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: Faith in Awareness

Okay, welcome folks. Welcome to you all. So we'll sit. It occurred to me just to say, in case it's not already clear, that on some level the way I approach these morning sessions is that you've already received some instruction on how to meditate. There's something you can do that you're familiar with in one way or another, and these are explorations of technique. Take whatever value there is in them and add that into what you already know and do. So let's find our posture and see what's greeting us today.

It's both so familiar and so fresh. A kind of dense web of associations of the stillness and the silence, almost as if it cues our body and awakens the muscle memory of steadiness, silence, and release. But it's also so fresh. Who knows what this moment will feel like, where the body and mind is today, where the next insight lurks latent.

No matter what phenomena the moment brings, there's some Dharma posture, some gesture of awareness, a gesture of the heart that serves our long-term welfare and happiness. No matter what's arising, there is goodness that can be cultivated.

We're so often looking for signs of our progress, signs we're doing it right, signs the Dharma is working. And so we look for concentration, we look for insight, we look for tranquility. But the mechanisms of healing and awakening are not usually evident to us. They unfold in ways we can't actually see. And so sometimes it's okay to stop looking for signs that we're on the right track, to stop orienting towards some trajectory we imagine is the right one, and we just settle back into a certain kind of faith in awareness. Trust that the Dharma is working its way through us, and then our job description as a practitioner becomes a lot simpler.

So there's relief in learning that we don't have to engineer the moment, that the seeds of awakening are already here.

We listen very carefully for the thread of wisdom and compassion. We tune to that as best we can, and then rest.

Dharmette: The Pleasure of Purification

We think that the practice is about the peaks. Meditation teachers are no doubt partially to blame in so far as we talk about samādhi^[1] and the enjoyment of stillness, or talk about insight and those moments when chunks of suffering just cleave off. We talk about love and the possibility that it might radiate out in all directions. And so we get the sense that the practice is about the peaks, and that the valleys are kind of intrusions or a sort of pit stop before another peak.

But the point of practice is not the peaks. The point is the ascent, the peak, the descent, and the valley. The point is all of that, because at each point along that ride we grow different capacity and strengthen qualities of the heart that are relevant for our own process of waking up. The descent and the valley have one of two tastes: the taste of suffering or the taste of purification. There aren't other options as far as I can tell. And so today's theme is the pleasure of purification.

When I tried coffee as a kid, I thought it was just inconceivable that any member of my species could prefer that to, say, red Gatorade. [Laughter] But as is said, some tastes are acquired tastes, and the pleasure of purification for sure is an acquired taste. We come to appreciate it and it becomes very rich. On this path, we have to come to enjoy this taste, to appreciate it, to become a connoisseur of the wholesome unpleasant. The forms of discomfort that are onward leading rather than the sign of injury.

Practice can unknowingly recapitulate our resistance to anything uncomfortable. It's so deeply conditioned; everything in our body kind of just says "no" even to small discomforts. We're working with that conditioning that runs so deep in us, and much of the path is about breaking the links of suffering. The way this came up last night in the conversation, the way that acting out our clinging partially delivers. We say, "Oh, clinging is suffering. Clinging is suffering." I think Ajahn Chah^[2] said to somebody, "Is it really? Do you really believe that?" pointing to the ways in which we have some fidelity to clinging. We have some fidelity to clinging because—and this is the tragic part—it partially delivers. It's an impoverished form of pleasure, but it's a pleasure nonetheless. To actually interrupt the cascade of dukkha^[3] means that we have to move against the stream, against the cycles of reinforcement that acting out our clinging brings us.

To move against the partial satisfactions of clinging brings with it a distinctive flavor. It's a flavor of discomfort, but it's a discomfort that has another hint: another taste, the taste of relief, the taste of purification.

Many, many years ago I was getting physical therapy for an injury. The physical therapist, who I loved, would cause a lot of pain. Sometimes he'd be working in a hamstring and I remember he'd say, "Ah, it's very ropey," and then kind of lean his weight into the tightness. That brought a feeling that was not what we would say comfortable. It's an acquired taste maybe, but you can taste the release in it: this is not the pain of injury, this is the pain of healing.

One of my teachers, Shinzen Young, says:

"The taste of purification is very hard to describe, but in essence it is a kind of joy. You may be in great pain, but there is a deep joy because you feel the blockages being worked out. Each time you greet the pain with equanimity, you can feel how the energy in the pain is wearing away the separation between you and your spiritual source. You sense that holdings from the past are being ground up, digested, metabolized by the peristaltic vibratory movements of impermanence. The grinding and digesting is both painful and liberating at the same time. This is the taste of purification."

The options are often the taste of suffering or the taste of purification. In that taste of purification, you can feel something is being softened. Like your heart is being kneaded, kneaded like dough.

We get out of the conceptual world of "This hurts, I don't like this, how do I fix this?" and instead we surrender to the flow of anicca^[4], of impermanence, the movement of any given moment. We just, in a sense, take refuge. You take refuge and let anicca wear down the forces of clinging. We keep noticing the bracing, the ways we subtly brace. We keep noticing that quarantines the pain. We brace for reasons, but it quarantines the pain and actually amplifies the distress. And then maybe there is a kind of surrender: "Okay, sensations. Okay, heartache. You can have me. You can have me. I offer myself up to you."

In this, we're so awake that it's almost like we're feeling the exposure therapy that is purification working moment by moment. I think last month I alluded to the ways that Dharma is in part an exposure therapy. In this purification, we can feel it working moment by moment. "I'm habituating to the discomfort. I'm habituating to the wholesome unpleasant." And that hurts. It's an acquired taste for sure. But you can taste the freedom in it.

This kind of willingness breeds a very easy mind state. In the wake of purification, it breeds a very easy mind state. When you get up after having actively chosen the taste of purification, the forces of clinging, the kilesas^[5], the forces of suffering just seem very uncompelling. Hate seems so obviously a form of self-harm, so absurd. It's not like we have to marshal our energy to put it down. The dead end of greed is so obvious. In the wake of purification, you really don't need much stimulation at all to feel very fulfilled.

It's a whole other topic, but it feels to me like one of the byproducts in this cauldron of purification is also love. We've experienced suffering with such exquisite poise and such vivid ways that the human condition itself becomes more poignant. The predicament of our own life becomes more poignant. Not frenzied, but poignant. There's pleasure—it's a weird pleasure, but it's pleasure nonetheless.

So I offer this for consideration. Please pick up what's useful, leave the rest behind. Okay team, I'll stop there. May your day be filled with much goodness. And when it's not, and when there is energy, may we have the taste of purification rather than the taste of suffering. Okay, see you tomorrow. Good to be with you.