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Guided Meditation: Calmness and Peace

Hello everyone, and welcome. One of the states of being that is often associated with meditation is calmness. Perhaps sometimes calmness is misunderstood and therefore underappreciated.

It isn't that calmness has to characterize all of ourselves, that all of us is calm, but rather it's more like the container is calm. It isn't that everything in the room, everyone in the room, is calm. But somehow the size of the room, the emptiness of the room, the clarity in the room—there's a calmness in the room that holds or includes someone who is not calm. So the same thing in ourselves.

We could have a lot of energy, good energy, engaging energy. And sometimes the calmer or more peaceful we become in meditation, it releases a kind of beautiful flow of energy or aliveness in us that very clearly is held or supported by that calmness.

So if we're looking for something very placid and peaceful everywhere, we might miss the calmness that's already here. Some of that has to do with the awareness, the mindfulness that knows, that holds our experience. It's somewhat like someone who has a lot going on, a lot of busyness or important things happening. You watch this person, you see that they're completely engaged in what needs to be done, but their eyes are calm. Their eyes seem settled, peaceful, and engaged. There's not a constriction around the eyes, or their eyes are not darting around. They're just calm and settled, gazing upon what needs to be done in a calm way while they work quickly and strongly.

So, sitting up or assuming a meditation posture that allows you to be externally still. Externally with the body, so the body can be still. This allows some part of your body to offer calmness, peacefulness. Even if there's a lot of agitation in the body, maybe there's something about the stillness that the body is in that is also there together with the agitation.

Gently closing the eyes and taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. As you exhale, see if that can be an exercise in calming, settling. An exercise of knowing, recognizing something that's calming about the exhale. Settling.

And as you breathe in fully, deeply, in whatever calmness that's there, welcome the experience of breathing in. Welcome the inhale.

Then letting your breathing return to normal. With normal breathing, is there in your experience some reference point for calmness, peacefulness? Maybe not all of you, maybe much of you is not calm or peaceful. But is there somewhere within, or somewhere in your capacity for mindfulness, that supports you to gaze upon your experience calmly, peacefully?

And not a calmness or peacefulness that pushes anything away, but rather something that allows what's there without getting caught in it, agitated by it.

Then settling in further with your breathing. Perhaps there's a way of continuing to relax the body, some of the tensions and holding in the body. On the exhale, softening, releasing whatever holding there might be.

Then settling into your breathing. Part of the function of focusing on breathing is not to deny anything or push anything away, but to support us in not getting involved, entangled, or reactive to anything. Because the energy of attention steadily, calmly moves with the breathing and helps us to find the calm center, or the peaceful container, with which we can gaze upon whatever needs our attention, calmly, without agitation. Seeing clearly for however long that's useful.

And then returning to the breathing. Relaxing with the exhale. Welcoming the inhale.

Is there accessible to you a capacity for more calmness, peacefulness? Somewhere within, or somewhere in the container of it all? Some way that you can be mindful in a calm, open, peaceful way.

So, as we come to the end of this meditation, one of the benefits of recognizing calmness or peacefulness is that it helps purify our love. Imagine when we're caught in agitation and fear and anxiety and hatred and greed; the simplicity and purity of love is hard to tap into. But the calmness, the peacefulness that we can experience, makes room for the simplicity and the clarity of love, of kindness, warmth, loving-kindness, compassion—the whole range of caring emotions and caring motivations that can well up within us. The simplicity of love that includes ourselves, includes others, includes the whole world.

The Buddha called love mettā^[1], as a form of wealth that we carry within us. And so as we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps we can extend our calm gaze onto the suffering of this world. Anywhere that our eyes land, our gaze lands—locally in our own family or local communities, or around your country, or the world—calmly allow your care, your goodwill, your compassion to take in the suffering of the world.

At the end of the sitting meditation, it's good to evoke some motivation, to have your meditation practice support you in helping to alleviate that suffering in the world, even if it's in the smallest possible ways that are accessible and easy for you. May it be that this meditation practice we do supports us to live for the welfare and happiness of this whole world. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Hatred (1 of 5) Non-Hatred as a Reference

This week for the Dharma talks, the theme will be the second of the three unwholesome roots, the second of the three poisons, and that is hatred or hostility.

The three are greed, hatred, and delusion. Last week we went through greed, and this week we'll go through hate. It's phenomenally important in the Buddhist course of practice to understand these three poisons—greed, hate, and delusion—because these are the primary conditions, sources, or catalysts for human suffering. To alleviate, to end suffering, to decrease the amount of suffering in ourselves and the world around us, it makes a huge difference if we understand greed, hate, and delusion and are able to decrease it, and even eliminate it completely. This is one of the purposes of Buddhist practice: to really bring it to an end. A remarkable achievement; it is possible.

So, as I did last week for greed, I'm not going to start the first talk today by talking about hatred directly, but by talking about non-hate. This contextualizes the discussion about hate. The word for hate is dosa^[2], d-o-s-a, and non-hate in Pali, in the Buddhist discussion, is adosa^[3], a-d-o-s-a. So not hate, non-hate. Now, that's more than just the absence of hate. It's understood in the tradition that it's the presence of something wonderful. Somehow the absence of hate doesn't leave us neutral, doesn't leave us empty in some kind of void, impoverished way. It's the opposite; the presence of hate is what's impoverishing for us, and as we release it, wonderful states arise. The primary one that's associated with this is love, that is, loving-kindness. It's also associated with patience, with calmness, and with peace.

