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Guided Meditation-Enjoying the breath

Hello. Good morning to those who are here, and good any time of the day for those who are joining through the live stream. I just moved it closer. I think that's better now. Yeah, thanks. Great. Oh, and then recording. Yes, of course.

So, let's settle in and begin by arriving and meditating together. I'll give some light guidance to help us arrive, settle, really arrive. And yeah, we'll take it from there together. How does that sound?

Let's begin. Let's begin. Begin again and again each moment. Ah, it's drawn with the new beginning. Each moment, a new arrival. Arriving, arriving here in this body. In this moment in time. Fresh, new, full of possibilities of this moment.

In the same way that if we have a cup with stale, cold tea in it, we have to throw it out to make room for fresh, new, warm tea. If there's stale thoughts, regurgitations, let's release them just for this period. Release them now. Making room for fresh capability, goodness.

Feeling this body, our sit bones and the cushion or the chair. If you're sitting on a chair, your feet on the floor. If you're on a cushion, your legs touching the earth. Hands on your lap. All these touch points, which we can always come back to. These touch points.

Resting. Resting in this body, resting in the space that surrounds the body. Resting. And including everything, including the sounds. They're not distractions, they're just sounds. They're just sounds. Let your heart relax, release in the midst of all this. The body breathing, pulsating, alive.

Sounds, the energy in the room, and the quiet, the silence between all the busyness outside and inside. Tune the frequency of your radio as if you had a radio internally. Tune into the calm, the channel of the calm. There is this calm in between everything else, all the noise, all the chatter in the mind. Follow the chatter inside, outside. Yes, those are there too. Holler all the news and this and that, but tune in right now. Ah, tune into the silence between the noise that holds all the noise. Holds it all.

Let the breath, the sensations of the breath in the body, guide you. Connecting to the breath in the body. Relaxing, relax, relax the body. Receive the breath not tightly, but spaciously. Oh, dear breath. Enjoying the breath, enjoying the breath.

And if the tuning of the attention drifts, if it drifts like an old radio that drifts to other frequencies of thought and plans and worries, return, re-engage. Again and again, this moment with the breath, with the silence that holds it all. It permeates everything internally. It's there, you know it's there. Just trust that it's here, it's already here.

Enjoy this breath. Can I enjoy this breath? How can I find a way to rest? Collect myself, gather, gather myself. Collect and gather myself. The entirety of the length of the in-breath. Cozy, sweet, spacious. And then the out-breath.

This practice is not about forcing. It's about learning, finding ways for joy, contentment, enjoyment. And there is plenty right here. Relax and receive. What a miracle this body is, alive and breathing.

When the mind, the heart, is content where it is, it doesn't want to drift anywhere. See how you can bring ease to the body. Relax the body if the body is tight. Tune into the joy, the delight, just quietly sitting and breathing. It's not a forcing. Finding the delight, the contentment that keeps us here. It's not about forcing.

Letting go, letting go of thoughts. Not now, not now, thank you. Back another time. Not just this breath. Just here.

Can I slow down enough? Can I slow down and fall in love with the breath for just a moment? May not even know what it means, but curious. What does it mean to fall in love with the breath?

With Valentine's Day coming up next week, make the breath your Valentine right now. Appreciating, honoring, loving, delighting in the breath.

Can you make yourself, this body, your Valentine? Not another being, who is you, whose care is entrusted to you. This being worked so hard. You know their challenges through and through. Appreciating, honoring, loving with every breath. This dear being who's doing their best. Just this breath in this body. With kindness, with mettā^[1], being your own beloved other. Not another.

And as we bring this sitting to a close, appreciating that you showed up, that you did your best. Without any self-judgment on what arose or did not arise. You showed up, you did your best. Trust that you have planted seeds for goodness, calm, wholesomeness, kindness, and let go of the rest. Trusting in this goodness together, we all share this co-created goodness. We offer it. We offer it to the world.

