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Lightly Guided Meditation

Welcome all, it's nice to see the names of those streaming over there with the comments. Let's practice together.

Taking some full deep breaths, there's almost like a sense of—especially on the exhale—a kind of wave or ripple of relaxation that smooths out the energy of the body. With this kind of breathing, we're making sure that breath gets into our belly, letting our belly be soft.

Letting our face be soft. The area around the eyes, the jaw. Shoulders hanging loosely. The hands untensed.

Suffering usually arises as a kind of increased density somewhere in body-mind. And so we breathe in such a way that smooths out the energy of body-mind.

We're not asking our breath to resolve the complications of our life, the predicament of any human life. We're just using the soothing ripple of the exhalation so as to suffer a little less right now, to bring tranquility and a brightness right now.

It's okay to put down the rest of our lives, just for this time. Affect and emotional circuits in our body are the engine of so much thinking. The pool of energy, the increased density in our body, seems to necessitate thought. It's like our mind needs to understand this little whirlpool of density in our body and our feeling life.

Our practice often is just to smooth out the energy of our body, to breathe into it patiently. To commit to being softened by intensity rather than hardened by it. As we meet our bodies and its densities with this awareness and care, the whole realm of thinking feels less urgent.

Just lavishing a kind of loving awareness on your body, using the breath if that's helpful in unifying the field of the body, smoothing out the densities.

Renunciation and Enjoying Pleasure

"So far as we are mere bundles of habit, we are imitators and copiers of our past selves. It follows first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to them throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists. The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." That is William James^[1].

Yesterday we explored helplessness and power. Opening the heart to helplessness illuminates our power. Today, another pair: renunciation and passion.

The fantasy of something for nothing runs deep in my mind. Sometimes I'll notice I just randomly look down at the sidewalk to see if someone dropped money there. The thrill of something for nothing runs deep, but mindfulness is not something for nothing. It is a path of relinquishment.

We don't exactly get to have the dharma and have our life. I want my life, I want my dreams, my stories, my pleasures, my routines, and my habits, and I want the dharma. But I don't think we can have it all. That might be a kind of American fantasy of Buddhism.

Regarding renunciation, the fact that the Buddha was a monk gets lost. Of course, people are free to practice as they want. Nonetheless, many Western dharma centers seem to marginalize what to the rest of the Buddhist world is central and historically vital to the whole process of dharma practice and enlightenment. It's like opening up the chest, attaching all the veins and arteries, carefully removing the heart and maintaining the body on a life support system. One can't help but wonder, is this thing really alive? Is this going to carry on? Obviously, my perspective is slanted as a card-carrying monk, but in wedging dharma teachings into a comfortable life, one may be missing something that's crucial to the dharma. I would suggest that people look closely at that. Is the dharma something that I tack onto my life, or is it something that I offer myself up to?

I've always loved that phrase. Is the dharma something we tack on, or offer ourselves up to?

We fear impoverishment in letting go. But as we let go, the hole in the center of our being gets smaller. We need less to fill it up. In other words, as we relinquish, this actually frees us up. And we know that we can let go, and so we're not afraid—or less afraid—of not having what we like.

I think we practitioners are perhaps a little too vigilant about pleasure. It's like at the slightest sign of pleasure we say to ourselves, "Oh my goodness, don't get attached!" And so there's a certain kind of almost defensiveness against pleasure in our practice and in our lives. As we train, we know we can let go and we're less afraid about holding on. Again, an attachment in the end is not a sin, it's just dukkha^[2].

I remember a wild, brilliant dharma friend saying that the meditative path is parasympathetically biased—biased towards the tranquilizing side. But this path enlivens and brightens us rather than flattens us. All this letting go, this renunciation, frees us up to enjoy pleasure and goodness more completely.

Sometimes we make the distinction between craving and desire. Tanha^[3] and chanda^[4]. Craving is that bottomless thirst, the fever dream of longing that's never actually satisfied. Sometimes I say craving is our frenemy, but what distinguishes desire from craving is that desire can actually be satisfied. In desire and longing, we're actually not asking too much of pleasure; we're asking just right.

This path is a path of dismantling craving, but as we work to dismantle tanha, sometimes chanda gets squashed too. As we let go, some of the drivenness and desperation around pleasure is gone, and so we can actually enjoy.

I talk about equanimity with unpleasantness a lot. This is a path of purification and it reveres the wholesome unpleasant. The wholesome unpleasant has a reverential place on this path. But what does equanimity with pleasure look like? We're being asked to have equanimity with that too. I would say equanimity with pleasure looks like a very uncomplicated, intense delight and satisfaction. It looks like enjoyment without compulsivity.

Do we still prefer pleasure over pain? Of course, but our heart is more flexible, less dependent, and less reliant on budgeting pleasure in the usual ways. Even egoic pleasure, we're not defended against that either. We feel that it feels better than insults. We're not defended against it, nor are we entangled in it.

A big part of dharma is about de-shaming suffering and pain. We are so moralistic anytime we feel pain or run into the First Noble Truth^[5]. We make it mean something about our being, and so a lot of dharma practice is about de-shaming pain, but it's also about de-shaming pleasure. It's a tender zone for exploration because we are exposed in our desire. We are exposed in our pleasure, in our dependence, our need, and our longing. We're less self-contained, and there's a vulnerability in that too if we're doing this consciously.

We start to free ourselves up, to loosen up. We become alive in our pleasure. We ask our pleasure only to do what it can do and not more. This gesture of relinquishment, of renunciation, of simplicity actually frees us up in some deep ways to enjoy deeply. When pleasure comes, pleasure comes. It is satiating, it supports us, and it provides a resource from which we can draw when our next task is to have equanimity with the inevitable difficulties of a human life.

So relinquishment frees us up to enjoy. I offer this for your consideration. Pick up what's useful, and leave the rest behind. I'm going to go check on the chat, which I saw was active during these comments, to see what's happening.