Guided Meditation: Inner Balance; Dharmette: Wisdom Awareness (3 of 5) Relating to Experience

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Inner Balance; Wisdom Awareness (3 of 5): Relating to Experience. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 02, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Inner Balance

Very happy to be with you, and we are right at the top of the hour. So let's start our morning meditation. For those of you who might be joining midweek, we are covering the topic of wisdom awareness. That is an approach to practice that I learned by way of both sides and through Western teachers that emphasizes what's here and what else is here, our relationship to what's happening.

So, we'll be using what I call some wisdom koans^[1] as part of the guidance for this. I want to first invite you to settle in. Settle into a posture that expresses your desire, your wish to be awake and aware.

Perhaps starting with a couple of longer, slower breaths. Noticing sound, hearing, noticing warmth and cool. Feeling into the weight of your body on the cushion or chair, and attuning to the details of your posture.

Feet grounded on the mat or floor. Your hips, hip points, buttocks grounded in your seat. Allowing your back to be upright, alert. And allowing your muscles, your core, to be supported in a relaxed but upright way. Allowing your shoulders to soften.

Making sure that your head is balanced over your shoulders and back. Crown of the head slightly upward to the sky. Allowing the jaw to be soft. Perhaps opening it and then allowing the teeth to float towards each other. The lips to close. Teeth slightly parted. Tongue relaxed in the mouth, the tip of the tongue at your palate.

Allowing your eyes to soften and close. And taking a couple of longer, slower, perhaps deeper breaths. Inviting this body to relax. And noticing, too, your inner posture. Whatever inclination—leaning towards or leaning away, reaching or pushing away—might be in your heart and mind. And inviting the heart and mind to relax. Come into balance.

Then attuning the attention, resting your attention on whatever anchor keeps you most present. Breath, body sensation, sound, or perhaps the flow of everything moving through from time to time.

Checking in. Aware. Are you aware? What's happening in this moment? Attuning to the details of this moment's experience with dedication. Simplicity. This moment like...

In the last few moments of our meditation together, the invitation is to take a step back and notice how the heart and mind are in this moment. What's the quality, tone in the observation, in the experiencing? Are the heart and mind soft and open, contracted, distracted, or perhaps spacious and vast, or simple and present? Just notice.

And as we bring this meditation to a close, gathering up any glimpses of goodness and appreciating them, being nourished by them. Then casting your mind outwards, your internal gaze outwards, offering, sharing that goodness with others.

May all beings be safe, happy, peaceful, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, and peace in the world. Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Wisdom Awareness (3 of 5) Relating to Experience

Good morning, warm greetings, Sangha^[2]. Happy to be with you today.

We are now on the third of five talks about cultivating wisdom awareness, and different dimensions of wisdom as well. Actually, so far we've been mostly talking about sensory objects of attention and how we can relate to them in ways that help to cultivate wisdom. The first two ways were a simple kind of discernment, discernment between simple distinctions. And the second is to bring interest to the moment, to our practice. In this practice, interest is a superpower.

Today we'll talk more about how our hearts and minds relate to experience in meditation. So that's where we're going. First, terminology. When I talk about the heart and the mind, I'm actually talking about the same Pali^[3] word, citta^[4]. In ancient cultures, the mind was actually considered to be unified with what we consider the heart. So much so that monastics would point to their heart—even today in Asia, sometimes, when they say "mind." So, just to know as I talk about it, tune into whichever dimension works for you, whichever understanding works best for your practice. Some people are more cognitively focused, other people are more emotionally focused.

This is awareness with regard to the heart and mind, and in particular, the quality of the heart and mind. And this is very much a part of the classic teachings on Satipatthana^[5], the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. I will read a very brief quote if I can find it. Give me just one moment. Yes. Here's what the Buddha instructs practitioners to notice:

"One knows a mind with greed is a mind with greed. A mind without greed is a mind without greed. A mind with ill will is a mind with ill will. A mind without ill will as such. And knowing a heart with delusion versus knowing a heart or mind without delusion."

My shorthand for that is noticing whether or not greed, hatred, or delusion is present in us, in our heart and mind, in any given moment. And a really easy way to start feeling into this—and I'm not talking about strong greed, strong hatred, strong delusion necessarily, but rather any of the sort of related things. Greed could be a very slight leaning forward, leaning into experience. Hatred, hostility, aversion could be a very slight pushing away of experience, or leaning away from experience. In other words, just notice: is there a felt sense in your internal posture, the quality of your heart and mind? Or maybe there's a sense of wavering or confusion.

