Guided Meditation: Refreshing Awareness; Dharmette: Wisdom Awareness (5 of 5) This is Nature

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Refreshing Awareness; Wisdom Awareness (5 of 5) This is Nature. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 04, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Refreshing Awareness

Good morning, Sangha. Good day. Warm greetings to our weekday sit. Whatever time zone you're in, whether you're silently holding presence or greeting each other in our global chat, you're very welcome.

This week I've been introducing you to a practice—for some of you it's review that has been very helpful for me—a practice through the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya^[1], my understanding of him, and the practice of wisdom awareness. That involves a number of different elements, which I've been talking about, dimensions of wisdom if you will. This week I covered some of them, not all of them. They include a simple discernment between distinctions, bringing a sense of receptive curiosity or interest to the practice, and seeing our own filters or attitudes of heart and mind, which can bring a kind of clarity, and seeing conditionality yesterday. Along the way, I've been introducing the practice of using what I call insight koans^[2] or wisdom koans. We will continue today with a little bit more of a wrap-up and also a little bit of another way of talking about conditionality, which is summarized just in the saying, also a wisdom reflection or koan: "This is nature."

So that is, as I said, another way of talking about cause and effect or the vast interplay of conditions. Sometimes it's really obvious that "this is nature," the vast conditions coming together to shake many of our beds in the Bay Area the night before last. That's literally tectonic shifts, geological nature. But there's also nature that intersects with us in a more embodied way. Many, many events unfold in which we participate, but we don't have control. And while that's obvious when we see certain natural phenomena—like a flash of fish scattering in schools or the change in the weather—all of these conditions apply to us and through us as well. So we'll talk about this a little bit more in the talk. But meanwhile, the invitation is to settle back, find your seat, and take a couple of longer, slower breaths. Refreshing your awareness.

Noticing. Are you aware? Aware.

And as you allow the breathing to return to normal, whatever normal natural is for today. Taking stock. Noticing, is your body tense or relaxed? And inviting relaxation. May this body be soft, relaxed, aware.

Noticing the details of your posture. Feet grounded on the floor or mat. Seat grounded in your place. Letting your spine support the weight of your core, and allowing your posture to be in balance, to be in alignment.

Softening the shoulders and the neck. Allowing your jaw to be soft, your eyes to relax and be receptive as if taking in the vast horizon of the ocean.

Softening the forehead, especially that area just between the eyes. Allowing the whole head to relax, including the area behind the eyes.

Inviting awareness to fill your body, saturated like rain.

And then inviting too: May this heart and mind relax. Receiving experience, including receiving the experience of whatever your anchor of attention is. Breath, body sensations, sound, metta^[3]. Allowing yourself to settle.

From time to time, allowing the inquiring impulse to refresh awareness. What's here now? What's this moment like? Inviting a light touch, and then staying present with the resonance. The resonance of now.

If the mind wanders or if challenges arise, perhaps dropping in the koan: "What else is here?" Meeting what arises with kindness. Graciousness. What's this moment like?

From time to time, dropping in the wisdom reflection: "This is nature." Whatever is unfolding in this body, heart, and mind.

In the last few minutes of our meditation together, the invitation is to open the lens, the aperture of awareness broadly. Perhaps taking a step back or a glance back. What is the quality of awareness? What's the relationship with the moment? Receiving the answer.

And then gathering up any glimpses of goodness, moments of interest, clear seeing, discernment, calm, or simple mindfulness. Any glimmers of goodness at all. And with an internal gesture, offering them, sharing them outwards with the others in your life, here, near and far.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe, peaceful, at ease, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, and peace in the world.

Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Wisdom Awareness (5 of 5) This is Nature

So, Sangha, we have arrived at the fifth of five talks on cultivating wisdom awareness, which is a practice that involves anchoring ourselves wherever we are, including open awareness, maybe breath, body, sound, metta, and then noticing what else is present, opening to a broader scope of awareness. One of the ways of doing that in this kind of receptive practice is to use what I call insight koans, wisdom koans. Along the way this week, I've introduced different ones of them, as well as different forms that wisdom cultivation and wisdom itself can take.

Those have included a simple discernment between distinctions of what's happening in the moment now. Bringing interest—interest is a superpower. Bringing interest to the moment. A particular way of bringing interest is to turn our gaze back or take a step back and notice the filters, attitudes, the tilt of the heart and mind in the moment. In other words, how we're relating to the moment, which can bring a lot of clarity. I likened that to taking off a pair of glasses and looking at them instead of looking through them. And then yesterday I touched on seeing conditionality in the moment. So that's where we've been.

And pardon the pauses as I cough with the mute on. Where we're going today is to touch on a little bit more about conditionality and do a little bit of wrap-up about wisdom awareness and wisdom in general.

