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Guided Meditation: Interest

Good morning. Welcome to our meditation.

One of the areas we navigate when we meditate is our interests—both intentional interests and unintentional ones. A big part of the terrain of mindfulness meditation is navigating the mind's interests when they're different than our own. If you're distracted about something that happened long ago, your mind is interested in long ago. If it's planning the future, your mind is interested in planning the future. If it's in the present, maybe something troubles you. Even if you want to be interested in your breathing or in the meditation, your mind keeps going into your troubles.

Part of meditation is to start becoming disinterested in some things, and to value the process of becoming disinterested. I do appreciate that this is almost like a natural process. As we get more centered, focused, comfortable, and delighted with meditating, then naturally the interest will go towards the goodness of meditation, and we will become less interested in other things.

If the meditation is difficult, then it's a little bit more difficult to become disinterested, as other things have more interest than meditation. But as we become wiser in practice, wisdom guides our interest. Wisdom has some sense of the significance and value of becoming disinterested in some things.

In this natural process of becoming more and more disinterested in things which don't serve us, we become stronger. Wisdom teaches us that even though meditation is difficult, even though there are challenges, it's really wise and good to be interested, to be present with these experiences. One way of understanding all this is navigating interest.

For this meditation, I'd like to suggest another distinction. We can have troubles in our lives, or troubles within ourselves, and then we can be troubled by it. I can be troubled by a car. One of my troubles might be a car that needs to be repaired. That's just a trouble, an issue or topic that has to be addressed. But I can be troubled by it—I can feel stressed by it, I can feel afraid, I can feel preoccupied, I can feel angry. There are all kinds of ways in which I feel troubled by it.

One of the things to become disinterested in is how we feel troubled. We might be troubled by what goes on inside of ourselves—our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our judgments about ourselves. But the thoughts are one thing; being troubled by them is something else. To sit and meditate is to lose interest in how we feel troubled. We can still be aware of it, mindful of it, but not invest energy, belief, authority, or importance in this feeling of feeling troubled. If we invest in it, it gets stronger and persists.

Learning to become less and less interested in the feeling of being troubled, and more interested in our experience as it is, in the simplicity of what it is, is one of the ways in which this meditation can deepen.

Assuming a meditation posture, gently close your eyes.

Maybe you're troubled by what I said, and there are a lot of thoughts, feelings, and reactions. You're welcome to those. I certainly don't want to take those away from you without you choosing to do so for yourself. But if you recognize whatever troubles you at this moment—the subjective experience of feeling troubled—maybe you can switch your interest and your orientation so that feeling doesn't influence how you bring attention now to your body breathing.

So your interest now goes into how your body is experiencing breathing at this moment. Every day we breathe slightly differently. Relaxing, being interested in how you can relax your body and your mind. Softening.

Letting go of any thinking that takes you away from the present moment, takes you away from mindfully breathing. And if there is any gentle, quiet thinking that guides you to staying with your breathing and staying in the present, let those thoughts encourage a greater quieting and settling. You don't have to let go of those thoughts.

Might it be alright to lose interest in your distracting thoughts?

What is your mind interested in? What desires might be behind those interests?

Is there a way of letting go of interest in your desires, so you're more fully present here?

And as we come to the end of the sitting, turn your interest outwards to the world around you. To the people who are nearest to you, wherever you're meditating. Maybe someone else meditating with you, someone else in the house, or a neighbor. And outward, beyond, to the city, the county, the province in which you're in. To colleagues, coworkers, out across the lands.

To be interested, but in a particular way. To be interested in their welfare and their well-being. To be interested with kindness and respect. And is there something about having meditated for half an hour, being maybe a little more calm or settled, that allows your respect and kindness for others to be more embodied, emotionally fuller? Not a casual impulse of the moment, but something that's embodied within.

And this interest in kindness, care, and welfare—perhaps in your own mind, silently, you can repeat these words as a way of giving voice to what's within, giving voice so it spreads out across the lands:

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may my care and kindness for others stay with me as I go through the day.

Dharmette: Insight Pentad (2 of 5) Disenchantment

So here we are, the second day of this series on the insight pentad.

These pentads—last week the gladness pentad, and this week the insight pentad—are descriptions of a natural unfolding in Buddhist practice and meditation. First, there's the idea that we don't have to always be in the driver's seat of our meditation, always controlling it, making it happen, measuring it, and riding close and tight. There's a time and place where we want to allow a natural process to unfold.

That unfolds better if we start giving up control and allow something to happen. But that giving up of control and allowing happens best when there's already some centeredness in the present moment, a momentum of being focused here at present. Then, there's very little tendency to get distracted, and a lot of interest in being really connected to our experience, connected to the breathing. If this momentum of being present exists within us, then by letting go and giving up control, we're letting go into that momentum, and something can begin happening. But without some opening and allowing, there's no room for it to happen if we're always trying to operate from our control and desires.

