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Gladdening of the Heart

Welcome. My name is Maria Straatmann. It sounds so strange to say that; I haven't given my name in so long.

I'm going to read a quote for you, and unfortunately, I have forgotten where I got it, so you'll just have to trust me that it's a great source:

There is a dimension of life, of awareness, that you can discover, tune into, rest in, that is silent, deep, embracing of all and in perfect balance. With it, a kind of wisdom that says, yes, these are the inevitable changes on the surface, and here's the stillness of awareness underneath it all.

I read this and I thought about it a bit, and I thought, this is really reassuring. What a wonderful idea that there's a stillness underneath it all, and it's a kind of wisdom, and I can just be with this in this space, this embracing space.

And I thought about the idea that this was gladdening to the heart. So, I have been thinking about gladdening the heart for some days, a week or so, and tonight we're going to speak about gladdening the heart. Having a little heart be light—not happiness, but a gladdening of the heart, a quickening of the heart, an uplift of the heart.

We're going to begin. I'm going to invite you to eat some blackberries with me. Now, I would love to be able to pass out blackberries, but I don't have any with me, and anybody listening who's not in this room wouldn't have access anyway; that just would not be fair. So you're going to have to use your imagination to conjure up these blackberries that we're going to eat. Use your visual memory, your sense of smell, your taste. Feel the juiciness. And we're going to go blackberry eating with Galway Kinnell^[1].

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched or firmed, many-lettered, one-syllable lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry eating in late September.

Did you taste any blackberries? Did you see any blackberries? Just the intensity of being with blackberries. The feel of being in those blackberries and really experiencing those blackberries—they don't have any meaning. They don't have any fundamental relationship to what it means in the world. They don't have anything to do with suffering. They have a little bit to do with pleasure here, but it's just the tasting and the seeing and the being with those blackberries that I want to call to mind here. It's the joy, the delight of just being with it, being in the process of eating those blackberries. Unlike the joy of getting my iPad to stay awake. [Laughter]

So when I speak of gladdening, I'm talking about introducing to our practice, or recalling in our practice, the delight that comes from practice. It's not uncommon to hear someone say, "I am so grateful for my practice. I never could have gotten through this without my practice. The practice has been so important to me... and it's beginning to feel like a terrible burden to have this practice."

And so I want to remind us that the practice is to be held lightly, that the practice is really a gift and not a burden. Too often, our practice has something to do with how we do it, when we do it, how often we do it, Am I doing it right?, How far along am I in my practice?, and What's going to happen next? But the gladdening of the heart is really about the delight that just happens. It's not like we do something to make a gladdened heart. It's a gift to just kind of come; it's like grace that sprinkles on you when you least expect it.

We're not managing suffering when we talk about gladdening the heart. We're not trying to right a sense of ill will. We can be in the presence of ill will and still gladden the heart. I heard something Gil [Fronsdal] said a couple of weeks ago where he said, "Okay, so if you can't bring yourself to push away ill will, at least be grateful that you want to. At least be grateful that you want to." That's a gladdening of the heart. That's in not taking everything that's happening to you and condensing it down into some black hole of seriousness and an inevitable pulling, but really being with the process of just living, being alive.

I want to recall the joy that arises in practice, for this to be enough in practice. To not think of our practice as something that is a valise, a suitcase that we carry around full of all our tricks, but that the suitcase contains us so that we can experience the smoothness or the roughness of what we are experiencing, the intensity of it or the boredom of it. Whatever the experience is, we want to be totally present for it, because in being totally present for it, it is just itself. It isn't something that we have to make into a story of our lives.

Another piece of this that I've been thinking about is that we have the story of our life, and okay, we accept the fact that we're changing all the time, but there's this little thread that we carry around with us. That's Maria. Here comes Maria, and Maria was here, and now she's there, and she's going to go over there. Suppose you could meet every moment and you don't have to be Maria, or Audrey, or anybody else. You don't have to be someone. You don't have to be the person you think you are. You don't have to be the person someone else thinks you are. You don't have to meet any expectations. You can just take the next step in this experience. Just the next step. You don't have to be anything in particular. How does that feel? Not to have to be who you think you are, who you have been.

Those of you in this room probably remember the rains of New Year's Eve when there was a lot of flooding and the storm was significant. Early in the morning, I was out on my back deck. I live on the third floor of this condo building, and it was dark so I couldn't actually see anything, but I could hear the storm. What I heard was water. The water was dripping through the trees. The water was hitting the roof. The water was running in the gutter. The water was rushing down below, which is, I have to tell you, not common; it's usually dry down below. And here it was rushing through the area around our building, and all I could do was hear. I was just listening to water. And all of a sudden, I had this feeling of total delight. Just, wow, water.

