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Guided Meditation: From Craving to Aspiration

Okay, then I think we'll go ahead and get started. So it's nice to be with all of you again. As you can see, Gil will again be away this week, so we'll have five days together. This week, the theme is going to be desire and letting go. We know that desire is a big part of human life. Once one begins mindfulness practice, we see in fact how frequently the mind is trying to get something or hold on to something that it likes, or finds pleasant or useful even. There is just a constant wanting all the time. And why is that?

Mostly it's because we think that it will bring happiness. Getting what we want is good—getting things that are pleasant or beautiful. But mindfulness also shows us that this isn't entirely true. Our quest to find happiness only by fulfilling desires gets more and more suspect on the path. It's tiring, and it's not entirely in our control. Of course, on the other hand, it's also obvious that not all desires are harmful for us. Some of the happiness that desirable experiences bring is hardly a terrible thing. So we're going to have to look more carefully at desires, and then on the flip side, we know that the Buddhist teachings are frequently about letting go. How does that relate to desire? We're going to talk about some of that during this week. I think it should be an interesting adventure.

But first, let's go ahead and get started meditating. Please settle in and find a posture for meditation where you can be upright and also relaxed. If you're lying down, that's fine too, but find somewhere where you can be in a straight posture.

Just allow yourself to feel where you're sitting. Maybe your seat against the cushion or the chair, your legs or feet against the floor. Allow yourself to be supported by what you're sitting on. We will deliberately invite some ease in the body, softening the muscles of the face, particularly around the eyes, and even the eyes and the eye sockets. They tend to get a little tight when we're looking at the screen.

Releasing the jaw, down through the neck, and letting the shoulders settle. Maybe letting the shoulder blades slide down the back. Softening the arms and the hands, and down into the chest area, around the heart and the rib cage. Just sensing into that, maybe letting it expand using the three dimensions.

Softening down through the belly, in the hip joints, and again feeling into where you're sitting. Maybe releasing a bit more, and then letting go of any bracing in the legs. For ease in the body, it might be that there are still places of tension or pain, or places where we couldn't feel it very well, and that's fine. The body is fine right now. We also invite some ease in the mind, with how things are.

We may gently turn attention to the breath, just the sensations of breathing in, breathing out as a simple present moment object.

Just touching into the state of the mind as we continue to breathe. Just noticing if there's any mood present, or generally the energy level. Is the mind a little bit tired right now, or is it a little bit agitated? Just so that we have a sense of how things are.

I'd like to invite a brief recollection. Please bring to mind a past experience of craving or grasping that was strong for you and clearly unbeneficial in some way. It doesn't have to be the heaviest one, but the time when you wanted the coffee so bad that when the person at the counter said they didn't have that kind, you felt angry. Something like that—an instance of grasping where the mind was clearly in a contracted state. Not a long story about it, but instead, recollect what it felt like to have that craving or clinging.

Once you have a sense of how that felt, then you can turn your attention back to the meditation on the breath and inviting ease through the body. You can feel the contrast between those, and let that recollection settle out as you breathe in and out. Maybe even the grasping affected the way you were breathing; you can just let it naturally settle out into how it is now.

If it helps, you can take a fuller, deeper breath, and on the out-breath, encourage relaxation throughout the body just to help reset. Then continue on with simple mindfulness meditation of noticing what's happening as it happens, and in particular, if the mind is inclining toward wanting or not wanting, noticing that. But mostly just staying with the simple object of the breath or the body in mindfulness meditation.

As you're watching the mind and resting with the breath or the body, you might notice that various present moment wanting or desire that comes in has some similarity to that grasping that was recalled. Maybe there's a sense of leaning or contraction, even if it's just a slight one, like, "I want a little more peace in this sitting," or "I want that twinge in my back to settle out." It's maybe milder, but it's of the same family as that craving or clinging. We just notice that this is just one of the movements of the mind—the movement of wanting or desire.

As we continue to sit, we may notice some things that are a kind of desire that has to do with the body, just the needs of the body. Like maybe you're getting thirsty after having sat here for a while, or maybe there's some discomfort related to being in the same position. Maybe you need to go to the bathroom. These are also basic kinds of desires. How are they similar to these other desires that we've looked at? As we continue to sit with breath and body mindfulness.

Now I'd like to invite another reflection or thought. Please bring to mind an aspiration that you have for your life or for your practice—something that is clearly wholesome. Maybe you're working on a degree or a certification so that you can work in a way that serves other people. Or perhaps you are aspiring to go on a three-month retreat at some point. Or maybe you wish for awakening, for freedom. Bring that into the mind and then feel how that is in the body, breathing with it.

