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Guided Meditation: Earth Element

Good morning friends. Lovely to have this opportunity to be here with you. I feel delighted to be taking Gil's place this week and to spend a little time with you. I'm Susie Harrington, if you turned on your screen and expected to see Gil, you now have a new person. I'll be doing the guided meditation and dharma talks this week, and Gil invited me to come. He specifically was hoping that I would offer some guidance, some instruction around practice in nature. Although I'm also a residential retreat teacher, I particularly enjoy and am committed to practicing outdoors and sharing that with people in the natural world.

Like many of you, I spend a lot of time outside when I can. I spent years as a backcountry ranger and a lot of time hiking. Through those years, I noticed something when I was outside: I was in the natural world, and I really loved being there, but there was still some distance, some disconnect. My mind still sort of ran the show, and the stories would still go in my mind. There was a contactfulness with nature that I felt came in glimpses, but wasn't there a lot of the time.

So as I developed my dharma practice, and as I developed as a teacher, one of the things that became very important to me was this ongoing inquiry about how the natural world is a collaborator, friend, participant, and teacher. Buddhist practice is very deeply rooted in the natural world. The Buddha was born outside, became enlightened under a tree, taught for many decades outside, and died outside. So this is nothing new. This isn't something different that I'm suggesting. It's about bringing it into our practice as we do it now, what the opportunities are, and how we can explore this.

One of the clearest and most direct ways that the Buddha mentioned a lot is through the practice of working with the elements. You may be familiar with the fact that in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[1], he mentions the elements practice as one of the foundational practices, and he uses the elements in many other places as well. So this is the way that I'm going to explore it and offer it this week.

Before we go into the guided meditation, I want to read one quote that is a lovely quote of the Buddha talking to his son Rahula, making a suggestion to him about his meditation practice. This is what he says:

Rahula, develop meditation that is like the earth. For then, agreeable and disagreeable sensory impressions will not take charge of your mind. Just as when people throw what is clean and unclean on the earth—excrement, urine, saliva, pus, or blood—the earth is not horrified, humiliated, or disgusted by it. In the same way, agreeable and disagreeable sensory impressions will not take charge of your mind when you develop meditation like the earth.

So as we begin to sit, this is the first aspect of doing the elements. Today, I'm going to introduce and work with the earth element, and this is the first aspect of it that I'd like to offer and that we can explore in our practice: this sense of stability. The groundedness. We often use that phrase—"I wish I felt grounded" or "I don't feel grounded." I think there's something in that. What we're commenting on is how earth-contactful do we feel? How stable on the ground, with our feet as roots in the ground, so that we can hold steady when what is difficult comes along?

This first practice this week will be an earth element meditation. Go ahead and find your meditation posture. Make yourself comfortable and find a nice upright posture that has a sense of dignity with it.

Allow yourself to relax. Allow yourself to soften. Relaxation in the shoulders. Relaxation around the eyes.

As you settle into your posture, allow yourself to feel the contact with the ground. Perhaps your feet, perhaps your legs. Certainly your buttocks in contact with the cushion or the chair. Whether you're literally on the ground or ten stories up, you're still in contact with the density of the earth. Wherever you are, it's reaching up and pulling down to you. Gravity is like the hug of the earth pulling us towards itself.

Feel the pressure and the contact of that.

Giving yourself a few moments here at the start of the practice to really land where you are. Whatever you've already done today, setting that aside.

And as you land in this spot, allow yourself to sense the environment around you. The space, the room, or the outdoors that you're in.

As we settle in, I want to invite you to feel the earthiness of yourself. To feel the hardness, the density that you carry around as part of your body. Your body is made of earth element.

Feeling perhaps first the hardness of your teeth, the hardness of your bones. This skeleton that is allowing you to sit upright. We have these very dense core aspects of us that are like a kind of mineralized rock, in fact.

And where this hardness meets the pull of the earth, you can feel pressure. This is the earth element, earth contacting earth.

Your flesh, too, not just the bones, has lots of earth element. When we eat food and digest it, we're bringing in earth, moving it around, changing it, incorporating it in our bodies.

We take in the earth, and we become part of the earth. We come from the earth, and we will return to the earth.

Feel the density, the hardness, the pressure of your own body sitting here. And feel the contact it's making with the earth. Feel how you are not so different than a boulder sitting on earth.

As you sit there realizing that you're made of earth, that you're part of the earth, allow your attention to take in more fully the earth below you. Have a sense also of its density, its vastness and abundance.

You might feel it flowing down below you, almost as if you had a taproot going down into the earth. Or perhaps your roots are more spreading, spreading out in all directions.

Let your attention flow down to the ground. Perhaps you might even notice that you could grow roots down into the ground.

You might even imagine that your breath comes up out of the earth through those roots, breathing up, taking in the nourishment of the earth. And as you exhale, letting your breath flow back down through these roots, down below you, out into the ground.

Feel your own weight. You, too, are dust, soil, mineral. Earth sitting on earth.

You are earth breathing. What a miraculous thing. Breathing for the earth.

Allowing your attention to flow down, and to come back.

