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Guided Meditation: Memories of the Path

Good morning everyone, or good day. Good to see you again. Welcome. Yesterday I said welcome to all of you, welcome to all of us. And today I want to say welcome back. Today, the heart of practice is coming back to this place here. This place in the here and now that we create in the meditation. This is the heart of practice.

So we'll begin with a guided meditation that, for some reason, in putting together the list, I called "Memories of the Path." We'll explore that in the guided meditation, and then the dharmette is just called "This Place"—this place here, in the hereness and nowness of experience. But to prepare the mind for the sharing of the dharma, let's begin by sitting in meditation together.

Bringing ourselves here, notice as we do so how we rely on memory to recreate each time the path back inward—the path back into our inner life and our inner world. We are so familiar with doing this that we may not be aware of the role that memory plays in our practice. Memory is a storehouse of instructions, guidance, and self-guidance, as a sort of automatic way that we have access to the storehouse of memory, and recollecting when we need to add a little effort—remembering more intentionally how we return to the present, to here and now.

As the instructions unfold today—as you hear them, as you practice them yourself with or without the guidance—notice the role that memory plays. I like to think sometimes that as I begin the meditation, I'm following a path of breadcrumbs that I left behind on previous visits to this place. I'm following these breadcrumbs to a clearing in the forest, or to a place of light and ease. Each time we retread these steps, we reinforce this pattern. We drop breadcrumbs that will be of use to us next time we return.

Noticing this, we close our eyes or soften our gaze. We bring our attention inward. If it feels very heavy and cerebral at the moment—which isn't uncommon in the course of our days, even if we've just woken up—we bring our attention downward. We notice the body. We engage the practice as an embodied practice by feeling the weight of the body, or feeling tension and ease in the body. Notice what's going on in the body, showing up for our lived experience, which is an embodied experience.

We draw on memory to connect with the breathing, or some other anchor that provides us a way to be here. When we attend to it, we remember to pick up the breathing in the abdomen, in the shoulders, or in the nostrils.

If we bring attention to the nostrils, we may recollect the instruction to notice the air passing in with each in-breath—quick and cool—and then passing back out—warmer, slower. Again and again, we find we remember, or more effortfully need to recollect, the instruction to return to this place in the present. Whenever attention becomes scattered, whenever the mind wanders or leaps away, or whenever we find our attention and mind becoming very contracted and tight around a particular course of thought or current of emotion, gently, without hurry, easefully, we come back to here and now. We reconnect with the breathing and this little place here that we create in the meditation. This is a place where the mind can rest, where the mind can be at ease, where we can rest in a free knowing of experience. This is the heart of practice.

When we return here, every time we move away, every time attention gets scattered or tight or contracted, or the mind wanders, it's far from being a problem. It's this wonderful opportunity to come back here. And when we come back, we can enjoy this sense of being here. I like to return with a sense of "ah" to this place. Each time we return, we can feel this wholesome pleasure that's here. It's just about being here now, instead of there. Wherever we found ourselves, we can come back here with a sense of "ah." So this place is the heart of practice, and so too is this "ah" of return. This "ah" is the heart of practice.

This place here in the meditation, whatever's coming up, whatever's arising, this here-and-nowness of our experience, this place in the very center of life: this is the heart of practice. Returning, remembering to come back. Recollecting how to return. Balancing effort and allowing. Finding comfort regardless of external conditions. Sitting in the flow of experience. Meeting experience without pushing or pulling. Being present without preferences. This place here is the heart of practice. And in this place of practice, there's a wholesome pleasantness that we can actively enjoy. There's pleasure in being here now, without fighting the experience, without struggling. And this is the heart of practice.

Dharmette: The Heart of Practice (2 of 5) This Place

Welcome, and as I said at the outset, welcome back. This is the theme for today: this coming back here, this coming back to this place of now, this way of being here. This is the heart of practice. I'd like to explore this a little bit today in a dharmette that will be titled "This Place." Let me begin with a personal recollection, which goes like this.

I learned to meditate as quite a young person. I think I was about thirteen. I grew up in the countercultural 1970s San Francisco Bay Area, in which it was acceptable for a teacher to invite a bunch of teens^[1] to her home to teach them to meditate. I fell in love with meditation. It was really special to me at that age, given other things that were happening in my life and family. I kept at it into and through college, and then I kind of let it go—graduate school, career, children, moving, all that life brings in your twenties and thirties.

Many years later—probably about twenty years ago now, maybe a little more—a dear friend of mine was dying. To keep him company, to show solidarity, to help, I began to meditate daily. Knowing that he was meditating, I began to meditate again in solidarity with him.

When I first sat to meditate, knowing that he was meditating, that he was facing death, I remembered how to return to the heart of the meditation. I remember very distinctly this intense realization I had the first time I sat again. I'd always sat off and on, particularly if there were health crises or emergencies; I found sitting very supportive. But the first time I returned there, I remember saying to myself, "Ah, this place. This place." Not that I'd forgotten it, but just that all the memory of the wonders of this place of meditation came flooding back. That was at least twenty years ago, and I haven't missed a day since.