May my goodness, may my attempts, may my engagement serve my own awakening, my own ease and freedom from suffering, my own happiness, as well as everybody else's in the world. May all beings everywhere be happy. May all beings everywhere be free.

Thank you for your practice.

In Praise of Collectedness

Hello again. Good morning. How are you feeling? I see nods. Give me a few words, how are you feeling? Happy, thank you. Content, peaceful, connected, and joyful. Settled. What else? And everything is welcome. If you feel stirred up, that's fine too. Bring it on.

I'm feeling calmer than I entered, more settled. Yeah. Anything else? Anything else in the room you want to bring in? Ah, connected. Yeah. Also a sense of connection. It's so nice to sit with people. I love Zoom, don't get me wrong. I love the little squares. I've fallen in love with Zoom over the past three years teaching a lot on Zoom, and yet the goodness also to the embodied presence. To the embodied presence, yeah. So I bring that in, just not sharing my reflections, but also for us to feel that there's something, especially for those who are in the room. And if you are joining us from YouTube, there is a Sangha^[2], there's a YouTube Sangha to really feel into energetically, and yet here feeling into. Yeah, it is nice. Sangha, community. Yay! How wonderful, other human beings who are on this path. Source of joy.

So today I'd like to share some reflections on gathering, collecting the mind, the heart, just this sense of settledness that many of you gave a shout out for. The sense of settledness, calmness, happiness, contentment. All of these are in each other's neighborhood.

And formally, the title or the topic of this talk is the Pali word samādhi^[3]. Samādhi is often translated as concentration, but "concentration" brings up the sense of concentration. Whereas this word samādhi actually means to put together, to place together, to collect, to gather. In the Chan tradition, actually, it's often translated as "calm abiding." Oh, I like that, right? Different translations of concentration. Calm abiding, feel that on your body, right? Concentration is like, "Okay, I gotta concentrate. Remember math class again." For some people that works, if it works for you go with it. But the idea again with that translation of concentration is to gather. When the orange juice is concentrated, it's gathered, it's collected, it's its essence, right? Whereas we have, it's like a word map, we have so many different associations with the word concentration that sometimes it's not helpful. But calm abiding, collectedness, gathering.

And in fact, the word itself in Pali, samādhi, comes from the prefix sam, which means together, and the root dhā, which means to put or place. So to place together, to put together, to bring together. So, unifying the mind in a steady, undistracted awareness, in the words of Richard Shankman in his book The Experience of Samadhi. So this idea of collectedness, collecting ourselves because that feels delicious, doesn't it? Oh yeah, collecting myself. Instead of being scattered—the opposite is being scattered, being everywhere. Collected, scattered.

And especially in our modern life, I think as the speed of technology and communication and just the deluge of information in so many ways has increased. Social media and news outlets, etc., etc. Even entertainment outlets, just the number of entertainment options available. Just so many ways we can get scattered. So raise your hand if you felt scattered at least one moment the past week. Two moments? Yeah, all the hands go up, of course. It's our common humanity. Now this, and in fact I should have asked you to look around, it's a commonality. Of course we get scattered. This is the condition of our lives right now in the West. Actually everywhere in the world it turns out, but especially here in Silicon Valley and in the West in general. So to help, to support ourselves, we want to collect ourselves and calm ourselves. Collect ourselves.

And so the question might arise, "Well, okay, why do I want to collect myself?" Let's do the why, let's do the how. How do I collect myself? Is it by force? Is it like, "Okay, now I'm gonna collect myself, okay, and push away all distractions"? Like to have an aversive fighting attitude with everything, like every distraction, every noise like, "Stop, I'm collecting myself." Is it that? I'm making fun of it clearly, not right? That's not the way to collect ourselves. But collecting ourselves really is through enjoyment and falling in love with peace, with contentment. That's the way it's done. There's no other way. It's not by the force of will and the whip, like, "Okay, concentrate right now." You can try that, it doesn't work. I'll say more about it in a moment.

