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: Grounding and Opening

Welcome everyone, it's good to be with you. My name is Matthew Brensilver, and I am happy to be back with the morning IMC Gil skills crew here. This week will be the same format in the morning of sitting for about half an hour and then some reflections for 10 or 15 minutes. Additionally, there will be a couple of evening sessions that you're welcome to join. Those will be on Zoom, and a daylong on Saturday too.

I've organized the week around the theme of dharma^[1] in our interpersonal life. So that is really an invitation to make this one week a kind of laboratory where we explore the place of these core teachings of Buddhism—sīla, samādhi, paññā^[2] (ethics, mind training, and wisdom)—in our interpersonal life. That's the invitation, to consider this a little bit of an immersive practice ground for this week. I'll say more about all of this.

Settling into this familiarity and this freshness... The buzzing, blooming aliveness of your body.

We establish some sense of groundedness. The downward pull of gravity. The settling effects of the exhalation. The million consolations of the dharma.

We ground ourselves... and then open. The whole body as if bathed in awareness. No matter what is known, knowing is happening. Something in us lets down, relaxes us.

Just giving a radical permission for the winds of feeling to blow as they blow, knowing they won't blow anything over inside of us. And so imperfection becomes our vehicle for peace. Each moment, in its own weird little way, beckons us towards peace.

So we find our ground, and we renounce all our agendas around fixing, acquiring, becoming, improving, tweaking, optimizing. We find our ground. We renounce the agenda. We let the logic of the dharma unfold through our heart.

Interpersonal Life as Dharma Practice (1 of 5)

Thank you. It's good to get to practice together.

Tony Kushner^[3] said: "The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs."

Sometimes when I give a talk about self-clinging—the topic for today—I tell a story of visiting a local sangha^[4] here in the Bay Area and being introduced in this grand, very generous way. It was maybe even an inflating or really celebratory bio kind of introduction. But on that particular night, I had managed to show up—this is pre-COVID—to teach a meditation class with my zipper down. Which I think we can all agree is the cardinal sin of mindfulness. [Laughter] To not be properly dressed leaving the house, right? This is not a sign of profound mindfulness.

So the juxtaposition of this kind of lovely intro and the cardinal sin of mindfulness... something about that. Nobody is their bio, and we can only ever look good on paper. I thought to share that as the framing for this week, actually, because the relational world is a bit like that. Our habits will not be concealed.

It's incredibly beautiful and incredibly rich, the interpersonal realm. The learning and the healing, there is just so much beauty on offer. And of course, no one escapes with their dignity fully intact, right? We should just give up hope for that. This is a realm of humility, longing, ecstasy, loss, courage, vulnerability, shame, grace, and healing. This is the realm we're entering into to consider.

And so other people are like steroids for the paramis^[5] and the kilesas^[6], the wholesome beautiful qualities of our heart and our habits of suffering. The emotion scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett^[7] says the best thing for a human nervous system is another human, and the worst thing for a human nervous system is another human.

Our life is relational. Sending and receiving, sending pain, receiving pain, sending love, receiving love. And of course, in the beginning, our very life depends on the care of others. We don't survive without that care, and so that forges a deeply relational being. The sense of belonging, of relatedness, is fundamental. And it's fundamental in the sense that if it is frustrated, we suffer.

Now, as we begin this exploration, I'm aware that some of you may be feeling like you have too much contact, and others feeling like you have too little. I hope this week is relevant across the whole spectrum, from those feeling too much to those feeling lonely. We try to get the amount of contact just right, but we can never exactly dial that perfectly either.

Some of the meditation we do, I would say, is only for itself. It doesn't need to translate whatsoever. It doesn't need to translate into the next moment, into the rest of our life. It doesn't need to translate into the interpersonal realm. We sit and we experience the blessings of that, and that is enough. If it doesn't function as the seed for something else, that would be enough. But some of what's developed on the cushion needs to translate too. We want it to translate to the rest of our life, especially our interpersonal life, which is such a deep realm of practice where what is evoked in us is so profound.

We take this as a kind of formal realm of practice. Other people help us see how we're not free, where we have maybe overestimated our freedom. And other people help us, through their love, become more free. This is the zone, I feel, where we investigate where our insight has stabilized and where it has not stabilized. We have an insight and we grow in our ease, our freedom, our care. We grow in the paramis, but then sometimes we recognize, "Oh, that's not actually stable." Maybe we've seen a thousand times, a million times, that greed and hatred are dead ends. But then all of a sudden, they seem kind of appetizing. Where has our insight stabilized, and where hasn't it?

Sometimes I entertain this delusion about how buttoned-up my whole inner life is. And then disrupting that is a moment of seeing just how glued together that delusion is. Or a dream that seems too potent to be meaningless. Or a reaction that takes me by surprise. And I want to encourage all of us to have a measure of fidelity to those realizations, to the ways in which the autobiography is punctured by moments, many of which are interpersonal. When I teach, I try never to forget my freedom, nor to forget my suffering. To have fidelity to all of that.

So the interpersonal realm is a realm of seeing what has stabilized in us and what hasn't. What has been realized. This is Eve Sedgwick^[8]: "I still hadn't realized it. That it hadn't succeeded in becoming real to me. Real in the same register as a living room is real. That's the sense in which I want to discuss reality today," she writes. "Reality not as what's true, but as what's realized. What is or has become real."

Where is the gap between knowing something and realizing it, taking it as real? To practice Buddhism, after all, is to spend all the time you can in the attempt to realize a set of understandings, most of whose propositional contents are familiar to you from the beginning of your practice. The intensiveness of different Buddhist traditions testifies to the centrality of the project of realization, to the sense of how normal it is for realization to lag behind knowledge by months or eons.

Dharma is not about knowledge, but realization. To make these teachings real. Real to your heart, real such that you feel the freedom of it. Real such that they are realized, they are stabilized. And the interpersonal realm is a very potent field for the exploration of what has been realized.

We take this—the gimmick of just a week intensive on the interpersonal life—I invite you to take this as a serious, loving inquiry. Where we say, "Okay, I make this a realm of practice for this week. I really want to actually investigate." And so we approach the whole question of our interpersonal life, the deep strong relationships that we have, the casual encounters that we have—we approach all of it with respect and wonder and freshness. A respect for what gets evoked in us, and respect for what is evoked in others. A forgiveness, yeah. A forgiveness for all the ways this can impact the heart and mind. For our needs and our strength and our confusion and all of it, may it be blessed with a quality of understanding and forgiveness. That sense of not being moralistic about our inner life, not being moralistic about our interpersonal life, that frees us up to investigate. To look more deeply with more fidelity.

And so, what happens to your mind in the interpersonal realm? What gets soothed? What gets activated? Notice all of that with care. How do you feel about yourself when you're with others? What ideas become more dominant? What begins to recede in your mind? Who do you take yourself to be in the interpersonal realm? Does the dharma feel more or less alive when you're with others versus when alone?

Please consider all of this in the next 23 hours and 15 minutes, and we'll come on back tomorrow morning. May you have a lovely day full of exploration, if that is intriguing to you, and we'll gather back tomorrow. Tomorrow night I'll post information on an evening session at 7:00 Pacific, and we'll sit and see how the day went. Thank you all, and I wish you well.