So that's what I want to bring attention to today: this idea of this place, and maybe even more importantly—because it's different for each of us—how we return, how we keep returning.

If I'd had a little bit more experience and had been practicing in a Buddhist tradition at the beginning of that experience, I might well have said when I thought to myself, "Oh, this place," maybe I would have thought, "Ah, this is the heart of practice." It's by way of memory, remembering, and recollecting that we get back over and over again to that place. And it's returning to that place again and again that seems to heal, that seems to fill our hearts, that helps us be more awake in the world. It seems to be good for ourselves, good for others, and good for our relationships with others.

We return by remembering the way, recollecting the way, drawing on our memory—memory of the place and also our memory of the path.

Some of you know—possibly a lot of you know—that the word in Pali that we translate as mindfulness, sati^[2], literally means memory. As a word, it's deeply bound up with ideas about memory: to remember, to recollect, to bear in mind, to return. In the mainstream traditions of the Buddha's time, this memory specifically meant remembering sacred texts and remembering the rituals that were in those texts. But the Buddha added a new meaning to this idea of remembering and recollecting: not an expectation to remember texts, but rather an invitation to find sacredness and freedom in our own direct experience.

So we might say that for the Buddha, sati or mindfulness has a specific feeling tied to memory: to remember to observe what's going on, what's coming up, what's coming and going right here, right now in our experience. To me, I don't know about anybody else, but it's quite a relief that we don't have to memorize a huge body of texts. We have a huge body of texts if we feel moved to memorize them, but rather we just have to keep showing up, remembering to observe what's going on here and now in our own experience. To me, that's a great relief. We don't have to master some arcane literature. We don't have to become an expert. We can just keep showing up as best as we can for what's happening right here and now. The Buddha suggests in his teachings that that's all we need to do to be free. In fact, to do that in a certain way is to be free.

A lot of times in the Buddhist teachings, we're encouraged to refrain from doing things. For example, don't cause harm. Don't engage in unskillful speech. Avoid unskillful action. But in the case of this idea of remembering, of recollecting the path, of remembering this place in the here and now of direct experience, of meeting our experience in a certain way—in a sense, the instruction is to not forget. Don't forget what's right in front of us. Don't get sidetracked by thinking we have to master arcane literature or a ritual, but rather don't forget to keep coming back to the here and now and learning from what's right here, right now in front of us.

Earlier today, I was thinking, "Oh, that's interesting. Where does the English word remember come from?" Gil loves words, and some of us students of Gil also love words. I've always loved words. "Remember" is an interesting word because it seems to mean "return to memory." I find this quite useful, inspiring, and moving, in that it helps us understand that the memory of the path starts to become available to us. Memory, in a way, is a storehouse of tricks and tools, pro-tips and practice hacks, breadcrumbs if you will—a path of practice that gets us back again and again to this place in the middle of things.

This helps me think a little bit about the contrast between remembering and recalling. I think there we can see the balance that we put a lot of emphasis on in effort and allowing, which is such an important part of our path of practice. "Remember" implies that something is there in the storehouse of memory and that it comes forward without any effort, or without much effort. Something is remembered. I close my eyes, I bring attention down into the body and inward to this inner life, and a memory arises. The path emerges; it unfolds in front of us like a carpet unrolling, or breadcrumbs—just drawing on metaphors that come to mind. Sometimes the practice is like this: we sit down and there's just this simple unfolding. We remember, we draw on memory, we allow the path to unfold, and we allow the practice to happen.

In contrast, "recollect" means that something is in memory—it's there, but maybe it's forgotten or partially lost to active recall, and it takes a little effort to bring it forward in the mind. Sometimes practice is like this. We have to tug ourselves back to the present moment with a little bit more effort, or bring together attention that has become scattered, or open back up when the mind has become tight around something. That can take a little bit more recollecting: "How might I do this in this particular moment?"

So memory in Buddhist practice is maybe like a storehouse. It's akin, in a way, to the ancient texts of earlier traditions of the Buddha's time. That is where the instructions are housed. But in the Buddhist teaching, what's to be remembered—and then recollected as necessary—is to keep returning to the heart of practice, to the here and now of things, to this place here in the middle of our lives. This is the heart of practice.

I'm going to keep playing with this idea because I'm enjoying it, and I hope some of you are as we go forward this week. Tomorrow, I don't know exactly what I'm going to do because it's not tomorrow yet, but my idea is to spend a little bit more time thinking about another way to unpack the word "recollection"—because of course, within it, we have "collection." This idea that a part of the heart of practice is the way we gather together our awareness in a way that supports clear seeing, that supports insight. There's a collectedness in the stillness of the meditation. There's a gathering of attention and awareness around the center of our lives, around the here and now of our experience, that supports insight and our seeing clearly.

In meditation practice, we cultivate a way of meeting experience that enables us to hold, in a sort of free knowing, some of the most difficult things that arise in our lives. And this is an act of recollection. We keep coming back to this place, this heart of practice, and part of what goes on there is this knitting together of awareness. This gathering and collecting of awareness allows us to see clearly, and in particular, it allows us to see clearly the arising and the passing of suffering.

We'll continue tomorrow. I appreciate your presence and your practice, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Take care, everyone. Bye.