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Guided Meditation: Freedom and Love

Hello and welcome to this guided meditation. To introduce today's meditation, I'd like to use an analogy. If your hands are dirty and you want to wash your hands, the thought might occur, "Why should I wash my hands? They'll just get dirty again." Or, "Washing my hands is kind of an odd thing to do because the world is a place where hands get dirty all the time. It's a kind of betrayal of the world, or a betrayal of the way the hands get dirty, as if there's something wrong with having dirty hands. Dirty hands should be accepted as they are and not be seen as a problem. It's a little bit too idealistic to be cleaning the hands. It's a little bit too—maybe even puritanical—too much emphasis on purity, and it's a real problem, and we're just going to keep going around never washing our hands."

A little bit, that's what happens for people doing meditation. Meditation can be seen as a time to wash the heart, wash the mind. And of course, it's temporary. Of course, it'll get caught up. It'll get attached. It'll have its challenges. It'll feel sad and angry and hurt. Of course, it'll be attached and spin out and get stressed, and there are all kinds of ways the mind can be. But from time to time, it's nice to clean the mind. It's nice to calm the mind, settle the mind deeply, and bring a peace to the mind and the heart. And it's not a betrayal of what happens outside of meditation. It's not like it means that we shouldn't do it, that it's too pure, too idealistic, or a betrayal, and that what we really need to do is to just radically accept having stress, anxiety, funny thoughts, ideas, and impulses, and that we just have to learn to accept that and keep going.

It's actually healthy. Just like it's healthy to wash your hands or take a shower, it's healthy to wash the mind and heart from time to time. It prepares us to see better. It prepares us to go back to take care of the world better. A surgeon who decides they're not going to wash their hands ever because "the world is a place where hands get dirty and we just have to accept it," is going to harm a lot of patients by bringing infections to them. So similarly, to be able to have some place where temporarily, provisionally, we are in an environment removed from the ordinary activities of life—removed from any monitor, surfing the web, and being involved in family dramas—in order to cleanse, to settle, and to get a new perspective, is a phenomenal thing to do.

Allow meditation to be that special time where it's okay not to bring the world with us. Of course, you can if you want to practice with it in some important way, but it's also an important place to not bring it along. This is a time for something else. This is a time for the surgeon to go into a clean room to wash their hands, to come back cleansed, then to do the work, and then to wash their hands after the work.

See this as a special time, a ritual time, a sacred time where we don't have to keep operating under the ordinary rules of the game, the ordinary values, concerns, and approaches of everyday life. We can take a break. We can step away a little bit for this deep inner work to see what's happening.

And as we do this, there are two movements that go hand in hand. One of them is that the heart starts becoming free of its clinging, of its contractions, of its tightness, free of its swirling and spinning of the mind. So provisionally, it's called being free of attachments. The other that's directly related to that comes along like the front and the back of the hand: the fewer attachments we have, the less reactivity there is. And we have more equanimity.

These two together—to no longer be contracted, to clean ourselves—is a kind of self-love. To no longer have those contractions allows equanimity to fill our love for others, to have an equanimous love. To do that in meditation is a phenomenally significant time to explore what this is like. Even if it's hard everywhere else, at least here can we begin finding or imagining ourselves into this equanimous love.

So, assume a meditation posture. Gently close your eyes and sit quietly, feeling the impact of my words on you. Did they land in any place in your body? Something got energized? Did they elicit any emotions? Is there a momentum of any thoughts triggered by what I just said? Allow that to be as it is.

Can you take in the quiet of meditation now to feel your way more deeply into something that's underneath all those responses? To a place inside that you associate from time to time with being a peaceful, warm-hearted place that you have.

From there, breathe into it. Breathe with it, with a gentle rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Touching, massaging. A tender, intimate place deep inside.

Gently taking some fuller breaths, and then a slightly longer exhale. Seeing if the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out can be a calm rhythm, a smooth movement, just for a few moments more than you normally would breathe. Having the thinking mind become quieter, so there's more bandwidth of attention to feel and sense the breathing. In a sense, so breathing can better fill the space of awareness, of attention.

Letting your breathing return to normal and seeing if how you're aware of breathing, how you know it, can be adjusted slightly so it's a calmer knowing, a calm awareness. A soft sensing of the sensations of breathing.

As you exhale, relaxing the thinking mind, softening the area where you do a lot of thinking. Softening around your heart center or wherever your emotional center is right now. Let it soften. Relax. Become more spacious around how you're feeling.

