Guided Meditation: Feeling and Tasting; Dharmette: Tastes of Freedom (1 of 5) Faculty of Taste

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Feeling and Tasting; Dharmette: Tastes of Freedom (1 of 5) The Faculty of Taste. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Meg Gawler at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 12, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Feeling and Tasting

Greetings, everybody. I'm touched to be here again with all of you. I've been a participant in this forum ever since it started. It's really quite something that Gil created here, and that all of you and all of us have helped to create this family of practitioners.

So, to begin the meditation, take your meditation posture. Upright, a little bit more upright than usual maybe, but even more importantly, relaxed to the extent possible.

Lower your eyes, and take a little trip inside your body, starting with the feet. And wherever you scan through, see if you can also, when becoming conscious of something like the feet, relax the feet. And the legs. The hips. The belly.

Moving up to the heart center, feel what the predominant flavor of the heart center is right now. It might be open and receptive. It might be anxious, fearful, or lacking in confidence. Or it might be brimming with joy, or it might be grieving. As you well know, however it is, that's just fine, because that is our lived reality.

And if there is a key to awakening, the key is to be able to cultivate our lived experience. As you know, our lived experience occurs only in the present moment. We can't live in the past. We may want to remake the past, or dwell in the past, or recriminate, but that's not the door to awakening. And if we're an anxious type, we might be planning or thinking of what we're going to do next, or preparing for the next thing. Living in the future, as you know, is not the door to awakening either.

So the simple, profound ask in front of us as we meditate is to just be here with whatever arises.

In the last series that I gave in February, the theme was "Opening the Dharma Heart." In my own experience, this opening of the heart has not been easy, has not been terribly straightforward, and has taken a long time and still has a ways to go. So again, don't sit on unrealistic expectations for your meditation, saying that there's something wrong with you if you can't just stay in the present moment. This is a sort of wisdom, really, that we have to cultivate because it is not innate.

Unfortunately, what is innate in us is reactivity. Either we're grasping and wanting more of something that's pleasant, or we have aversion and we're turning away from something we don't want to experience. The only way to be able to make the choice of living, even if it's just for a few seconds, in the present moment is to have well-cultivated mindfulness. As we cultivate it, it becomes more and more continuous. But when we're beginners, this kind of real awareness in the present moment—not someplace else, not on the thought trains, not in the recriminations or the fantasies—just being satisfied enough with this moment, that's the key to learning to have awareness and mindfulness that is more continuous. And that's what allows us to go deeper in meditation.

So we were doing a body scan, and we've been in the heart center for a while. So now let's continue with the shoulders. Are there any tensions in the shoulders we might be able to let go of? Or if it's not possible to let go, to soften around it. Going down the arms, the elbows, the forearms, the wrists, and the hands, what might we let go of here?

And now coming into the head area, take a moment to see if the head is easily supported by the spinal column—not drooping forward, not leaning back or to one side or to another. Because if the head is not well-centered with our source of gravity, that creates additional tension which makes it harder to be present.

And now taking a long, deep inhale, followed by a long, complete exhale. And now following the cycle of the breath.

I like to think of the cycle of the breath as an oval. This is not Buddhist, but I've found it useful. The oval begins at the perineum and goes up the back, and then continues over the head and over the fontanelle—which is that little space between the bones of the skull which is still an open gateway—and then down the front, slowly. So at whatever rhythm is your rhythm—doesn't matter if it's fast or slow or medium—follow your natural breathing. If you like the idea of trying out this oval, going up in the back, over the head, and down in the front, and then returning to the perineum and starting over again, please feel free to try it out. And if that's not your cup of tea, just do it your way, that's fine.

Our intention for the rest of this meditation is to, to the extent possible, stay with the breath on the whole cycle of the inhale and the exhale. And if a slight smile should come to your lips, that may express the flavor of joy, which is nourishment for staying here in the present.

[Silence for meditation]

In the last few minutes of this sitting, the invitation is to discern or get in touch with the flavor of your experience in this moment. Maybe it's sweet, salty, bitter, sour. However it is, let that be known and accept it.

So we breathe in our internal reality with things just the way they are. We don't need to change anything to appreciate being alive.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, let's take a moment to offer the benefits of our practice to all beings everywhere, without exception.

We have had the good fortune to embark on this beautiful path. And of course, it has its ups and downs. But little by little, we become more and more able to be aware, to dwell in our awareness in the present moment, and to be satisfied with the gift of the breath, not needing anything else.

