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Guided Meditation: Four Elements

So good morning everyone, and welcome to IMC. Mostly we'll sit quietly this morning, but I would like to... one of the central meditation aspects of this Vipassana^[1] tradition is to be aware of the four elements. This is the Sunday to celebrate Earth Day, and so the four elements are earth, water, fire, and wind.

In this Vipassana tradition, we sometimes will focus on the ways that these are found in ourselves as particular qualities of experience. They often say the earth element is everything that's hard and solid, but I often experience it as that which offers support. The water element is everything that's fluid and moist, but the way it's experienced is that which holds things together—cohesion. The fire element is everything that's animated in us, everything that's energized within us, the energizing forces of life, which is basically all of our sensations. And then there's the wind element, and that's the movements, everything that moves as we sit: the movements of the chest, the diaphragm, the belly, anything that moves—just the wind element.

So to sit quietly here and to feel those four. Gently close your eyes, and feel the support of the earth.

The earth is what we rest on. Our bodies... the earth element, it supports us. Feel the contact of your body against your chair, your cushion. The floor, in a sense, holds you up from the pull of gravity. In your body, there's a support of your lower torso that holds up the upper torso, the neck that supports the head.

And the water element, the cohesion, that can be exaggerated in all the feelings of tension that we have, the holding together, the tightening, pulling in. Gently, as you exhale—exhaling the wind, the air—release some of the extra tension holding in your body. Relaxing in the shoulders, the belly. In a sense, releasing the tension that pulls the muscles inward, and allowing your muscles to fall outward away from the bones, where it can be held by the skin. The cohesive holding property of the skin can hold us.

And the fire element of everything that's animated, energized within us. Energized sensations, every sensation you experience is there because of the animated energy of the nerves, the firing. The energy behind thinking, this is the fire element. Whatever you're feeling, emotions are an expression of that animated life energy that Buddhism likens to fire. And that fire element can come into harmony like a candle flame without any wind. Everything burning, everything alive, animated, held in awareness, allowed to burn, allowed to be without our preferences, our likes and dislikes, our wants and aversions pushing them around.

And then the wind element. Gently, as you breathe in and out, gently feel the movements of the body as you breathe.

Maybe treating the breathing as something delicate, fragile, tender that you want to hold or receive gently in awareness. With no forcefulness, just a soft receiving of breathing, the movements of the body touching awareness.

And so we sit here, aware of the natural elements found within us that are found in the natural world. And sitting here, in a certain way, we are continuous with the outer world and the inner world here, now. Nature here and now.

As we come to the end of this sitting, I'd like to use the analogy of a light that goes on in a dark room. If the light is on a dimmer and it gets turned on at the absolute lowest setting, the room might just begin to come into view just a little bit. But as the dimmer gets turned up higher and higher, more and more comes into view until the whole room is filled with light.

So we come to the end of a sitting and we dedicate our practice for the welfare and happiness of others. It might begin with this: the light of care, the light of compassion, the light of our deep connection to others. Maybe it's turned on at just a little bit, and our wish to benefit others can be a small wish. But it can be the beginning of that light getting brighter and brighter until it fills the world.

May it be that our care for others and for this world can grow steadily within us. And may it be that the benefits that come from this morning's practice is dedicated in some known and unknown ways for the happiness, safety, and peace of all beings. In this world of war and environmental degradation, poverty and hostility and hate, may we be a light in wishing and working for the possibility that all beings may be happy. All beings may be safe. All beings may be peaceful. And all beings be free.

And may that wish be a light that grows stronger and stronger.

Earth Day: A Generosity That Gives Life

Before the talk, I think one of the nice announcements—especially since we're celebrating Earth Day today, a few days late, but we do it on Sundays usually—is that IMC is restarting its Earth Care group. That is a group of people here at IMC who meet to talk about earth care activities, studying earth care issues together, and considering what IMC might do in this wider world for caring for this earth.

