Guided Meditation: What Does it Take for You to Let Go?; Dharmette: Tastes of Freedom (5 of 5) Letting Go

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: What Does it Take for You to Let Go?; Tastes of Freedom (5 of 5) Letting Go. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Meg Gawler at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 16, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: What Does it Take for You to Let Go?

Greetings, dear fellow travelers on this beautiful, wholesome path. It's good to see you, good to practice with you.

I need to begin by making a correction. The Chinese character combining "look" and "see" is not the one given for translating nirodha^[1] (cessation), but rather samādhi^[2] (deep concentration). Bringing the mind and the body, and all of us individually—all the parts of us—together. It's a beautiful quality of samādhi that nothing needs to be left out, even the parts of us that are still somewhat unskillful from time to time.

Now we'll begin by formulating our deepest intention: why we are here to meditate. It's advantageous if your intention includes a dimension of altruism. It's not only for you, but it's for everyone, all beings, and how we might contribute to the well-being of everyone on this planet.

Setting your intention sets the stage for your effort. So now assume a meditation posture from which you feel you could practice letting go, relinquishing. Letting go of tensions in the body, but also letting go of unwholesome mind states, like being tempted to jump on thought trains.

For me, what I need in my posture for that is to know that I'm upright, that my three centers of gravity are well balanced: the belly, the heart, and the head. And then I like the image of sending roots deep down into the earth, from where I have the sensation of contact with whatever is supporting me, whether it is the floor, a chair, a cushion, or a bed. That's where we send down our roots.

Another invitation for our meditation today is, throughout the whole half-hour of practice, to endeavor to maintain a flavor of kindness. It's above all being kind to ourselves, being kind to whatever arises in the mind, being kind to our foibles or imperfections. Just recognizing them without any judgment at all. "Oh, this is how it is." That's wholesome recognition.

So now we'll do a brief body scan, from the soles of the feet up to the crown of the head. And as we do, wherever we place our awareness, we see if there might be something there to let go of. If it's not possible to release tension, then we settle for just softening around whatever feels contracted.

Gently coming up the legs... Now placing our awareness in the belly. If we're sitting, that's our center of gravity. If we're on a cushion, it might be like a tripod with the knees and the bottom of the spine. If we're sitting in a chair, it might be under the thighs. Steadying ourselves is a way of inviting the mind to maybe slow down a little bit. Maybe take a break from the distraction of thinking.

And then continuing our scan up through the heart center, and showering ourselves with loving-kindness. It's really okay to be just who we are.

Up through the shoulders, down through the arms and the hands, and then placing our awareness in the head area. Are there any parts of the face that you would like to soften a little bit?

And taking the ritual long, slow, deep breath, in and out. Making contact with the experience of breathing.

And now we'll do a practice of reflection based on the Awakening Factor of Investigation^[3]. So if this is okay with you, you're invited to ask yourself: what in you would benefit from letting go? What would you enjoy letting go of in your mind? And if you could take a brief vacation from whatever stands in your way of quieting the mind, please celebrate that. It's wonderful. It doesn't have to last; just a taste of a quiet mind is beautiful.

I imagine most of you have already closed your eyes, but in case you haven't, that can be beneficial. So staying with the cycle of the breath, and in the background keeping the flavor of kindness and also the factor of investigation. What would it take for you to let go of keeping the mind so busy?

Just keep practicing like this.

And if a door should open for you towards the beauty of tranquility, feel free to step through it.

Perhaps you've gotten a glimpse of what the obstacles are that you need to clear in order to advance on your chosen path. In that case, the invitation is to invoke the Awakening Factor of Effort—wholesome effort. What do you need to let go of to purify your efforts as you meditate?

If the problem seems to be the wandering mind, might it be helpful to make a vow to just keep coming back?

Particle physics has demonstrated that most of this human body is in fact emptiness. So now the invitation is to visualize that emptiness inside and radiate your emptiness, which is infused with kindness, in all directions: above and below, in front and back, to the right, to the left. Spend a few moments radiating, purifying yourself and all beings in the whole universe with emptiness infused with kindness.

And now we come to the end of this sitting, and we radiate our well-wishing to all beings everywhere, including ourselves. May we and all beings be held in kindness, and may we all be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Tastes of Freedom (5 of 5) Letting Go

Happy to be here with you. I need to begin, however, with a couple of corrections.

One is that the event on Saturday, which is a fundraiser for a new monastery near Seattle—I didn't get that right. I kind of jumped to conclusions, but it seemed to me to be a reasonable jump because when I saw the invitation to this event, there were six monastics, with monks interspersed with nuns, and they were all named. And I made the assumption that, "Wow, there are going to be nuns in this monastery," and that's not the case.

My beloved mentor, Ayya Anandabodhi^[4], actually had to come out and say that, in fact, that monastery will just be for male monastics. The reason they put nuns in there was not because they were going to be part of the monastery, but because they were friends of this future monastery. And I guess the poster wanted to make a fundraising pitch for them as well. Anyway, I do apologize for my uncalled-for jubilation, but I'm happy for the monks that they're doing a fundraiser for their new mountain monastery.

