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Guided Meditation: Light Awareness

Okay, so I'm wondering if we have sound now. Okay, we have sound. Wonderful.

Welcome. I'm at the Insight Retreat Center^[1] today, IMC's retreat center in Santa Cruz County, California. I'm teaching here for the week, and this is the place from which I'll do the broadcasting. I'm happy to be here. Maybe at the end of the week, we can zoom out or zoom around, and you can see the meditation hall a little bit more, for those of you who'd like.

I also want to mention that we have three people attending here. All these years that I've been doing YouTube from IMC, I've almost always been alone. A couple of times, a technician or one of our Sangha^[2] members who helps a lot came in. But here we have two of the resident volunteers at IRC, and one of the big volunteers who comes here to help. They're sitting here in the meditation hall with me, and it's nice to have company here.

Welcome to the beginning of the week. Last week we did a series of teachings on different ways of being aware. For today, I would like to suggest another variation on awareness that can apply to all the other different ways you are aware. That is the choice between letting the awareness be very light, and having awareness be—I don't know if "heavy" is the right word, but a little bit more intense, serious, or weighty.

Sometimes the idea of lightness—where awareness has a very light touch for what it's being aware of—can be very helpful, because anything more than a light touch can sometimes be too much effort being made. The art of effort is to have a light touch, a lightness to the effort, but to be committed to it so it's continuous and really stays there. So, a light touch. A light touch with how awareness touches the breathing, the sensations of breathing. A light touch in how we know it. And if there is mental noting, a light touch with the noting.

That will be the addition to the meditation this morning.

So, take a comfortable, alert posture^[3] and gently close your eyes.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, exhaling and relaxing on the exhale. Part of taking a few deep breaths at the beginning is that when you stop doing it, you can appreciate the lightness or the more simple way of breathing when it's not intentionally taking deep breaths. You might try that now. Return to an ordinary breath and appreciate the ordinariness of it, or the lack of that extra effort and force to breathe deeply.

Just with a light touch, be aware of your breathing. A light touch that doesn't interfere with your breathing. It doesn't have any agenda with it. Just there, feeling it coming and going.

As you exhale, without making a lot of effort—just a very light effort, almost as if the lightness of the effort is part of the medicine—lightly relax parts of your body. Be content with just a little bit of softening at a time. Softening in the face. Softening in the shoulders. Softening in the belly.

Then, settling into your breathing. If it's easy enough to feel this, let there be a light connection with your body and the movements of breathing. Feeling that part of the movement that feels free. The movement that feels like it moves easily, lightly, even if it brushes against tightness or pressure.

With this emphasis on lightness, as you exhale, lighten up in the mind. Maybe a sense of a soft touch in the mind.

If there is anything that's heavy or challenging for you as you're sitting here—thoughts, feelings, sensations—see if the mindfulness of it can be light. Almost like mindfulness is a soft feather that gently brushes across whatever difficulty there is. Where awareness is a soft cotton ball that gently touches what's heavy or difficult, and then gently pulls away. Lightly touches, briefly, with no force, no insistence. Just a gentle hello.

Whatever mental effort you're making to be aware and mindful here in the present moment, can that effort have a lightness to it? Easing up, so there is an ease in how you're encountering whatever is happening here, moment by moment.

With a light touch of awareness, you can sometimes feel as if whatever the experience is of the moment, it is touching you lightly.

And if there is any suffering, distress, fear, or difficulty, when we can feel it lightly—the light touch, the feather touch—then there is more room for compassion, for care, for kindness. To touch our challenges with a light touch of awareness, so there is room for a tenderness.

As we come to the end of the sitting, bring to mind some person or animal for whom it's easy for you to have a warm regard. Love, friendliness, kindness, or maybe an admiration of a kind. Someone for whom it is easy to have goodwill. Think of this person or this animal with a light touch. So that the awareness of it is not mixed up with desires and fears. It's just very simple. The lightest touch of goodwill or love that needs nothing in return, that's asking for nothing. Love with a light touch.

