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Guided Meditation: Letting Go into Unification

Greetings dear ones. I so appreciate this online sangha. Although, unfortunately, I can't see the chat during the sessions, I do enjoy looking at it after the talk is over and seeing many familiar names from far and wide.

Today is our fourth in the series this week on cultivating peace, and the expression of peace we'll explore today is letting go into unification. As we've been doing this week, we'll begin our meditation by making the conscious choice to leave all of our concerns, agendas, worries, and responsibilities well outside of our meditation area for the next half hour. The invitation is to take a moment to carefully put all your concerns in a safe place on the other side of the door, with the commitment to leave them there. You can always come back to them afterwards.

Now, closing the eyes, getting settled. We will practice breathing in open, non-reactive, peaceful awareness, breathing out letting go.

As we did yesterday, we'll begin our meditation by bringing awareness, our friend sati^[1], to the fore. We know that when awareness is strong, it opens the door for us to seeing when unskillful states arise, and we can make the choice to not pick them up. With sati, mindfulness in the forefront, we can bring a strong, clear awareness to our posture, balancing and aligning the whole body. Feel your physical and energetic connection to the earth, with roots going down deep from your sit bones.

If you like, you can invite the grounding energy of the earth to flow up into your body through your seat, gently moving up the spine, providing physical and energetic alignment to the posture. Then, letting this energy exit through the fontanelle, the small energetic opening in the front of the crown of the head. In the Vedic tradition, this soft spot is called the infinite chakra in Sanskrit, so maybe you can imagine your energetic connection to infinite space. In qigong, this soft spot is where we can absorb the energy of heaven and draw it down into the body. To be clear, drawing on this particular way of connecting our energetic body to heaven and earth is not the teaching of the Buddha. Excuse me. But it works well for me, although it may or may not be helpful for you. If it doesn't work for you, no worries—just come back to your normal posture.

The Buddha did, however, in his teachings on emptiness, teach dwelling in the realm of infinite space. So the idea is to have a posture that is both grounded and spacious as a way of encouraging the mind to also be simultaneously stable and open.

Breathing in normally and out normally, do a quick scan from the head down to the feet, relaxing, letting go, or just softening a little bit any tension or holding. As you do this relaxing scan, breathing in contented awareness, breathing out letting go. We are cultivating a healthy balance between being alert and being relaxed.

Breathing in contented awareness, breathing out letting go. Settling in with the eyes closed. Breathing in contented awareness, breathing out letting go.

If the thinking mind becomes active, we whisper in a kind and loving way, "Come back, be here."

Breathing in contented awareness, breathing out letting go.

Breathing in contented awareness, breathing out letting go.

Now we're going to transition from having generated the condition of peaceful contentment to unification. The Buddha teaches that in one who feels peaceful contentment, the mind becomes unified. The mind state of unification the Buddha is pointing to is like coming home. Coming home to a place where we feel safe and where we can really be ourselves.

Over these few days, we've put in place the conditions for the arising of samadhi^[2]: the subtle joy of resting in awareness, tranquility, and peaceful contentment. And what is so nice about samadhi is that we don't have to be perfect to let go into this unification. What a relief! In the unified mind, there's room for all of us, warts and all. Nothing has to be different than the way it is, including ourselves.

So continue practicing now. Breathing in quiet contentment, breathing out home to safety. Breathing in quiet contentment, breathing out home to safety.

You are home in your sacred seat of awakening, your bodhimanda^[3], knowing that everything is okay and all of you is safe at home.

Breathing in quiet contentment, breathing out home to safety.

As we come to the end of this sitting, let's bring to mind the people we will come into contact with today, strangers as well as people we know. Make the wish, the aspiration of offering them our example. Our example is the very best way to give these teachings to others. Through our example, we model and offer the ease, the happiness, and the safety of being at home with a mind at peace with things as they are. We have room to be just who we are, and we offer others the same freedom to be just who they are. This is a beautiful gift.

May all beings, ourself included first of all, be safe. May all beings know peace. May all beings be happily contented. May all beings feel at home in their true abode of a unified mind. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Cultivating Peace (4 of 5) Trusting the Supreme Safety

Welcome dear sangha, it's lovely to be here with you all. Some of us have been part of this online community since it started over two years ago, and I treasure this international sangha, so I thank you for your presence.

Today is the fourth day in our theme this week of cultivating peace. Yesterday, I appreciated the kind and thoughtful comments about my loss when my little sister died. She became ill twelve years ago and died seven years ago. To be honest, I no longer experience her departure as a loss; she's still very much present in my heart. Yes, I had been grieving intensely and constantly for about five months before being able to, in a retreat setting, dive into and then swim in that ocean of tears. That was transformative: to abide in the lucid awareness of my pain, and finally to let go of wanting or needing a different reality. This was profoundly healing.

