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Guided Meditation: Returning to Awareness

Warm greetings to all of you. As part of this wonderful community of ours of 7:00 a.m. meditators, and the one who does the most speaking, maybe I can represent all of you and offer that welcome on behalf of all of you. We're all welcoming each other and have a sense of being included by the whole community, so thank you for being here.

I want to start with an analogy. Say that you're going to go do some exercise, maybe go to the gym, and you really enjoy exercising. You need to exercise; there's a physical kind of thing you're trying to heal from or something. So, you're determined and motivated, and everything's good. You go there, and as you're going into the gym, you see other people working out. You think, "This is good to work out, there's a certain vitality and engagement. This is a really healthy thing for people." And you think about a friend of yours who really needs to work out, maybe for many reasons.

So you're thinking about your friend. You care about your friend, you have compassion for your friend, and you want to help your friend. You walk by a little lobby part of the gym, and there are some magazines. Maybe there's a magazine with big headlines about working out and health. With your concern for your friend, you pick up the magazine, and you go sit on a little couch in the back wall of the gym. You hear people working out, and for the hour you had to work out, you read this magazine, and another magazine, all to think about your friend.

Then your hour is up, and you realize, "Wait a minute, I didn't exercise at all. I spent the whole time thinking about my friend. I could have worked out. I need to work out, and I could have done the reading or looked into it later. In fact, I didn't really learn that much by looking at these magazines."

I give this analogy for coming to meditate. We're here to meditate—to do a kind of mental working out, if you will. If you start having compassionate thoughts for people who are challenged, and you start thinking about how to help them and do things for them, and you spend the whole meditation in this kind of planning mind, this discursive mind, thinking about them, in a sense, for that meditation session, you're not meditating at all. You're not doing the practice; you're just thinking about a friend.

In the context of meditation, of course, you might think about a friend who's suffering. And of course, you might think about how to help them or do something for them. But in the context of meditation, the most significant way to respond to the suffering of the world that we experience and feel is actually not to use meditation as a time to plan and think about what to do. Rather, it is to really prepare ourselves for doing and acting later. That powerful thing is to act in a certain way.

And that is to go back, recognize what's happening to you, recognize concerns, recognize the feelings that are there, and recognize the impulse and the aspiration to help. These are all good. And then fold it all back into your workout, into your practice. These steps we've been doing this week around compassion are a great series of steps to fold back into your practice.

Come back and just rest in awareness. Be aware of how you're feeling. Be aware of the sensations in the body, of the compassion, the care, and the concern you have for your friend. Be aware of what it feels like in your body to have a desire to do something. Just be aware of what's happening for you. As you're aware, become attuned to yourself, find harmony with yourself. To go headlong into planning and thinking about the friend is actually a way of losing touch with oneself. Meditation is a way of being profoundly in touch with oneself here. Be attuned to this person—if you're suffering, be attuned to your suffering; if you're not suffering, be attuned to the sensations, feelings, and what's happening. Appreciate yourself.

Appreciate what's happening, respect it deeply, but don't give in to it. Don't fall into it. Don't spin out with it. And then, here, have an aspiration. Maybe the aspiration is in fact to care for the suffering of oneself and for others. Then in meditation, you can do it again and again. By these repeated cycles, you're actually building the kind of foundation that allows compassion to grow. It sets the ground for cleaner, greater, simpler, and more straightforward compassion to be there for later.

If you go headlong into, "I need to fix the problem, I need to help the problem, I need to do something," and start planning it—at times that's useful, but not when you're working out in the gym. Then you want to sit deeply, come back, and do the cycle again and again to purify, to clarify, to simplify how it is for you. We're freeing ourselves from the distractions of discursive thinking about it. We're freeing ourselves from looking at the magazines rather than doing the exercise. And by doing the exercise, something strengthens inside of us that later will give birth to a greater capacity for compassion and a greater capacity for how to act.

So, assume your meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Without anything else, begin your meditation. If the occasion is right for it, go through the first four A's of the five A's of this week: cultivate awareness, attunement, appreciation, and aspiration. And in meditation, the aspiration is to be present, to be here. The aspiration is to keep cultivating greater awareness of the present moment, greater attunement to the present moment, greater appreciation of the present moment, and letting the aspiration to do so be simpler, clearer, more harmonious, and more supportive of going through this process again.

