Guided Meditation: Stillness and movement with emotions; Dharmette: The story of Sona, a mother with many children

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Stillness and movement with emotions. Dharmette: The story of Sona, a mother with many children. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 09, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Stillness and movement with emotions

Yeah, good morning, good day everybody. I'll begin our third day of the stillness and movement adventure. Today I will be continuing this theme of stillness and movement. We'll be incorporating stillness and movement with emotions, as well as the body. Okay, let's begin.

Take a few moments to settle into the space you're in. Allow this arriving and entering into this body, mind, and heart to be a gradual process. Not rushing, pushing, but being gentle, kind. Arriving here and now. Entering into the temple of this body, mind, and heart. Making our seat.

Maybe just these words already evoke a sense of being grounded and uplifted. What's the felt sense of settling into this body, mind, and heart? Feeling and sensing your own experience. Maybe the global sense of the body posture—sitting, lying down. Maybe the contact of the body with the floor, the earth. Earthy body resting on earth.

Giving this body to the wonder of gravity. Nothing to do, naturally settling down. The earthy part of the body is naturally grounding, stabilizing, solid, steady, somewhat still. Resting in the stillness in the body. Maybe just a hint of it, or relatively still. It doesn't have to be some kind of grand level of stillness; it's a relatively unmoving, steady, quiet.

Sitting like a mountain. There's a fierce resonance. You can simply rest here, maybe that's enough. Otherwise, you can follow the words. Open to receive the felt sense of the movements of the breath. Stillness highlights the movements; it becomes obvious. Feeling and sensing the sensations of the movements in the body, however they may show up for you.

Maybe it's the flow of the breath coursing through the torso. Maybe it's the expansion and contraction, as everything moves through the body. Nothing to do, simply becoming available for the natural movements and the stillness in the body.

Other sensations in the body may become felt and visible. Energetic field, pulsations, vibrations, tingling, sway, whatever may be available. To the motion of the sensations, feel and sense. Stillness never left us.

A sense of lightness may be here. A deepening sense of grounding may be here. Not just the quieting and stillness in the knowing, but in the feeling and sensing. This is the perfect, perfect place to rest in.

If you like, do you feel willing, open to receive the movements of the mind? Maybe waves of emotions. Receiving the waves by resting in the vast stillness in the knowing. As if you're settling in the bottom of a quiet lake, and feel and sense the waves on the surface.

Maybe big waves or small waves. And nothing is felt emotionally—maybe just a tenderness, quiet kindness, aversion, confusion. They may have an embodied resonance: a heat or a coolness related to the emotions. Resting in the bottom of the lake to feel and sense.

Sensations of the body may come in. Thoughts may come in. All of it can be received within the vast quietness. This is a safe place to feel, even if it's unpleasant. Letting go of the storytelling of the emotions. Resting in the feeling and sensing.

The emotions move—emotions in your hearts and minds, and in the body. Like clouds or storms moving through the tall mountain. The tall mountain remains unmoving whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Abide in the field of peace and into stillness. Abide independent, not clinging to anything in this world.

Dharmette: The story of Sona, a mother with many children

Today, I brought another great woman disciple of the Buddha with us. Her name is Sona, and Sona is very different from the two women I spoke about in the last two days. Sona was known in the Buddha's time to be a mother or a housewife with many children. In fact, she had ten children. This is a little harder for us to relate to in our modern-day life, but it's not uncommon in ancient times—maybe ancient India—and maybe it's still so in some parts of the world nowadays. I know for myself, my grandmother had five children, and many in her generation had six, seven, eight children. Women married very young, and so they often had a lot of kids. What is not common for Sona is that all her kids were doing really well. All ten children were doing really well. That's kind of special. They had their own families, their businesses were doing well, and she probably had grandchildren, so it was all good, and that's probably not very common.

Her husband was a devotee, a disciple of the Buddha, and at some point, her husband decided to join the monastic Sangha^[1] with the Buddha. That left Sona alone with all her ten children. Initially, this wasn't quite an issue. In those days, often the elderly were cared for by the children, and all ten of her children were doing really well. So she decided, "I'm just going to give away all my possessions and split it across all ten children's families," and she asked if she could just stay with one child at a time and kind of rotate this. She didn't have a lot of needs, so bare necessities would do, and that was working well for a while. Back then, there weren't really senior centers, so that was how the elderly were often cared for.

But that didn't last very long. After some time, there began to be disputes, bitterness, complaints, accusations. And we probably all know, there is probably a bunch of family drama when in-laws are living with the family. The challenges of living with in-laws have withstood the test of time from thousands of years ago until now, and so that was the case for Sona.

