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Guided Meditation: From Othering to Centering

Warm greetings from Insight Meditation Center here in Redwood City, and greetings to all of you from all the different corners of the world where you're listening and watching in.

One of the things to become wise about in meditation is the nature of our thinking. People struggle with thinking in meditation; sometimes the struggle is unnecessary. However, at the same time, it's important to overcome the tendency to get lost in thought or be preoccupied in thinking. One way to overcome that without struggling with it is to become wiser about our thinking and take some time to understand something of it. For this meditation, if you do find yourself thinking, I suggest you notice whether you're thinking about something other than what has to do with here and now.

If you're thinking about something different than the meditation itself—what's happening for you as you meditate—whether you're thinking about work or home life, conversations with friends, relatives, companions, or strangers, planning vacations, or remembering something in the past. Whatever the mind is involved in that's other than here and now, recognize that clearly. The way to recognize it clearly is, rather than noting it or being aware of it as "thinking," maybe just say the word other. That's short for thinking about other things. Then, really take stock and understand how much the mind is thinking about other things that are not about here.

It becomes a little bit of an alienation, a little bit of an abandonment of oneself here and now. It's choosing to go into a realm of thought that limits your ability to really delve deeply into your lived experience in the moment—to settle in it, to wake up in it, to really be intimate with this time right here. So say the word other, and then if you recognize when that's the case, come back to here. Come back to here, and do so gently.

If you find yourself thinking about the meditation, maybe continue to do that. Maybe even use the word here for that. But see if you can adjust how you think so it's only friendly, kind, supportive, calm, and settled at ease. Just like a gentle friend or gentle supporter accompanying the experience, recognizing the experience, being with the experience. Where thinking about here becomes less important, there's not a strong pull into it, but you're not letting go of it entirely. Just calmly, almost like a whisper in the mind, kind of adjusting it to support you to be here. Be here.

Entering into a meditation posture, maybe from the inside out, feel yourself adjusting into the posture. If you're sitting upright, is there some way that, from the inside out, you can sit up a little straighter? Or sit with a little bit more open chest? In a relaxed way, with the shoulders rolling backwards a little bit. And then, relaxing your gaze, and if it's comfortable, close your eyes.

Gently, relaxedly, as a way of beginning to attune your attention to your lived experience, take some long, slow, deep breaths. Maybe three-quarters full—just full enough that you don't get winded or stressed by it. Continuing this as a way of attuning your attention to your lived experience in your body. Breathe out a little bit more fully than usual, but make sure that your attention is accompanying it; you follow along with the exhale. Deep inhale, and follow along with your attention. Long exhale, and have your attention accompany the exhale.

As you exhale, with a release and letting go, let's see if you can relax any tension in your attention. Any pushing, striving, or tightness in the attention that accompanies your breathing. And if you're a little bit too complacent, hesitant, or resistant to meditation attention, as you inhale, awaken in attunement to breathing. A being connected. Perhaps even a little bit of diligence in your accompaniment of breathing. And then continue to accompany your breathing. Let your breathing return to normal.

On the periphery of your awareness—with the center being your breathing—as you exhale, relax your body wherever it can soften^[1] or release.

And then settling into your breathing. As you're settling and focusing on breathing, on your present moment experience, if you find yourself thinking a lot, preoccupied in thought, recognize whether you're thinking about the meditation, the here and now, your present moment experience, or anything other. If it is other, name it as other. Recognize it as, "Oh, this is involved in other things, not here." And then come back to the intimacy and the realness of here and now.

If you're thinking about meditation, see if you can calm your thinking down. Think calmly about it. And if thinking is in the background and you're not preoccupied with it—it doesn't interfere with your being with your breathing—then no need to concern yourself with your thinking. Just continue with the meditation.

Recognize other when you're thinking about other things. And then recognizing it, maybe notice the way that it is a disconnection with the experience here and now. Say other to yourself, and then reconnect to the embodied experience of the present moment breathing.

