Guided Meditation: Relaxing; Dharmette: A Monastery Within story (1 of 5) Inside Out

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxing; A Monastery Within story (1 of 5) Inside Out. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 05, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing

Good morning everyone and good day for those who are in different time zones. And so this week I'm going to be here with you for this 7 A.M. practice and sharing Dharma. So I feel just really happy to be here with you all. And so we'll begin with about half an hour of meditation.

So for this week, I feel like I'm still riding along with the waves of the two-week retreat that Gil^[1] taught in May, and so I'm going to channel some of the teachings from that retreat. And so this morning meditation will be guided by a set of words that starts with R, and today I will start with relaxing. And so that's where we're going to begin our guided meditation today.

So if you like to join me, please allow yourself to settle into a sitting posture that's supportive of sitting for about half an hour, 45 minutes.

To begin, maybe take a few long deep breaths. As you breathe out, allow the whole body to settle towards the ground. Maybe allow the whole body to ever so slightly begin to relax. I'll offer a guided body scan to relax the whole body.

Maybe feeling and sensing into the lower half of the body. Feeling the feet touching the ground, maybe the sit bones making contact with floor, chairs, bed, wherever you may be meditating from. Relaxing the feet, relaxing the pelvic floor. Relax, whatever relaxing might mean to you. For me it's a sense of settling down. Allow the weight of the body to settle downwards. Maybe a sense of letting go of any extra tension, unnecessary tension that may be holding the legs, the feet.

So relaxation is not a demand. It's a gentle invitation. If the body doesn't want to relax, maybe relax about that.

Relaxing the lower half of the abdominal area, and relaxing the whole belly. Just as if the breathing can freely flow. Belly can freely rise and fall. There isn't any extra constriction. A gentle invitation to relax the constriction.

Softening and relaxing the lower back, however it might manifest itself. It could be just feeling the back softening and easing up. Relaxing the waist area and the upper back. Allow the weight of the torso to settle simply by trusting gravity. Nothing to do here.

Softening and relaxing the chest. There may be a slight opening. Softening the shoulders, arms, and hands. Allow the shoulders to naturally drop. The body is naturally supported by the earth underneath us. There's no need for extra effort to hold up. Relaxing the muscles around the arms and softening any tension that could be softened.

Relaxing the muscles around the neck, in the front of the neck, sides, and the back. Relaxing the face, muscles on the face, the jaw. You can even soften the tongue inside the mouth. If it's helpful you can open the mouth slightly and gently close. Release any tension, constriction, tightness. Soften around the eyes and forehead and scalp. Soften whatever may be softened right here.

Relaxing the mind. Wherever the mind might be located in your body. And relaxing the thinking muscles. As we relax the body and mind, you may notice that your experience becomes clear. The whole body is at ease. The mind is at ease, heart is open, soft. The movements of the breath, sensations in the body, become clear, visible, felt.

If you find your energetic field feels a little dull, can you dial up a little clarity without adding tension to the experience? The relaxed mind and heart allow clear seeing. Clear recognition. If you find tension picking up again, or striving is present, you simply in a relaxed way invite easing, relaxing, and softening. Just a gentle invitation, they don't have to go away.

Allow your awareness to be relaxed. As if whatever arises and passes away is held by the field of relaxed awareness. Relaxed awareness already has the flavors of kindness, the flavor of tenderness.

Dharmette: A Monastery Within story (1 of 5) Inside Out

For this next part of the Dharmette^[2], if you wish to continue to be kind of in the meditative mode, please continue to sit in your meditative posture. Sometimes I feel that the Dharma talks, when being received in a meditative way, have a different effect on me, and so I offer that as a possibility.

So for this week's Dharmettes, I'd like to channel Gil's wisdom^[3] by reading a set of stories, tales from Gil Fronsdal's^[4] book called A Monastery Within. And the stories that I selected from this book form a theme, which has to do with the Dharma practice, right? The Dharma path. In particular, these stories hopefully will offer some aspect of the sense of the multi-faceted or multi-dimensional nature of the Dharma practice. I think for most of us, if not all of us, sooner or later as our practice unfolds, we'll come to realize that the practice or the path, the Dharma path we walk, is not what we think it may be like.

So to me, this is the case for me when I first started the practice. I thought if I just read and understood, studied enough in my head, then that'll do it. And so you know, I did a ton of readings and studies of suttas and books, and discussed them in groups, until I felt like my head was about to explode if there's more information to be stuffed in my head. And so I realized that the Dharma path is more than sort of this information accumulation in my head.

And so that opened me to extend or expand my practice. The books also said meditating is important, right? So I sat and meditated at home, on retreats, until at some point I realized, well, there is more to the practice than this form also. And so the practice began to expand even further. It included family life, and particularly after my son was born, that whole journey included caring for my family relationships, relationships with close circles, and then expanded to relationships with other people I don't know well or I don't know at all.

