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Guided Meditation: Noticing Change

Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, great, yes, two thumbs up even. Yay, thanks Nancy.

Good morning, good morning. It's lovely to be with you all in person. Wow, three dimensions, sweet. It still surprises me after two and a half years of Zoom. So, let's begin with sitting together, and I'll offer a very lightly guided sit just to help us settle.

Arriving. Arriving in this body. Arriving in this moment in time. And bringing awareness to this body, to this body sitting, or maybe at home you are lying down. If your body needs to lie down right now because of pain or self-care, be aware of the position of this body. And if there is movement needed right now, rolling back the shoulders perhaps. Ah, maybe trying to sit up a little straighter, just a tiny bit, just to bring more awareness, more uprightness. More sense of integrity and alignment.

And feeling the connection of your body to the Earth. If you're sitting on a cushion, feeling your bottom on the cushion, your legs, your feet. If you're in a chair, the bottom of your feet on the Earth. Feeling grounded. There might be a lot happening, maybe a lot has happened before you got here physically, figuratively. It's okay. It's all right. That can be happening still, but it's like a snow globe that's shaken, it's still settling. It's okay.

Set the snow globe down on the Earth. Feel grounded, feel the connection of it. Feel the stability of this body while all the flurries settle. The flurries, it's okay. But be aware, pay attention, pay attention. This moment is precious, fleeting. Pay attention.

Let the breath move however it wants, deep, shallow, move through the body, not controlled. Let the body be relaxed, soft, the mind be soft. When the body is relaxed, the mind can relax. Checking in with the forehead, softening if needed, the jaw, neck, shoulders. Eyes in their sockets, let them relax. Ah, moving down. Arms, hands, chest, abdomen, sit bones, legs, and feet. Really landing, arriving more deeply every moment.

Welcoming each and every in-breath and out-breath. Every in-breath like spring, every out-breath like the fall leaves falling, letting go. Appreciating the arrival of each in-breath like a gift, and appreciating and letting go in each out-breath, with equanimity. Every moment a new arrival and a new letting go, the arising and passing, arising and passing. Such is the nature of human life. Pay attention.

And if you find your mind is traveling to distant places, memories, plans, it's like the snow globe is getting shaken again. It's okay. It's all right. Notice what has happened and set the snow globe down again, and again, and again. Become embodied, connect with your body. Let awareness know that you're sitting and breathing, no judgment. No self-recrimination. Gently set it down again and again and connect with this passing moment in this body, in this river of experience, the body, mind, and heart.

Letting the attention be turned inward. Flow of experience in the body as a way of grounding, settling, and knowing—knowing change. Sensations keep shifting and moving. Maybe tingling in your hands, sit bones, temperature shifting. Maybe feeling the abdomen expand and contract with each breath. This landscape of shifting, changing experience, it keeps changing. Stay with the change.

Feel impermanence intimately for yourself, internally with each moment. Change internally in each moment, not as an idea, but as a felt-sense experience firsthand. What do you notice? Does it stay the same, or does it keep shifting? Different sensations, thoughts keep arising seemingly uncontrollably. Notice what's happening. Notice, pay attention. Know change, get to know change intimately.

And if at any point knowing change feels overwhelming, too much is changing internally, then feel the stability of the posture, being grounded on the Earth. Feel the snow globe resting on the Earth, stable. Stability to support seeing change.

Can there be a sense of spaciousness, stability, groundedness in your body, your mind? Sitting upright, grounded, rooted with change. With change internally, making space, allowing for change, as it is the nature of all things. Can we welcome change with stability, groundedness, equanimity, and not fight against it? It's all changing all the time. Can we intimately know this for ourselves, even for a split second?

And as we bring this sitting period to a close, appreciating yourself for your practice. Not judging what happened or did not happen, you did your best. You showed up and aligned your actions as best as you could with your intentions. Wonderful. Appreciating yourself for having shown up, practiced, and trusting there is goodness, there's goodness in this cultivation. And offering this goodness to yourself and all beings everywhere: May my actions, my practice, my wholeheartedness, without attachment to results, may my goodness be of service to all beings everywhere, including myself. May all beings everywhere be happy and free, including myself.

The Gift of Impermanence

Good morning. So you've been sitting for a while, and out of kindness to your body, I'm going to suggest, if you'd like, you can get up and stretch for a minute while I get set up with my notes here. Give some love to those bodies. Okay.

