This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Allowing

So good morning. Welcome, welcome. And wherever you are on this planet, maybe it's not morning, but sending warm wishes your direction.

So today I will continue on this theme of these letters from Mara—these completely made-up letters, but I appreciate them. They have some whimsy in them, as well as some truth, maybe a little bit of uncomfortable truth in them. But as you know, we will begin with a guided meditation.

Establishing yourself in a posture that feels comfortable. For some of you that will be sitting, whether it's on a cushion, or in a chair, or from the couch. Establishing yourself in a posture that feels comfortable and feels grounded. And if you are sitting, feeling that uprightness of the posture without stiffness, but an uprightness, so ease. I'm trying to think of a synonym for uprightness, but if you have one, you could insert it into your mind.

And then letting the awareness sense into the body, the bodily experience right now. Letting the awareness inhabit the body. And what would it be like to let this awareness fill and encompass the whole body? The quality of spaciousness. Spaciousness and ease. Right, tuning into, being sensitive to the experience of the body.

However the body is right now. It might be restless, might be tired, might be a little bit achy, maybe a lot achy. Maybe even some numbness. Not quite sure how the body is. However it is, can we notice? Letting the sense of the body reveal itself to you. We don't have to go out and capture it. It's allowing it to be seen, noticed, felt.

And then however the mind is right now—the emotions, the thoughts, the images, whatever it is—can we also allow that to reveal itself? To be known, to be noticed. To be known and noticed with the quality of gentleness and that spaciousness. Maybe even some warmth.

Without putting pressure on what's being known, allowing this gentle holding quality of spaciousness and ease. Allowing experiences to show themselves, reveal themselves.

And can we wish ourselves well? Extending some kind-heartedness towards ourselves, this body, this heart, this mind. Wishing it well, wishing yourself well with some warm-heartedness.

And then, if you haven't already, resting the attention on the sensations of breathing. Bringing this ease, this spaciousness, this warm-heartedness to noticing the experience of inhales and exhales.

And when the mind wanders, as it's apt to do, no need to make a story or judge ourselves. We just very simply, gently begin again.

To do this practice with an attitude of warmth and care. Sometimes there can be a little bit of harshness that creeps in when we notice the mind has wandered or is lost in thought or story. Can we even have warm-heartedness towards the harshness?

Dharmette: Mara's Army of Malice

Hello. It's lovely to practice together. So nice to sit in community, even if it's this kind of modern version of community—remembering the chat boxes on YouTube and these kinds of things. So thank you for sitting together.

I'd like to continue on this theme that I've been doing this week about letters from Mara^[1] to leaders of his armies. So he has ten armies; I'm not going to go through all ten. And he sends letters to each of them, encouraging them to continue in their efforts in obstructing, getting in the way of, or preventing people from finding freedom. I'm also not going to worry myself about what exactly Mara is. I'm holding it right now as a rhetorical device, a literary device that's getting used to convey something. And what's getting conveyed is that we might consider these things that prevent us from finding freedom, and this way of including this character Mara is a way in that can depersonalize it. It makes it feel less like, "Oh, this is a problem that we have, or some failing that we have," or something along those lines.

And so Ajahn Punnadhammo^[2], up in Arrow River Forest Hermitage in Northern Ontario, Canada, wrote these letters^[3]. They are written more in modern times, where Mara is sending letters to the leaders of his armies trying to encourage these armies to continue preventing people from finding freedom. And maybe I'll just say this small little aside: I heard—I don't know if it's true—that an effective way to stop smoking in teenagers was to, rather than show them the causes of smoking, show them their lungs or something like that, portray an image of these middle-aged white men sitting around a table cackling with how much money they were making, how they were getting filthy rich off of getting other people addicted to tobacco products. And somehow it was that that activated this inner rebel in people, who said, "I don't want to be part of that! Here, I'm going to show them I'm not going to get addicted, or I'm going to kick my addiction." And I admit to something a little bit like that for me too, in these letters from Mara. That makes me feel like it's such a different way, like it's such a shift in this orientation away from "Oh, there's something wrong with me, I don't have it quite right" to this "Oh no, wait, I don't want to be part of this! I don't have to be part of this." So without taking things too literally, what I'm pointing to right here is this complete shift in orientation away from "I'm doing something wrong" to this depersonalized idea of "Oh no, I can do things differently."

Okay, so today I'd like to talk about this letter from Mara to the leaders of the army of malice and obstinacy. There are maybe different ways we could translate that, but I'm going to go with what Ajahn Punnadhammo has done: from Mara to the leaders of malice and obstinacy. And I'm excerpting this letter, and it goes like this:

"It is your duty to see to it that beings fall into the habits of aversion, ill will, anger, hatred, and spite. It's your job to develop mental proliferation around any unhappy feeling tones. If the being in question is not mindfully aware of their own mental processes—and few of them are even marginally aware—then we can turn this simple unpleasant feeling tone into a whole complex of aversion and resentment.

The raw unpleasant feeling tone is a momentary thing of little significance in and of itself, but what fun we can have with it! Because being engrossed in unhappiness or anger, beings are unable to see things clearly. They cannot see their true situation, and they cannot work out an escape.

