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Guided Meditation: Cultivating Softness

Greetings, everyone. I'm going to begin with an announcement that yesterday we discovered that the 7:00 a.m. teachings for this week were double-booked on YouTube. So starting today, IMC will stream them both. I'll teach from 7:00 to 7:45, and Matthew Brensilver will teach at this same YouTube link one hour later from 8:00 to 8:45 Pacific Time.

The theme for this week is opening the Dharma heart. We are exploring five wholesome qualities that the Buddha used to determine if someone was ready to have the deep insight that leads to enlightenment.

As you know, in meditation, we're training the mind, and it's really up to us to become our own teacher. Little by little, we learn how to let go of unwholesome qualities and to cultivate beautiful qualities of the heart and mind. To begin again, we'll start by exploring our intention. What motivates you to meditate?

The Buddha encouraged his followers to practice both for their own benefit and for the benefit of others. If your intention includes altruism as well as improving things for yourself, it will be all the more powerful. Take a moment now to articulate your deepest wish.

Assuming your meditation posture, see if you can lengthen the spine, gently stretching the base of the spine down towards the earth, and carefully balancing the head on top of the spine so that energy can flow through your body from heaven to earth and back.

Letting the eyes close gently.

And now, doing a quick scan from the head down through the torso. Relaxing the shoulders, arms, and hands. Relaxing the belly, hips, legs, and feet. Softening the muscles of the face, in the forehead, around the eyes, the lips, and softening the contact of the jaw.

Take a long, slow, deep breath, letting go of tensions wherever you can, because even minor bodily tensions can create blockages in the mind, inhibiting our freedom. So it's worthwhile to take time to get to know these areas of tension and find ways to release them. Sometimes it might take years to release a particular knot. To really relax something that's very tight, maybe it's possible to soften around the edges.

So here we are. The miracle of being here in this spot and breathing together with a supportive sangha from all over the world. Letting your breath nourish you and everyone here.

Now, as we did yesterday, bring to mind a benefactor—someone who instantly brings you gladness when you're in their presence. It could be another human, it could be a pet that you know cares about your well-being just as you care for theirs. Looking into each other's eyes, you both smile in your own way, enjoying the warmth that you share together.

So wishing for your benefactor: may you be safe and protected. May you be happy, peaceful, and free. And as you offer your wishes to them, you can feel that they fervently wish the same for you. So you can light a little candle of friendliness in each other's hearts.

In the company of your benefactor, you know that you're in a safe space. And now we resolve to leave all your preoccupations, worries, and concerns outside the door for the remainder of this meditation to the best of your ability. If you wish, you can pick them up on the way out.

For the rest of this meditation, we will endeavor to stay here in the present moment with a warm heart, ready for whatever arises. Bringing our attention to the breath as our friendly anchor and exploring the whole cycle of the breath. Letting it light up with the attention of our mindfulness, which is operating in a context of warm friendliness. Receiving the breath with a mind that's soft and open, and letting each in-breath and out-breath reveal itself to you.

Is there anything pleasant in the felt sensations of breathing? If so, feel free to relax into them and enjoy even a small feeling of goodness.

It's really quite incredible to actually be sitting here breathing together.

I love the idea of kindfulness, which is a word coined by Ajahn Brahm^[1]. It's mindfulness that is imbued with benevolence.

Breathing in, radiating kindfulness. Breathing out, radiating mindfulness.

On the in-breath, radiating kindfulness inside. On the out-breath, radiating kindfulness to all beings everywhere.

If the mind is wandering somewhere in the past or the future, first of all, bringing a smile. Okay, this is what minds tend to do, but for this meditation practice, I'm going to come back to being here in this body, carefully, kindfully attending to the cycle of the breath. Staying close and soft with the felt sensations of the breath.

We might want to, or have to, appreciate the gift that is breathing. And perhaps enjoying carefully unwrapping this gift in order to be with our breathing.

Breathing in, radiating kindfulness inside. Breathing out, radiating kindfulness to all beings.

The gift of breathing becomes even more of a gift if it is imbued with kindfulness.

Out of this sitting, through the goodness of this practice, may we from our center of softness and kindfulness now gently radiate our heartfelt wish that all beings everywhere be safe. May all beings be happy, peaceful, and free.

Dharmette: Opening the Dharma Heart (2 of 5) A Soft and Malleable Mind

I'm happy to be here with you all, and I'll repeat the announcement I made at the beginning of the sit for those of you who are just arriving. Yesterday at IMC, we discovered that the morning teachings for this week had been double-booked. So starting today, IMC will be streaming both of them. I'll continue teaching at this time, and if you're looking for Matthew Brensilver, you'll find him on the same link an hour later. He'll be there teaching his meditation at 8:00 and his little dharmette at 8:30 Pacific Time.

