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Guided Meditation: Listening

Okay, so good day to all. Let's go ahead and get started with our meditation together this morning.

So settling in for a period of sitting, allowing your body to come into its usual meditation posture, however it's disposed this morning. Just sensing into a spot where you're sitting, your seat against the chair or the cushion, or perhaps you're lying down. And just feeling the support under your body and allowing yourself to relax into that.

Perhaps allowing the body itself to find a place of balance. So just gently inviting: how can the body shift slightly to feel like there's almost no effort to be upright? And then softening the face, the jaw, the throat, down through the shoulders. Softening the arms and the hands, down into the chest area. Feeling how when the spine is straight and alert, the chest actually relaxes. Down into the belly area. Releasing any tension in the low back, trusting that the spine bones themselves will hold us up without the muscles. Sinking a little farther into the seat. And releasing any bracing in the legs all the way down to the feet.

So we just invite ease through the body, and it's okay if the body isn't relaxed in certain places or they aren't making contact very well with part of it. That's all fine. We just have a sense also that the body is okay as it is today. And we can invite a sense of simplicity in the body and in the mind. Sometimes the mind is complicated, a lot of thoughts or emotions, but the awareness of that can be simple. The knowing of it can be very simple.

Connecting in with perhaps the sensations of breathing in order to join the body and mind in a simple, direct way.

I would invite now tuning into sound as a meditation object. So there's the sound of my voice, and there's likely also some kind of sounds in your environment. Maybe other people, or cars outside, or wind, or a heating system^[1]. And just allowing the arrival of sounds at the ear to be a way of connecting to the present moment.

There can be a sense of ease from not knowing what is next, but just knowing that we'll meet it with our listening. Just relaxing into the flow of the sounds.

Now we can shift slightly to applying this faculty of listening to the body. There's a bodily sense faculty that kind of runs throughout the body. It's not just the touch sensors on the skin. We can tune into that. The inner sense of the breath is part of it, but there's a lot more also. So we can incline the mind toward listening to this bodily sense door. Not knowing what body sensation will come next or how they'll shift, and just resting in listening to the body.

To the mind. Here we're using our awareness faculty in a very open way. It is possible, for example, to hear thought as if a speaker were playing in the room. Thoughts, just inner sound. Seeing if we can simply listen to the mind. Finding that same sense of rest that we can find when listening to sound externally. And we're not listening for anything, or we're not listening because we need to do anything. We're listening because these parts of us want to be listened to. In a simple way, very simple. And we'll just rest with that for a while.

In the last few minutes of sitting and listening to experience in the body and mind, you might reflect, did I learn anything? Did the listening bring about some learning? And even if it doesn't feel explicit, this kind of practice is kind of like deep data gathering. Something was going in. And it's worth feeling happy about that. Content with having rested in our experience for some undivided time that we know will bring benefit in some way.

From this meditation we can also get the sense that this practice of listening and learning is actually a heart practice. We can feel that it's not just coming from the mind, but it's a full-being, full-body, heart experience. And that it may relate to what the Buddha simply called the Dharma^[2], how things are. Practicing in line with the Dharma, being connected with the Dharma, all those phrases that we hear have something to do with this experience we've had in meditation today.

This is it. Our experience is it. And so we can hope that as we go forward today, we'll be a bit more connected to all of what's going on through our capacity to listen and to learn, that will help all the others around us, not just us. Sometimes in ways we can't even know right away.

Dharmette: Meeting Life Well – Five Dharma Resources (3 of 5): Listening and Learning

So this week we are talking about five Dharma resources that help us to meet experience well. And when we have these five readily at hand and we're also mindful, then we will find that appropriate responses are much more likely to come forth. So we've talked already about confidence and virtue, and how these are not automatically Dharma resources, but they become so when we take them into the heart and let them be nourished there.

