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Guided Meditation: Blaming/Loving

Warm greetings from a dark morning in Redwood City, California, at the Insight Meditation Center (IMC). From this Dharma seat in the middle of IMC, seeing all your names and greetings, I kind of imagine that IMC has stretched and stretched in circles. The community now extends around the globe, and it's a very nice feeling.

I would like to say something that is hopefully provocative in a good way, and maybe make an impression on you for this meditation. It might help you become quieter, think less, and be more curious about what you are capable of discovering or being when there is more silent awareness. In the same way that if you listen to a sound, you don't need to be thinking to hear the sound; when you're tasting food, you don't need to be thinking while you're tasting it. In fact, if you think distracted thoughts, you might miss the sound or miss the taste. So, in the same way, the thinking mind is not needed for the deep, silent, and wonderful awareness that is possible.

This awareness that we are capable of is a natural functioning of our minds and our being, if we can leave it alone. If we are alert to it, alert to the nature of awareness by itself,^[1] just kind of attending to it and the silence or stillness of it, there will be no complaining and no blame.

In that lack of complaining and blaming, there is something in the family of love. Exactly what that is might vary from person to person. Maybe it is just a simple tenderness, a sense of gentleness towards all things, or warmth. Maybe it is compassion or kindness. It doesn't need to have a name. This wonderful, vague English word love is all we need to know.

So what is it when you sit and are alert to awareness? If mindfulness is very simple, open, and receptive to what is, how is it that there's no complaining and no blaming in that? And instead, there might be something in the family of love in that. How is that?

I'm hoping that this evocative introduction doesn't lead you to do a lot of thinking about it, complaining about what I said, or making exceptions. All that can be for later; there is plenty of time to think it out. But maybe there can be a curiosity as you do your practice and show up for your experience with this clear awareness. Is that awareness characterized by an absence of complaining and blaming? Might it be somehow, maybe subtly, characterized by love?

To begin with, assuming a meditation posture, the somewhat silent sensing and feeling of the body can be how you begin your meditation. Sense and feel your body and your posture, making small adjustments in ways that support the body to be more aligned, more settled, and more at ease.

Gently closing your eyes, perhaps with a curious quietness of mind, or with the quietness of sensing and feeling the body, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Stretch the torso and the rib cage as you breathe in deeply, and let go, relax, and settle on the exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal, on the inhale, emphasize the way the body can feel and sense itself, not really needing the medium of thoughts, ideas, or images. On the inhale, feel where the body might be tense or holding you tight, and on the exhale, allow the body to soften around that area.

For the next two or three breaths, feel your whole body as you inhale in whatever way that is easy. As you exhale, see if you can quiet or let go of your thinking. Letting go into your body... letting go of your thinking and letting go into your body.

As we continue, with whatever capacity you have to be aware without needing to think about it—hearing sounds, feeling sensations of the body, simple knowing, simple registering of emotions and thoughts—be alert to a silent awareness, a thought-free or thought-reduced awareness. Perhaps being aware out there, in that awareness, there is no complaining or blaming. Even if in some other place, like in the place of thinking, there might be, go to that place where there is no complaining, no blaming.

Being aware in a quiet way, in that quiet, might you find something in the nature of love within that awareness? Accompanying that awareness, supporting it? As you continue this meditation, stay close to the awareness that doesn't complain, the awareness that is associated with and comes with something in the family of love.

(Silence for meditation)

Where is that place in awareness where there is no complaining, no blaming? Might there be some place of awareness which is in touch with qualities of kindness, goodwill, and love?

As we come to the end of the sitting, imagine that you're sitting on a park bench next to someone, maybe a friend or someone you know. After some conversation and talking, there's no need to talk anymore. It feels very content to sit quietly. Imagine in this quiet, silent way of sitting next to each other that you are aware of them. You even think of them without any complaints, without any blame, but rather with goodwill. Not a goodwill that is doing something, but rather from a place where awareness has tenderness, gentleness, goodwill, love, and care within it.

Maybe your care and your love can be private. You don't have to tell them you're sitting quietly. And maybe in this privacy of sitting quietly next to each other, you can allow yourself to feel fully the warmth and the care of this other human being being loved. That feeling maybe now can extend outwards to the park, the trees, the children playing, the people strolling, and out into the world.

There is a way in which a quiet mind can give room for the heart's capacity to quietly love, generously love. May it be that our capacity to do this practice—to free ourselves from complaining, blaming, and hostility of all kinds—promotes the welfare and happiness of everyone. May it be that we learn to live effortlessly with the welfare and happiness of everyone.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Conditioned Consciousness (4 of 5) Loving, Not Complaining

This will be the fourth talk on what I've been calling conditioned consciousness, focusing on this wonderful phenomenon—the fact that, one way or another, in our waking hours and maybe other times, we are conscious. We are aware. We are conscious beings. And maybe that's enough to know, but we also have some way of constructing a sense, an idea, a feeling of what it is to be conscious. We act as if there is a thing called consciousness, something that we can call awareness.

