This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Strengthening Awareness

All right, so let's go ahead and get started as you're settling in and saying hello. Now finding a posture for meditation, just sitting.

Allowing yourself to feel the body and the sitting posture, feeling the contact where you're sitting. Your seat against the chair or the cushion, or what you're lying on. Just having a sense of being here.

Sometimes meditation is called taking the one seat. You take your seat in the middle of experience, and the idea, in a sense, is to stay there. Not get drawn away by things that come and knock on the door or wave at you through the window. You're just sitting in your seat, resting. And yet you're aware of all of experience.

So we'll expand our awareness piece by piece. Beginning first with this sense of the body sitting in the room where you are. You can feel the space around you, and then opening further to other aspects of physical experience. You can sense the sounds. There's the sound of my voice. There may be other sounds around you from the household or from nature, or outside. Or maybe you are outside sitting in nature. Opening to the sounds and also the silence in which those sounds are occurring.

And then we become aware of the inner experiences in the body. Allowing awareness to include the sensations of breathing, the inner sensations of the body, feelings like the clothing against the skin, the natural strength and straightness of the spine, pressure where you're sitting, the various movements of energy through the body. Allowing all of these to enter into awareness.

Now beginning to include also the mind, different aspects. Noticing if there are any emotions present in your experience. That may be very clear or maybe not. Maybe there's just a general mood, or maybe the mind is quite neutral and there are just emotional shifts now and then. Just see how it is and include those in awareness. All while sitting in the one seat, not getting drawn in.

And opening awareness further to include thoughts. If there's any thinking or thoughts going on in the mind, we just open the space of the mind so that those come in and out the way clouds come in and out in the sky. Forming out of nothing, drifting around, sometimes dissipating in the wind. So the space of the mind holds the thoughts that come and go.

Now letting the mind be so large and vast that it can even hold our background assumptions and views, ways that we see the world. Just one more aspect of the mind, actually. These things too are phenomena that can be seen and held in the vast stillness of the mind.

All of experience: the space around us, the sounds, bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, views. These are all things that we can be aware of within a large sky-like or ocean-like mind. All of experience can come and go in its multitude of varied forms.

We can also ask: what knows this? Sometimes there's a shift in experience when we turn to include even the knowing in the realm of what we can be aware of. So just resting in the totality of experience. Even allowing the sense of practicing or observing to fall away. That too is extra. Just this.

When attention gets drawn into something, when you notice that, gather what energy is available and put it back into awareness. Re-strengthen awareness and rest there.

Sensing the great peace that is available in awareness. Feeling how it can fill and pervade experience, such that everything that comes and goes just feels like part of nature. And what a valuable way of being this is to bring to the world.

There's so much struggle in the world trying to get this or that, trying to stop this or that. It's not that we would never make any movements or choose any actions, but doing so from a place of vastness where it can all be held and seen means that our actions come from wisdom and compassion. They actually do real benefit in the world, help to align things, balance things, rather than contributing to the lurching around and imbalance that so much characterizes our unaware life.

So let it be that we contribute to the awareness of the world, trusting that our cultivation of that quality extends out from us into others, into the world. Since awareness is not something that we just hold for ourselves, it's more like something that's available, we increase its availability by opening to it, and that's a gift to the world.

Dharmette: The Art of Letting Go (5 of 5) Letting Go by Developing

So we've made it to the last item in our list of seven methods for letting go. But first, there was a question in the chat yesterday for the sutta reference. We are broadly following the teaching found in MN 2, the Sabbāsava Sutta^[1], but I've brought in other teachings as needed.

So we've talked about letting go or abandoning by seeing, by restraining, by using, by avoiding, by enduring, and by removing. And many of the earlier ones were about somehow getting free of unwholesome states of mind. That is great and necessary, but it's not the whole story. We also have to develop wholesome states, and we're in a position to do that very effectively once the unwholesome ones are not dragging us down.

