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: Meditating with Strength

Good morning and a good day from Redwood City Insight Meditation Center. Thank you for being part of this. I appreciate it very much coming here and, in a certain way, kind of sitting in the middle in the midst of all of you.

Because Buddhism—to the degree to which Buddhism, meditation, or mindfulness is associated with values of peace, of non-harming, of a certain kind of modesty, and non-greed, non-hatred—it's very easy in that process to feel that one should diminish oneself. To the degree to which there's letting go of attachments, and one of the primary attachments is to self, there can be the idea that somehow we should be self-effacing and diminishing ourselves, kind of like we don't count, or just let go of our own needs or situations, or somehow consider ourselves unimportant.

It's true that Buddhism has a lot to do with letting go of attachment to self. Letting go of conceit and arrogance is a big part of it. But there's also a coming into or merging into a kind of personal strength. Some people say it is a certain kind of unshakeable confidence: that we can take our stand, we can be here in a clear, upright, full way, as if we count, as if we are allowed to be strong. And in that strength, to not be arrogant; in that strength, to not cause harm in the world; or to hold ourselves in any kind of way that diminishes other people, but still to just be there with strength.

Some people might say with power, some people might use the word confidence, some people might use this idea that we're allowed to be here in a very stable, clear, upright kind of way. So in this meditation that we do today, I'd like to try to evoke this for you as a support for your meditation practice. Maybe some of the words that I use will not work for some of you. One of the arts of guided meditations is if some word that's being used is not quite right for you, you might try rewording it and see what similar word might work for you. Or you might consider that maybe in general circumstances this concept doesn't work for you, but that there might be one or two times in your life where it is relevant, it is important, and so use that situation as a reference for what the meditation is about.

Assuming a posture for meditation, in whatever posture it is—probably most of you are sitting, a few might be standing, a few might be lying down, and there might be some of you also who are maybe doing this walking, maybe walking back and forth in your room as you listen—whatever posture you have, enter into it with the idea that you're going to have a posture that has room for your confidence. Even if you don't know you're confident yet, you create that. So maybe sitting up a little straighter than you normally would. Maybe rolling your shoulders back a little bit. Maybe letting your chest be a little bit more open and expanded.

And then feeling the base, wherever the weight of your body touches your mat, your chair, your bed, the floor. See if you can feel a solid stability there. As the weight of the body comes into contact with what is supporting your weight, feeling the support, the stability. And perhaps that support or stability, for some of you, can be a source of something comparable to confidence—something that's going to hold your confidence, or from which confidence can arise.

Gently close your eyes. In a moment, take a few long, slow, deep breaths, as we often do. But see if you can let the deeper breaths—three-quarters full, not a strain to breathe, just deeper breath—be breathing with confidence. With a kind of intentionality, volition, that you're really behind. This is breathing confidently.

Breathing in deeply, and then letting go of it all as you exhale. Maybe a long exhale, softening, relaxing the body. Breathing in confidently, and exhaling, letting go into embodied strength, embodied confidence.

Let your breathing return to normal. Take a few moments finding where in your body, what parts, what area of your body do you most associate with your strength, personal strength, or confidence? If you are going to do something with some strength, or real confidence, dedication, is there some place where you would feel that strength or that confidence? In your chest, or your belly, hands, or the feet, in the spine? It could be anywhere.

And if you have such a place that you associate with personal strength or confidence, breathe with it. Let your breathing kind of move through it, accompany it, as if gently, calmly breathing is aligning itself with that confidence. Breathing is carrying that strength, spreading it through the body.

Gently let your inhales arise from your confidence and your strength. And on the exhale, let go of your thoughts. Let go of reactions. Let go of self-preoccupation. Let go of ways in which you are measuring yourself or judging yourself. Letting there be inner strength, confidence, as you breathe in, and as you exhale, let go, and let go into that confidence.

A confidence that reassures the mind it doesn't need to think about things, figure things out. It doesn't need to be involved in self-concern, self-preoccupation. Confident to be here now, in this lived experience.

