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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Non-Harming

Warm greetings and welcome. And especially more welcome now that you can hear me.

I want to begin this morning's meditation, and the theme for the meditation, if you like, is a little statement that would capture Buddhism in its essence. Three words. If we could only use three words that would be Buddhism, and everything else about Buddhism, I would like to believe, is just an elaboration or application of these three words. And those three words are: cause no harm. Do no harm. Exactly what that means, of course, takes some discussion. But to be able to keep in mind that this is really at the heart of what Buddhism is about is not causing harm.

For meditation, that means in particular to not cause harm to oneself. What we learn how to do in meditation then becomes the basis for learning how to be a non-harming person in the world and with others as well. In meditation, it's not just a matter of learning to restrain ourselves from causing harm, but to actually grow into becoming a person who is incapable of causing harm to oneself and to others.

Maybe that's a tall order. It's a great goal. It's a great direction to go. The way to reach that goal in meditation is to begin practicing it. It isn't just a matter of meditating on the breathing, but learning how to meditate in such a way that we can be focused on the breathing or focused on the present moment—whatever practice we're doing—in a way that we're attentive and sensitive to the ways that we might be harming ourselves in that process.

What stands out strongest to me is the ways in which we're self-critical about it. "I'm not doing well enough. I need to do better. I want something different." There are all these desires, clingings, expectations, and judgments that come into play. Some of them are things we've done a lifetime of, that we begin to notice, and we begin letting up.

We maybe begin by realizing we don't have to believe these things that we do. We don't have to listen to them and go along with them. It might be hard to stop some of those inner voices and tendencies, but we can begin shifting our relationship to them so they don't have the upper hand. And then with time, learn to let go of them, to soften them, and relax them.

And to be able to sit even when meditation is not going well, or we're not particularly feeling well, or the mind is not behaving in the ways we want. The heart of all this is: given how it is right now, let's not add harm. Let's not add a second arrow^[1]. Finding that place, and letting that be the foundation upon which we develop mindfulness, concentration, and so forth. We develop those things on the basis of not causing harm.

This is a tall order, of course, but this is at the heart of what the enterprise is about. It's not just about getting concentrated or becoming mindful, but doing so that we become a person who causes no harm—no self-harm to begin with.

So, take a meditation posture that is the appropriate posture for you. A posture that will allow you to become attuned to your present moment experience. Some postures, especially if they're too relaxed, might enable a certain kind of complacency or a lack of engagement where it's easy to drift off into thought. So, there might be some alertness in the posture. If you're sitting in a chair, you might consider sitting up a little straighter. Or, if it's possible, not to use as much of the backrest as you are using.

And then generally, we close our eyes. Closing the eyes is a little bit of a ritual, a reminder that for now we're going to be here in the present moment, attuning ourselves to our direct physical experience, the direct inner experience, what's actually happening for us here. Closing the eyes can also be—if that's what you do—a beginning of a certain kind of turning inward, some people would say, but turning to the experience of all the other senses. Becoming aware of the ears hearing. Allowing yourself to receptively hear the sounds around you. Or, if it's mostly silence, taking a few moments to hear, in a sense, the silence.

Hearing can be a very nice teacher for mindfulness because we generally don't interfere with the sound that comes to the ear. That very particular way in which sounds just arrive, before we judge them or react to them, is one reference point for the simplicity of mindfulness.

Become attuned to the physical senses, to how particular nerve endings at the end of your nerve channels pick up the sensations of your body. It might be temperature—temperature nerves feeling warmth and coolness in different parts of your body. Tactile nerves that feel the contact of your body against your chair, your cushion, the floor, or the bed. The nerves of proprioception—feeling your body in space, the position of your body, the uprightness, or however you're sitting. Feelings of pressure and lightness, heaviness and substance, whatever way you feel your body.

And then become attuned to the place in your body where you feel breathing, where the body most clearly experiences breathing. Then accompany the body as it breathes, feeling the physical sensations of breathing. The rhythm of how the exhale feels and the inhale. Perhaps even riding the waves of inhale and exhale as the sensations of the body come and go.

Maybe as you exhale, begin relaxing the mind. Whatever pressure or tension there might be associated with thinking or associated with your emotions, as you exhale, relax and soften. Maybe as you inhale, begin a process of opening. Opening up to experience. Opening up to the experience of breathing. And then continue that opening and releasing as you exhale.

Are there any attitudes that you have now that could be seen as forms of harm? Judgments, criticisms, expectations. "Not good enough." "It should be different." Those thoughts don't necessarily come with harm, but they might. Is there any way in which you are now that can be said to be harmful to yourself? An attitude about yourself, or anything at all? And then, as you exhale, maybe you can soften and ease up on the way that harm is being caused, the source of it. The source in the immediate present. How you are. How you're contracted or tight.

For these few minutes here in meditation, maybe there is absolutely no need to engage in the kind of thoughts, attitudes, desires, wants, and aversions that are, in a sense, causing harm to oneself. You are allowed to be as you are simply, relaxedly, and from this basis, to develop and cultivate present moment awareness. Mindfulness of breathing. Here and now.

Is there any way now that you can let go of causing self-harm? Even the subtlest ways in which it's stressful. To sit here with a certain peacefulness, from which there is a dedication to being present and aware. Aware of that part of the present moment which is not causing harm. Which does not involve harm.

Dedication

As we come to the end of this sitting, we can offer a dedication of merit—an aspiration for how to take the benefit of this meditation into the world. Rather than living for the benefit of all beings, or rather than wishing for the welfare of all beings, sometimes it's simplest and maybe most realistic to come out of meditation and aspire to be dedicated to not causing harm for this day. To have no harm that is either done towards others or imagined towards others with thoughts of hostility, inappropriate desires, or judgments.

May it be that coming out of meditation, building on the practice of mindfulness, we spend the day being a person who is safe for others. That we're safe in the sense that we are not going to cause harm. May all beings be free of harm, free of violence, free of oppression. May all beings experience safety that allows their good hearts to come to the foreground.