This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Grounded, Open, Aware

Good morning, Sangha^[1]. Nice to see all of you in virtual form in the chat. Happy to be here with you today.

I'm seeing all the greetings for the morning... Yes, preventing the reverberation. It really warms my heart to see all of your warmth, all of your friendliness to each other. And I hope wherever you are, whatever weather you're having, that this is a good morning for you. I'm grateful to be here, and it is time.

Taking in how it feels to be here this morning, to be settling into your own practice in the field of these good people. Looking at names of old friends, friendly greetings from those who we only know from imagination and from these textual greetings, and savoring in your heart.

And when you're ready, shifting the attention inwards. Noticing how it feels in your heart, how it feels in your body. Perhaps taking a couple of slightly slower, deeper breaths. Feeling a sense of being connected, immersed in this moment, this place.

Noticing the weight of your body in the chair, cushion, or mat. A sense of rootedness, belongingness here.

And allowing the breathing to return to normal. Softening, relaxing on the out-breath. Appreciating the nourishment of the in-breath. And connecting to the felt, lived experience of this moment, this breath, this body.

I will be giving instructions for mindfulness of breathing. If you connect more with another object of attention, please adapt and do what is right for you: sound, the entire body, whatever it is.

Sustaining the attention on any ease, motion, or contentment of the in-breath and the out-breath. Allowing the heart and mind to soften into the still point at the end of the out-breath and rest there just for a moment. Feeling into, enjoying the flow of the in-breath all the way to the top of fullness, and pausing there for just a moment before releasing. Inviting relaxation, letting go on the out-breath.

Turning into the felt sense of the whole body, and allowing any other thoughts, concerns to fade into the background. Devoting the attention just for now to being fully, completely here.

Honing in, if it feels right, on where in the body the breath feels most soothing, relaxing, pleasurable. It might be a sense of the respiration of breath in your whole body: the rhythm, breathing, and aliveness. It might be the full body of the breath in its more obvious form, from the tip of the nose, back through the throat, to the chest. The relaxing^[2] of the ribs, diaphragm, and belly. Or all of the little sensations of warmth, aliveness. Settling in, no matter the way, to the rising and falling waves of sensation.

Perhaps each out-breath feels like an offering, each in-breath a receiving.

Inviting the breath to massage your body from the inside out. Maybe noticing it in the chest, the back of the rib cage, massaging the back. Or the movement of the belly, diaphragm, and perineum, in and up, down and out, out and in. Appreciating any sensations there.

Leading awareness through the whole body, where it ripples or lands. Allowing the mind,^[3] the heart, the body, the attention to collect and gather in this moment.

Perhaps noticing a wellspring of energy, ease, or contentment. Imagining it like a nourishing spring emerging from deep within, filling the whole body with awareness. Just to be alive is well. Bathing the whole body, to be immersed, connected, unified in this moment.

Opening the field of attention to all of the processes, all the things coming and going, arising and passing in the present moment. Sensations, sounds, a general sense of mood, the sense of knowing. Anything floating through the mind and heart, all seen, flowing through unimpeded like birds flying through the sky.

As this meditation draws to a close, please gather up, collect, savor any good feelings, moments of awareness or mindfulness, glimmers of joy, or peace, or contentment, as they occurred. Gather those up in your mind and heart and savor them. Really take them in. And also being with, in kindness and compassion, any moments of difficulty, challenge. This too is a beautiful thing to do.

And when you feel ready, casting your internal gaze outwards towards the others in this world, in your life, directly and indirectly. And considering ways that nourishing yourself through this practice might be refracted outwards to shine on their lives, to benefit them, if only through your kind gaze.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may everyone, everywhere be free of suffering.

Thank you. Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Wise Unification (5 of 5) - Wisdom; the Factors in Daily Life, Q&A

So good morning, Sangha. Good morning and welcome to the fifth and final of five talks on factors of mind that support the stability of meditation practice, the deepening of practice, and that can support us in daily life.

So a brief recap: we started this week with the fundamentals of mindfulness and practice intelligence, kind of a clear comprehension and curiosity about the present moment. We've uncovered connecting and sustaining—vitakka^[4] and vicāra^[5]—and the emergent mental faculties, embodied faculties of joy (pīti^[6]) and happiness or contentment (sukha^[7]). And then how it all collects together, unifies into ekaggatā^[8], unification. Today I'm going to talk about how wisdom supports fruitfully working with these mental faculties and how these factors also support wisdom. They can help us attune more to our own wisdom inwardly for the purpose of freedom from suffering, for the purpose of happier and more content lives, and for awakening.

I'm also going to take a few minutes in the middle to answer some of the wonderful questions that came in through the chat.

So, as I mentioned yesterday, samādhi^[9] I translated as unification or collected calm. Discernment is also translated as the capacity to make distinctions. Wisdom is cultivated right in the process of what you've been learning, which is how to recognize distinctions between these different mental factors and others, and how they contribute to the meditative process. Wisdom is also cultivated in the process of learning to savor and be nourished by the goodness of these qualities: the pīti, the sukha, the mindfulness itself. And wisdom is developed by learning to let go of, eventually, any energetic or exciting, pleasurable aspects of experience, and letting go into the more refined experiences of peace, equanimity, even little tiny glimmers of it. There's wisdom in learning what feeds our practice, what is onward-leading for us at different phases in our own practice lives, and at different phases in our own development as humans.

So, equanimity. Equanimity, which is part of that fourth, most soft, still phase, is very closely related to wisdom and to ekaggatā, unification. Wisdom and equanimity, in particular, both have kind of a settled back quality to them. There is a wise separation from reactivity to events in the moment.