The tip-off for that is often rampant speculation. In other words, delusion, moha^[6], and this is the hardest to see. So, I wouldn't worry so much about seeing it. But sometimes you can notice it in that kind of wavering feeling, or when the mind is just off making story after story about what might happen. Or you can sometimes even see it the way you notice breath fogging a mirror.

Noticing these tendencies of mind is hard sometimes, right? Kilesas^[7], afflictions, are what they're called. And yet the instruction is simply to see them, simply to notice them. I want to point out that this instruction is 2,600 years old. People have been experiencing this for a long time. Having one of these arisings happen—greed, hatred, delusion—is not a personal failing. It's simply a human tendency shared by pretty much all of us.

Here is a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn^[8]: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?"

So it's helpful to get interested, get curious, and stay interested in the darker parts, the flits of malice, whatever you don't like coming up in your mind. Because if it's seen clearly with awareness and mindfulness, you don't have to identify with it or believe we need to follow it. And these qualities are no longer running the show.

It's also helpful to notice when there is a skillful, beautiful, wholesome quality in the heart and mind. Kindness, goodwill, compassion, generosity, gratitude, friendliness, wonder, open interest, or simple okayness. The absence of greed, hatred, and delusion, and their many derivatives, leaves the heart, the mind, beautiful, luminous, and clear, and all these different flavors of wholesomeness and skillfulness can show up.

Either way, whatever is being seen is valuable information. The root teacher I've been talking about, who introduced me via Western teachers and via listening to him to this practice, talks about the mind and heart being like a satellite dish that receives all these different packets of information. And eventually, if received and seen clearly, all those little packets of information clarify into wisdom. This is one way of talking about understanding our relationship to reality as valuable information.

This leaning forward and leaning back, grasping or pushing away, is a way of talking about filters or tints on the mind. This is just another way of describing the same phenomena: filters or tints on our perceptions of experience, of reality, and this moment. There are lots of ways of describing this. What is the music underneath the movie of your mind? What's the mindset or inclination of the heart? Or what's the attitude of mind? Or the filter on the photo, or the video, or the app?

When we know that filter for what it is, then it's no longer masquerading as reality. Have you ever put on someone else's prescription glasses? Instead of seeing the world clearly, all of a sudden there's all this distortion. This allows us to take off the glasses, whether they be distorted, dukkha^[9]-colored glasses, or rose-tinted glasses, and look at them rather than through them.

So why does all this matter? When we respond to greed, hatred, and delusion with identification, we tend to amplify them. In other words, if I respond to aversion—that quote-unquote "evil" that Aleksandr talked about—in my own heart with aversion, with hatred towards myself, towards that quality, it tends to amplify. Or if I respond to greed with greed, or to greed with hatred, again, we amplify.

Gradually, however, these qualities, these tendencies, these kilesas, will transform if they're met with receptive interest, clarity, mindfulness, and awareness. And sometimes they transform even faster when they're met with their opposites: renunciation, generosity of spirit, kindness or compassion, clarity or discernment. Because the core of this practice is how the heart and mind relate to experience. Seeing filters for what they are, the quality of mind for what it is, increases clarity, discernment, and wisdom, and it decreases suffering that comes from distorted perceptions.

To access this level of our experience in meditation, it can be helpful to drop in these wisdom koans. You can just try them now to discover your own internal tint or tilt of the moment. "What's the attitude of mind?" Or simply, "Attitude." "How am I relating to this?" Or simply, "What's the relationship?" "Notice." And then finally, "What's the quality of awareness?" Now, that's the one I use.

Again, the invitation with using these insight koans, these little wisdom reflection questions, is please make it work for you. Use your own language if it's helpful and distill it down to the simplest, simplest version, even one word: "awareness" and "wisdom." Respond to the inquiring impulse. It can be as simple as an internal question mark.

So, dear Sangha, between now and tomorrow, the invitation to you is: notice. What's the relationship? Drop some of these question marks into your day, into your practice, and discover for yourself what emerges. Thank you very much for your kind attention.