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Guided Meditation: Meditating in Truth

It feels wonderful to be here with all of you, even though it's this unusual world of not being in person. But still, I have a strong sense in my heart of all of you—many of you who are participating here in our Zoom practice. Thank you for being here for this meditation today.

I'd like to evoke the concept, the practice, the virtue of truth—of truth-telling. It is said that there are all kinds of reasons why people think it's okay to do small lies, white lies, lies to save people's face, or little ones as a way of taking care of people. Maybe that's true. I don't want to engage in that now. But what is never true is that it's okay to lie to oneself.

If you want to grow in the dharma, if you want to grow in this mindfulness practice, then never lie to yourself. Always be truthful to yourself. And so we sit in meditation to support that ability, to develop the capacity to sit in truth, sit truthfully, to recognize it, to recognize when we're veering from it, and to sit in the truth of the moment.

And maybe that expression, "sitting in the truth of the moment," has two wonderful meanings. It means to sit in the middle of it—not reacting to it, not turning away from it. And to really be there in the middle, just there. Sit in the middle of truth.

So here we are to sit in whatever posture that works for you to meditate. Assume your posture, give some initial care to the posture you're in. Maybe some wiggling around, twisting, and swaying supports you to be here in this body of yours. And then, gently close your eyes.

With the truth of this moment, the truth of here and now, in the immediacy of what you're experiencing now in your body, what's immediately around you within a foot from the edges of your body, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. This encourages the mind to remember that in meditation, this is the meditation center: your body here and now. Make physical contact with the truth of this body of yours.

As you exhale, release and relax the concerns you have, the tensions you hold. Then, letting your breathing return to normal, and with normal enough breathing as you exhale, relax into the truth of this moment, the truth of your physical, embodied experience. Relaxing the muscles of your face, relaxing the shoulders, and relaxing the belly.

Then, center yourself from the body's experience of breathing—not to avoid anything, but to sit in the middle of it. Be in the middle of the truth of this moment. Let the breathing be at the center.

When your mind wanders off in thought and you find yourself distracted, ask yourself, "What's really true? What's the truth of this moment that's deeper than your thoughts, your distractions?" Or, "Is there a deeper truth that's underneath them or behind them?" If you recognize that truth, you might find it easier to settle into being here and now, breathing in the middle of all things, allowing yourself to be simple, just breathing.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, consider that when we're truthful, when we're true to ourselves, we actually have more to offer others. It's a position, a resting place, with which to gaze upon the world kindly and supportively, and compassionately feel and sense the challenges of other people. And to perhaps live with the wish that all beings could be well. That all beings could find joy and peace in their own truth, being truthful to themselves, being honest.

May it be that all beings be happy. All beings be safe. All beings be peaceful, and all beings be free. And may we contribute to that, supported by our capacity to be truthful.

Speaking as a Gift

For this dharma talk, I'd like to begin with a story. It seemed that there was a young woman who very much wanted to meditate. She'd been introduced to meditation in college, but college was a busy time, especially the last couple of years with coursework and all the other things of college. She looked forward to a time when she could finish college and she really wanted to live a dharma life. She was hoping to go live perhaps in a monastery, or live at a retreat center someplace where she could really devote herself full-time to the dharma and integrate all of the practice into her life—not just meditation, but a life integrated with the path of liberation, the path of freedom, the path of love.

But soon after she graduated, her older sister and her older sister's husband were in an accident and died. Her own parents were quite elderly and needed a lot of care, so she was left as the sole caretaker for her sister's two children. Her plans to be able to go off and live this integrated dharma life didn't work out so well. She found herself caring for two kids, needing to care for her parents, needing to work long hours in order just to have the finances to do all this. There was no time even for meditation, let alone thinking about or engaging in an integrated dharma life.

She went and found a meditation teacher, told the teacher about her problems and her challenges, and asked what she could do. The teacher said to her, "If you don't have time for meditation and you want to live an integrated dharma life, your life integrated with practice, then what you can do is have the practice of making sure that your words, when you speak, are gifts. Practice generosity in your speech. Whatever you say, think about how it can be a gift to the person you're speaking to."

So that's what she did, and she learned a lot about herself in that process. She learned how often she was speaking not as a form of generosity, but as expressions of anger, spite, fear, anxiety, or desire and wanting something—trying to get someone to behave just right so that she could get what she wanted. She got to see so much about what was operating and driving her. She wasn't told just to look at that, but that's what came up. And then she had to work through that, adjust for it, and find another way to come from a different place, and to have her words be gifts arising out of generosity.

Generosity can't be an obligation. It can't be forced. It's a kind of upwelling of goodness in the heart. She found that in practicing letting her words be a gift, she slowly learned how to do that, and over time it really transformed her. She grew in amazing ways. She grew in freedom, she grew in love, she grew in understanding and wisdom in a way that made her life integrated with the dharma.