So today we have letting go by developing, and there will also be a kind of a reprise of letting go by seeing. To be clear, it is wholesome to let go of the unwholesome, of course, but imagine now that you've cut away a hundred pounds of weight that you were dragging behind your bicycle. Now you can really cruise. You can go around corners more smoothly, you can do tricks, you can ride up steep hills. It's one kind of development to develop the skills to abandon what is unskillful, and it's a different kind of development to actively pursue what is skillful. The Buddha differentiated different types of wise effort, and half of them are about handling what is problematic and half of them are about fostering what is beautiful. So what are we developing?

Broadly speaking, we're developing the Eightfold Path. So that's right, or we could also say wise or appropriate: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. And when they're appropriate and right, all of these are wholesome and skillful and they pervade all aspects of our life. They touch into all different aspects of our being. And then in meditation specifically, there are also many important qualities to develop, and they're developed more in meditation, but then they also bleed out into our daily life also. In particular, the sutta, MN 2, names the seven factors of awakening as appropriate things to develop.

The first of those is something that we're all familiar with, which is mindfulness. That's the first of the factors of awakening, and it's said to be always useful. You kind of can't have too much. So awareness ends up being our greatest resource on the path, something that we continually develop and strengthen. And also which supports the whole process of the path by helping us to see where we're starting to go off track or what else we might need to bring in. It's a balancing factor in the mind also.

And then the other six factors of awakening are divided into two different types, let's say. The first type is the energizing—three of them are energizing qualities, and those are investigation, energy, and joy. And note in particular the last one, that joy is a factor of awakening. So we're moving toward having a deep sense of inner well-being and happiness that's regardless of conditions. We can think about joy because the sunrise is beautiful this morning, or joy because of our family or our material circumstances in some way, but those conditions are quite unreliable. And there are other forms of joy that go very deep, that are more about the quality of our heart. It takes a while to really cultivate this and bring it to the fore, and of course it's fine to have other kinds of joy, but we're just aware of the role that that can play and it is energizing. It brings an aliveness to our being.

And then investigation is the continual checking into experience: Is there suffering here or not? Is this skillful or not? Am I aware or not? And that brings natural energy, spiritual energy, to our being. So we have ways of enlivening ourselves, and we can see this in very advanced spiritual beings, teachers, and others, that they always have an aliveness to them. Their eyes are bright, faculties are fresh, even when they're very old.

So that's these factors. And then in addition, the other three awakening factors are calming factors, and those are tranquility, concentration, and equanimity. So there's a supreme balance and calmness that comes, and it comes from knowing. From knowing how things actually work, from knowing that everything's going to change and so I don't need to grasp onto things. And from also just knowing that that kind of peace is better than the peace of sensual stimulation, say, or the joy or the happiness from that. That the calmness is such a needed quality not only for us but for others.

So these seven factors together—mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity—form a very beautiful set in the mind, and sometimes, if you look at them carefully, they include seeming opposite movements: energizing and calming. And so we're asked to consider maybe how the mind can expand to hold all of these. How can we be highly energized and joyful and also tranquil and equanimous? In fact, the mind can be energized and calm at the same time when those are spiritual qualities.

So is it strange that developing can lead to letting go? No, actually it's not strange. It is one of several different fruits that can come from developing, but let me name first one of the initial fruits of doing some development of wholesome states, and that is that the mind gains genuine protection. There's a story of a king who wanted to make his kingdom safe for people to walk in by covering everything in leather so there wouldn't be any thorns or sharp stones or things to trip on. He wanted to cover the whole kingdom in leather. And his wise advisor pointed out that it would be much better to give everyone shoes.

It's like that in our practice. We can look out at the world and see all kinds of dangers and problems. We might be afraid to go out and walk. Or we can put on shoes and go. So if our heart is strong, it's okay to go out and walk among the thorns and the rough patches. That could literally be outside in the world, or it could be the thorny patches in our own mind and heart where we haven't ventured yet. Part of this practice is to keep uncovering more and more in our heart, and we do that by getting stronger in one area and then using that strength to go into new areas.