Earth sitting on earth. Sitting like a mountain.

Can you be steady? Feel this stability, this contactfulness with the ground. This vast, expansive, and supportive ground.

The earth is a vast lap of belonging. You belong here simply because you are of this earth. It could never be otherwise.

Allow yourself to receive this hug, this pull of the earth. Relaxing the body, trusting the structure of your own skeleton. This uprightness of earth sitting on earth.

Allow yourself to rest, knowing that you belong, that you are part of this earth. An active, walking, breathing, sitting expression of earth.

Feel the density of your body, the contactfulness of the pressure, the contact with ground.

Feel the supportive and vast density of the earth.

Letting your roots grow deep, your breath enlivening and further contacting this earth.

Nature as Teacher: Earth Element

So continuing from that earth element... Hopefully you felt, as you were sitting, one of the ways that we can contact the earth element: this way of sensing stability. I mentioned the word contactfulness a lot. It's like we all want contact, and we might look to other people or to situations for it, but the contact is built right into us. We're right here in contact with ground, with earth, with the earth in us all the time. And in that contact with the earth, with this earth element, we're also in contact with a deep equanimity, a right-here-ness.

So this is one of the aspects of the earth element that we can take into our practice, and we can practice it as we did here. You can practice it when you're walking. If you're doing walking meditation, you can feel the contactfulness with the ground, let yourself touch, and let the roots of your feet go down into the ground as if you were a plant moving and walking.

Another aspect of the earth element that's very important—and this is true of all the elements—is a very fundamental teaching of the Buddha around not-self. Here's what he says about practicing with the earth element, internal and external. He said internal and external are simply earth element, and that should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom: "Thus this is not mine, this I am not, this is not myself."

This is a very important aspect of the elements. You heard me touching on this in the guided meditation: this recognition that earth element is flowing through us. We eat and we digest, and it becomes part of us, and then it flows out. We either shed it off our skin, leave it in the toilet, or ultimately it all goes from our bodies when we pass. All of the earth element that is here is only temporarily borrowed.

We can recognize, "Oh look, this is just flowing through. This is not mine. This is not me." There is no inside or outside; it's simply earth element moving around, and I'm part of the place it moves to. When I go for a walk, it's earth element going for a walk. In this, we can sense that we're part of a flow, a continuity—that we are earth come alive. We haven't separated, and this is so important.

We live in a world that is in the trauma of separation. How do we release that belief, that idea that somehow we're separate, that nature is outside, the earth is outside, other people are outside? When we think we're separate, that sets us up, of course, to abuse the earth, to view the earth as somehow something to be extracted from. This also leads to the separation of other people, of other creatures, and otherness.

So this realization—"Oh look, we're all made of the same thing, it's all just earth element moving around"—drops the ownership, the colonial mindset that makes us think we can own a piece of land. Actually, the land owns us. We belong to it.

Another aspect as we're working on this journey towards dropping separation is recognizing the generosity. The exchange is not just mechanical; there's a generosity of exchange happening here. When we eat, we're eating this incredible abundance of the earth.

I love walking through my garden. Right now, there are strawberries out there. There's not so many that I can pick a big basket of them, but there's just the right number that every time I walk by, I can lean down and pick one and be reminded of the abundance of the earth. I notice that this is one of the things I love about walking around in the natural world. When there are berries, and you pick a raspberry or a huckleberry. Or perhaps—the mountains near here got a lot of rain this summer—to go and look at the mushrooms, and to pick the few mushrooms that are actually edible, and to just be amazed that these things come up out of the ground. Then they come into this body, and we're involved in this generous exchange.

Then there are simpler ways. I was just leading a river retreat out on the river, and it was hot. The simplicity of sitting beside a boulder in the shade of it. The generosity of the boulder's shade. The generosity of a tree and sitting under it. The generosity of the breeze moving the leaves—the leaves are earth element being flicked in the breeze. We can receive the generosity and the abundance of the earth in so many ways. As we do that, we naturally have this desire to want to give back to it, to realize we're in this flow.

This leads to another way that we can recognize and participate in our earthiness: that we can take care of the earth. Everybody's felt that when you go out. The simplest way is out in a garden or with plants, but when you make compost, if you've ever done that, it's quite miraculous. You can take all these different things and put them in a pile, and they get all hot, and then they turn into soil and earth, ready to grow again.

The reciprocity of taking care of places that we know. Simple things, like picking up trash that isn't yours, or perhaps you write letters or actively defend places. Edward Abbey^[2], a person from this area that I live in, Moab, Utah, once said, "The wilderness needs no defense, just more defenders." We all can participate. The generosity flowing in and flowing out; it's a reciprocal relationship.

I'm going to end by reading you a short poem from Rabindranath Tagore^[3]:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

I invite you on this day to feel your earthiness. Feel your contact with the ground. Feel the abundance and aliveness of being earth walking on earth, of earth breathing, of belonging. Of you are earth belonging to earth.

Thank you for coming this morning. It's lovely to see a number of familiar faces here in Zoom and to see others, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow if you'd like to join again. Thank you.