So, are your words gifts? Could they be gifts for others? Could there be generosity practiced in what you say? This begins, maybe, by understanding what motivates you for what you're saying. What underlies or drives you to say what you say? Is it generosity, or is it something else? Is it kindness, care, and respect for others, or something else? What is being expressed through those words, and what would it take for your words to be gifts?

What are the gifts that people would like to receive through words? Could you say all the things that you need to say, but do it in a way that seems pleasant for other people to hear, that feels right for other people to hear, that maybe helps people relax, or open, or trust you in some deep way? How do you take care of yourself socially and interactively with others if your speech is always going to have this quality of generosity in it—this goodness, this gift-ness in the words themselves?

That's maybe not an easy task, but it's a phenomenal task. If some of you would like to really take your meditation practice and learn how to integrate it or expand what's happening in meditation into the rest of your life—so meditation is not just a refuge or relief from your life, but rather it's the source from which you live your life—and if you want to grow into your life with a sense of freedom, integrity, openness, truthfulness, love, and sensitivity that comes from meditation, if you want to spread that into your life so that your life is integrated with this, then practice generosity in speaking.

Do it as an exercise. Do it as a way of learning about yourself. Do it as a way of stretching yourself. Do it as a way of understanding other people better, to be attuned to them rather than just attuned to yourself. Be better attuned to other people and attuned to care for them, but not at your own expense, because you want to stay rooted in generosity. You can't sacrifice yourself because you have to really be available for yourself for this upwelling of this beautiful quality to be there. If you diminish yourself, forget yourself, or sacrifice yourself too much for others, maybe that generosity is not really available.

So, to practice generosity as a practice to learn about yourself, to learn about others, to learn about how to relate to other people. I'm confident that if your speech is generous to others, you might actually be benefiting more than the other people. We all benefit from our own generosity when that generosity comes with this upwelling of the heart, this freedom of the heart, this loosening up of the constrictions, the fear, the defensiveness, the resentments, the ambitions that get in the way of simple, ordinary generosity.

You might argue with me that this is maybe not such a profound spiritual thing to do, or maybe a little bit of a sentimental way of practicing, or some artificial way of practicing. And that's far from what I intend to get across. Rather, it's a vehicle. It's a means by which to really get deep into our hearts and minds to understand it, to find out what really makes us tick, to question it, and maybe even debate it with yourself and really find out: Are you really coming from the best place, the most nourishing, the most healthy place for you when you speak? If you learn to speak with generosity, you'll come from the best place. I'm confident in that. You'll come from a place that will help you to grow into phenomenal health, freedom, wisdom, and understanding. So, to speak with generosity.

When the Buddha taught about speech, he had a list of five criteria for speaking. Generosity is not one of them, but maybe all five of these are the means or the support to help us understand how to speak generously and as a gift. What they point to is that, for the Buddha, a Buddhist life, a practice life, is also a reflective life. It's a life that reflects and considers what it's doing. It doesn't just act impulsively or intuitively, but there's a consideration. That consideration can be second nature; it doesn't have to be a lot of work. But sometimes it's completely appropriate to actually step back and go through these five criteria for speaking.

The first one is the question: Is what I'm going to say now, what I want to say, timely? Is it the right time for me? Is it the right time for the other person? Is it the right time to have the conversation? It might be something very important that needs to be talked about, but it's not the time for it. Someone is stressed out, they're busy, they're doing something else, they can't focus. Their mood is not really available for a real conversation about what needs to be talked about. At a different time, they're more receptive, they're more ready and available. So is it timely? When we ask the question, "Is it timely?", you take into account the circumstance of the other person. Is it timely for them, and would it be better to wait until it's the right time?

The second is: Is it true? Is what I'm going to say truthful? And here's where it's so useful to be true to oneself, to be honest with oneself, and to grow in this self-honesty, self-truth. Truthfulness in itself, but self-truth, self-honesty in particular, is a guaranteed way to grow spiritually. It's a guaranteed way to grow on this path of liberation and freedom. Stepping back and being really honest: "This is what's happening. This is what's going on." And not just with the first thing you see, but to keep looking: "What's really going on here? What's happening here with me? What's really true here?" It's a way of healing to do so. It's a way of creating healthy relationships to really stay close to what's true. Sometimes what's true is not the right time to speak it to other people, but it's always the right time to know it for yourself. So, consider: Is what I'm saying true? Probably most people don't lie automatically, but is it a lie? Is it a falsehood? Am I twisting it a little bit? Am I adjusting what I'm saying so it's mostly true, but I'm putting a little spin on it in order to make it look better or something? Is it true?