And might there be for you a calm confidence, a confident calm? Where some subtleness or calmness coexists with strength. A strength which is not asserting anything. A strength which is not calling attention to itself, but is embodied strength that offers confidence to being present here and now. Maybe present through the body, that offers confidence about the value of being aware, being present to the experience here and now.

Feeling for a moment or two whatever degree of embodied confidence or strength, stability that's here. And staying, somehow resting in that, turn your mind's eye outward to the people in your life, in your communities. The world of neighbors and colleagues, and people of your town, your city, your region. People you know and don't know.

And with that confidence, that strength, gaze upon them kindly. Gaze upon the world with goodwill and friendliness. Ready to attend to others, aware of them in their conditions, their situation, where your inner strength does not direct you towards conceit of your own, but to care of self and others.

May this practice that we do free us from conceit, and liberate a confidence that allows us to meet the world with goodwill, with care. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Binding and Unbinding (4 of 5) Unwholesome and Wholesome Confidence

So the theme this week is binding and unbinding, or being tangled and untangled. There are qualities of our inner life, qualities of being, that can look like each other, be related, kind of similar, but on either side of that divide. Sometimes in letting go of how we get caught and entangled in attachments—because the wholesome side of it looks similar—we might let go of that too. But we want to keep the wholesome, that which is unbinding, that which helps us to become untangled.

So, conceit is one side of that divide for today. Buddhism puts a tremendous emphasis on freedom from conceit and sees that conceit is clearly an attachment and entanglement. Together with that is this philosophy, this teaching, to realize not-self—to realize how many things in our life that we take somehow to be "me," "myself," and "mine" aren't really that way, and they're not really who I really am. And so we let go of the entanglement with things that we appropriate for our self-identity, for the way we cling to identity and ideas.

These two ideas of not-self and overcoming conceit then lend themselves to the idea that you're not supposed to in any kind of way be strong or be confident and show up in a confident, clear way, like you're really there. You should probably sit in the back of the room. You should probably slump in the couch so you're not really asserting yourself. But in fact, Buddhist practice is meant to free the emerging qualities of strength—emerging qualities of life that have nothing to do with attachment, that come from the release of deeper responses, attitudes, feelings, and motivations for this world that we live in.

One of these can be a sense of confidence. There can be strong confidence in the Dharma, in practice, a strong confidence in oneself that we've learned how to navigate through the world wisely. One of the ways to have that, I would like to suggest, is easy to understand but maybe not so easy to do: to be confident that we'll go through the world and not break the precepts.

Hopefully, all of you are confident you'll go through the world and not act on any impulse to kill any other human being. You have confidence this is not what you're going to do. You're not going to steal from someone. And from there, hopefully, you're not going to cause harm through sexual misconduct. That's part of the reason why there is sexual misconduct—people start making exceptions. And then that you don't lie, and you don't engage in intoxication. Have confidence in your precepts so that we can have that confidence—confidence we're not going to intentionally harm anyone. We're not going to purposefully go... we'll restrain ourselves if necessary, but that's not what we're going to do.

And then there's confidence in our ability to not make things worse. This is a powerful thing: whatever situation you're in, don't make it worse. You might not know what to do—maybe not knowing is important, it's okay not to know—but don't make the situation worse. Hold your tongue, don't act if you think it's going to make the situation worse. To have confidence that you know what to do like that, to have confidence in your practice that you can show up and be mindful and find your way with what's going on.

That confidence then feeds a kind of inner strength. Buddhist practice makes us a stronger and stronger human being as we go along. It's kind of like we're cultivating and developing muscles: spiritual muscles, psychological muscles, muscles of mindfulness, muscles of concentration and focus, muscles of equanimity, muscles of non-reactivity, muscles of understanding and wisdom and discernment.