The theme for this week is opening the Dharma heart. To be honest, I have never seen the expression "Dharma heart" anywhere in the Pali Canon, but these texts do often speak of opening the "Dharma eye." And the Dharma eye is opened when one has the deep insights that then give rise to awakening.

In the early texts, there are a number of stories of the Buddha teaching and the person listening becomes enlightened right then and there. But this doesn't work for just anyone; one has to be ready. The text of the Brahmāyu Sutta^[2], which I talked about yesterday, gives five qualities of mind that are necessary for awakening. In Pali, these qualities are called kalla, mudu, vinīvaraṇa, udagga, and pasanna^[3].

Pali is a highly polysemic language. Polysemic means a word that often has a number of quite different meanings, which is great for poets but it's difficult for translators, because if you're translating, you have to discern which meaning is meant in that context. In this particular group of the five wholesome qualities of mind, they're more like variations on a theme rather than five clearly distinct elements.

Kalla, which we talked about yesterday, was receptivity. Getting ready and available to wake up. That includes having the mental fitness necessary to accomplish the goal. You're not going to run a marathon and start your training two days before; it requires preparation. Receptivity also includes the nuance of a mind that is pliant.

And that brings us to the second quality, which we'll take up today. The Pali word for this is mudu^[4], which is often translated as "soft mind," a mind that is malleable. The root mud actually means both "soft" and "happy." The softness of mudu also includes being receptive, just like what we saw yesterday, being flexible and pliable. The commentary explains mudu as being free of the defilements of fixed views and conceit.

When I was fifteen, my father said to me, "If it weren't for you, we'd have a happy family." There was not only physical abuse, but psychological abuse as well. The model from my father was being quick to anger, quick to criticism, and I learned to be judgmental. The reason I share this with you is that it took me decades to learn to become a bit less judgmental. For me, if I wanted to cultivate a beautiful mind that was soft and malleable, this tendency to pass judgment all the time was one of the first things I needed to let go of.

I learned that being judgmental has a lot to do with being opinionated and having fixed views as well. Yesterday, I talked about walking this path as a process of emptying that which is unwholesome. I've seen in myself that what sometimes underlies conceit is trying to overcompensate for a deep feeling of not being worthy. So I might look like a lion trying to project an image of strength, but really I'm just a little tiny mouse pushing around a big cardboard lion to try to fool everybody that I'm strong.

And probably what is most arduous is emptying the mind of conceit. As you may know, in the Buddhist texts, conceit is not just thinking you're superior to others, but it's any way that you compare yourself with others. So all that comparing—"I'm better than," "I'm worse than," "not as good as," or "just as good as"—you get to a point where you realize that this is taking me nowhere. So emptying the mind of thinking that somehow we have to measure up. This fetter of conceit is one of the ten fetters^[5] that we need to completely uproot on the path to awakening. Emptying the mind of needing to be somebody, or needing to exist.

So from my experience, cultivating a soft, malleable mind means seeing the futility, the unskillfulness of clinging to my opinions and comparing myself with others. And this begins the gradual training of seeing these unskillful tendencies start to arise. You see that something like this—being judgmental or some kind of comparison—is starting to arise, and you can nip it in the bud. You can say, "Ah, I see you needing to be somebody. No thank you, not going there." Or, "Oh dear boy, this sounds so judgmental, let's not go there."

If we really want to cultivate a soft mind, it's up to each of us to find out where our sharp edges are. Once we've recognized and learned where we tend to be sharp rather than soft, we need strong mindfulness practice so that we can nip these unskillful tendencies in the bud before we do any harm.

I'm thinking that a fertile field in which we might cultivate a soft and malleable mind is by practicing Right Speech^[6]. Before I say anything at all, it has to satisfy the following criteria: it has to be true, it has to be useful or helpful, it has to be kind, the tone must be soft and gentle, and it must be at the right time for the person receiving it. If any one of those criteria is not fulfilled, then it's better to keep silent.

That right there is a very strong practice that can evolve over a long, long time. We first of all have to learn to be less impulsive, to not speak as soon as we want to say something, and to catch ourselves before the reactivity has already sent the words out.

So the fetter of conceit and not needing to prove oneself has been a big one for me. And also, when I see the tendency to be judgmental of myself and judgmental of others... for a long time I saw how unskillful that was, and yet it kept happening. So at some point, we need to really see that this is not something that we want to keep doing. And this is where mindfulness is our very best friend. The more that we can cultivate mindfulness in every moment of the day, not just in meditation, the better chance we'll have of avoiding unskillful behavior which keeps us trapped.

Like a little homework practice for the next 24 hours, you might try investigating where your sharp edges, your prickliness, is. And also, what would be the most skillful ways for you to soften them. If you have a Dharma buddy or a good friend that you feel you can confide in, it might be interesting to share what you learn about yourself in terms of where those hard edges are, and your ideas about how you might soften them.

Yesterday we cultivated receptivity; today we're cultivating softness and malleability in the mind. Thank you for your attention.