But in praise of collectedness. I wanted to also share this quote which I love by Thomas Merton, the celebrated famous Trappist monk who was also a good friend of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They were buddies. So Thomas Merton, many of you might already know his name. I love this quote by him. He said this gosh, how many years ago now, decades ago. I don't have the date of the quote, but decades and he's been dead for a while. So decades ago:

"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

Powerful words from a wise, wise being. Too many demands, too many projects, want to help everyone and everything. Do you identify with too many projects? Raise your hand. Too many, yeah.

So what he talks about, which we recognize, this inner capacity for peace. To cultivate this inner capacity for peace, to maintain that, so that our outer work in the world is inspired. It comes out of that inner capacity, that inner holding of peace, of stability.

So now motivating... I'm trying to motivate a little bit. Probably I don't need to motivate why practicing calm abiding, settling, gathering is important. But I will just spell it out. It is the way that we create this fort, this stability, this rock-solid foundation on which our work in the world is based. And also our inner work of insight is based on calm.

So the practice of calm abiding, gathering, collecting, concentrating the mind, settling the mind—we'll just use the word settling the mind. The practice of cultivating samādhi to any extent possible. And there's quite a range in levels of depth of settling that our minds can cultivate. But at any level, cultivating samādhi is the precursor to insight. It is the precursor to insight internally and externally. If we don't have a settled and calm mind, we cannot clearly see. It's not possible.

So imagine your mind, you have binoculars, right? And you're trying to look at your life, you're trying to look at your habit patterns, you're trying to look at the world, right? The lens of insight, the binoculars of insight. But if you don't have a stable base, if you don't put it on a tripod, if it's just moving, moving, moving, you can't really look. The image keeps shifting and changing. There needs to be stability so that you can take your breath, "Oh, that's what's happening. Okay."

So building that tripod that we set the binoculars on for the sake of insight. And insight, by the way, is also another word for vipassanā^[4]. For those who have been practicing for a while, vipassanā inside practice, seeing things as they are arising, passing, all of that. And the precursor to that is samādhi. Is calming, settling the mind.

And also, if we take insight, because insights really are personal. We always have in this practice, you know, many times maybe beginners think, "Okay, all these insights I hear about, I hear about impermanence and I hear about not-self. I especially want that not-self thing, how do I get to that insight? That sounds... or emptiness, that's what I want. That sounds so cool, give me some emptiness." Okay, slow down. Slow down. It starts from the personal.

And when you have the insights that are personal in nature, then it extends to... then you can see the universal. But you can't jump into the universal. It becomes a spiritual bypass if you start to just want to see the universal and pooh-pooh the personal. "I don't even exist. Yeah, the Buddha says there's no self. Not-self. Yeah, no, no, no, no." Come back, get quiet down, calm down, slow down. Cultivate some samādhi, some stability of the mind, and get to see your own insights from the personal level. "Oh wow, I'm suffering. I'm really attached to this relationship that did not work. I am really suffering. There's a lot of suffering here. Okay, how do I work with this? There's personal suffering here. There's attachment, there's wanting, there's anger, there's resentment, there is self-blame. Wow, okay. Okay, I'm gonna start there." It's not like, "Okay, that's all personal, forget it, I just want to go and like chill out and do the not-self thing." Because no, no, no, you have to start right here.

Because what can happen... there are many different ways different people have insights, but I'll just give one example. You stay with the pain, the suffering, okay? So the teachings... alright, mindfulness of the body is the first Satipaṭṭhāna^[5], the First Foundation of Mindfulness. Okay, so you start to feel the sensations in the body. "Yes, this really hurts. Ouch, this really hurts." And then by actually acknowledging the pain, that "Oh yeah, this really, really hurts. I'm really hurting right now." "Oh, sweetheart." That arises compassion. Compassion, oh. That which may not have been there because you were just kicking yourself. "I shouldn't have said that, I should have done that. I'm really hurting right now. I'm really hurting right now, right now." So there can be a sense of compassion that arises. "This really hurts. I'm really hurting. Oh, if I actually have compassion, kindness, ah, things are easier."

