Guided Meditation: Arriving in the Present Moment; Dharmette: Dhamma in Time and Beyond Time

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Arriving in the Present Moment; Dharmette: Dhamma in Time and Beyond Time. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 25, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Arriving in the Present Moment

Greetings. Yeah, I see people joining already and I'm here in Los Altos^[1], California. Just wanted to do a sound check while we wait for a few minutes to join everyone. See if anyone in the chat can let me know if you're able to hear me. Okay. All righty. Thank you. Thank you everybody.

Hello everyone. Good morning, good day. I'm so happy to just be here with you flowing from my dear friend David Lorey yesterday, who started our week of exploration on the six qualities of the dharma. As you join and I'm seeing the chat messages, I have this really good feeling. It's such a fortunate thing for all of us to gather and explore the Buddha Dharma. It's a beautiful way to start the morning here for me.

So I'm going to offer a few words about the remainder of the week following what David brought alive yesterday. And this week for our guided meditations, I'm going to introduce an arriving sequence that I learned from one of my teachers, Phillip Moffitt. This arriving sequence helps us to establish sati^[2] in a wholesome way. What I realized is the steps of the arriving sequence map to the qualities of the dharma quite well. So I'm going to kind of weave this in a little bit as we do the meditation together, and it supports the insight practice that many of us have been practicing for a long while as this YouTube sangha^[3].

The arriving sequence has three components to it: arriving, being available, and aligning. Arriving is this aspect of really allowing ourselves to gather and collect to establish mindfulness and mindful presence. We do so such that we can allow our sati to become steady and stable. And then from there, we become available to the alive experiences that are happening—kind of alive to the dharma that's unfolding in front of us, in us—and then let the dharma naturally guide us in this whole exploration.

So I'll be touching in around the arriving first. It's not so different probably from what you've already been doing, except there is a little bit of emphasis on establishing from the get-go our mindful presence and letting it really become steady and stable. We're less concerned about objects in the mind to begin with, but rather we're turned inward. This inward orientation—gathering, connecting towards sati—is directly related to the qualities of the dharma that David brought in: sandiṭṭhiko^[4] and akāliko^[5]. The dharma is directly visible here and now, and it's immediate. And so we'll do that in these next few days as we unfold this, and I'll be doing a little deeper dive flowing from David to the next quality, akāliko, that David mentioned yesterday.

So with that as an orientation, let's practice together. I'm going to start with the sound of the bell to help us arrive.

As the sound of the bell fades away... arriving. Arriving. Arriving into the present moment. Arriving into sati, mindfulness. Let yourself feel your presence. There is a felt sense of being present. It's not a conceptual thing, but you can feel and sense your presence. Gently, softly, gathering ourselves inward. Not in a hurry. We are coming into this moment now. Now.

Objects in the mind may arise and pass. Here at the beginning of this meditation, we're learning to establish sati. Let the attention rest inward. Mindfulness front and center. You may feel centeredness. A mindfulness all around at the sense gates. But the attention is not to follow the sense gate contact, allowing them to be there. Attention rests in sati. You are present. You're present in the here and now. Sandiṭṭhiko. Dharma is visible here and now directly.

The momentary mindfulness may become continuous as we stay inward. Maybe you feel a kind of a flow of mindfulness or there is a stability that you begin to feel. There may be a felt sense of presence. Stability. Quiet. The now presence maybe expresses that stability, that stillness. Let the mindfulness become big, spacious. There is a wakeful aliveness when we're present for the ever-shifting, changing life moments. The dharma is visible here and now in a direct way. It's immediate, unfiltered through ideas or beliefs. You can feel and sense the aliveness of being present.

Maybe a sense of being available is powerful. Available to the movements of the breath. Enlivening the body. Animating the body. Available to the sensations. Dancing, humming in the body. In the stability of mindfulness, there may be a palpable sense that you are in time and it feels timeless. Akāliko. Resting here in the now, softening the doing. Remembering that the first dharma quality is that the dharma is well proclaimed, well taught by the Buddha. Complete and accessible. Aligning to this possibility of resting in the qualities of the dharma. Noticing any well-being that may be bubbling up. Calming, gathered, collected. Quiet feeling, sensing, and knowing.

Sometimes connecting with the breath can support the deepening and stabilizing of sati. The directness and the immediacy of our experience being felt, sensed, maybe nonverbal. No words are needed. There is a raw aliveness that you may feel, and let that be enough.

