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Guided Meditation: Between Suppression and Entanglement

So welcome. Welcome all. It's nice to see the morning greetings over on the chat stream, and I'm happy to again be with you. We'll settle in and practice together.

Finding a posture that feels sustainable.

And maybe I was a little premature in the whole silence and stillness thing. If you need to check which friends are here, go ahead, check the chat. Forget about that whole silence and stillness thing. I see Stinson Beach is in the house. Boise. Yeah, welcome. Welcome to all of you.

Just sensing the presence of others. The jewel of Sangha^[1].

Just softening your face. We wear the self on the face. In other words, a certain kind of self-consciousness creates tension in our face. Relaxing all of that tension, relaxing self-consciousness, relaxing the grip of self.

Relaxing the shoulders, your belly, hands.

We sit undefended. But there's a deep dignity in being undefended.

The game of fixing, optimizing this moment. Shoring up our resources. Maybe it feels safe enough to put all of that down. To rest in the goodwill of Sangha, the goodwill of Buddha Dhamma^[2]. To truly make peace with this moment.

We just keep blessing experience with awareness, love.

Non-equanimity arises as a kind of density, friction. And it's as if the awareness gets blown into that solidity. Everything becoming less dense, more like space. Giving up all our fights.

Wherever the story or narratives of time, of our autobiography, the story of this meditation—as that accumulates and we notice, and we just breathe awareness into all of it.

Somewhere between suppression and entanglement.

Equanimity (2 of 5): Safety and Compulsive Hypothesis-Testing

So, welcome. I'm always struck; you can kind of say welcome before sitting, but then the welcome after sitting feels like a true welcome. So I'm happy to be with you and be continuing this exploration around equanimity.

It's said that all of biology is evolutionary biology. We humans, we don't just come from animals. Sometimes we say that we come from animals. Let you in on a little secret: we are animals. And sometimes I think that the word human, the name human, maybe that's just like another vanity of our species.

I say this because if we forget that we're animals, we start to maybe hate parts of ourselves. And when we hate parts of ourselves, we can't really train ourselves. We can't really learn. It's harder to train ourselves when we have this kind of moralistic idea of what it is to be human. One element of equanimity is becoming non-moralistic about experience.

I've always remembered a teacher sharing that one of the honorific names for the Buddha was "the unexcelled trainer of the animal within the human." This path of practice is very much about our status as animals, embodied, and the vulnerability of that.

In neuroscience, there's a model of the brain as basically a hypothesis-testing organ. You make a hypothesis, you do the experiment, you get the data, you revise the view. This idea of the brain as a prediction machine, as a hypothesis-testing organ, is different from the normal stimulus-response: there's a sound, I have a response. In this way of thinking, this approach, we're not really reflecting the world as it is. It's more like we're testing hypotheses about now based on what happens next. Like we're constantly generating and testing predictions and then adjusting based on the feedback. And so in a way, our very sense of now, of what's happening now, depends on what happens next.

To make it concrete: is this sensation in my knee just a harmless ache or a sign of tissue damage, of injury? Well, I have to see what's next. Make a hypothesis, see what's next. From this perspective, perception is a process of optimizing beliefs about the causes of my knee sensations.

The driving concern in all of this—the knee sensation or the sound—the driving concern in all of this as animals is safety, protection. A very innocent longing.

The scientist Kay Tye^[3] made this kind of offhand comment. She said, Fear has an authoritarian command over the rest of the brain. Yeah, fear has an authoritarian command over the rest of the brain. This longing to be protected, to be safe. And this way in which we're figuring out the present based on what happens next, making predictions, testing them, gathering the data, revising, minimizing our errors.

So maybe you have a question, like, Why am I talking about this? Well, I'm talking about it because it gives us an actual sense of the power and the gravitational pull of the future. So we say, Just relax into the present, or the shirt that says Be present, and it sounds simple. But it's actually quite radical to be present. It's an act of letting go to really be present. Because in some sense, to be present is to be open to that vulnerability, to our mortality, to be undefended against the future. To begin to put down some of this habit of generating hypotheses about the next moment, the next moment.

We don't always recognize that to be open to the present moment is like a profoundly unguarded state. There's a dignity in it and a power and, as we'll see, a safety in it, but it is a profoundly unguarded state.

In this mix, as we're trying to ensure our safety, as we're modeling our inner world trying to understand, What does this mean inside me? What does this sensation mean? What does that mean? In all of this, maybe the most important signal that has the most salience is something like pain. Something unexpected, something unpleasant. And so we get very preoccupied with pain, because it seems to mean a lot, and it gets us moving into this mode of hypothesizing, checking this moment against the next moment.

All of this is to say that equanimity is vital if we're to step out of this loop of preoccupation with the next moment. For the heart not to be spun by pain, for us not to over-interpret pain. Often, pain just means too much to us; we over-interpret it. Because we're animals, because we're patrolling our borders, because we are surveilling to see, Is everything okay?

And so even little pains, little bits of dukkha^[4], feel—as I was saying yesterday—like these freak accidents rather than just woven into the fabric of our universe, the fabric of our biology. And so we become so vigilant.

Equanimity with pain creates a deeper sense of safety. We're not tracking threats in the same way. Our vigilance starts to let down, the belly gets soft, experience feels less dense, and we settle into the moment in a more profound way, a way that feels nourishing.

The waves of pain or discomfort, the signals of threat rise up. The contraction or the pressures, the tingling, the sharpness, the dullness—all of this rises up. And then that itself brings on a kind of cascade of emotion. And then the mind goes scrambling: What is this? What do I do? What can I do? What does this mean about now? What does this mean about me? What does this mean about the trajectory of my life? And we just bring it all down into the present moment with this equanimous heart.

Even small pains can create a sense of desperation when we really look. Just this itch on my face, we can sense that it builds into a certain kind of desperation. And so we stay. We feel our way through it. We keep our chest open. We breathe. We breathe into it. We rest in the Triple Gem^[5]. We have confidence in this Buddhist path and we open to the whole body.

As the momentum of equanimity builds, this makes us less afraid, less preoccupied with the future, and we start to settle into the present moment. A moment that doesn't feel sandwiched between past and future. Some kinds of present feel sandwiched: Here's where we are, and this is coming next. As we develop equanimity, we don't feel sandwiched in that way. We drop into a deeper kind of presence. Totally exposed, but the equanimity creating a sense of refuge.

So I offer this for your consideration. And it's good to think of you out there in all the places, and I look forward to being together tomorrow continuing the theme. So, thank you all.