Guided Meditation: Water Element; Dharmette: Flavors of the Dharma (3 of 5) Humor

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Water Element; Flavors of the Dharma (3 of 5) Humor. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Kim Allen at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 21, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Water Element

So good day, we'll go ahead and get started. Nice to see everyone, those of you who are commenting. Please settle in for our meditation together, finding a posture for your sitting, standing, or lying down, and just allow yourself to come into the internal awareness, how the body feels from the inside.

Perhaps closing your eyes in order to bring the attention more inward. And maybe taking a long, slow, deep breath, really feeling the lungs, and on the exhale settling a little bit further just into how you are this morning or day.

Softening the face, the eyes, and the eye sockets, allowing the jaw to release. Softening down through the throat and shoulder area, the arms, and the hands. Softening down into the torso, letting the feeling into the rib cage—the front, the back, the sides—letting that feel relaxed. Letting the belly be round, expansive. And down into the legs, softening any bracing in the legs or the feet so that we have this invitation of some flexibility in the body.

Sensing the contact points where you're sitting, where your hands are maybe touching your body, if your lips are touching—just simple contact points. And making sure those places aren't pressing against each other; rather, just resting softly, surfaces touching softly. Feeling the groundedness when you're sitting in this way. There's a connection to what you're sitting on, stability.

This week's meditations are exploring these qualities of the elements as noted in Buddhist teachings, and today we'll focus on the water element. The water element has two main qualities: wetness and cohesion. So we can feel the water element directly in the mouth, in the eyes. If we're sweating, there's moisture associated with the body. Touching into those places now.

Bring to mind now how the solidity of earth is softened by water. Earth with no water easily becomes a powder, like sand or dry soil. But when a little water is added, then it binds together. There's a coherence or a cohesion along with the wetness of water.

Letting the soft, moist feelings in the body also bring a softness to the mind, maybe a unification—the way water dissolves disparate things and unites them in a solution. Feeling a connection throughout the whole body, and feeling how the mind can naturally be aligned with the body.

The attitude of softening and dissolving barriers could relate to an emotional tone of lightness, even of humor or amusement—gentle, gentle humor. So in this meditation, you're encouraged to see the mind with lightness, perhaps simply smiling at the wandering mind, if it's wandering. Connecting in with the breath, the body, mindfulness, presence with how things are. Setting the intention to simply stay with things as they are, stay connected, so there's a coherence and a cohesion between mind and body and heart, a flow of experience.

You may notice that there are various thoughts and forces in the mind pulling away, not wanting to flow along gently or be unified. I'm reminded of Jack Kornfield^[1] saying that he named the various voices of his thoughts. He had names for the characters that appeared in his mind. Sometimes if one of them piped up, he would just bow internally and say, "Thanks for your opinion," and move on.

As we settle in a bit more, we can let go of any remaining imagery or words that we might be retaining, and just notice how experience has a flow to it. Letting it flow along like a river, swirling around you and passing on, passing through, not getting stuck, not solidifying, and also not wandering away. The stream of experience just keeps flowing on if we let it. It's a bit like sitting on the riverbank, stable where we are, and letting it all flow by, all through. Just resting with that for a while now.

Sometimes the river of experience has eddies in it, and we can find ourselves swirling around and around in a little place that is not flowing on. And at that time, we can smile at the mind for its caughtness, and that may gently allow it to pass out into the current that flows again.

The experience of body sensations and impressions in the mind—when we open to that, it creates a certain lightness that's felt literally in the body, almost as if the body becomes transparent, or just simpler. The mind becomes wider, simpler. And there's a way that we can carry that sense forward into the day. Experience flows along and changes off the cushion just as much as on, each moment different.

An interaction, a task that we're doing, the thought or emotion passing through as we sit with a cup of tea—always changing and flowing on. And if we're open to being with that movement, letting it change, letting it unfold, and bringing a certain acceptance and lightness to that, then we can offer that as a gift to the world. Our willingness to just keep staying present even as things change helps others to be less stuck, less caught in fixity, tension, gripping feelings that we know also in ourselves. But the degree to which we can let those go can loosen a situation, can help a challenge or difficulty pass more easily, or simply help us to be with the difficulty that isn't passing. And it can add happiness and joy that's available in a situation, whereas being stuck dampens those kinds of things.

