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Guided Meditation: Fire Element

Hello everybody, greetings. Greetings from Los Altos, California. I'm seeing greetings in the chat. Nice to be with you all again here. Thank you, everyone. For those who wish to settle in and arrive, just take a few generous moments to do that. I will begin momentarily.

Hello everyone, welcome. Welcome to our sitting and practicing together. I invite you all to arrive. Arrive here. The sense I'm having right now is active; we're all settling into a quiet meditation hall. Maybe a little bit of gentleness and care is offered as we settle in.

Arriving here gently, softly. Not jerking ourselves around, not forcing anything to happen. Quietly settling into a sitting posture, or whatever posture you're taking for this next 45 minutes or so. Arriving may be a process for most of us. Take some moments to arrive.

Allow the body to really sit down, maybe with some intentionality, being deliberate, taking a sitting posture. Now we make ourselves available to however the body is sitting. Making contact with the floor, the chairs. When the arrival becomes full, maybe we also feel the support of the ground. Landing here and now in present experience. And our awareness is already here, knowing that we're here in this body, this mind.

Receiving sound, sensations in the body, fleeting thoughts, maybe ripples of emotions. We are available to this. Not wishing something else to happen, or being pulled by our preferences. Available to this.

From a stable ground, we align. Align our body, heart, and mind with our aspirations, values, and integrity. Virtue, inner virtue^[1]. We align with the wholesome, skillful, and beneficial to ourselves and others. Sometimes the alignment is about some kind of ease in the body, maybe in the heart. A heart unburdened.

Whenever you're ready, open your awareness to receive the felt sense of the earth element. The hardness of the bones. Weight settling down. Sort of a strain holding this body up; the bones are holding this body up. Maybe a hint of stillness coming along with the earth element. The earth element is grounding and, relatively speaking, unmoving. Relatively speaking—not totally unmoving. Allow this earthy body to rest on earth.

With the steadiness and stillness of the earth element, maybe you are already aware of the air element. Movements of the breath. Vibration, bubbly sensations in the body. There is a stillness in the earth element, and there is a movement in the air element. A still, moving body.

The water element may reveal itself. Feeling into the water element. Moisture in the mouth. Moisture around the eye sockets and eyes. Maybe you feel some sense of fluidity inside of the body. More than 70 percent of our body is water. The water element may settle along with the earth element. There may be a sense of sitting in a still pond of water. There may be waves or ripples on the surface^[2]—thoughts, emotions. Yet they can be held by stillness, quiet.

Letting go of any momentum trying to figure it out, matching some ideas we may have in our head. Let the body speak for itself. We are available to the felt sense of the body, however it manifests itself.

Now if you wish, maybe you can follow along. I'm becoming available to the fire element in the body. Maybe there's some warmth in your palms. Coolness on some part of the skin. Warmth of the out-breath. Maybe coolness everywhere. This body experiences different temperatures. You may even feel some heat in the belly or the chest. The coolness of the skin on the face.

Certain emotions may have an embodied fire element in us. Anger and frustration may be felt as some kind of heat inside the torso. Without trying to push them away or wishing them to go away, resting in the knowing of the fire element, the embodied experience just as it is. Being kind and truthful to this experience.

From here, we make our awareness wide open. Receiving whatever is available to us. Stay true to whatever arises and passes away. The stillness of the earth element may be prominent, or the movement of the air element is obvious, or the heat or the coolness is clear. However it is, receiving. Receiving the blessing of this life.

The Blessings of Sila - The Fourth Precept (4 of 5)

I feel quite fortunate to be able to spend this morning sitting with you, practicing Dharma, and exploring Dharma. Today we'll continue our discussion around sīla^[3], and we're going to speak about the fourth precept, which is to undertake the training of abstaining from false speech.

I wanted to expand this a little bit because, clearly, in our modern-day societies, speech has broadened out a lot more. With many different modalities—the internet, social media, emails, lots of different devices that we use—it's not the same as 2,500 years ago when a verbal exchange was mostly the only way to explore the aspect of communication. Now we have so many modalities that we're engaging in to communicate and exchange information. So this precept, in our day and life now, I would expand it to include all of these modalities. We undertake the training to abstain from false communication or lying through all these different ways, or propagating misinformation and miscommunication. This is under this training precept for our day and life here as well. And so again, I wanted to explore this from the dimensions of awareness, abstinence, and alignment. That's the "triple-A" framework we've been talking about.

Instead of speaking about lies or lying today, I wanted to start with truth. Staying true, dedicating ourselves to truth. In our guided meditation, I guided briefly for us to tune in to the truth of our experience. As we cultivate mindful awareness, we can become sensitive to our own heart, mind, and body, and we can begin to notice what is true. What is the felt sense of truth within us, and what is the felt sense of not being truthful?

