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Guided Meditation: Listening with a Quiet Mind

Welcome to this community of meditators gathering for what, being in California, we call the 7:00 a.m. sitting and Dharma talk.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the first month or two of the sheltering in place, it was remarkable how quiet this local city became and how you could hear sounds that I normally didn't hear. There were sounds of birds that made you think, "Oh yeah, there are so many birds here." Normally those sounds are drowned out. Maybe you've been in situations where something became quiet and you could hear things. Maybe it's the quiet that happens when the refrigerator hum stops, and you can somehow hear the quiet or hear other things.

Or there are times when the haze or the smog in the air has cleared out, and here where I live, we can sometimes see across the San Francisco Bay. It's surprising how close the hills are on the other side when it is clear.

So in meditation, when the noise of the mind quiets down, when the haze and veils over our inner eyes, our perception, clear, it's surprising what we can see, and hear, and feel within ourselves.

Part of meditation is to see the noise, the thinking, the attitudes, the agitation—all these things that make it difficult to see. But from time to time, meditation supports the humming of the refrigerator turning off. The city within us becomes quiet, and we can feel and hear and sense something we normally can't. And what is it that we sense? What is it we feel that's normally obscured by the busyness, the loudness of our ordinary life? Of course, that's an answer for each of us to answer for ourselves.

So to begin our meditation:

Place your body in a posture that might allow the agitation and the busyness to settle. Maybe there's a posture you can take that's relaxed, that has some qualities of being peaceful and settled.

And in a peaceful way, lower your gaze, not looking at anything in particular. Slowly and peacefully, letting your eyes close.

And without doing much else, not changing your breathing, notice how it feels to be breathing right now.

Letting your attention roam around the torso to feel the movements of breathing, the sensations, the rhythm. Where in your body can you feel the body breathing in a tranquil and peaceful way?

Maybe it's not your usual place to notice breathing. Maybe for a few moments, it's to be aware of the movements in your back rib cage, or the very subtle movements of your spine.

Maybe there's a little bit of tranquility or peace for a moment at the beginning of the exhale, or at the end of the exhale.

And as you sit here, as you meditate, is there a beginning of a little bit of calm or tranquility, simply sitting here?

Feeling, perceiving a global experience of your body. Noticing where there's agitation and tension. Noticing it with some gentleness, and letting the body relax as you exhale.

And with gentle care, be aware of any agitation, or noise, or busyness in the mind. Gently, caringly be aware of it.

And now on the exhale, perhaps letting the thinking mind relax.

And as you would let the thinking mind be quiet to listen to a faint sound in the distance, let the thinking mind be quiet so you can feel and sense the dynamic flow of sensations in your body.

Maybe the subtlest sensations of the body vibrating, humming. The deepest feeling of aliveness, where your body generates sensations of the body just being here. The background, deeper sensations, always here, of just being alive, and the energies humming, vibrating. Sensations that arise out of the body and are received by the body, known in the body.

And in the middle of all that, there's the sensations of the body breathing.

Maybe almost as if breathing arises out of and returns from the subtle sensations of the lived body.

Gently riding the sensations of breathing, as if you're being lifted and lowered by swells of water that you're floating in.

Riding the exhale all the way to the last sensation associated with exhaling. And from that last sensation, receive the upwelling movement of sensations of inhaling.

With a deeper hum or vibration or flow of sensations in the body, like the current that moves through the river of the body. And the breathing is gentle swells, waves coming and going in that current.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, let something within you become quiet so that you can remember some experience in your life of care. Someone caring for you in a peaceful way, or you caring for someone, or for some animal.

What is care like? What is love like, if it arises from the place inside that's quiet and peaceful, that maybe is only felt when the mind is quiet? Nothing flashy, maybe love and care that is free of desire. A tender appreciation.

And from the place inside where maybe love or care is most innate, quiet, and peaceful, let your goodwill flow out of there, out into the world, as if it radiates.

And let it carry the words out with it into the world:

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: Similes for Meditation (2 of 5) Refreshing Lake Spring

So this will be the second talk on the Buddha's use of similes for providing meditation instruction.

I think that these beautiful similes the Buddha uses for his instructions might not at first seem like instructions. In fact, in my early years of reading these early texts, I was somewhat dismissive of the similes and kind of glossed over them. But now I linger with them, and they seem to be quite enriching.

The human mind often works well with images, metaphors, and similes. Some people say that we understand ourselves and the world around us very much through the filter of similes or metaphors, and that sometimes we can understand things in new ways through metaphor. Someone might be repeatedly, angrily, or aggressively trying to fix themselves, to get rid of some trait or something they have that is causing suffering. Then they hear a metaphor that their approach to try to stop this tendency is kind of like picking at a scab. If you pick at a scab, it doesn't heal. That metaphor might penetrate much deeper into the psyche than simply saying, "Just leave yourself alone, don't keep trying to get rid of something that you don't like." The metaphor somehow speaks to something.

When my son was very young, he didn't fall asleep very easily, though he had a high sleep need. When I took him to bed, I would do guided meditations with him, but I wouldn't sit next to him and say, "Be aware of your in-breath, be aware of your out-breath." What I would do was paint a picture of some animal in the natural world that was sleeping. One of the most common ones was a sea otter resting on the surface of the ocean, surrounded by and underneath all this kelp that kept the sea otter quite safe in the story I made. The sea otter would just lie on its back and gently feel the rising and falling of the swells of the ocean. Those swells, I would say, were very peaceful and gentle and quiet. I would tell him, "As you feel your breathing, maybe put your hand on your chest and just feel that rising and falling of the swell, and the otter falling asleep, resting there safely." And with that, he would stay with his breath. He would feel the movement of his breathing, and he would gently fall asleep.

