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Guided Meditation: Tuning the Energy

Great, let's do this. Nice to be with you. Since we are quite literally all around the world, good morning, good evening, and good night.

Let's pick up where we left off with the study of the pāramīs^[1], the Perfections. My name's Kodo, very happy to be here with you. We'll be doing a very simple meditation this morning. I'll say more about this in a bit, but the two pāramīs, the two Perfections that we will focus on today, are energy (vīriya^[2]) and patience (khanti^[3]). Energy and patience, and we'll look at how they work together.

What I'd like to do during the meditation is something very simple, which is, after we settle, to pay attention to how the in-breath brings just a little bit of energy into the system and how the exhale brings just a little bit of relaxation into the system.

So we'll look at these two qualities, energy and patience, and see during the meditation how we can sense into them, how we can get a feel for them, how they're accessible right here. A little bit of energy with the inhale, a little bit of relaxation with the exhale. So let's find our way to our preferred meditation posture.

Let's take our time. Let's take our time arriving, not hurrying to be here. Mentally setting aside whatever can be set aside. Any unnecessary thoughts or preoccupations, you can come back to them after.

Just here. We find our way here through sensing, feeling maybe the seat, maybe the flow of breath right now, temperature on the skin. And feeling our way into alignment. Long spine, relaxed ribs and torso.

If it's helpful, as we did yesterday, we could do a quick scan through each of the sense doors, just relaxing each in turn and letting that relief register. Your eyes, ears, nose, tongue in the mouth, body, and the thinking muscle.

With each adjustment, all the more here. Any attention right here.

And then our simple practice for this morning is to observe how the breath turns the energy on the inhale. And how does that register for you? A little bit of energy coming into the body, oxygen into the blood giving you a little bit of lift, maybe a brightening in the mind. It could be anything.

Now to get familiar with how the exhale turns the energy in the body, even in the mind. Maybe it's subtle sensations that you notice. A little bit of relaxation or slack, a little slowing down, grounding.

For the rest of our sitting, freely exploring these two. Energy coming in with the inhale, relaxation, settledness with the exhale. However seems fit. Bouncing back and forth, or favoring one or the other as is appropriate for you now.

If something in your mind is a little dull, perhaps giving an emphasis to the in-breath, the energizing breath. And if the mind is a little restless, after noticing the nature of restlessness, giving an emphasis to the exhale, the grounding breath. All in the service of being human, of seeing clearly.

And for this last minute of our sitting, the invitation is to relax any effort and fully rest. Letting any of the benefits or goodness of our practice register and nourish.

Dharmette: Pāramīs (3 of 5) The Perfections of Energy and Patience

After our meditation together, now turning to the Perfections of energy and patience.

So far we've been practicing these pāramīs, the Perfections, step by step. First, we had a discussion about dāna^[4], giving, and one who practices dāna learns a kind of letting go that initiates this path of the Perfections. And then once sīla^[5], virtue or ethical conduct, matures, and we grow in this ethical sensitivity—sensitive to the "ouch" and the "ah" of our actions—then we practice wise renunciation. We see more and more clearly those states, actions, cravings, and clingings that no longer serve us, and then compulsive desire lets go. Then one grows wise about distinctions and perspectives that support liberation, and in doing so, we learn where to direct the effort of our practice, our energy.

And this brings us to vīriya. These last two days we focused a lot on some of the basic principles of pāramī practice. We've reflected on this approach of reflecting on the benefits of the quality of a pāramī, and reflecting on the drawbacks of the opposites. I think this has a basis in the Dhammapada^[6], one of these well-known teachings: doing no evil, engaging in what's skillful, and purifying one's mind. This is the teaching of the Buddhas.

So today I plan to highlight something a little bit different, which is how pāramīs work together. I want to share this from the perspective of both our meditation practice and daily life. Appropriately, the very next line in the Dhammapada after "this is the teaching of the Buddhas" is "patient endurance is the supreme austerity." So immediately, patience and energy are named.

I mostly want to talk about how vīriya (energy) and patience work together, and why that is. What I've noticed over the years of this kind of wild monastic, semi-monastic, and lay Dharma life is that for a practice to be nourished and balanced long-term, this relationship of energy and patience points to some of the central concerns. In his essay The Joy of Effort, Thanissaro Bhikkhu^[7] begins the discussion of energy this way: he says when explaining meditation, the Buddha often drew analogies with the skills of artists, carpenters, musicians, archers, and cooks. Finding the right level of effort, he said, is like a musician tuning a lute. Reading the mind's needs in the moment—to be gladdened, to be steadied, or inspired—is like a palace cook's ability to read and please the taste of a prince.

So we may think of energy as something we have, something we hold on to, and something we give over, like it's a discrete quantity. Or that it's something we have to muster when there is none, when we're depleted. But what is it? What does it do? We can reframe the idea of energy as something we tune, and we attune both to the appropriate level and to the needs of the moment.

In the suttas, in the Anguttara Nikaya^[8], there's this very well-known story that Thanissaro Bhikkhu is referring to here, about Sona. Sona is an ardent, energetic practitioner who is pouring himself into his sitting and walking practice as a monastic. And he is discouraged. He's been practicing diligently, but he's not free. He's not free, and he is considering giving up the training. So the Buddha goes to question him.

The Buddha goes to question him and he says, "Sona, when you were a householder, were you skilled in playing the lute?"

"Yes, Lord, I was."

"If you tuned the strings too tightly, did the lute tune and play?"

"It didn't."

"And how about if you tuned the strings too loosely, would the lute tune and play?"

"Oh, no, no, it wouldn't."

And then the Buddha asks him, "So when you tuned the strings neither too tightly nor too loosely, then did the lute tune and play?"

