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Guided Meditation: Care

Hello everyone, and here on this Friday we come to the end of the series on faith. I'll probably say this later as well, but there's so much to say about faith. Over these months on YouTube, I think I've talked about it a few times, including the topic of refuge^[1].

There's a lot to say, but I prefer—and maybe it's the truth—not to know what faith really is. There's something to me quite marvelous about not knowing, but trusting or allowing or feeling something here.

I think I'm a fairly rational person who reasons and is thoughtful. I also tremendously value the way that in mindfulness we know we don't know. We know the particulars of this moment, we know our experience as it's unfolding in the moment for itself. There's a clarity that arises with mindfulness that we really know. The deeper we go in mindfulness practice, the greater the knowing quality is. At the same time, the process, the unfolding, the larger picture of what all this is—this human life of ours—there's so much that I don't know.

Mindfulness has placed me in the middle of all of it with a deep trust, a deep confidence, a deep faith that is heartfelt. It is close to a kind of love or warmth, a sense of belonging here, of being at home here.

One of the definitions of belonging that I'm fond of is the idea that belonging is the capacity to give care and to receive care. Rather than belonging being a passive thing—rather than faith, trust, or our place here in this world being passive—it does involve the capacity to give and receive care.

What is that capacity? How can we center ourselves in the present moment and expand this capacity? One way is to expand our capacity to just know this. The more we can know this and trust this, have faith in this, have confidence in our ability to be present for this, the greater becomes our capacity to care.

So the simple word I'd like to offer today for this practice is the word this. Perhaps that little introduction I just gave can add some greater dimensions to the simple, maybe humble word this. This is really a doorway to a greater capacity to belong, to be at home in this universe, but not at home in a way that is passive; it awakens our heart's capacity to care in a deep way, to give and receive care.

That's what I recommend today: if you'd like, you might try, as you meditate here, to use the word this. Maybe the richness of that word, or what it points to, can awaken in your heart.

To begin to belong to the place in which you're sitting. There's a long tradition in Buddhism to take the particular place you happen to be meditating in, the physical location of where you're at, that which receives the weight of your body, as being your spot of awakening. This spot, this location.

Feel the weight of your body being held by whatever supports it, and maybe appreciate the support and that contact. Relax and soften the gaze of your eyes, so you're not really looking at anything, staring at anything. Let the eyes relax in the eye sockets. If it's comfortable for you, you're welcome to close your eyes.

As you exhale, release the holdings of your body. Perhaps relaxing your muscles, releasing your heart, your mind from your concerns. Not to abandon them, but to let them be put aside for these few minutes. It's okay to allow yourself to be here in this experience. Relaxing deeply.

Take a few moments to feel your global body, whatever way is easy for you to be aware of your body—a particular area of your body, or the whole body—whatever comes easy to you. There's a tradition in Buddhism to take your body as the meditation center, the meditation hall, and to breathe in within this body.

Experiencing how the body experiences breathing. Maybe as broadly as you can, become aware of the impact breathing has on the body. As you exhale, relaxing the tensions, contractions, and tightness of the mind. The pressure that might be associated with thinking. Perhaps by stepping away from your concerns and instead appreciating the totality of our minds, all that it does for us. Stepping away from our concerns so there can be a greater appreciation of this here.

And then settling into your breathing, maybe using the word this. When you breathe in, this in-breath. Gently saying this as you exhale, this exhale. Or if you find yourself thinking, you might say this. This too is included in awareness. This is a marvel. It's a wonder. A sound, a body sensation, this. That opens the door, not to a rejection of anything, but this too is where we find belonging, care, the ability to receive and give care.

[Silence]

To be in your present moment experience and to recognize it as this. This which welcomes everything, including yourself, into being. Into belonging here now.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to appreciate that we have the capacity to give and to receive care, and that when we meditate, we're doing both: giving care to ourselves and receiving care from the meditation, from the dharma^[2].

And to feel a degree of gratitude or appreciation for the circle of care that happens in meditation. And then at the end of the meditation, to expand that circle of care out into the world. We receive so much from the world: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food the farmers provide. So many people in the world are doing services that sustain our life, our lifestyle, and it is a kind of care that we receive. Then we can return that care and live in a circle of giving and receiving care. This is what it means to belong, one meaning of belonging.

So at the end of the sitting, to consider whatever benefit we receive from this practice—known or unknown, immediate or benefit that comes over time—may that somehow be transformed or inspire us to share those benefits with others. To extend ourselves to serve and care for the world around us. May we contribute to the welfare and happiness of others. May the benefits of our practice spread from us out into the world, providing peace, compassion, care, generosity, love, and goodwill out into the world. So that all beings may one day experience happiness and peace and freedom and safety. May this practice we do benefit the world.