I had a whole repertoire of animals that I would use. One of them was a gorilla or a monkey that had a little newborn baby that would rest on the chest of the parent, and would feel the rising and falling of the parent's chest as the parent was breathing. The baby would just feel that movement. Again, I would maybe have him put his hand on his chest and feel his movement. This worked very well for quite a while and helped him fall asleep.

This idea of painting an image or a story allows the mind's imagination to make an emotional connection. A little baby monkey with its parent, or the safety of being surrounded by kelp, touched some different aspects of who we are that allowed something deeper to connect to the movements of breathing in doing this kind of meditation.

The Buddha also used these similes. These similes tap into our imagination, how the picture that's created reaches out and touches different parts of our emotional being, our concepts and ideas, and our ability to visualize in a way that supports what we're doing.

I didn't know that this could be part of meditation, partly because both in Zen and in Vipassana^[1] practice as they started in Asia, it was clearly opposed to doing anything like that. It was just sitting here present with the truth, not doing anything, not trying to make anything happen, just a direct penetration of the truth of emptiness or something. And with Vipassana practice, it was just directly seeing things as they are without the overlay of concepts and stories and images and similes. There's something very profound about the way I was taught Zen, and the way I was taught Vipassana. But it was also kind of an advanced practice and assumed that people were already able to settle quite well. And in fact, when I started Zen, I wasn't; in Vipassana, I wasn't. And so it took a while to find myself settled enough to do the instructions that they were teaching.

But when the Buddha gave his meditation instruction, he gave some very simple technical explanations of what to do or what goes on, but then he provided similes that filled in the picture. They gave a richer sense of what was going to happen within. It's almost like similes and metaphors sometimes evoke, touch, explain, or describe what can go on inside better than a simple statement.

If someone said to me, "I'm feeling pretty sad today," I would care for them and wonder what's going on. But I've heard sad songs that made me cry. There was one children's song for my son—I don't think he was ever moved by it, but it was by the singer Raffi—and I would hear the song and get teary; it was such a sad song. There are things that touch us and evoke us.

The simile I want to describe today is for the beginning stages of really getting quiet and settled. The noises of the mind, the busyness of the mind, are no longer there, and we're beginning to settle into the present moment. But there's still a dynamism, a flow of energy of life that is flowing through us in a very nice way.

The simile is that of a deep mountain lake. There are no rivers flowing into the lake, so it's not being replenished by rivers coming in. And there's no rain that falls, so it's not being replenished from above. Instead, this particular lake is being replenished by an underwater spring that's at the center of the lake basin. Water is flowing out of the spring into the water itself and fanning out in all directions through the lake.

This water is explained as being cool and fresh. In a hot climate like India, cool and fresh water was very comforting, very wonderful for people, and had very positive connotations. The simile of cool, refreshing water coming out of the spring and spreading throughout the lake means no part of the lake is left untouched by this cool current of water.

In the same way, as a person gets settled and starts getting quiet and able to hear and listen more deeply to what's going on—partly because they're starting to get focused on the breathing, and the thinking, distracted, discursive mind starts getting quiet—there starts to be a unification, a gathering together, a harmonizing of the energies, of the sensations of what goes on inside of us. Something gets freed up, and there's a flow of energy, a delightful sense of well-being that can flow through the body, in the same way that the water from the spring flows through the lake. This delightful current flows through the body so that no part of the body is not touched by it.

Sometimes this current is called joy and happiness. It has all kinds of intensities. It can be an essential well-being, a sense of unification that might be comparable to a craftsperson really happily absorbed in the work they do, or someone reading a book, playing music, or doing some activity where they are fully, completely involved in it. We're not fragmented; all the energy is gathered in a peaceful way to be involved in it. Some delightful, happy sense of concentration or absorption has this welling up feeling that spreads throughout the body.

That's the simile. It gives a sense that as we get concentrated, as we get settled and present here with a quiet mind, there is something deeper that wells up that feels quite healthy, delightful, and wonderful, that we can trust, that is supportive. The simile gives a sense of feeling that there's a current, a flow, that arises out of some source within us.

The important part of the simile is that the source of the sensations of delight and well-being arises from the inside out. They arise from within the body and are not dependent on any of the rivers coming from outside, any of the sense doors^[2] being stimulated by sounds, smells, touch, or sights. They're not dependent on anything in the world. And because there's no rain falling in—and in the metaphor, the rain is all our thoughts and stories we make living in the conceptual world—none of that is influencing us. We're not being impacted by the world or the world of our thoughts. This source of well-being is not dependent on anything in the world.

That's a phenomenal pointing. This simile pointing to that possibility can give a lot of inspiration. "Oh, I don't have to fix the world. I don't have to line up the world to be just the right way." There is a place of quietude or peacefulness where happiness can arise and swell up from the inside out, and it can feel like it has no worldly cause or reason. The cause is being settled and focused and present in a more continuous way, but it has no worldly cause.

To begin having a sense of this possibility that we carry with us can free us from the idea that our happiness is dependent on what goes on in the world, and that we have to fix the world or get everyone to behave properly, and then we'll be happy.

Rather, there is this beautiful, deep mountain lake inside of you in which there is an underwater spring of refreshing energy coming up that can flow throughout the whole body. The treasure is in you, not outside.

So thank you. I feel a little bit apologetic that the guided meditations this week are a little bit long, a lot of words, but hopefully, it conveys a little bit of what I'm teaching here with these similes. And we'll continue again tomorrow. Thank you.