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Guided Meditation: Letting Go of Thoughts

Hello from Redwood City in California, and welcome to our meditation session together.

One of the important supports for meditation is no longer being fascinated by our own thinking, or no longer so actively involved in our thinking. No longer simply allowing thinking to go on and on without being clearly mindful of that. There is a kind of heightened attention to thinking that's useful for meditation, to protect us from being swept away in our thoughts.

One way to do this—and at the same time, it's very important not to be in conflict with thinking or struggling against it; it's almost better just to keep thinking than to struggle—but a few things that you might try doing today: One is, with every exhale, let go of what you're thinking. Thinking might begin again very quickly, and that's okay, but every exhale, let go of your thinking and be there for the inhale. Then let go again, and be there for the inhale. Kind of get into the rhythm of that, so that whatever thought arises, you're not swept away in it. You're not caught in it. You're not fueling it or involved in it.

If letting go of it seems a bit too much, an alternative is to, with every exhale, if you're thinking, recognize your thinking. Acknowledge that's the case, and it can be with a simple word: "thinking," that you say to yourself. Saying the word "thinking" helps many people step away from their involvement with thinking. And in that stepping away, we're not fueling it and feeding it anymore—the stories and whatever we're involved in.

So both letting go of your thinking and just recognizing that you are thinking do not have to be done with any opposition to thinking. But there are better things to do than to think if what you want to do is to meditate. This beginning to create a little bit of freedom from thinking then makes space and room for a greater settling, a greater calm, or clarity of mindfulness.

Assuming a meditation posture, taking some time to move around, twist, and sway the body a bit, both to wake up the body and connect to your body, but also to help the body come into an aligned posture, or just to adjust to the best posture that's suitable for you. Gently closing the eyes, and taking a few long, deep, slow breaths—three-quarters full. Some people find it helpful to open the mouth a little bit and breathe in through the mouth with steep inhales, so they are more conscious and engaged.

Breathing in deeply, and then a long, slow, relaxing exhale. Perhaps as you exhale, settling into this body posture, and then letting your breathing return to normal. Continue the process of relaxing the body, softening. Some people like to do it systematically, some people like to just do it randomly wherever the tension is in the body.

If you do it systematically, you can start at the forehead and the eyes, relaxing with the exhale. Softening the cheeks and the jaws. There might be some relaxing of the neck, softening of the neck. Release the holding in the neck on the exhale. Releasing the shoulders, or softening or easing up with the shoulders. Softening in the chest. Softening the belly. Perhaps there can be a softening, relaxing of the hands, the fingers, and a relaxing of the legs.

And if you have a location in your body, in your head, where thinking is most predominant—there's a physical engagement of energy, or agitation, contraction, or pressure associated with thinking—as you exhale, can you relax that thinking muscle? That tightness associated with thinking.

Then to settle into your breathing, the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Maybe with your central vision—in a sense, central attention—going on breathing. In your peripheral attention, as you exhale, let go of your thinking. With every exhale, lighten up, quiet your thinking.

Or, if that is difficult, every exhale, acknowledge that you're thinking. Stepping back, stepping away, and seeing thinking for what it is: This is thinking. This is the mind thinking. And that stepping away, and seeing it this way, begins a process of not being so identified or involved with thinking.

Recognizing that you're thinking, and keep recognizing it, letting go of your thinking. Letting go into your breathing, and keep letting go of thinking, gently, kindly, without struggle or aversion. Just letting go.

Letting go of thoughts, perhaps there can be a fresh awareness of the inhale. A fresh involvement, settling into the experience of breathing in and breathing out.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, again take a few long, slow, deep breaths. This time, perhaps breathing in deeply into your heart, almost as if you can expand your good heart as you inhale, and spread that goodness out with the exhale.

