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Guided Meditation: Ease as the Reference

Okay, thanks to everyone for checking in. It's always nice to hear where you are and see you there, but now we'll go ahead and get started. So, settling in for meditation together.

You can see in the chat all the folks that are joining us. Just allow yourself to be in the shape that you're in, closing your eyes if that's comfortable.

And just softening the body into the meditation posture that you're using today. Perhaps feeling the contact of your seat with the chair or the cushion, or whatever you're lying on, or maybe you're standing. Just sensing the support beneath you.

Taking slow, deep breaths, and on the exhale, just allowing the body to settle in a bit more.

We're taking in just the sense of the whole body in whatever posture it's in. And gently softening, softening the expression on the face. Softening the eyes. You can even soften all the little muscles on the scalp.

Allowing the shoulders to be soft. Letting the shoulder blades slide down the back.

Checking in into the heart area, sensing if there's any tension, tightness, or ache. If there is, that's fine, but just inviting a softening.

Letting the rib cage relax, all the way down into the belly area. Maybe on the in-breath, imagining drawing the air down even below the lungs, all the way to fill the belly area, into the lower abdomen.

Letting the hip joints soften, down into the thighs, the knee joints, and all the way to the feet.

And then returning to the sense of uprightness. And with some initial softening and ease, seeing if that allows the spine to straighten up a bit more. Softness leads to a deeper kind of strength.

Feeling the body supported through the middle, and soft around that.

Then in the mind, bringing awareness and mindfulness to the fore. A sense of being here, present for our experience. And that provides stability and strength in the mind, and everything around that can be soft. Letting the thoughts be soft. Letting emotional energies just flow in the background. Letting mindfulness be the spine of the mind.

We can notice that there's a certain feeling of ease when there is awareness in the present moment, even if what's going on in the rest of experience is something uncomfortable—something in the body or something in the heart. The simple fact that there's mindfulness of it, that there's presence, actually has a slight amount of joy and ease associated with it.

And we can tune into that as a kind of reference point: that feeling of simple ease when the mind is mindful. So the invitation is to use ease as the reference point. Some part of the body that's at ease and the ease of presence in the mind as the reference point, something that we orient around.

You know, when the mind is entangled in a thought or an emotion or some reaction to the body, we can feel how that's complicated, not useful, and return to the reference point of just useful awareness of the flow of the present moment.

If the mind has become complicated and the body has tensed up because of thinking or entanglement, just gently re-prioritizing ease as the reference point. The ease of staying simple, just being aware of what's happening in the present moment. Softening the body. And if there are parts of the body that are painful or tight, then there's mental ease around how the body is. It's fine right now.

And if you are finding that there is some degree of ease compared to when you started the sit, just allowing that to continue infusing into the body and mind. Noticing what happens if you just open to the possibility of ease, or peace, or contentment. Whatever word seems to work.

Sometimes we can be surprised to find resistance to ease. Like it's not quite allowed, or not quite right, or might harm us. I don't know, we can just have ease with our resistance. It is interesting.

And as we move toward the end of this sitting, we might just open the mind to some gentle reflection. Now, would there be some way that carrying a reference point of ease and presence and peace in some way could help with letting go of the various things that come up during the day? What are we willing to give up our peace for?

We've finally gotten the puppy quiet a little bit. Are we going to let it lunge out and run around?^[1] I suppose that's what puppies do. Maybe that's what our mind will do. But maybe there's some unnecessary running around and lunging after things that our mind tends to do where we could just say, "No thank you, it's fine just being present."

We might find that this is supportive for other people too. Not participating in the escalations that often happen as each person gets more and more excited and entrenched in their view or opinion. So seeing if that might be supportive, this reference point of being at ease in some way.

Dharmette: The Art of Letting Go (2 of 5): Letting Go by Restraining

So this week we are talking about seven practices that lead to letting go. And recall that letting go is multidimensional. Sometimes we actively engage, sometimes we watch, sometimes we have some agency, but often we don't really control the actual act of letting go. We just do these practices, and then the letting go occurs when and how it does.

So a very important way of letting go, or factor in the process of letting go, is seeing. That was what we talked about yesterday, and we talked about it in the context of noticing whether wholesome states are increasing or unwholesome states are increasing, and then redirecting what we pay attention to or how we're paying attention if needed, in order to support the mind staying in a more wholesome condition. So this method from yesterday actually weaves through all of the other six methods, because we often have to check if we're moving toward or away from suffering. So in a sense, this seeing that we talked about first is actually the most fundamental way of letting go, and clear seeing provides the discernment needed for all of the other methods.