So by the goodness of our practice, we open our hearts and radiate good wishes to all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Tastes of Freedom (1 of 5) Faculty of Taste

Greetings, everyone. It's a genuine delight to be back here practicing with all of you. Many of you have been in this Dharma group since its inception in the spring of 2020, as I have been. I think it's remarkable, the meditation community that we've been able to create together. And I do mean together. Of course, we owe everything to Gil who initiated this, but the way this meditation group has evolved has been in response to all of the participants all over the world. So I would just like to honor everything that all of you have brought to this community and continue to bring to this community.

When I was standing in for Gil in February, I talked about opening the Dharma heart. I made some reference to my own path and my own difficulties in opening my heart. I would just like to share with all of you that if you find this practice not so easy, you're not alone, and I'm with you on that.

For some of us, it takes a long time. Some of us are naturals and we become free, or at least the initial stages of freedom we can manage to do relatively quickly. But for many of us, it takes not just years, but in my case, decades. So it's really important not to set the bar too high, because if we do, we'll get frustrated, we may be discouraged, and we may quit. But I think all of you who have been practicing for some time, if you look back on how you were before you started practicing and then how you developed over time, chances are you've learned some things and chances are you're a little bit more comfortable and at ease in this body and mind than you may have been before you started.

So for this coming week, a theme that I've chosen is "Tastes of Freedom." Freedom is a big word and there are many degrees of freedom. There's a whole gamut of little smidgens of freedom, and then something a little bit more substantial, and then maybe a little bit deeper, or maybe a little bit more embodied and lasting.

For most of us, it does take time. But I do believe strongly that even as relative beginners, if we can taste something of the freedom that's in store—as we can see in the suttas from the Buddha's own experience and the experience of all the arahants^[1], whether they're monks, or nuns, or laymen, or laywomen, or gender-free—it is very, very valuable to have even the tiniest taste of freedom.

My program for the week is kind of ambitious, and I'll do my very best to be as inclusive as I can and make it as accessible as possible. We are going to look this week at four of the relatively advanced states of meditation that support our practice. They support the seven factors of awakening^[2], they support especially our meditation. And in the suttas, it is clearly described that enlightenment doesn't come as a thunderbolt out of the sky. It comes from dedicated meditation practice that is so heartfelt and continuous that we little by little make progress in letting go of our attachments, letting go of grasping for what we like and what we want more of, and letting go of being aversive to what we don't like and want to push away, and finding our peace in this body and mind the way it is right here, right now, in this moment.

I was pleased to listen to some of Ying's teachings last week. The theme that she spoke about, namely the multi-dimensional, multifaceted realm of practice—practice that includes much more than just meditation, practice that includes all of us, all of our life. She shared some lovely stories from Gil's little treasury of stories called The Monastery Within.

This is a lovely thing and, in fact, it segues beautifully into what I had chosen to talk about this week, which is tastes of freedom. The Monastery Within... I think we can say that the monastery within is who we are. It's us. It's inside here. It's not someplace else. What that means is that as our meditation deepens and we are able to little by little step into states of samadhi^[3], that's the monastery within. That's what opens the doors to freedom.

And as I dwelled on in the meditation and mentioned at the beginning of this talk, we need to cultivate patience to be able to really enter into that monastery within.

I was corresponding with Kim Allen, who's going to teach next week, and she asked me what my theme was going to be because she didn't want to overlap. I told her, and she said, "Oh, that's great. I think that'll work with mine nicely." And so I asked her what her theme was going to be, and hers is "Savors."

So mine this week is "Tastes of Freedom," "Savors of Freedom." And next week you'll get a lovely, I'm sure, five days of teaching on the emotional tones of a teaching. The word in Pali is rasa^[4], and that means tastes or savors.

So with that, I would like to express my appreciation for the practice that each of you brings to this community, and that each of you, all of us, offer to everyone we come in contact with, and that radiates out of that circle to wider and wider circles like a pebble being dropped into a calm lake.

So with this bow, I express my gratitude for your practice and end this talk. And I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Q&A

Gil: Okay Meg, we'll go ahead and if anyone has any questions on Zoom, you can go ahead and raise your virtual hand I guess, and we'll unmute you and you can ask your questions. So give us some time for people to collect their thoughts. Gil, can you do the selection please?

Gil: Sure, will do. Okay, so we've got Luna.

Luna: Hi. Thank you for offering this morning. I just had a little flash when you were talking about patience, how patience and equanimity feel very similar, but it's just a body feeling and I don't know how. So I wonder if you have any thoughts on that?