If we value goodness, kindness, friendliness, generosity, love—if we value some of these heart qualities, the end of a meditation is a time to remember them, to touch into them. And on whatever benefit that's come from the meditation practice, let these good qualities of the heart float on the benefits of meditation and the ways you're calm, more settled, more open. Consider how whatever benefit, known or unknown, that comes from the practice—consider bringing those benefits into the world. That you yourself are an agent of doing good in the world, benefiting others.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be safe. May all beings be free. And may each of us contribute to that possibility.

The Long Game of Practice: Conditioning and Skills

Okay, I have a little bit of a tickle in my throat today, so we'll see how this goes.

One of the things well known about mindfulness practice, Buddhist meditation practice in general, is that it's very much based on being present in the present moment. It's a practice that aims to bring us into the present moment more fully. But not just to be present for its own sake, which sometimes is quite lovely and profound, but to begin utilizing or engaging some of the potential that comes when we can be present for our experience. Some of the potential of mindfulness practice that can be actualized when we're present, when we're in the now, is really something that belongs to the world of time—that the benefits come in the future. The benefits we're putting in place, we're doing activities, we're doing the meditation practice in such a way that benefits will come, sometimes well into the future.

So what are those benefits? What is part of the long game of meditation that we're engaged in here now? I'll start with an analogy of raising children.

I had the experience—that I think probably plenty of parents have—of when the kids are quite young (two, three, sometimes even four, five, maybe even older sometimes), that we might make a lot of effort to do something wonderful with the children. We take them to some wonderful place, do some kind of wonderful activity at home, or spend a lot of time to really do something quite marvelous. And as the kids grow older, they don't remember so many of the things. What parents can remember as special moments weren't particularly special for the kids—they don't remember.

The event, the activity, the conscious experience of something doesn't remain for the children in the way it sometimes does for the parents. But what remains is a few things. One is that in early childhood, things that the kids don't remember is that they're receiving the conditions. They're being conditioned. They're being influenced, nourished, supported, and impacted by the environment that they're in.

If the parents, or the family, or the environment is creating an environment where the kids feel safe, nurtured, loved, and cared for, that creates a very different conditioning for the child than if the child grows up with violence, anger, being ignored, being dismissed, and all kinds of things. It's very different conditioning if they feel safe and cared for. Something relaxes, and they feel at home in the world; they feel comfortable. But if there's war and violence, anger, drunkenness, chaos, dismissing, and ignoring, then they don't feel like they belong. They feel like something's wrong. They feel they have to protect themselves. They feel tense, they feel afraid. Each of those two scenarios creates very different conditioning, and that conditioning can last well into a person's whole life. They don't remember all the details, but the conditioning has remained. Some people feel like even before kids learn language and have the words to remember what happened, they're already being conditioned by the environment in that first year of their life in a very deep way.

One of the ways that meditation or Buddhist practice works—a very important part of it—is that we are putting in place conditions that condition us in a good way. They influence us on maybe even a subliminal or a deeper, physical, heartfelt, emotional level that words and understanding don't do. And so we are beginning to understand what the conditions are that are supportive. So that's one thing: the conditioning.

The second thing I want to talk about—and then I'll bring these two together—is that you also see in young children that a lot of what childhood is about is learning new skills. They don't know how to crawl, and then they develop the skills for crawling. They don't know how to walk, and then they develop the skills for walking, maybe with a lot of falling as part of it. They don't know the skills of eating, and then they develop the skills for how to eat. Those skills sometimes develop in greater detail as they get older. People who grow up with spoons eventually get forks, eventually get forks and knives, maybe even they're introduced to chopsticks, and they develop all this physical dexterity of how to eat. It's a skill that gets developed. By the time we're an adult, we're not thinking about that as a skill; it's just kind of an obvious thing that we know how to do. But you watch the little kids, and you see they're learning how to do this. We learn language, we learn to ride a bicycle, we learn to put on our clothes for ourselves, and we learn all these different things. We're learning these skills.

