This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Not Fighting with Ourselves

Welcome, folks. Welcome, all. It is sweet to see the comments here. My name is Matthew Brensilver, and I am one of the teachers at IMC. I am quite happy to be with you. I don't want to feel like I'm crashing a little family party—the 7:00 a.m. sit. But thanks for the warm welcomes, and I'm happy to see a lot of familiar names.

I will follow the custom around these parts, and we will sit together for about half an hour. Then, I will offer some reflections on a theme for this week. I know Gil left off with three weeks on greed, hate, and delusion, and freedom from delusion was Friday's talk and theme. This week, I will be exploring the theme of equanimity. Equanimity is woven into the fabric of our practice and so much of the goodness that unfolds.

As we sit, we will practice the way one of my teachers, Shinzen Young^[1], put it: we will practice the non-interference with the arising of sensory experience. The nervous system not fighting with itself. We can actually get a feel for what it is like to not be in contention with ourselves, not be in contention with experience. To give a kind of radical permission for phenomena to arise and pass. To give it our blessing.

So, finding a posture that is sustainable for you.

Just feeling that upright axis of the spine, the rest of the body hanging loosely from that gently upward-reaching spine.

Remember this crucial aspiration of our practice: we practice for ourselves and for others. We cultivate our own heart such that we become a cause of more joy, more safety, and less suffering in the world.

The attitude we take, in line with this theme of equanimity, is a kind of deep non-violence towards the whole of our experience.

Wherever it feels like two solid objects colliding—the solidity of some ache and the solidity of a contracted mind—wherever it feels like a collision, we soften. Awareness like space.

This means we can't get what greed wants. We can't get what hatred wants. We renounce the objects of clinging when we make peace with imperfection and the human condition.

The forces of grasping have been a source of agitation forever, a source of inner friction in our own nervous system. So we give up the fight, at least for this moment.

Relax the body. Relax the mind.

Even though equanimity is known for its coolness, it actually deepens the poignancy of life. It makes our heart more, rather than less, responsive to suffering; more, rather than less, responsive to joy. More attuned, not less.

Equanimity (1 of 5): Introduction

Good morning to you all. Welcome to those just joining. My name again is Matthew, and it's good to sit with you.

I was listening to Gil's Friday session just to see exactly where he left off. It struck me that Gil makes teaching look so easy, and I make it look really hard! [Laughter] But that's the situation. I have no problem with that either. I'm happy to be with you all, and I trust we'll feel each other's hearts, and that will be plenty.

Sometimes people say about their practice, "You know, Matthew, I'm paying attention, I'm being mindful, and everything is still terrible." It's important to acknowledge that simply using our attention doesn't generate wisdom. Attention, in other words, is not necessarily wholesome or unwholesome in itself. We're using our attention all of the time. It is the most basic currency of human beings, our most basic resource, and we want to use it wisely and appropriately.

Wise attention means that it's connected to wholesomeness. It's conjoined with wholesomeness, and among other things, it's conjoined with equanimity, which is what I was alluding to. More and more, it feels like equanimity is a kind of foundation for this path. This path, as Gil said as he left off, is about non-clinging, and non-clinging is very closely related to equanimity. It is related to equanimity with not getting the promises that craving makes—not getting the promises that greed makes or that hatred makes.

Sometimes it is defined as a kind of inner balance. The way I tend to think about it is as a non-compulsion around our preferences. We may still have preferences, but there is no compulsion to act them out in the world, to live out this greed or live out this hate. That can refer even to the way we subtly act out greed and aversion in our sitting. We are subtly lured into imagining that this moment can somehow be fixed. We relinquish that sense that the moment can be fixed. We may still have preferences, but we are not feeling so compelled to enact them.

Sara Lazar^[2] and her colleagues describe equanimity as a widening of perspective—more readily engaging incoming sensory information and disengaging cognitive and emotional reactivity. Clinging is always claustrophobic; everything feels hemmed in and pinched. We widen our perspective. Rather than solidity meeting solidity, it's maybe like solidity meeting space—this ache meeting the space of awareness. We are relinquishing, or renouncing, the defensive coping strategies that we use to deal with the imperfection of the moment.

One of my teachers, Shinzen Young, described it as the balance point. Equanimity is the balance point between suppression on the one hand and identification on the other.

Michele McDonald^[3], I believe, said equanimity is "the courage of low expectations," which is very funny. The courage of low expectations, and I think she would add: the courage of low expectations but very high aspirations.

I don't want to give one definitive definition. We'll sort of unfold a range of definitions over the course of the week, because something like equanimity has many flavors and many facets. Hopefully, rather than starting with some simple, reductionistic idea of exactly what it is, we live into it and practice into it.

It takes a lot of equanimity just to open to the human condition, to the intensity of the human condition, to dukkha^[4], to suffering. In a way, even after all of these years, every time dukkha arises, it feels a little bit like a freak accident. It's like I still haven't fully acclimatized to the First Noble Truth^[5]. It just has this feel of, "The universe is off its rails!" And it's like, "No, Matthew, you just stubbed your toe." It is woven into the fabric of existence, and to actually open to that is no joke. To really begin to appreciate what this inner life or our outer world is entails a measure of equanimity. Otherwise, it's too much.

So we open. Now, maybe I say all of this and you think, "Ugh, equanimity sounds tiring." I want to celebrate equanimity as very generative. It is so closely tied to peace, to love, to release. And so this is the focus of the week.

The last weeks, as I said, Gil taught on greed, hate, and delusion—the wellsprings of self-generated suffering. Even enlightenment itself is sometimes described as the absence of greed and delusion. What I want to begin this week with is saying that to work skillfully with these forces, with the defilements of greed^[6] and delusion, requires equanimity.

In a way, greed and hatred are readily observable. Greed is that hole in the heart; we try to get what we think we want, and we act out that craving so often. But craving always over-promises. What we get never actually satiates the craving, but compounds it. We might get some fleeting something, but it actually deepens the habit of acting out craving. We want to begin to see how the objects of greed—the fantasy of what I get when I get what I want—always over-promise. So we develop equanimity with longing. That's very tender.

With hatred, if you haven't noticed, there is always something wrong; something can always be better. And so we develop equanimity with imperfection.

If greed is a hole in the center of your being, and hatred feels like your heart is on fire, what is delusion? Well, delusion feels exactly like the truth, until it doesn't. So the question is: how do we see what we can't see? I would say that delusion is more subtle than greed or hatred, but delusion launders our greed and launders our hatred. It serves to justify and dignify the forces of greed and hatred.

When we launder money, I get money through some criminal enterprise, and then I make it clean by running it through some legitimate business, right? When you launder greed, you make it look like hope, fun, and excitement. When you launder hatred, you clean it to make it look like righteousness, clarity, and discernment. Delusion serves to obscure the greed and the hatred.

The invitation is this: if we can have equanimity with greed and with hatred, we do not have to build, fabricate, and proliferate the stories and perceptions that launder and dignify our defilements. We develop equanimity with greed and aversion, and this makes the kind of delusion that serves to make them disappear—to make them look like wisdom, to make them look like fun—unnecessary. We no longer need to enact that delusion. But it starts with equanimity with these pushes and pulls on the heart.

This is the terrain of exploration for the week. I offer this for your consideration, and I look forward to being with you tomorrow morning. Thank you all. I'll check out the comments here, and see you tomorrow. Thank you, and thanks, Kevin.