And also, the heart is not just easier, but also you get a sense, the mind, the heart can get a sense that, "Wow, other people are going through that too." Then the heart can open up to compassion for others. "This is hard." Or that other friend of mine who a few months ago was going through something similar, and I was just checking Facebook while we were talking... "Oh, ouch, ouch." And your heart opens up. "Oh, that was really..." So in that way, through your personal suffering, you open up to compassion not just for yourself but universally. So it's through the personal that it becomes the universal. For example, with compassion.

Similarly with all the other insights. With impermanence, things arise and pass away. You just have to keep noticing, seeing in detail. "Yeah, it rises and passes away. I woke up this morning, oh yeah, I was really, really upset. Oh, that mind state, that heart state has gone away." And then it starts to become universal. Everything is impermanent. Everything is impermanent. Then the next time something happens and you're in the midst of fear like, "Ah, what if this never ends?" "Everything is impermanent. I know that. I deeply know everything is impermanent."

So, and impersonal. So let's talk about anattā^[6], not-self, impersonality. You get to see when you really slow down, and you get to see the mind states, you get to see the sensations in the body, they all arise and pass. And you have no control. When you get to see you have no control over, say, aging, over how this body recovers or doesn't recover from, say, a cut. Like, wow, you can't do this, the body is doing this. Or all the other ways that there is no governability. You can start with the body, but there's so many different ways to have all of these insights. A gazillion ways to have these insights. But the point I want to make is it starts with the personal. That's the point I want to make. I don't want to give a 24-hour or 48-hour discourse on all the ways to have these insights because there's so many different ways. But the point is it starts with the personal insights.

And further back, pull back a little more. It starts with having a calm, settled mind that is able to have the insights. If the binoculars are all over the place, you cannot see. You're just in the whirlwind of a thought, an entanglement. You won't untangle. Stabilize, put your foot down, sit down, rest. Calm the body, calm the mind.

So many whys. So many whys to do, to practice calming, settling the mind.

Okay, so I could continue, but you might say, "Okay, I'm alright. Yes, I'm signing up. So how do I do this? How do I settle?" Well, as I've been intimating, and also as I've been leading in the guided meditation, it is through enjoying, through loving, through finding contentment. Because when the mind is content, when the heart loves what's happening, it doesn't want to go anywhere. Think of a hobby you have, something you really enjoy doing. You just get absorbed and hours can go by. You may not even eat because you're so absorbed. You're loving what you're doing. So that's the kind of relationship to cultivate with practice. It's not a grim duty. "I have to sit, you know, science says 30 minutes a day is good for my health." No, fall in love with it. Fall in love with it. That's the only way to do this.

So there are different methods. There are different techniques, lots of different objects for developing concentration, for developing collectedness of the mind. And different techniques and ways and "do this" and "do that," and yet the ethos, the way to approach it all of them, is similar. So I'll talk a little bit about both.

So there are many different concentration objects, many different ways to collect the mind. So in the West, we tend to practice with mindfulness of the breath. That's our primary object. Yes? Familiar with that one? Yeah, that's usually the anchor, right? We go to the breath, we see thoughts, entanglements, matter, go back to the breath or tune back to the breath. Yes, you're with me? Yeah. Everybody's had instructions on mindfulness of the breath. Yes. Okay, so that's primarily the object. However, there are 40 different objects in the Visuddhimagga^[7], which is the Path of Purification, this thousand-page manual, two-thousand-year-old practice manual, which is wonderfully obtuse and great. There are 40 different objects.

