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Guided Meditation: Listening Quietly

Good morning, welcome.

Welcome to this 7 A.M. community, the YouTube meditation community. I feel it's delightful to come together this way, and the repetition of doing this for such a long time makes it feel like a kind of homecoming to sit down here and be with you all. So thank you.

One of the metaphors that is used sometimes for meditation is listening. In fact, listening is sometimes considered to be a profound spiritual practice, especially if we listen to what is not a sound. We listen to our hearts, listen to what's inside, listen to the silence that's here.

Many years ago someone told me that the Catholic order of the Benedictines, their description of their way of life, begins with a Latin word: ausculta^[1], meaning "listen." And the direct disciples of the Buddha who listened to him were called the listeners, sāvakas^[2].

But to sit in meditation and think that we're listening—the reason why it's such a useful metaphor or idea is that with listening, we have to listen well. We have to suspend our judgment, suspend our commentary, suspend our projections onto a situation. Something has to become quiet to listen well. And if mindfulness is a kind of listening to the moment, and we close our eyes, it's often listening to ourselves in some deep way.

Why do we have to suspend to listen well? What are the commentaries, what's the noise of the mind that we quiet, and willingly quiet, wisely quiet? Because we put great value in what gets revealed when we are not having commentary, not preoccupied in thoughts and stories of past and future. To have this stance of listening, also, we don't interfere with the sounds that come our way. I mean, I guess you could go and turn up or down the volume on this broadcast if you'd like, but there's something about sounds that come, that in and of themselves, they come. Without blocking the sound or attacking the sound, there's something about the receptivity of listening that is a profound aspect of mindfulness practice.

So to assume a meditation posture is to assume a listening posture. I think sometimes if we go into the forest and someone points out, "Oh, there's a special bird singing in the trees, it's kind of faint, can you hear it?"—the posture that we take for that is lifting the neck a little bit out of the shoulders, lifting the head up a teeny bit, almost like we're becoming a better antenna to hear, pulling away from the static in the mind to be quiet.

Gently closing the eyes and adjusting your hands, so the position of the hands is the best position for the shoulders. So the shoulders have some room to relax.

And gently, maybe lovingly, take some deeper breaths than usual, but not so deep that it's a challenge. Full breaths. As you breathe in, feeling the torso expand. As you exhale, feeling what releases and relaxes in the rib cage, the chest, and the diaphragm.

And then let your breathing return to normal. Continuing to feel the gentle, or not so gentle, expansion as you breathe in, and relaxing the chest as you breathe out.

As you breathe in, feel the global experience of being in a body, so you can recognize where there's some tension. Then, when you exhale, soften the tension in your body.

Feeling any tension, pressure, or agitation in the thinking mind. As you exhale, relax the thinking mind. As you exhale, a gentle, gentle calming of the mind.

And then centering yourself on your breathing. Maybe the metaphor of listening to your breathing can bring an interest and a non-interference to breathing. Receptivity and non-judgmental, however you're breathing, as if it's something to simply listen to.

Maybe listening from deep inside the body. As you exhale, letting the thinking mind become a bit quieter, so there's a higher sensitivity in the body to listen or feel the experience of breathing. Listening deep in the body where breathing begins. Or being sensitive and quiet to hear or feel the quiet and soft ground or basis through which breathing occurs. A quiet place underneath or behind your breathing. Listen, feel, sense, deep inside.

[Silence]

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, consider what a good skill listening is. Many people, what they most want is to be listened to, to be heard. In their challenges and their difficulties, to be heard, to be seen, to be known.

And may it be that this practice that we do, learning to be attentive and mindful, can help us become better listeners to the world. Better listeners to our friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors. This practice that we do leads us to be interested in others so that we can know them better. This is one way that we extend the benefits of this practice out into the world.

May our ability to listen to others bring them happiness, bring them safety, bring them peace, bring them freedom. In this simple, practical way, may we bring the benefits of this practice into the world for the welfare and happiness of all, by becoming better listeners. Thank you.

Dharmette: Attunement (4 of 5) Communicating

Continuing on the theme of attunement—living attuned to the suffering of the world, the suffering of the people we encounter, and to be attuned to our own suffering. This means not to simply experience it in the usual way, in ways that are challenging for us, but to engage in a process where being attentive to suffering is for our betterment and leads to the betterment of the world. One of those ways is to be attuned to suffering, being in harmony with it, to find a balance with it.

We're using this acronym TOUCH, which seems very nice for compassion. To be compassionate means to be touched by the suffering. This idea of being touched in some deep way—it's kind of tender, it's kind of loving, it's kind of like we get touched by the things that are important to us, that we value, that move us. And then, in return, to touch others. Not literally, maybe, but to touch others with our kindness, with our support. And sometimes it can be literal; sometimes a gentle touch on the shoulder or the arm can be so meaningful for someone who feels lost, broken, hurt, or isolated. To touch others is to let them know that they're not alone.

So we think about the suffering we encounter to find a healthy way of thinking about it, to be open to it, to be upright in the presence of it. And today, the "C"^[3] stands for "communicate." To take time to communicate with the people involved, who are suffering, who are challenged.

