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Guided Meditation: Entering the Dharma Field

Welcome folks. It's nice to see you. I'm familiar with a lot of those names; it's very sweet to see you in the chat. I'm happy to be with you this week. So let's do the thing we do, and just take the posture and trust that the Dharma is there waiting for us.

Maybe we've sat enough times, contemplated the Dharma for enough months or years, that just taking the posture reminds us of everything. The poignancy of our life, the endlessness of suffering in this realm, the strength and fragility of goodness, the miracle and blessing of this path. And I wasn't feeling all of that five minutes ago, but in seeing your names, taking the posture, it's all right here now.

Let your breathing remind you of the Dharma. Our practice, of course, is about opening to the intensity of this realm, but it's also about refuge, protecting ourselves from the intensity. We use these simple ways of directing attention to the rhythm of our breathing as a way of taking a kind of shelter for the heart momentarily. It is a way of putting down the riddle of our life temporarily. In a world that's as small and as big as our breath.

Whenever our mind goes tending to what we imagine our life is, we just fold that into the breathing. Just fold it all back into the breathing. It's like we feed it. We feed our thoughts, ruminations, anticipation, and memory; we just feed it all to our breath. Our breath can absorb the body blows of hope and fear. It can subtly soothe the unrest of fear and anticipation, and settle the leaning forward, excitement, and agitation of hope. We put all our hope into this moment, this breath.

The language of entering Dharma fields... it seems like we're just pointing the attentional spotlight to the sensations of breathing, but more generally we're entering a Dharma field. Entering a realm where everything, including our so-called mistakes, are Dharma. Where everything reminds us...

Dharmette: Reflections on Mortality (1/5)

Okay, so it's good to practice with you. I sort of realize I kind of assume like you, we all already know how to meditate because I don't know what that was, but it's good to know how to meditate and then see what instructions like that do to the heart.

"Everything is teaching us," Ajahn Chah^[1] famously says. "Everything is teaching us." We want to learn from life, and maybe we say implicit in that is that we neither want to over-learn or under-learn from experiences.

So over-learn: when we over-learn, we make an experience mean too much. This or that experience disproportionately shapes our model of the world or model of ourselves, right? We know those experiences that have such a deep kind of emotional resonance, a deep impact, that we make it mean so much. Maybe an experience of fear, for example. We can over-learn from that; we can generalize in ways that are not justified. We make it mean too much about the rest of our life. That experience means too much. There's so much feeling and so much affect, so many thoughts, that we endow it with this enormous significance. We can over-learn.

But we can also under-learn. And by under-learn, what I'm pointing to is the ways we can fail to appreciate that this experience has implications for everything else.

And in our Dharma practice, we're sort of weaving and bobbing between over-learning and under-learning. We're trying to learn. And this week, I'll be exploring the theme of mortality, and the ways we can learn from it. The ways in which we can be softened or hardened by it. And this is a zone where we can over-learn or we can under-learn. We can endow it with too many meanings or too few. We can, on the one hand, just appreciate mortality, that death is not such a big deal, and we can also appreciate the depth of poignancy of this life, birth, and death.

And so I'm thinking about this, really because I sort of always am, but also I had a death in the family one month ago. And I've just been watching my heart, watching my heart, and trying to appreciate the ordinariness of death. You know, like at the funeral, the people, the gravediggers who were like very respectful, but they're there having a very different day than everyone else. They're planning their day, they're coordinating, they're eating their lunch. Very, very ordinary.

And we ought not make that seem too ordinary, or we must not miss its significance. We ought not under-learn. The letter Kafka wrote: "The meaning of life is that it stops." And we can interpret that in a very bleak way, that death blots out all meaning; the meaning of life is that it stops. Or that finitude is what makes anything meaningful. Immortality obliterates meaning; life is meaningful because it ends.

And so this week is about death supporting life, informing life, teaching us about the ways that mortality informs our practice. And I consider this sacred ground. Sacred ground. I remember I was 29 years old, and I was doing the 'A Year to Live' practice, Stephen Levine's^[2] practice of, you know, following a book with a group and living as if it's the last year of one's life. And I was 29 and healthy. And I remember telling my neighbor, who lived right across the hall. And she was a Holocaust survivor; her entire family was killed, and that was an ever-present reality in her life. And I remember she asked me about the program, like, "What are you doing?" And I remember her indignation, you know, when I explained this practice. And I remember Sarah saying like, "You weren't there, you weren't in the camps. You don't know. Don't play games. Don't play games with this question," you know. And yeah, I don't know. And I'm trying to understand, and we all have our own relationship to this question, and this is sacred ground.

I'm old enough now where Kaiser is actively searching for my death and testing my body each year. And this year: negative. Next year: don't know. It's not negative forever.

My paternal grandmother died when my dad was 12, just before his bar mitzvah actually. And my paternal grandfather had mental illness and often thought he was dying even when he wasn't. And maybe it's not an accident that both of their children studied medicine. My dad and uncle studied medicine, trying to navigate, master the realm of illness and birth and death. And so somehow I've always just felt the presence of death, the meaning of it, trying not to under-learn or over-learn from it.

And so how can our Dharma practice be informed by this? How can our wisdom and love be informed by mortality? And I sometimes say something like, "A good death starts now." I get that. But I was struck when I said that at some retreat, and this yogi in one of our practice meetings very thoughtfully kind of pushed back. I was so struck by what she said. She said, like, "What do you mean by a good death?" And she said that it's a very great mystery, you know, really equivalent to the mystery of life. And I took what she said to heart. Yeah, I don't know. And so we respect that. We respect the mystery of it all.

And I don't know that Dharma or anything is a kind of perfect consolation for death, for the changingness of all things. It may not be the perfect consolation, but it's pretty good. Pretty good. So that's our theme for this week: how death can inform our practice, inform our samādhi^[3], our sīla^[4], our sense of self, inform our love. How death can inform our love. So I'm happy to be with you and exploring this. So may we have a good day, and see you tomorrow. Yeah.