These skills that we learn, we continue right up until we die. We're still learning skills and how to be in this world. It's a very ordinary human thing to, through repetition, through engagement, learn mental skills, physical skills, and maybe emotional skills of how to do things. Part of Buddhist meditation practice that has to do with time is that we are developing skills. We are developing the skills of concentration, the skills of mindfulness. Developing a whole bunch of skills about knowing what to bring mindfulness to and what to include.

We learn after a while that we should be mindful of the fact that we're drifting off in thought a lot, or we need to be mindful of our attitude as we meditate. I know people can meditate without realizing that there's anger as part of their mindfulness. They're upset with something, or there's an expectation that some wonderful thing is going to happen. Or there's some subtle thought that, I can't really do this, this is too difficult, or there's a greed or a desire that's pushing, wanting some wonderful experience. So, with all these attitudes, there is the learning of the skill of recognizing those subtle attitudes that are sometimes even tripping us up as we meditate, or which are having an undue influence on how we meditate.

Part of the skill is then to learn about conditions. To learn that it's our job to put in place the proper conditions that nourish us, that support us, that allow for the growth and well-being of who we are. Meditation is one of those. If you spend your time just watching movies on Netflix or something, or if you only spend your time chasing after making lots of money, or only spend time chasing after anything at all—you can name it—and you're preoccupied, busy, involved, then that's a conditioning factor. But if you spend time having a Sabbath, having time just to be quiet and still and content with your life as it is, it creates a very different conditioning.

If you feel like you always want more, then you're conditioning, influencing, and predisposing yourself to feel that you're always not enough, that there's always more to be had. And no matter what you get, there's always more. If you're conditioning yourself to be content, then you're more likely to be content, or to recognize that you are content. You don't need more and more and more. This conditioning is not brainwashing. It's just taking the good qualities that we have and developing the skill to connect with them more often. To remind ourselves more often, and to cultivate the things that bring those about and bring them forth, because we have the potential of feeding ourselves good influences.

Classically, the Buddha said it's useful to spend time with good spiritual friends^[1]. To spend time with people that represent values or present qualities of being that you want to be influenced by, that you want to be conditioning factors for yourself. If you spend time only with angry people, only with hostile people, then maybe that's what gets encouraged and returned back. So, to take care of what comes in, it influences us. The more we're in the present moment, the more we can be the custodian, the caretaker of that, and we can make the choices.

We can make choices about something as simple as this: there are two freeways here on the Peninsula, there's 101 and there's 280. Sometimes it's been more or less the same which one I take, maybe a little bit longer on 280. I see that driving down 280 goes through beautiful hillsides, and sometimes of the year, these forests and mountains on the side. 101 goes down through the airport and city, urban areas in a way that's not so inspiring in parts of it. Just to go down 280, I feel better. I feel more refreshed and relaxed at the end.

But even if I go down 101, where there's maybe a lot more traffic and business and smog and stuff, then what conditions do I want to support to develop inside of me? It isn't just a moral obligation to be patient or to be a driver that's generous to the other drivers, but what do I want to develop in myself? Maybe I don't want to develop being in a hurry, being impatient, and zigzagging out of the traffic to get someplace where I need to go as quickly as I can. Maybe what I want to develop is driving in a way where I'm driving safe and content, as if I have lots of time. This idea of giving ourselves time and driving in a contented way, rather than a discontented way with pressure—in the long game of life, those begin creating conditions that allow something deeper to unfold and develop within us.

These two things are a very important part of Buddhist practice in general: that Buddhist practice has a lot to do with putting conditions in place, and there's a lot to do with developing the skills to do so. Some of these skills, some of these conditioning factors are things like kindness. We develop the skill of being kind. Some of it has to do with letting go. We develop a skill of letting go. Some of it has to do with being generous, and so we cultivate the capacity for generosity, becoming skillful at learning the art of generosity and how to give wisely.

There is a variety of different things we're developing: the skill of ethical conduct, the skill of wise speech—speech which we feel nourished by when we finish speaking it. We feel like we've benefited from it, rather than later feeling, I'm so sorry I spoke that way, I was just mostly complaining the whole time we were together, and I feel a bit drained, and maybe you do too. These are all called skills that we develop. We develop beneficial skills.

