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Introduction

Hello, welcome. Good morning to those around this time zone. I know from my nephews it's the first day of middle school in the Berkeley Unified School District, and you have a substitute teacher today, so I'm happy to be with you.

My name is Matthew Brensilver, and I'm always happy to do whatever Gil asks me to do. I feel inspired by his service, and I am very happy to be with you and practicing this week together. We'll have the usual format: I will guide us in a meditation for a half-hour and then offer some reflections starting at half past. Let us sit together.

Guided Meditation: Landing in the Body Breathing

So much of meditation practice is about relinquishing reference points, but it's very useful to have the reference point of love. Love not so much in the sense of some ebullient feeling, but love in the sense of knowing that all experience can soften our heart. That any experience, any experience might hurt, but need not harm our heart.

So we begin with this reference point and progressively surrender so many of the others.

Just taking some deeper breaths, spreading your breath through your whole body. It's like we pour the awareness into the whole body.

There's no rigidity, but there's a gentle discipline. There's no turning any experience into an enemy, thinking, or whatever, but we do know why we're doing what we're doing. Beginning to gather up the fragments of our attention, bring them all right here to the body breathing.

The urge to fix and secure our life—such natural urges. It's easy enough we just put this down. Remember in our heart of hearts what practice is about. But sometimes the energy of fixing and securing our life is so strong that it itself needs the blessing of awareness and love.

And so we move the spotlight of attention from our body breathing to the urgency of fixing as it manifests in our emotional body. The circuits that light up with the worried thought or the conclusion we've longed for.

The engine of thinking is affect, and so we invade that in awareness and patience. And then perhaps it feels appropriate to return to the body breathing, the field of attention more unified.

In meditation we all experiment, practice becoming temporary monastics. A monastic in the sense of privileging the life of awareness over our life of projects. And so to be mindful is actually quite a deep surrender.

Dharmette: The Mechanisms of Action of the Dharma

It's good to sit with you. I'm happy to be with you.

In clinical treatment research, there are often two key questions: Does this treatment work? And if it does, how does it work? There are the questions around efficacy or effectiveness (does it work?), and then the mechanism of change (how does it work?).

The Buddha made claims about efficacy: this works, this is not a shell game. And that's part of why it's so helpful to have new experiences on this path—bliss, or insight, or love, or something. New experiences help confirm the sense that we're not being conned, like there's something on offer here. And so we start to get some sense of how this can work. The Buddha made those claims, but mostly the teachings really unpack a vision of the ways that practice transforms, the mechanisms of change.

That language, you know, is borrowed from pharmacology, where the question of how a medicine works is: well, it stimulates this receptor system and down-regulates another receptor activity. I use that language here because all dharma talks implicitly embrace some mechanism of action. When we give a meditation instruction or a talk, we have a mechanism of action in mind. We have a theory of change in mind: this is how practice gets under our skin; this is how freedom from suffering unfolds.

We talk explicitly or implicitly (usually implicitly) about the mechanism of action for at least a couple of reasons. First, really to encourage you to keep going. We really do need a strong "why." Why do we do this, and why should we ever be willing to experience suffering consciously? We need a strong answer to that to keep going. Much of what dharma teachers do is more or less just to say, "Don't give up. This is how practice works. This is its mechanism. It's supposed to feel like this," even though a part of our mind is utterly unconvinced we're ever supposed to feel like this. Rilke^[1] says: "No feeling is final. Just keep going. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand."

So we talk about the mechanisms to encourage you to keep going. And also, when we understand how practice works in a deeper way, we can reinforce the positive effects and minimize the side effects. We can really determine what's important on the path and emphasize it.

Classically, you might say that what points to the mechanisms of change is Sīla^[2] (ethical training, ethical conduct), Samādhi^[3] (the training of the mind, gathering of attention), and Paññā^[4] (wisdom). These are the classical mechanisms of change.

Sīla: purifying our karma^[5]. You can't really expect to be happy if you're perpetually harming yourself and others. The kind of hatred, paranoia, or separateness that's bred by harming is not actually compatible with deep happiness. And so we start to build the foundation of our spiritual home on the ground of non-regret. There's so much that our ethical alignment builds on the foundation of non-regret. There's a kind of transparency in our life: we can't be found out. When we're acting in alignment with our own deepest values, we can't be found out. Like Mark Twain says, something like, "When you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything," right? Our whole life becomes like that: non-defended, we don't have to remember anything.

And there's Samādhi. There's Samādhi in the deep enjoyment of being secluded from the bombardment of Saṃsāra^[6], this realm of existence. I thought of Bob Dylan^[7]: "I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail, hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn. 'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give you shelter from the storm.'"

Just being human is a little overwhelming. Moment to moment, a little overwhelming. And so we have to take shelter. One of the ways we take shelter is to rest in attention. To really open to the kind of intensity of the human condition without the shelter of some Samādhi is too much. And so we take our seat. The usual way we understand Samādhi is the kind of stillness of the discursive mind, and that's real. But there's almost another sense of Samādhi, of just the sense of our body all being in one place. Even when the mind is very active, there can be a sense of something gathering, something stilling. And so we settle down, we take our protection, and the spotlight of attention isn't shaking so sharply anymore.

We start to perceive the objects of attention more clearly. This is said to lead to wisdom (Paññā), clear seeing. Understanding what brings happiness, what brings suffering. Perceiving the hallmarks of experience, the characteristics of experience. Beginning to understand cause and effect in a more nuanced, rich way. Our maps of happiness are impoverished when we begin practice; we start to fill them out, complicate them, see them in more detail. What is happiness? What is it really? How does pleasure differ from satisfaction? What is conducive to a heart at rest?

So these are the classical mechanisms of change. This week, for whatever it's worth, I'll offer an alternative map of the mechanisms of action. Just a different way of framing how practice functions for us, how it gets under our skin, how it begins to transform our heart. It emerges from my own practice and also from my encounters with clinical research and psychotherapy research. Over the next four days, I'll unpack four mechanisms through which practice may transform and inform our heart. Hopefully, it will feel familiar and fresh at the same time, and hopefully, it will animate your practice so that you keep going, so you know what's useful, so that you have a strong "why" to stay.

I offer this for your consideration^[8]. Happy to be with you and happy to see what unfolds this week. I wish you a good day, afternoon, or evening wherever you are, and look forward to gathering back in about 23 hours.