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Guided Meditation: Expanding Capacity to Feel

Hello everyone. Welcome.

And to begin, there's a variety of turns of phrase or expressions that convey something very important about dharma practice. And one of them is that maybe we're not focusing on changing our experience as much as increasing our capacity for experience. Expanding our capacity for being with discomfort, expanding our capacity to be with comfort, with pleasure, with joy. Increasing our capacity to be with challenging emotions, increasing our capacity to be with beautiful emotions. This idea of being able to have, to hold, or to make space for our emotional experience.

If we have very little capacity, then we become easily reactive, or shut down, or try to run away, or collapse—all kinds of things. And if we have a capacity to hold anger without acting on the anger, hold sadness, hold despair, hold emotional pain, it's a radically different thing to make room for it, to hold it. And what this means is not to be defined by it, not to be constricted by it, not to be pushed around by it. Not to be necessarily for or against it. You're not caught in its grip or making it into something, but rather allowing it to be there. And even very intense pains and sorrows, to just kind of keep opening, keep relaxing. "Well, I can relax with this too. This too." Even though there might be tension as part of it, sometimes there's a greater capacity of awareness of the heart, of the body to hold it, to make room for it, to expand beyond it, to allow it to be there.

So with that in mind, maybe we'll sit today, meditate today with not changing anything, not probing anything, but rather opening to everything, opening our capacity to hold, to be present, to make room for.

So to begin, to have a posture that works for you and your way, a posture that is stable, strong, open enough so that you can bring a capacity to be with challenges and joys. The body is a great help for this capacity building.

And gently closing your eyes, and to check in with yourself sitting here right now, respectfully respecting yourself as you are. What is your capacity right now? Some people are stressed, some people have difficult life situations going on, some people have illnesses. All kinds of things can happen that might limit our capacity to be with new challenges or even new joys which are energetic or challenging, demanding. And to recognize that's the case. To do that with respect, with care, with love. This is how it is now.

Maybe your capacity feels bigger. Maybe it's a time in your life where things are settled and peaceful and you've had lots of rest, and so you feel like you now have lots of room. And respect that.

And then to take a few long, slow, deep, gentle breaths. As if you're breathing through it all, breathing through your capacity to hold your experience.

As the body exhales, to relax. Soften.

To let your breathing return to normal.

And gently, without ambition, as you breathe, see if you can spread waves of calmness through your body.

See if you could also let there be a calming of the mind as you exhale. The quieting of your thinking.

Settling into your breathing.

And as you inhale, be present for the full length of the inhale. As if deeply as you breathe in and the lungs fill with air, the chest expands. As if you're expanding the boundaries of your body, as if you're opening up and becoming larger.

Whatever you're experiencing as you sit here, rather than changing anything, open up more fully to experience it. Make room for it.

Whatever is happening, recognize it's happening and allow it to be there, as if it has a lot of room. Whatever is happening physically in the body, emotionally, mentally in the mind. Allow yourself to become bigger than the experience.

Whatever is happening, whatever way you get distracted or involved in thoughts, or feelings, body sensations, you can gently say, "This too." You're open to this too. You will allow and breathe, breathe with it, making room for it.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, is there some way that silence supports a greater capacity to be with all experience? A certain kind of silence of mind, silence of heart. The silence of the space around us.

And is there some way that a healthy inner silence or stillness can give you a greater capacity for being with the joys and sorrows of others? A capacity to accompany others in their challenges and their celebrations.

And in that greater capacity to be with people, to share with people their joys and sorrows, maybe it's easier to tap into feelings of care and goodwill, love, kindness.

May it be that our capacity to be present for all experience makes room for our love and kindness and our friendliness to everyone that we encounter. May it be that our practice this morning is for the welfare and happiness of others, and our own. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

[Music]

Dharmette: Wise to Emotions (5 of 5) Reactive and Non-Reactive Emotions

Thank you. So on this fifth talk on becoming wise towards emotions, I want to talk a little bit about attention to the source of our emotions, where they arise from. Certainly, there are layers of sources from within, and I talked a little bit about that yesterday: that certain emotions might have other emotions that are the source for it, or the immediate predecessor for it. Anger might be hurt or fear. Joy might vary in the source within us. It might be praise to our conceit^[1], and we're so energized joyfully about that. Or it might be this delightful sense of freedom or ease that comes when conceit disappears and when it's not there.

In the teachings of the Buddha, there's a distinction between two sources or two kinds of emotional lives. One I like to call dharmic, and the other we call non-dharmic. Some people might call it spiritual and worldly, there's a variety of things they call this. But at the heart of the Buddhist teachings on mindfulness is this distinction between that which belongs to the sensual world and that which belongs to something deeper, the non-sensual world. Spiritual and non-spiritual, it's not a criticism or a denigrating of that which is non-spiritual or sensual. But there is a distinction between emotions that get triggered by our reactivity and those emotions that are not arising reactively to something, but rather emerge, flow through us, arise out of us almost independent of the conditions around us.