The danger of that kind of word is that we make it into a thing, and then we try to discover what that thing is. Whereas maybe it's not a thing; maybe it's more like a hologram. A hologram is something, but is it a thing? We get caught up in issues of linguistics and definitions. But this conditioned sense of what being conscious is has a lot to do with the states of mind and attitudes we have. Today I want to talk about the difference in consciousness and awareness between blaming and loving, complaining and caring.

When we spend time blaming, complaining, and caught in the grip of those states, there is a tightening and a narrowing. Often, that tightening and narrowing around those feelings and ideas is closely connected to the sense of self. It becomes a lumping up, a coagulation, a condensing of a lot of different things—awareness, feeling sensations in the body, attitudes, energies of thinking—where everything gets turned into a strong feeling of "me." Yes, me, myself, and mine: the self.

When blaming creates this place of contraction, oftentimes that is the origin of a strong motivation to be blaming and complaining about things. The paradox is that this tight place of self can be felt experientially as a solid wall. Experience hits it, and it hurts or threatens it, reinforcing how fragile this wall is.

Whereas, when that self-coagulation—this contraction of self—is not there, the events of the world can still be known very clearly, but the knowing has no weight, no substance, and no resistance. What is known just travels right through. We can still be responsible and take care of things, but it doesn't hit anything. It doesn't reinforce that coagulated, contracted sense of self.

Blaming and complaining constitute a world and universe of self and other, conflict and tension. In this state, awareness gets contracted, gets small and tight, and gets filled with that tension.

As we learn to sit quietly and shed the contractions of the mind, the tightness, and the things we're holding on to and clinging to, the preoccupation with complaining and blaming will quiet down. The motivation to be hostile—this sense of hostility within, which is part of the same complex—will settle. Awareness then has a chance to not be so congested with concerns, feelings, and the contracted self that we often live under.

The capacity to sense or feel that we are being aware becomes more and more empty of all this gunk, all this stuff. This emptiness^[2] is a fantastic thing. Awareness of emptiness can grow in a certain way and have no boundaries. It can be as big as a cathedral, as big as the space over the ocean. That which knows it begins to share some of those qualities. We construct our idea of what consciousness is from the way that knowing, sensing, feeling, or being aware is. If it's more and more empty, it has different characteristics. The more empty it is, the more it allows for something deeper to surface and be present. I like to call that something the family of love.

We find many spiritual traditions say something like this. In Mahayana Buddhism,^[3] they often equate the deep experience of emptiness with compassion. Somehow, emptiness and compassion arise together, or there is compassion in emptiness. It's a wonderful phenomenon how some sense of emptiness is coterminous with compassion, or impregnated with compassion.

We have a deep instinct and capacity to nurture others, like the parental nurturing of children. We have the capacity to care for the welfare of others, like a nurse who tends lovingly and warmly for whoever has been wounded or sick, even someone they don't know. Kindness and warmth can come in that kind of caring.

It is an amazing capacity that as awareness feels more expansive and peaceful, more empty in a certain kind of way, there is room for something to surface in it that doesn't detract from that emptiness. Because there is no contraction, no tightening up around it like there is with blaming and complaining, the mind and the heart stay open. Penetrating it all, oozing from it, or radiating can be goodwill, kindness, friendliness, care, tenderness, warmth, compassion, sympathy, empathy, and maybe just plain old-fashioned love.

This is one of the great things about the deepening of practice: to have that begin to surface. For some people, certainly in my case, my own capacity for compassion, kindness, and loving-kindness (mettā)^[4] was not something that I cultivated or worked at developing. It surfaced as I matured in this Buddhist practice. There was room for it, and something began to emerge and grow that changed my life. It felt like this was what was in there waiting to come out in the open, quiet, settled space of awareness.

I would like to propose to you that blaming and complaining is really a waste of time. It's a form of undermining yourself. In fact, all hostility is an undermining of yourself. Your hostility makes you a hostage. Non-hostility frees you from captivity. It's that dramatic.

So check it out. If you have a tendency to complain, or even an occasion to complain, and with that complaining you blame someone else, you are giving someone else responsibility for your happiness and your peace. Don't be a hostage. Don't give away your peace to someone else that way. Live in your own peace and take responsibility for it. Don't sacrifice it.

If you need to take care of a problem in the world, chances are it's possible to do it even better if you don't complain and don't blame. You can do it better when you're kind, supportive, loving, caring, and compassionate. It's so much better that sometimes it is wiser to wait to address a problem until you have some modicum of goodwill, and some decrease in blaming and hostility.

Thank you very much. May your conditioned consciousness nourish you with love.