So through our practice, we become a gift in the form of openness, and flow, and ease, passing through like water. May that guide us today.

Dharmette: Flavors of the Dharma (3 of 5) Humor

We have a different emotional flavor or tone each day of this week, based on the classical Indian rasas^[2] or savors. The Insight teacher Sylvia Boorstein^[3] says that we need three things in our practice: gentleness, precision, and humor. So true.

So as we look at these flavors or emotional tones, we can look back that Monday was love and care, which might relate to gentleness. Tuesday was heroism and persistent effort; maybe the connection there to clarity is less direct, but it is true that we can't see clearly if we don't make some effort to remain undistracted and to look carefully. So we have gentleness, precision, and humor. We've made it to today. Today's flavor is humor. It's very helpful to have a sense of humor in our Dharma practice. It's probably necessary for healing in Dharma practice.

Mindfulness practice especially helps us to see through things if we stick with it, teasing things apart, or breaking them open, or differentiating experience so that we can see different parts of it and not be fooled by the kind of solid-seeming picture that we saw at the beginning. I think nearly everyone has this experience, even quite soon after starting practice, and just more and more over the years, where we start with something that seems so solid, so bound up in certain ways, and if we just look at it and keep turning it over, encountering it again and again, it kind of breaks apart. We see different pieces: "Oh, it's not all one thing. It's got these little parts."

So this is this process of seeing through, also called disenchantment in Buddhism, nibbidā^[4]. That word doesn't always sound appealing, but what it means is this way that we're no longer enchanted or charmed into just seeing something a little bit illusory and often solid. Instead, we see pieces of it, we see that it's empty, we see different aspects of it. The spell is no longer cast on us. So disenchantment is a positive term in Buddhist practice.

And once we have some experience with seeing through something, then we gain the ability to gently poke fun at some of the mind's tricks, and also some of the wider culture's traits. We aren't so attached to things being a certain way. We know that they're differentiated. We know also that they're often created or constructed to be a certain way because we've seen the process in the mind of constructing them—how my mind just produced that anger, or that something else.

It's very freeing to see that, to see that things are not so solid. They shift and change. A lot of it we're making up, and so then we can smile at the antics of the mind, at least sometimes. This poor, silly mind. Do you feel that sometimes? Just as a simple example, we don't control what thought will arrive next. Who knows what the mind's going to toss up next.

Gil^[5] tells a story of walking one time. He was walking to IMC from his house, and he just happened to walk by a pickup truck that had a big tarp over the back of it. Not such an uncommon sight, but his mind produced the thought, "I wonder if there's a body under that tarp." And he thought, "What? Where did that come from?" Who knows? Who knows why the mind said that.

So we have, I think, numerous instances of this during the day where the mind produces some thought based on sensory input, and we don't know where that came from. But it's kind of amusing if we're open to the amusing side of it. And this can even extend into areas that we would consider more serious, the spiritual realm or religious culture.

I'm thinking now about the Dalai Lama, who of course has a very honored position. And so the result is that when he goes to teach somewhere, there's a lot of pomp and beautiful things, high-up seats, and all of this. Sometimes you can see him laughing at that. He takes it lightly, but in a skillful way. He very much takes seriously his role as the Bodhisattva of Compassion for our world, but he's not caught up in that in a sense. There's a certain way that the lightness contributes to his gentleness, his healing, his love.

I remember watching him ascend up to a high teaching seat for something he was going to teach. And of course, it was very well padded, right? He got up there and he realized, "Oh, this is soft, what they put up here for me." And he kind of bounced on it for a moment, like a child might bounce on a bed. You could see he was just amused and delighted, right there in the middle of setting up for a serious teaching. That kind of skillful lightness comes from seeing the emptiness of the world, seeing through the constructions of what we're making and creating. There's a way that we can develop that skill also, and I think it's actually important for our practice to have that side.