I thought how magnificent it was because all I was doing was just hearing. I wasn't thinking about what the water was doing, or where it was going, or why it was here, or how much is there. I was just listening. And in being totally in the moment, there was delight. It's not like I was going after delight; I was just listening. That to me is what it means to gladden the heart. To be available for the heart to be gladdened. To be totally, totally present for whatever is happening, without an opinion about what's happening. Just here.

Today I read a story about two people who are friends. There was an article in the New York Times, and it was about two unlikely-to-be-friends people. One of them was a well-known Christian conservative who speaks out against gay marriage and abortion. The other is a former civil rights lawyer who spent most of her career fighting to desegregate schools and protect transgender kids from bullying. These are two pretty different people. They were both assigned to the same committee, called the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. One was assigned to the committee by a Republican, and one was assigned to the committee by a Democrat. I'm going to let you guess which one was which. The two of them went in. He is a white, older, conservative Christian from Louisiana. She is a Hindu from South Chicago. Really different people, but it turns out they had much more in common than they had separate from one another.

The two of them began checking with one another when they were looking at religious freedom outside the United States. We won't go into why they were looking outside the United States, but that's what the commission was formed to do. They would support people who were being penalized by their government or by other people because of their religion. The two of them were often fighting on the same side, and the consequence of that was that they actually became friends. They kept in touch after their commission assignments expired, to their great surprise. The man said, "You know what I realized? I realized we were friends when I realized she was in my prayers. It made me really careful of how I referred to anything because I didn't want to offend her, and so I became much more careful in my speech."

As I was listening to that, I teared up. I realized that that tear was not about sadness, and it wasn't about happiness. It was a tear that arose from the hope that polarization doesn't have to be the sad thing that it is. That people can talk to one another, that people don't have to be on opposite sides of things. Just the presence of that I found so hopeful it brought tears to my eyes. That is a gladdening of the heart. That appearance of hope, that reassurance of hope, that possibility lightens the heart, and you say, ah, it's possible. And you can see it's possible. This is what I mean by gladdening the heart.

But it's possible not to notice it. We could just go through life not noticing it. That would be pretty easy, actually. If I am determined to be upset about something, I'm not going to not be upset about it. If I'm overwhelmed with a sense of injustice or righteousness, I am not going to be able to see a way out of it; I'm just going to be bemoaning it.

In the same way, last week I was very discouraged. I'd been working on a project for about a year and a half, and it looked like it was just over. It just was not going to happen. In that moment I thought, "You know, I'm going to be okay with this. I'm a good Buddhist. If it was meant to be, if it was going to happen, it was going to happen. If it hasn't happened, I can just be fine." And meanwhile, my heart's just going, oh, oh, how can this be true? This particular project is not something that personally benefited me, but something I really believed in, and it looked like it just wasn't going to happen.

Somebody encouraged me to go look at this other place, to go check these people out. I thought, I've checked so many people out. But I had a meeting with them, and they were terrific. They had a great plan, it was much less expensive than the other proposal that had been made to me, and I was so excited about it. As I was reporting it, I found myself saying, "I see the approach of a Pollyanna complex. I so much want this to be true that I'm just going to believe anything." And in that moment, I realized it wasn't that; it was a fear that I couldn't be a Pollyanna, that it was a fear that I couldn't be optimistic. I'd been so discouraged before.

I decided to suspend the opinion about whether I was being overly optimistic and just said, "Well, let's just see what happens. Let's just see what happens." Of course, I still don't know what's going to happen, because it's a process. But in the moment that I let go of either denying optimism or totally embracing optimism, and left myself in the place of just I wonder what's going to happen, everything was lighter. I didn't have to have an opinion about whether I was being optimistic or not; it just didn't matter. It was, "let's see what happens." And that "let's see what happens" part is the place of a gladdened heart. It leaves hope and possibility and a sense of freedom.

Think of how much courage it takes to be really present. It implies a great deal of trust. You have to trust that the people you're talking to, the position you're in, is somehow not going to hurt you. We get in the habit of vigilance. I have to be careful about this. I have to be careful about that. I have to watch my sense of that. I have to be careful of free speech. I have to be careful of wise speech. I have to be careful. We find ourselves being vigilant about everything. The energy of that vigilance sets up a barrier to experiencing something just as the raw experience, because now we're measuring it against all of our little safety tags. How does it measure against that? How does it measure against that? Not only does it take a lot of energy, but it distorts what we see and how we experience just being alive. I am not advocating that one gives up all diligence or vigilance, only that we see when vigilance is operating, that we notice it. That we notice how careful we're being.

One of the really great things about retreat is that you can just sit in a fairly safe place. You don't actually have to talk to anybody. You don't have to explain yourself to anybody—you kind of have to explain yourself to yourself, but it's a relatively safe place. You can allow whatever feelings you have to come out, to allow whatever things you have been suppressing in your life to just kind of happen in a safe place. Well, suppose we could do that more often. Suppose we could do that without having to be on retreat. Suppose we could just show up for this moment and not worry about anything. For just this moment. Just this one. Not all of them, just this one. It's safe in this room right now. Right now it's safe. And as soon as I said that, I felt myself take a deep breath. Wow.