This is also a kind of desire. How is it similar to the other kinds of desire that we explored in this meditation, and how is it different? Without thinking about that, just rest with it.

So what we see as we begin to explore this very natural, very normal quality called desire is that it has a wide range. It can have a wide range of how wholesome or unwholesome it can be, how strong it can be, and how we relate to it. We relate to different desires in different ways. It's a big part of the mind, of life, and it's a big part of what drives the world to be doing all that it's doing, so it's very important to start looking at it.

We can maybe see in our own life the drivenness that comes from some of our desires, or has come in the past, and this connects us to all people, because all people have this. We can also feel compassion for how it is to be driven if we're not seeing that. We can feel the wisdom even just of these few minutes of looking at this quality of mind, this factor of the mind and heart.

We can wish that our particular desires can be pointed toward helping those around us. And even if they're not doing that directly, simply knowing about our desires and being able to see them—that's going to give us some choice about how we interact with others, how we make choices in our life. So we can wish that those will be of benefit. We can be glad that we have the awareness in order to make some of those choices instead of only being driven.

Dharmette: Desire and Letting Go (1 of 5): The Diversity of Desire

Okay, so we are talking about desire and letting go this week. As I mentioned before the sit, mindfulness practice reveals to us that our quest for happiness that's based in fulfilling desires may not be fully effective. We start to feel the disadvantages of how tiring it is to always be chasing desires, and also that we're not totally in control of what it is that we want to get. But on the other hand, some desires are certainly useful in life and on the spiritual path. So we'll start to look at that, and the topic for today is the diversity of desire.

I think it's important to say right up front: is all desire bad? No. So we'll just say that clearly at the beginning. The Buddha was a lot more nuanced in his teachings on desire, which is a very fundamental movement of the human mind. Maybe we could call it something like "a movement toward" in the mind. We can feel that there's a movement toward, and there's also a movement away, which is related, but we're focusing now on this movement toward as a very general aspect of the mind. As we'll see as we go along this week, the Buddha actually used our tendency to move toward things as part of the path to freedom that he described and laid out for us.

But often, we know that moving toward is not about freedom. We know from the Second Noble Truth that craving or clinging is closely related to suffering, so we're going to have to look at this desire, this movement toward, sooner or later. It's an important part of the practice to look at that. It's important territory, let's say.

We can see that there's a range of desire, or a diversity of desire. I don't think it's quite a linear spectrum. It's more like a space, or even a mandala, of different kinds of desire. The way I want to talk about it today is to say that there are five different aspects of desire that we could maybe identify. As we touch into each of these five different aspects, or facets of desire, see how each one resonates for you. Notice if and how it may be present in your mind stream or even in your body, or how it's been playing out in your life.

Clearly in the unwholesome realm of the space, we find what is called taṇhā^[1] in the Buddhist teachings. That's a word that literally means thirst, but it's usually translated as craving. This is that grasping kind of desire or clinging that is obviously painful and harmful, and it relates to things like lust or greed or strong wanting. When this craving is about the world of the senses, like some taste or sound or touch that we desire, we call it kāma^[2], which means basically sense desire or sense pleasure—like the Kama Sutra, it's the same word. So kāma-taṇhā is strong grasping of sensual objects. But it's not really about the object, of course; the grasping is occurring in the mind. We might habitually grasp at comfort food, or sex, or sexual fantasies even. We also see things like addiction to drugs and alcohol. Taṇhā can also relate to things that aren't sensual, like craving for power or for certain identities. These kinds of desires, I think I can just state clearly, do not support our path to liberation. They are themselves binding the mind up; we can feel that when we are under their sway. So that's one kind.

To fill out more of the space, another kind is that we have some basic desires that are related to bodily needs: the desire to eat, the desire to drink or to use the bathroom, and sex as a basic desire in some stages of human life. These desires are not usually seen as inherently harmful, but they are somewhat stressful, aren't they? It takes some effort to do all these things. I would say that how we relate to the desires of the body influences how happy or unhappy we are. Even awakened people have the desire to pee, and they still feel physical hunger. There's one sutta that says that even arahants^[3], fully awakened beings, feel sensations that are dependent on the body and conditioned by life, which I think means these basic bodily feelings. So there is some distinction between beings as to whether or not these very fundamental desires bring any dukkha^[4]. We'll talk a little bit more about that at some point, but that is a kind of desire.

