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Guided Meditation

Hello everyone, and welcome. I'm quite happy to be back here after being gone for a week, and grateful for David Lorey^[1], who taught for you all last week. I was on a teaching retreat, which was quite lovely, at our retreat center in Santa Cruz.

I think probably most of you know that the Pali word (the Sanskrit word) dukkha^[2], which is often translated as "suffering," gets translated other ways as well. One translator, Thanissaro Bhikkhu^[3], translates it as "stress." One of the benefits of "stress" is that even things which bring a lot of happiness and joy can simultaneously be stressful. The example that's given is a wedding: someone getting married is quite a joyful event, but at the same time, it can be stressful. Stress can also apply to small things: small degrees of anxiety, small degrees of resistance.

Whereas "suffering" is a big word, and people sometimes associate it with the major catastrophes of life. The word that sometimes I prefer, or enjoy and delight in as a translation of dukkha, is "unease." That has some of the same benefits as "stress," and perhaps it has a more universal application—to feel uneasy. Then the opposite is "ease." Ease and unease. To feel easy and feel uneasy about something. In meditation, those two can be a wonderful guide for finding our way in practice, and a wonderful way of discovering for ourselves the Dharma^[4] path. That will be the theme for this morning's meditation.

We'll begin. Assume a meditation posture, or sometimes I like to say, enter your meditation posture. If you're familiar with the meditation posture, it can be kind of like putting on some comfortable, soft clothes. Lower your gaze and perhaps close your eyes. Gently, modestly take some deeper breaths that fill your chest, maybe even your belly expands.

And as you exhale, relax the body. As you exhale, kind of settle into your seat, into the place where you're meditating.

As you exhale, let the weight of your body be received by whatever holds the body up from the pull of gravity.

Letting your breathing return to normal, continue to relax. Relaxing your body with the idea that you're putting your body at ease. Meditation is a continual process of finding our ease in our body, our mind, and our hearts. Maybe on the inhale, feel the muscles of your face, and on the exhale, relax the muscles in your face.

Feeling the muscles of your shoulders, relax your shoulders. As you inhale, feel the muscles of your belly, and as you exhale, soften the belly. Relax.

As you inhale, feel the muscles, or what can seem almost like the muscles, of the thinking mind. If there's any pressure or tension, contraction, or activation associated with thinking, as you exhale, soften in the thinking mind.

And then to introduce the idea of ease. Do whatever easy way you can do so. Set your body at ease. Maybe there can be an easing up of the body tensions and pains and challenges. Easing up, being easy with how the body is.

And then to set your mind at ease. Supporting the mind to take a break from its worries or concerns. Giving the thinking mind a chance to be at ease. Being easy with the mind. And if it's easy enough, ease up in whatever way the mind is.

And then setting your heart at ease. Whatever emotional center you have, or emotional state that you have, set it at ease. Or if it won't be at ease, ease up on it. Be easy.

And then centering yourself on your breathing. Being easy with your breathing. Easing up if that's helpful. Breathing at ease.

And then for the center of this meditation instruction: with whatever degree of ease or maybe calm that you have as you're meditating, notice what takes you away from that ease.

And when you're ready, set yourself at ease again. Maybe it's only an ever so slight ease. Set yourself at ease and know what takes you away, and be easy with what takes you away. Ease up on whatever unease you have. Be easy with the ways that you feel uneasy.

As you breathe in and breathe out, practicing being easy with whatever is happening, and being sure to notice what takes the ease away.

[Silence for meditation]

Set yourself at ease. And maybe then it's easier to stay aware. Easier even to be aware of how you become uneasy, without being caught in the unease.

[Silence for meditation]

And as we begin to approach the end of the meditation, see if in the last minute of this meditation, you can set yourself at ease. Be easy with whatever is going on, whatever your meditation is like. Be at ease for the next 60 seconds.

[Silence for meditation]

And then to finish up the meditation, direct your heart to take in the people in your life, your communities around you, the circles of people known and unknown. As these circles spread outwards, out into the world, may what you've discovered or touched into about ease in the meditation help you to recognize how others are uneasy when they're not at ease.

And may we be a safe presence for others. May we talk or be present in a way that supports others to be at ease. May all beings be at ease with themselves. May all beings be at ease in their communities. May all beings be at ease in this world with its challenges of all kinds. May all beings find enough ease so that they can be wise and clear about how to live in an uneasy world.

May living our life today generate ease. May our ease ease up the suffering of others. May all beings be free of unease.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Core Teachings (1 of 5) Suffering and its End

So hello everyone, and welcome to this Monday morning and the beginning of a new five-part series for this week. What I'd like to talk about is what maybe provisionally we can call the central or core teachings, as I have come to emphasize as a teacher.

Every teacher has a particular way of teaching, perspectives from which to teach. That may be because of what works for the teacher, what they've seen supports other people, or maybe it represents some of the core values the teacher has. As a teacher, I have ways that I teach and I have core or central aspects of my teaching, assumptions or underlying premises from which I teach or emphasize. Since some of you have been listening to me for a long time, I thought it might be nice for me to try to explain, at least for this week, five different fundamental orientations that I bring with me in my teaching. Maybe some of you will recognize how I teach and why I teach what I do because of these explanations that I'll give this week.