And we actually didn't completely finish talking about seeing, so I'll probably say a little bit more about it on Friday since it's so fundamental. But for now, we'll move on to some other ways.

And the next few that we'll talk about apply in particular domains of experience. I think yesterday I said, you know, if it's a glass jar we would open it by turning the cap, and if it's an aluminum can we need a can opener, and so forth. So today's method is called restraining, and it comes out of seeing, actually. If we see that unwholesome states are repeatedly occurring when we do certain actions, then we might wish to restrain from doing those actions. That would help, right? That would help our mind.

So the teachings say that there are cases where we will experience taints, vexation, and fever if we don't have restraint. And I think we're actually all familiar with what it feels like when we could have had more restraint, and sometimes that can be kind of painful, right? So what we're actually restraining is the compulsion that leads the mind down a path toward dukkha^[2]. I don't know why the mind sometimes wants to go toward dukkha. That seems to be one of the problems we inherit as human beings. And so there's this compulsion sometimes, and we want to restrain that part of the mind that is running in the wrong direction for our own care.

There are three domains maybe to pay attention to. One would be compulsive actions, like eating that third piece of pie. This is sort of an obvious one. As we sit there after the third piece, feeling bloated and with an amazing sugar high, we might be experiencing taints, vexation, and fever associated with not having quite enough restraint. So I think in that case the terminology, we can get a sort of a visceral feeling with that.

And then, of course, there's the area of speech. I knew someone once who was working on refraining from complaining. I was impressed that she took this on, and over a several-week period, she tried not to complain either verbally or mentally. What she discovered—and it wasn't so much whether she was going to succeed 100% or not, because that would be very difficult, but it was like a learning experience: you put down the idea, "Okay, not going to complain," and then see what happens with that, observe how the mind is. She discovered that complaining has a compulsive side to it. She would come to mindfulness in the middle of complaining. Sometimes it was afterwards, but as she got better at it, she would become mindful in the act of complaining, in the middle of it. She realized that she couldn't stop. In her words, "I chose not to stop because it felt too good in the moment, but afterward it did not feel good at all." So it's like this with complaining. It feels so good while we're doing it, "I'm going to sock it to that thing that I'm complaining about," and it feels really good for a moment, but if there's mindfulness, she realized it doesn't feel so good to put the mind in a state like that.

Could we restrain in some way before we put ourselves into that not-good feeling, like before we have the third piece of pie? There's an interesting practice I've heard about and used when practicing with restraint in the verbal realm, and it's an acronym: WAIT (W-A-I-T), and it stands for "Why Am I Talking?" I recommend this. When the mind is thinking about saying something, you just insert WAIT: "Why am I talking?" Maybe it's fine. Maybe what you're saying is useful or helpful, or even compassionate—maybe it's even fierce compassion. But maybe not. So maybe just putting in that question, we might realize whether or not what we're saying is something that we really want to say, would really be useful and helpful, and contribute to the situation.

Another area where we tend to have compulsion is thought. We have actions, speech, and then there's also thought. I think if you're a meditator, you know you have compulsive thought, the tendency to just keep chewing over a memory or a fear or an anxiety about something. If we repeatedly think about some topic and get upset, could we choose to restrain that train of thought? Or even at the subtle level of mind, there can be ways of restraining that. I mean, there's lots and lots of them out there, so there's another area where we can't talk through all of that, but there is the possibility of switching the mind to something that's what's called an antidote. If we are complaining a lot, could we switch to metta^[3]? Some kind of appreciation or gratitude for some other aspect of what's going on, instead of the part that we're complaining about.

Another thing we can do is deliberately reflect on the suffering that comes from such thoughts before ruminating on something. If we are stuck in the topic of the rumination, the mind is removed from the present moment; actually, it's in a concept. If we actually feel in the body how much suffering there is associated with those thoughts, sometimes that's enough that the mind is like, "Oh, I don't want to be doing that." So there's a number of ways that we can do this. I've mentioned some internal ones, but it's worth mentioning that the Buddha does talk about ways that there can be external restraints in our life. We don't have to just sort of knuckle under and take it on as "I've got to do everything internally."