It's not only a matter of showing up and being mindful in the present moment, developing present moment awareness, and then trusting that all the goodness we have will come and take care of things. That's a little bit of magical thinking. We develop mindfulness of the present moment, and then we see more choice. We live a more considered life; we're more wise about things.

Some people put a tremendous emphasis on religious experiences. They're looking to have a great 'aha' moment. They've heard in Buddhism there's enlightenment, and they think, I want to get that experience of enlightenment, and then everything will be okay forever after. Or, I want to have this wonderful religious experience that then I can go around and tell my friends, 'Aha! You know, it's so great what happened to me when I was on retreat. This great experience happened and it was so profound, and I'm so glad I had this profound experience.' There are wonderful experiences that can happen and can arise in practice, and I don't want to diminish their importance. But to overemphasize them at the expense of the ordinary, day-to-day cultivating of skills, cultivating the right conditions—the long game—some of this conditioning bears fruit far into the future.

It's possible that as we develop generosity, or contentment, or the capacity to be equanimous—a capacity to be with pain and not be reactive, afraid, hostile, or contracted—it becomes a skillfulness of being with pain. It's one of the things I started learning in my early years of Buddhist practice when I was living at Zen Center. In a variety of different ways, I got the message: "Gil, it'd be good if you understood how to be present for pain without the self-pity, the reactivity, the anger." And I would look for situations where I was feeling a lot of pain, but it was safe to do so. Then I would explore it, and be with it, and develop the skill of being present in an equanimous, open way, without being troubled by the pain, but being wise with it.

I mean with simple things, like sometimes we were carrying really heavy objects. I was working on the Zen Center farm, and we had to carry farm implements. So, allowing myself to feel the pain and doing the work—up to a healthy limit, hopefully—but working with that edge, learning about myself, developing that skill. And then later in life, I had accidents or had things happen to me where I was in a lot of pain—not because I wanted to be, but because it was an accident. And then I had the skill of knowing how to practice with pain. That was really useful, to learn how to let go. Not because letting go is a moral obligation; you can simply live a much better, happier life when you let go.

That becomes obvious as people get older. It seems like I've come into that stage of age—maybe old age, maybe—where with my friends sometimes we go through a litany. I think of a litany as a kind of sacred repetition of a chant or something. Anyway, the litany of different physical ailments, how our bodies are changing and shifting as we get older. To learn how to let go of all the physical changes—let go of how things were—and then embrace what's happening now, finding some joy in it: Okay, well that goes now too. This too, this too. That's a skill we develop.

If you've never let go of anything in your whole life, and then something happens in old age where you can no longer have a certain ability, you can get bitter at the absence of that ability. But if you learn to let go, and learn not only letting go but letting go into something great—you've conditioned yourself, you've cultivated and developed a sense of peace, tranquility, love, and goodness. Letting go is not just letting go into an absence or a deprived state, but letting go into this goodness that's been developed, this goodness that's been allowed to grow.

The skill of letting go comes together with how we've been conditioned, how we've allowed ourselves to be conditioned and to grow. That is part of the long game of meditation practice. So what are the conditions you want to have in place?

One of the interesting things about Buddhist practice and the teachings of the Buddha is that he didn't put a lot of emphasis on causality—like we are responsible to cause things, to cause our meditation practice to develop a certain way. Rather, we're responsible for putting the conditions in place that allow for growth. So there's both a removal of responsibility and an addition of responsibility. We're not responsible for what actually happens, but we are responsible for putting the best conditions in place so that something good can happen.

There's a kind of releasing of obligation, or releasing of a certain kind of self-centered effort to make something happen. It's more like grace. It's more like we receive all this goodness; we make room for it and allow it to grow and happen. That's one part of the conditions we offer: getting out of the way and allowing the goodness to evolve and develop. We put in the best conditions so that the best can grow out of us.