There's a wonderful, famous verse from the Dhammapada^[4]. It's the third verse in this anthology of Buddhist poetry from ancient times, and it goes something like this: "Hate is never overcome by hate. By non-hate only is hate overcome. This is the ancient truth." The word non-hate, as I said, implies the positive corollaries to that. Some translators will actually translate it that way, so they'll say: "Hate is never overcome by hate. By love alone is hate overcome. This is the ancient truth."

That particular verse was very impactful after World War II. In the early 1950s—1951, 1952 I think—there was a big international conference in San Francisco to decide on the fate of Japan. Japan had lost the war, the United States had occupied Japan and was governing the country. Many of the countries—forty countries, I think—who had been impacted by Japanese aggression during World War II came to San Francisco to decide on the fate of Japan. Should Japan be divided up into multiple countries? Should different countries take over parts of it? What should happen to it? There was a kind of stalemate at this conference until the foreign minister from Sri Lanka came up and evoked the principle of caring for everyone, including the Japanese people, and he recited that verse. When he recited that verse, the way the report goes, everything settled down, and the conference then went ahead and decided to grant Japan its independence. It was a kind of expression of love and expression of goodwill, and maybe even a trust that there was another way possible after the aggression of World War II. There's a plaque in Tokyo commemorating this event that has that verse on the stone.

As we meditate, or as we have other means in our lives, from time to time maybe we begin tapping into a degree of calmness or peace, a capacity for love and all the different manifestations of what love might be, a capacity for deep patience. That begins showing us something very important. It shows us that when there's hatred, it diminishes us, it impoverishes us, it brings with it suffering. Hatred is a fire that burns the person that's hostile. One analogy is that picking up hatred is like picking up a hot piece of coal. Of course, not everyone who hates or has hostility recognizes that. Partly because of the intense focus on the object of hostility, that sometimes blinds us to the impact that hate has on ourselves, and it also doesn't lead to very clear thinking. Calmness, on the other hand, peacefulness, love, tends to produce wiser trains of thought. Not necessarily always, but it tends to help us think more wisely. It does so by including what impact our behavior has, our feelings have, our emotions have on ourselves and those around us. Then we can feel the diminishment of our own well-being.

So rather than talking about hate this week in a critical way, or in a way that condemns hate, or is puritanical—like we should just get rid of hate because it's wrong, it's bad—I want to emphasize the perspective we have on hate when we are really rooted in a place of peacefulness, of calm, or love. In that kind of situation, we can look upon hate not as an enemy, not as something that we need to judge in some negative way, but rather almost like it's an illness. Almost like it's something that needs to be addressed, but we don't have to condemn ourselves or condemn other people for it. But we do want to address it, and find an alternative, and find a way of settling and relaxing and supporting ourselves and others for the best qualities of heart to come forth and to meet the world.

If we want to try to help support the world to suffer less, human beings to suffer less, we really need to figure out some way to show the suffering of hostility, the suffering of hate. One way to do that is to really know the opposite. To really know this thing of non-hate. To recognize it, even if it's in small halting ways at first, to keep coming back and recognizing where we can find in ourselves our capacity for calmness, for peacefulness, for love, for generosity. And not to have that make us passive, but maybe it's even empowering to step forward in that way, in that peace, in that love, and to learn the wise ways of doing that and the engaged ways of doing that.

So as we go through this week and focus on hostility—which is maybe not necessarily a pleasant thing to talk about or reflect on—if we remember that we're looking upon it and exploring it from our capacity for peace, love, and calmness, then we can look at the topic as something which moves us into greater capacities for those things. Greater capacities for love, for kindness, for goodwill, for compassion. We have a wide range of wonderful feelings inside, of positive feelings connected to non-hatred.

For the Buddha or for the Buddhist tradition, the quality, the state of non-hate is refreshing or enlightening like the full moon. The expression from the ancient text is actually "pleasing like the full moon is pleasing." So imagine the full moon on a clear night; that is the analogy for non-hate in the clarity of an unobstructed heart and mind.

This non-hostility is characterized by the absence of violence. It's said to be gentle like a good friend, and it's the cause of friendship. So rather than simply the absence of hate, there's something here that supports friendship in the state of non-hate. It's said to be like the smell of sandalwood. Sandalwood has a wonderful smell; it's used for perfumes or different things, but sandalwood normally doesn't harm anyone. In the same way, for someone who lives in non-hate, there's a kind of non-harming perfume or atmospheric mood that can waft from them that is palpable sometimes.

They say that when there's non-hate, we never harm ourselves or harm others, not intentionally or knowingly. In fact, the opposite exists: we're interested in promoting welfare for self and others. That's one of the functions, one of the manifestations of non-hate.

Finally, a couple of other things about non-hate. The tradition says that it's a condition for youthfulness, that the fire of hatred speeds up the aging process. The ancient texts talk about how when there's a lot of hatred, there's a quicker gathering together of wrinkles and gray hair. Be a little bit careful with this kind of idea; don't assume just because someone has wrinkles or gray hair that there's hate there. But the speeding up of that process is what the ancient texts say. And having non-hate, discovering non-hate, is like having a tight knot that's unraveled and set free.

So, may you come to appreciate your capacity for non-hate as an untangling of the constrictions and knots in your heart and your mind. And discover your capacity for peace and love so that the way we gaze upon hatred is not hateful, but rather brings the medicine of goodwill and care.

Tomorrow we'll talk more specifically about this, and there's the same plan as last week to go through the five different aspects of this. I'll share that plan tomorrow again. Thank you.