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Guided Meditation: Fading Away

Hello, and good morning, good day.

To say a few introductory words for the meditation: There's a fascinating use of attention and awareness in meditation, especially by the time when we can give ourselves over to the exercise, the experiment, the discovery process of what happens when we're really aware. And that is to be aware of some psychological thing within: thinking, some emotion, and hold it gently, carefully, fully in the gaze of awareness.

If you do that, if it's really only aware of it, awareness in itself does not interfere, doesn't judge, or doesn't react to what we're aware of. And so, if we're fully invested and caught up in something, being aware is a process of beginning to step away from it, to know it, to see it without being caught in it, without fueling it, without adding to it or participating in it, but just knowing it. As we know it more and more that way, we start seeing. Eventually, we might see how we're participating, how we're fueling it, how we're repeating the same thought patterns, ideas, and desires in order to keep certain things going.

And so, we keep opening or developing that non-reactive, non-judgmental awareness just to see it. We see what we contribute, or we stop feeding it, renewing it all the time, and then we see it begin to fade away. It becomes less intense, it weakens. More often than not, it's hard to see sometimes if our participation in it, our reactivity to it, is subconscious. It's deeply embodied and habitual. So we have to be careful with making too many conclusions around this, but this idea of just gazing upon something long enough to watch it begin to fade, to weaken, is a fascinating process.

A lot of things will fade quicker than we realize, surprisingly fast. There are some studies about how quickly an emotion will last by itself, and it's a minute or 90 seconds. That's how long emotions last unless there's something in our psychophysical system that's renewing it, feeding it, building it up.

So, to be with the breathing—if the breathing is a neutral place where we're not controlling or reacting to it—is another way in which we are shifting the direction of the mental fuel, the mental renewal process, so that we're renewing and fueling attention to breathing, not to our thinking, not to our reactivity, not to certain reactive emotions.

So, taking a meditation posture, assuming a posture, entering into a posture, and slowing down. Slowing down, and maybe twisting and swaying your body in a slow way to begin the process of mindfulness of the body. Aware from the body's point of view how we can find a balanced, aligned posture. Maybe twisting a little bit from side to side, the upper torso around the shoulders, is a way of helping the shoulders come alive and maybe settle a little bit.

Lowering the gaze. Gently closing your eyes. Taking a moment to simply know how you are in the most obvious way. Know it in the most non-reactive way that you know how. Just know how you are in some simple, general way, where what's important is not how you are, but the way you know it.

And then, on the exhale, relaxing your body. A kind of relaxation that is not forced or expecting much, almost allowing the body space and room to release itself. Shoulders. The belly.

And then connecting more fully to your breathing. Taking three breaths. Just three breaths. A three-breath journey of settling in, being here, just with your breathing three times.

And then once you've done three ordinary, simple breaths that you attend to carefully—you're quite aware of the count, the breath, really connected to it—then do it again and again. Give yourself over to three breaths at a time. A relatively small goal to stay present for three breaths, and then to renew that practice.

Remembering to do the three breaths. Just fully present for three breaths: the inhales, the exhales, the transition between inhaling and exhaling, exhaling and inhaling.

Coming back to doing three full breaths, remembering to stay with three breaths again and again.

If you're able to stay with the repetition of three breaths at a time, great. And if you can't, what is it that's pulling you away? Not the content of your thoughts, but is it thinking? Is it feeling, emotions? Recognize clearly what it is that grabs your attention so you forget to be with your breathing.

And now, let go of focusing on breathing. Bring your attention to the process of thinking, or to some emotion that is difficult. Gaze upon it carefully, non-reactively. Just watch and see. Step back, let it be what it is, but live in the knowing of it, not in it. You might even use the note: "thinking," "feeling."

Allow whatever is there to be there, but don't participate in it. Just step back and gaze upon it non-reactively.

And if there is desire or aversion, wanting or not wanting, gaze upon that with non-reactive awareness, recognizing it as wanting, not wanting, and see what happens under that gaze.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, there is a way to gaze upon the world non-reactively that is, at the same time, kindly. Kindness, friendliness, love is not necessarily a reactive way of being, but rather just flows from the open heart. And to gaze upon the world with kind eyes, without wanting anything or not wanting, just kind eyes. A kind of kindness that carries with it the wish, the delight, and the appreciation of others, wishing them well.

May from these eyes of mine, may there flow well-wishing, wishing for the welfare and happiness of others. May there flow from me the wishes carried in these words: May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free. And may we contribute to that possibility. Thank you.

Dharmette: Insight Pentad (3 of 5) Fading of Reactivity

So, this is the third talk on the Insight Pentad, which is the five qualities of practice, five aspects of how we change and grow that have a flow to it. There's a kind of evolution, a natural growth from one to the other. Of course, it doesn't always work in this linear way, but another way of understanding this is that there are five qualities that work together; they support each other, guide each other, and feed into each other. Sometimes maybe it goes in reverse order, but the classic way is this order in which I'm presenting them to you.

It begins with having insight, described as seeing things as they are. And then from that comes disenchantment, breaking the spell of our desires and our projections onto things that are not so helpful. And then today, we'll talk about something called fading away, sometimes translated as dispassion (I'll talk about the two choices). And then there's liberation, and then we'll talk on Friday about the knowledge of liberation. But today the topic is virāga^[1], fading away.