One of them is the breath. And then there are the Brahmavihāras^[8], the practice of the heart. For example, mettā (loving-kindness) and compassion, and you know, all the four Brahmavihāras as the practice of our muditā (vicarious joy) and equanimity. Those four are some of the 40 different ways to calm and collect the mind. When you sit and wish yourself well, or wish somebody else well, and engage, really engage. Stay, stay with that practice. The mind collects and settles and becomes happy.

Then there are a bunch of other objects, that's 10 of them, they're called the kasiṇas^[9]. And they're basically visualization objects for this practice. And some people actually, their minds take better to the visualization object. My favorite visualization object is what is called the white kasiṇa. In fact, I taught an online retreat at IRC at the end of last year, and I'm teaching another one online (it's on my website) in the beginning of March. So the white kasiṇa is just basically the color white. And the mind can just settle and be absorbed and find peace, just collecting with a white disk, white circle. And it becomes expansive. And some people report that it's actually easier for them to connect with that sense of purity and calm and subtleness compared to the breath.

So there are many, many different objects, many, many different ways for the settling to happen. One thing to keep in mind with calming, collecting the mind around an object is the difference between samatha^[10] practice, practicing samādhi (samatha is the name of the practice, samādhi is the state), so the practice of collecting the mind, versus insight practice, also translated as vipassanā. These two are a little different. So let me decode it for you.

With collecting the mind, you keep coming back to the same object. Keep coming back. When other things happen, thoughts, etc., you say, "Not now," you let them go. You let them go. You keep coming back to the same object over and over and over again. Okay? Compared to that, insight practice is... the mind rests on, say, the sensations of the body for a while, sees the three characteristics, their arising and passing. And then moves to another object. Moves to thought, sees their arising and passing, etc. So it keeps moving from object to object to object. So in the words of Steve Armstrong, concentration practice is like absolute monogamy. You are dedicated to one object alone. It's just the breath, or it's just a white kasiṇa. That's it. Everything else, like distractions, you're just coming back.

In insight practice, maybe you start here... here's where it gets... let me share his words. He calls insight practice to be serial monogamy. So you're monogamous, you give all your attention to one object, you know, the sensations of the body. And then oh, maybe vedanā^[11], feeling tone. "Oh, this is how it's changing and shifting." And then maybe thoughts. "Oh, they're arising and passing." So you're giving your heart to one object, you're really dedicated to it, but then another object, and another object, another object. Okay.

What tends to get confusing for Western practitioners hearing this is, "Wait a minute, that's not how I practice. I start with the breath, I'm just staying with the breath. And then I've been taught as a Western practitioner, okay, then thoughts arise, okay, maybe I notice thoughts arising, I pay attention to them a little bit, and then I let them go and I come back to the breath." Right, because that's familiar for many of you. Okay, so that is called dry vipassanā. That's essentially the style, though there are many, many different styles.

So it's going one level deeper. So let's, just for simplicity, say there are two different ways to practice vipassanā and insight practice. One way is to spend days, weeks, months, years practicing samatha, collecting the mind. And when you really, really have a collected mind, a settled mind, then you practice vipassanā. Right? It's always a precursor, right? It's always a precursor, so it always has to happen first. Okay, that's one way. Not taught in the West. There are some teachers who teach this way. My teacher, Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw^[12], whom I studied with, you know, you practice the concentration, samatha, until jhānas^[13] and absorptions might happen. So really deep states of concentration arise, and then only then you switch to vipassanā. Okay, that's one way.

