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Guided Meditation: Being Personal

Hello everyone, welcome. Offering a welcome is sharing my joy and happiness with being here with all of you. I think a welcome carries the most value if it's offered quite personally. If every other word that came out of my mouth was "welcome to everybody," it might feel like automatic pilot and not mean much. But if it feels personal—actually, a person personally feels the welcome, or some fullness of the person is welcoming you into their space—it can feel richer or fuller. Perhaps sometimes when you come to some place where you really do feel welcomed, it feels like all of you is welcome. You feel it personally; in your bones and your muscles and your heart, it just feels like a full experience of oneself that's being welcomed.

I would like to do something that is a little unusual for a Buddhist meditation, and that is to really take it personally. Welcome yourself fully; allow yourself to be welcomed fully. Let this meditation be very personal. Sometimes the wisdom teachings in our tradition say, "Don't take it personally," whatever happens. It's very freeing to not take something personally. We have a thought, maybe it's a horrendous thought, and we don't take it personally—meaning, don't define yourself by it. Don't let it be the whole being of who you are. Just let it be something like the weather that kind of wanders through. We know that it impacts us, but it's not us. So, don't take it personally.

But today, I'd like to suggest really taking things personally. Well, taking is an evocative word that maybe is part of the problem of it all, but let it all be personal. Let it be personal in a particular way—not personal in terms of letting yourself be defined by it, where your ideas, memories, ideas of the future, and your stories of self come into play. Rather, the kind of cozy personal that you may feel if you were engrossed in a very good book, comfortable on the couch reading. You wouldn't call it personal, but something very subtle and full and whole is there, just being in the pleasure of reading.

Maybe after a full week of activity, you go for a walk in a park and everything falls away—your concerns, your problems, and your issues. It's just so nice and full; you feel a fullness and happiness just being alive and walking in the park. It's very personal. The sense of aliveness may be like spring, and you feel like spring inside. So, it's not taking it personally, not making it personal, but experiencing it personally with all of who you are.

As we sit today, maybe there's a place that has depth in you, or breadth in you, or fullness in you of what is personal. It's not your identity, not what you think about yourself, but somehow how you feel or be. It is so personal. As meditation goes deeper and deeper, in a way, it is very personal. It's not someone else's experience; it's the experience of this body, this person here.

[Music]

Maybe by going personal today and going all the way personal, something drops away. Some self-concern, self-preoccupation, and some ego drops away because there's no room for ego in the depth and fullness of what's most personal.

Assuming a meditation posture, which is also very personal—each person finds their own posture and comfort. Gently closing the eyes. With the eyes closing, we sometimes feel we're coming into a personal world here, maybe a little bit internal.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths. On the exhale, let go of your thoughts, your concerns, your ideas, and your reactions to what I've said. Maybe on an exhale, let go of a certain kind of self-preoccupation that travels in the highways and byways of your thinking.

As you let go, relax your body. Let your breathing return to normal and gently, on the exhales, relax. There's a settling in as the body relaxes—the shoulders, the belly. Maybe the thighs can soften, the arms, and the hands. There can be a settling in, coming home, as the body begins to soften.

Breathing in and breathing out. Relaxing deeply in the core of your being. Settling into what is more personal than personal—that which is more personal than how you usually define yourself or think of yourself. In the depths of your being, let this meditation be personal.

Maybe your breathing can be a gentle invitation to come deep within, where all of you is welcomed. As all of you is welcomed, there's a letting go of what is superficial. There's a relaxing into the depths of our being. Breathing through the depths, breathing with the depths of our fullness, our beingness.

Whatever happens during this meditation, it's all okay, but assume that it's a means of relaxing into something deeper, more personal. Not what's on the surface of your thoughts, feelings, and ideas, but almost from the place where they arise. The depths of who you are—breathe there. Trust the depth that's within you.

All too often, thinking takes us away from the depth and fullness of what is most personal here with us. More personal than our history and our plans. Here, deep within this body and heart, may be a quiet place, a warm place where we can sit with what is most personal here and now.

How quiet can you let your thinking mind be? The kind of quiet that allows you to feel or listen to the fullness or the depth of what's most personal here as you sit quietly and breathe.

As we come to the end of this sitting, reflect for a moment how, when you are most comfortable with yourself, at peace with yourself, and at home with yourself, you become a message. The medium is the message; you become a walking message that it's possible to be at peace, at home, and comfortable with oneself. This is a gift for the world, where so many people don't have that experience.

Perhaps, in whatever way that you are now—maybe you're more settled, or maybe more willing to find a way to be at home in yourself in this deep personal way—may this serve to bring greater well-being and peace to this world. Whether it's directly or intentionally, or indirectly and unintentionally, may the benefits of this meditation we've done today, with the many of us doing this together across the globe, spread from us in benefit for everyone.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we each find ways to contribute to this possibility.

[Music]

Thank you.

Dharmette: Finding Our Way (4 of 5) With Happiness and Suffering

Finding our way in this challenging world, finding our way with the personal challenges we have, and with our minds and all that. One of the things we're navigating and working with is the terrain of happiness and suffering.

Buddhists talk a lot about suffering. It's a big word for some people. Sometimes, people who come new to Buddhism are a little disturbed by how often we talk about suffering, because suffering just seems like such a monumental thing. But we use the term in a wide way.