Mindfulness and practice intelligence, the five faculties, cultivate a greater stability, a capacity that can be directed towards this big picture, towards the wisdom of knowing and seeing what's hard to see. Wisdom about conditionality, cause and effect, and a lack of self-centeredness or even a sense of a separate, solid, reified, concretized self. That wisdom can begin to develop through seeing the impermanence and inconstancy in life and moment-to-moment experience, and that can yield a sense of gratitude for what is the precious ephemerality of experience.

So that wisdom that also develops can understand the contributing factors of dukkha^[10] or suffering in the heart and mind. As I mentioned earlier in this series, mindfulness is kind of a gatekeeper (maybe I see a comment in the chat about this too) that discerns what's helpful to let in and what's not helpful to let in, and guides what's helpful to nourish our practice the most. This is where mindfulness and wisdom begin to shade together. Mindfulness and wisdom, and this naturally develops.

For all of this, the attention does not need to be completely, totally unified in jhāna^[11], one-pointed. And that said, there are powerful forms of wisdom that can be cultivated by deep retreat and experiencing these states, particularly in alternating^[12] between them, and in letting go of them and reflecting back on them.

Q&A

So that brings me to answering a few of the great questions people put in the chat yesterday.

The first question is: Are ekaggatā, unification, and serenity the same thing as samādhi? And I'll just say this briefly. Ekaggatā, unification, refers to being focused on one meditative object or on one point, especially in samādhi. Overall meditative concentration or stability. So in that sense, the terms are synonymous. But ekaggatā is one small part of a broader experience of samādhi, settlement. The territory of samādhi is varied and vast, and ekaggatā is one part of that much larger landscape. So I'll just say now, for detailed answers to each of these questions, for time's sake, I'm not speaking all of it, but you can go to my website and I did post detailed answers to these questions, and that is in the chat right now. Please don't read it right now, wait till I'm done talking, but there are more detailed writings on this if you're interested in it.

The second question is: Is the unification and serenity of ekaggatā the same thing as equanimity? So, they can be, is the answer. In the refined mind state of fourth jhāna in particular, that place of complete stillness, unification and equanimity have merged. And that kind of unification is indeed one way that equanimity shows up. And there are many others. There are other forms of equanimity that are not so still or gathered around a single meditation point, that are part of a broad, flexible awareness. And then there's equanimity in these forms that is receptive to this wide variety of experiences, many, many things coming and going. So both kinds of equanimity are very powerful and beautiful, and each can be healing and transformative. However equanimity is experienced, it tends to be onward-leading towards freedom, onward-leading.

The third and last question kind of overlaps with the one I just answered. Someone wrote: "When I try to do single-pointed meditation, my mind guides me away. It feels like it's not skillful. Yet I remain interested because so many people report that it's very healing." So if this is you, and I'm confident there's more than one of you, I really want to encourage you to work with what feels skillful in your own practice, in your own mind. Trust your practice. Some minds benefit more from single-pointed concentration, unification, than others do, in the way that we've been talking about it this week. That said, if you're still curious, an option is to experiment with other objects of attention, like mettā^[13] or full-body breathing. There are many, many different objects. And it's helpful to know that some people's minds are just more naturally inclined towards samādhi in general, and unification in particular. One of my teachers talks about these differences in our minds as being like left-handed or right-handed. It's not good or bad, it's just different. And if your mind isn't inclined that way right now, there's still plenty of wisdom, healing, and open awareness that can develop.

Different kinds of practices work for different people at different phases. It may be helpful to back off from a style that doesn't seem to be working and experiment with something else for a while. Let the practice mature and experiment again in a few years if it's still of interest. But there are many different Dharma doorways into maturity, greater freedom.

So those are some of the answers. I do want to acknowledge that there were a few questions that came in that I didn't have time to answer. One in particular on "Yogi mind," and that doesn't fit so well into this very short talk. But I will post about it sometime in the next week or two on the website, a longer kind of discourse to talk about.

As I mentioned, for some people, mettā and the brahmavihāras^[14] are another way into this kind of unification. That was how I started concentration practice in my own practice. And there are resources available if you're interested in that.

Daily Life

So to wrap up, as I mentioned yesterday, we don't need uncommon states to learn and start to develop wisdom and maturity. Discerning, relating to factors of mind as factors of mind, starts to train our capacity and our ability to experience beautiful qualities in ourselves, in our meditation practice, and in others.

And the five factors have corollaries in daily life. We can bring mindfulness and intelligence to that bigger picture in relating to our lives and to others. We can connect and give full attention to other people or to whatever's in front of us. Sustain those important connections. Develop relationships based on respect, close attention, consideration. Notice and resonate with joy, pīti. And allow any initial joy of connection deepening to soften into contentment, practicing contentment with what is. That would be a corollary to sukha. And finally, allowing different ideas and deliberations all to occur in the field of understanding and acceptance of ourselves and with others. And when appropriate, gathering together towards any harmony, common purpose, integration that happens to be present.

These are not the sole guidelines for interpersonal relationships, just a few notions of how these particular factors might apply. And finally, I'll just say these capacities, these factors, are also helpful to tap into within yourself in daily life. There's kind of this feeling of being at home in our own bodies and minds that can be tapped into, an inner access to a certain kind of stillness or contentment that can then be like carrying around our home with us inside us wherever we go. A little bit like a snail carries its shell or a turtle carries its shell, home is always there. And this can reduce grasping and discontent.

So these are some of the gifts of finding stability and connection to your practice, however you practice, however you find it.

Thank you, Sangha, for your kind attention. It's been a joy to be with you this week. Be well.