So the third item in the list is called suta^[3] in Pali. It's not sutta^[4] with two T's like the discourses of the Buddha. It's suta, s-u-t-a. And this one is interesting because we really need to bear in mind the idea that it becomes a resource when it's linked to the heart. So suta is a past participle of the verb suṇāti^[5], which means to hear. So suta means heard, you know, something that has been heard. And in the Buddhist texts, it's often translated as learning.

So we can consider that in the Buddha's time the teachings had not yet been written down, and most people were illiterate anyway. So the only way to learn spiritual teachings directly was to listen in person to a teacher and be able to remember what was heard. So suta doesn't just mean literal hearing, but something more like learning, what has been learned, what has been comprehended, what has been taken in intentionally. So how can we understand its presence in a list that is connected to things like inner wealth, fortitude, aspiration, and modes of spiritual growth? As I mentioned on Monday, those are some of the ways that this list of five is named in the suttas. So how does learning help us to meet life well?

So for this series this week, I'm translating suta as listening and learning, so that we get a richer picture of it. So we could say that we will meet situations well by really listening and also by drawing on our inner wealth of knowing Dharma teachings. And that's not mental, it's not the learning that's just in our mind, but it's more the learning that's happened through listening to them with our heart.

How can we listen in a dharmic way?

One time in a class of about 45 people where I was a student, we were asked, "How many of you feel that you are really listened to every day?" And maybe two people raised their hands. And this is, you know, this is significant and maybe also a little bit heartbreaking. There's so much talking and so much hearing, but so little real listening. And this is actually something that we learn to do for ourselves in meditation. So if you meditate every day, you can experience the feeling that you are deeply listened to every day in meditation. Listening is related to this quality that we call investigation, which is one of the factors of awakening^[6].

So we don't mean literal listening to the words of our thoughts, although that can be part of it if we happen to have that going. But it's kind of deeper listening to the sensations and energetic flows of experience. It helps to listen with the whole body. Of course, the attention and the interest are coming from the mind. The mind and the body are not separate, but there is a way to bring in the body such that we're connecting more intuitively. And we can even take in the Dharma in this way.

I was living at the Insight Retreat Center (IRC) when we held the very first retreat in Spanish there. And I went to the morning instructions and the Dharma talks even though my Spanish is rather minimal. But it didn't matter. I could feel the good energy from the Dharma going into my system through some other channel. You know, my linguistic mind was not getting much satisfaction, but my heart could still feel it.

And that prepared me well for attending a couple of retreats in Sri Lanka that were given in Sinhala. As an aside, some people say Senegalese for that language, but it's properly called Sinhala. I don't speak a word of it, but still there was this sense of receiving Dharma.

Actually, Sinhala is quite an ancient language and it's related to Pali. And when the teacher would quote the Pali Canon during these Dharma talks, he would read the quotes in Pali, because, you know, the Sri Lankan people didn't need a translation. And interestingly, I found that I could halfways understand the Pali quotes even though I couldn't understand the Sinhala at all. It was a great experience.

So all of this is to say that we can listen to the Dharma in a language that we don't understand literally, and that means that we can also listen for the Dharma in everyday situations. You know, is there Dharma in a trip to the grocery store, or out hiking, or picking up your children at preschool? I would say yes. It's just a kind of a matter of tuning in.

And, you know, sometimes people ask, "Where is the Dharma in my crazy life?" or often, "How can I take my practice out of the meditation hall into the world?" And one possibility is to listen for it. There's so much Dharma happening all the time if we listen for it.

So here's where we can shift to this other aspect of the word suta, which is learning or what has been learned. We're talking about listening and learning together today. And so if we're going to be able to detect the Dharma in everyday situations, it helps to have some integrated knowledge of what the Dharma teachings say.

Not all teachers focus on this, but I do encourage people to study and learn something of the language of the Buddhist teachings. And I don't mean Pali. I don't mean the Pali language, but rather the terminology and also the major lists and how the path works to lead us from a place of suffering to less suffering or even no suffering. Not because you need to get a good grade in a class or that you need to memorize things or think about them a lot, but more like because we're always operating from some model or view of the world and ourself and our life. We're not neutral entities in our interaction with the world. And so if we want to support the Dharma path unfolding, it really helps to see things in a way that aligns with the Dharma. So, for instance, seeing our challenging mind states in terms of the five hindrances^[7], or seeing a difficulty that we're in through the lens of the Four Noble Truths^[8]. "Oh, this is suffering, that's what's going on. I wonder if there's some craving or clinging going on here."

