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Guided Meditation: Tension/Peace

Guided Meditation: Craving/Aspiration

Good morning or good day, everyone, and welcome.

An English word that I'm fond of is the word aspiration—to aspire. And I think part of the reason I like it is that from the Latin roots, French roots, it means to breathe. Aspire is like respiration, and just like inspiration as well, they all come from this root word for breathing. This points to the profundity of breathing, how it's deeply connected to so many things. To connect our aspiration, our desires, to something that's so deep, integral, and connected to ourselves as the breathing, contributes to this idea for me that aspiration is a positive word for desire.

It's a kind of desire that is not treated as somehow wrong in Buddhism. There's a simplistic understanding of Buddhism that all desires are somehow wrong or should be transcended in some way, but there's a very important place for healthy, skillful desires and aspiration.

To have the wish to direct oneself towards a particular purpose and goal that comes out of the heart—the heart's wish, the heart's aspiration, the heart's calling—may be a stirring that wants something. It's a wanting, a desire, that, because it comes from breathing, comes from a place of feeling full. It comes from a place of being content and settled. It doesn't come from a sense of lack—that I don't have enough, I need more. It rather comes, if anything, from a sense of contentment, a fullness, like I have enough. What seems to emerge in this very settled, peaceful place is an aspiration.

There are many that can exist together in the same person. Certainly, the aspiration to somehow do good in the world is a beautiful thing. The aspiration to become free ourselves, to become free of the ways in which we're limited, where the heart is shackled or contained, to become free from our attachments, preoccupations, and neuroses around "me, myself, and mine"—this is a phenomenally beautiful thing.

And so, sitting in meditation can be motivated by this aspiration. If we get settled enough, quiet enough, maybe we feel and sense that at the root of where breathing begins, there seems to be almost a natural desire, wish, or inclination towards something profound.

If you like this kind of language—if you don't, you can ignore what I'm about to say—as you take your meditation posture, make your body your temple. Make your body the meditation center. Let your body become the sacred grove in which you go to meditate. Let this body be appreciated as the field, as the territory, the location for a deep connection to life, to oneself, to the depths of our stirring, the depth of our aspiration about how to live this life.

Gently close your eyes, and gently, on the exhales, relax your body. You might start at the top of your head and your face, relaxing, softening. Sometimes the facial muscles can hold a lot of discontent, wanting things to be different. Relax those muscles of discontent, muscles of anxiety.

Let the relaxation descend into your shoulders, softening, gentling the shoulders. Moving down to the chest, heart, and the solar plexus area—relax, soften. Sensing deep inside the torso to what can be relaxed and softened there. Moving the relaxation down into the belly, softening in the belly. Down into the hips and the legs, softening. Perhaps a final relaxation is global throughout the body, releasing any holding in your body.

And then feeling your way into your body, deep inside, to maybe where breathing begins, or where aspiration arises from the depth of you. Let there be an aspiration, connecting to whatever your aspiration is here and now about how to be present. An aspiration of what to actualize in terms of being present directly, being free of attachments, fear. The aspiration to let the heart be free, the mind at peace, here and now.

And with the word aspiration meaning etymologically to breathe, perhaps you can allow a gentle aspiration to be present, to be free, to let go, to be there with every breath, breathing in and breathing out.

As you're here in the present moment the best you can, being mindful, being present for what is—your breathing in and breathing out—let there be an aspiration to be present. Connect to find an aspiration that supports you in wanting to be present here and now. Perhaps you can connect to something that takes you to the depths of your life.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, imagine that as you exhale, the exhaling breath carries with it whatever wishes you have for the world. If those wishes are wishes of ill will, you'll spread seeds of ill will that will sprout all over. But if you breathe out goodwill, those will be the seeds that you'll spread across this world.

Perhaps in some deep place inside, below all the layers of challenging feelings and experiences you've had, maybe there's a place that you have goodwill for this world. Will you aspire to spread goodwill around everywhere, perhaps as seeds? So as you exhale, as I speak these words, may your exhale carry your goodwill, your aspiration for goodness in this world.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be safe. May all beings be free.

And may everything your breath touches receive your well-wishing.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Conditioned Consciousness (3 of 5) Craving and Aspiration

Come to the third talk in the series called Conditioned Consciousness. The idea is that the way that we perceive, experience, or construct the sense of consciousness is something that is conditioned. It's constructed or influenced by all kinds of other factors in our minds, our hearts, and our lives. As we start understanding some of these conditions, some of these influences for how we put together the idea of consciousness, we can appreciate how some conditions create consciousness which doesn't feel so good, and others help produce one that feels wonderful.

Today I want to talk about the range, or the distinction, between craving and aspiring. Craving is considered to be a form of suffering in Buddhism; craving has a compulsion to it. If it's strong, it has us by the throat or by the nose, pulling us around, and we're not very free. There are two kinds of freedoms you can find. With the craving itself, there can be a sense of freedom when we give in to it, but it's just going along, giving in to attachments so it has free rein. It's not a real freedom. The second kind of freedom we can discover is when we have craving, but we don't succumb to it, we don't give in to it. We have the ability to see that we're craving and not pick it up, not get involved enough, so that we have a broader sense of awareness, of presence, of attention to it.

