This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Introduction

Hi folks, welcome to you all. Good morning to many, good afternoon. I see Ireland and Scotland in the house. Sweet.

My partner sometimes listens to Gil Fronsdal^[1] on the way to work. Yesterday, she did not hear Dr. Fronsdal, but me rambling about the need to relinquish any fantasy of a love devoid of ambivalence. [Laughter] She calls me at like 7:50 and is laughing. She's like, "Really leaning into that theme of ambivalence, huh? Anything you need to tell me, you know?" No, dear. Just talking about ambivalence.

On that note, we sit.

Guided Meditation: Breathing and Thinking

Find your posture. Just letting it all shake out. Relaxing everything that can be relaxed. Anything that cannot be relaxed, to try to relax it is just more tension. We allow it to remain.

Maybe it's possible to relax even the assumptions about what is supposed to happen, what comes next, who you are, what we're doing, or what meditation is. We relax all of that.

To relax is simply to realize that something we were holding on to doesn't need to be held. That the holding was demanding some energy and tension. In some sense, the whole of the path is just a progressively refined relaxation, a self-soothing. So there's nothing that needs to be soothed.

Our breathing can soothe whatever is inflamed. Breathe life into whatever is dull or numbed out, such that we feel the presence of our breath. Not just the front of our body, but the back of our body. Not just in our face, torso, or belly, but our whole body unified by breathing. Mindfulness perched on that razor edge between knowing and not knowing.

Thinking arises as mental imagery, even with our eyes closed. Imaging our body, the room, or some future memory. Become disidentified from the imaging our mind does. And words—we just call it thinking, but it's auditory thinking. The almost desperation we have to narrate the moment, to situate self and world, past, present, and future, to situate our attractions and repulsions, liking and disliking.

We start to become sensitized to auditory thinking. The actual sense of spatial location where it arises is often between the ears or the back of the head. Of course, it's not actually happening there, but at the level of perception, it arises spatially located. We're not trying to get it to stop or start. We are not exerting force at all. But when a sentence comes to an end, we listen to the silence that replaced the sound.

Our thinking is often a tool of our wanting. It is the way we organize our preferences, hopes, and fears. It is the way clinging strategizes. And so we practice wanting what we have. What we have is an imperfection, and yet our heart can be fully satisfied even amidst imperfection. There's nothing left to strategize. Just to be alive is enough, Suzuki Roshi^[2] said.

Dharmette: Dharma in Our Interpersonal Life (4 of 5) Love, Grief and Dharma

Okay, thank you all. I think for tomorrow, maybe we'll do questions to see what's in our virtual hall here. If you want to, just chat in a sentence or two tomorrow, and we'll see where the center of gravity is. I'll try to speak to whatever is alive in the room and see how that goes.

So, love becomes meaningful because of time. Because of finitude, for anything to matter, we actually need anicca^[3], impermanence. Put differently, meaning and finitude are linked. Our love matters in some sense because it ends. Immortality would destroy our meaning. In superhero movies, a character who could absolutely never even be hurt creates no drama at all. Finitude, mortality, loss, and the inevitability of grief—that is encoded in each moment of love.

That's part of why I like to elevate grief above the swamp of affective feeling. People are often grateful when they're given permission to grieve, to know it as fully part of the path. The traditional phrase of what the Dharma delivers us beyond is that the fruit of practice brings us beyond grief, sorrow, lamentation, and despair. But I've never loved that phrase. I don't really think that grief fits neatly into one of the categories of greed, hatred, and delusion—the wellsprings of suffering. Where does grief fit? Maybe you say aversion or hatred? I don't know. It doesn't fit that neatly to my mind.

It has always struck me as defensive and detached to say, "If we completely understood impermanence, we wouldn't suffer in the wake of loss." Understanding anicca does not imply the absence of grief. I want my Buddha to grieve. That may be controversial, but I want my Buddha to grieve. Some practitioners are just afraid, I think, to feel the full weight of grief, so they construct a version of the path where they don't have to. It's defensive.