For me, the felt sense of truth has some sense of alignment in my body, heart, and mind. My body, heart, and mind are in harmony with each other, not like one wants to go one direction and the other goes another direction. Cultivating clear awareness is very important for us to begin to know what's true and what is untrue. Without the cultivation of clear awareness, the state of delusion might often cover up what might be true.

I'm very aware of a certain conditioning I have. I'm an Asian American, and sometimes I would notice that when I'm in a group with other people from other cultures that I'm not familiar with, if I'm the only person who's not in the dominant culture in the group, when people say things and it feels like everybody else knows what they're saying—they're laughing, they're nodding—here I am. I have no clue what they're talking about because I didn't grow up with this kind of culture that the group is expressing. There are moments when I would notice: do I nod as if I know, or not?

For me, this is a learning. I learned that when I am pretending that I know, there's something off inside of me, something not aligned. I learned in situations like this to not give in to the tendency of simply following along, pretending, or maybe feeling embarrassed if I don't know something that everybody else seems to know. All this little kind of "self" thing going on pulls us out of staying true to what we know and what we don't know.

I learned that it's okay to say, "I don't know." In fact, many times people are very happy to tell me what they know, and I learn something new. Rather than carrying the burden of misalignment in our heart, mind, and bodies, when we really tune in to our inner being in situations and begin to discern this kind of alignment, we can become clear. We can practice this precept with a lot of lightness in our bodies and heart. If you observe little kids, especially when they're quite young, if they tell deliberate lies, sometimes you see that something is kind of off in them; they're not quite themselves. In the same way, that may be true for adults as well.

This cultivation of awareness is to begin to get to know this felt sense of truthfulness and the felt sense of the untrue or dishonest. When we can stay connected with that sense of truth, we can then trust more and more what flows out of that place: our words and our actions.

There is a teaching in the Majjhima Nikaya sutta (MN 61)^[4]. It is a sutta that the Buddha taught his son, Rahula. Rahula was about seven years old, a very young monk who apparently had told a deliberate lie. So the Buddha decided to give him a teaching. I'm not going to go through the entire teaching here, but the Buddha ended a section of the teaching to Rahula by saying this: "Rahula, when one is not ashamed to tell a deliberate lie, there is no evil, I say, that one would not do. Therefore, Rahula, you should train thus: I will not utter a falsehood, even as a joke."

That's quite a strong statement to a young kid, right? It made me pause just to reflect, what is the Buddha pointing at here? What does it mean to tell a deliberate lie without feeling ashamed of it? Just taking a few moments to pause right there, what might this be pointing towards? For me, there was a vivid image of piling mud on top of thick mud, layers of delusions piling up. The first thick layer of mud is the deliberate lie, and not having a moral conscience is kind of like piling another thick layer on top. Now the truth is really far away, hard to get access to.

I wanted to say a few words about having this conscience, to know, "Oh, I may have engaged in an action that wasn't wholesome." Having a moral conscience^[5] in the classic teachings is said to be the guardian of our heart and mind, so we can reflect about the consequences of unskillful actions, speech, and communications, and then we can begin to have a choice moving forward. From this point on, without this moral conscience, without something that we feel in our heart that isn't aligned, it's pretty hopeless, right? Imagine that. Can you imagine living in a world where people will behave in harmful ways, but there's no protection of some form of moral conscience? I have a hard time imagining living in a world like that.

Having the moral conscience to know, and letting this moral conscience also have a dimension of care and wisdom in it, knowing, "Whoa, this wasn't skillful, and now I'm going to make a different choice." Now we have an opportunity to train our heart and mind in a different orientation.

I also wanted to go back to the importance of staying true because lies break trust amongst human beings. Lies break our own inner integrity. We human beings live our lives depending on trusting each other on some levels. When we can really have that deep trust for our own actions, speech, and activities, and we can trust others, there is so much safety in us, so much well-being that can come from it. Because of this, it's important to undertake this training precept to abstain from false speech and false communication.

We align ourselves with the truth, and we cultivate wise, skillful speech that is kind, unifying, beneficial, and conducive to creating safety and trust. I'll end by quoting again the Mangala Sutta^[6], the sutta for blessings. It has a few lines speaking to this. It says: "Education and a craft, discipline and training, and well-spoken speech—this is the highest blessing."

May we all continue our journey of practice. May our practice benefit all beings. Thank you all for being here today, and I'll see you tomorrow. Have a wonderful rest of the day wherever you are.