Meg Gawler: I think you hit the nail on the head. In this volume of teachings, there are many Dharma lists. One of them is the seven factors of awakening, and in that, equanimity comes at the very end because it's the highest of them all. In fact, in every list that equanimity is part of, it's always at the end because it's the ultimate in the brahma-viharas^[5]—the four flavors of love, whether it's friendliness, or compassion, or sympathetic joy, or equanimity.

There's also another list of the ten paramis^[6] in which patience is highlighted as a very important quality to cultivate. And for many of us, it's not so natural. You know, it's easy to get ahead of ourselves, it's easy to want some kind of success earlier rather than later. So every time we find ourselves becoming impatient, or maybe actually if we've gone too far and we've become impatient, then we can say, "Oh, welcome, welcome impatience, I know you. I think I'm not going there right now." Kind of like if you meet Mara^[7] the tempter, you slow down enough so that you can recognize that you're impatient and then you can say, "No, thank you." Does that make any sense?

Luna: Yeah, totally. Thank you so much.

Meg Gawler: Pleasure.

Gil: Okay Hugh, you can go ahead and unmute.

Hugh: Thank you, Mark. Meg, early in your talk you said that a fontanelle is still an open gateway. I've heard some say that the fontanelle closes in early adulthood. Could you expand a little more on that?

Meg Gawler: Sure. So what you say is correct if we're talking about physiology. When we were babies, we all had fontanelles that were wide open. As adults, there's still a little opening in there, but I was referring to—and when I started talking about this, I said these are not Buddhist teachings. You won't find anything about this in the Buddhist scriptures about the chakras and the openings to the cosmic energy and to the earth energy.

But I've done a lot of Qigong practice and have been very influenced by the idea that if you really do sit up straight, and your head is not flopping forward or off to some angle and you're centered, and your perineum is open and your fontanelle is open, then the energy—the chi, which by the way corresponds to one of the seven factors of awakening, viriya^[8]—can flow easily. When that energy starts to be unobstructed, it has a very calming and purifying effect. So you know, when I'm talking about the fontanelle or the perineum, I beg your forgiveness because Gil would never talk about this stuff! [Laughter]

Hugh: All right. Thank you, thank you very much.

Meg Gawler: It's Gil always saying, "No Meg, I don't want to do Qigong. You don't need to teach Qigong during the retreats. I just want to keep things simple." Anyway! [Laughter]

Hugh: I appreciate it. I've been thinking about chi quite a bit, and I've been a member of a Tai Chi study, so I've been thinking about it quite a bit. Chi is almost one half of an important part of my practice, but it's seldom talked about in our meditation group, so thank you for tying it in.

Meg Gawler: You know, when I was trying to introduce this way of staying with the breath—where we stay with the whole cycle of the breath as this sort of oval of energy going up the back, across the top of the head, and down the front, and then back through the perineum—that is called the "Grand Circulation" in Qigong. And Qigong is the ancestor of all the martial arts, including Tai Chi.

Hugh: So the chi, after it enters the dantian^[9] and passes through the body, it comes out the fontanelle, it returns back and comes back into the dantian again?

Meg Gawler: Yeah. And you can feel it coming. I mean, Venerable Analayo, when he does this sort of introduction to meditation, he invites people to straighten their spine but feel it coming up the back. Then it's up to each of us to know where we're most comfortable concentrating our energy. It might be in the dantian, the belly, and the advantage of that is that you can never overdo it. For people like me, it's often the heart, but you have to be a little bit careful there because you can go overboard. For a lot of people who don't practice, everything's happening up here in the head, and that's really easy to overdo. So you don't want to try to invite too much chi into the head center.

Gil: Meg, I think we have one last question from YouTube. If you find it increasingly difficult to meditate, should you continue to try?

Meg Gawler: Ah, well. I mean, it depends. I think I'm going to try to answer that for you this week by hopefully giving you a few tastes of freedom—the freedom that comes when we stick with it for a long time. It does work, and many people do get discouraged because it's so difficult. And honestly, we are not programmed for this. Our DNA is telling us, "Oh, watch out, there's danger. Don't go there." There's a lot of work to do to let go of that intuitive programming of being reactive and clinging, either to getting rid of something or getting more of something. Clinging is what perpetuates our suffering.

But to be able to start letting go of that clinging, we need to practice. And you know, if your problem is that it is difficult for you physically, you can try other positions. But I would gently encourage you to stick with it and see where it takes you. Does that work for you?

Gil: And she said "thank you" on YouTube. Okay, alrighty. Okay Meg, I think that's all the questions we have for today. So, yeah, thank you very much for your teachings.

Meg Gawler: My pleasure. Thank you all for being here.