With time, as we settle in, there's insight. We see something really clearly. Exactly what we see varies from person to person. Classically, one of the key things to see is how changing our experience is moment by moment, and how we can't hold on to it; we just allow for the changing nature of it. Some people don't understand why this is so significant, and some people have other insights that are key as we keep unfolding.

What's interesting to see is what these insights lead to. The insights we're looking for lead us in a certain direction and open to something. If we understand what they're opening to, then we can look back and personally understand the different things and insights that might support that opening.

What it opens to in English is usually translated as disenchantment^[1]. It's a strong disinterest in continuing with business as usual, the usual things that our mind and heart do. Disenchantment is a kind of healthy "enough already." It's a healthy kind of wariness or tiredness—"God, this is enough already."

This can happen, for example, if you meditate every morning for half an hour, and after 252 days, you realize that every morning you are obsessing about lottery numbers, and that's all you think about. You get to the 253rd day and you realize, "Wait a minute, a good part of this last year I've been thinking about lottery numbers to no avail. It doesn't help me win any lottery. I haven't had a single accurate number in any lottery anywhere on the planet, and I'm spending an inordinate amount of my time in meditation thinking about lotteries, let alone outside of it." Maybe it's enough already.

You feel tired from all this thinking, figuring, and calculating you do in meditation, and you're really getting tired of this now. So there's a disenchantment, a disinterest. The person hasn't won any lotteries, but they were so enchanted and entranced by the possibility of what would happen if they won. After 253 days of this, they finally start falling out of the trance of instant wealth that the lottery provides.

We call it disenchantment. I like the word disenchantment because it implies that you've been enchanted, you're under the spell of something. We can be under the spell of our desires, under the spell of our fantasies, under the spell of certain beliefs that "if only my partner behaves better, then I'll have a good life." There is the spell of conceit. There are all kinds of ways in which we are overly interested or caught in ideas about how terrible I am, how wonderful I am, how mediocre I am. We are entranced by all these things.

As we sit and meditate, we start seeing the repetition of the same kind of thoughts, behaviors, and interests more and more clearly. We start seeing this as having a high cost. "I've been resentful for 252 days. Maybe I didn't realize I was doing it every day, but now that I meditate, I see it." Only because of the familiarity and seeing the regularity do we understand the cost of daily resentment meditation.

Then there starts to be a disenchantment, a disinterest, and our attention or life energy doesn't go into those thoughts around that thing. Rather, now it's more available for this momentum that we're talking about in practice—getting out of the way even more so the momentum of concentration, mindfulness, and being more settled has a chance to operate, because we're not activating ourselves with it all.

So we become disenchanted with craving, disenchanted with ill will, disenchanted with all kinds of fantasies we have, disenchanted with conceits and self-preoccupation. "Boy, I'm always self-preoccupied." Some of that might be okay, it's not necessarily wrong, but we see the regularity and how little it does for us. Not only does it not benefit us, it's actually sometimes deleterious. With the opportunity of meditation, we sit there quietly, dignified, and respecting ourselves, and in this embodied respect and presence we see, "Wow, there's a lot of nonsense in that mind, I had no idea." And we start becoming disenchanted and disinterested.

This movement towards disinterest comes from starting to see more clearly the difference between events in the world and our relationship to them. As I said earlier in the meditation, we might have troubles in the world. The car has a flat tire—that's troubling. Or we might have much bigger troubles; maybe we have family members who are ill, and we have to care for them. It's a challenge, it's a problem to figure out how to do it well. So there are the troubles, and then there's being troubled by it.

By making that distinction and separating those two out, we can start seeing the feeling of being troubled as something that we're contributing to, something that is subjective and arising from within us. We might not feel like we have much choice or ability to do anything about it, but when we sit and meditate regularly, and bring a lot of mindfulness to our experience, we see how often we're troubled. We start getting some handle on it, seeing it clearly, and being able to observe it without being in it or absorbed in it. The relationship to feeling troubled might change, and we might become disinterested and disenchanted with the value of feeling troubled. The energy that goes into it and the tension that we hold around it begins to soften and relax. Then we might discover we can take care of the issues we have to address much better if we don't feel the tension, burden, or weight that comes with feeling troubled. We become disenchanted with some of the reactivity and responses within us to events in the world, disenchanted with the second arrows^[2] we shoot at ourselves.

The idea of becoming disenchanted is considered to be a form of wisdom that will support the momentum and the deepening of freedom in our lives, so it has a tremendous value. It arises out of insight, into seeing something clearly. Whatever you see clearly enough that allows for this deeper movement of disenchantment—maybe that's insight for you.

The question and homework for today would be: what wisdom, what understanding, what insight do you have about what's happening for you—how you react, respond, think, feel, or desire—that might awaken or support a healthy disinterest or disenchantment with some of your desires or things you've been caught up in? Give yourself some time today, maybe having tea or going for a walk, and consider this topic of disenchantment and healthy disinterest. How might that be evoked more strongly so that it supports you in your life?

Thank you very much. We'll take this another step tomorrow to see where this healthy disinterest and disenchantment begins to take hold, what that allows for, and what we can allow to happen next on this journey to freedom. Thank you very much.