If you're thinking, if you're "reading the magazine," begin the cycle of being aware, attuned, appreciative, and aspiring to be here and present, not lost in thought.

If while meditating you have any suffering, stress, or tension about something, offer yourself these five steps. Be aware in a deep way. Attune yourself in a useful way. Appreciate yourself. And in a supportive way, have the wish, the aspiration, that you be free of the suffering. And then act. The act we do in meditation is to do the first four again. Go through the cycle. Just keep deepening with it, expanding it, quieting the mind.

As we come to the end of this meditation, appreciate that meditation is a time to be inward, an inward focus on our own experience here and now. And to maybe do it so deeply, so fully, that we are turned inside out, so that there is a deeper sensitivity and availability to the world.

Let the attention go out into the world, aware of the joys and sorrows that are so extensive in the world. Be attuned to a certain kind of harmony of heart with all the joys and sorrows. Never forget to appreciate and respect all people in the world. Allow the heart's aspiration to bubble up, the aspiration to care for suffering wherever it's encountered. And when we encounter it in the world around us, aspire that that suffering comes to an end.

And then, action. May each of us aspire to do at least small actions to make this day a better day for others. May each of us alleviate and lighten the suffering of others through even the smallest acts: smiles, checking in—"how are you?"—offering a small gift. Being aware, attuned, and appreciative of others—that itself is a gift that alleviates suffering. It doesn't have to be more complicated. If nothing else is relevant, your act to support the world is to go back to being aware, attuned, and appreciative.

The benefits of doing so will spread out into the world. May all beings be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings be peaceful, and may all beings everywhere be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Aspects of Compassion (5 of 5) Action

Today we come to the fifth element of compassion: action. It's actually very important that we act. There's something empowering, something freeing, something enlivening in actually acting, rather than just having wishful thinking, rather than living under the weight and burden, rather than just feeling the challenges and the suffering of the world. Even small acts count for our hearts. With small acts, who knows how much they'll benefit others? Sometimes small acts of kindness and compassion have the biggest impact.

It's always important to act, but we have to be very careful what that means and how we take that in. If we live under the obligation that we have to go and help someone else, then it's very easy to add stress and tension to that very effort, imbuing it with something which is actually maybe not beneficial for yourself and others. One form of action is, in fact, to keep purifying oneself, to really clarify and develop oneself.

There are times when we feel the suffering of the world and maybe we can't do anything. There's so much suffering if you read the news, and we're not going to reach out to all of it, but we can still be moved by it. We can still do the first four of these elements of compassion. As we move into action, it's not necessarily to do things directly for the people who are suffering, but sometimes it's simply to go through that cycle of awareness, attunement, appreciation, and aspiration again. It's kind of like a cleansing, a refining, a smoothing out. It's a growing of the clarity of that compassion, the fullness of that compassion and care, so it becomes stronger and less mixed with tension and suffering.

Many times, when there's a quick impulse to be compassionate, we don't realize how much we bring along our conceit, our ideas of self, of others, of pity, of tension, or of obligation that kind of messes it up in some way. There is something like a natural compassion that can well up. I feel very fortunate because my discovery of the beauty and the wonder of compassion was that it found me through this repeated meditation practice I did. Just by meditating day in and day out for years, it welled up. It's like I made space; the hindrances for compassion settled, and lo and behold, there was this beautiful feeling of compassion, care, and love that was there. At first, it was there without the need to do anything or a specific direction that had to be addressed—it was just there, and I got to appreciate the beauty of compassion.

So one of the reasons to be recursive, where the action is to go back and go through this cycle of mindfulness again while you're meditating, is so you can start discovering the natural compassion that really is quite beautiful. Sometimes the action of compassion and the aspiration for suffering to end for someone leads us to say, "Well, I can do something." It's not just wishful thinking; it's a recognition that yes, I can do something for them, I can do something for the world.

To do it on the foundation of the first four elements hopefully means that there can be a beauty, an attunement, a naturalness in the action that we do. It isn't a sense of heavy responsibility, or bearing down, "I've got to do something." Or maybe doing something because we're angry: "Yes, I have compassion, but I'm angry and I have to go fix something in the world."