Announcements

Before I begin this talk, a couple of announcements. At the end of the talk, I'll open a Zoom room and we can have a community meeting on Zoom. The Zoom link is right now posted near the top of the chat here, and I'll post it again at the bottom of the chat after the talk. It's also on the YouTube page if you look below the video where it says Insight Meditation Center. It has the Zoom link there; you might have to copy and paste it. Finally, it's also in the "What's New" section of IMC's homepage. In the bottom right-hand corner, there's a little section called "What's New," and one of the top things there is a link for our meeting here. It might also be in the IMC calendar. Hopefully, all those areas work.

Second, today and then again on Sunday is a day that all the donations which aren't specified clearly for other purposes, we'll turn around and give them to Partners In Health. It's a wonderful non-profit that does work in Haiti. They're on the ground working with some 5,000 or so local healthcare providers, people working in villages, nurses, and doctors in the rural countryside all over. They're partnering with people there to provide the kind of care that both the Haitian government is not doing, and that many people don't have access to. So many people there are suffering from the earthquake, from poverty, from storms, from a dysfunctional government, so we want to support people there. I think it's a wonderful thing. These neighbors of ours, we can say, are our fellow citizens on our North American continent here. It would be lovely to see our YouTube community—we've never done this before—kind of come together as a group to care, to offer. We talk about benefiting the world at the end of our sitting, and here's a chance maybe to do it more as a community. So thank you.

Dharmette: Faith (5 of 5) Service

For the talk today, the general topic—maybe the title—can be service, faith as service. The idea of service is to offer care. When we combine the idea of faith, it's associated a little bit with devotion, a little bit with trust, a little bit with generosity. Faith can also involve not only what we receive, what we trust and allow for, but it's also something deeper in that it's a wellspring of what we offer. It's an action, an expression of our love, an expression of our faith, an expression of where we place our hearts, what inspires us in some deep way.

Faith is not that we're only recipients. In having faith, we're actually givers. To really have faith, I think it really helps if there is a feeling or recognition inside that there's a desire for action, to do something. Many times it's a desire to serve. Whatever the source is for the faith, to support it, to help it out, to benefit it. But the service aspect of faith doesn't have to be directed to the source of the faith, like your religion or your practice community. Faith can elicit this desire out of love, care, compassion, or a fullness of heart to serve people anywhere in the world—maybe Haiti, maybe other places, maybe your neighbors, maybe more fully in your own family.

This idea of service, to serve, is a beautiful thing of the heart. It's a wonderful, rich, multifaceted quality of generosity, of love, of care. There's something about caring that's really part of freedom, non-clinging, which I talked about yesterday. As we don't cling to anything, there's much more room in the heart and the mind to be responsive to the world around us. Responsive to the suffering and the joys of the world, and to respond in a way that feels like we're expanding the faith, expanding our freedom, expanding our love out into the world in some wonderful way.

To serve out of faith is not to want anything in return, but rather it's just a clear, clean expression of generosity, of serving something that's valuable to serve. And this language that I use in the meditation, the circles of giving and receiving, and to have those circles flow and move and turn freely—not to be clogged up, stopped, or have the brakes on. If you take half of the wheel away, it's not a wheel anymore; it won't roll. You need the whole wheel to roll. And so the wheel of giving and receiving arises not out of a "should," not out of obligation, but from being settled in some deep way in our hearts. It comes from having something here we trust, here we have devotion to, here we have confidence in. Yesterday I talked about the confidence in non-clinging. To rest in that confidence is not a passive thing, but it's like the soil, the nutrients for responding to the world.

A response which, again I want to emphasize, is not an obligation, but it feels like the most natural thing in the world. It's just what flows out of the liberated heart. The heart that's filled with this kind of dharma faith, that heart that goes for refuge, is not a passive heart. It's one that has an orientation, a motivation, and an inspiration to act in a new way, to live in a new way. One of the ways of understanding this is to live with care, to offer care.

In some ways, it's natural to care for... let me say it a little differently. One of the wonderful things to do is to care for the place in which you're practicing. That's part of the practice: to care for the place you practice. Part of practice is to care for the world in which you practice, and that world spreads out beyond any walls, beyond any boundaries, and is open-ended. And to do that with a sense of the kind of service that is almost like a devotional service or an expression of love or goodwill.

So I've talked about all these different qualities and characteristics of faith this week, and there's many more. Faith is a rich capacity, a rich thing. As I said in the meditation, I actually prefer not to believe that I know exactly what faith is. I can talk about different aspects of it, but it feels much more in harmony with faith, with this deep trust, not to know fully what it is. And in not knowing, to open myself to trust it or appreciate something larger and bigger than anything I could know, anything that I could have control over or possess.

So there's a kind of a wonderful feeling of this willingness to be open, that doesn't have to know but is ready to serve, ready to care, ready to participate in this world as if I belong here, as if we belong here. Belonging is this wonderful circle of giving and receiving care. And maybe in the end, this practice that we do is a practice that transforms us into free beings that are deeply connected to our communities and our world in this mutuality of giving and receiving care. Service is an element of faith.

So thank you.