There was the case of a new monk named Meghiya^[4]. The Buddha gave him some suggestions to help settle his mind and stop thinking compulsively, and some of them were external. The story is probably something that we can relate to. Meghiya was serving for a while as the Buddha's attendant, and so he was hanging out with the Buddha. There came a time when it was meditation time in the afternoon, and he said, "Can I go meditate by myself in that mango grove?" The Buddha kind of discouraged him and said, "Nah, that might not be such a good idea for you, Meghiya." But he was really determined, and he asked again, and again the Buddha said, "Maybe not." But he was so determined and he said, "No, please, I'm really devoted, I really want to go meditate in the mango grove." So the Buddha said, "All right, what can I do? It's about meditation, go for it."

So he went there and he sat down for the day's meditation, if you will, and the sutta says: "But while Meghiya was meditating in that mango grove, he was beset very badly by three kinds of unskillful thoughts, namely sensual, malicious, and cruel thoughts. And then he thought, 'It's incredible, it's amazing. I've gone forth from the lay life into homelessness out of faith, but I'm still harassed by these three kinds of bad, unskillful thoughts: sensual, malicious, and cruel thoughts.'" Here it is, we've gone forth—we're not monastics, but we've taken on a spiritual practice of mindfulness, and we're sitting down meditating so well, and lo and behold, all these terrible thoughts come. And what I love is that Meghiya doesn't say, "Oh, I'm so bad." He says, "It's incredible, it's amazing, how could this happen?" So it was sort of genuine wonder.

He went back to the Buddha and he said, "This is what happened to me." So then the Buddha took this as an opportunity to teach him, and he said, "When the heart's release is not ripe, there are things that can help it to ripen." He names a whole bunch of them, but I'll just name a few. He says good friends, companions, and associates. This is the first thing that can help your heart to ripen. So sangha^[5] friends, companions, talk, sitting with people, being in a group that's also practicing. Very supportive for a mind that is harassed—what does it say? Beset. So that sounds like taints, vexation, and fever. Beset by difficult thoughts.

And then second, he says one can be ethical, conducting oneself well and associating with suitable people, and so forth. So then there's a way, of course, that is sort of an individual effort, but ethics are relational. Getting people around us who will also be ethical and will help support us in wise speech, in wise actions, this can be very, very helpful.

And then also, the Buddha says to Meghiya, it's very helpful when a person gets to take part in talk about self-effacement that helps open the heart whenever they want, without trouble or difficulty. And then he says more specifically: talk about fewness of wishes, contentment, seclusion, arousing energy, ethics, concentration, wisdom, freedom, and knowledge and vision. So these are, you know, lofty Dharma topics, but the chance to talk about the Dharma is also an external support that we can use that restrains the mind from running off into difficult thoughts and restrains us from difficult verbal behavior and actions. So it can be useful to have some good support around us if our mind is in need of restraint in some ways.

And then we can see that also how we do the restraining matters. For example, if there's a text where someone is supposed to evaluate whether or not a teacher is good for them, and one thing they're supposed to check is whether it looks like the teacher is restrained without fear—not restrained by fear. Is a person who's leading a group restraining by fear of themselves, or are they making others comply out of fear? Or is it a natural kind of internal restraint? So restraint by fear is not what we're looking for. We don't restrain ourselves because we're terrified of the consequences. We restrain ourselves because there's ease. We have a basis of ease; we know that it's more useful that way.

In the Dhammapada^[6], there's a chapter that opens with a rather remarkable stanza. It says, "If one knew oneself to be precious, one would guard oneself with care. A sage will watch over herself in any part of the night." So we restrain ourselves because we know how valuable we are. We watch over ourselves in a protective way because we matter. Our inner life matters, our heart matters.

I've noticed that here in the West, it can take some time for people to begin valuing themselves. We may have internalized a lot of criticism, so we don't really like ourselves, or we might have learned that it's better to take care of everyone else and not ourselves. But at some point, we have to make our own well-being a real part of the path. And that includes restraining the parts of our behavior, speech, and thought that are unwholesome, because that harms us.

So it comes down to our heart, our citta^[7]—our heart-mind. So we're a little over, so I'll just end with the Buddha saying, "I do not see even one other thing that when tamed, guarded, protected, and restrained leads to such great good as the citta, the heart. The citta when tamed, guarded, protected, and restrained leads to great good."

This is a healthy, helpful movement. The citta is our emotional center, and it starts out entangled with all kinds of bad habits; it's been kind of beat up. And so then through Dharma practice, we disentangle it, unfold it, and it becomes free. But at the beginning, we have to protect it like a little seedling, and restraining is part of that protecting process. When we restrain compulsion, it becomes less compulsive; its energy gets weaker. And eventually, those habits really don't sway the heart anymore, and so we become happier and lighter. So restraint can lead to letting go in freedom.

All right. So, thank you.