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Guided Meditation: Being Available

Hello everyone, and I'm happy to be able to share this week on right effort. I think it's really an essential area of practice and easy to overlook, even easy to think of effort as being somehow effortful in a stressful way. But there's also effortless effort. And so for today, for the meditation, I would like to emphasize that when we're going to do something, encounter something, engage in something, or make some effort perhaps to do something important—if it's important enough, we prepare ourselves for the event.

Someone who is playing a sport might warm up first and prepare themselves for it. A musician might do the same thing, prepare themselves for a performance. Someone might be going to give an important speech; they might breathe deeply or be calm or quiet for a while to gather themselves together to prepare for what they're going to do. So this idea that we prepare ourselves is a common part of human life. And maybe a big part of meditation, especially when we start, is preparing ourselves so that we are available. Available for what? Available for life.

The alternative to being available is to go ahead, lock into our desires or wanting, trying to make something happen, trying to assert ourselves. But to be available is a little bit to get out of our own way. It makes room beyond our opinions or ideas of what should be, or how things are supposed to happen. To be available is a very different stance or way than to assert ourselves. And one of the things we can become available for is we can become available to what wants to emerge, what is arising here, and in particular, be attuned to what feels healthy, what feels good, what feels wholesome, what feels beneficial.

What is it that arises? If what arises when we're available are difficult things, difficult emotions that might need to arise, there can sometimes be a sense of goodness or rightness in allowing them space. And that availability, the wholesomeness, is the receptivity, the compassion, the care in which we open to receive what's difficult within. But also what can arise is something really good. And maybe the goodness, the rightness of just being available is so wonderful, the energy of availability. So this being available is the theme of the meditation today.

So assuming an upright meditation posture and gently closing your eyes, prepare yourself for this meditation. Prepare yourself for an encounter, a meeting with a phenomenally important person, and that person is yourself. Prepare yourself as if you're an important and valuable person, someone that you care for and love. How would you make yourself available to sit and be present with this important person?

Maybe you would take a posture that's not collapsed, not receding too much, but really showing that you're here and present, that your posture is one of being available. And with the eyes closed, take some long, slow, deep breaths. And as you exhale, see if you can let go of other thoughts and concerns that might get in the way of being available for what's here.

Letting your breathing return to normal.

Taking a few breaths to continue the preparations by relaxing your body.

The more the body is at ease, the more we have to be available with: greater sensitivity, attentiveness, and more space to feel the fullness of our life.

And then, rather than focusing on breathing, how would it be different if your awareness was available to the experience of breathing? To be available.

And when the mind wanders off in thought, in that wandering off, we're no longer available for our immediate experience of breathing, of the body, of here and now. When you notice you've wandered off in thought, re-establish a sense of being available with your awareness, with attention. Not to assert yourself or require something to happen, but to see what emerges, what wants to come, what's here. Allow things that are good to come into full awareness. But don't get lost in them, don't get caught by them, so that the sense of availability to what's next is eclipsed. Keep staying open, available.

With awareness available.

Might there be some feeling of wholesomeness, goodness, or pleasure in the sense of availability itself? Available attention, which is available for the present moment.

A sense of awareness available to experience can be supported by imagining there's lots of space here in awareness for things to arise, where the difficult things are easier with all the space around them, and the beneficial things have space to grow. Allow the wholesome to spread out wide and fully.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, take some gentle, deeper breaths as a way of expanding or returning to a sense of being available to our present moment experience, whatever it might be. The sense of availability does take some kind of effort, but maybe it's closer to an effortless effort than an effortful one.

And then to bring this meditation to an end. If your care and connection to others arose out of this sense of availability, where there's no resistance or no assertion, no obligation, no protection, just available for oneself and for others, what would the nature of your kindness, your care, your love be in such a circumstance?

And perhaps with that as a reference point, give some thought, think about it in your own way, of goodwill, well-wishing for others. Who do you have goodwill and well-wishing for? How do you want your goodwill and well-wishing to go out into the world?