The third is: How I'm going to speak, is it gentle? "Gentle" might mean: Is it harmonious? Is it with a tone of voice that is friendly, that people want to hear, a voice that's supportive for others? As opposed to a voice which is harsh, that comes across as kind of critical, or angry, or demanding. So, is what I'm going to say, am I going to say it gentle, or is it harsh?

The fourth is: Is it beneficial? Is what I'm going to say going to be beneficial? Does it have a good purpose? Part of that also is that maybe you'll say, "Yes, it's beneficial because of what my purpose is for it," however, you don't think the person is going to be receptive. So yes, I hope it could be beneficial, but in fact, when I realize a person is not receptive, I'm just going to waste my energy to keep saying this to the person over and over again. If it's not going to be beneficial to say it, even though in theory it should be, maybe there's no point in saying it. And actually, maybe it makes it worse if the person is closed to hearing what I want to talk about. "Is it beneficial?" has other connotations and associations as well. Is it going to have a good impact on people? Is it going to have a good consequence if I say this? Maybe I feel it's the truth, maybe I feel like I can say it gently, but maybe the person will get angry. Maybe the person will not want to talk with me anymore, and so the doors are closed. And that's maybe not beneficial, to have that kind of reaction. So, is it beneficial that people learn from it? Do people change in a beneficial way because of how we speak, what we're saying? Is it beneficial?

There's a lot of speech which is not particularly beneficial. Yesterday, I was at a public talk, and I kind of thought that the talk wasn't a very good talk, to put it simply. I found it so strange that I had this inner compulsion to want to tell my companions, "You know, that wasn't a good talk, was it?" And I look at myself and say, "Why would I want to say that? Why bother? Is it beneficial to say that?" Maybe it's true that the talk wasn't particularly good, but why would I say that out loud? Maybe another approach I can have is to talk about what the person talked about, and maybe I can highlight what was beneficial. Maybe there was something beneficial in what the person talked about, and then we can all benefit from the conversation. If we spend time talking about how it was not a good talk, do we benefit from that?

So, is it timely? Is it true? Is what I'm going to say gentle? Is it beneficial? And the last one is: Do I speak with a mind of loving-kindness? A mind of care, a mind of friendliness. Sometimes there are difficult conversations to be made, but can I do that with a mind of kindness, of kind regard or friendly regard for self and others? In the teachings of the Buddha, this has a very high value. He puts tremendous importance on this idea of coming from a kind, loving space, coming from mettā^[1].

My assumption and my understanding of why the Buddha puts such a high level of importance on coming from loving-kindness is that the alternative, more often than not, is to come from a place that's not beneficial, to come from a place maybe of ill will. It is to come from a place where there's not much freedom. Goodwill, mettā, when it's really genuine, when it's this upwelling of the heart, when it's healthy and nourishing, it is an expression of freedom. It comes from the letting go of attachments and clinging. We're no longer contracted around something or tight around something, and so there's this idea of opening to the world. Anything less than that goes in the opposite direction to this wonderful dharma path, the dharma path of freedom.

If what a person wants is to really take what they're learning in meditation about themselves and their capacity for freedom, for peace, for ease, for love—finding it here in meditation—and they want to not leave it as something they do only in meditation but to learn how to bring that into their life so that they live that... because maybe that's where real honesty, real integrity, real being true to yourself really resides, in this place of being free. And to bring it into life, this is one of the great satisfying tasks. Certainly, for me as a teacher, this is what I love to hear, that this is what people want to do, is to integrate it or bring it into the whole of their life.

So today, I'm suggesting that one way to do that is to practice generosity with your speech. Have your words be gifts to the people you speak them to. And learn how to do it in a timely way, speak what's true, speak in a gentle or caring way, speak with what's beneficial, and speak with a mind of loving-kindness, a heart of loving-kindness. And in doing that, especially the beneficial one, there's a feedback loop that we'll constantly want to use to reassess and see: How was that gift received? Was that a useful way to do it?

Perhaps it takes a while to learn how to be generous in speech so that it feels authentic for ourselves and is not too contrived, so that it doesn't make other people actually uncomfortable because there's just too much trying to be generous. How to make it natural and simple, so that when we speak, maybe we help people smile. We help people readjust the direction in which their mind and heart is going—from talking about how a public talk was not such a good thing, and kind of commiserating with each other ("Oh, that wasn't so good"), versus talking about something that was beneficial, that is a spark of joy and delight, and we benefit from talking about it. How can we spread joy and delight and benefit, and grow in the dharma?

One of the great ways to grow in the dharma is to be truthful. Maybe there's very little growth in the dharma without truth, that being true and honest to oneself.

So those are my thoughts this day, and I hope that it gives you some suggestions on how to practice in your life. I hope that you benefit from it, and maybe run it as an experiment for a week and see what you learn in the process of practicing generosity in speech.

Thank you very, very much.