The natural compassion that can well up when we are really centered on ourselves, when we have this autonomous awareness, this deep attunement, this agency that goes into clarifying it all—there's a beauty and a pleasure to it. It's a source of happiness that is not intended to make us happy, because it's not about us. Because of the purity, the clarity, the simplicity, the absence of dust, the absence of tension—when we get ready to act, there's a simplicity to it, a naturalness, a beauty, and a kind of pleasure. It's something that feels good.

I was so surprised when I started discovering how good it felt just to have these very simple acts of care, attention, and compassion for other people. At first I thought, "Is this okay? Are we allowed to do this?" because it felt so good. Am I doing it now for selfish reasons? But I found very quickly that as soon as I tried to do it for myself, that messed it up. There had to be an absence of self in the action, in the care. There was something deeper than this self-concerned preoccupation that was motivating the whole thing. If it comes from this natural compassion, this natural action, then it's attuned to oneself and attuned to the situation.

Even if the action is sending a check to a good cause, there's a delight, a joy, and a deep satisfaction and happiness to just be able to do that. It isn't like, "Oh, I should do more." It's just, "Yes, this is good." If a friend is suffering, and all that seems right is to just go over and sit near them, you don't have to get more involved. Sit near them and see what happens. Maybe sitting near them might be 10 feet away; sit there and be available and see what happens. There are people sometimes who find it so meaningful as they suffer that they were accompanied from a distance, that someone was there with them. Or maybe you sit closer, but you don't say much, because just sharing the space is enough for them.

Maybe it's getting someone a glass of water. You see they're distressed and ask, "Can I bring you some water? Are you hungry?" There are so many small ways in which compassion can take form. I had this wonderful experience with my son when he was small, maybe five years old. I was going out to a Mexican restaurant to get a burrito with him, and there was a homeless person in front of the restaurant asking for money for some food. So I said, "Well, come with us, and I'll buy you something." He came in and just ordered the simplest thing, like a simple burrito. I asked, "Don't you want more?" and he said, "No, this is enough." We offered for him to eat with us, but he said no and left.

I didn't think too much about it until I left the restaurant, and he was waiting outside for us. He had no paper, but he had found a brown paper shopping bag. He was a poet, and he said, "I wrote a poem, and I want to read it to you in thanks." He read this beautiful poem to us. He didn't give us the poem, but he read it to us, and that was his thanks. I thought, "Wow, who gave who a gift here?" It was pretty simple for me to pay for his burrito, but wow, what a beautiful thing to take the time to write something.

So, what can we do, and how do we do it in a natural way? The action that we do benefits ourselves. If it's only about benefiting someone else, it's too easy for it to get messed up. If it's only about ourselves, it certainly will be messed up. But there's a way of caring for both, to be attuned to both. Being attuned to oneself is not being attuned to our concept of self, our alter ego. To be attuned to oneself is to be attuned to the motivations and the sensations, our suffering and our joys, and our pleasure. It is being attuned to where the beauty is here, the selfless beauty, so that when we act, that is what flowers in us, not our selfishness.

Compassion is a profound and wonderfully natural aspect of the human heart. It's a kind of birthright. At some point, you realize, "This is who I am. This is what I want to orient my life with because it feels so integral and so right." It's not a duty; it's not an obligation. It's an expression of some of the deepest understandings, the deepest ways of being centered here in a selfless way. To be able to come into the world to express this deep, inspiring part of our hearts is one of the greatest things to do in this life. Until we really discover and can live that, don't underestimate that one of the greatest actions you can do is this practice of mindfulness and awareness.

Really cultivate awareness, attunement, appreciation, and aspiration. These four things are part of the profundity of who we are. Practice them, go through them, deepen and clarify them. Then, when the time comes for action, you'll know when the time is. Sometimes the action occurs when nothing else makes sense.

May we all be agents of change, to change the world to make it a better place. I teach the Dharma^[1] to help and support individuals. My aspiration and my trust is that as we individually blossom in the Dharma, we benefit this world. I would like this Dharma to really flower and benefit the whole world. This process of clarifying our compassion is one of the profound ways that we become agents of peace, joy, support, and compassion.

Thank you all very much. Next week I'll be on retreat at the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz. I'm very happy that Nikki Mirghafori^[2] will be coming back—one of the great teachers here at IMC^[3]. You'll be in good hands with her. I'll be back the following week, and I would like to continue this theme of compassion, because there's much more that's invaluable about it. So, I will probably do that when I come back. Thank you very much, and I look forward to being here the week after next.