And then to find within you, or to awaken within you, a warm-hearted goodwill. That's not necessarily for anybody, though it could be for you, or for someone else. An inner place of gentleness, tenderness, warmth, of love. The less you're attached to things, the less caught up in thoughts, the more room there is for that lovely space.

As you breathe in, imagine that love spreads upward through your upper torso, feeling it. As you exhale, it spreads wide into your lower torso and maybe down into your legs. Slowly, you're filling your body with love, with care, goodwill.

Imagine that you're sitting on a comfortable, beautiful bench in a beautiful park on a beautiful day. As you inhale and exhale, you spread your goodwill out across the park to the people walking by, people sitting on their benches. Nothing's required of you, but just sit there and radiate goodwill and love out across the park. The people there are strangers. Nothing is needed from you. Your love, your warmth, your kind regard is unconditional. As you breathe, on the inhale, let your love spread outward, maybe in an upward direction, and on the exhale spreading outward, maybe in a downward direction all around.

You maybe can appreciate how non-reactive or uninvolved the love can be, sitting on a bench. To support that kind of love, you might say as you breathe towards the people you see, "Your choices are yours to make, and I have warmth and love for you. I wish you well, and you'll make your choices of how to be in this park and what to do."

No matter who is there in the park, regardless of whether it's the kind of people you're comfortable with or uncomfortable with, everyone leaves you alone. People doing things that you ordinarily wouldn't approve of, and that you do approve of. But for these minutes, it's not interesting to be approving or disapproving in the safety of the bench. Just to be content, to love equanimously, to spread love in a non-reactive, impartial way, including everyone who comes through the park. "I care for you, but your choices are your own."

As we come to the end of this sitting, open your mind and your heart wider beyond where you're sitting, beyond the park that you're imagining, out into the world. See for a minute or two if you can sit gazing upon the world with a kind of equanimity, at peace in your kind regard. Just gazing, feeling, sensing, imagining this whole world without being caught up in anything about the world. But for a minute or so, appreciate a peaceful gaze of love across the world, as if it's medicine for everyone. Like being in the peace of a peaceful dawn before the world has woken up, and the first sunlight begins to appear.

Let these words of goodwill be like the first sunlight that spreads across the land: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may I carry this light of love with me into the world as medicine, as light to brighten a suffering world.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (73) Unconditional Positive Upekkha Samadhi 4

Hello and welcome to this continuous series on love. This time, continuing talks on equanimous love, upekkhā^[1], and this is such an important love to have in certain circumstances.

One of the ones I'm thinking about is a friend who's a brilliant and innovative Vipassana^[2] teacher. His name is Shinzen Young^[3], and he developed an approach for teaching mindfulness to young teenage boys. He developed it and trained some people to do it. I don't know how common it is anymore, but for a little while, it was operating.

The way it worked was that there were never any instructions, no mindfulness instructions to these teenagers. There was nothing they were expected to do, no technique or anything of mindfulness. Rather, they were invited to bring some of their own music that they liked listening to, to the session, to the gathering of the group. The instructor would ask them a series of questions before and after listening to the music. I don't know what the actual questions were, but questions about how they listen, maybe, or how they hear it in their body, or how it affects their thoughts—what touches them the most deeply. I'm just making this up, but I'm sure the questions were probably even better than that. They were simple questions.

To respond to those questions required an inner attention, a kind of feeling oneself, sensing oneself, being present for oneself before, after, and more importantly maybe, during the music. Then they would report back. That reporting back also helped everyone in the group feel more connected, and incidentally, they were all becoming more mindful, more present, more here in their bodies and minds, and really waking up in a nice way.

One of the reasons I'm telling you this is that one of the most important parts of this approach was that the facilitator had to practice unconditional acceptance of whatever they said—unconditional positive regard. No matter how they answered or how they reported, there was never any response from the facilitator that they were wrong, hadn't understood, or had missed the boat. It was all just very appreciative and welcoming, and held it all. For that age group, the feeling was that anything else—anything instructive, what they had to do, what they could fail at, anything that felt like a judgment about them—they were going to be highly sensitive to. The facilitators had to just practice this unconditional positive regard. There were no mistakes. They could make no mistakes in doing this. Nothing was wrong.

That's a situation where this unconditional positive regard, equanimous love, has a big impact and a big benefit. I believe that the expression "unconditional positive regard" might have come from Carl Rogers^[4], the famous American therapist and psychologist, who cultivated this way of being in relationship to a client.

