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Guided Meditation: "Satisfactory-ness"

Good morning, friends. Good day. Good afternoon. I can see people coming in from all over, all times of day. Welcome. We'll get started in just a minute.

Good morning, all. Glad to see people checking in with one another in the chat. A big welcome to people not involved in the chat. That's most of us.

Okay, 7:00. Welcome. Each day this week as we explore this idea of the heart of practice, I've been providing a different welcome, and I'm trying to see if I can think of a way to bring it into today's theme.

Today's theme, at least in part, is satisfactoriness. A word, like some other words, I'll be kind of making up as we go along today. So, maybe today's welcome welcomes all of us as we are with all the things that aren't perfect, that aren't complete, all the loose ends, all the messiness.

We can bring what we've got, what's available, into our practice today, knowing that that's sufficient, that it's enough, that it's good enough. This is a practice in which we don't have to be perfect. And there's always enough in the practice. There's always enough in the meditation to sustain, to enhance our being here now. So, welcome.

Welcome to here, now, the way it is, the way things are right now. Whatever that means, however incomplete or unsatisfactory that may seem. Practice helps us find some satisfactoriness even in the unsatisfactoriness.

So, let's sit together. Let's prepare the mind for the sharing of the Dharma that's to come by meditating together. And in the theme of the week, we can drop into this meditation by remembering the path. Remembering our way back to this place.

And as we said yesterday, maybe that means it just springs to memory when I say that. Maybe we just allow the path to open up before us, jumping forward from memory with ease. Maybe we do some recollecting. That is, maybe with a little more effort, we remember things like bringing the eyes down. Letting our attention come inward. Letting our attention rest downward into the body, noticing how the body is.

I just noticed as I said that that my shoulders are kind of hunched up, and over the course of a few breaths, I'm going to just let my shoulders soften a bit with each exhalation. That's part of my recollection. A little more effort as I notice how the body is.

So remembering the path, recollecting the path, and finding our way to ease. If it's a path of breadcrumbs, which is an image I like... Sometimes we follow this winding path, and we follow it always at each Y, at each crossing, we incline the mind toward ease. Finding our way toward ease.

We don't have to get all the way there. We don't have to find perfect ease, complete ease. We just keep leaning in toward whatever ease is available.

Maybe there's ease in just being quiet for a while or being in a quiet place. Maybe there's ease in simply bringing our attention inward and downward. Maybe there's ease in resting in the here and now. Attending to the body, attuning to the body, even if there's discomfort in the body. Resting in the flow of experience even if there's emotional currents or patterns of thought that periodically intrude or distract or [clears throat] add turbulence to the meditation.

Maybe there's ease in opening our awareness a little bit to let a little bit more in than we might otherwise. Maybe there's ease in the idea introduced Monday of letting all of our experience have a place in the meditation, excluding nothing. All of us is acceptable here. All of us can show up here. We can show up for all of us here.

Maybe finding our way toward ease means letting go of some of our preferences or softening our constant wanting for things to be other than they are.

So, the ease of practice, something that we keep moving toward as we settle into the meditation can be very satisfying even when it's not full or complete or perfect. It can be satisfactory. Good enough for now, good enough for here. Good enough for the purposes of our meditation practice. Good enough that is for seeing more clearly what's going on in our experience.

You have everything you need right here, right now to be a good enough meditator. To give enough and get enough. To give enough to the meditation and get enough from the meditation. You have everything you need to be more awake, more free in the world.

This enough, this sufficient, this satisfactoriness of the meditation—this is the heart of practice.

So, remembering how to come back here, recollecting how to meet this here and now. This is a way to hold the feeling of unsatisfactoriness that frequently accompanies us in our imperfect and messy lives. We can meet this unsatisfactoriness, I'll suggest today, with the satisfactoriness that's here in the meditation. The enoughness, the sufficientness that we cultivate here and now, collecting our attention and awareness around whatever little bit of ease, whatever clarity is available to us.

This is the heart of practice.