All right, hi. Good to see you, good to be with you. Yay, how nice. It just touches my heart to be in the room with you. This is so wild, right? Things we used to take for granted, and now it's like, "Wow, I'm in a room with people. How nice is that? How awesome is that?" Actually, I want to invite all of us because I'm really feeling the poignancy of being in a room with other human beings and listening to the Dharma, sharing the Dharma, supporting each other on this path. It's so poignant, and all of us have traveled, walked, biked, or driven miles, I know. So, thank you for being here, really. Thank you for each other for being here.

For the topic for today's reflections, I'd like to invite us to reflect on change, on impermanence. You might have already guessed that from the invitations in the guided meditation. You noticed? Yeah. The guided meditation, just to share what the intention was, was at the beginning to try to stabilize with the body. Become stable, feel the grounding. Because in order to know change, it's helpful to have a sense of stability, right? Remember the metaphor I used with the snow globe that's shaken, and it's like, "Oh, everything is twirling, all the little bits and pieces." When we arrive often on the cushion, our minds are like that. And, "Oh, set it down." Ah, set it down. Yes, feel the body, feel the stability, feel yourself on the Earth, on the ground. In fact, you see the Buddha is touching the Earth with the Earth mudra^[1], representing groundedness.

The story of the Earth mudra—as you've seen, many Buddha statues actually have the Earth mudra—is that on the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha was assailed by Mara^[2], the personification of doubt and all the other—you know, the full catastrophe that we have in our minds: "I can't do this." It's said that Mara comes as doubt and says, "Who are you? You think you're going to wake up and awaken? Who do you think you are?" With all of what's going on, that is the shaking, right? All the moving pieces in the mind. The Buddha touches the Earth as if to say, "Earth, be my witness, I belong here," and steadies himself, grounds himself. Hence the Earth mudra. So remember, at any time the snow globe's little pieces are twirling inside—and they do twirl, don't they? A lot. Not just in sitting meditation, but throughout the day: "Who do you think you are?" Ground, ground.

So in our guided meditation, I started with inviting you to ground the body, feeling the connection to the Earth, feeling the breath, relaxing the different parts of the body very briefly. Because again, as the body relaxes, the mind can relax, they're so connected. Especially if you're a newer meditator. I remember I would come and sit, and I was like, "Okay, I'm trying to quiet my mind." It took me a while to realize, "Oh, I need to quiet my body first." If I really settle my body, pay attention to my body, stabilize it, ground it... oh yeah, the mind, it's like a little baby. It becomes calmer when the body is calming. So again, coming back to the guided meditation, what we did is to settle in the body, relax, and then I invited you to notice change. I invited you to turn to change internally, starting with the breath. Each in-breath as a spring arrival. Each out-breath as a falling of leaves, like the fall. Especially given that in the Northern Hemisphere it is the fall. As I was driving to IMC this morning, especially down Bridge Street, wow, all the leaves have fallen. It's so beautiful. There is a grace, there's a beauty in the letting go, in the fall. So change, every in-breath a spring, every out-breath a fall. And noticing the change, noticing every moment's sensations. There's tingling, moving, shifting. To get to know change intimately. Because change... yeah, yeah, everything changes. We know that concept. "Yeah, yeah, everything changes, for sure, what's new." But really getting to know it intimately is an insight. It's actually a profound insight.

In Buddhism, it's known as one of the three characteristics of existence. And the three characteristics, as a review: the first one is impermanence, inconstancy, anicca^[3]. I'll talk more about that today; that's the focus of the reflections today, anicca. The other one is dukkha^[4], this word that often gets translated as suffering, but that's just one translation. Another translation just as well could be stress, or unsatisfactoriness, or just things not quite being right. It's like it's never right, do you notice? Get yourself comfortable and say you're okay for a few minutes, it's like, "Oh, it's not." It's that sense of dukkha, it's just that not-quite-right ever, even if you get conditions perfect. Anicca (impermanence), unsatisfactoriness, and anatta^[5] (impersonality or not-self). Which doesn't mean that you don't exist and there isn't a self, but it means that it's impersonal, it's ungovernable. And these three characteristics actually relate to each other, they're all different aspects of one another. When something is inconstant, keeps changing (anicca), it's ungovernable, you just can't quite fix it and get it in one place, right? Hence anatta comes out of that. And also, when something keeps changing, you can't quite make it satisfactory and let it stay that way. So these three are different... it's like the light coming through a diamond and refracting, it's the same light but you just see it in different ways in your experience.

