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Guided Meditation: Softening to the Ungovernability of Experience

Good morning. Who knew a chat stream could be a source of quite a bit of joy? Anyway, it's sweet, too. I like the customs around these parts of checking in. I'm on Zoom, but then there's the YouTube window and the chat scrolling on the side of my screen. Anyway, it is very sweet to see you all, so welcome.

After the sit, I'll reflect on the connections between equanimity and love, or equanimity as a kind of indirect route into a deep love. We can look in our practice at what happens when the openness of our heart and the balance of the mind meets with the first noble truth—meets with dukkha^[1], meets with the difficulties inherent in being human. My experience is that in that cauldron, that meeting of equanimity and dukkha, the byproduct of that meeting is something like love. So we gather in this spirit, and that's it.

Sometimes we sit and it feels like coming home, and sometimes it feels like getting into a body of water that's too cold.

We just soften.

Just give the heart some moments to adjust. Just still mass.

Even as the spine ever so gently reaches towards the sky, also surrender the rest of the body to gravity. That subtle, soothing, downward pull of the earth.

Receiving all of our concerns and worries.

Just another animal walking on the surface of the planet.

And in any given moment, there are a million things right and a million things are wrong, and equanimity affords us the luxury of not needing to sort all of that out.

Freedom beckons us from within each experience.

In the face of the flood of experience, can our heart be softened?

Can we bow to the truth of dukkha, the intensity of the human condition, the intensity of being sentient?

Can we bow knowing that in that bow, our heart is softened?

Equanimity (3 of 5): Transmuting Dukkha

Thank you. I just sense a certain kind of closeness to you, to the sangha^[2], a sort of recognition that whether we're in the same room or on YouTube spread across the globe, it's only ever sight and sound and thought and feeling, and there's a kind of fundamental equivalence to all of our situations. And so this feeling of closeness is not secondary, you know.

So, equanimity. The Buddha is said to have found the middle path, the middle path between self-mortification and self-indulgence. It should be noted that the middle path sounds middle, but it's kind of hardcore. It's one meal a day and no TikTok. It's kind of hardcore, but it is not an ascetic path. It is not a path of asceticism, in other words. It's not trying to make ourselves suffer, to make the body suffer so that the mind gains strength. That was a model, a reason to pursue a kind of path of pain. This is not the Buddhist conception.

Desire does not cause suffering; the cause of suffering is grasping of desire. You really have to investigate desire and know it for what it is. We can be very idealistic in thinking that even the need for food is some kind of desire we should not have. One can be quite ridiculous about it, but the Buddha was not an idealist and he was not a moralist. He was not trying to condemn anything. He was trying to awaken us to truth so that we could see things clearly.

So pain on its own has no liberatory potential. In fact, it usually has the opposite effect. Self-denial is not a path. I think it's a story from the suttas^[3], but maybe I'm misremembering, but it's something like the Buddha meets a spiritual seeker who's standing on one leg and asks, What are you doing? And the seeker says, I'm burning up my karma^[4]. And the Buddha is like, Well, how much is burned? I don't know. How much is left? I don't know. How will you know when you're done? I don't know. And then the Buddha says, Ah, this is foolishness.

But here's the catch: pain, minor or dramatic, met with equanimity, has a profound liberatory potential. In a way, the Buddhist path is about not squandering dukkha. Not squandering the opportunities of dukkha, of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness. And so, famously, Thich Nhat Hanh^[5] says, No mud, no lotus. It's mud, not problems. And we recognize that dukkha is usually squandered. It usually doesn't become wisdom; it doesn't become love.

This path is about this turn of the heart: how do we transform difficulty into something nourishing? It is almost an alchemical sort of process where we are transmuting difficulty into love and a longing for liberation. My experience is that that is what dukkha is transformed into in the cauldron of the heart, in the trenches of practice. Dukkha is transformed into something like love and a longing for liberation.

Sometimes people say, I'm doing metta^[6] practice, I'm doing loving-kindness practice, and I cannot feel the love. Well, sometimes the path into a deep, steady, radical love is more circuitous. It's not straight into metta. It's the circuitous path through dukkha met by equanimity. In a way, it can be even more potent than the direct path of love. It's a love that fully understands dukkha.

One of my teaching colleagues, Tuere Sala^[7], described equanimity^[8] as a kind of softening to the uncontrollability of conditions. She emphasized that word: softening. The heart is softened by this. We sit, and here we are, and who knows what comes up? We just actually give up the reins we have on experience and surrender. Surrender, soften.

I feel like one of the primary roles of a dharma teacher is being something like a trustworthy cheerleader, because there is a part of ourselves that just cannot believe this is the practice. Everyone wants peace, but who wants purification?

Experiencing pain, experiencing dukkha without equanimity, often leads to hate. We can perceive this at different scales, even at the national level. Pain not met with wisdom, not met with equanimity, can wreck the mind. It can contort the mind into just incredible destructiveness, ugliness.

But pain met with equanimity, this is a cause for love in the cauldron of the heart. In the basement level of practice, the capacity to actually bring difficulty into attention, to bring physical or emotional pain into attention, is profound. It's the basis for not spilling our suffering on others. When do we harm others? When do we do things we regret? When does our own self-regulation fail?

So we stay with the dissatisfaction, and it does feel almost like magic what happens. So much of the time, practice has just been this honest, simple labor—a labor of the heart. This process of purification is transforming energy that ordinarily causes suffering into the seeds of our growing freedom.

Dr. King^[9] described non-violence as the sword that heals. The sword that heals—how can that be? How can that work? It's kind of wild.

Shinzen Young^[10] said that equanimity is the primary cathartic factor of dharma practice. I've always loved that description: the primary cathartic factor of practice.

Now, not all of dharma practice is cathartic. This building of intensity, the pits of despair, intense negative affect—the wave crests and breaks, and there's relief, there's ease, there's bliss, there's peace, there's something. Not all of practice is like that. Some of practice is just this very invisible accumulation of the paramitas^[11], of goodness. We don't even see it.

But some of it is dramatic and cathartic. The wave breaks, and equanimity is very deeply involved in that wave breaking, in the catharsis, in being reborn into some new open space, a new pasture. And so we start to get a taste of this process of purification—an acquired taste for sure, but a taste for it nonetheless.

That begins to bring a certain kind of equivalence to experience, to pleasure and pain. As we work with this—maybe it's just this sit, we've worked patiently with tolerance, with equanimity, with difficulty—it's so hard to hate. It's hard to rush. It's hard to despair. It's hard to do the subtle kinds of violence to our own hearts.

So something is softened. Love is the byproduct of this meeting of equanimity and dukkha, and that is profound. And that is something we share with others.

Closing

Thank you for your attention. It's good to be with you these days. I wish you all a good day, good morning if that's what it is. I'm aware that we don't live in a geocentric world, nor is California the center of the universe or the standard time zone. For those in the evening, be well too. It's sweet to think of you everywhere. So, thank you.