[Bell]

Dharmette: The Heart of Practice (3 of 5); A Little Goes a Long Way

So, welcome. [Clears throat] Welcome back. And today's special welcome is welcome back to all the ways that this experience is incomplete, imperfect, not as we'd want it. Today, we can bring that into the welcome, too. Welcome however you find yourself now, however you're meeting experience.

Today, as I suggested in the guided meditation, the heart of practice is satisfactoriness. A little bit goes a long way is how I've characterized the Dharma. And I mean by that that a little bit of satisfactoriness goes a long way.

So, let's try to tease out some of these themes. A lot of our attention, a lot of our awareness gets wrapped up in, bound up in, caught up in what we perceive as, what we experience as, the unsatisfactoriness of life. We don't like this, we don't like that. We want more, we want different. I think you know what I mean.

And in the meditation, and in the practice more generally, we can find a way to rest in satisfactoriness, enoughness, sufficientness. I'm aware that I'm making up some new words here, some neologisms, some new coinages. I think a lot of teachers find that the Buddhist teachings can't be easily boxed in by the existing words in our languages. And so, we create novel vocabulary in which the experience of meditation, the experience of awakeness, can be more easily accommodated, more easily expressed.

So, satisfactoriness. Sometimes "satisfactory" in our language, in English anyway, means not really good enough. If you do a satisfactory job, that might mean to all of us perfectionists out there that that's not really good enough. I'd encourage you to think about satisfactory in another way.

It has in it "satisfying." It satisfies the necessary conditions. And in this case, the satisfactoriness of the meditation is enough, is sufficient to seeing clearly. That's all we need it for. We only need enough ease and collectiveness of attention to see a little more clearly than we do now. That's a big deal.

So, that's again a way that a little goes a long way. Whatever "satisfactory" might mean in your work life or around the house or with friends, maybe you can put that to one side. It may still have use there as a word. But it can have a different meaning in the meditation practice. Satisfactory can mean just right. Just enough effort, just enough allowing. Enough ease, enough clarity, enough collectiveness.

Particularly today I am suggesting—and I'm putting together a lot of unusual formations of words, at least they work this way in English—today I'm particularly suggesting that what makes for, or what constitutes, the satisfactoriness in the meditation is any degree of collectiveness of mind that helps us see more clearly.

And I want to return to the idea of recollection from yesterday. Yesterday, in referring to mindfulness, I talked about one rendering of the word sati^[1], which is sometimes translated as mindfulness, is "recollection." Recollecting the path, either when it doesn't just unfold on itself, sometimes we need to recollect the way, recollect the method. A little more effort is involved.

And we can explore today another way that recollection works in our practice. Pulled apart as "re-collecting," recollection describes the way every time we sit, we bring together again, we gather up again, we recollect our attention and our awareness.

And as I tried to point to in the guided meditation, one way we do this is to collect our attention, gather our awareness around ease. That's our orientation. The ease is pleasant, and it's a wholesome pleasant, and it leads us toward beautiful things.

Sometimes we have to be very attuned to notice where it is. As we notice, and as we incline the mind toward greater ease, we collect our attention and gather together our awareness around that ease.

We can do this even when there isn't a lot of ease, calm, or peace available. Sometimes our meditation, particularly in a short sit at the first of the morning of half an hour, there's not a whole bunch of ease or calm or peace available. Particularly in the first fifteen to twenty minutes when the mind naturally takes some time to settle down, even for people who've been meditating for decades.

But we only need a little bit. That's what I want to keep stressing today. We only need a little, and that little can be imperfect. A little goes a long way, and our practice doesn't have to be perfect to be powerful.

I'm going to move away from the notes I have in my mind to just say, in the guided meditation I remember saying, "You have everything you need to be a good meditator, to find ease, to find clarity, to see clearly in this practice."

We sometimes feel like we don't have enough. We need more, and part of that can be this reflection of perfectionism, that we're looking to perfect our practice, to master this. All of that may be useful in other parts of life. In this practice though, we have to let a lot of that go and be content with the ease, the calm, the peace that are available, the amount, the quantum of collectedness that's there.