So maybe an analogy is, imagine if you're studying to be a chemist in a modern Western setting, but you grew up with a model of the physical world that was based on the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. And suppose, though, that you then insist in your chemistry classes that you have to use that model and you refuse to learn the periodic table of the elements that is the current standard way to do modern chemistry. I suspect it would be very difficult for you. But it would instantly be easier and more effective to just think in terms of the periodic table.

So I don't know if that's a perfect example, but there is some similarity between that and the situation of learning the Dharma teachings in order to be able to walk the Noble Eightfold Path^[9], if that's what you're doing in your practice. But probably it's even more important in the case of the Dharma because the Dharma is not just a cognitive model like we have in chemistry. It's a whole body issue, a whole being issue.

And I've seen this in my own practice. I started studying the Buddhist texts maybe one year into my practice, and I've devoted quite a lot of energy to learning the teachings, listening to talks, and trying to understand some of the more difficult ideas that the Buddha taught. And in ways that I can't quite explain logically, phrases and ideas that are rooted in the teachings sometimes come forth spontaneously in everyday life, and also on the cushion.

I remember one time I was doing a search on the internet about some kind of a scientific explanation for something, and I found all kinds of fascinating articles and videos which got me kind of excited and joyful because it was something really cool. And my mind can do that kind of thing. And for some reason, my mind noticed that my mind state was similar to the first half of the awakening factors, which are the energizing factors of investigation, energy, and joy. And because there was mindfulness, I sort of felt my mind naturally step back and expand to take in the bigger picture of what I was doing. And as that happened, there was this natural calming of the energy and a release from being wrapped up in the energy and joy and excitement. But there was, you know, there was still joy and interest there. But I felt the balance coming in of including the more calming factors of tranquility, composure, and equanimity.

So these were kind of everyday versions of the factors of awakening. But still, I marveled at how my mind drew on its knowledge of the awakening factors to recognize some of those factors in my present moment experience. And then it drew on its knowledge of how the awakening factors operate in the mind to bring them into balance. They operate by having the energizing factors and the calming factors present at the same time and in balance.

So, you know, that can happen just in our everyday life, and it happens on the cushion too. Sometimes I get snippets of teachings coming into my mind, key phrases or verses. They come in kind of like a Dharma coach during meditation sometimes. And I would guess that you might have some examples like this from your life and practice also.

In the foundational text on mindfulness practice, the fourth establishment of mindfulness is about seeing in terms of the Dharma. So this is recognized, and it's a fundamental practice. The fourth foundation is mindfulness in terms of dhammas^[10], which are then expounded as being the five hindrances, the five aggregates^[11], the six sense bases^[12], seven factors of awakening, and Four Noble Truths. But those are just representative. What we're generally doing is learning to see in terms of the Dharma teachings.

Through this quality of listening and learning, or suta, we gradually cultivate what I like to call the mind of Dharma, or we could say the heart of Dharma. And in terms of the Dharma resources for this week, we're training our heart to bring forth the qualities that are named in the teachings, which include also things like the brahmavihāras^[13], the heart qualities, generosity, patience, as well as the various lists that I mentioned.

So this heart of Dharma is a heart that knows the teachings, that can stay mindful in a range of experiences, and that responds in line with ethics and heart qualities and sees in terms of wisdom. You might notice how that brings in a number of other qualities that are on this week's list, like ethics and wisdom and generosity.

So as we listen internally and externally, learning to recognize the Dharma qualities that are all around us, we will more and more be able to respond in line with the Dharma, which will be in a non-harming and wise way.

So I wish you very well with your connection to the Dharma today. Thank you.