So impermanence, such an important thing to contemplate, to actually become aware of. It's really liberating. It's a liberating reflection, and it's not bad news. It's not like, "Ah, everything changes, okay, might as well..." That's not the idea here. But to actually appreciate that things change. They're not going to stay this way, they change all the time. Borrowed from Seido Ray Ronci^[6] from The Examined Life, they say: "Wisdom is not merely something to be gained with old age. One can be wise in every stage of one's life. To manifest wisdom means simply to step back and see, to reflect, inquire, be aware, be disciplined, and be focused. Not once in a while, but all the time, moment to moment. This life is precious and fleeting, pay attention."

So one aspect of appreciating impermanence is not to have the delusion of permanence. Because we have the delusion of permanence, that's the modus operandi that as human beings we operate on, and it's not our fault. Evolutionarily, we're designed to think, "Oh yeah, things are fixed," and you just think about tomorrow and the day after and the next year and the next decade is going to be fixed and nothing's going to change. And things are changing. It's not going to stay this way. Appreciate it. Appreciate it, especially this being the Sunday before Thanksgiving in North America. Appreciate giving thanks. Things are not going to stay the same; they're shifting and changing all the time. People you appreciate in your life, people whom you love and care about, people who annoy you, appreciate them. All these relationships are impermanent. We are so impermanent. We just don't quite connect with it. We feel like maybe we do connect with it intellectually, but not on an insight level.

The word anicca—again, impermanence. If you notice in many Buddhist teachings, impermanence keeps coming up. Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence. And impermanence is a doorway, really. Deep insight into impermanence, it's a doorway to nibbana^[7], to liberation. To the mind opening up, becoming freed up. It is a doorway. It's not just something nice to do or have, but this is the way. So pay attention. Pay attention to change, pay attention to how you react to change.

Let me say something about the word. In Pali, this word is spelled A-N-I-C-C-A, and the 'c' is pronounced as 'ch'. So instead of 'anikka', it's actually anicca. And in Pali, the word literally means inconstant, and it arises from the synthesis of two separate words, one being nicca and the primitive a, which negates everything. So nicca means continuous, the concept of continuity and permanence, and a means not, so not permanent.

Suzuki Roshi^[8], the author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, once was asked by a student who came to him and said, "I've been listening to your lectures for years and I still don't understand. Can you please express Buddhism in a nutshell? Thank you." So he did. He replied, "Everything changes." That's Buddhism in a nutshell. Everything changes.

So when we fight that everything changes, we suffer. When we make peace with that... yeah, this body changes. It ages, it's going to age, it's going to die. Everyone I love, they'll change, they'll be separated from me. Everything I love, things change. When you make deep peace with change, your heart is liberated. It's freed. It can have equanimity to hold change. It can still grieve. It's okay, you don't become a robot. It's okay to have emotions and grief, it's fine. But there is a sense of ease. There's a sense of ease in not fighting with things as they are.

Another quote from Suzuki Roshi continuing that: "Everything changes, there is nothing to stick to. That is the Buddha's most important teaching." So today's topic is the Buddha's most important teaching: Everything changes. And change is so around us. It's within us, it's around us on so many different levels. Geologically we can see it, and we can see cultures... when we go to historical places perhaps, if we travel, and we see different civilizations that have come and gone. I remember years ago I went to Cambodia, to Angkor Wat, and seeing the grandeur of the Southeast Asian civilization, and wow, how things have changed. And it made me realize, oh, this civilization, the Western civilization, if there were the Romans and the Greeks, and now there is the United States in some ways and the hegemony of the U.S., it's all impermanent. We're just part of this ocean of change.

So larger levels, historically, and then chapters of our lives, right? You're not a child anymore, you're not a teenager, it's all gone. Who are you? And not just chapters of your life, but also every day since you woke up this morning. How many thoughts? How many emotions? How many reflections have you had since you arrived here at IMC or turned on the YouTube channel? It keeps changing. Your body, your mind, it just keeps changing. It's like a waterfall when you actually start to notice. So the invitation in practice, in meditation, as I invited you in the guided meditation (and again, this was a short meditation and short time to contemplate change), but say on long retreats when your mind is really stable and quiet—and actually it can happen in short sits too—but when the mind is really present, you get to see that appearances are like a waterfall. So much changing, shifting all the time.

And what's... so seeing change, when we see change, our minds can react in many ways. And often the first reaction that our minds have is resistance. And that's natural. Don't blame yourself, this is just what happens. When we see change, our minds tend to resist it. We don't want it, we want things to stay the same. Unless we want impermanence to be on our side, and sometimes impermanence is on our side, right? It's like, "I don't like this situation. Impermanence, change it, please." Except for that, usually we don't like change. We're scared of it perhaps. There's a sense of unsettledness or fear that can arise, because even sometimes if things are uncomfortable, then at least it's what we know. It's the devil we know versus the devil we don't. Or we don't want change, maybe it's a relationship that's not quite happy, but we know it, we don't want change. So being afraid of change, and we often blame ourselves, we blame others. There's a sense of blame with the resistance that can come. We don't want our bodies to change, our minds.

