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Guided Meditation: Free and Spacious

Good morning and good day. Welcome to our 7:00 a.m. sit. I'm sitting here just starting my morning in silence and quietly receiving the chat messages and greetings from all over the world. It really brightens my heart. So welcome, welcome everyone.

This week, we've been exploring this topic of sila^[1] from the inside out, and we touched upon two aspects of sila: sila protects our hearts and minds, and sila purifies the hearts and minds. Today we'll be bringing in yet another aspect of the practice of sila, that it frees our heart and mind. It liberates the heart and mind from the default programming of greed, hatred, and delusion. In this meditation that we'll start, I'll offer some pointers to the possibility of freedom when we touch in with a virtuous heart, a blameless happiness. Let's begin.

Maybe just pausing for a moment. Let yourself settle into the posture you're in. Being generous, letting the settling happen on its own, at its own pace. We are not in a hurry to get anywhere else. We are gathering and collecting ourselves around the here and now. This includes adjusting and settling the posture, including a sense of arriving. Arriving into the moment that is called "now." Gentle and spacious. We are not trying to crowd the moment. It's a gentle settling. One moment at a time.

You can begin to feel present. A sense of becoming alive, awake to the lived moment. Aware that the inner light of mindful awareness is turned on. So you can begin to feel and sense directly what's here, without the filters of what should be here and should not be here. It's what it is, now. Now. And now.

At some point, maybe you feel you have arrived. As mindfulness becomes steady, stable, there may be a felt sense of a pervading presence. A kind of spacious presence. A spacious presence that can receive the moments of sense contact: sounds, smells, touch points, streams of thoughts, flowing emotions. Being available. Being available to whatever is here feels like this.

Aligning ourselves with a virtuous, kind heart. Aligning with the goodness of the dharma. Let yourself feel the possibility of the presence of a virtuous heart. Not a kind of demand, but opening to the possibility. There may be uplifts felt in the body, or groundedness, relaxation, and ease. A breath can flow freely. The sensations in the body can dance freely.

Momentary difficulties and challenges may arise in the spaciousness. There is room and there is a possibility for clear knowing. In the seeing, in the knowing, there is a natural agency in us. We can awaken and choose not to let the habit tendencies act out^[2], to blame, to fix, to judge. They are freed, released. It is not so much doing, but making space for this natural freedom, this natural responsiveness to flow.

Whatever characterizes the moment does not have to define who we are. It's just how the moment is. Let it be. The virtuous heart within does not seek for recognition or praises. The virtuous heart is quiet, peaceful. The virtuous heart is vast, spacious, free from being defined or identified by the passing moments.

Let this peaceful, blameless abiding be a refuge for ourselves. And let this peaceful, blameless abiding be a refuge for others. Here there is safety, well-being, and freedom. Freedom from being entangled by wanting and not wanting.

Dharmette: Sila from the Inside Out (3 of 5); Sila Frees

So very grateful, very grateful for practicing together as a community, and I trust this has a rippling effect into the world in this way.

I'd like to speak a little more about the aspect of sila. I've spoken about sila being a force that protects, protects our hearts and minds, and offers safety for ourselves and for others. And I also spoke about how sila allows for a kind of purification process, a cleansing process to happen. Today I'd like to offer some reflections on the possibility that sila offers freedom.

I was reflecting on this: often when we use the word "freedom" in the culture or the environment we're in today, much of what comes to people's minds is this orientation of "freedom to." Freedom to express ourselves, the freedom to do, freedom to shop, freedom to acquire, to consume. And this orientation, for me, is a sense of outward-going, an outward orientation, without touching something deep inside. So "freedom to" is that kind of orientation.

But the Buddhist teaching in terms of freedom is a "freedom from." I may have heard this from some teacher recently, and so that's why it's in my psyche. I want to acknowledge that, but I can't remember who I heard it from.

The Buddhist teaching of freedom is "freedom from"—freedom from the default conditioned programming in us. Habitual tendencies keep us living in this very surfacy way, driven by our wantings and desires, and greed, aversion, delusion. This orientation in terms of "freedom from" is inwardly oriented. It's touching in deeply within.

