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Guided Meditation: Arising and Passing

So, hello everyone. Nice to see you arriving. Let's go ahead and get started together.

Settling in for meditation, sensing into the body, arriving at your spot, and closing your eyes if it's comfortable for you to do so. Maybe taking a couple of long, slow, deep breaths, really filling the lungs, and then just allowing the breath to naturally exhale. Just to really connect into the feeling of the body, and then just letting the breath be natural.

As is often helpful at the beginning of a sit, inviting some ease throughout the body. Sensing into the head area, softening the eyes and the eye sockets. Letting go of all the little muscles on the scalp, down through the jaw and the throat. Releasing the shoulders and any holding in the upper back so that the heart can naturally be forward. Just letting the arms float freely.

And all down into the belly area, releasing the diaphragm, softening the area of the belly so that it can kind of round out or drop down farther into the abdomen. Releasing any holding in the low back so that we're just balanced on the spine. Releasing the hip joints, down through the legs, the calves, the Achilles, and into the feet. Just inviting some connection to the body, and it's okay however it is.

Bringing attention also to the state of the mind or the heart. First of all, noticing what's there. How are you right now? And then also inviting some ease in the mind. One way to do that is to find some bit of ease somewhere and just connect with that. Kind of emphasize it in attention, even if there are other parts of the mind that are not so much at ease.

Connecting in with the sensations of the breath. Sensing the breath, maybe like a warm bath—something gentle, something that envelops the body. Imagining that we can steep the body in the breath. Just encouraging the body and the mind to be simple. If there are complicated or agitated parts, we can put them more on the back burner, and keep the simplicity of our awareness, and breath, and body on the front burner.

If you begin to sense some degree of peace or ease, or even wholesome pleasure in the experience of breathing, it's fine to favor that in attention. To emphasize that. This is actually how the instructions for mindfulness of breathing go; mindfulness is not always purely neutral. So go ahead and favor any sense of ease or peace, feeling the simple rhythmic rocking of the breath.

If we're getting too involved in the pleasure and the joy of the breath, we'll feel that as agitation. Or, if we're resisting this idea of enjoying the simple experience of the breath, we will feel that as agitation. Also finding the middle way that's very simple and tends toward ease.

For now, I will offer a shift: turning the attention more toward the changing nature of the breath. It's the same experience, but we turn attention more toward the flow in and out. Sensations that continually change the experience of the breath. We see that it's never the same from moment to moment. But there is still some ease in just resting with the flow.

We can gently open just a bit the investigation aspect of the mind, acknowledging that the breath is a multitude of sensations that are arising, shifting, and passing away in an overlapping kind of way. Really allowing the deep acknowledgment of that in the body and in the mind. Keeping the mind soft as we open to the fluttering kaleidoscope of change that is the breath. We'll rest in silence with that for a bit.

In the last few minutes of this meditation, we can reflect that what is experienced just in the breath is also paralleled in daily life, as well as in the arc of our life. There's a continual arising, shifting, changing, and passing away of things. To the degree to which we can acknowledge and rest in that, we're in touch with how things actually are.

Relationships change over time. There are new ones, and sometimes they end. Our work has changed. Our body and health shift over time. The weather, the seasons—it's always in flux in some way. And of course, we know this at some level, but we also forget it. Oftentimes when we're suffering are the times when we are out of touch with this natural flow.

We can reflect on the way meditation prepares us for living well in the world. It's not about knowing a lot about the breath; it's about having that experience and relating to it well, that then somehow can come forth as we meet life. We can hope that in our day today, and going forward, we're able to discern these patterns of how things work in order that we can relate well to people and live in a way that is inspiring, and reminds people in even just a simple way that it's possible to flow along with life in a way that doesn't have too much suffering.

Dharmette: Meeting Life Well – Five Dharma Resources (5 of 5): Discernment

We've made it to the last item in our list of five Dharma resources for meeting life well. We've talked about confidence (saddhā^[1]), ethical conduct or virtue (sīla^[2]), listening and learning (suta^[3]), and generosity and letting go (cāga^[4]). And then the last item can be seen as something distinct, but it's also one that emerges from and sums up the other four, and it is discernment (paññā^[5]). That word is also translated as wisdom, but we'll lean toward using "discernment" for today.