However, in the West, the Mahasi method that's mostly taught is kind of interleaved. So the samatha gets interleaved with the vipassanā. That's why it's called dry vipassanā. So you start with a little bit of samādhi, you calm and collect the mind, right? And then, "Oh, a thought arises. Okay, now it becomes vipassanā." Now you actually go to the thought and you see like, "Oh yes, distraction." Maybe you label it even. Yes, labeling, noting, anyone? Yeah, you're like, "Oh yeah, that's the kind of thought I'm having. Planning. Self-judgment." You get to see it. Then, so you were still doing vipassanā, you with me? Now we let go of it and we come back. So we're now doing what? We're doing samatha practice, right? Calming the mind, stabilizing it a little bit so that we have enough stability. The next time, "Oh, backache. Tight moving tension," right? You get to investigate in the body a little bit. Now you're doing what? Vipassanā. Then after a while, "Ah, the body doesn't attract your attention this much," right? The instructions are you let it go, you come back to the breath. Now you're doing what? Yes, samatha. So you see how it's interleaved? Yeah. Whereas in this other style, you're just doing like samatha day and night and day and night and like after months, "Okay, now we're gonna do vipassanā." It's just like, "Okay, now you're ready, now you're just gonna investigate all phenomena."

So, and having said that, it is helpful, it is helpful if your mind or heart is drawn to it, to take some time in your practice to settle the mind a little more. To just create more settledness through these various practices.

So I want to come back to joy. I also want to say because this is so important, so important. This is from Ajahn Sucitto, a respected monk in this tradition. So about the practice of samādhi, this is what he says: "I think of enjoyment as receiving joy, and samādhi as the art of refined enjoyment. It is the careful collecting of oneself to the joy in the present moment. Joyfulness means there is no fear, no tension, no out-thereness. There isn't anything we have to do about it. So there is stillness, it's just this."

Right, so cultivating samādhi, collecting the mind, of course there's engagement, right? You have to engage, but it's not effortful. It's enjoyment. It's tuning into the joy of the moment. So I have the breath, remember I was inviting you to fall in love with the breath, you know? What is content? How can you enjoy this moment? Can you relax? So relaxing the body is very important. If the body is tight, getting it to settle is really hard.

Here's another quote about the use of pleasure in calming, collecting the mind. This one is from Thanissaro Bhikkhu, another celebrated monk in this tradition. "How do you use pleasure? Focus on the breath right now." (Of course he's talking about mindfulness of the breath as the object.) "Focus on the breath right now and see how it feels. Then experiment with the breath to see how the way you breathe can produce either pleasure or pain. It may be subtle, the difference between the two, but it's there. We've learned to desensitize ourselves to this aspect of our awareness, so it's going to take a while to re-sensitize ourselves to begin seeing the patterns. This is why we practice. Keep coming back to the breath, keep coming back to the breath. Try to get more sensitive to this area of your awareness, more skilled at learning how to maximize the potential for pleasure right here and now, simply by the way you breathe. Not only producing pleasure, but also maintaining it. After all, feelings of pleasure and rapture are part of the path. They are tucked in the Noble Eightfold Path right under Right Concentration. And as part of the path, they may have to be developed and maintained. As the Buddha said, this pleasure is blameless."

So there's a lot of pleasure and enjoyment to the practice, to cultivating samādhi, samatha, this calm collected mind that for some people starts to get addictive like, "Oh, I want that pleasure." Like, "Okay, let that go, that's also impermanent." But it gets so much pleasure and so much calm collectedness, which again the point is not to check out in it, but to use it as a basis for our life, for our insight, for our service, for the way we show up in the world.

Anyway, there's a lot more I can say and I think I'm going to end now. And maybe if you're interested you can come and I'll teach you about the white kasiṇa online in a few weeks. But I think I'll end there. This is endless, this is just so joyous, this topic and this cultivation and sharing it, and also just igniting perhaps igniting the delight and interest in others. It's a practice that's been so meaningful to me in my practice. Both dry vipassanā, this interleaving, I've done that for many years before practicing with my teacher Pa-Auk Sayadaw.

So I hope the reflections today were of service to your practice, to your awakening. And let's dedicate the goodness of our practice to all beings everywhere. Ah, may the goodness of our practice, our attention, our inspiration, our co-created goodness, may they serve all beings everywhere in their goodness and their awakening. May all beings everywhere be free, be awake, including ourselves.

Thanks for your attention everyone.