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Guided Meditation: Opening to the Nature Within; Enlivening

So good morning Sangha, and good day. Greetings from the Bay Area, California, where I am. I'm happy to see all the chat messages coming in and feeling a sense of connection right here.

Welcome to our 7:00 a.m. guided meditation and Dharma talk. We'll be starting our meditation, and I'll offer just a couple of orienting words here. Yesterday, we started our meditation from this sense of grounding, and today we'll be expanding our meditation. If you'd like to stay with a sort of grounded feeling—this sitting like an inner mountain—feel free to do so. But we're also going to expand to include a kind of aliveness in this being. Think of this as a kind of live mountain, if that image or metaphor somehow works for you. That includes paying attention to our life breath, the movements of the breath. That's the orientation we'll be working with. We're expanding to explore the nature within, this aliveness and enlivening aspect of our being. So we'll start with the sound of a bell.

[Bell rings]

Pausing to begin arriving. Arriving at where you are and how you are, just as it is. Not as what you wish it to be or demanding it to be otherwise. Gently, softly feeling and sensing here and now. Maybe with the felt sense in the body, sound, temperature, whatever may be present in this moment.

Mindfulness is in the foreground, and maybe heartfulness and bodyfulness are here too. Sensing this body sitting, maybe the posture, movements of the breath. That's a general sense of the body, without having to figure it out. Maybe you're feeling the weight of the body settling down naturally. A felt sense of the earth element in the body, like mud settling down in the water. It's natural. Feeling and sensing the earthy body resting on earth, like stones in the riverbed. Or a sense of sitting like a mountain within. Quiet mountain. Still.

Resting here if you like. Steady. Quiet, collected. The steadiness of the inner mountain naturally highlights the movements of the alive breath. Like the breeze in the mountain, open to receive the felt sense of breath. There is an alive mountain within.

Feeling and sensing the movement of the breath, maybe throughout the body, or just throughout the torso. As life breath enlivens the whole body, you may notice different attending sensations in the body. Tingling, pulsing, vibrating, maybe a kind of energetic humming. Swaying in the torso. Aliveness is being known.

When we're receiving the felt sense of aliveness within directly, there may be an effect, a sense of being enlivened by this conscious relationship with our own aliveness. You may stay with the movements of the breath, or just this general sense of enlivening within this fathom-long body. Alive mountain.

[Silent Meditation]

A sense of awe or wonder may come in. Maybe sweet joy, happiness, by staying in touch with the movements of the breath. A sense of enlivening. Releasing ideas, beliefs, and conceptual overlays. Trusting your own felt sense.

Allow the knowing to emerge from the immediacy of your own felt sense. Maybe there is no need for words.

In these last few minutes of our meditation together, allow this aliveness flowing from the movement of the breath to nourish the whole body. Delight the whole body. Allow the flow of the breath to dance its own dance.

[Bell rings]

Dharma Talk: The Simile of the Chicken and the Eggs

Yeah, so we'll make a transition to a little more words. This sequence of Dharma talks that we're building upon is from a sutta in the Samyutta Nikaya^[1]. Yesterday, I offered kind of an overarching description of what this sutta was about. The sutta started out by saying that knowing and seeing the destruction of taints^[2] come with development, or come with cultivation, or you can say practice—not otherwise. Then the Buddha offered three different similes to illustrate some of the characteristics of the cultivation. I wanted to unpack the first one, which has to do with a chicken and a bunch of her eggs.

Let me read this little piece right now: "Suppose there was a chicken with eight or ten or twelve eggs, but she had not properly sat on them to keep them warm and incubated. That chicken might wish, 'Oh, if only my chicks would break out of the eggshell with their claws and beak and hatch safely.' But they can't break out and hatch safely. Why is that? Because that chicken with eight or ten or twelve eggs has not properly sat on them to keep them warm and incubated."