And then, with that light touch of love, imagine that it has a door that you can open. A wide door that opens up, and the same light touch of love, care, or kindness can be extended to all the people in your life that you know. They don't have to know you're doing it. A light touch of kind regard in all directions.

With a light touch, a lightness of heart, opening your goodwill up in all directions to all beings everywhere.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Seven Factors of Compassion (1 of 5)

Hello and welcome to our Monday gathering. Today I'm at the Insight Retreat Center. It's lovely to be in this meditation hall.

The topic for this week is compassion. I want to talk about it in a particular way, building on two weeks ago when the theme was compassion as well, and building on last week when the topic was different ways of being aware.

The importance of different ways of being aware for compassion is that if we only have one way to be aware, that mode of awareness might not be the best and healthiest way for us to be present for suffering in ourselves and suffering in others. For example, if someone mostly is aware through feelings, and that's the only way they know how to know anything, some of the suffering in the world might just feel like too much. Our own suffering might feel like too much.

It's important to feel, but it's also important to find an awareness where we can be present for something and not be weighed down by what the experience is. If someone who feels a lot might be able to shift a little bit into an observing mode—maybe observing from a little bit of distance—or they might move more into a mode of clear mental recognition of what's happening. The feelings are still there, but coming into the mode of recognition, knowing, "Oh, this is pain. This is someone's sadness," it might be easier to be present for it.

We might be able to find a place of a light touch, being present in a way that has a certain degree of ease or lightness in the awareness itself. That lightness, ease, or a little bit of calmness around how we're aware makes room for compassion to arise, rather than distress, fear, or alarm.

The mode in which we're aware can affect how we can have compassion. Also, if we're compassionate, the mode in which we're relating to things—the mode in which we're aware—can affect how we enact that compassion, how we live from that compassion. So the compassion is lived in a way that maybe isn't so heavy. It doesn't come from a sense of duty, and it doesn't get mixed up with fear, ego, or all kinds of things that can be there.

What I'd like to offer you this week is what I'm calling the Seven Factors of Compassion. They're the same as the common Buddhist list of the Seven Factors of Awakening^[4]. So: the mindfulness factor of compassion, the investigation factor of compassion, the effort factor of compassion, the joy factor of compassion, the tranquility factor of compassion, the concentration factor of compassion, and the equanimity factor of compassion.

What's kind of lovely is that when we live from compassion, the Seven Factors of Awakening follow along. With the first one being mindfulness, there's a way in which coming from a compassionate place, responding to things compassionately, brings mindfulness with it. Mindfulness just comes along without having to really work at it. When people only practice mindfulness, there are times where it feels like you're doing the mindfulness—you know, "I wandered off, I have to come back and do it again." But when compassion is in the forefront, there's a way in which mindfulness can follow effortlessly. It's not like we have to work at being mindful. The same thing goes for the other factors.

To make this easier to understand, I would like to give a school playground example. Say you're visiting a playground and there's a small child, maybe a four or five-year-old child, who's having lots of fun playing. But then the child trips and scrapes her knee. She's wearing shorts, so her knee rubs across the asphalt and gets scraped. Maybe it's dirty, and there's a little gravel. She's quite stunned and shocked that she was having so much fun, and now suddenly she's upset and in pain.

It's a relatively common schoolyard injury. She comes running to you. You feel her distress and see that she has a wound, but you've experienced this yourself in playgrounds. You've seen it before. It's a common thing; she's going to be fine. What she needs is someone who cares for her, is present in a calm way, and begins taking care of her in a nice way.

With compassion and care, you want to clean her wound because there's gravel and grit in it. But it hurts to touch it, even with a flow of water. So you get a soft, moist cotton ball, and you very lightly tap the wound in order to pick up some of the dirt that's there. You do it with care—you really don't want to hurt her. You care about her, you want to settle her, and you wouldn't want to agitate her more. There's this love and care to do this as carefully as you can.