And so this practice began to expand in many different dimensions. I realized at some point I began to reflect on how I choose to live my life, how I behave or speak, and the attitudes I hold living this life. And at some point I began to ask myself, what do I exclude? So this is a long way to say that the practice is multi-dimensional or multifaceted. And so the art of our practice is to begin to open ourselves to this multi-dimensional nature of our practice, our path, because all of those different dimensions support each other and inform each other.

And so each of the stories that I'll be reading this week points to some dimensions of the practice that one may or may not have considered. And they're not exactly what you must do or have to do, like what the stories are pointing to, but rather they serve as metaphors to point to how one might open oneself up to the multitudes of the practice. And so as I read the stories, sometimes I'll be offering some reflections and commentaries, and this might be an invitation for you as well to incorporate some of your own reflections.

So that's enough said. I'm going to read the first story of this week. So this is called Inside Out.

An engineer had been a regular and devoted visitor to the monastery for many years. The meditation practice taught at the monastery was the only thing that made sense to him. In fact, the pragmatic logic of the meditation teachings gave him hope that he would overcome his chronic unhappiness and deeply felt pain. He tried all the meditation practices that the abbess taught him. He began each practice technique with enthusiasm, only to have each end with the same frustration. He would encounter a wall he could not pass. The closer he came to the wall, the more he would recoil back into trying to think his way out of his pain. Offering him much support, the abbess encouraged him to relax, trust the practice, and to simply feel his inner pain without reacting to it. After many years, the abbess decided a different approach was needed.

During his next visit to the monastery, the abbess told him that if he wanted to continue being her student and to be able to return to the monastery, he would have to take on a special practice. Once he had completed the assignment, he could then return for deeper teachings. Once more feeling hope, the engineer quickly agreed. The abbess said, "For two years, I want you to volunteer ten hours a week at the maternity ward at the local hospital. The hospital needs people to hold babies who are born prematurely. If they don't receive enough physical contact, the babies will not grow healthy. When you have finished these two years, please come back to see me."

The man was quite perplexed by this instruction, but because of his trust in the abbess and his failure to find any relief elsewhere, he plunged into volunteering in the maternity ward. He was surprised at how small and fragile the babies were that he helped. He would hold them ever so carefully. He would watch their every breath because they all seemed in danger of stopping breathing. He spent a lot of time thinking about how he could more effectively care for the babies he held. But there was nothing more effective than simply holding them against his chest. After about six months, he started feeling something quite new. He started to feel a little spot of warmth and softness in the very center of his being. Since this was a foreign experience that didn't fit any of the ways he thought about himself, he ignored it. Ignoring it was the best thing he could have done, because it prevented him from interfering with the warmth by thinking about it too much. Over the following months, the tender spot grew until it pervaded his body. As it did, the cold, dark wall around his heart slowly relaxed, thawed, and dissolved.

When he had completed his two years of volunteering in the maternity ward, the engineer returned to the monastery. The abbess saw immediately he was a changed man. He was no longer desperate, and he was no longer trying to fit everything he experienced into a conceptual framework. Now he wanted to learn what else the abbess had to teach. Giving him a new instruction, the abbess said to him, "When you meditate, don't think about what is happening. Rather, let your awareness be seated in the tender warmth you feel in your body. If you do this, any meditation practice you do will be fruitful." The man found this to be true.

So what might be the walls that block the deepening and the richness of your Dharma path? In this story, the abbess is the one who offered the new instructions to the engineer, but for each of us, the abbess may be ourselves. We may have to discover the wall and new possibilities for ourselves. And like myself, at some point on my journey, I realized more study, more reading, is only going to build a thick wall. And so I had to open to new dimensions of the practice. And similarly, just like this engineer, often we may practice using a lot of conceptual frameworks that we learned about, but we don't quite know how to practice in an embodied way. And so for this engineer, holding the premature baby softened and opened him up to get in touch with his own direct embodied experience. And so for each of us, we may have to discover what the pointer of holding a baby is in some different ways.

For many of us, we know that the Dharma path is often described as a threefold practice of sīla^[5], samādhi^[6], and paññā^[7]. And so sometimes, maybe the ethical dimension is challenging, and this can be a wall for ourselves, and maybe sometimes we have to cultivate ethical conduct in order for other dimensions of the practice to come along. So it's quite rich and there's a whole territory, and my invitation today is to discover and open your practice in a multitude of ways. And I will continue tomorrow in this way. So thank you everyone for your presence and your practice, and may this bring benefit to yourself and to all beings everywhere. Thank you everyone, have a wonderful day.