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Guided Meditation: Earth Element

Welcome. Another warm welcome to everyone from everywhere joining here together in this 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time sitting. I'm going to begin, so just allow yourself to settle in. Maybe take some generous moments to settle into a sitting posture conducive for a little bit of meditative practice.

This week I wanted to offer a guided meditation that starts with what I call the "arriving sequence." This is something I learned from some of my teachers—Dana De Palma^[1], Tuere Sala^[2], and Phillip Moffitt^[3]—who are our teachers. This arriving sequence uses three A's: arriving, being available, and aligning. These are three words you will probably begin to hear repeatedly as we go along in these five days of meditation practice.

We will begin with the arriving sequence. This week, I wanted to offer some words using the elements that make up our body as part of our meditative practice: earth, air, water, fire, and space. This is going to be a build-up from the first day all the way to Friday. If you join in between, you will pick it up because we will be repeating some of this as we go along.

Let's begin.

Arriving. Arriving here and now.

Maybe the word arriving evokes some sense of beginning to settle in. Sometimes I have the sense of coming back home after a long trip. Arriving home, maybe putting away the bags and a big jacket. In the same way, as we arrive, maybe we put away the plans, the projects, the memory. We arrive at the present moment experience, right here and now.

Maybe that's felt as the contact of the body with the chair and the floor. There is a long, deep breath that is happening right now. Arriving home, the home of this body.

Take a few moments to just check into yourself. Maybe the sitting posture. Maybe how you are in your mind. Not as a way to evaluate or judge it, just to receive what is happening here and now.

As you arrive, make yourself available to the lived experience that is happening right now, right here in this body. Being available is pointing at the sense of receiving experiences as they arrive and pass, and not demanding it to be any way. Just making ourselves available to whatever is happening right here.

And then we align. Align our being with a wholesome cultivation. Aligned with our inner integrity, inner dignity. Sometimes for me, aligning may be experienced as an ever-so-slight uplifting in my torso.

Making ourselves available to the physicality of our bodies, I invite you to turn attention to the felt sense of the earth element in the body. Maybe you are feeling the firmness as you make contact with the earth, the floor, the chair. The hardness of the bones. Your tongue pushing against the teeth, the hardness of the teeth.

The earth element is heavy. Maybe subtly settling downwards. Making ourselves available to the felt sense of the earth element, letting go of any big ideas about what this is. However it is felt in the body, it is okay. The earthy body resting on earth.

Maybe you feel some sense of steadiness as you rest in the earthy body. There is a stillness in the earth element. Unmoving. Like the foundations of a building. And if the mind wanders away, always invite ourselves to arrive again.

Being available to the felt sense of the earth element in this body. Being available is like letting go of any exertion or control; rather, opening our heart and mind to receive.

Noticing our experience that may be pleasant or unpleasant, maybe pain or discomfort in the body, and paying careful attention to see how we are reacting or responding to the experience of pleasant and unpleasant. Are we pushing away, resisting, wishing the unpleasant to go away? Are there signs of ease, openness, kindness towards all of this?

The Buddha offered a teaching to his son, Rahula. He said to his young son: meditate like earth. When you meditate like earth, pleasant and unpleasant experiences will not occupy your mind. We won't get caught when we meditate in the stillness and stability that is manifested in the earth. Meditate like earth. Steady, stable, unmoving.

The Blessings of Sila - The First Precept (1 of 5)

As we transition into the short dharmaette^[4] for this morning, I invite you to continue to stay in a meditative mode if you like. I intentionally didn't ring the bell as an invitation for you to receive these teachings in a different way.

This week I wanted to share some words about sīla^[5]. I call these morning teachings "The Blessings of Sīla." Sīla is a Pali term that is often translated as virtuous conduct or virtuous behavior. One can think of it as behaving virtuously through one's bodily and verbal actions.

There is an outer expression of sīla, and that may be a natural extension of our inner being, the inner integrity I mentioned in our sitting—the inner care, the inner tenderness. This week I want to offer an exploration of sīla from an "inside-out" orientation. This is not the only way that we explore sīla, and I thought I would try something different. In fact, the classic teachings of sīla often begin with refraining from harmful actions externally, kind of from the outside in. But I thought that since many of you have been practicing in these 7:00 a.m. sittings and in many other ways, we would do something a little different and approach sīla from an inside-out orientation.

I also wanted to offer a framework for us to explore this, and that is the framework of "Triple A." This is another three A's, different from our meditation three A's. These three A's are: aware, abstain, and align.