As we come to the end of this sitting, there's a way in which a lot of thinking about other things, other places, and other people limits our ability to love, to care, to be kind. There's a way in which being centered in ourselves, intimate, and calm gives us access to love, to care, to kindness as the situation calls on it. With whatever ways in which we're centered and at ease in ourselves, we can, in fact, not so much think about others, but have our hearts open and directed towards others. To care about others coming from being centered here, not toppling over with a lot of head concerns, thoughts, and stories.

To center ourselves deeply and well here, and then find ourselves being turned inside out so that our hearts can now touch and be touched by the world. May it be that our ability to be centered, grounded, and intimate with our direct experience becomes the source from which we care for this world and live in some way for the benefit and welfare of others. May the goodness of the practice we've done today spread outwards from here out into the world. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we contribute to that.

Dharmette: Patience (3 of 6) Patience Under Insult

So again, good day. Before I give this talk, I want to mention my gratitude for all of you who donated to our Haiti fund efforts to support the people of Haiti, passing on the donation to Partners In Health. To me, it was phenomenal how much was able to be raised this way. As a community, we raised—last count I heard—thirty thousand dollars. That was a count a week ago; I think there's still something coming in designated for that purpose. We had the full accounting at the beginning of the month, but all the money that was donated for that purpose will go to Partners In Health. So thank you very much. It was inspiring. That's enough money to make a big difference for some people in the country of Haiti. Partners In Health goes into the countryside and all kinds of places where often people are forgotten, and works with local medical care people. It is very locally focused. So thank you.

Today's topic on patience has to do with patience under insult. This is any circumstance where the tendency is to get angry or agitated, or maybe so afraid that we become impatient and in a hurry. But especially in the Buddhist tradition, it has to do with situations where we get angry, annoyed, irritated, furious. It could be with other people. It could also have to do with events in the world. It could be that you are angry with your computer because it's not behaving right, or the weather is irritating because it's not what you planned it to be.

The word patience here—patience under insult, patience under assault—might be interpreted as a kind of tolerance. Tolerance of people being unkind, saying mean things, doing things which are provoking. Tolerance with all kinds of things. But tolerance is not really the orientation, because intolerance is a focus outwards—to the other, to the thing out there. Buddhist practice often begins not with the other, but here with us. What's going on here?

Rather than tolerating insult, patience under insult means maybe even a kind of intolerance. An intolerance for us diminishing ourselves, causing suffering to ourselves, harming ourselves. It's an intolerance: "No, I don't want to harm myself." The particular way the tradition emphasizes that is through being angry. So rather than tolerating injustice in the world—that's a whole other topic of what our relationship is to injustice, things that are wrong, things that make us angry or upset; that's an important topic. But the core aspect of patience under insult is that we don't allow ourselves to succumb to anger.

It is a particular kind of anger, because in English, sometimes the word anger covers a wider span than what classically in Buddhism is considered to be angry. Anger in Buddhism is always connected to hostility and malice. If you can be angry but there's no hostility, then it isn't what Buddhists call anger. You have to kind of translate between languages here: when you hear Buddhists talk about anger, it always implies that there's some hostility involved in the motivation, in the fury, and the fire. Hostility always hurts us; it harms us.^[2] It's hard to see that when the focus is on others. It can actually be a kind of pleasure sometimes to be really focused, angry, and directed one-pointedly on someplace else. It can feel very alive or energizing. Some people feel so powerful that way, and they enjoy the power.

But when we can stop focusing on the other, stop othering and directing, and feel intimately what's happening for us—coming back and being centered here—then we see that hostility always harms ourselves. We don't want to harm ourselves. Buddhist practice, as I say, always begins with ourselves. It doesn't end there; it ends with caring for the world. But if we can care for ourselves properly, we have more to offer the world. We're safer for the world. We're not liable to make quick mistakes in what we do.

Sometimes we talk about this patience under insult as a practice of restraint: not giving in to the anger. That's maybe the first line of action. Buddhism likes to divide human activities into body, speech, and mind. With the understanding that the coarsest is what we do physically with our body—we can see it, it's visible, and we have a little bit more control over it—we practice being restrained from harming people with our bodies. That can be with glares, that can be with gestures.