So if I am in a hurry to get somewhere, driving somewhere, and someone is driving really slow, my eagerness, my strong desire to get someplace is frustrated. I might then get angry or get afraid, reacting to the person who's driving slow. In another situation, the same situation, I might be trying to go somewhere, maybe I need to get there on time, but I'm driving in a relaxed, open way. Someone's driving slow and I see it, and I say, "Oh, someone's driving slow and it looks like someone who maybe is old and is just trying to drive carefully." And so I let it be, and I use it on this occasion just to relax. In that relaxation, just the being of the situation, there's now room more deeply that I'm not reacting to anything. There's a feeling of contentment or a feeling of gratitude for the day and the sky and things like that. There might be a sense of care and love for the person driving slow. I'm not being triggered by what's out there; it's just kind of a natural upwelling of warmth for someone who's driving carefully, caring for them.

Or we sit and meditate and we might feel like we're very ambitious to get really deeply concentrated right away. And maybe we have a bad feeling about ourselves, we feel like we somehow don't succeed very well in things in our lives, and meditation is supposed to help us, and it's supposed to be an alternative to the challenges of life, so I have to be successful in meditation. And then we're not getting concentrated. So already there's a built-up tension behind doing the meditation. When meditation is not going successfully, we react to that. We get angry at meditation, angry at ourselves, angry at Buddhism, you know, angry at the world. Reacting there on the surface. I think of the surface level of who we are, we're carrying the tensions and stresses—emotional, physical, mental. And those stresses, when they're touched by the world, get triggered.

When we have a great capacity and lots of space and ability to be open, to be relaxed, to be present without those surface tensions and stresses, then for someone who's really mature in this practice, there are no triggers. Things occur, and they don't hit us. If we hold up our conceit—in Buddhism, this idea of holding up conceit—and something comes along that threatens that conceit, there's like a collision, and then there's a reaction to it. If there's no conceit, something comes along and criticizes us, and it doesn't hit our conceit, it just goes right through. But going right through, that capacity to not be caught, not be reactive, not have something up there inside that the world hits, makes room for the upwelling of a lot of wonderful emotions. There's an upwelling of healing, an upwelling of movement towards harmony, movement towards unification. There's an upwelling of contentment or peace, sometimes joy and happiness. That which wells up is not reactive. That is what's dharmic. Dharmic emotions, dharmic feelings are those that arise in an empty space in a certain kind of way. Empty of tension and empty of holding on to certain emotions. Empty of having certain kinds of demands on the situation, or expectations, or cravings, or ambitions, or a strong sense of self that we're protecting or hiding.

And so the non-dharmic emotions are the ones that arise when there's a collision with something hard inside of us. That's the non-dharmic. The dharmic is when there's nothing in there and there's space and things can go right through. But more importantly, there's space for things to well up.

The classic simile for this is that of a mountain lake^[2] where there are no rivers or rain that fill the lake. It's getting completely refreshed from an underground fount, an underground spring that's welling up from the bottom of the lake, spreading this fresh water throughout the lake. In the same way, we're not depending on input from the world around us—the rivers coming into the lake—and we're not depending on the rain—all the thoughts and ideas we have in the mind—in order to have this upwelling. Rather, there's more like a settledness, a relaxation, a real sense of presence, attention to here, and then an upwelling has a chance to arise. We have within us a tremendous capacity, a dharma capacity, for a flow, for a naturalness of positive emotions: things like love and care and joy and contentment, gratitude, delight, gladness, compassion. Beautiful, beautiful states. But they're not states that we make happen reactively. They are almost like a gift that comes when our capacity to be present is expansive and open, and we're patient and available, without the stirring up or the agitation of reactivity, of a lot of desires that are pushing us around, a lot of aversion pushing us around. There's a settledness happening.

So there is this distinction between those emotions that are born out of our reactivity, and those emotions that arise from a deeper upwelling that is not a reaction, but is more like the innate capacity of our psychophysical system to express itself, to manifest something that is responsive and in harmony with our environment and with what's happening.

I don't know how well I've articulated this, but I think maybe well enough to give you something to reflect on this weekend. Think a little bit about the source of the different emotions that come through over the next few days. Are the emotions more reactive emotions? Even the joyful ones, are they reacting to something that's happening in the world, so that it's touching something inside there that then just reacts? Or is there an upwelling? Is there a naturalness? Is there a kind of almost as if you're getting out of the way and something wells up? Dharmic joy, dharmic happiness that doesn't depend on the conditions of the world. Reactive emotions depend on the conditions of the world, and the world being ourselves as well. The dharmic are those which are independent, non-dependent in a certain kind of way.

Announcements

So then, one announcement that some of you might be interested in. In a few weeks, on July 9th through Insight Retreat Center, we're going to have a day-long retreat online on Zoom that I'll be teaching. If some of you would like to continue this in a deeper way, you can go to the insightretreatcenter.org website. Or at some point in the next while, there will probably be an announcement about this on the IMC website too, on the 'What's New' page.

So thank you all. And I was thinking that maybe next Monday, next week, to continue with this theme of emotions, but maybe to go through and choose five different emotions to consider and reflect on how to practice with, and how what we've been talking about this week might apply to particular situations. So thank you.