They had unconditional positive regard for whatever a client said and gently repeated back what they said. Not verbatim, but maybe in a slightly different way, as a way of acknowledging, naming, and making room for what they had said. Lo and behold, that would give people a chance to build on that, to expand on that, to go deeper with it. It was remarkable. In the videos of Carl Rogers doing this work, it's remarkable to watch how it deepens, helps, and moves people. There's no advice given. There are no instructions and no judgments. Just unconditional positive regard, mirroring back to them what's there.

Some of these videos are from the 50s, maybe early 60s, so the language and the culture were a little bit different than they are now. It might seem a little stilted, but at the time, it was revolutionary. There are times for this unconditional positive regard, which is a modern English way of saying equanimous love. From time to time, that's the medicine for the situation, and to learn to do that is a phenomenally useful skill.

It's not easy. It really takes a lot of self-understanding, a lot of mindfulness, and awareness of oneself to not get tripped up by judgments, ideas of right and wrong, justice, or what has to happen. To not get tripped up by fears, preoccupations, or the ways that we get caught in our own inner doubts. But to keep the playing field of the heart wide open and clear so that what flows out of us is an equanimous love, a balanced love, a non-reactive love that has a continuity to it. A love where it's not being disturbed by a lot of doubts, exceptions, complaints, or "what ifs"—like "what of those situations?" Or remembering, "Oh yes, this is fine, but there are other times where it's not easy," and then galloping off into thinking about the times that are difficult. Instead, really appreciate that there's a time and place to come here and discover and work through whatever is going on within us that keeps us from a continuity of unconditional positive regard, to be calm and gaze upon the world kindly.

One of the things to appreciate here is that it's quite appropriate and very human to take time to do particular things without it being a betrayal of other things that we do as a human being. Many of us will go home from work in order to sleep at night. Imagine what chaos it would be if everybody at a big company just worked all the time, and they all slept in their office. It would be very different. People wouldn't get the rest and the recovery that they would need to come back to work. So we go home, and there's no betrayal of work. It's just the rhythm of life that way.

And so with meditation, it's like the analogy I gave before. It's like washing our hands. Washing our hands is not a betrayal of the world, not a betrayal of dirty hands. It's not a waste of time because the hands will get dirty again later. It's appropriate, it's nice, and it prepares the surgeon for being able to do surgery without infecting people.

When we do have time off from the world, that's what meditation is for. It's powerful and amazing to give yourself permission to drop the worldly concerns the best you can and allow for there to be an unconditional positive regard. To gaze upon the world kindly, to gaze upon yourself kindly, and to do it with continuity as samādhi^[5], to dip into it and immerse yourself in this cleansing process of equanimous love.

We do it by building on the love that we've created through mettā, karuṇā, muditā^[6]—through goodwill, compassion, and appreciative joy. And then to have a simpler love, a more basic love. To sit on the park bench where strangers are walking by. It's very safe, it's a nice day, everyone's in a good mood for the most part. Some people are smoking cigarettes, some people are maybe doing things that you normally wouldn't approve of, and maybe some people are even arguing. But you're sitting there watching the world go by with unconditional positive regard, with an equanimous love, independent of whether they deserve it or not. Just because it's so phenomenal, so wonderful to finally be able to be at peace yourself and to radiate, feel, and sense a positive regard in all directions.

To do this, it's a practice. It's not just an ideal we can snap our fingers and drop into. It's something that we are slowly working our way towards: understanding where it's difficult, understanding where we get tripped up, and having a warm, unconditional regard towards ourselves.

We can never do it wrong, in a sense. We're never being judged. We're like the young teenagers who really benefit from that. But we can keep asking questions, keep opening up, keep discovering, "Oh, this is how it is. This is how it is." We can be present for the difficulties we have in a way that supports greater interest, greater opening, greater discovery of sensing, "Oh, this is it." As if that's what we're doing. Opening to more here, making more room, more space to hold everything until everything can be held in our freedom.

Everything can be held in our kind regard, where freedom and kind regard, freedom and love, are inseparable. What a phenomenal direction to go in our lives. This practice is leading us in that direction. That's the north star of the heart set free, so that it can have this simple, universal love for all.

Thank you very much, and we'll have another day with equanimous love tomorrow. May it be that you begin maybe today, or look over the next day at what are the ways in which being free from attachments, free from contraction, free from clinging and grasping, free from pushing and resisting, free from being stuck—right there you can discover love, positive regard, being deeply at ease, and gazing upon the world kindly.

Thank you.