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Guided Meditation: The Importance of Pleasure

Hello everyone. Welcome to this meditation session.

I'd like to start with an introduction, but the introduction will be a bit of a rhetorical device. I say that to you because maybe rhetorical devices should have a warning in front of them: this way of talking may be hazardous for your habits, or maybe hazardous if you overdo them.

An important part of meditation is to enjoy it, to find pleasure. For this meditation, I would like to give you some guidance, some instruction if you'd like to take it on, actually enjoying your meditation and finding pleasure. One of the places in the beginning to find pleasure is to find whatever pleasure there might be in relaxing.

Part of the reason to use pleasure is, in fact, to break our habits. Some of us have habits of a negativity bias: a habit toward thinking about what's terrible and what doesn't work; a habit to orient ourselves around the problems of life, the problems we have now, how we're not doing well, and how difficult it is. It's certainly reasonable to have those thoughts occasionally, and if you never have those thoughts, maybe that's not healthy either. But for today, let's try to break those habits by focusing on what's pleasant.

Don't chase pleasure, and don't have a high standard for what it means. Even the absence of something uncomfortable you had in the past can be a kind of pleasure. So maybe that's good enough.

Assuming a pleasant posture. Not the most pleasant posture you can take, but a pleasant posture for meditation. The most pleasant posture you can find where the body itself expresses being alert and aware.

Then, to close your eyes. Or, if you don't want to close them, let your eyes be relaxed and looking down.

Then, look for how to make it pleasant, so that you really enjoy doing this, doing it in your way. Take a few deeper breaths, maybe slowly. Let the exhale be slow enough to enjoy it, to the extent it feels nice.

As you take deeper breaths, adjust it so it remains enjoyable. And as you exhale, relax your body. Look for where the relaxing is pleasant and enjoyable, even to the most minor degree.

Then, letting your breath return to normal. Even thinking of normal breathing as occurring within a range.

As we breathe in, if you can, look for how to breathe the normal inhale that you enjoy, that has some pleasure to it. Maybe only a small piece of the journey of inhaling—the beginning, the end, or the middle.

And also seeing, is there anywhere in the exhale that you can enjoy? That there's pleasure? Maybe it's the very, very beginning of the exhale. Or there's a smooth feeling in the middle. Or maybe at the end.

Maybe some of the pleasure of breathing, very, very subtly, is that just before you breathe in, it's slightly uncomfortable. There's a desire to breathe in, and it feels good to begin breathing in. And the same as you breathe out. The very beginning might feel like, "Oh, this is good to begin."

As you breathe in and breathe out, is there any pleasure more widely in your body that is kind of the atmosphere or the weather around your breathing? In how you are, in the weather of your body, are there ways you can relax the body more as you exhale? Maybe enjoying the effect of relaxing.

Part of the function of feeling pleasure and enjoyment while you meditate is so that you can be more in the present moment, where enjoyment occurs. The embodied pleasure or enjoyment, right here and now.

And then, to enjoy relaxing the thinking mind. Maybe on the exhale, softening and quieting the mind. And maybe there is some enjoyment or pleasure found in the mind, if you're aware of the spaciousness around your thoughts. The softness beyond the edges of your concerns.

As you're being aware, especially aware of your breathing, maybe it can be more pleasant to shift where you're aware from. If you're aware from the front of your brain, be aware of breathing from the back. Or be aware from within breathing itself.

Letting the thinking mind become quieter for the purpose of better sensing, taking in, and registering whatever is pleasant, here and now, in your body with your breathing. In the quieting of the mind, allow yourself to feel whatever pleasure is here.

If your body is beginning to ache or hurt, you might shift your posture. Trust and assume it's okay to take in whatever degree of pleasure there is here. A pleasure which supports you being present in a quiet way.

Ever so gently, slightly turn up the corners of your mouth to a small half-smile. And if there's any pleasure from doing that, include that pleasure as part of mindfulness of breathing.

Then, coming to the end of the sitting. Feeling or imagining what it's like to be with yourself when the body has a degree of ease and enjoyment within it.