There are many things that it's useful to discern on the path to freedom. The most fundamental is understanding what is unskillful and what is skillful. Discerning between what leads toward suffering and what leads away from suffering. This links paññā to sīla (virtue or ethics), but it also goes outside the conventional range of ethics into areas like choosing how to navigate the mind during sitting meditation.

Sometimes people think that there shouldn't be any form of judgment in practice—that we just accept everything all the time in a passive way. But this is too broad-brush. Judiciousness is essential for waking up. This is from the Dhammapada^[6] in a chapter called The Just:

The wise person who, as if holding a set of scales, selects what's good and avoids what's evil, is for that reason a sage. Whoever can weigh these two sides of the world is for that reason called a sage.

I apologize for the word "evil"—that's what the translation said. We could just think "unskillful" or "unwholesome." And the same chapter also says:

One is not just who judges a case hastily. A wise person considers both what is and isn't right.

These quotes affirm that wise judgment is indeed part of practice. But they also imply—the way these ones were written—having some kind of time to consider options, weighing the two sides of the world, and considering both what is and isn't right. Sometimes we have the space to do that, and we should when we can. This is part of living a conscious, reflective life.

But there's also what happens in the moment. Fortunately, there are other ways that we can train our discernment so that it becomes a reliable resource even right in the moment, when it's combined with mindfulness. To do this, it's best to understand the ways in which we tend to make mistakes in how we see things, and then we can train to see in wiser ways. These are various ways that we don't properly discern what's going on—when we're making mistakes basically because we gloss over details or we focus on the wrong thing.

The Buddha identified three main mistakes, let's say, to watch for. I think he called them distortions.

One gloss that we make is to see things that are impermanent as permanent, or things that are changing as unchanging. In many cases, this comes down to a matter of careful mindfulness. Suppose we're outside, and we look across a clearing, and we see a black line across the ground. It looks solid, but as we get closer, we see that it's actually a line of ants. It's lots of ants walking close together in the same direction. You can see this sometimes on retreats out in centers that are in the jungle or away from the cities. As we get close, this solid line breaks up into individual ants in motion.

Or maybe you've seen those fire sticks that people sometimes wave around on holidays. You do it at night, and it's a stick that's burning on one end (or these days, it might be an LED), and it's twirled rapidly in a circle. It looks like a solid circle of light because we don't see that it's a single light being moved when it's going fast like that. There are many things that are like this. We look out and we see a tree, but if we get closer, and closer, and closer, eventually you'll be looking at molecules that are all in motion. How solid is that tree?

Sitting in meditation, we might perceive pain in our shoulder to be a solid wall. It feels like a hardened area, almost like a stone. But with careful mindfulness, if we're willing to turn toward it, sometimes the pain can break up into many little sparks of sensation, often in quite a small area. It might still be there as a strong sensation, but we can't quite believe in its solidity anymore if we look with careful mindfulness.

Experiences like solidity and unchangingness are actually products of how we're seeing. If things are changing slowly, or if mindfulness is not very precise (catching a moment here and there, not every moment), then they can seem relatively permanent. It's a very important Dharma insight to see into the impermanent, inconstant, and changing nature of actually all experience. This greatly assists in letting go, because we discern at an intuitive level that there really isn't much to grasp. We can train the mind to discern in this way. We can incline toward seeing in that way, and as we do that throughout the day and in meditation, that way of seeing will be available to us as a Dharma resource at moments where it's useful.

A second gloss or misperception is to see what is ultimately unsatisfying as fully satisfying. We typically carry the idea that getting something pleasant, something that we want, is going to satisfy us. Maybe it's even going to be the thing that really does it for us: "If I just get this one thing, or if I just get rid of this one thing, then it will be better."

For example, we might think, "Ah, I'm going to take a hot bath tonight, that is really going to do it for me after a long day of work." And if the conditions come together and we do get to do that, we enjoy it. But does it really satisfy completely? Doesn't your mind just go on to the next thing that will be "just perfect"? We're talking here about this quality of dukkha^[7]—unsatisfactoriness in human life. It helps very much to understand that dukkha doesn't have to have this narrow meaning of suffering, which is often how it's translated. Definitely, a nice hot bath is not suffering, nor is it wrong to enjoy it. But a hot bath is dukkha because it is not able to ultimately satisfy us, and if we don't know that, we're actually setting ourselves up for genuine suffering.