I think they're going to start having regular monthly meetings, and a lot of them will be on Zoom, so it means that people who are IMC-connected far away could maybe participate. The first meeting will be next Saturday at 1:00 PM. Ram, who's raising his hand in the back, is one of the people organizing it. He went through the Sati Center's Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy program, and now he's deeply connected to this whole world. And Shawnee, who's also here, she also went through the Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy program together with Ram. So if you're interested, there's more information on the website under "What's New," with the Zoom link. It's also in the IMC calendar, or if you're here at IMC, you can talk to Ram and probably Shawnee too.

To talk about Earth Day, I want to adapt a story that I'm fond of. I've told it before, but adapted it for this occasion.

In a village, there was a couple who were going to give birth to their first child. She was born, this beautiful little baby girl. Some wise elder of the village, or from the area, came through town and looked at her and said, "Oh, very nice. However, it's her destiny that she will die on her wedding night."

Well, the couple raised this daughter and were kind of hesitant to have her be married, but at some point they couldn't keep her from becoming married, and they didn't want to tell her about the prophecy. So she was married, and there was a big party that evening. Everyone in the village came, and it was a big celebration. The parents, of course, were a little bit worried what this meant. Everybody was involved in the party, but then someone knocked on the door. It turned out to be this very old lady who lived on the edges of the village, and people had kind of forgotten about her. No one really quite knew how old she was, but she had lived there for her whole life. She had given birth to a number of kids she cared for, and she took care of her grandkids, even took care of her great-grandchildren. But because people had children when they were quite young in this village, after she had grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she stopped having the energy to take care of them because she was old.

As the generations proceeded, she was forgotten. Some of her kids and grandkids had died, and great-grandchildren had died, and the people left this old lady alone. She couldn't take care of herself anymore, and she was hungry and poor. So she came to the wedding, knocking on the door to ask for some food.

The guests opened the door and said, "Just shoo her away. You know, someone that poor and old, just not so nice to have at a wedding party we're celebrating." They shooed her away.

But then the bride saw this, so she went out and asked, "What is it?"

She said, "I'm hungry."

"Oh, let me bring you some food." So she brought her a big plate of food and asked, "May I sit with you while you eat?" And she said yes.

When they had finished eating the meal, the old lady said to the bride, "You know, I've been living in this village for a long, long, long time, and I have a lot to teach you for the sake of your children, and their children, and their children down the generations. I know things that people have forgotten. I know the seasons to plant and harvest so that the soil doesn't erode away—it actually keeps the soil healthy and fertile. I know how to harvest things from the forest trees so the forest regenerates. I know how to care for the lakes and the rivers so that pollution and sewage and all kinds of things don't destroy the life there. I know how to have fires in the village, when to do it, where to do it, how to do it so that the children don't grow up with asthma. If you come visit me, I'll teach you these things."

And the bride said, "Sure, I'll come."

Well, she went back to the party, it was a celebration. The bride and groom do what bride and grooms do, and then the next morning the bride was still alive. So the parents were kind of like, "What happened?" They went to the person who had prophesied about her death, and they said, "Well, there was one thing I couldn't tell you. There was one thing that would allow her to live, and that was she had to be selflessly generous. But if I'd said that, it wouldn't have been selfless, so it wouldn't have been real generosity. And she did that selfless giving to this old lady, and that kept her alive. It saved her."

And more than it saved her, she got a gift back from it, an offer to come and study and learn. This old lady, her name in different languages... in our Buddhist language, it was Bhūmi Mātā^[2], the earth mother. Terra Madre in Italian. In Norwegian, it's jordmor^[3]. And the word jordmor means earth mother, it also is the Norwegian word for midwife, which is kind of nice. You can probably make all kinds of connections from that, interesting ideas that our earth mother also gives birth to all that we have here, supports it, and brings it forth.