And this is nicely characterized by this idea of satisfactoriness. There's a way in which letting go of the [sighs] idea of trying to make it perfect is related to this as a heart of practice. I could probably go on with this for several weeks. But in a way, letting go of perfection as part of today, that too is the heart of practice. Such a relief.

So, notice maybe sometimes when we want the meditation to be completely still, completely easeful, completely peaceful or calm, or just to be complete. In reality, it's seldom complete, and that's just the nature of life, right?

So, in this practice, we don't resist the nature of life. We rest in it. We even revel in it. We want to be in the flow of the nature of life. Every once in a while, all the conditions align, external and internal, and there's total ease in the meditation, completeness. Great. Enjoy that when it happens.

But most days, what we've got to work with, what we have at hand, is whatever ease, whatever collectedness is available. And we can lean into what's there, what's available. Incline the mind toward what's available. Over time, this inclination of mind toward the ease that's available helps it grow and prosper, and it creates momentum, propensity, it creates a path that we can return to again and again.

How might we practice to strengthen satisfactoriness in the meditation practice? Maybe I've already pointed to this, but the first thing, and perhaps the most important thing, is to notice the gentle arising of stillness, collectiveness, contentment, balance, clarity, equanimity in the meditation. Any little bit of any of those kinds of things, and you may have your own ways or your own words to characterize what it is that feels good and right and wholesome about the meditation experience. Notice that.

And it's interesting I emphasize "notice that" because I think sometimes we don't recognize how important the noticing is. But that's how we're bringing the mind's attention, and there's brain chemistry behind this. When we notice something, we're strengthening connections to it. So when we notice it, and all we need to do is notice it, it gets stronger. And when we notice something that's wholesome, that feels good in a wholesome way, it becomes stronger.

I've already said the second thing. The second most important thing is that once we've noticed them, we should enjoy them. You may have noticed that I dropped the word "should" in there. I did that purposefully. We seldom use the word "should" in this practice. There's a way in which we put a lot of shoulds to one side, but the Buddha is quoted in numerous places in the Pali texts instructing us, enjoining us, inviting us, encouraging us to actively enjoy the satisfactoriness that's available in the meditation.

And this too has brain chemistry involved. When we actively enjoy something that's good for us in a wholesome way, it gets stronger. This is what we mean sometimes when teachers use the phrase to "cultivate" something, like cultivate satisfactoriness in the meditation. I could be saying this is how these things are cultivated: noticing them, enjoying them if they're wholesome. That's how we cultivate them.

So, with an eye on the clock and wrapping up, when we put this practice of orienting ourselves toward satisfactory, toward sufficient, toward enough in the practice, we create an easy path to reconnect with when we meditate. Instead of looking for something that's way up there or way over there, I'm going to get into this idea tomorrow that we're not trying to get anywhere else.

What we have right here, with all its imperfections, with all its partialness—another word I'm making up—with all its complications, this is enough. This is satisfactory. This is sufficient. This is adequate. A lot of different words we could use.

Some of you may recognize that the word dukkha^[2], the word that's frequently translated as suffering and sometimes as stress in our practice, is also translated as unsatisfactoriness. This persistent feeling of not having enough, not being enough, of wanting more, wanting different, liking this, not liking that.

This unsatisfactoriness of life meets in our practice and in the depths of the meditation with an important satisfactoriness. We can come to be confident that what we have here, what we bring to the meditation, what we derive from the meditation is enough. We don't have to wait for the meditation to become any different than it is now. We don't have to wait for it to become perfect to benefit from it and put it to good use.

So, to wrap all this up before our end time today, and I'm saying this to all of us perfectionists out there. Again, maybe it's a useful quality in certain parts of life, getting ahead in work, but in the practice, if we ever find ourselves thinking that only perfect is good enough, remember that in this practice, good enough is perfect.

If ever we find ourselves thinking, "Oh, only perfect, only mastery, only complete understanding, only perfect is good enough," remember, in this practice, good enough is perfect.

This is the heart of practice.

Till tomorrow, friends. Looking forward to that. And take care. Have a good day, wherever you are.