well-wishing for others. So, to spend the next minute with that well-wishing for individuals, for groups of people, for everyone.

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

And may all of us meditating together go out into the world to make a collective beauty, collective music, through simple acts of kindness. May our meditation be for the benefit and the welfare of all people.

Thank you.

Dharmette: What is the Dharma? (1 of 5) The Dharma is Relationship

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first talk of the year and the beginning of another week, a five-part series. What I'd like to do this week is to answer the question, "What is the Dharma?" I'm hoping this series will create a nice foundation for what will follow, which isn't completely decided, but I would like it to build on this.

Dharma is in some ways a very important, very central word in Buddhism because it could mean Buddhism. The Dharma sometimes is synonymous with the word Buddhism. The word Buddhism is kind of a modern Western invention; it didn't really exist in that kind of way as an "-ism" word in Asia. In fact, even the word religion didn't quite exist. In some of the Asian languages, when they had contact with Western culture, they had to invent a word for religion to translate it into their language.

Now, the word Dharma sometimes holds all of that, but Dharma also has more specific meanings. Even in ancient times, they said it had a lot of different meanings. There is a list of three things that Dharma means from the ancient commentaries that I think is very evocative. They are words that are built on verbs, activities—something dynamic.

The first is pariyatti^[2]—p-a-r-i-y-a-t-t-i, I'm not sure if there's one or two t's. Pariyatti is usually taken to mean teachings, but it's based on a root word that has to do with obtaining, receiving. Sometimes pariyatti is understood to be the act of learning. So first there's learning, which is an activity.

The second is paṭipatti^[3]—it means to practice, which is also a verb.

And the last one is adhigama^[4], which is to obtain or to attain something, to reach something.

Here the Dharma has three different activities, and having something dynamic, not something static, is being emphasized. The dynamism of what Dharma means, I would like to encapsulate that Dharma means relatedness.

The ancient way of saying it back in the time of the Buddha was through a little slogan that goes, "Whoever sees the Dharma sees dependent arising. Whoever sees dependent arising sees the Dharma."^[5]

A powerful statement. Dependent arising means that things occur in dependence on other things. Things are not independent; they don't self-exist. They don't simply materialize in thin air for no reason at all, or no cause, or no conditions at all. They're always there because of some preceding conditions, some event, some occurrence that then is the possibility for the next thing to occur.

Human life itself is clearly dependent on many factors in the present moment and down through the ages that had to occur in order for there to be this physical, psychological, mental life that we embody, we experience, we are. In some ways, who we are as human beings could be said to be a hundred percent dependent on something else existing for us to be able to live. Breathing—there has to be oxygen. There has to be water on this planet. How did that happen? How did oxygen happen? Conditions had to build over millennia, millions and billions of years, for the conditions to be right for what we have as human life. Those have to persist. You can go layers and layers into the present moment. Our lives depend on things, and our psychological life, our inner life, is dependent on all kinds of things as well.

Some of them might be hormones; our biology affects our psychology quite a bit. Or what happens in the world. Some people's moods are completely connected to, wedded to, things in the world and what other people are doing. Or substances—how they feel is completely dependent on having coffee or not coffee, or drugs and not drugs, or alcohol and not alcohol. How we feel can be dependent on many things—exercise and not exercise. It's in that dependency—not dependency in terms of codependency, exactly, the psychological term, but the fact that things occur in relationships to other things occurring as well. That relatedness between things, that's how I would like to present this idea of dependent arising today. It has to do with relatedness.

Dharma is the relatedness between things that can be called things. In fact, in Buddhism, I think it's a fair thing to say that there are no "things" in Buddhism. There are only dynamic processes, dynamic occurrences, events that are moving, in action, in process.

At least that's what Buddhism focuses on so much, the dynamic aspect of life. Our psychological, spiritual, mental, physical life is very much caught up and involved in this whole dynamic world of relatedness, in relationships that everything occurs through. Everything that happens goes through the dynamic process, the dynamic activity of perception. A mountain might not seem so dynamic; it might seem like a real thing that's there, changing slowly over time but not much in my lifetime maybe. But the perception of the mountain is a dynamic activity. Everything that we experience in the world goes through our perception.

Deeper than our perception, it goes through our liking and not liking it, our sense of this as pleasant or unpleasant, partly because of our evaluation of things. Everything that happens to us then goes through the way that we know it. Do we know it with contraction, tightness, and assertiveness in greed, or generosity, or without it? So there's this whole dynamic world of things that happen in relationship to other things being there. And that is the Dharma. Dharma is found there, and in caring for it.

Because that is also where bondage occurs, where attachment and tightness, where suffering occurs. There's no inherent suffering that just kind of pops up in the universe like out of the blue. Suffering occurs in relationship to something else. It's a way of relating; it's a relatedness. Freedom is a shift in that relationship.

This idea that the Dharma is relatedness is a paradigm change from, I believe, how many people live their lives, where they live focused more on "me, myself, and mine." What's happening to me, my ideas of self. What's happening out there, who those people are, what they're doing. But there's a paradigm shift of appreciating what's happening between the people, or between us and the world, nature, and everything. What is the relatedness?

Also within ourselves, how do we relate to our inner experience? How are we relating to the outer experience? That's where the Dharma begins to be discovered. That is all to do with things which are fluid and dynamic, and because of that, they can be changed. Maybe not easily, but that's what Dharma practice is. The practice of relatedness, the practice of working with this whole notion of things arising dependently on other things, is that we can shift and change the relatedness, the dependencies, the dynamic quality of it. So that what supports our hearts, our minds, our freedom is more present than what supports attachment and clinging and suffering.

It's a paradigm shift. You might try stretching your mind to look at a kind of invisible world—the world between another person and you. What is the relationship that's being formed? Like, especially if you meet a stranger, maybe that's easiest there. How is that relationship before you get to know them? Are you afraid of them? Are you cautious? Are you eager? Are you curious? That's a way of being in a relationship. As you talk with a stranger, do you feel more closed down and pulling back, or do you feel more open and interested? Is there kindness? Is there friendship going back and forth, or the opposite?

What is happening in that invisible world that maybe you don't necessarily see, but maybe you can feel, maybe you can sense? If that relatedness between you was music, would it be beautiful music or not so beautiful? If it was color, would it be a beautiful array of colors or a disharmonious display of colors? How is that relatedness?

I would encourage you for today to look at this world that has to do with how you are in relationship to all things, including yourself. What's the nature of that relationship? And that is dynamic; that is shifting and changing throughout the day. What kind of relatedness, what kind of meeting do things outside of you have towards you? How are things relating to you? The air that you breathe, how is it relating? One could say it's not relating at all, but it does have a relationship to you. What is that relationship? What is the relationship to the food that you eat? How does it impact you?

Maybe there's a way to do this paradigm shift here, that you really are stretching yourself to be in the world from a very radically different perspective than how you usually go through the days. The perspective of: what is the relatedness that's going on right here, and how do you want to relate? What is the beautiful way of relating?

So the Dharma is what arises in relationship. If you can see how things arise in a related way, then you're seeing the Dharma. You see the Dharma if you see how things arise in a related way.

Thank you. We'll continue this topic of what the Dharma is tomorrow.