As I said, when distress and loss give way to peaceful acceptance, then we are in a much better position to radiate our peaceful, contented abiding so that we can better offer support to others who are suffering. This ability to remain peacefully contented with whatever the dharma has on offer for us is the condition that makes possible the last of the necessary conditions for abiding in samadhi—the state from which the liberating insights of awakening can arise.

The expression of peace that we're exploring today is letting go into unification. Samadhi is usually translated into English as "concentration," but personally, I have a strong preference for translating it as "unification," because in Pali the word samadhi literally means "gathering together." We are happily composed, not needing anything to be different in our present moment experience.

For me, the English word concentration has connotations of maybe coming from the control tower, which may suggest effort. It's interesting that in the vast Pali canon with so many teachings, there are no instructions that the Buddha gave on what to do to enter into samadhi. Rather, he taught that what we must do to advance on the dharmic path to awakening is to put in place the conditions that allow for samadhi to arrive spontaneously, effortlessly.

Those conditions, of course, begin with living ethically and with generosity. Then, in order to step out of the bonds of samsara^[4], the first thing we have to do is to establish receptive awareness, sati. This is the foundation of our practice, both inside and outside of meditation. Yesterday we spoke about living in awareness with satipatthana^[5], evoking a metaphor for the mind of living in a messy house, but one that has a quiet living room. When we begin the dharmic path clearly seeing dukkha^[6], both in our own unskillful mind states and in the world around us, we see the mess and we know there's work to do to clean out all the other rooms of the house.

This work starts with our commitment to practicing continuous mindfulness the best we can. As our mindfulness practice develops, we begin to get a feeling sometimes for resting in present moment awareness.

What I'd like to offer today is an instruction of how to encourage these beautiful mental states, like sustained mindfulness. When awareness arises and is strong, the instruction is to notice, appreciate, and relax into the experience of strong mindfulness. We do this with all of the conditions that allow us to enter into samadhi.

We begin with the subtle joy of resting in this clear awareness. Our gladness to be on the dharma path also naturally allows for joy to arise. When joy is present, we see that, we notice it, we appreciate it, and we relax into it. Then joy gives way to tranquility, and it's important to notice tranquility when it's there. Noticing it, can we appreciate the moments of calm? Can we relax into the calmness^[7]... excuse me.

We've seen that when the mind is calm, peaceful contentment naturally arises. So we repeat the practice of noticing, appreciating, and relaxing into the beautiful feeling of being content with things just as they are. This practice helps us to become more familiar with these wholesome states, and with familiarity, it becomes easier to enter into them. We do need clear awareness when dwelling in wholesome states, because sometimes it can be tempting to get caught in chasing after these beautiful states of mind. But we know that they're conditioned; they come and go.

If we can stay soft and relaxed in the well-being of contentment, the door is wide open for samadhi to arise.

Now I would like to read to you from a beautiful teaching by Gil^[8] that he taught when he was teaching a course at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley on samadhi:

"To allow yourself to settle into a state that's broad, expansive, it helps to be relaxed, to have faith, to have some modicum of stability, and it helps to be mindful. Part of mindfulness is that we start noticing how we're tense, stuck, how we have concerns, and we find a way to live at peace, conflict-free with whatever arises. And we heal the urge^[9] and the wars that exist inside us. Mindfulness sees all this and perhaps is able to meet it with kindness, friendliness.

As our attention settles, we settle into being here, and we start to feel like it's actually more interesting to be here than to be elsewhere. So part of the movement of mindfulness and samadhi is a clarifying of our interest. If you try to settle on the breath but you have all these thoughts, is it that you're more interested in your thoughts? It's not easy to convince the mind that it's more interesting to be here. Distracted thoughts might arise, and we let them fall away, and it becomes more interesting to keep the focus on the safety of the harbor that we're going to. It means that we gather together all the energies, and there is a phenomenal sense of safety to be found in the state of samadhi.

We keep coming back, letting distractions go, and just settling in with the simplicity of being here. And contentment arises. The mind is fully engaged, and we have the encouragements of joy and happiness that help us to stay on track. It begins to feel so good to be here, and this is very healing work. Samadhi can move toward deeper and deeper states of equanimity. So we can develop samadhi into a very deep equanimity, where being here and settled is so strong and safe that the mind does not really react to what is going on.

It's not something to be believed, this process. It will be revealed to you when you've entered the temple under the tree on your riverbank. And it brings wisdom for how to be in the world. Doing this deep work and truly being here, discovering this samadhi of just being here, transforms us into peacemakers in this world. It's not an escape, but a sacred preparation of caring for each other in this world we live in."

Thank you to Gil for this. Samadhi is the condition for liberating insights to arise, and we begin to trust the supreme safety of dwelling in a unified mind where no part of us is left out.

For the next 24 hours, it would be nice to experiment with these wholesome mind states that allow samadhi to arise. When you see one of them, whether it's joy, or tranquility, or contentment, take a moment to notice, to appreciate, and to relax into that a little bit. In this way, you'll become more and more familiar with these mind states, and they will arise more easily.

Thank you very much for your attention, and thank you for your practice.