As I mentioned in the introduction to the meditation, cause and effect or conditionality can be a really vast topic, and it includes the natural world, it includes society. For example, those of us in Santa Cruz and more broadly the Bay Area felt our beds shake the night before last. Tectonic shifts, geological nature. We can see the way a flock of birds flocks or bees lazily buzzing around a rose bush. All of these are examples of nature interacting with itself. But this interplay of conditions moves through each of us as well. The conditions of our lives, biology, context, society, education, culture, the vast universal forces and the tiniest microbes all influence us in each and every moment.

To illustrate this, a simile I've been using this week: Let's say you're back in that canoe, and we've been talking about putting your paddle in to do a light touch of effort and then gliding with awareness. In a little bit of a different application of this same idea, you're back in that canoe. Now zoom out to the river. And the river here signifies life and dharma^[4], but especially life, the natural unfolding of how things are. None of us get to control the lay of the land through which the river flows, how it meanders, the number of rocks and rapids. Each person has just been plunked in there. You don't have control. But you do have influence. And that influence is the skill with which you navigate. The amount of attention you bring to reading the water, responding to conditions as they arise. And this meditative cultivation, any kind of mindfulness or wisdom practice, including wisdom awareness, increases that skill.

We are nature. This is nature. And we can gradually, slowly by slowly, and sometimes in sudden shifts of insight, change how we relate to and even shift some of the numbers of conditions moving through within us.

This incomprehensible number of conditions that form what has to come to be in this moment are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, influenced by the habits of mind, the cultivation of mind in this moment. This is what the entire practice of bhavana^[5] (meditative cultivation, usually translated simply as meditation) is: beginning to layer different beneficial conditions into our psyches and our soma (our body) and our mind, and gradually operate with more skill. Understanding this interplay of conditionality and how practice flows with it and sometimes against it—up the stream, against the stream, right? Understanding this is a form of wisdom, and a deep understanding of conditionality is a form of the insight into not taking things personally. A dropping away of self, or at least a dropping away of self-preoccupation, when self no longer needs to be at the center of things. And when the self is no longer at the center of things, kindness, wisdom, spaciousness can arise, a sense of the bigger picture, the broader view, the wise approach for all.

In the solitude of secluded meditation, this can manifest as a very cool wisdom, settled back. Emptiness sometimes is another way of talking about this. And as a heart quality, equanimity^[6] and wisdom come into play because there's this flavor of balance, okayness, matured dispassion, and the heart's wisdom. If we look at this through the lens of the heart rather than the mind—though there are different dimensions, as I've talked about before, of the same thing, the same word citta^[7]—the heart's wisdom can express these qualities in the relational world too. But above all, rather than being simply cool and equanimous, which at the highest levels of practice can be a trap, the wise heart is awake, responsive. Wisdom doesn't cling even to equanimity. A wise heart, a heart experiencing a moment of wakefulness, has a full range of responses appropriate to the circumstances. As our friends in the Zen world say, one definition of freedom or awakening is an appropriate response.

Even well before this level of insight, though, as basis and preparation for it, it can be valuable to cultivate wisdom awareness in this kind of receptive awareness form, this inquiry form with whatever kind of practice is arising in your heart and mind right now. Many of you are in a long series with Gil Fronsdal^[8] on the immeasurables, the Brahmavihara^[9] practices right now, and I have blended this practice with those practices now for many years, and it can be fruitful to do so. So I'll just say a few words kind of as a way of closing out this little series before you return to the longer one.

It can be very fruitful in the practice of wisdom awareness—this interest, this dhammavicaya^[10] (investigation of states), that dimension of it—to simply be aware of whatever heart state or mind state is arising: love, metta, gratitude, compassion, sympathetic or altruistic joy, or anything else for that matter, equanimity, with simple discernment and interest. Is this metta or something else? Compassion or something else? Wisdom or something else? Notice when beautiful qualities of the heart and mind are present, and notice when they are absent. Either way is great information. That's what's beautiful about wisdom awareness practice. If a beautiful quality is absent, or for that matter a hindrance or a kilesa^[11] (a difficult quality: greed, hatred, delusion) is present, that's food, that's data, that's fuel for more wisdom, for clear seeing. And if beautiful states are there, chances are the practice is moving in a good direction. Chances are very high you can trust the wholesomeness of the heart.

And if these beautiful states are arising spontaneously outside of formal cultivation of the practices, that is an example of conditionality. The way the heart and mind have been conditioned, trained, cultivated to respond to the moment. This too is nature. This is nature: conditions unfolding with the compass of practice.

There's a saying of the Buddha's in the ancient discourses that I love to quote: A person of great wisdom does not wish for affliction for themselves, others, both themselves and others, or the world. But rather, a wise person of great wisdom wishes for benefit for themselves, others, and the world. Wisdom and the heart qualities meet in the wish for non-harming, the wish for goodness for oneself and all.

So my closing invitation to all of you, dear Sangha, is to bring all of yourself, your entire body, heart, and mind's intelligence to your practice. Practice with your practice, and trust. Trust.

Thank you.