So here we are on Earth Day, and we have this wonderful earth that has been supporting us for generations. The earth has cared for human beings since the beginning of human beings, provided abundance, often in order to survive or to make it down through the generations. And here we are. What's going to save us? The earth is struggling, it's under assault. The people of the earth are under all kinds of tensions and stresses that are pretty awful with climate change and things. What's going to make the difference? What's going to keep us alive?

Well, from the story, it's an act of generosity. To be generous. And generosity can't be forced. It can't be an obligation; it has to really come from us. To say that or to hear that, some people will protest. They'll say, "No, no, we have an obligation. We have a responsibility to work to save this planet, save and mitigate the problems of climate change, not only for the sake of the environment but also for so many people who are going to be harmed by all this, some of whom are the poorest of the poor." And of course we're obligated. Especially here, maybe some of us in the United States, where the United States has five percent of the world population but produces thirty percent of the pollution. You could say the privileged should actually be more responsible. So of course there's the responsibility, and we bring up our finger and we shake it, like, "You have to do something, and you're responsible and obligated."

But obligation and responsibility and chastising like that is not generosity.

Of course we're responsible. But if you like obligation, if you like the idea of responsibility, if that's your thing, then from the Buddha's point of view, we have to turn it around and say, well, we have an obligation then, a responsibility, to learn selfless generosity. So that from selfless generosity we can support the world and the people of the world. It comes with a joy, a delight, so we're willing not just to sit down with everyone and learn from them and be friends with them, but to not be divisive. There's a kind of poison that comes along all too easily if we act from obligation, duty, like you have to. It doesn't lift us up. Obligation is like a burden, and I don't think there's much hope for us as a planet if everyone has to gear up their obligation and like, "Okay, we gotta..."

But can we do things with selfless generosity? Maybe tirelessly, maybe do a lot, maybe give ourselves over to it, but come from a motivation that is inspiring, that's nourishing for ourselves and for others. Then I think there's hope and possibility. Then it's contagious, if we can figure out how to do this.

And I think that's one of the contributions Buddhism can make to all this. Buddhism hasn't had a particularly historically good or bad record, I would think, of caring for the environment. People who are Buddhist environmentalists will kind of squeeze out of Buddhist teachings teachings that support caring for the environment. So you can find it there, but I don't think that you have to really search for it. You get small little hints here and there and they put them all together in one big package so it looks nice. Buddhism hasn't had a lot to say about this, but Buddhism has a lot to say about generosity. About care, compassion—those are important.

And so when we see suffering around us, the idea is to generously care for that, generously, inspiringly, with loving-kindness and friendliness, engage in doing something. And how do we come to that place so that we don't have to fall back on obligation or defensiveness or war to care for ourselves?

Well, that's the strength of Buddhism—to bring forth those in an inspiring way, in a delightful way. And so we learn how to look at our attachments, our clinging. We look at the ways that we create divisiveness and hold on tight, and create a sense of self that contributes to divisiveness, contributes to selfishness. And we learn an alternative. We learn to settle deeply and open up and discover layers and layers of inner freedom, layers and layers of joy and happiness that dissolve selfishness, dissolve self-centeredness, and help us to feel more and more deeply connected to others, to the world.

Like from the first years I was practicing, I was in college and I took a botany class. And maybe literally because of my meditation practice by that time, there was one day when the professor was on the board and speaking in the amphitheater class. He was talking about photosynthesis and the cycle of oxygen and carbon dioxide. He had all these diagrams of how this cycles through nature. The simple cycle is that we produce carbon dioxide and the plants convert carbon dioxide to oxygen so we can breathe. Without the plants doing it, there would not be enough oxygen here for us to be alive.

So then I left the class. I was kind of absorbed in this whole discussion, very still. And because I was so absorbed in it, everything, distractions, kind of fell away. When I went out and stood in the courtyard at the college where there were huge old oak trees around us, I stood there and I kind of became—frozen is the right word, but completely, I couldn't move. I just started looking at it, and I felt, Wow, I could do without one of my kidneys, without an arm, and all kinds of parts of my body I can manage fine without, but I can't do without these plants. And so where do I begin and where do the plants end? Where is the separation if I'm so dependent on them?