Then imagine how you would walk around your home, informed by that ease or that enjoyment. How would you do ordinary household chores if you had all the time in the world, and you did them informed by ease and pleasure? Staying close to it, not in a hurry to get the job over with, but as a vehicle for continuing to feel the pleasure.

If you're sitting in a comfortable chair, feeling this pleasure and enjoyment, and you're talking with a friend—if you talked resting in this ease or this pleasure, how would you talk?

There's a Native American expression: "To walk in beauty." How would you live in beauty? How does it support you to live in beauty, to have this reference point of a sense of pleasure and enjoyment in your body?

How might you care for the welfare and happiness of others, if you cared in beauty? If you cared informed by your sense of inner physical ease and pleasure?

How might your heart wish well for others? May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Hindrances and Assistances (4 of 5) Restlessness vs Pleasure

Good morning, good day.

We're looking at the strategies for how we live our lives, the strategies for how to be with challenges. There are healthy strategies and not-so-healthy strategies. I'm using the example of the Five Hindrances^[1] for the not-so-healthy strategies, and the opposite of those hindrances for healthy strategies. Part of the significance of taking this point of view of strategies is that if we take the time to stop and ask ourselves the question, "What is my strategy here? What is my approach? How am I trying to get what I want? How am I trying to take care of myself here?" just that pause and asking that question will maybe get you to see more clearly what you're doing habitually, unconsciously, or unreflectively.

Many times when there are challenges, and if we're a little bit stressed in it or very stressed, sometimes we're responding from a gut reaction, an instinctual reaction, or a neurotic reaction that we might have. We're so involved in that reaction that we don't even know it. It's very easy to lose ourselves, lose our wisdom, our clarity, and really lose track of what's going on. Then we say things we later regret, or we run around in circles. Simply pausing, checking, and asking this question is very significant. Then we can answer that question for ourselves and say, "Well, maybe that's not the best way. Let's see if there's a better way."

The hindrance of today is usually translated as restlessness and remorse. Restlessness is a kind of agitation that can be very compelling. It can come with a lot of anxiety and stress, or out of a force and power to keep us in its grip. It often arises out of something we're thinking about. Maybe we're having thoughts that are predicting danger, or thoughts that are challenging. How we relate to those thoughts is where the power of restlessness arises, and remorse too.

That's because we squeeze the thoughts. We get close in; we become claustrophobic around them. Squeezing them keeps them going and keeps them flowing. Remorse is the same way. The word remorse in Latin means "to chew again." This rumination is chewing again and again over what we've done, what we regret, and what we feel bad about. Again, the thinking has gotten close, constricted, or tight in a way that feels uncomfortable. That discomfort and how we think around these thoughts is part of the fuel that generates more restlessness and more remorse.

When we do things while restless or filled with remorse, we tend not to do them in beauty. It's not a source of working from pleasure; it's very uncomfortable. Restlessness is not a good strategy for dealing with challenges. It's almost like avoiding them. It's like running around in circles, being trapped, not knowing what to do, and spinning out. It's almost like the absence of a response. Or, if we do respond, it's confused, impulsive, or not really attentive to what's happening. If we get lost in remorse, we tend to shut down from a fuller picture of ourselves. Our whole definition of ourselves becomes defined by what we're remorseful about. There's a narrowing, and we don't have access again to pleasure or to a sense of the beauty of what to do.

The other way of responding, that's healthy, is to see things this way: when there's restlessness and when there's remorse, there's a kind of energy or a way that we're animated where the energy for the activity in the body is off. It doesn't feel pleasant or enjoyable. It's tight, hard, or constricted, or has pressure behind it—maybe pressure in certain parts of the body.

There's a whole other way of being animated, a whole other way of where the energy comes from. This energy is not agitated or restless; it is not constricted and tight like when we have remorse. That is a kind of energy where we are not caught by the thoughts. We're not squeezing them. We let go of the squeezing, the preoccupation, and the attachment to thoughts. The animation comes from some place inside that feels wholesome, that feels like a home within us. It comes from some place inside that has a pleasantness to it, a kind of pleasure, a kind of beauty, a kind of ease.