Then the second, which is a little bit harder—mindful speech is harder—is to be restrained from causing harm through speech. If we feel angry, start becoming very, very careful with speech. Don't cross the line to speak in ways that express hostility. Wait, if you can, if it's appropriate to wait to calm down. Don't necessarily leave the situation, and don't ignore what's going on, but hold back until you feel you can address it without hostility. You'll be much wiser that way and more effective, especially in the long term. Hostility is effective in the short term because it frightens people, and people pull away or they stop what they're doing. So there's a kind of reward in being hostile. But the long-term consequence in human relationships is not good, and that can actually be more harmful for you socially in the long term than in the short term. So be restrained in speech.

The more subtle but more important area for Buddhist practice is to be really careful with your thoughts. If your thoughts are mean, if your thoughts are hostile, be very careful with that and hold back. Restrain yourself from giving in to those; don't succumb to them. This act of restraint is an act of strength. It's not an act of repression, but it is an act of protecting yourself from yourself. The impact of actions that harm others, the impact of speech that harms others, on oneself is actually quite big.

The Buddhist tradition suggests that we don't really recognize how big it is because it has this karmic^[3] impact. It affects deeper conditioning, the deeper subconscious workings of the mind, the memories. How things are remembered, how things return in a future time in a way that's unexpected—it's huge.

So how do we be restrained? How do we hold back in a way that is not repression, but really is for our own good? One way is by really recognizing the difference of othering—having the mind's concerns directed towards others. "Others have to be different. Others have to do things a certain way. Others have wronged me." Of course, it's accurate sometimes, that kind of thinking. But to be preoccupied with that and caught in that is an alienation; it's a loss to ourselves. When we're not grounded in ourselves and are focusing externally, that's when hostility can slip out. Because we're not in, we're not following ourselves mindfully, carefully observing what's going on here.

To learn in meditation to not spend a lot of time thinking other than recognizing thoughts as othering, and to become skilled at not going down those channels and coming back here, is training for life to be patient under insult. It helps us learn to recognize what's happening here, focusing and being careful, attentive. Being so attentive that you're there with yourself at those choice moments about what you're going to do with your body, what you're going to do with your voice, and even what you're going to do with your trains of thought. You're right there. That's where you relax. That's where you let go. That's where you settle back. If necessary, so you don't cause harm, that's where you practice restraint. Maybe clamp your mouth shut if necessary. Bite your tongue so you don't say something that you'll later regret. Restraint is the right action when the alternative is worse.

Through practice, we can do better than restraint. We can let go. We can stay close to that place where we're free, where we're not caught in these movements. We might still feel angry, we might feel hostile, but there's no tendency to pick it up. No tendency to go with it, to do anything. It has no power over us even though it might bubble up. Where the power lies is in ourselves—in our ability to be mindful, attentive, centered, and have choice about how we work with all the inner impulses that come along.

As we live that way, we start having wisdom and clarity about how to interact with others. How to have difficult conversations. How to show up in ways that don't frighten others, but also don't lead to retaliation or difficult dynamics where anger meets anger and it flares up even more.

Finally, maybe I shouldn't say this as a punctuation for this talk. I want you to take what I said seriously, but maybe not hold it up too idealistically. Sometimes, you know, the way to irritate someone who is being hostile to you, or who is being a problem for you, is not returning irritation in kind and not getting angry in return. Staying calm, staying non-reactive. Staying kind of unconcerned with what's coming, staying free. Sometimes that little reward knowing, "Oh, I got to that person, the person is frustrated now, irritated," maybe it's not the healthiest thing to do, but maybe it can inspire you to find your way to healthy patience under insult. [Laughter]

Thank you very much. If you have opportunities in the next 24 hours where you feel frustrated, irritated, or angry, you might use that as an occasion to see how some of the things I've said today play out in you, how they're working inside of you. Maybe you'll have more wisdom and more options of how to live with your own frustration and anger. Thank you.