One of the most fundamental orientations I have, which maybe comes as no surprise because it's emphasized a lot in Buddhism, is to focus on suffering (dukkha) and the end of it. There's a simplicity to that orientation. Of course, dukkha or suffering is complicated, so certainly it can be complicated to delve into it at times, but that's the orientation: the fundamental purpose of the Dharma is to end suffering.

The orientation is to not only point to the end of suffering, but to point to real study and learning how to effectively be present for suffering—to see it, know it, and work with it. It makes the Dharma much more simple and kind of streamlines it.

There are a lot of wonderful spiritual goals, spiritual understandings, religious understandings, humanistic understandings, and purposes that people have for how they want to live their life. Some of them involve pretty grand goals that are glorious, that involve great accomplishments in meditation, great accomplishments in experiences, and all kinds of wonderful things. And these are all good, but the question that I live with is: am I suffering? Is there suffering here?

In some great spiritual experiences, there may be no suffering, but the experiences haven't really plumbed the depths of the sources and the roots of the unease, the distress, the stress, the anxiety, and the psychological challenges that we live with. The Dharma is meant to really plumb that depth, to really see clearly and not just have no suffering. You can have no suffering by getting distracted enough. But to really get down to the roots of where suffering comes from in us, so that we don't live with suffering waiting to be triggered in us.

This emphasis on suffering I think of as a little bit like if you're a nature photographer and go to the savannas of Africa, and you want to take pictures of many different wild animals. It's hard to go roaming around the savannas, the plains of Africa, looking for all the animals that you want to see. But if you sit at the watering holes, all the animals sooner or later have to come to the watering hole. So if you sit there, maybe camouflaged, and wait, then all these animals will come and you can take a picture.

This orientation to suffering is that—that's the watering hole. That's the place where everything that you need to know, everything you need to study, everything you need to let go of and to realize comes into play around suffering. So if you become attuned to it, study it, see it, and learn to be comfortable with being mindful of the ways in which we're challenged, it gives you a vantage point from which to learn, to discover, and have insight into everything that you really need to know in order to be free of suffering.

One of the things that orientation around suffering does is it puts the practice in the world of our direct experience. Suffering—or if you prefer words like stress or unease. In the guided meditation, I introduced the translation of dukkha as "unease." Sometimes I've seen translators spell it with a hyphen: "dis-ease." That has its evocative, suggestive idea that dukkha is a kind of a disease that we have.

Focusing on suffering puts us in our direct experience. That's where we want to be, and it does not put us in the books to read about Buddhism, being a book-bound^[5] Buddhist who reads all the time. Ideas are wonderful and inspiring. Some people get very calm and inspired and have wonderful experiences reading, but sometimes it doesn't go deep inside because it doesn't sustain us. The idea is to read the book of our own hearts. So when we remember that we're looking at suffering—not to suffer better, but to find a healthy alternative to suffering, to find the resolution of the suffering, the dissolution of our suffering—it keeps us grounded.

Suffering is a direct experience. It's not metaphysics, it's not things we can't know for ourselves, it's not taking us away into some transcendent world away from our imminent world of here and now and with other people. It puts us right in the human world where we can do the work of really seeing and being with what is.

The fundamental question I ask myself as I go about my life is: am I suffering? And if I am, then I stop. So the bumper sticker that I might have is: "I stop for suffering." If I don't feel the suffering, if I don't recognize I'm suffering, then I'll continue what I'm doing if it doesn't cause any harm. It makes it very easy.

There are people who have other goals for their religious life, spiritual life, and they feel these other goals are grander, more wonderful, more important than simply the ending of suffering. That's fine, but my hope is that first, or in addition, they're also working to really uproot their own suffering. It's one of the great goals of life to discover the end of suffering. Some people might see that as being a lesser goal, maybe it's a modest goal. Maybe there are fantastic things to do in life and experience in life that are better and greater than the end of suffering. But at least do that; let that be the foundation by which you do everything else. And then it isn't suffering that's motivating you to get away from suffering, or trying to solve suffering indirectly, or to bypass it that drives higher goals.

For me, I've discovered that one of the most ultimate things we can do is come to the end of suffering. This practice of insight is the practice that I've seen take me to the end of suffering in such a clear, dramatic, and full way. I know nothing else that does this good and direct a job because it's really addressing it directly.

For me, it's a pretty ultimate experience, an ultimate purpose that I like to teach for and I like to live for. It's not the only purpose. In the wake of the ending of suffering, there's more. There's a motivation from that to support other people. I've dedicated my life, from a particular moment I had in a Buddhist monastery, to live my life to support, aid, guide—whatever I can do to help others get to the root of their own suffering, and uproot that root to bring it to an end.

As I've learned to recognize that in myself, it has inspired me to support other people to do the same thing. It is possible to come to the end of suffering. By putting that at the core, the center of Dharma practice and my teaching, the hope is that we're providing a direct way—the most direct way to do it without being distracted or caught up in sideshows^[6] that might have their own value but can be a distraction from dukkha and the end of it.

That is one of my fundamental orientations. With that, there are some areas of Buddhism that I don't find particularly interesting because those areas are not pointing directly to that. I'll talk more about that over this week, but as a beginning to the core teachings and foundations to my teachings, this is really at the center.

Thank you, and I look forward to offering you this kind of background to how I teach for the rest of this week.