In the last days of the Buddha, in the Maha Parinibbana Sutta^[2], there was a procession of people who were coming to see the Buddha at the end. And each time they came—you know how suttas are, there'll be a phrase that keeps getting repeated: this happened, and then the next people come and the same thing happened—and the phrase that kept happening was this one: "And the Blessed One spent much of the night instructing them in the Dharma, rousing, edifying, and gladdening them." Rousing, edifying, and gladdening them.

This is what the Buddha chose to do in his last hours and days. Rousing, edifying, and gladdening. The rousing is about energy. The edifying is teaching the truth of the Dhamma^[3]. And the gladdening is the appreciation for the fact that if we have a heavy heart, if we are loaded down and burdened, we can't take anything on. The gladdening, the loosening of the strictures around how we experience something, is key to being able to move forward in practice.

Gladdening is one of the first steps in the sequence that leads to samadhi^[4]. There are five things: gladness, joy, tranquility, happiness, and samadhi. It isn't like you do something to get to those steps; what you do is step into the flow where each one leads to the other. A gladdened heart leads to joy. How wonderful it moves when you're in the flow, when you're just allowing something to happen, when you're just allowing the experience to be. When you're in meditation, these can inevitably lead to samadhi and deep concentration in a place where you can see things clearly. I maintain that we're more likely to be able to see things clearly just as we're walking around in the world off the cushion, if we can do it with an unguarded heart, with a gladdened heart. So I seek that not as the thing, but as an opportunity. The opportunity for just thisness.

The other thing about gladness that I wanted to talk about is that gladness arises out of practice and supports it. Let me put it another way. If I recognize delight in sitting and meditating, I'm much more likely to meditate. And if I'm meditating more, I'm much more likely to give up the strictures around my limits on how I will experience something. I'm much more likely to have a light heart. I'm much more likely to be involved in the mindfulness of this moment. I will grow more familiar with what mindfulness means. I will become a person who knows what's happening in this moment, not ahead of time or behind, but experiences this moment and says, "Oh, I know I'm sitting here. I know I'm speaking." We treat the experience as actually happening and not just part of the story. So that mindfulness just becomes habit. That leads to a gladdening of the heart, and the gladdening of the heart in turn leads to joy, which leads to increased attention to our practice. It is both an evolution of practice and something that supports the practice. It becomes something that's not a task, but something that we can be aware of.

It kind of works like this. Tomorrow, I'm leaving on a road trip at 7:30 in the morning. Tonight, I was coming here to talk. I've got this project where I've got vendors yelling at me, "Why are you not answering my bid?" And the reason I'm going on the road trip is that my mother's in hospice and I want to go see her while I can. You can imagine there's all kinds of family dynamics around this; I have lots of siblings where I'm going, so that's been on my mind. Why are you doing this? Why aren't you doing that? I'm doing laundry, and I'm packing, and my husband decides he wants to rebalance our investments again today. [Laughter] So late this afternoon, I found myself in the midst of great chaos. Mental chaos. A lot of mental chaos.

I had my sister on the phone who wanted to tell a story which wasn't relevant to the time, and a text from the person who's going to take care of my plants: Are you ready to tell me about that? I looked at my hands, and I realized they were moving, moving, moving. And I said, "Well, I could just let the hands move. I don't have to move." As I dissociated myself from the train of I have to get all these things done, I was able to say, "Well, what will I choose to get done in this moment? I'll end the conversation with my sister. Talk to you tomorrow." Just acknowledging that some things are going to fall down. The realization was that the chaos was really just trying to do everything at once, which wasn't going to happen.

So I could become filled with anxiety and stress and lose my sense of presence by getting lost in the story of all the things I had to do, or I could just say, "Oh, things are falling on the floor. Look." You can actually do that. That's what I did. I said, "Well, some things are going to fall on the floor." Just the act of saying that, even if I didn't quite believe it—I didn't quite let go of everything—I breathed easier. More easily.

See, it can't be about all the things I want, even my good intentions. If I'm too wed to, well, as a good Buddhist, I'm going to be totally equanimous in this moment, I'm going to deny that things are falling on the floor. Because then I have to be there for the fact that things are falling on the floor, things are not getting done, people are unhappy (Why didn't you call me?). In that moment of realizing things don't have to be better to be at ease with them—the "at ease" part is not everything's smooth and I don't have to worry about it, but rather, I'm okay with everything's not smooth. Everything's not smooth. To not make it a piece of responsibility or judgment. It doesn't have anything to do with me; it's just how things are right now.