So today we're going to talk about the last wholesome mind state for the week, which is called vossagga^[5]. But before I go there, I need to make a correction for my teaching yesterday. When I was wanting to explain the Chinese character that was used in the Agamas^[6] to translate a Pali term, I had remembered that it was nirodha. But actually, it wasn't nirodha; it is samādhi. So this wonderful picture of "look" and "see" is the Chinese term for samādhi.

It wasn't too far-fetched on my part to make this mistake, because samādhi is really related to nirodha (cessation), samādhi being deep concentration. Samādhi can be seen as the quintessential stopping of the wandering mind. And when we finally stop well enough, then we can see we're ready for insight. At that point, nothing is going to stop us from becoming enlightened. So stopping is the big part of samādhi.

How would we describe samādhi? For me, it's a mind that is open, soft, and steady, and it has a quality, I believe, of emptiness. A kind of emptiness that allows for receptivity. And that's what allows the meditator who can go deep into samādhi to really see things as they truly are.

The theme for today is vossagga, which is usually translated as relinquishment. And like all the other factors I've been introducing this week, it also has a very wide spectrum of meaning in Pali. We see this from the context in which we find it in different parts of the Pali Canon.

An initial translation of vossagga is letting go. Letting go can then mature into giving up our unwholesome tendencies, so vossagga is also translated as giving up. Then it can go farther: that can lead to release. And when release is mature, that is complete relinquishment. That's Nibbāna^[7]—the candle is blown out. We've dropped everything, we've let go of everything. That's when we get ready to be an Arahant^[8]. It may not be for this lifetime, but that's where we're headed.

Very interestingly, another meaning of vossagga, in addition to letting go and relinquishment, is simply a donation. It also means giving, and the beautiful heart quality of generosity. You may know, if you've read some of the early texts, that when the Buddha was especially teaching lay practitioners, the very first instruction he would give would be to cultivate generosity. And then the next one, even more important, is that when we're comfortable with being generous, to really take seriously the Five Precepts^[9], and really endeavor to live as ethically as we possibly can. I love my monastic teachers because they incarnate that so beautifully: this exquisite ethics of non-harming.

It's also said in the early texts that when we have mastered making use of the wholesome mind qualities of the Seven Awakening Factors, what this ripens in is relinquishment—the same quality of vossagga.

Another thing I'd like to stress is that when the thinking mind does quiet down for a moment, for most of us it really feels good. And yet, there's nothing but the goodness of this mind state, of a quiet mind. Recognizing that when it happens—even if it's not for a long time—is really valuable, and it's really good to take a moment to enjoy that.

This also shines a light on the importance of joy in our practice. Sort of like the puppy that I talked about earlier this week: training a puppy with treats rather than with punishment. Our mind is going to respond favorably to experiences that we perceive as joyful or happy. In a healthy way, you'll want more of that, so it helps to keep us on the path when we really taste how good it is to let go of all that thinking.

But as we all know, quieting our mental fabrications or mental constructions—the word in Pali is saṅkhāra^[10]—takes a long time because it's not instinctive for us. And you know that your awareness, your mindfulness, your attention (where you've placed your attention) is profound when it's no longer coming from the control tower, and also when your experience is no longer one of reactivity. So this feeling of well-being, happiness, and joy, its function in meditation is to help us trust being here in this body, in this moment, however it is.

In his recordings of his meditation teachings, Venerable Anālayo^[11] begins by asking us to formulate, in an altruistic way if possible, our deepest intention: why are we here to meditate? I think I'll share with you my deepest intention, which I came to a few years ago and has stayed with me for a while: I make a vow to be a safe haven of kindness and emptiness for all beings.

The kindness is obvious, but for someone like me who gets caught in the comparing mind—comparing myself to others—emptiness is really a valuable quality to cultivate. I know that if I'm not empty, if I have fixed ideas in there or I'm just obsessed with myself, I can't be safe for others. So I really do want to be safe for others, and I think cultivating emptiness is a very wholesome thing to do.

If you'd like some homework at the end of this week, I suggest that you sit down with a Dharma buddy that you trust. The two of you can have an in-depth conversation where you ask each other over and over again: "What keeps you from letting go?" Give your buddy a chance to think about it and answer it, and when they do, repeat the question to invite them to go down to a deeper level. The process of investigating our own mind state helps in getting a glimpse of what is holding us back from completely letting go.

I'll be teaching here again the week of July 10th. But next week you will be treated to the teachings of my longtime Dharma buddy, Kim Allen. I believe that the theme will be another very different exploration of the faculty of taste (rasa)^[12], which we've worked on together this week.

To end this week of practicing together, I bow to each of you to thank you for your beautiful practice. We'll keep streaming the chat for a while in case you'd like to make any comments or suggestions for improvement. Thank you so much.

Closing Announcements

I'm going to disappear. There won't be a Q&A because my adorable little grandsons are visiting and I need to go out and play with them. So that's all folks! [Laughter]

Host: All right, thank you, Meg. And thank you to our YouTube editors and AudioDharma editors that have also joined this morning. Also to [unintelligible], who's playing with his grandchildren today, Julie, and Kevin H. So thank you everybody and everyone have a good week. Take care.