Part of the effect of craving is that it tends to, like other tensions, narrow the range of consciousness. Attention tends to be focused now on the object of the craving. It could be a laser focus, a narrowing of the field. Things get smaller and tight, tense, and agitated. Sometimes hot, sometimes there's a feeling of pressure that comes with craving, like it's saying it has to be now. But craving, as powerful as it can be, is a relatively shallow segment or layer of the mind that keeps us somehow alienated from ourselves, disconnected. This is partly because we're constantly looking outside for the object of craving, and so we can't settle back into ourselves.

As we settle back and relax, and really find a place to rest inside where we're free of craving, free of that compulsion, agitation, and contraction, with time we can then start discovering that there are wellsprings of desire, of wishes, of aspiration that arise. They can occur without any compulsion. Because they are a wellspring that wells up, the influence they have on our sense of awareness is to support it, to buoy it. If you're a practitioner who knows something about being present and mindful, the underlying welling up of this aspiration—to be free, to be compassionate, whatever it is that comes from the depth of who we are—it almost spreads and expands the sense of consciousness. It expands the sense of awareness rather than contracts and narrows it.

This aspiration has to be expectation-free. It has to be free of a certain kind of conceit, all of which tighten up again and narrow the scope. An aspiration is a wish that is not compulsive; it doesn't even need to be fulfilled. It's just like, this is what the heart's wish is, and if it's possible, great. If not, it just arises and, like the exhale, it can just flow out. You don't necessarily lose aspirations like that if they don't get fulfilled or acted on, anymore than you lose your exhales just because you exhaled once. Another exhale will come. Another aspiration, if it's a sincere, deep aspiration, will be there and come as well.

Part of the advantage of sitting in meditation, being mindful, and really learning to settle below the layers of agitation, layers of tension, layers of craving, is to come to a place where we have these deeper wellsprings of compulsion-free desires. Expectation-free, it doesn't have to come with a sense of need, that "this needs to happen."

This idea of noticing the difference between craving and aspiration is a very significant exercise. I think some people don't have much sense of what an aspiration is in the way I'm talking about; maybe they've never been pointed to it. For me, I grew up without ever having any sense of what that might be. It was through doing this Buddhist practice that I came to appreciate that there's this kind of—I call it sometimes biological—a biological drive, a biological desire. Because it didn't seem to be connected to the ordinary cognitions of the mind, the surface thinking and concerns, or the surface emotions, they seemed to be more built into the depth of the whole operating system here.

I use the word "biological" in the sense that it's deeper than cognition and thinking. This kind of aspiration can feed into our cognitions, our desires, our dreams, our imaginations, all kinds of things. It can really enrich a person's life phenomenally to come from this place. Begin noticing the difference between craving and aspiration, and noticing the different ways in which they affect you physically, emotionally, and consciously. How does it switch and change the sense of being aware depending on which one you're operating from?

One of the things that I believe is often the case is that with craving, there's often a feeling of discontent. Craving can often come from a sense of lack, and so that sense of lack, we're trying to crave to fill it. We're trying to assuage it, soothe ourselves, distract ourselves, or entertain ourselves so we don't have to feel the pain of that sense of lack or emptiness we might have.

With aspiration, there's a contentment. There's a sense of no lack, a sense of fullness, because we've learned to take whatever lack or discontent there might be and bring our attention right into it. We massage it from the inside out, turn it inside out, and fill it with something profound. We fill it with ourselves, fill it with awareness, so that the tension of lack, the tension inherent in this feeling of vacuity, pain, or loneliness, begins to relax, soften, and settle.

I associate craving with discontent, and aspiration with contentment. The funny thing about discontent is that when we're discontented, the mind is "content-full." Discontent churns up thoughts, ideas, desires, aversions, projections, fantasies, and all kinds of things. Discontent is actually a busy, agitated mind; a discontented mind is a content-full mind.

Contentment, on the other hand, allows for the settling and quieting of the mind and the heart. In a certain kind of way, contentment is "content-free." There's space and room for inputs, for things to arise and be there, to feel more deeply what's going on in this world. Craving tends to create very little room because it's so content-full of all kinds of churning stuff. Contentment tends to be content-free in that there's room for us to not only feel the world and be aware of the world in a significant way, but also to be aware of ourselves. To be aware of what's really going on, to be sensitive enough to start living from and feeling something that is more the depth of who we are, the fullness of who we are, rather than this funny thing of lack which feels empty but then becomes content-full.

I hope that this wordplay with lack and fullness, content-full and content-free, points you to something possible that allows you to begin seeing more clearly the difference between a world lived from craving and a world lived from aspiration.

May aspiration be your guiding light that supports you in living with desires in a way that's phenomenally free, compulsion-free. Thank you very much, and I look forward to being here again with you tomorrow.