One of the ways I'd like to use it today, regarding happiness and suffering, is that happiness is something deeper than contentment, deeper than gladness, deeper than joy. That happiness is something that's deeply personal. The opposite of that—suffering—is also something deeply personal. Some of the greatest suffering that people experience is when there has been a real personal violation, whether it's a physical violation against your body, or a violation against some deep sense of trust, or a deep violation about who you are as a person or in relationship to others.

I remember many years ago, a friend of mine had her car broken into, and she felt it was such a deep violation. Somehow that car represented so much more than just a car. Our sense of safety and place in this world, our sense of belonging, is a very personal issue. To have a sense of belonging, a sense of connection to the world, or our sense of personal meaning and purpose—even our sense of worth and personal value—somehow dismissed, destroyed, or threatened, can cause a lot of suffering. It isn't just a simple suffering like having a flat tire and arriving late to an important meeting. Something is deeply personal, and it can have deep conditioning factors within us.

The corollary is the same for happiness. It's not the happiness of, "Oh, now I fixed the tire, and that's great. I'm not stuck here anymore, and I think I'll get to the meeting on time." That's nice, and certainly you can be happy around that, but by the time you get to the meeting, you've forgotten about the tire and what happened. The happiness that is real sukha^[1] in the Pali word, the real happiness of the Dharma, is something very personal that touches something very deep within us. It's a fullness that overlaps with a deep feeling of belonging, meaning, or purpose. It overlaps with a sense of worth and value that is full, a sense of personal confidence. There's a fullness and a depth to it.

Some people might take exception to my repeated use of the word "personal" today. I do it a little bit to challenge you to look deep into yourself, into a fullness, because it's something Buddhists don't tend to use. Of course, there's a common teaching in Buddhism not to take things personally. I understand this to mean the taking, the appropriation of things and saying, "This is who I am." The act of defining ourselves by something, the act of proving ourselves or building up a self, building up this edifice of ego that we have, keeps us superficial.

The happiness of sukha, this happiness of the Dharma, is something that's fuller or deeper than anything that you could take personally, assume to be, or define yourself by. It's not about definitions; it's more like being so comfortable with yourself that you don't need to be defined by anything. You don't need to prove yourself to anyone. You have nothing to fear because it's so deep. The personal is so deep. We tap into some depth inside of peace, of well-being, of "personalness," that can't be touched or hurt, no matter what other people do to us. Maybe this is a place that is a reservoir of well-being. So it's very personal.

In terms of the theme of this week, there is a pendulum. There is a kind of happiness and suffering that live in relationship to each other. You set up one, and it's almost like preparing the ground for the other to come back and forth. That happens when we take things personally in a superficial way. We take things personally by some appropriated identity or definition that is not really who we are.

For example, if I define myself by producing shows for YouTube, and the technology works well for a few months—like it has lately—I could feel really happy about myself. But when somehow I forget to push the right buttons, the happiness that comes from the praise I get from others and the delight others have with my great capacity on YouTube plummets, and I feel miserable because I forgot to push the right buttons. Then I feel unhappy, and I suffer. That pendulum of happiness and suffering is dependent on these superficial and fragile things. Because reality is always changing, it sets you up for crashing and building yourself up again. Finding our way with the superficial will keep us superficial.

The Dharma practice is to connect to something deep, something that's not defined by these superficial things, or influenced and affected by what happens. It's not affected by what other people think about us, believe it or not. It's not affected by whether we're a success or a failure in the things that we do. We do things sincerely and honestly; some succeed and some fail, but the depth of our being—where we really reside and live inside, where we're comfortable with ourselves—stays intact.

To not know the depth of ourselves, to not be comfortable, resolved, and healed in the depth of us, can leave that depth in a place where there's a lot of suffering. But if we heal it, and work with it, and relax and open deeply into it—this deep personal place where we can find peace, home, trust, and refuge—it's not exactly a pendulum anymore. It abides by itself. If it falls away, it doesn't necessarily go into despair or steep suffering.

Deep suffering is there if we take things personally. Deep suffering is not there if we are personal, if we abide and rest in that which is deep, full, and complete inside of ourselves.

In Buddhism, we're quite fond of talking about not-self. One way to bring the two things I'm talking about today together—being personal and not-self—is that when we are so personal, so at home, resting in what's most personal, most intimate, and most full, it flows from within us. It's so full and complete that there's no tendency or desire to define a self out of it, to find a self in it, to want a self in it, or to hold onto a self. The idea of "me, myself, and mine" and those kinds of concerns just fall away.

It's like someone who's involved in a wonderful play, sport, or playing music; they get completely absorbed in what they're doing. It feels so complete and good to be there that the usual thoughts about "me, myself, and mine" don't occur to them while they're doing the activity. In the same way, when we meditate or practice the Dharma, there is this deep personal place where we can find comfort, belonging, healing, happiness, and well-being. If we can really learn to be there, trust it, and allow ourselves to get quiet enough to truly be absorbed in it, there's no movement in the mind, no tendency for the mind to grasp at "me, myself, and mine."

From the point of view of the surface, where we think a lot about "me, myself, and mine" and live in that world, these things I say might be met immediately with, "But I am me, and there are things that are mine." From the logic of that superficial world, yes, maybe what I'm saying doesn't make sense. But that superficial world is where the pendulum of suffering and happiness live in relationship to each other, and we get trapped swinging back and forth, never ending.

But the depth of who we are, the depth of well-being, the peace of the Dharma that's within us, is the Dharma. When you become yourself fully in this personal way, it is said that the Dharma becomes the self. When you are yourself, the Dharma is the Dharma; you are the Dharma.

Thank you. I look forward to coming back tomorrow and having our meeting in 24 hours.