And that's just the initial benefit. And what further fruit is that when our mind is fortified with mindfulness and clarity and calm, we will begin to naturally release more subtle forms of dukkha^[2]. So development does lead to letting go. We're not always just working with blatantly unwholesome mind states and unskillful behaviors, we also have these more subtle forms of dukkha that we need to let go of also. We have various ways of subtly identifying with experience, thinking that it's about me. Maybe we are genuinely kind and generous much of the time, and that in itself is a great accomplishment if we can get ourselves to that state. But in the background, we might subtly believe that "I am a generous person, that's who I am."

And once we start having these more refined qualities of heart—mindfulness, energy, joy, equanimity, the things that I named—we start to feel a little bit of tension or wind drag, as Gil^[3] would say, when the mind is enacting these more subtle patterns of I-making and my-making. And those can be released by noticing how they cast a shadow on the wholesome mind. The Buddha says very clearly that we should be virtuous but not identify with our virtue.

And then there's this teaching from the Samyutta Nikaya^[4]. It says, "Whatever arahants^[5], perfectly enlightened ones, arose in the past, all those blessed ones had first abandoned the five hindrances, the corruptions of mind that weaken wisdom. And then, with their minds well established in the four ways of establishing awareness, they had developed correctly the seven factors of enlightenment. And thereby, they had awakened to the unsurpassed perfect enlightenment. And similarly for arahants of the future and the present." The language is a little bit complex and characteristic of the suttas, but it says every Buddha has abandoned the five hindrances, established the four foundations of mindfulness, and developed the seven factors of awakening, and that's what makes a Buddha. I think it will be the same for us.

So then we can have a reprise of seeing, if you will. Recall from Monday that seeing is the most fundamental way of letting go. We talked about it then in terms of seeing clearly whether the trend in the mind is toward unwholesome or wholesome, and making sure we're going in the right direction. And once we've engaged in the development of wholesome states, which becomes easy when the unwholesome ones are at bay, then we get to a deeper level of seeing where it's even more effective as a way of letting go.

The most basic and skillful way that we can attend to experience is to see in terms of the Four Noble Truths. So we see: This is suffering. This is the arising of suffering or the conditions that are leading to suffering. This is the cessation of suffering. And this is somehow part of the path that's going to lead to the cessation of suffering.

We can see what aspects of experience are part of the first Noble Truth. Know dukkha. What is dukkha? And then we know that those are to be fully comprehended. And we can see which parts of our experience are the conditions for dukkha. Where's the grasping and the clinging that are conditioning this dukkha? And we can abandon that. And then we can see which parts relate to the path that's toward the ending of dukkha, and we can know that, "Ah, developing this is going to be good for my mind." And we actually do see moments of dukkha ceasing, and we acknowledge and realize those so that they will strengthen, so that they will create momentum for us to continue on the path. And when we start to see in terms of these Four Noble Truths, these four lenses of seeing things instead of in terms of me and what I like and I don't like, a whole new direction can open up, and we can find the path of letting go.

So our job is to do the practices, to see in the terms of the Four Noble Truths, and to cultivate the means of letting go, and then the letting go will take care of itself at some point. Gil was once criticized for telling one person one thing and another person another thing. The student basically said, "You're inconsistent in what you tell people, how is that correct?" And he laughed and said, "I'm like someone who's watching people walk down a road. And if they're going off to the right, then I call out, 'Go left.' And if they're going off to the left, then I call out, 'Go right.'" Those would sound like contradictory instructions if they're taken out of context, but they're each correct for that person's situation.

So it's like that with our practice too. Sometimes we're going left or right. Sometimes we avoid, sometimes we use, sometimes we restrain, sometimes we cultivate. It's good to develop the skill of knowing how to nudge ourselves in the right direction in a given case. And of course, sometimes everything is fine and you don't need to change anything, just live. Just live your life.

And it might be that these seven different methods we talked about this week are not always so distinct. "Which one exactly am I doing?" Don't worry about it. Just be aware that there are different aspects of how we can move toward letting go. So next time you ask, "How can I let go of my anger?" consider that there are a variety of practices to engage in that could lead to that letting go. And we just have to do them with diligence, with goodwill, without grasping to the result. And then someday the Dharma will surprise you with a release. Letting go does happen.

So I hope this week of teachings has given you some sense of the art of letting go and that it will continue to fill and nourish and enrich your life. Thank you. Be well.