Restlessness and remorse are often very much in the head, in the thoughts and the ideas. Sometimes restlessness can be purely physical, but then maybe it's not the hindrance of restlessness; it might just be feeling over-activated. But there is another source for something very profound about ourselves. There's another source for how we're animated—where our vitality comes from. So rather than being activated by reactivity, we are supported by a flow of vitality.

We're supported by an upwelling of something that feels good. Even if we're taking care of something very challenging, a huge challenge that is painful and doesn't give us a sense of pleasure, the source of the energy, the animation, where we're coming from comes from a place of home. It comes from a place of beauty. It comes from a place of, maybe we could call it pleasant or enjoyable. We don't sacrifice that to take care of things that are terrible in the world. When things are horrible in the world, if we pause to see where we're coming from inside, we can say, "Maybe I can shift from the agitated, squeezing, tightening, tense place of restlessness and remorse, and come from a place of flow, a place of upwelling, a place of inspiration."

Instead of getting caught in remorse when we've done something we regret or feel bad about, the Buddhist approach is to learn from that. Instead of remorse, we re-engage and go forward dedicated to doing better. If we identify with something, we identify with the one who is trying to do better, not the one who did something that was not good.

One of the functions of meditation is not just to make us calm, but to make us more and more familiar with a place inside that sometimes can feel like there's a lot of joy. It sometimes can feel very peaceful and at a home. Sometimes it can feel like there's beauty there inside, something that feels really right—an at-homeness from which animating energy can flow out. We're not passive from that place, but the source of motivation from that place is very different from the source of motivation when we're squeezed, when we're tense, when we're tight, when we're restless, and filled with remorse.

As we learn to meditate, the idea is to begin appreciating this alternative source of how we can be animated. We learn not to sacrifice it for the strong messages we get from our anxiety, our restlessness, our remorse, or our regrets. The strong messages we get from the pain that comes from the second, third, and fourth arrows^[2] we shoot at ourselves just make things even more difficult. We get trapped. Some restlessness arises because we feel trapped by all these arrows we're shooting. So, take time to pause and ask ourselves, "What's the strategy here? Where's my source of activation, source of energy, and vitality coming from? Am I activated—in a not healthy way, triggered—or am I inspired? Is it flowing for me? Am I responding from some depth inside?" Pause to ask that question.

If we've been meditating for a while and doing the kind of foundational practices that I'm talking about these weeks regarding how to work with challenges, maybe it's reasonable to begin asking that question and switching over to being that way that's beautiful. Being that way that maybe is closer to the place of pleasure, enjoyment, or at-homeness that we have here. This human life of ours is very important, and it's well worth and appropriate for us to begin discovering a different place from which we're animated—the different source within from which we live, the healthy place. To be able to distinguish that from the unhealthy places from which we respond and react to the world.

The world is a better place if you can come from this deeper source. Come from a place of beauty, and come from a place of ease and at-homeness. It's not selfish to do this; it's actually a contribution to the world. We don't contribute to the world by worrying. We don't contribute to the world by being angry and hostile. We don't contribute to the world by diminishing our value, by living under the weight of, "I'm a terrible person." We contribute to the world by putting all that aside enough to see if we can find that very natural place within. It's our nature to have this upwelling source deep inside that has a flow to it, has a joy to it, has a pleasure to it.

Whatever pleasure we can feel is healing. If you are going through a big challenge, pause. If your situation allows for it, go and do something enjoyable. Don't stay in the middle of the challenge and feel trapped or feel like it's just spinning out more and more. If you've been in a challenging place psychologically or emotionally for some time, go find something to do that's pleasant. Go find someone's pet that you can pet, or go do something that brings you a sense of pleasure. Do an activity that brings you pleasure, whether it be cleaning, cooking, or going for a walk. Pleasure is one of the great medicines. It can be one of the great escapes and avoidance mechanisms, and that's what the pleasure of addiction does. But hopefully, it's not that kind of pleasure. You find healthy pleasures that you can do. When you feel over-challenged by situations, try not to stay stuck. Try to engage your vitality, your energy, your capacity to do things, to go find healthy pleasures, and then come back and address the challenge from a different place.

Thank you. I hope that today you can spend some time exploring where you're at, where your vitality is flowing from, how you're animated, and if it is coming from a healthy place or not such an inspiring place. Thank you.