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may my goodwill be available for all beings.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Right Effort (5 of 5) Desire for Right Effort

So for this last talk on right effort, I would like to emphasize how incredibly important this topic is for anyone doing Buddhist practice. All of Buddhist practice could be summarized as the practice of discovering what right effort is, and kind of refining and maybe purifying effort so that the effort is completely wholesome and has no attachments, no pressure, no resistance in it. There's a freedom, there's an ease, there's a peacefulness in the efforts we make.

And finding that right effort, the right way, is in some ways a constant adjustment that we're making, finding our way. And over time, it becomes second nature. Just like riding a bicycle, after a while it becomes second nature, even though you have to swerve around this way and that way, and make different kinds of effort depending on the grade you're driving on. Or driving on a freeway in a car, we might conventionally say we're going straight down a lane, but there are ever so small little movements left and right to the car that we're constantly making adjustments for, but doing it almost automatically, so it's second nature. It's the same way with effort.

But as we understand the difference between a wholesome effort and an unwholesome effort, wholesome mental states and unwholesome mental states, to really be able to see those and see them for what they are—that the unwholesome drains us, the unwholesome diminishes us, or stresses us, or is painful, and the wholesome ones do the opposite—that's a powerful insight. It is powerful really to see that, and then to have confidence, and this is an important thing, real confidence that it's not worthwhile to engage in things which are unwholesome, to engage in unwholesome ways. If we want to live our lives, don't make the effort that's unwholesome, that's debilitating, that's stressful. Have confidence in the wholesome.

And it's hard to find that confidence. In this kind of funny way, many of us have confidence in the unwholesome, like that's how we'll be saved, that's how we'll take care of ourselves, that's how we fulfill our responsibilities, but in fact, it does the opposite. As practice develops, we have more confidence in the wholesome, or to say it maybe more to the heart of it, the confidence in the unwholesome withers away. And so we're not prioritizing it anymore, and we're left more with the wholesome.

But also, we can prioritize it. As we value the wholesome, we make space for it, we allow for it. We are not willing to sacrifice it. We don't give it up for the unwholesome, for the stressful. So this idea that it's important to stay close to what's wholesome and beneficial is part of this Buddhist practice. And what are some of these wholesome states that we stay close to? Some of it is just being mindful, staying present. Some of it is as simple as being mindful and discerning and really connected, to have wisdom operate. Some of it is to be non-reactive, to have a certain degree of calm, to be kind, to have compassion. Some of it might be to have a sense of pleasure or delight or joy in all the different thirty-two flavors of joy that can happen in practice, that we begin making room, more available for this kind of sense of well-being that can begin to be here.

And as we feel the well-being, that's a reference point, a support to highlight when we lose it because of the unwholesome. It gives us an early warning sign, "Oh, I'm going to lose this." If we hold on to the wholesome, then we're doing something unwholesome, the holding on. So we're always looking, always kind of, you know, the wholesome way of investigating is this very simple thing: Is it wholesome? Is it stressful or is it unstressful? Is it beneficial? Is it useful? And any effort at all, including the effort to investigate that, the effort to be mindful, the effort to let go, the effort to stay with the wholesome effort, has to be under the lens, the frame of reference of this right effort.

It's a powerful protection for us, that the very way in which we practice Buddhism is not going to be stressful for us, that it's not going to be detrimental to us. It's also a powerful way of discovering what freedom is. Because in the end, to be able to live right effort with ease and choice, and really stay close to that place where the effort itself is almost effortless, so easy, where it doesn't carry the weight and the stress of conceit and self, that is a kind of freedom that we have.