What are those conditions? Part of a Buddhist spiritual life is reflecting and thinking about what conditions you can realistically put into place that support that long game, that support the influence you want to have and the conditioning you want to develop. And what skills do you want to develop?

Meditation is a skill, and it's done by repetition, over and over and over again. When I heard [unintelligible]^[2], who taught recently, when she was abbess of the San Francisco Zen Center, she said she sometimes would watch new students come in to meditate, and see how awkward they were in their physical bodies sitting in meditation posture. How they had to move and fidget throughout the meditation session. And then she'd watch slowly over the weeks and the months as their bodies would adjust. They would find a way to sit, and eventually they would sit in a very good, balanced, settled Zen posture. They develop a skill slowly over time to cultivate that subtle place.

So some of these skills we develop are done by repetition, over and over and over again. I'll give you an analogy I've used before that I love. It has to do with the old-fashioned—people don't have them anymore, I think—telephone books, that are really fat and have very, very thin paper. You take a bunch of them and stack them up on the floor. If you use them as a prop for a yoga posture, a yoga asana, like the triangle pose: If one arm is supposed to reach all the way down to the floor, but it can't get there, you have your arm reach down to the top of the telephone books. And then every day, you tear off one page of the books. So each day, the difference is almost inconsequential. But slowly, in a way that's imperceptible to you, slowly, slowly you're able to bring your hand closer and closer and closer to the floor, until finally you can do the triangle pose touching the floor.

There is gradual growth, patient growth. The patient developing of skills. The patient development of these inner qualities that support us and influence us, that are mutually supportive for us and the world around us: kindness, love, generosity, truthfulness, wise speech, equanimity, compassion, letting go, relinquishment, seeing clearly, stopping and looking, mindfulness itself.

All this can lend itself to the idea that you have to be busy, that there's a lot of doing. But the idea of being busy and doing, doing, doing is not really a good condition to have. That's not a really good influence in this process, and developing the skill of being busy is not necessarily one of the better skills we want to develop. As we pay attention to all this, there's a self-correcting movement. We start recognizing: How do we do things? How do we engage in Buddhist practice and all the elements of it so that it has a good influence on us, so that we're developing good skills in the process?

This is where we come closer and closer to the present moment as well. Rather than only thinking of the long game, we want to discover the goodness of what we do in the moment that we do it. There has to be a good feeling that, Oh, this is nourishing. This is supportive. This is not stressful. So being really busy, doing too much—if you really feel and are present for that experience, you can feel, Oh, this doesn't work. So, developing skills, and putting together conditions, and doing those things skillfully, in a way that provides conditions of ease, relaxation, and enjoyment of this precious life that we have here.

Appreciating our role in putting the conditions in place and developing skills can give life a tremendous sense of purpose and value, and then it's not such a mystery how spiritual change happens. In fact, one of the signs of maturity in Buddhist practice is a real understanding of how to work with the world of conditioning and the world of skill building, and to have engaged in that for a long time. Slowly, slowly, something develops and evolves over time—both the benefits that are immediate and the benefits that come through time.

I encourage you from time to time to really consider the long game. If you do so, then you'll be ready for old age, sickness, and death, and these won't be so frightening or difficult because you've put the conditions in place and developed skills that will support you even through sickness, old age, and death itself. Thank you.

Announcements

I have one announcement. I'm starting a two-week retreat this afternoon, so the next two Sundays I won't be here. But I've invited two wonderful teachers to come teach. These are both teachers who have just graduated from their teacher training, so they're relatively new teachers, though they've had a fair amount of experience already teaching. They're quite marvelous; I just delight in both of them.

Next week it's Devin Berry^[3], and the week after that is Tara Mulay^[4], who's taught here for us before. I think you'll enjoy them quite a bit. Hearing a different voice and a slightly different mindfulness teaching will be something you'll appreciate a lot. Then I'll be back in a few weeks, and I'll see some of you in the weekday morning meditations we do. Thank you.