As I said yesterday, we are cultivating a love thoroughly infused with wisdom. Wisdom crucially involves understanding impermanence. Therefore, a love uninformed by grief is a naive love. As far as I can tell, the only redemptions for grief are something like love and art. More love and art. Pema Chödrön^[4] wrote that grief is completely pregnant with bodhicitta^[5]—from the Tibetan tradition, a kind of awakened heart. Grief is completely pregnant with bodhicitta.

This work is for ourselves, but also for community and society. The failure to grieve spills out and has consequences. Some of the derangement of hatred that we witness is so ascendant in this country, but it strikes me that a full grieving process does not leave hatred in its wake. Hatred might be a facet of the grieving process, but when it is mature, there is no hatred left. I cannot imagine a kind of spiritual life entirely divorced from grief.

Even when it's not a specific loss, the growing pains of Dharma often feel like grieving. Like how children get muscular growing pains, the way we grow on this path often feels like something is being lost, like some grieving process is unfolding in our heart. The Insight tradition focuses on insight into the three characteristics: dukkha^[6], anicca, and anatta^[7]—unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and not-self. There is a tremble at the heart of all things, and that tremble implies dukkha and anatta. Pleasure would have to stay very still in order to be finally fulfilling, but it does not. There would have to be an unchanging essence at the center of our being, but we do not find that.

And so, we want to allow anicca to inform our love and our interpersonal life. We are so on guard about change, and yet the wild thing is that change, when it comes, almost always startles us. I am practicing and reminding myself all the time about anicca. And yet often, when things change, I realize that I have tacitly been assuming permanence. For animals like us, this may be unavoidable. Grief may be an irreducible part of dharma and life when we invest our heart deeply in relations that end. Sometimes that's another person, and sometimes that's an ethical pursuit or a cause. You tie your heart to that, too.

We are separate beings, but love fundamentally intermingles our being with others. Our body is separate, but our sense of self really is not separate. Our model of ourselves literally involves the other. When one has given one's heart fully enough, the other literally becomes woven into our self-model. The presence of another who is loved is grafted into the very sense of who we are. When that being is lost, our sense of who we are is fundamentally altered.

That is why people in deep grief often say something like, "There is a part of me that is missing." That is very interesting language. It is sometimes almost like the neurological phenomena of phantom limb pain. It is a kind of amputation, and yet the pain is still sensed where the limb was. It is the absence that is more present than anything.

"People do not pass away. They die. And then they stay," writes Naomi Shihab Nye^[8]. She said death is not the end of life, but the center of life. How tenderly can we open to that? Because if we can, every day of our life becomes poignant. The poignancy is all around us if we're not pretending we'll live forever. Then there is a great gratitude for what is here. Great gratitude amidst this fleeting dream of life bookended by eternity. Bookended by eternity, and yet here we are on YouTube together. It is so easy to lose sight of the wildness of having been born.

We talk so much about equanimity with imperfection, but what about equanimity with pleasure? With what is here? Equanimity turns that pleasure into deep satisfaction and gratitude. Can we perceive that interpersonally? Prompted by art, I have sometimes experimented with thinking, "Okay, I've already died. This is the afterlife." Life just demands appreciation at some level. When there is less fear about the end, it's just like gravy. All of our life can feel kind of like that. We are all living on borrowed time in some way, and this breeds a very deep gratitude.

And yet, in the face of grief, we do not have to find the perfect consolation against the changingness of all things. There is, I feel, some measure of inconsolability in the tragedies and pain of life. I don't need to medicate every [feeling]. It's okay. I'll live deeply anyway. I offer this for your consideration.

[Snorts] So for your homework, maybe it's gratitude. Not Hallmark card, New Age gratitude—not gratitude despite dukkha and anicca, but because of dukkha and anicca. See you tomorrow.