And so, just like that, if the practitioners would not properly cultivate and wholeheartedly develop what is needed, even if we wish—oh, we wish—we won't be free. Just like the chicken. I was struck by this simile. There are two things that got highlighted. The first was, "the chicken had not properly sat on them," and the second was, "to keep them warm and incubated."

The first one I want to point out is that our cultivation and development is rather specific. This cultivation needs a proper cultivation and development. In the sutta, the Buddha offered that the specific cultivation and development is the 37 Wings of Awakening^[3]: the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Five Spiritual Faculties, the Five Powers (some of you would know this, and those are all the things that we've actually spoken about in the 7:00 a.m. Dharma talks), the Seven Factors of Awakening, and the Noble Eightfold Path. So the development is quite specific, and we have to engage in them.

And this other phrase, "keep them warm and incubated," means we have to give ourselves over, to commit to this cultivation and development. If the chicken wants the chicks to break through the shells, but she wanders around and socializes with other chickens or goes to get her worms, sits for a few minutes and gets up, the chicks won't break through, right? In this way, for us too, when we cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path, our whole practice is aligned with what the Noble Eightfold Path is orienting us towards.

There's a lot of nuance in how chickens incubate and allow the chicks to be hatched. This kind of life-making process is probably never as trivial as what we think or what we see. I had some birds incubating and hatching under my roof, and I was kind of stunned by the intricacy the mama bird was engaging in this whole process. There were times that she had to protect the eggs because a big bird would come, and there are times that she would be there and sit on them. We don't know what might be going on within the chicken, but my sense is that she's attuned to this process. She's attuned to the chicks being incubated in some way. For us, this development invites us to be attuned to our inner process.

Then the simile goes on. The Buddha also said—I'm going to paraphrase this a little bit, and then I'll read it—basically, he said, even if you didn't wish to be free, but if you keep motivating and developing the mind and heart properly, and keep developing it, even if you didn't have a wish to be free, it will happen on its own, just like the chicks.

Let me read this part: "When a mendicant or when a practitioner is committed to development, they may not wish, 'If only my mind was freed from the taints by not grasping.' Even so, their mind is freed from taints by not grasping. Why is that? You should say it's because they are developed in the 37 Factors of Awakening. Suppose there was a chicken with eight or ten or twelve eggs, and she properly sat on them to keep them warm and incubated. That chicken may not wish, 'If only my chicks would break out of the eggshell with their claws and beak and hatch safely.' But still, they will break out and hatch safely. Why is that? Because that chicken with eight or ten or twelve eggs properly sat on them to keep them warm and incubated."

What stood out for me are two things in this teaching. One is that our practice or cultivation development is not based on wishful thinking or based on the ideas of goals or results. It's not a result-oriented orientation. This goal orientation is kind of in the popular culture, right? We are very driven by goals oftentimes, and yet our practice is not goal-driven or result-oriented. Rather, it invites us to cultivate and develop with wholeheartedness, sincerity, and aligned in a way that is conducive to freedom.

The other point that this particular simile really highlights is that, just like the chicks hatching, there is a natural process that is being born. The process of liberation is born within. So much of it is under the surface level of our being. There is a natural unfolding. The chicken can't just go ahead and break a shell for the chicks. The inner development has to unfold in its own time and in its own way, and the chicken plays a part in doing this. As we can see, much of this happens below the surface level of our being.

Just like this, our Dharma practice that we're participating in is a process of developing and cultivating or nurturing a womb-like environment for the goodness of freedom and knowing and seeing to grow and to mature. Sometimes I feel like the freedom is almost coming out the womb of my being, from the belly center of my being, rather than coming from the head center.

This process, we can't rush it. We can't rush it just because we want it so badly. If you just hear that, it almost feels silly or it doesn't make sense, because clearly that is not aligned with non-grasping, right, because we want it so badly. Instead, the invitation is that we learn to properly cultivate the inner capacities that kind of grow out of our inner womb with sincerity, with care, with patience, and a greater degree of wisdom and love.

So thank you, everyone. That's the simile of the chicken and the eggs. Thank you for your attention. Have a wonderful rest of the day, everyone.