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Lightly Guided Meditation

Welcome to you all. It's very sweet to see the YouTube sangha in the chat. You know how this goes. Please settle in.

Sometimes we practice just stopping all at once. Sometimes we ease our way in, and sometimes we stop all at once. We just open to everything now. Of course, there's this kind of gravitational pull to nursing this wound or planning that pleasure, mapping out these contingencies. So there's a certain kind of courage, maybe even faith, just in stopping.

Meditation requires that we tolerate all the loose ends of the human condition. We don't need to tie them up; we just stop. We treat all phenomena like a gust of wind blowing through awareness. We're neither bracing against that gust, nor are we trying to bottle it up and hold onto it.

It's often skillful to have a line of definition around what is in the focus space and what is out of it. So maybe we draw a line around the sensations of the breathing—the nostrils, the belly. Or maybe the line includes all of the soundscape while excluding everything else. Maybe the line includes all of the body sensations and leaves the rest of the world behind. Or maybe the anchor is everything—the five sense gates, the mind. But just know what's inside the circle and what's outside it. Rest with a kind of balanced energy. Neither bracing against nor holding onto the wind.

When we relinquish the agenda to direct our life, when we just sit here, all phenomena become a kind of gateway to wisdom and love. It is not the case that only the preferred gusts of wind are the gateway; everything is a door. We just keep walking through.

When we actually open to our life in this way, when we put down some of the impulse to engineer it and just open, a kind of love for ourselves becomes almost self-evident. This love is not based on our characteristics, the pros and cons of me, but is an appreciation of the condition of being sentient: feeling pleasure and pain, longing to be safe, longing for peace amidst the intensity of saṃsāra^[1]. And that kind of love dawns on us. It's a love that can't really be contested by our self-harshness and judgment. We rest in that. This takes us more deeply into the present.

Grief and Love

It's good to sit with you.^[2]

This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses without distinction the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is: marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy; my father died peacefully at 74, attended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy. What shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration.

History, which I had always loved even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where it could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral: glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable. The idea of loss pressed in around me like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.

That's Kathryn Schulz from Lost & Found.

I wasn't planning to talk about this, but here it goes. When we love in a world that changes, a world that trembles in all directions, grief becomes a part of life. We have to love something; it's just what mammals do. And so grief is woven into the fabric of our biology. Really, when we care about other beings, when we care about sentience itself, grief becomes a feature of life.

Monday was about helplessness—how helplessness can illuminate our power. Yesterday was renunciation—freeing us up to enjoy pleasure more fully, less compulsively. And today is grief—grief freeing us up to love more deeply.

Now, when I use the word grief, I'm not just talking about the loss of someone; it's broader than that. And I'm not talking about the species of grief that debilitates us, that freezes us, although that's a part of life too. I am talking about the way that the Dharma interacts with the grieving heart such that we are positively changed by it. Our love is deepened by it.

Spiritual practice is a form of growing up. And growing up entails growing pains. You know, sometimes kids will get diffuse pains in their legs or something, and we say, "Okay, no problem. Growing pains." There are growing pains of spiritual maturation too for each of us. There are growing pains of evolving our sīla^[3], evolving our ethical commitments, of actually growing up ethically.

Maya Angelou said, "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." We have to be willing to know. To come into a deeper alignment with our existing values, to actually trace out what those values mean for ourselves in the world, to come into a kind of alignment with the depth of our own heart. We're willing to be stretched to widen the circle of moral concern. The movement of the heart in that can feel a little like grief. That circle widening, you know? More and more of the world feels like a worthy moral concern.

There are growing pains associated with deepening compassion. When love meets suffering, there are two byproducts: grief and compassion. The movement from the clenched fist of grasping—that Gil^[4] often speaks of—to the open hand of letting go feels like something. It often feels like grief.

Not so long ago in teaching, this insight arose, and it was like, "Wow, how did I not put this together before?" Much of the fruit of practice unfolds through a process of grieving. It feels like something is being lost, and for sure, something gained.

We don't have to make this some enormous project, "my grieving project." We're just willing to feel. I hold grief in a kind of reverential way. It does not belong in the family of afflictive emotions in my mind. I can imagine a life that is free of agitation, anger, and anxiety. I don't live it, but I can imagine it. I cannot imagine a life free of grieving. I don't even know exactly what that would be, but it feels like it would be an abdication of our love and care in some way.

People are often grateful when they're given permission to grieve—to know that this is part of the path. Amidst loss, this is part of just the growing pains of the evolution of our compassion, of our love, the expansion of the scope of our moral concern. The movements of letting go entail some sense of grieving.

The traditional phrase about the fruit of this practice is going "beyond grief, sorrow, lamentation, and despair." We get beyond grief, sorrow, lamentation, and despair, but I want my Buddha to grieve. Maybe that is controversial, but just for me, I want my Buddha to grieve.

Grief is redeemed by different things. We're certainly redeemed by art, but also by growing our love. A love that is uninformed by grief is a naive love. What we find in grief is that the ego is just all out of moves. Do you know that feeling? Those moments where the ego is all out of moves, there's no energy for it to move in this way or that way, and there's some beauty and opportunity in that itself.

We do this work for ourselves, and it's important for our society, because the failure to grieve, the failure to let go, spills out. The failure to grieve can distort our love. Our love becomes too reticent or too controlling. The courage to love is the willingness to grieve. And when we're willing, love deepens—less reticent, less controlling.

Sometimes fully enlightened beings are described as being "consummate in shame." What's being alluded to is hiri and ottappa^[5], the shame around moral transgression, around causing harm. Consummate in shame; I'm always struck by that translation. I wonder if maybe it's possible to be consummate in grief, too.

It is possible I am pushing through solid rock in flint-like layers, as the ore lies, alone; I am such a long way in I see no way through, and no space: everything is close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief so this massive darkness makes me small. You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in: then your great transforming will happen to me, and my great grief cry will happen to you.^[6]

For consideration. It's good to be able to talk about these things together. Thank you.