So these become strong, and that strength can feel embodied. When we show up someplace, we don't show up with any hesitation, we don't show up in any way to diminish ourselves. We don't assert ourselves, but we also don't diminish ourselves. There's a confidence in just being present, that midpoint between pulling away and asserting ourselves. Just there fully, this full confidence in being present and here, as if we count, as if we belong here.

To navigate between conceit and confidence and not confuse the two: In Buddhist teachings, conceit is said to be a product of the imagination. Its purpose is to advertise oneself. The way it's talked about in the ancient world is to hold up a banner, a flag: "Look at me, I'm so great," somehow advertising myself as being great. It comes along with greed—greed for my way, what I want, and who I want to be. It thrives with praise, and the searching for praise is one of the functions of conceit. It's a contraction, it's a form of irritation for the heart to have conceit.

Oddly enough, for many English-speaking people, the word conceit is often associated with arrogance, which Buddhists also associate it with. But it's also associated with a certain kind of preoccupation with self, a contraction and tightness around self that is what we might call in English a negative conceit. That is an attachment to being, or a preoccupation, or kind of being entangled with thinking of oneself as being less than others, being less valuable than others, or something like that. And that's just as much conceit as thinking that we're better than others. It still involves the self, it involves comparisons. The practice is supposed to free us from establishing an identity based on comparing ourselves to others, either as better or worse than.

What can we do instead of comparing ourselves? We learn just to be. We learn to be without comparisons. We learn to be without measuring ourselves against other people under any kind of standards at all. We learn in meditation to let go of that. There are some standards that we might have to deal with: the precepts, for example; the standards of making amends for some of the harms we've done in the world; the standards of learning how to speak honestly, truthfully, kindly. We might have to clean up our act to some degree in order so we can really let go and trust this moment, trust ourselves. So that there can be an emergence of a non-arrogant, non-conceitful sense of real strength, presence, confidence, and aliveness.

And so we do things without attachment, without clinging to anything, but also wholeheartedly. We're not held back by attachments, we're not held back by holding on to complacency, or resistance of any kind, or ideas that "it's too hard." There's a freedom in what we do, that we do it wholeheartedly given the conditions of our mind and body, the energy that's available, and all that. But there's not a complaining that comes along with doing. There's just "this is what I'm doing, to whatever way that I can."

Confidence, strength, is part of Dharma practice. In fact, there are five strengths^[1] or powers that the mindfulness tradition that the Buddha talks about: the power of confidence, the power of engagement, the power of mindfulness, the power of samadhi^[2], and the power of wisdom or discernment.

How can those powers flow through us, emerge through us, without conceit? I'd like to propose that conceit is always a reactive response to the world, but that Dharma confidence, Dharma strength, is not reacting to anything. It is an emergent quality that emerges through our freedom that we allow for.

So it may be for these next 24 hours you can look at this. You can try to take a look at this divide between two ways to be in the world. One where we're entangled in self-concerns of some form or other: of what people think of us, or how we want people to think of us, judgments, and ways we measure ourselves—that we're entangled and caught in conceit, or arrogance, or even kind of self-diminishment that we might be caught in. Versus a whole other way to be in the world with confidence, with certain strength.

To do this exercise and explore this, I'd like to suggest that in whatever way that is appropriate for you, you act in the world this day and find ways to behave that are expressions of confidence, expressions of whatever innate strength that you can tap into. It might be as simple as when you're sitting in chairs, you might not slump, but sit in some way that allows you to relax and rest, but really allows you to be in a posture of confidence and strength.

If you're cooking, if you're washing dishes, whatever you're doing, see if this day you can do it in some way that allows something to emerge inside and be expressed that is strength and confidence without conceit. And as you do this emergent thing of confidence and strength, it might highlight where conceit is operating.

If you start seeing it, don't despair. Seeing conceit clearly is one of the great benefits of mindfulness practice. If you see it clearly, then there's hope for not having it interfere with your life, not to bind you and keep you entangled. So thank you, and I hope this exploration is nice for you.