As we see things as they are—well, let me back up a little bit further. This Insight Pentad builds on the Gladness Pentad. And one of the great treasures, maybe the phenomenal forms of wealth that we can have, is inner well-being. Some sense of inner contentment, happiness, gladness, joy—some kind of feeling of well-being within. It's not easy to come to, necessarily, but I think it's fair to say that most people live a life without availing themselves of what is available. If we slow down or take the time to really allow the inner life to settle and open, chances are there's more well-being there than most people allow for. But it's a treasure we want to stay close to, build, and know how to support and protect. Because what this does, when we sit down to meditate with this inner sense of well-being, is we have a reference point for what takes us away from that and what keeps us close to it.

And so, when we are settled enough to begin seeing things as they are, we can see that the ways we are caught in them, enchanted in them, preoccupied with them takes us away from that well-being, diminishes it. And so, of course, it doesn't feel good to do it. Seeing that distinction—that I feel more contracted, I feel tighter, I feel more caught up in my despair, depression, upset, resentments, whatever—that doesn't really feel good. It's a diminishment of some modicum of well-being that just being here can feel like.

Then it begins to be easier to question the value of the projections, the interpretations, the ideas, the desires that keep us hooked, fixated, and caught up in something. And so there starts to be a process of disenchantment. These things are changing constantly, moving constantly, impermanent, arising and passing. These things are suffering; causing more pain to be caught up in things. And there's something about these things that I'm caught in that are not useful to define myself by, to measure myself by. And so, a process of disenchantment.

As I talked about yesterday, as we get disenchanted with the projections we have, the strength of the projection, the strength of the desires, the wanting and not wanting that's behind those projections, that enchantment begins to diminish, and it begins to fade away.

This fading away is supported by non-reactive awareness. As we become non-reactively aware of what's happening here and now, for many people, it's a very different way of being than business as usual. Business as usual, as we go about our life, is to have a reaction and to be living in the reaction, and living in response to the reaction. Participating in it a little bit or a lot in a way that feeds it and keeps it going, keeps the fire going. We can keep putting logs into the fire, and it keeps burning. And so, our anger will not persist as long as it does unless we are putting more fuel in it, maybe repeating the story to ourselves over and over again.

The non-reactive awareness is doing something very different. It is ceasing putting logs on the fire; it's leaving things alone. We can watch the fire, whatever it might be. But a watched fire, which we don't put logs back onto—you know, a little fireplace fire or a campfire—will fade away by itself, it would just die out. If you have enough time one evening, watching a campfire not being fed, you can watch the whole process until it fades away, the flames disappear, and the hot coals cool down.

We can do the same thing within. As we see things as they are, as we become disenchanted with them—disenchanted with their promise, how they're going to bring us happiness (which is a future happiness that's unreliable compared to the inner happiness we develop through meditation)—then the interest in those fades away. The desires and the aversions that go into those projections begin to fade away. And that fading away is stronger in the non-reactive awareness that doesn't put fuel in the fire. It's fascinating to watch that process of fading away.

Some things will fade away quite quickly under the gaze of non-reactive awareness. I'm thinking, you know, people sometimes struggle with thoughts. They let go of the thoughts, come back to the breath, let go of their thoughts, go back. They keep getting caught up until they are told, "Just let yourself think, but bring a careful gaze. Look carefully on the fact that you're thinking. Really see it." And some people are so surprised by this new exercise because their thinking stops. Something under the gaze of attention—thinking doesn't have the fuel that it needs, which is often done kind of out of sight. But to have the main fuel be seeing, which is no fuel at all for some of these fires, things fade away.

Sometimes this fading away is very slow—maybe days, weeks, months, maybe years for some things that are quite powerful habits within. And some things can fade remarkably fast. The speed by which things fade has a lot to do with how much concentration we have together with the non-reactive awareness. It's almost as if the more concentrated we are, to some degree, the more open space we have for things to kind of unwind and dissipate under that gaze of non-reactive awareness.

And so part of this process of insight practice is to recognize and allow for the disenchantment—that we're no longer enchanted with the things we used to want and think were all about what we had to fix or get—and to allow for this fading away. This fading away is very important, whether it's fading away of the tensions in our bodies—some of the tensions we can relax, but some take a long time. It's remarkable what deep bodywork can happen by regular meditation and sitting in a good posture, and things begin to relax, and relax in a deeper and deeper way.

And then, reactive emotions fade away. Reactive thinking fades away. And I use the word reactive because some emotional states, moods that we have, are not reactive, and those don't necessarily fade away the same way. They sometimes actually get bigger and stronger because there's more room for them to flow into. They don't come from reactivity; they're not states that are being fed by the fuel, by the logs on the fire. It's more like, rather than the light of the fire lighting up the darkness, there are some emotional states like loving-kindness that are more like the dawn, where the sun rises and it fills everything. And it will be there for the day; it's not going to fade away quickly.

So, this disenchantment: what are you disenchanted with? What projections, what investment of belief and value have you put in things, consciously or unconsciously (a lot of this happens subconsciously), that we think somehow is so important? What do you invest yourself in that doesn't really serve you, that takes you away from this place of well-being? Trust the inner well-being, and then allow for the fading away.

And so the homework, if you'd like for this next day, is to spend some time, some high-quality minutes during the day. Maybe having tea, maybe looking out the window, maybe going for a very nice stroll, maybe meditating a second time or a third time today. And see if you can give room and space a little bit—some minutes of a Sabbath, some minutes of sacred pauses—and see, if you do that, what fades away. If you give time that allows for fading away, what fades away from you? If you're relaxed and taking a break from the usual caught-upness and engagement, take breaks through the day and observe what's happening in you. See if you can see what fades away, and how is that good? What's the goodness, what's the value, what's the benefit you get from this fading away?

So, thank you for going along here in this Insight journey, and we'll continue tomorrow. Thank you.