We can begin to become clear what the underlying forces are where our actions and our speech come from. When we're not touched in, most of this "freedom to"—you know, freedom to do, all this doing—flows out of the compulsiveness from the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion. And we all know the impact of this kind of outward-going flow without a deeper touch-in, in terms of the clarity and sensitivity that may be available to us.

The consequences on a large scale, we all know. This freedom to consume, overuse, and over-consume has immense impact everywhere: on natural resources, the climate that we live in. And on small scales, for each of us individually, we know the consequence when we simply act out the rage, act out anger, or act out fear—we harm ourselves, we harm other people, and we harm the environment.

Because of the common orientation in our society, there's a sense of "freedom to" that is prominent. Sometimes when we speak about a "freedom from," there can be misperceptions and a feeling like, "Oh, we're kind of restraining ourselves, or we're hiding, or we're avoiding." But it's far from that. Freedom from unwholesome forces in us, around us, in fact, opens us up to a different kind of agency, a different kind of possibility, that we can live our lives not giving in to the forces within ourselves and forces all around.

There is a possibility to open up to a kind of unshakable courage, a kind of strength, a kind of resilience that's available to us. So this kind of "freedom from" actually opens up and blossoms within us, widening the range of wholesome possibilities. Because the dharma is responsive—it's not reactive based on delusions—there is responsiveness that emerges when we're no longer caught by our identifications and the habit mind.

This kind of refrain or restraint from unwholesome forces is not based on fear. It's not based on some kind of forcefully tying ourselves up, and it's not based on grasping for a certain kind of recognition. It's not because, "I wanted to be a certain kind of person," but rather, it's based on the growing degrees of inner clarity.

I choose to refrain from false speech and lying because I understand the suffering that this leads to, both for myself and for others. Or I refrain from causing harm because I deeply care. I deeply care about the well-being of myself and others. As we turn inward, we can begin to open up for this kind of recognition to emerge naturally. This is not something that we make big claims about. But as we practice, as we observe the impact of unwholesome forces and wholesome forces, we recognize, "Oh, when I'm not engaged with ill will, with harmful activities, there is a natural degree of peace in me." A blameless happiness. Often the Buddha would say sitting in the blameless happiness is available to us, and that is possible.

In the Dhammapada^[3], there are verses that describe the Buddha as the one who abides in harmlessness among the harmful. Just let yourself feel that possibility. Yes, people around us may be hostile, may be angry, may even be violent. There is a possibility for us to live without hostility. When we're among the people who may be hostile, it is possible to dwell among the violent without violence in our hearts.

Is it easy to do? No. I'm not saying this is easy to do. And this is why this is a practice. This is a gradual training. We start where we are. Is it true that we might slip up, doing something unwholesome or harmful? Of course. There are forces that get moving through us. And yet, when this is a practice, when we practice it wholeheartedly, we give ourselves a chance, a possibility to learn from what we're doing and over time to allow this cleansing to happen.

This freedom becomes available little by little to us, to our own hearts, and to others. There is not a big hurry, and we don't have to beat ourselves up. For each moment as we engage in this practice, I love this phrasing: that the dharma is good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. Let whatever degree of goodness that's available to us permeate, and let that be good enough.

We gradually learn that when we get identified, when we blame ourselves, when we beat ourselves up, they don't really help. They don't really help. And so we open, we become more spacious, and free ourselves from this kind of ongoing, perpetual unwholesome activity. In this way, it becomes possible. It becomes possible for ourselves and for others.

In one of the suttas in the Pali Canon^[4], the Majjhima Nikaya^[5], the Buddha spoke about the ten pathways of skillful deeds, and he listed many possibilities that can arise when one cultivates sila. It includes all the way to freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom in this very life. I don't always associate with this kind of statement in a sort of "once-for-all" kind of way, but what I'm beginning to open to recognize is, in this moment, maybe this is possible. In this moment, I can feel a momentary freedom of the heart and mind that is not caught by desires, aversions, and delusion.

I'll end by offering this particular quote in the sutta. It says that when a person has this entire spectrum of noble ethics, noble sila, they experience a blameless happiness inside themselves. May this be possible. May this be possible for us. May this possibility offer goodness for others. And may the blameless happiness inside ourselves be a source of goodness for the whole world.

Thank you everyone. Thank you for your attention, and thank you for being in this wonderful dharma field. I'll see you tomorrow.