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Guided Meditation: Befriending Awareness

Good morning, everyone. It's September 10th. Some people celebrate birthdays on this day. Happy birthday. Some of us wake up in a mood of elation, in softness. Some of us wake up... it was another startling morning for me. So, let us... we need to turn something off here. I can hear it echoing. There we go.

So, let's begin. Now, we're setting aside the time to just be here. A time of quiet stillness, of settling. Find your place. Find the place where you can say, "Here I am. I'm now doing this. I'm sitting. I'm going to devote this time to just being here, experiencing what's happening here."

Having set the intention, take a deep breath. Let it out. Feel your body settling with that breath out. Let your body be loose. Relax your head. Relax your neck. Let the shoulders fall down. Feel that shifting down, sinking in through your arms, through your hands, down through the torso. Whether you're sitting or walking or lying down, feel the muscles as they loosen and settle all the way down to your toes. Feel your whole body just here. And the breath moving in and out.

Perhaps the thinking mind can also feel this relaxing: thoughts coming and going, arising, passing away, here in the room, breathing in and out.

How does the heart center feel today? Is it at peace? Is there sadness? Is there wanting? Is the heart-mind settled or looking outward? No right or wrong. Who is it? What am I feeling? Just be aware. This is coming. This is going. This arises. This passes away. This seems stuck. But the breath keeps going in and out. I can befriend myself here. Just in and out.

As the breath moves in and out, the thoughts come and go. How is my energy? How is my heart space? What am I aware of as things pass in and out? No judgment. Befriend my thoughts. It's worried worry. Where do I feel that worry? Where do I feel that sadness? Do I feel the crinkled forehead, tightness in my belly, or am I reacting to sounds? What's coming up? What's arising? Befriend it and let it go. Hello. Goodbye. The breath goes in and out. Feel it arising and passing away.

What am I aware of in this moment? Am I with the breath, with my thoughts, with the twitches of my body? Renew the intention to be present, to be here, to just be breathing and allow what is true to be true. Thoughts come and go. And I'm still here, aware of what's passing through.

What is the quality of the breath moving in and out? Am I aware of whether it's deep or shallow, quick, slow, easeful, jerky? Am I aware that I know this? Am I aware of the passing thoughts in my mind? If I'm stuck there, what's the quality of thinking? Is it pleasant, unpleasant? Is there a story running? How does that feel? Know that you know, watch it arise and pass away. You can know this. You can befriend the passing.

The breath in and out. Receiving your awareness. Not pushing it. This is what's happening. And this, here in this room, in this space, I'm aware what's happening. Aware of the breath moving in and out. Aware of the body breathing, of the shoulders crept up, with the hands still at rest.

Am I experiencing ease, or am I restless? Is the breath in front or in back of something else in the body? But am I aware of ourselves? An interruption, or just another thing coming and going, arising and passing away. Aware of the transitory state of everything. And watch the passing.

Does the mind have an opinion about all of this? Notice the quality of that opinion. Pleasant, unpleasant, approving, disapproving. Just notice, awareness doesn't have an opinion.

Dharmette: The Truth of Suffering (4 of 5): Disentanglement

Hello again. So this is Maria Straatmann, and this week we've been talking about suffering.

Yesterday we talked about conditions, the preconditions of our minds and the preconditioning that comes from karma. That where we live is what we experience. If we live in a place of ill will, that's what we experience, either now or later. We've looked at how our views and unseen attitudes of mind affect how we experience things, and we've come to understand that they're conditions, most of which we have no control over: the environment, the people that are around us, what they're bringing into the room or into the space or a conversation or into our thoughts, wars, festivals, the weather—all the conditions of our experience that affect how we are reacting.

The trick to being mindful in the midst of it all is not to begin in the midst of it all, but to continue in the midst of it all. So in meditation, we come to see, "Oh, this is what's happening. Oh, this is how I'm meeting this." When we're still enough and not in the midst of too many distractions, we learn about ourselves so that we become conscious of what different moods and attitudes and conditions—how we experience them in our bodies. So that that becomes a clue for us in the rest of the world. And we have that habit of noticing, "Oh, my shoulders are up. Oh, my shoulders are up." Not what's wrong, but "oh, my shoulders are up." And realizing that if they're up, they can also be down. And whatever has caused them to move up is affected by lowering them. We see, we're learning to see.

Today, what we're going to talk about is the process of disentanglement. Somebody made a comment in the comments yesterday that it seemed impossible to be open and vulnerable. I appreciate that feeling. And so what I want to talk about is how do we develop the capacity to stop in the midst of something and say what's happening. So the process is called disentanglement.

Joseph Goldstein wrote this book called Mindfulness^[1], which I think is absolutely wonderful—if it's quite erudite and not easy to get through, I would say—but he devotes about two lines to the process of disentanglement. I mean, the whole book is about disentanglement, that's all of what mindfulness is, but just this statement about disentanglement as being disenchantment, dispassion, and cessation^[2], he devotes two or three lines to. So when he was talking about his book, I asked him if he would expand on that and he was confused. To him, it was such a simple process and so automatic that it didn't seem to him to be remarkable in any way. But we're going to talk about it anyway.

First, we have to discover our own mind habits and how they're manifested in the body. We have to understand anger shows up in my body as tightness in the belly and a huge rush of adrenaline. I feel that rush of adrenaline before my mind consciously says I'm angry. I feel that rush of adrenaline and I'm on alert. And then the mind says, "Anger." That space that I've come to appreciate helps me stop and say what's happening. That's what we're trying to cultivate is the ability to notice. Not because everybody's mindful all the time, but to be able to use our direct experience of what we've learned in our experiences as we move through the day. How do we deal with this? We don't learn this in a moment of reactivity, but we do discover reactivity and we say, "Oh, I know the flavor of this reactivity. Is it appropriate to now or not?"