If we're honest, really all those special pleasant things that we create in our life are quite temporary, and sometimes not even as good in the moment as we think they're going to be. Yes, the hot water is nice, but sitting in a bathtub I find to be a little hard on my back, resting on a hard enamel surface. And after ten minutes anyway, the water's cooling off a little bit. There's an image given in the suttas for the hindrance of sensual desire, which is dyed water—like water that's been dyed certain colors so we don't see very clearly through it. I think it's sort of an early version of rose-colored lenses. It's helpful to train our mind to discern when we're looking with rose-colored lenses and not allow ourselves to think that things are going to be more satisfying than they are.

Now definitely, sometimes people resist this idea of training the mind to understand that a given experience cannot be ultimately satisfying, but I see it as actually very supportive. In fact, the very fact that we have a distorted perception that some experience is going to make us fully happy actually diminishes the enjoyment of it, because it places kind of pressure on it in a sense. When we actually understand that no experience can inherently make us happy, it actually makes it much easier to enjoy things fully and then to let them go as they're passing. It's really just a protection for the mind. Don't worry, life still has many good things, but we're just not distorted about them.

And then the third main gloss, or non-discerning way of seeing things, is to mistake what is not-self for an abiding self. In this case, I haven't found very much value in really thinking about this cognitively; it's really much better just to do as a practice. A great practice that can be done in daily life, as well as on the cushion, is found in the instructions that the Buddha gave to Bāhiya^[8]. I think some of you are likely familiar with them. He said: "In the seen, let there just be the seen. In the heard, just the heard. In the sensed, just the sensed. And in the cognized, just the cognized."

We practice seeing experience in an unadorned way, a simple way. For example, the sound of a bell. Just ring a bell. I guess I could do that. Listen to this.

[Bell rings]

It's a simple experience of sound just arising and passing. It doesn't have much to do with our self, unless we add one on. But really, it's just the sound coming and going. In cases like this that are simple, we get a glimpse of the way putting a self onto something would be actually imputed onto experience by the mind. If we were to say, "That's my sound. That's a special bell just for me," it's obviously something extra. That's not to problematize that we do that sometimes; it's just to be accurate that putting a self on is something extra. It's additional to the experience. See for yourself. It takes careful mindfulness, but you can see this for yourself. In the words of Joseph Goldstein: "Only six things ever happen: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and mental activity."

The Buddha concludes his teaching to Bāhiya by saying, "This, just this, is the end of dukkha." When we can see experience in a simple way, then there isn't suffering or stress.

Essentially, when we train not to be fooled into these non-discerning ways of seeing, then we're much more likely to make good decisions in the moment. Non-discernment is to think that things are—in the words of Ruth King^[9] (I love the way she puts this)—"permanent, perfect, and personal." And what we want to train in is to not be fooled by that.

If we see more wisely, more discerningly, then we won't be foolishly trying to hold onto or control things that are bound to change. We won't be setting ourselves up for disappointment and dukkha by tying our happiness to things that change and are limited. And we won't be getting wrapped up in thinking that things are inherently personal, inherently ourselves, and all the dukkha that goes with that.

This is kind of a culmination of all the things that we've been practicing up to now: the confidence, the sīla of ethics, the learning of the teachings, listening carefully to our experience, and then being willing to let go, whether in the form of actually giving something or the releases that happen along the path. Then we come to have this discerning view of understanding the changing nature of things, and how to live well in the world.

As a reminder, the Buddha said that these five qualities are a form of inner wealth. They're a form of fortitude of character. They're inspirations—when we think of how they can be known in the world, we feel happy. People who possess them and have them well at hand are said to be spiritually mature. One that I didn't say up to now is that these are also said to help us at the time of death, and when these are well established in the heart, they assure an easeful death.

These serve us both on and off the cushion to meet life well in the moment. We can strengthen any and all of them through training, which is very worthwhile to do. And all of them are made potent by mindfulness practice; that's the core foundation behind all of them. So, thank you for being here for this week. I very much hope that something in it landed for you, and that it will support you and all those around you to take it into your practice in life. Be well.