So in the Eightfold Path^[1], right effort is the sixth factor^[2]. The seventh is mindfulness, and how they're related is very important here in the list. Once we understand right effort, then the mindfulness we develop and get stronger gives us more information in order to practice right effort. So with the heightened awareness of attention that we develop, we're more attentive to the subtleties in which right effort and wrong effort operate within us. Also, mindfulness itself then is protected by right effort. Usually, we teach people mindfulness without teaching them right effort first. And then for some people, and for the first long period of time in my doing practice, it is discovering how to be mindful in a useful way, in a healthy way, in a wholesome way. But if we were taught right effort first and we really know what that is, then when we start doing mindfulness practice, we're looking at the mindfulness efforts through the lens of right effort. "Is how I'm practicing mindfulness right effort? Am I practicing with greed or with aversion? Am I straining? Am I pushing? Am I being assertive in a way that's not wholesome? Or am I engaged in a nice way, a way that brings ease and peace and dedication to what I'm doing?"

So in the background of all this, that's part and parcel of what the Buddha talked about when he talked about each of the four steps, the four kinds of right effort. He talked about generating desire, and here he's talking about wholesome desire. And as we go through and learn about this right effort, this is one of the gifts, the treasures, is to learn how desires can be wholesome. It can be beneficial, no stress involved whatsoever in having a desire, no compulsion. That the desires themselves are beneficial for us. Human beings constantly have desires. Some of them are really unconscious and we don't really see we have the desire, we don't call it desire. You know, so I'm lifting up my arm to be a little bit more emphatic as I speak. There's a kind of desire to be emphatic, to make a stronger point, a desire to move my arm, that is almost second nature so I could do it without thinking about it and even without consciously intending it, but there's a desire. There are desires all the time. Human beings are kind of a stream of desires, if you look at it.

As we become aware of these desires, aware of the choices we make, letting those desires flow out of the wholesome place, we're cultivating the wholesome, we're becoming the wholesome. We're transforming ourselves into being available to be filled with goodness, filled with the wholesome, the beneficial. And then this miracle happens that the desires we have come out of that wholesome place, and the desires no longer seem necessarily that they're my desires even, because the identification, the attribution of self to it gets in the way. But at the same time, we're tracking the desires to really know that they're wholesome, that they're beneficial, and we're tracking a little bit the impact they have in the world around us, so that it's beneficial for other people as well.

So, to generate desire to prevent the arising of the unwholesome, to care for ourselves enough to live a careful life, to not carelessly live a life where the unwholesome begins to take over. To live a life that, when we recognize the unwholesome in us, we have a careful, loving way that we try to put it down or abandon it, or at least not believe in it and go along with it. That we value the wholesome, the helpful, the beneficial, and we make space available for it, to recognize it and support it. And we generate the desire to maintain it, to stay close to it, to not lose it easily once it's there. All of this generating desire is done with ease, with non-attachment, non-clinging, non-resistance. The desires are that way, the effort is that way, and this is a good treasure to find our way to.

So I hope that this has given you something to look at and consider and practice with. And for this weekend, you might want to see, maybe prepare for next Monday when the next series is. I know that maybe some of the teachings I'm saying might be difficult and challenging, and you have questions about it, or it just seems too much or something. But instead of dwelling on that, see if you can kind of frame it and understand this: that it's inspiring for you, that it helps you feel more prepared for practice, more ready and receptive, more confident, more inspired. "Yes, this is a key, this is important, this is valuable." And that would be your homework for today and the next couple of days, is to really reconsider this topic of right effort to the point where you can discover some degree of confidence and inspiration, and it gives you the readiness and being prepared for something. And maybe you have a chance to talk to friends about this right effort thing, journal about it, listen to these talks again, read about it, whatever it does for you.

So thank you very much, I appreciate it very much, and to be with you at this turning of the year. We'll be together a few more days before the end for those of you going on vacation. And for others, I wanted to tell you, for a while now... you know, at the end of November, IMC sent out an end-of-the-year fundraising letter, and some of you might not have received it. There's a link to it on the YouTube page for today, just underneath the video. And also on the "What's New" page for IMC, there's a fundraising letter I wrote. And if some of you are interested in supporting IMC, that would be very wonderful. And so thank you all, and I look forward to our next time.