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Guided Meditation: Aware Just As It Is

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good time of the day. Any time of day when we decide to settle and give some attention to just being here is a good time of day. Whether we're in meditation or running around doing chores, it's a good time of day, a time of hope and settling. So for us, let's settle into this meditation not with expectations, but with openness.

Let your heart be here with your body, in your body. Take a deep breath to know that you are here. Let it out slowly. Find yourself. Find yourself in your body in a relaxed, comfortable, but alert posture. Allow your head to loosen, your cheeks to settle, your jaw to loosen, your neck muscles to loosen just enough to hold the head steady. Lower your shoulders softly. Allow your elbows to just be there. Your arms not have to wave, but to be just here, just as they are. Your hands, your fingers.

The simple act of being here, breathing. The torso holding our core gently, settling into whatever posture. The hips relaxing, the legs relaxing. Here in this moment, feet firmly on the surface, not heavily, resting. The toes resting. This body breathing. It doesn't have to be a perfect body or a perfect breath. It can be just as it is. Experience just as it is. The breath coming and going softly, jerkily, smoothly. Just let it be. You can just be here. Just aware of being here. Healing.

If the thoughts are wandering, just remind the mind: for now, in the room, in this space, thoughts can come and go. My awareness is here, not following thoughts, noticing the quality of the thinking, not the content. Let that pass. Just for now, let all the moods, the thinking, just pass in and out. In this moment, we're just aware of what's coming and going. The breath in and out. We just know we're breathing. Aware of the movement of the breath.

What else am I aware of? The feelings in my body brought about by the thinking. Do I feel peaceful or slightly anxious? A sense of rushing? Sense of fear? Nothing to be fixed, just to be seen. What is really here? What is really happening? Staying in this space. What's in this space? The energy of this space. Just know it. No opinion. Just know. Breathing.

Aware in this body-mind. The awareness doesn't go seeking. It simply knows this is what's happening. This is the feeling. This is the breath. Aware of hearing. Not 'what am I hearing?', just hearing. Knowing the thoughts are coming and going. Knowing the energy. Not looking. Awareness doesn't judge. It doesn't say good or bad. It might say pleasant or unpleasant. It's just knowing, knowing the breath. Knowing the movement of the air, the movement in the body. The stillness in the body. Just knowing.

Keep feeling the pulling away from the thought story. Feeling that arising in the moment. Knowing, 'Oh, I'm here.' Knowing the breath is coming and going, reliably here. Noticing the reaction to the silence, and the absence of silence. Feeling the pull or the push. Just knowing. In and out.

Dharmette: Wisdom and Views (5 of 5): Incorporating Wisdom

Hello, good morning, good afternoon. We have been talking this week about wisdom. So, I thought maybe a good way to start this is with a quote from a recent essay by one of my favorite physicist-philosophers. So, don't let that scare you. Carlo Rovelli^[1] wrote an essay recently on one of his new books. And so, this is Carlo Rovelli on reality. Reality, that's what we're trying to see here and develop wisdom around, right? How things really are.

So, here's what he says: "Reality is more complex than we expected. Physics, my trade and perhaps the most objective among the sciences (we won't say anything about its objectivity, right?), questions the possibility of a full description of how things objectively are. An electron can be in a quantum superposition so that to an observer it doesn't occupy just one location." Okay.

Later he says, "But an object's properties may differ depending on who or what is looking at them or may not even be defined at all. Properties are not simple features of things. They are relations between one thing and another. What we call the world is therefore only how some parts of reality manifest themselves to other parts. Us, for example."

I thought this was a really great description of what we try to do in practice: What is actually happening here? How are things really? And he points out that it has to do with who you are. That all the properties that we can describe of what we call reality in the world are dependent not only on that object, but on who, what, and when we're watching it.

It sort of emphasizes something that we've touched on all week which has to do with the dual nature^[2] of wisdom. So when we look at wise view and wise intention, what we find is that wisdom is both the product of reflective awareness and the intentional source of skillful action. Wisdom has both of these features. It's what we come to know, and what we come to know becomes the source of our intentions, our source of skillful action.

Reflective awareness is an easy phrase to say, but maybe not so easy to understand. What is reflective awareness? Reflective awareness has a quality of asking, 'What's happening? What is this?' The rumination, what we typically label as papañca^[3], the proliferation of thoughts and thinking, has a way of saying, 'Why is this happening? Why is this happening to me? Why am I keeping up with this habit?' And there's this sort of anguish around trying to understand it. Not that there's anything wrong with understanding, but the kind of understanding that we're looking for is the understanding that says, 'What's happening? What's really happening here? What do we know? And how finely tuned is that knowing?'

I know I'm sitting here, but until I actually feel it, experience being here, I'm not aware of being here. How do we increase our awareness in meditation, in our daily lives? It's a matter of seeing where am I? What am I doing here? What is this? What's actually happening?

So wisdom is the view or understanding that directs our awareness also. So as soon as I say, 'Well, I'm anxious,' I ask myself not what's the meaning of the word anxious or why am I anxious, but is it anxious or is it uneasy? And is it uneasy or is it jitteriness? The words that we use to describe kind of fall in the category of rumination. And so we don't need to be too attached to those words. It's what's happening, what is this? The understanding comes from seeing as clearly as possible. So that knowing our experience, reflecting on that, leads to a confidence and a clear knowing, a realization of new or expanded understanding.

So I'm going to repeat something I said earlier this week. Sayadaw U Tejaniya^[4] says the work of awareness is just to know; the work of wisdom is to differentiate between skillful and unskillful.