And the Buddha concludes: "In the same way, Sona, over-aroused persistence leads to restlessness. Overly slack persistence leads to laziness. Thus you should determine the right pitch for your persistence and attune the pitch of the other faculties to pick up your theme."

Something I'd like to highlight this morning is: what's the opposite of energy? What's the opposite of energy? I'd like to say it's not rest. I believe that sometimes the most appropriate attunement of energy is to rest.

Maybe to overstate this, I could say that the pāramīs of energy and patience could be considered the pāramīs of our times. We can think about this in terms of the incessant demands on our energy. Maybe this comes in the form of compulsive activity or overwork. Rest is necessary for the path to develop long-term.

I think here of the cycles of a fruit tree over the seasons. When a season turns cooler and the days get shorter, the tree draws its energy back into the trunk and into the roots in a sense to hibernate, before the sap and all the biological processes initiate the energy back outward, leafing and flowering.

One Dharma teacher described the intention of a sabbatical as to live fallow, to restore, rejuvenate, and replenish. So rest is really necessary in supporting our Dharma practice long-term. This is the pāramī of patience in the form of time and non-exertion.

So this is another way that energy and patience seem to work together. We played with this some during our meditation: with the inhale, the energy coming up; the exhale, the energy settling back down. And this is another natural cycle of the pāramīs, energy and patience.

In meditative terms, as the Buddha put it, the over-application of energy can incline us to restlessness and agitation. Attuned energy can be a condition for the arising of joy and rapture, leading onward to happiness, concentration (samādhi^[9]), and beyond. So it's this skillful tuning of the energy that I'm emphasizing a lot this morning, something that Suzuki Roshi^[10] called "adjusting the flame." Adjusting the flame of our energy is adjusting the level of effort just to suit the moment, just to suit this mind in this activity.

The question I hear a lot is, "How much effort should I apply?" It's almost never a question of one prescription; it's a matter of discernment, what's appropriate.

When discussing vīriya, Dhammapala^[11] tends toward the heroic. You can imagine him talking about uninterrupted effort for four eons with compassion for all beings. This can be inspiring if we're receptive to it or in the right frame of mind, but it can also be discouraging. Like Venerable Sona, that may come across as impossible or not realistic. One of the ways that energy or aspiration can lose its balance is if our aspirations become demands on the universe. Practicing the pāramīs in order, however, hedges this problem. Our dāna (giving), our ethics, our renunciation, and our wisdom support us in knowing how to attune our effort.

This practice is a marathon, not a sprint, so we tune our inspiration. In everyday practice, I think it's very important to have energy's partner, patience. One of the most interesting teachings from Dhammapala on this is that the proximate cause of patience isn't what I expected. I imagined it to be like forced endurance. It was "seeing things as they are."

The proximate cause of patience is seeing things as they are. And in many of the Buddhist teachings, seeing things as they are is an insight that comes through sustained practice, sustained observation. We see something in a new way, free of our misperceptions. Wisdom is a cause for patience, rather than force.

Among other modes of wisdom, one of them is noticing that we are not in control of reality. Doesn't that influence our sense of patience or impatience? We're not in control of this reality. This body ages, a pleasant sound fades, a desired mind state doesn't manifest, this person next to me in traffic... you can fill in the blank. We're not in control of reality.

Instead, our role as practitioners—you hear this again and again—is to contribute conditions. We contribute conditions to a complex system of reality and experience.

One of the clearest examples that comes to mind for me now is that the Buddha taught how the when and the where of karmic fruition—how our actions have effects in the future—the when and the where of how that will happen is nearly unknowable by anyone but the Buddha. But he strongly emphasized that we be circumspect in our actions. We can't know how the effect will necessarily ripple out into the future, but take great care with your actions nonetheless. So our role is short of omniscience and total control, but we contribute. We contribute conditions of our intentions, our actions, our skillful means, our compassion. And that sort of perspective supports the Perfection of Patience.

Dhammapala also characterized patience in a way that was much more powerful than I was used to thinking. He describes it as a strength, a supreme source of constancy, a shore bounding the great ocean of hatred, an unimpeded instrument in the development of noble qualities.

And we also know how patience affects the way people see us. If we respond to them with patience, that affects the interaction. In this way, Dhammapala calls patience an adornment, the basis of a good reputation, and says it has the function of quelling hatred.

One point that he teaches that I think is well worth our consideration is that patience has a function, it has a realm: it's an appropriate response to other people's anger.

Based on Dhammapala's emphasis on this and our current social scene, I think this is another way that patience and energy could be considered the pāramīs of our times.

His counsel is to have a number of wise reflections available to use on the spot when facing others' anger. They tend to fall into the categories of making it impersonal, maybe by reflecting on the fact that the sense faculties will necessarily experience the pleasant and unpleasant, so we can expect to encounter the unpleasant. And one of my favorites: reframing our perspective of the other person. I think of the wisdom of parents in this regard because the reflection is to see all beings as my own children. I think of all the wise restraint and patience that a parent sometimes cultivates.

In practicing patience with our energy, we reclaim some of the power that's lost to impatience. We have agency because of a patient perspective and can then employ a skillful, attuned response in the moment. Patience allows us the wise direction of our effort.

I think for today, as we're coming to the end of our time, you can take into your practice for Wednesday: Where is energy showing up? Where are effort and persistence showing up? And where is its opposite showing up—maybe sloth, torpor, slackness? And then, where is patience showing up? Where is endurance, forbearance, steadiness, that adornment of patience? And where are its opposites showing up? And then particularly for today: how do these two support each other? How do energy and patience support each other in your own life?

Thank you for sharing some time in practice this morning. May all beings benefit, and we'll pick up the thread tomorrow with the next two Perfections. Thank you.