You know, I could tell myself stories about how I should have organized my day better, but what's the point of that? The day is already over, so that's not useful. I am here, and this is what's happening. I am here, and this is what's happening. Knowing this is what's happening is a lot easier than writing down the list of things that could be true.

To be in the presence of stress and say, "How do I know I'm stressed? Well, there's this tight feeling of pulling." Okay, so just let it have all the room in the world and watch it spread itself out. Notice, does it have colors? My stress tends to be gray, but sometimes it's red. I have a sense of red and heat. Sometimes it's just boring old pulling. To be right there with that feeling frees you from having to think about all the reasons that you might be stressed. You're just feeling stress. So just feel it. Just be there with it. Just notice it. Give it a name: Hi, Fred. [Laughter] There doesn't have to be a story attached to everything that we experience. It can just be itself, just as we can just be the person that has shown up for this moment. We don't have to be something. Just this, and the heart gets lighter. We don't do it to make the heart lighter; we just lighten the load. Stop carrying around the burden.

If we were to cultivate gladness of heart, what would we do? What would you do? How would you do it? How would you be? The most important thing is to just be present. Just be here, really here, and not in this story, the story of your life. And to be here with a sense of ease. If you're here, you're not there. You don't have to compare yourself to anything. You're just experiencing this. And "just this" is actually easy. It's, oh, just this.

One of the practices that I took on a few years ago that I still practice diligently is equanimity practice. It's the moment when I say: "My suffering is dependent on my intentions and actions, not what other people want. Despite what I may want, things are as they are. May I see things just as they are." The act of saying that over and over again to myself frees me from the requirement to explain all of my experiences. I see things just as they are. That's how I want them to be, instead of only looking this way at them.

Yes, even the practice of mettā^[5] can be distorted. If we do mettā purposely to get rid of ill will and be a better person and get along with our neighbors more—these are all very good reasons for doing mettā. However, now we've set out an agenda where these are my intentions, and if my intentions don't come through, then there's something wrong here. The practice is wrong, or I'm doing it wrong, or I'm wrong. Whereas, if you do mettā with the idea of really wishing yourself well, really wishing someone else well—just that, no further than that, just wishing all beings well—there is a softening of the heart, an opening of the heart, and ill will does not coexist with that. We don't do it to get rid of ill will. We do it so that it's the condition we're introducing as our contribution in this moment: just an open, gladdened heart.

When we cultivate the Eightfold Path, it turns out that it's really hard to have a gladdened heart if you're cheating. Cheating at anything. If you're taking the shortcut that is harming someone else. If we're not living up to the ethics of the precepts. If we're taking what's not freely given—saying, well, this little bit won't hurt, this isn't hurting anybody—it turns out that that squeezing of our intention, squeezing of the way we are in the world, shuts down the heart and burdens it so that we can't have a gladdened heart. And when we say, "Oh, I guess I won't do that anymore," the very act of saying "I don't want to do that anymore" opens up a space.

The other day I had this strong experience of shame. It was triggered by something I watched on television. It wasn't something I had done, but I recognized the feeling of shame. You know, that kind of cringing feeling, and you want to go hide, or you come up with something more like bravado where you think about injustices or why do I feel this way? All of those thoughts came and went in my mind. I thought, Okay, so shame has been triggered because the people in this program were so shameful, but the shame is mine. There's something that I'm not able to recall that has been triggered by what I saw. So I don't have to own the shame, or figure it out, or decide what it means. I can just feel that shame and let it just be. And watch as it fades away. It was quite odd not to ask, what's this about? But just let it be.

And then turn your awareness in a different direction. I didn't have to grab the shame and roll around on the floor in it. I get to say, "Huh, that feels really icky. And I know I didn't do anything, so it isn't that I have something I have to stop doing." So I look at something else and say, "There is some delight in this world, and there is some virtue, and some things that I do in this world, and I'm going to think about them. I'm going to think about the other people that I know. I'm going to think about kindness." And the heart is gladdened. I'm not shoving anything under the rug with that movement; I'm just allowing something else into view. The way one would if you were trying to meditate and you just can't quite settle, so you decide to think of someone who does settle. You just sit and picture that someone, and you're inspired by that, and you settle, inspired by the possibility of that. Taking refuge in the possibility.

I'm hoping I'm going to put my hand right on this. This is a poem by David Budbill^[6], "Winter: Tonight: Sunset."

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road, my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first through the woods, then out into the open fields past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop and look at the sky.

Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere. I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening, a prayer for being here, today, now, alive in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

I offer gratitude to you for being here on this evening, in this room, under this sky. For your practice, for your willingness to show up and be present. And I wish you gladdened hearts, and the joy that follows. Thank you.

So time is up, but if anybody has any comment or question I'd be happy to entertain it. ... Go enjoy. Thank you.