I'm going to tell this story, and the characters in this story are ants, but it's not about the ants. It's about what the mind does in response to the ants. Okay. So, we've had swarms of ants in this condo building for several weeks, and we have outbreaks in our third-floor condo in several places. They're in the walls, the ants, and they're crawling up the pipes, and there's kind of an endless source of ants. And so we've gone around and we've caulked and closed all the possible conditions. And yesterday, ants showed up on my desk, and I was immediately in a state of confusion. How can that be? I don't see ants anywhere. Why are they on my desk? They were crawling. I followed them on a cord. And [Laughter] they had formed a colony. I have a window seat over here. I'll just—maybe I could show you. Yeah, window seat over here. And usually I have the Buddha in one corner and my meditation seat in the middle. And I have a small forest of orchids over there, lots of little ones and big ones. Well, the ants, because we'd sealed everything off, couldn't get home, and they formed colonies in my plants.

And my mind just went to horror, and what do I do with all these ants, and how did they get here, but what do I do now? And so I moved everything out. The remedies are not so important. I've had to move my meditation cushion, and I feel the loss of that cushion being there. And I look over and it doesn't look right, and I feel that not-rightness in my mind. And the loss of all of my carefully tended plants—maybe I'm going to have to throw them all away. And the sense of clinging, and watching the mind do all of this around a few ants crawling on my desk, and how that expands and proliferates. How I could become obsessed with the whole ant thing, or I could just be watching my mind. What is the mind doing through all of this? And watching my reactions and learning from that, to know that a view has been created. What am I thinking about it? How is my attitude shifting?

The thing to notice is when something arises, does it open my heart or close it? Do I feel the influx of aversion, or do I feel a peacefulness or an equanimity? This is not about liking and disliking. It's not even about pleasant and unpleasant. It's noticing the movement of the mind. The inclination toward or away from. And the skillfulness of my next move has to take into account who's showing up here. It's a simple knowing.

What we're practicing is a simple knowing, because I've come to trust that knowing. When I feel the kind of tension and closing in of ill will or sourness, I feel an aversion to the sourness and I feel, 'Uh oh, this is not everything. I don't have to imbue this with meaning.' The ants in my plants are not meaningful. They're just there swarming [Laughter], doing what ants do. And there is this reactive mind. Can I lay down this thought and be aware of something else? Do I have to hold on to this thought? What is actually skillful in life?

The knowing is a way of locating ourselves here. I'm here. Whoever I am, that's not what's important. It's who's here. How am I reacting to what's going on in my world, in my life? What is that feeling? And can I hold it a different way? Is there something more skillful here? If I'm really unhappy that I got this terrible email about something I tried to solve weeks ago, nobody was listening to me—to hear that nobody was listening, and say, 'Ah, but now they are. So what now? What now? What now? What now?'

Another aspect of reflective awareness is to be aware of what I'm sure of. 'I'm sure this is true.' And every time I hear myself saying, 'I'm sure of this,' I say, 'Not sure.' I know what that person's thinking? No, I really don't. I know how I am receiving their behavior. I don't know their intention. I know what I would do in that situation, but I'm not in that situation that I see over there. So, how can I judge how they are? How can I say I know how to fix that for you, if I'm not you? How do I keep open the conversation between myself and what I see?

So, first I'm going to read this quote from Ajahn Amaro^[5], because it brings very closely the idea of the middle way. There's not any one right way to be skillful, or to engage with someone, or to engage with ourselves.

Here's the quote: "The middle way is appreciated as a finely felt sense. It has nothing to do with being mild or halfway along the arc of a pendulum, but rather the still point that is the center of movement, the axis that the pendulum pivots from. In our heart of hearts, we know what it is to be perfectly balanced. There is a deep intuitive familiarity with this. And this is what we need to sustain and trust. This is the way that the root of concord can be found and embodied. All this said, the rational mind can still struggle for more precision. Yes, but what exactly is it? When a piece of music moves us, we say it's perfect. But even in the saying, we've almost lost the feeling. Louis Armstrong, when asked, 'What's jazz?' responded, 'Man, if you got to ask, you'll never know.' The middle way is that wordless quality of balance, of pure and vibrant harmony."

You know what equanimity feels like. You know what the middle way feels like. Just become more familiar with it.

So, the poem I'm going to read this morning is from Naomi Shihab Nye's^[6] new book, Sidekick. It's a poem she wrote about her last conversation with W.S. Merwin^[7], who has since died. And what I want you to notice about this poem is the care, clarity, and persistence of the conversation. And imagine it as you hear this poem, imagine talking to yourself.

Calling Back is the name of the poem.

The last time we ever spoke by phone, things blurring by then, words further apart, drifting syllable threads. "What's that?" you'd say, asking me to repeat. But how are you really, knowing you missed Paula too much to mention it? We traded words tenderly. Your trees, our palm tree in Texas you had planted so many years ago. When we all had easier times walking hidden roads, you carried it in your pocket. Baby palm from Gonzalez, saying it would grow waist-high. William, it's twenty feet tall. Silences felt lit. Soft evening light on my end, afternoon birds on yours. In the gaps, your breathing calm as ever. You said, "Ah, well," the way you always did. You held a note, still, William, in every way. I thank you for encouraging me always to speak to the dead out loud. You said they might even answer sometimes in ways that might be important. Surely, this has been true already, and would be even more true later. When we hung up so reluctantly on my side, I sat at the wooden table trying to rise, thinking that might be the last time I ever heard your gentle voice in my ear. Maybe our giant palm was bowing down right then. When the phone dinged your number again, it seemed a mistake for sure. You always said you hated telephones, but your elegant voice that had traveled so many miles, said so many poems, helped so many people feel more at home in words than on earth, was right there firmly asking, "Could we talk some more?"

Never give up on yourself. Never give up trying to see. Never expect more than you have. Don't be sure what you have. Don't be sure who you are or how things are. Just keep saying, 'What's happening? Can we talk some more?'

Thank you for spending this week with me.