The third kind of desire is that there are desires that accompany trying to live a typical human life among other humans. We have the wish to find livelihood, we may have the wish to find a partner, to be part of a community, to secure a place to live, and to have enough food that's nutritious, and so forth. These desires take a lot of energy and a lot of attention, and they're myriad. I don't think I can even name all of them. Relationships, family life, all these worldly desires, all of our political interests, and so forth. Gil has said that we should be called "human desirlings" rather than human beings because there's so much desiring and doing involved in all of these. These are often the desires that we will defend as being very necessary and very normal. In some ways, yes—of course we have to do these things. But this is a big realm for Dharma practice because many of these are actually mild forms of what I called kāma before, the world of sense desire and sense pleasure. We don't have to have deep pathological grasping in order to be somewhat enslaved to our sense desires. Isn't that true? The Buddha aimed a notable amount of his teaching about desire into this space, and we'll talk about it more as the week goes on—the desires that go with being human.

Then as we continue with this space or mandala of desires, the fourth one out of five we could call the more "elevated" human wishes, if we can use that word. These are things like desire for the well-being of others, aspiring to be a better person, wanting to learn to meditate or to study spiritual teachings, wanting a peaceful and happy life where we care more about how we're living than about money or status. These are generally very good desires. There can still be some delusion, there could be a self or an ego behind them, but some of these wishes can actually serve our spiritual development, our ethical development, and our development of compassion. The Buddha used our elevated desires as part of the path. He encouraged these kinds of skillful wishes in order to draw us along the path. So it's good to pay attention when we have these kinds of desires and not worry, "Oh, I'm not supposed to want anything if I'm on the spiritual path." Some of these good desires are very helpful, and they will lead us along the path.

And then the last kind of desire—it's kind of part of the fourth, but I want to separate it out—is the most powerful expression of spiritual desire, which is the desire to awaken, the desire to be free, to be liberated. Even within this one, there are several different facets. One word for it is saṃvega^[5], often translated as spiritual urgency. There can be times where that's an accurate term; it can really feel urgent that we need to wake up or we need to do something to move toward liberation. It can have almost a grip to it, but not like the grip of taṇhā. Sometimes it doesn't quite have that urgency, and the wish to awaken is captured more by a word like "calling"—a calling to practice, or a deep sense in the heart of wanting to be free, knowing that there's something more than what we're seeing conventionally, something that we tap into that's deep in our heart.

So we have this range. We have on the one hand taṇhā (grasping, clinging), and then the animal desires of the body, the wishes of a human life, the elevated wishes toward ethics and compassion, and then this wish for awakening. Although they aren't quite on a linear spectrum, there is clearly a division of wholesome and unwholesome, skillful and unskillful, that's definitely relevant as we look at these different kinds of desires. Some are blatantly painful. We might still be succumbing to them, but it's clear enough that they're painful, right? For others of these desires, we're making choices. We decide to put up with the stress or struggle of them because we decide that the result is worth it. There's a kind of a cost-benefit analysis going on in our mind, maybe subconsciously, and the Buddha asks us to look very carefully in that realm. We'll talk a little bit more about that. And then some of the desires are clearly helpful, like compassion or ethics. But on the other hand, even though we know they're clearly helpful, that doesn't mean we always do them, does it?

So there's a lot of potential here for training. There's a lot to learn about our mind and our heart, and a lot of good effort we can put into releasing the ones that are really binding us, and doing more of the ones that are helpful and that are elevating us. But to do that effectively, we're going to need some wisdom, some clarity about what is actually onward-leading on the path and what is actually binding our heart up. We're not always clear on that as humans in this realm of desire.

To complicate things a little bit more, it changes along the path. Something may not really feel like a burden or a hindrance to us at the beginning of the path. Some kind of desire that we have doesn't feel so stressful because there are other more pressing issues that we're working on. But then later, we might start to feel the contraction or the limitation of certain kinds of desire that we didn't feel before. We start to realize, "Oh, this is more like attachment. The cost-benefit analysis doesn't work for this one anymore," and so we have to change as it goes along.

This is the space that we're in this week: this space of desire and letting go. Tomorrow we're going to have a look at this kind of desire that I call kāma, sensual attraction or sensual desire, and also the movement of mind that helps us to restrain it or shape it in various ways. I hope you'll want to continue along on this adventure. Thank you. I will see you tomorrow. Be well.