Guided Meditation: Thought as the exhaust from engine of affect; Dharmette: Humor and Playfulness in the Dharma

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Thought as the exhaust from engine of affect; Humor & Playfulness in the Dharma. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 15, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Welcome, folks. I appreciate seeing your names over there. Welcome to the 8:00 a.m. session here. I thought Gil and I made a mistake, but actually, eight o'clock is a more dignified time for me to speak. So you all are benefiting from the pharmacodynamics of caffeine—a better profile. And I am awake, so let's sit together.

Guided Meditation: Thought as the exhaust from engine of affect

Stay tuning... attuning to the present. In the way we might attune to another human being in front of us.

To attend to another human being is to cultivate empathy. To clarify the inner landscape of the other—it's attunement. To be responsive to the inner landscape of the other. And of course, meditation is a kind of self-directed empathy, attunement.

This pool of affect, of feeling energies sloshing around, of emotion that calls out for its objects. And so, a surge of feeling in the body, affect. And then a kind of interpretation of what it means for this moment, what it means for my life. For what I must have, what I must rid myself of.

So much of our thinking, proliferation, is like a smoke rising off of the engine of affect.

We're always reading the tea leaves of our body, coming to conclusions about what we want and don't want.

So natural, adaptive, to be able to do this some of the time. But fatiguing for our heart to do it all the time.

And so here in our practice, as the energies of our body surge, and swell, and bloom, and collapse, we're practicing not over-interpreting any event, not making it mean too much. Treating all of the urgency that our feeling life creates as a kind of false alarm.

For so long we've made our feelings, our affect, mean so much. So many things, so many objects born of that feeling. So many plans and strategies of acquisition, of removal. But now our feeling, our affect, means one thing so often: suffer.

Pleasant means good. Unpleasant means bad. But in our practice, we revere all experience for its capacity to soften our heart.

In the pleasantness, we abide, rejuvenating our heart, truly resting, letting the Dharma saturate.

In the unpleasantness, we let the imperfection soften the somethingness of ego. We call it purification.

Staying empathically connected to yourself, to experience, to the richness of our feeling life.

Dharmette: Humor and Playfulness in the Dharma

Okay, it's good to sit with you. I saw some chats about the cyclone, Gil, and Ajahn Sucitto^[1]. I have not been in touch with Ajahn Sucitto. Nancy has been in touch with Gil, and I reached out to the retreat center. They're safe and sound, and they're still posting to DharmaSeed^[2] actually. So, excuse me.

I was talking with a yogi after a retreat, and they said something like, "You know, I'm suspicious of spiritual teachers who lack a sense of humor. The lack of a sense of humor usually means they haven't reached deep into the mystery." That's what they said. And for a long time, I thought the Dharma was serious business, and Dharma teaching is even more serious.

I'll tell you how I got my nickname, "Captain Buzzkill." I have a lot of joy in my life, but little excitement. Even things that I wind up enjoying a lot, I'm not excited about in advance. And that's not because I'm trying to be all "Buddhist present" or whatever; that's just probably more temperamental. My younger brother is kind of the reverse, more on the excitement side. Years ago, he was telling me something that he was excited about, and I was kind of like, "Well, the First Noble Truth^[3] is still true," or whatever. [Laughter] And he was just like, "You know who you are? You're Captain Buzzkill." That nickname has kind of stuck with me.

So today, the theme is playfulness and humor. That's next on my list: Monday, surrender; yesterday, humor; playfulness today.

There is this sense that the intensity and the poignancy of life are somehow in contention with the humor of it—that it is incompatible in some way. But one of the gifts of Buddhist practice is how quickly even strong forces can move through us, leaving sort of no trace and opening us to a very different next moment. Poignancy, and then delight. Grief, and then humor.

The seriousness is often driven by ego, which is, I think, by nature serious. The hallmark of ego is a subtle kind of defensiveness and territoriality, and the ego definitely doesn't think it's funny. It can get tight in there, and certainly in retreat: my meditation, my insight, my samadhi^[4], my enlightenment—it gets serious. And yet, this is a long path, a deep path, and playfulness and humor are needed at various points along the path.

What are the characteristics of playing? To play in the way a child plays, there's non-vigilance. We cannot be playing when we're patrolling everything. There's an absence of self-consciousness. We play in the absence of that congealed sense of self. You can't play if you're trying to look cool or smart; you cannot play. It's a performance, and play is not a performance. Play is the inclusion of our whole being, at ease with ourselves in a kind of flow. It's a beautiful thing to see a child at play, and it's a beautiful thing for us to play. It's intrinsically rewarding. We're not getting anywhere, we're not building towards something—we're playing.

Donald Winnicott^[5], a psychoanalyst and pediatrician, said psychotherapy takes place at the overlap of two areas of playing: that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. Where playing is not possible, the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.

And a lot of that can be said for the Dharma, too. Where can you play? Where can we play? Where can we not? Can we play with our foibles? Play in the zones of clinging? Play even, maybe, with our shame?

As the egoic framework becomes less and less of an organizing factor in our lives, we open to humor and play. Because a lot of what is painful in the presence of ego is playful in its absence. As we come to take ourselves less seriously, we can play with the conventions of self, with who we think we are. We play with it. In other words, we become the joke, and it feels good.

I've always loved when people make fun of me somehow—well, not when I was in middle school, but if they're making fun of me with love, it's a delight. And making fun of myself, there's delight there too, actually. It's not like a casual making fun; I'm actually making fun of myself, but from love. The Buddha says something like, "Don't deprecate yourself when you're teaching," and I get that, but I am making fun of myself from love.

Part of how we can relate to our defilements is actually through some sense of humor. In our playfulness, there's a kind of relief. We release some of that affect. Sometimes affect can really go more than one way—it can become shame or pain, or it can become humor, lightness.

Where can we play? Where can't we? And where we can't, it is a signal. It is a little warning light of egoic seriousness. But our path is both serious and playful.

I went to a workshop—a sort of breathing, pranayama-ish^[6] practice—with a couple of friends years ago, alongside a couple of other Buddhist people. It was not a Buddhist practice, but I got into a very interesting mind state. It was a 90-minute session, and we were in the dark, breathing. Maybe an hour in—I think we were lying down—I started to hear this woman next to me start crying. The poignancy of it brought tears to me. We had met very briefly; I didn't know who she was, but, "Okay, I'm hearing crying, I'm gonna be crying too," and I started crying.

Coexisting perfectly, in perfect harmony with those tears, that empathic connection of whatever she was feeling, was humor. Not laughing at her, for sure, and not laughing at myself, but humor. Laughing deeply, deeply. And coexisting with the tears and with the humor was this abiding peace. As if I were miles beneath the surface of the sea. So still, and yet convulsing with laughter and with tears.

And this is our life. So may we find the coexistence of grief, of seriousness, of earnestness, of play, of humor, of lightness, and keep going.

Conclusion

Okay, it's good to be with you. We'll gather back again tomorrow. I wish you all a good day, and I appreciate being with you in this way together.