So we have a whole wide spectrum of emotions to work with. There's the very mild and temporary flicker of aversion towards the driver ahead of you on the freeway. There's that smoldering resentment towards the inconsiderate boss at work. And there's that bitter, lifelong ethnic hatred that can inflame entire nations. All of these are manifestations of the same thing.

But we must be vigilant against that one credible antidote... that is universal loving-kindness. This is the one force which we cannot stand. So stop it before it is cultivated. Discredit it as a weakness. But little do they know that it requires real courage to practice universal goodwill."

So this whole idea of loving-kindness, sometimes we might think, "Oh, loving-kindness, that's what you do when you can't do the real practice." Like somehow it's this lesser practice, or a booby prize, or something like this. Or maybe sometimes when we talk about mettā^[4], loving-kindness, we get the sense of, "Oh, we're just pretending to be really nice and like everyone, or let's just paint the whole world pink, or we'll act like Pollyanna," or something like that. These are some of the ideas that people might have when they hear this word of loving-kindness or mettā. But loving-kindness, mettā, is not that. It has a real strength to it. It's not a false and flimsy thing. It does have this strength, but the strength has a softness to it. So in some ways mettā, loving-kindness, has this infinite strength and this infinite softness, which is such a beautiful combination.

Mettā, loving-kindness, is different than what we might think of as love. Love is this beautiful thing and we need it in our lives, and it's part of the human experience. But mettā is well-wishing. It's this deep friendliness, but it has this quality of boundlessness and unconditionality. And it's these two qualities—boundlessness and unconditionality—that distinguish it from what we usually think of when we say the word love.

So, boundlessness. When we look at our lives, when we look at our relationships, and we look at the movement of care in our life, we will see that our care, our well-wishing, is actually bounded. That we tend to care for those that are immediately around us—our partners, our family, our friends, hopefully ourselves too. And that's perfectly natural; this is what humans do. So boundlessness, not having any limitations, is a really lofty ideal. But that's the direction that it moves, that mettā moves. It is this direction to no limits, to boundlessness.

And in the same way, unconditionality is a quality of loving-kindness. Because if we're honest, sometimes we might say to a partner or whomever, "I love you," but sometimes there's this quiet little "I love you when... [fill in the blank]" or "I'll love you if you change a little bit," or "I love you except when you do that thing that drives me crazy." Or even, "I can't love me the way that I am, I'll love myself as soon as something else happens." This is a normal part of the human experience as well, we don't have to beat ourselves up about it. But mettā, loving-kindness, has this quality of unconditionality. No exceptions, like no conditions whatsoever. And again, this is a movement of mettā. And we're going in this direction that this question of deserving or not deserving just stops making sense; it's just well-wishing, goodwill.

So this direction that we're going with mettā is one of boundlessness and unconditionality. And that distinguishes it from this maybe different way we might experience love. And it's also these qualities that help provide that antidote to ill will, this antidote to malice. And also, bringing in this term from Mara, this obstinacy—this getting stuck in one way and being like, "Nope, things are this way and they're not that way." Because if we think about it, both ill will and obstinacy and all these different flavors of it, they are very tight and contracted. And they have this story often associated with them: "I can't believe they did this," or "They don't deserve goodwill because of that."

So this movement towards boundlessness and unconditionality is the opposite movement of this contraction and separation, and this dug-in-the-heels kind of a feeling. So loving-kindness is, in some ways, this non-abandonment or non-rejection. This means not abandoning or rejecting ourselves. Sometimes it's not so easy, and there's a way that when we're lost in ill will or obstinacy, that we're cutting ourselves off, cutting ourselves off from our hearts, and rejecting others, or building a wall around our hearts. And so there's a way in which, when we're practicing loving-kindness, we are reclaiming—reclaiming maybe that which we have cast aside, or which we have cut ourselves off from. Maybe all those unacceptable aspects of ourselves, which of course show up as unacceptable aspects of others too.

So maybe I'll end with this idea that the practice of loving-kindness is not an effort to convince ourselves of anything. It's not an effort to pretend, or demand, or plead that loving-kindness show up. Instead, it's this practice of tapping into something that's already inside of us that already knows about warmth, and care, and respect. It's not a form of positive thinking; it's a way of focusing on goodwill instead of ill will. It's a way of inclining the mind and heart towards something inside of us that already cares, that already has warmth. And this is where the strength and the softness of goodwill shows up, of loving-kindness, of mettā.

I'm not going to talk about loving-kindness practice per se. There are a number of different ways we can practice it, and maybe you already have your own favorite way of practicing. But I just want to emphasize the strength and the softness, and this movement towards boundlessness and unconditionality, that loving-kindness and mettā practice have. And in this way, it's a real antidote to this ill will or aversion that always comes along with these stories. And I don't want to say that there isn't injustice, and there isn't oppression, and there aren't lots of terrible things happening in the world. I am not saying that. I am saying, as a practice, can we tune into this, that inside of us that already knows this beautiful quality of warmth, and care, and respect?

So with that, I wish you all a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you.