There's a prayer in the Vajrayana^[6] practice where one asks, "Give me energy to see through life's illusions." It's a nice wish.

And there's humor in the Suttas also. There's a wonderful story in a text called the Udāna^[7] about a monk named Nanda. It seems that Nanda was discontent with the monastic life, and he told his comrades that he was planning to disrobe. So they went and told the Buddha, who summoned Nanda. The Buddha asked him why he was discontent, and he talked about a woman. He said, "On departing from home, a Sakyan^[8] woman, the loveliest in the land, with her hair half-combed, looked up at me and said, 'May you return soon, master.'" He was so smitten with her that he just couldn't be satisfied with the monastic life.

So the Buddha doesn't try to reply to this directly. Instead, he grabs Nanda by the arm and he transports him up to one of the heaven realms. There, Nanda sees Sakka^[9], the ruler of the devas^[10], being attended upon by—the text says—500 "pink-footed nymphs." Apparently, this is a reference, by the way, to a beautification practice in ancient India where women would rouge their feet. We think rouge is just for the face, but they put it on their feet. So, 500 pink-footed nymphs. The Buddha asks Nanda, "Which is lovelier: these nymphs, or the Sakyan woman that you couldn't get over?" And he says, "Oh, the nymphs." And so the Buddha promises Nanda 500 pink-footed nymphs if he will stay as a monk living the holy life. And he agrees.

Of course, the other monks hear about this, and they tease him incessantly. They say, "The venerable Nanda is living the holy life for the sake of nymphs!" He becomes very embarrassed and ashamed by this, and that is exactly what prompts him to go practice rigorously, the result of which is that he gains arahantship^[11], enlightenment. At that point, he has a different view of the world. He has seen through all the constructions and all the antics of his mind. And as an arahant, he goes back to the Buddha and he says, "Um... about those 500 nymphs... never mind." [Laughter]

So it's a great story. I think it's clear to me, at least, that the compilers of the Pali Canon^[12] had some sense of humor. There are more subtle indications of humor also. There's a sutta where the Buddha kind of jokes with the monks. He says to them a little bit—you can almost hear the tone—he says, "You may well acquire that possession that is permanent, everlasting, eternal, not subject to change, and that might endure as long as eternity. But do you see any such possession?" And the monks all say, "No, venerable sir."

And so he praises them, saying, "That's true. I don't see any such possession either." And then he goes on and says, "You may well cling to that doctrine of self that would not arouse sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair in one who clings to it. But do you see any such doctrine of self?" "No, venerable sir." He agrees. So he seems to be gently teasing them. And I think as we get more familiar with the suttas, we start to see places where there is subtle humor, or irony, or poking fun—more of them than we might think.

How can we use this flavor of humor, lightness, amusement in our practice? We've already noted some, but I'd like to add one more angle. If there's something that we can't laugh about, most likely there is some identification there, some kind of clinging, some kind of identity usually. We can use this negative approach—what we don't laugh about—to highlight where we're clinging, and then maybe we can try to bring some lightness to it. What we don't find funny reveals where our identity is invested. It's not that everything should be humorous, but if we can't find any lightness in some area, it's worth investigating to see if there's some sticking point there.

And just as we heard in the sutta quote a moment ago, the Buddha points out that the identification is a form of suffering. You might find that self you can cling to that won't bring sorrow, but do you see such a self? No. Ajahn Buddhadasa^[13] was a boxer before he became a monk. And even when he was a well-known teacher, he retained some of that kind of belligerent air sometimes that could come across as gruff or blunt to people. Sometimes people took offense at him because they thought that a spiritual teacher should be kind and gentle in a particular way.

And if anyone challenged his demeanor, Ajahn Buddhadasa would roar with laughter and he would say, "Oh, that's just my personality." So there's a way that humor has an important place in our practice, in the right way, in a skillful way. It can be done unskillfully also, but it's a key component of Dharma practice. And especially when we start seeing clearly into all the strange habits that our mind has accumulated, lightness really helps.

So that is our flavor for today, and I hope you might find some ways in your day today to look with lightness, or smile at something that you could have gotten caught up in. Give it a try. Be well.