One of the reasons why this is important is that it's very easy to encounter someone who's suffering and to assume that they're suffering the way we would in a similar circumstance. We project our own experiences, our own history, our own fears onto other people, and then we might miss them. We might not understand what's happening there, what's really going on.

To communicate is to find out a little bit more what's happening or what this experience is like. People who are suffering don't necessarily appreciate probing questions, where people are really trying to probe deep into what's going on. But simple questions, very open questions, or statements like, "This must be hard," is an acknowledgment and recognition of what's happening. That sometimes opens doors for people to feel seen and recognized, so they're willing to share more about how it's hard.

A simple question like, "What's the hardest part of this?" or "What's the most difficult thing for you in this circumstance?" can be eye-opening. Someone might have broken their leg and has to stay home and rest their leg, immobilized for a while. They're suffering and it's difficult. You ask them, "What is the most difficult thing? What's so hard for you?" And they say, "Oh, the most difficult thing is that I was really counting on going to a graduation of a dear friend of mine. This was a culmination of so much of their life, such an important thing, and I wanted to celebrate with them, and now I can't do it." You had no idea that that was the biggest thing causing them distress. Maybe for you, the idea of being independent is so important that you assume what's difficult is that they can't count on^[4] freedom of movement and have to depend on others.

So find out what is going on for people. Hang out with them, talk about what's happening, and learn more deeply. Don't assume we know what's going on. A nice question sometimes to ask is, "How might I support you with this?" or "What are some ways that you can be supported?" Don't even promise you're going to do it yourself, but just ask, "What are some of the ways you find support in this kind of challenge?" Some people find it helpful to be reminded with a question like that. They think, "Oh yes, I forgot, meditation is important for me. Maybe this is a time to meditate." Or, "Friends are important for me."

Asking very simple questions or acknowledging what's happening with someone is an active expression of compassion, of caring for someone. For some people, that's what they mostly need. They don't necessarily need someone to fix them or do things with them, but just to sit with them and recognize, "Oh, that's what's happening."

I've been with people when I've been challenged by something, who were really quick to want to do things. Like, "Let's go and do this and that, and that'll make it all better." But I just simply wanted to be quiet and be present and be with what was going on. I would have valued having a friend who sat and was just present. We could gently, quietly talk about it, and I could just express in my voice^[5] my feelings and the thoughts that I had.

This ability to listen deeply, and communicate in such a way that we're not trying to fix people—we're not trying to be the helper first and foremost. We're trying to be the person who understands, sees, and gets to know the suffering we have in the world. The more we can be directly with people to find out, the deeper we understand what the suffering is.

If we read about suffering in the news, far away on the other side of the world, we can certainly have compassion for that. We can certainly feel the pain of that in some ways. But chances are that we're projecting a tremendous amount of our own assumptions onto that situation. Our imagination has come alive, and some of the imagination might be true enough, but it's very different from being on the ground with people and seeing exactly the details of what's happening.

When the suffering is far away, really take the time to read, study, and look more deeply into the situation. Get into it so deeply that you have a sense of what it's like for individuals in that circumstance. Now, with all kinds of social media, news, and videos, you can often see people being interviewed, talking and saying how it is, so that there's a deeper connection to people and what's actually happening for them. Find ways to communicate, find ways to listen, find ways to speak that are open-ended, that are caring, and that are not in a rush to fix or to help.

Also, be very careful learning how to communicate. In our communication with people who are suffering, we're not first and foremost taking care of ourselves or moving the attention of the conversation to ourselves. A classic way of doing that is to say something like, "Oh, I know exactly what you're feeling, I went through the same thing." Then we start telling the story of what we went through. Maybe it's not the same thing—we don't actually know what's going on with others. It's a way of disconnecting. In an extreme version, the conversation is now more about oneself than about the person we're with.

When people are suffering, you want to be very careful how much you talk about yourself. Sometimes talking about oneself is a way of caring for ourselves, or trying to assuage or calm down our own discomfort with what's going on. Sometimes talking fast, talking a lot, asking a lot of questions, or rushing to solutions is more about taking care of our own discomfort than really taking care of the other person that we haven't learned to get to know yet.

Communication is such an important and profound phenomenon that sometimes I think of the phrase "sacred communication." When we communicate from the place of practice, from the depths of who we are, then the communication goes better. This is why something like meditation, where we've learned to listen deeply to ourselves, can show us a place inside from which we can listen to others with some depth. And maybe even, for some people, in our listening and our communication, our depths can touch their depths. It's really something profound that goes on between two people.

I've been in situations of being challenged by some suffering in my life, and had conversations with other practitioners that turned out to not really be about the particular suffering I was having. Somehow we dropped into some deeper place of where we find the most value and importance in the practice. Being reminded, touching into that, was like the best medicine for me in that situation. From that, I had the resources and the ability to be open, to be upright, to be present for the challenges I had.

So, communicate. Think about it: be open, be upright, communicate. Tomorrow I'll talk about help, the last part of the acronym TOUCH. What's important here is that helping comes after the first four. Rather than thinking we have to help first and foremost, we want to prepare ourselves to be ready to help. Thinking, openness, uprightness, and communication prepare the ground for effective ways of being a support, of serving other people. So that's for tomorrow. Thank you.