As we close this meditation together, recollecting the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. So grateful. So grateful that the Buddha discovered a path, discovered a possibility that's available to each of us and taught the dharma that's complete and accessible. So grateful for the dharma directly visible here and now, and it's timeless in its immediacy. I am so grateful for the sangha past, present, and future. So grateful for this sangha, this specific sangha practice, practicing together from all around the world. And it is said that the dharma is good. Dharma is good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. May whatever benefit that emerges from this heart, this mind, this body—may the goodness nourish the whole being. May the goodness be shared wide open in all directions. May all beings know the goodness of the dharma. May all beings be held by the possibilities of happiness, well-being, joy, wonder, wisdom, and a liberating wisdom to free the heart and mind.

Dharmette: Dhamma in Time and Beyond Time

Thank you everyone for practicing together. I'll share a few words flowing from David's exploration yesterday about the first two qualities of the dharma. He used the words that the dharma is complete and accessible, and these Pali terms, sandiṭṭhiko and akāliko, that we brought into the meditation.

Paradoxically, in the Buddha's teachings, the Buddha also said that the dharma is not easy to see. How so? There is a sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya^[6] number 26 for those who are interested, called the Noble Quest or Noble Search. And the Buddha said this: "This dharma that I have attained is profound, hard to see and hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise."

It's a little paradoxical, you know, when we say it's directly visible here and now and immediate, but the Buddha here says this is hard to see, hard to understand. It's not revealed in the same way through our logical analytics. And so the Buddha gives a reason why the dharma is hard to see, hard to understand. He says, "Because people like clinging, they love it. They enjoy it. It's very hard for them to see this."

I was reflecting and pondering on this line. I feel the truth of it. This chasing after something one way or another, clinging, grasping... these movements of reaching out so often take us away from living in the present moment in a more holistic way. And it blindsides us in various ways. Often our mind can be preoccupied by the goals, the destinations that we want to go, and we completely skip over what's right in front of us here and now.

I want to offer a couple of reflections on how it is that we might miss what may be directly visible here and now, that feels so immediate, so close. In this reflection, I hope to allow us to become more and more clear with these tendencies so that we can get out of our own way to allow the dharma to be revealed for itself.

One of the ways that we can be blindsided is that we are often living in conceptual ideas and beliefs about what we're experiencing in life, rather than dropping into the immediacy and the directness of our experience in this raw, felt-sense way without the conceptual filters. One of the teachers that I worked with had an analogy: it's like we're pressing our face against the glass to look through and see something. That's not how we're doing this in our practice, but rather we're dropping inside the experience to know the immediacy of experience within it. So there is that raw immediacy and directness that comes alive as we drop below these surface-level ideas and concepts.

Our ideas often have associations of what's good and bad, what's right and wrong, what should be happening and should not be happening. It can distort the rawness of our experience. It also often leads to a kind of reactivity that can happen when we think something is not right and it shouldn't be happening. We can begin to judge, we can begin to blame, we can begin to fix before we even have a full-range experience of what is really happening.

To go beyond or to counter this kind of tendency we have—and it's not something wrong with us, it's just a habit tendency—the prescription that the Buddha offered in terms of a practice path is that the Buddha emphasized so much an embodied, felt-sense way of practicing. We're dropping inside this alive experience rather than utilizing our projections, interpretations, ideas, and stories about the experience. As we drop inside in this raw way, in the embodiment in a quiet, silent way, this embodiment has its own intelligence. The Buddha used this phrase that it's "not attained by mere reasoning," and this kind of intelligence is not based on logic or analysis.

Another way that we can be blindsided is that we're not living in the present moment here and now so much of the time. But the aliveness of the dharma is visible here and now. The aliveness of the dharma happens here and now. But how often we find ourselves being in the past or the future! This clinging and grasping tends to take us out into the past and the future, and so we are not giving ourselves a chance to actually settle deeply into this timeless now.

To counter this tendency, the Buddha spoke so much about establishing sati, establishing mindfulness, to allow it to be our ground, our foundation in a felt-sense way. In the arriving sequence that we did this morning in our practice together, we are learning to gently arrive in the present moment, and we gather our attention inward. We turn towards mindfulness, sati. It has this kind of felt sense to it. And we let ourselves really feel and sense into it in this raw way.

The other thing to say is that often clinging and grasping happen at the conceptual level. What we're really grasping are the conceptual ideas of our experience. In a way, it's not possible to be grasped because it's always shifting and changing. As we practice in this way, little by little, we begin to allow this dharma that is visible here and now deep in us to be revealed naturally. We can live more fully in the multi-dimensionality of being human, and we don't have to go anywhere else.

This sense of immediacy has a timeless quality. Akāliko is timeless, not of time. Right here the life moments can freely flow, and we're alive to it. We are meeting it from this deep place, unburdened by the ideas and fixed views or the beliefs that we have. Can you feel that freedom that's already palpable right here?

Allow that to be a possibility as you go about the day and establish sati momentarily. Maybe arrive multiple times a day, and we'll unfold these qualities tomorrow a bit more. Thank you for practicing together, and enjoy the dharma together. Be well.