Aware means that as we cultivate mindfulness, we become aware of our inner dynamics and inner forces that operate inside of us. We notice dynamics and forces that may lead to harmful consequences and outcomes.

Abstain means we abstain from those harmful actions and harmful forces.

Align means that we align with wholesome qualities. As we become aware, we can also pay attention and see how the wholesome can come about. As we begin to notice this, we can cultivate and align ourselves with the wholesome and skillful in our actions and behavior. This is the framework I'm going to use to explore these aspects of sīla.

The classic teachings of sīla, especially for the lay community, are often referred to as undertaking the training rules of the five precepts. Today I will share some reflections on the first one, which is undertaking the training rule of not taking the life of a living being, or not killing living beings.

You may all wonder, "Why bother?" Especially right after a meditative practice, none of us are killing anyone or any living beings, so why would we explore this? To answer this question, I wanted to unpack the Pali term related to this particular precept a little more. The Pali term pāṇātipātā^[6] has this very vivid sense of exerting some kind of violence, kind of like striking down a living being, which would lead to taking their life. So for me, this sense of violence and aggression is what this precept is also pointing at.

Let's explore this from the inner perspective we talked about. In our guided meditation, I invited you to pay attention and become aware of how we might relate to our inner experiences, the pleasant and unpleasant experiences that happen in us, and in particular, the unpleasant experiences. I'm curious what you might notice. Very often when there is an unpleasant experience, whether it's pain or discomfort in the body, there can be an attitude of pushing it away, wanting it to go away. Sometimes we even have a subtle sense of aggression towards it. If we had an option to somehow get rid of it, we would have done it, right?

There are these kinds of anger forces that can happen, and as we become aware of them, we see that this can happen within us. When these kinds of forces get manifested externally, they can express themselves as aggression, violence, or aversion.

For example, we may all have had the experience of a bee or a fly buzzing around us non-stop and not going away. We all abide by this first precept and don't want to kill the bee or the fly, but we can act. Maybe at some point we get really frustrated, we throw our hands up, and from the perspective of the bee or the fly, this gesture might be life-threatening or, in some sense, a little violent.

As we tune into our inner dynamics, we can begin to see how our internal relationship to unpleasant experiences can get manifested externally. This precept invites us to begin to really tune into some of these forces. It's about abstaining externally from killing living beings, but also pointing internally: are there different ways to relate to unpleasant experiences?

In the sutta that I quoted regarding the teachings the Buddha offered to his son, Rahula, it reads like this. I'm going to read this piece again: "Rahula, meditate like the earth. When you meditate like the earth, pleasant and unpleasant contacts will not occupy your mind." What this is pointing at is that as we cultivate mindful awareness, our inner capacity grows. We can begin to have a choice not to be moved by the experiences of pleasant and unpleasant. Maybe we use the word equanimity for it. Maybe we can be equanimous toward our experiences that are pleasant and unpleasant.

This is a form of alignment. Align with wholesome qualities: kindness, compassion, equanimity.

I remember many years ago when I was learning meditation from a Chinese nun. Once she was offering me meditation instruction right in the courtyard of the Tathāgata Meditation Center^[7]. We were standing right under a tree, and a bug fell right on her. I was about to jump back, but she very gently, using the cup of her hand, picked up the bug and gently put it on the ground. That was a very powerful teaching for me. I thought to myself at that moment, "Wow, there is something very precious and beautiful in her."

This brought me much trust and confidence in the teachings of the Buddha, in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. It also brought lots of trust in this teacher of mine, this Chinese nun offering the teachings, because the way she expressed herself offered such a possibility of the kind of heart and mind that exists in each of us.

The flip side of not killing is to offer our deep respect and appreciation to all beings, all lives around us. All life is wondrous on this planet. We are only one aspect of this whole ecosystem. Our lives are intertwined with different species and nature, so who are we to decide how other lives must live or not? So, align with kindness, align with gentleness, align with respect.

These are the three aspects. Aware: becoming aware of our inner dynamics. Abstain: taking actions to abstain from what is unwholesome, unskillful, and harmful. And then Align: aligning ourselves with what is wholesome. The practice of this first precept offers much protection and safety to oneself and to all beings. As such, this precept is a true blessing, a very true blessing for all beings.

I want to share a few words to end today's dharmaette. This is from the Mangala Sutta^[8], the discourse on blessings. The Buddha said: "Desisting and abstaining from evil, diligence in good qualities, respect and humility: this is the highest blessing."

May you all be blessed by your virtuous conduct and your practice. Thank you all for being here. We'll continue tomorrow. Have a wonderful rest of the day. I'll see you back tomorrow morning.