That was saddening. Imagine, she had given away everything to all her children, and her husband was no longer there to go back to. So she thought, well, there was really no other option but for her to also join the Buddhist monastic Sangha. There was no refuge in the children's homes, and she also had no home of her own, so she joined the monastic Sangha. That was the only way for her.

But this also turned out to be not easy for Sona. Joining the monastic Sangha of the Buddha, her monastic path wasn't like Bhaddā^[2], who I described yesterday, or Patācārā^[3]. She realized, all the way up till that point in her life, she had always lived mostly as a wife, mother, and grandmother, and she had a really hard time adapting to a monastic Sangha life. It can be a lot different to live in a monastic Sangha, intimately with people who you don't really know whether you like them or don't like them. And there are a lot of different kinds of things to do. Maybe the kutis^[4] or the cabins needed to be fixed, and they needed to learn to fix the cabins and all of these kinds of things, and she had no clue about those.

By the time she joined the monastic Sangha, she was already kind of old and weak; she wasn't very young. And so she did things her way, and other nuns did things their ways, and she often got criticized by other nuns. Maybe a lot of them were younger, and they would criticize her even on small matters, so that was really tough for her.

But one of the prominent qualities of this woman, Sona, was that she was courageous, strong, determined. She wasn't discouraged by any of these challenges that she was facing. Her sincerity, dedication, and steadfastness led her one step at a time on the Dharma path. So she just kept at it. You know, there is this term that one of my teachers, Phillip Moffitt, sometimes would say: "Practice the practice, not practicing the results." And so she just gave herself over to practice as much as she could.

She probably didn't have a very good memory, but she set the Buddha's teachings in her memory. She memorized it by heart and practiced whenever she remembered to do so. That was the kind of wholeheartedness that she went forth with in this monastic life.

And so definitely not like Bhaddā, who was very quick to grasp the teachings, this was not easy. She was like a turtle going one step at a time, but she kept going.

And one day, this was what happened, as she recounted in the Legends of the Therīs, Apadāna^[5]. She said, "Then the nuns left me alone in the retreat." The Buddhist nuns going off with the instruction, "Heat the water while we're gone." You can see these nuns were a little kind of mean when I read this. They were all going for retreat, and they asked Sona to go heat up the water while they were gone. But this is what happened.

She said, "Then bringing water, I poured it into a small pot. After placing it on the hearth, seated, I then came toward my heart." Just in the simplicity of those activities—pouring water into the small pot and putting it on the hearth—she sat down and her mind became collected, settled. You can say she entered into a state of samadhi^[6] and mindfulness.

"Just so," she says, "seeing the body's diseasedness, essencelessness, impermanence, throwing off all the defilements, I achieved arahantship^[7]."

So right in this process, she saw the impermanence, not-self, and she let go of all the defilements and became one of the awakened women.

"Then coming back, those nuns asked me about the hot water. Through concentration on the fire, I quickly made the flame ignite." Yes, maybe she had a little psychic power or something kind of fun. "And then, astonished, the nuns made that fact available to the Buddha. Hearing it, the Buddha, overjoyed, spoke this verse: 'Right now, a life lived only for one day, undertaken with strong effort, is better than a century lived inert, lacking energy.'"

So she was known to be one of the foremost of the nuns who had courageous energy, courageous effort in this whole process, never giving up. She was determined. Her old age, her householder conditioning didn't hinder her capacity to practice at all. She practiced the practice patiently and wholeheartedly, one moment at a time.

I was reflecting that in an age and a culture where one is constantly pushed for efficiency and speed, patience and wholeheartedness can be hard to come by. And yet, this can be one of the most important qualities and capacities to cultivate.

And through this story, we may also realize that meeting difficulties and challenges is inevitable on our Dharma path. The Buddha experienced immense challenges too before his awakening, including fear and dread living in the forest, and he faced it. And so did this disciple, Sona, and so will we if we are to continue on our own Dharma path.

Jack Kornfield said this in his book, A Path with Heart: "As we follow a genuine path of practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide from them and from ourselves. When we don't follow the old habits of fantasy and escape, we're left facing the actual problems and the contradictions of our life. A genuine spiritual path does not avoid difficulties or mistakes but leads us to the art of making mistakes wakefully, bringing them to the transformative power of our hearts."

And so as we rest, abide in the stillness, openness of our heart, we allow the difficulties, the storms to pass through. Not to push them away, to run away from them, but we're cultivating this capacity to allow, to be with the challenges and difficulties of our own life and the lives of all beings.

So may this be the transformative power of our heart for the well-being of all beings everywhere.

Thank you everyone for being here. May you all be well.