I stood there, and this kind of world of separation dissolved, and I felt this beautiful, inspired sense of the mutual support and connectedness. How we are not born from the earth, from nature; we are the earth, we are nature. We're not visiting this planet, visiting life. We are the life of the planet, we're inseparable from it.

And so from that, to be generous, is your right hand generous when it washes the left hand? And the left hand, is it being generous when it washes the right hand? You could say yes, but it's selfless. It comes together because they're connected, or we don't think of it that way because it's just caring for what's here. Can the way that we relate to the world around us have that kind of intimacy? Like it's almost as if it's part of us, where there's no sense of it being an obligation to care, or no sense of it being required even, but it's just of course we do it, of course that comes out of us. It doesn't even come out of us, of course it comes out of the world.

And this is kind of the beauty and the mystery and the wonderfulness of settling deeply into Buddhist practice, is to discover this beautiful source of motivation, this beautiful source of energy and engagement that is kind of selfless. We can't claim it to be "mine, me, myself, and mine," but it's available, or it lives in a mutuality with this wider world. And then there can be generosity. That's the selfless generosity, that's the heart, that's what makes the heart sing and smile. That's what nourishes and supports the heart.

So what is that generosity? How can we learn it? How can we enact it? How can we give ourselves permission to do wonderful things, to turn on the light of that generosity, that care, that love, that compassion, turned on so that it does wonderful things for the world around us? Not because it's an obligation. I don't know, I'm gonna miss my Netflix, but rather, Why would I watch that? Why would I watch Netflix when I can do these wonderful things? When there's something in flow with this flow of the natural world, its aliveness and goodness can just flow and be here, and I feel more alive, and everything is kind of free in this generosity and in this doing in the world.

So this mutuality and this intimacy with the world that's possible, I think for me is represented by the emphasis that Buddhists will have on finding the four elements within us. These four elements are said to be earth, water, fire, and air. And what this means is that there are certain characteristics, sensations, sense feelings that we can have that are identified as behaving in the same way within us as we can find out in the natural world.

So finding the quality or characteristics of earth within us is to find where there's support. The ground supports us. And in us there are things that are solid and heavy and supportive that hold us up and allow us to sit upright, for example, and receive the weight of our body and provide support. I a little bit delight in this idea that how important it is that we have this earth to support us, because without it we would just be floating around in space. I see sometimes photographs of the astronauts up in the space station and they're just kind of floating around up there. I guess if there's a small enough space they probably push themselves off the walls, but imagine if the earth wasn't here. We would have to find our way back to the earth to push on something, and we'd probably just be helpless in the air. But the earth has gravity that pulls us down, it keeps us and supports us just enough, just the right amount so that we don't float away, but we don't get crushed by too much gravity. So the earth, everything else is the same thing.

And then there's the water element. The characteristic of water that we can feel, they say, is cohesion. Like water droplets put next to each other, they stick together, they get more and more of them together—that cohesion. There's also that phenomena where water goes up a little bit on the edges of a glass that's holding it, and sticks—capillary action in plants that pulls up the water of the tree, of these big redwoods we have here. Imagine that! Redwoods, because of the nature of water, properties of cohesion in water, it pulls water to the very top of a redwood tree, it's a big tall tree there. So this cohesion—so much of what we are, we're held together. We're held together by the skin, the muscles, the tendons, all the stuff that holds us here together. And if we didn't have the cohesion, all our particles would just kind of float away, but we're held together. And these are natural phenomena that somehow have evolved over time out of the cosmic soup.