You bring your attention into that. You're paying attention to her very carefully to see what the response will be when you touch, so you can pull back quickly if it stings her too much. You just touch very gently, and you're very careful about how quickly you do it and the pressure you put on the wound. There's a lot of attention. What's driving the attention is the compassion, the care for the girl.

What follows in the wake of that care is a lot of mindfulness, a lot of attention to really be present and take in the situation. No one needs to tell you to be aware, pay attention, be mindful, or come back to the present moment. That just follows along with this deep motivation to care for this person and be attentive in a nice way to not cause more pain for her.

Not only is there a lot of awareness and attention, there is what in Buddhism is called investigation (Dhamma vicaya)^[5], which is to be very discerning about what causes more pain and what causes less, what supports her and what doesn't. What kind of tone of voice to use, what not to say, partly taking cues from her as you speak. There's a lot of care, not only in being present but in making distinctions between what is useful here and what is not. The compassion takes the lead, and this consideration about what could hurt her more or less is almost effortless. It's obvious—of course, if you want to carefully care for her wound, clean it, and put a bandage on it, you're going to try to pay attention to doing it in a way that causes the least amount of pain and distress for her. You are tuning into all these little factors of what's useful and not useful.

What is in the lead here is compassion. One way to develop mindfulness is to be compassionate. One way to be compassionate and mindful is to develop your capacity to be aware in a light, calm, and open way, so that the tenderness and warmth of your heart has room to be there. When we're aware in a heavy or strong way, or if we're angry while being aware, the anger doesn't give much room. If we're full of desires or fear, there's not much room for anything else to arise in the field of awareness.

But if we can learn the art—even with fear, anger, and distress—of having a light touch, an easefulness in the mindfulness, you might find there's a little more space to have care, love, compassion, and kindness for yourself for the distress you have, and for others for the difficulty they have.

Once the compassion is there, let that be in the forefront. Act on that. Live that way. Have compassion, maybe not in such a way that everyone knows you're being compassionate—because that might be a little bit too much for some people—but you care. You bring a caring and a kindness to people and events.

Notice as you do that: Can you notice the easeful way in which you are aware, your mindfulness? Can you notice the matter-of-fact, obvious way in which you're investigating and making distinctions between what supports the situation and what doesn't, what's helpful and what's not? That compassion is wise compassion. When we act on it or live motivated by it, it brings along a lot of different factors that support the compassion, sometimes without even needing to think about it.

This is provided that we don't get locked in with the compassion, or alarmed, or fearful, or dutiful, so that the compassion becomes heavy. When there's a lot of suffering in the world, we might feel obligated: "I have to be heavy, I have to be serious, my compassion has to be strong." The paradox of all this is that the best form of compassion we can have is not strong or heavy compassion. It's light compassion. It's calm compassion. It's compassion that has lots of room for things, including lots of room for yourself. It's that kind of compassion that brings along with it attentiveness, mindfulness, and the discernment about what's helpful and not helpful—all with a light touch.

A light touch makes compassion sustainable over a long period of time. That's one of the things we're looking for: sustainable compassion. Because compassion that is heavy, strong, or too tightly connected with other challenges we have will lead to compassion fatigue. We'll get exhausted very quickly. But this lightness, a light touch—maybe think of living a life of compassion as more like a marathon than a sprint. In a marathon, you start off with a light run.

So, the Seven Factors of Compassion build on compassion. Today I mentioned two: mindfulness and discernment or investigation. As you go about your day-to-day, maybe try to have a light touch with your awareness. Have a light compassion, a light care, love, or kindness that allows room for attention and awareness of what is happening in this field of kindness and compassion. Start seeing how mindfulness can follow compassion, how discernment follows, and see how those work together. You might find that it's even easier to be mindful and develop your mindfulness if it's guided by compassion rather than just being guided by a sense that "it's good for you."

Thank you. We'll continue from IRC tomorrow. Thank you for being here.