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Guided Metta meditation

Let us ritualize this moment, this time together. Let the attention drop down into your belly. So the mind is descending into the settledness of the belly. This moment, this practice does not need to be a direct response to the pain in your heart or the complexities of being human. Just to practice is enough. You don't need to map your way out of the labyrinth of suffering in order to become free. So we just breathe together, giving life the honor it's due.

You don't need to reverse-engineer your suffering in order to grow more free. We just practice wholesomeness, abiding in goodness, deconstructing our suffering, habituating to it. You don't need to make promises to some future self. Just cut it. Have faith in the path. Faith that this moment will do with our heart what needs to be done. As we are softened, we grow stronger.

What would it mean to trust the moment? We practice and set our minds and hearts up such that no matter what's contained in this moment, in one way or another, it's medicine.

Introduction

It's good to practice with you. As I said, we'll kind of crowdsource a theme here. If you have a question, please chat it in on Zoom or YouTube. And if you're on Zoom and you see a question you like, maybe you heart it or something so I'll know what to speak to.

I had planned to give a talk on something else. I'll share what I was planning to give a talk on, but I was sick and just couldn't rally to put it together. I wanted to talk—and will at some point talk—about what sounds like a super nerdy and not relevant topic. The title of the article was "The Path Asymmetry in Complex Dynamic Systems of Psychopathology" by Shirley Wang and her colleagues at Yale.

She said something that I had kind of known intuitively, but she described it in a powerful way that's relevant to Dharma practice. She says, "We define path asymmetry as the phenomena in which pathways into a disorder may be different from the pathways out of a disorder." She's talking about psychiatric stuff, but we could think about it more generally as dukkha^[1]: the pathways into the vulnerabilities, the maladaptive thinking, the emotional patterns, and the behavioral patterns are different than the pathways out.

The pathway out is not merely medicating or reverse-engineering the pathway in. In some ways, it's technical computational psychiatry. In other ways, we can make sense of it in a way that's helpful for our path—at least I hope so. But I needed some time with it.

Q&A: Barriers to Relaxation and the First Noble Truth

Well, we have a couple of related questions. One asks about the barriers to feeling like you can ever really relax. And then, relatedly: "Considering the political situation, can you speak about the freedom that comes from accepting things as they are? The First Noble Truth^[2]." I think they're related.

It is said that only our hearts truly understand dukkha. Only fully enlightened beings truly understand dukkha. I sometimes render it as suffering, stress, or dissatisfaction. Sometimes I talk about it as ambivalence or helplessness. But only those totally free beings understand dukkha, and that's intuitively seemed right to me.

I think sometimes there's a sense that if I could really get dukkha—if I could get the First Noble Truth—I would get the other three, too. It would be contained in that understanding of dukkha: an immense amount of patience, understanding, love, and renunciation.

Yet, because we can influence so much, it creates the illusion of governability. The illusion of governability keeps us in the mode of feeling like, "I must always be doing something to my life, for my life, with my life." It creates the sense that the burden is on me to make my life go, to make this moment go, to make this moment okay.

In other words, we really do not trust non-doing. That comes out of very deep conditioning as animals amidst unimaginably vast forces—a sense that it all depends on me. Then we see we can make all these efforts and changes, and we can influence so much, and it almost erodes the sense that there could be goodness in non-doing. It erodes the sense that there are some Dharma places to which we cannot bring our "doing."

The capacity to relax—we can understand it in a lot of different ways, but I associate relaxing with the dissolving of a certain kind of willfulness, the dissolving of a certain kind of control. It's very fatiguing to control. It's fatiguing not to trust that some current of goodness will carry us. That's what I was alluding to when I said we set our hearts and minds up such that this moment is medicine, no matter what this moment is.

That sense of deeply taking my hands off all of the knobs of samsara^[3]—that's relaxation. That's tranquility. We're not filling up with samsara anymore. But to do that, in a sense, means we have to understand something like the unsolvability of dukkha in a deep way; otherwise, we keep trying to reassert some measure of control.

To know dukkha does not mean it's this nihilistic, apathetic collapse. We'll talk about this at the IRC daylong on Saturday. To understand dukkha is not tantamount to passivity, but it is to trust that imperfection at a deep level is not a problem to be solved. And then there's nothing asked of us in this moment, right? We're not asked to change, tweak, dial in, or adjust anything.

Sometimes what lurks in just the agitation of the mind is self-view. Self-view is agitating. The baseline layer of agitation is something like conceit—something like the sense of territory, that I must defend this territory against the incursions of the First Noble Truth, dukkha. The very sense of self contains some measure of alienation, agitation, or non-rest.

Some of our practice is dedicated to decentering, where the self-referential, autobiographical narrative ceases to hold the mind so much. Maybe that too is a facet of having opened to dukkha. When we have truly opened to dukkha, there's less defensiveness, which is a kind of hallmark of the sense of self-dislocation. So, that's what comes up for me.

Tranquility is one side of the path, but it's a very energized state, actually. I noticed just being sick, it's like the attention and the energy are very closely tethered. So we are cultivating these kind of higher arousal states, but there's a brightness that is wedded to the tranquility, and we can act. There's a willingness to act, to take a stand.

But it is important to let the heart rest. I'm grappling with it myself, but it feels like there's a way that compassion and equanimity^[4] need to be firewalled. Love in the face of suffering is action, the willingness to act. And then love in the face of helplessness is equanimity, a very deep surrender of control. Love is on the other side of our power.

If we're half compassion and half equanimity all the time, it's fatiguing. But it's like, "No, love and rest. Love and rest." When we find ways of resting, everything looks different from the vantage point of tranquility. Everything looks different. It's amazing. It may be that just one breath puts our system back into some sense of regulation, and everything looks different.

Closing

I see a comment on YouTube about living through a time that's dysregulating, for sure. We'll return to that theme, but maybe we'll pause here for now and wish you all well.

If you do want to come to the day of metta^[5] practice on Saturday through IRC, you can register there. I'll be away on retreat next week, then back on the 28th. So we'll continue on. Thank you all. I wish you well.