And the fire element, they say that how the fire element is, is that everything that's animated within us. It's all the energy that keeps us alive, every sensation we have is an expression of something energetic within us, the firing of the nerves. Firing nerves is a kind of fire. And all the energy we have that keeps us alive and going, in some way or other has originated from the sun. Sunlight comes down, and the plants photosynthesize and turn it into carbohydrates, and we eat them, or something else eats them, and then eventually if we eat the food we transform it somehow or other into energy. In a sense, we're a continuity of that energy from the sun that keeps us going, and so we can feel that continuity. The energy, the aliveness, the vitality, it's part of the nature not only of this earth but of our solar system. I think it's so cool!

And then the air element is the quality of movement. We're moving beings; we're not plants rooted down. We can get around, we can walk around, we can move our limbs, we can move our chest, our diaphragm to have this exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

So this idea of feeling within ourselves characteristics or qualities or aspects of what we can see outside makes it so that it suggests that there's not actually such a strong line between self and the world around us. We're all sharing so much of the same material. It is said that each of us is made from recycled materials. How's that? Recology^[4] is going to do a new line of business, you know, that we're all just all recycled. The material that we're built of has been in many different places and times down through the millenniums. And it's possible that each of us is breathing in now at least one particle of air that the Buddha breathed. Because there's so many billions of little particles of water and air that go into us, statistically the way it spreads out, there's a good possibility we're breathing in something that the Buddha breathed so long ago.

So this feeling of interconnectedness and interdependency is a phenomenal thing to feel, and to feel it in such a way that we want to be generous. And we want to learn, before it's too late, learn from the elders, learn from the people who are studying it. Learn how to live in harmony with it. How to enjoy maybe the sacrifices that we need to make. Sacrifice meaning making sacred.

Maybe the lifestyle that some of us are living is not sustainable for this planet, and is there an alternative lifestyle that we can enjoy, that delights us? And this again, I think for coming back to Buddhist practice, is the possibility of learning how to enjoy life without needing the latest and greatest technology, without needing a lot of consumer goods, not needing a lot of doing things that require air travel and even car travel. Just to feel the delight and the joy.

One of my delights on Sunday morning is to walk down here. It's about a 30-minute walk from my house. I enjoy it so much. But what a waste of time, right? I mean, I could have spent 25 more minutes at home. It only takes five minutes to drive here, and I'm sure I could have spent a good 25 more minutes checking out the news again, or reading, or looking for more websites and just kind of searching. I mean, that 25 minutes could have been productive and useful and all kinds of things I could have done with Netflix. But I actually enjoy the walk, acting like it's a beautiful, wonderful thing to walk down here.

And so the example is supposed to be the example of how our practice of mindfulness, attention, being present, how can we let that bring forth this beautiful potential that we have? This phenomenal potential we have so that we are inspired, we're delighted, we're happy to live a radically different life, a radically selfless life, where of course we want to live a differently, a different lifestyle. It's not a sacrifice. I would say that if I had decided to drive down here, save 25 minutes so that I could do more web searching or whatever I do, that that would have been a loss, that would have diminished me. Is the walk that enhanced me?

So I don't know if that example works for all of you, but maybe you have your own examples. I hope when I die I don't look back on life and say, "Yeah, I think I should count up how many websites I visited. And celebrate on my deathbed, 'Yeah, I visited 232,000 websites over my lifetime! What a great life!'" Or look back and say, "Actually, the feeling of joy, delight, well-being, grandness I had from these walks I take, that is a good visceral memory to die with. Wow, that is good." Or the people that I touched or I was touched by. Remember those deeper connections and love, and that's something to have.

So, Earth Day. Mother Earth. She's knocking at your door. She's been forgotten, she's starving.

What do you do? Send her away, saying "continue the party"? What do you offer? What do you have to offer? And what life do you save by stopping long enough, sitting down with her long enough, to offer your generosity and to learn and study from our great parent, the earth parent?

So let us appreciate this wonderful earth that we have and all the inhabitants, and care for the earth and its inhabitants equally, they are inseparable.

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

And may the earth thrive in this wonderful way that the natural world lives in harmony and homeostasis. Let us support this harmony and homeostasis whatever way we can.

Thank you.