So the only way to see suffering arising is through our embodied experience. We have to be in touch. We have to be in touch. We have to notice, "I'm walking." Every once in a while notice, "I'm walking. Be aware that I'm walking." So that we can see, "Ah, this is suffering." Something is coming up. It's clearly evident now. Maybe I don't know what it is, but something's happening. And I can feel my reactivity right in the midst of it. So, I'm already reacting.

You know, good and wise people lose their temper, and cruel people aren't cruel all the time. I once went to a conference where the Dalai Lama was talking. It was a big auditorium. There were like 2,000 people there and everybody had the same experience, that he was only talking to them. He just has such amazing presence. And at one point, somebody had asked a question, he responded. And then Robert Thurman^[3]—if you were aware of him, he's no longer with us, but he was a very powerful man and a big speaker, a founder of Tibet House and a professor at Columbia University, but he was one of the Dalai Lama's earliest Western students, so they had a great long-standing relationship. He stands up and he says, "I think what His Holiness really meant to say..." And the Dalai Lama stood up and you could see the anger in his face and he said, "I said exactly what I wanted to say." And then you saw it all leave. Just poof, it was gone.

That moment will never leave me because what it said to me is it doesn't matter if an afflictive emotion arises. What matters is whether you hold on to it. Watched that flame and then it was gone. It was so obvious.

So let's take the word justice. What does the word justice conjure for you? You say the word justice, does it mean a judge in the penal system, or retribution, or equality, or despair, or optimism? The word justice can mean so many things to different people in terms of just the immediate response that you have to the word. Know what your response to the word is. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a response. Know what it is so that you know how you are conditioned.

The response feeling is conditioned by what you think you know, what another family member tells you, what someone you respect tells you. And maybe your response is colored by the fact that you've been criticized or condemned or abused or discriminated against or bullied, or someone in your family has been in the penal system. The response can be seen separate from the story or the justification of that story. It's not controlled by the view imposed by the conditions of the story. It's controlled by seeing, "Ah, you need to pause or momentarily stop whatever it is," just a pause. That gives you space to introduce your intention and to be aware that there's something automatic happening. Just knowing that is so important.

So let's look at resentment. How about resentment? Elements that you might notice about resentment is how it feels in the body. Contraction or sadness or sorrow. The reaction can be generally described as unpleasant. If you notice, "this is unpleasant," that might be enough pause for you to say, "Is this right? Is this what I want to do? Is this what I would do if I could control it? If I knew something about it that I could do?" Notice how you're conditioned by an automatic defensive response. Know what defensiveness feels like in your body, so that you know, "Oh, I'm being defensive here. Do I need to defend myself, or am I simply reacting because I'm afraid, and there's actually not something to be afraid of?" That is, this person isn't actually threatening me, but here I am on alert.

See the suffering when it arises. The goal of this knowing our own sources of reactivity is to see when something is arising: unpleasant, a caving in the heart, or aversion. "Not my fault. It's not my fault." I become on alert when I hear my mind going, "Not my fault." Oh, okay. Defensiveness comes up when I say "not my fault." And so I can feel that happening and ask, "Is that appropriate for this moment?"

This doesn't happen automatically. It's not something you will your mind to. We condition ourselves by knowing our mind habits. By knowing what reactivity feels like, what anger feels like, what resentment feels like. Even if I don't recognize it as resentment, I can notice, "Oh, something's happening here. It's familiar. It's unpleasant. It's like this." Oh, this is what's happening. Without the story, there is a disenchantment. If I can remove myself from the continuing tale about what's going on, I become disenchanted by that tale. I break the hold on me that this story has.

At first, we can't see this. "Of course, I'm resentful. It's not fair." Hear myself yelling, "It's not fair," and say, "What's arising here?" We see the suffering that arises from retelling the story. As soon as we say it's not fair, we start justifying the position it's not fair. We see what's arising and we notice, "Ah, the story is bringing this back." Now I become not only disenchanted, I can feel a shift. I can feel something happening and I experience dispassion. I'm not as emotionally entangled. I'm not as energetically entangled with the story. If I can separate myself briefly from the story, this we call dispassion. And in the face of dispassion, we become uncaught. And what we have is cessation through a falling away. We don't have to let go. It's just when I'm not caught, it falls away from the open hand. I'm no longer clutched around it. This is the process: disenchantment, dispassion, cessation.

Those three words Joseph Goldstein thought were so obvious they didn't need elaboration, because he's very much in the habit of mindfulness. Mindfulness is described in terms of observing the arising and the passing away of phenomena in the body, feelings, mind states, all of it. And mindfulness is the key here. This is why we put so much emphasis on seeing clearly. It is only when we see, "Ah, this mind habit," that we have a path to freedom in the midst of those conditions.

So the practice is to see clearly for even a moment. For even a moment.

I'm going to close with a poem about this by Jane Hirshfield^[4] called "The Promise".

Mysteriously they entered those few minutes. Mysteriously they left as if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart, who was always sleepless, suddenly slept. It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that, only a stepping back from the petty. I gazed at the range of blue mountains. I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank. Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted. Even the greedy direction, even the grieving trusted, there was nothing left to be saved from. Bliss nor danger. The dog's tail wagged a little in his dream.

It's not the big insight, life-changing thing that makes a difference. It's the daily, every moment noticing the small, "this is what's happening."

Trust it. Learn to trust you. May all your moments be seen clearly, as clearly as possible. Thank you.