One concept here which I really like—when I heard it the first time, something lit up for me like, "Yeah, that makes sense. Of course." As I was saying earlier, if we resist change, we suffer. And one way to say that is rope burn, right? When there is a rope and the rope keeps going, and we're trying to hold onto the rope really, really hard, really tight, we get rope burn. You know what rope burn is? Yeah. So notice when you don't want things to change.

So why is this teaching on impermanence one of the most important teachings of the Buddha? Let's contemplate that for a moment. Why would it be? There are so many different teachings, right? Why this one? I'll share a sutta reference. This is from Majjhima Nikaya 37^[9], the Shorter Discourse on the Destruction of Craving. And this is a translation quoted by Joseph Goldstein^[10]. So pay attention: "In seeing impermanence, the mind doesn't cling. It's not agitated. When it's not agitated, it personally attains Nirvana." I'm going to read this again. This is not just poetry, though it sounds beautiful, but these are actually instructions to how to practice, how to become free. It's very clear, step by step by step. Pay attention. By the way, there have been examples where people have given Dharma talks, people have listened, and they have suddenly become awakened. So pay attention, this might just happen! [Laughter] There's always hoping. So here we go. MN 37: "In seeing impermanence, the mind doesn't cling. When the mind doesn't cling, it's not agitated. When it's not agitated, it personally attains Nirvana." Yes. [Laughter] Always hoping.

A couple of things to be aware of. One is that this insight into impermanence is not supposed to be used as a spiritual bypass. Be very careful about that. "Oh yeah, everything changes, whatever. No point. I'm just gonna go lie there and let things change." That's not wisdom. So it's not that nothing matters; it's that actually things are even more precious. This life is precious, pay attention. It's impermanent. It actually imbues... when the heart is free and not agitated, then it has more capacity for beauty, for goodness, for love, for service. Instead of being threatened by every shift and change—aging, loss—if it's okay, yet these are part of the human experience. Can we appreciate it, value it all, and live and love fully in the midst of all the change? So it frees the heart to love more, not to not care and say, "Yeah whatever, it doesn't matter." It's quite the opposite, you see. So please don't use impermanence as a spiritual bypass. Quite the opposite truly, as an insight it allows one to care more and love more deeply.

It also allows one to drop into different levels of perception, from the content into the process, right? Because we are often stuck with the content. But when we see impermanence, we get to see the process. We get to see change itself, not the thing, but the process. We get to drop down a level from the movie of our life, being an actor... and we're still an actor, but we step out a little bit and we see the movie on the screen. Oh yes, we are an actor, yes we still love, we still care, but it frees us up to actually love and care more freely, not to be so attached to things that are impermanent. Of course they're impermanent. Let's wake up. Waking up, nibbana. Let's wake up to the fact that things are impermanent and they are beautiful, they're precious, they're wonderful, but not to be threatened all the time by that.

Questions and Reflections

So there's more I can say, but I think I would like to pause. And maybe what I'd like to do is to turn it around and ask you a couple of questions. The meditation earlier, is there anything that came up for you? Anything in your first-person experience? Now the meditation was a whole hour ago, so much has happened, so much content, you might have forgotten all about it. But if there was something that really jumped out for you when the invitation was given to observe change in your first-person experience, for the benefit of others, I'd like to invite you to share. Let's open up to that.

Audience member: "So the thing that I noticed is that I have in the past tended to experience sensation and a kind of mental map of where I think the body should be and what it should be like. And then you kept emphasizing personal experience. I was like, 'Oh, actual experience there, instead of on a mental map,' if that makes sense."

Nikki: "Yeah, totally. Nice, great. So what I hear happened for you is usually you experience sensations as if it's a mental map, as if it's out there. It's like, 'Oh yeah, there's a leg, there's some emotion.' Whereas today what happened for you, it's like, 'Oh, it's right here. Look at that, it's moving and changing, it's shifting.' Wow, beautiful. Thank you. This is great, stay with that, because that's how the intimacy of this insight arises. Thank you."

Nancy: "Thank you, Nikki. I recently took a class with Bob Stahl^[11] on the 32 parts of the body^[12], and for me, the meditation was being aware of your bodily processes and all of the sort of birth and death that's constantly going on just within your body."

Nikki: "Great, thank you for that, Nancy. Yeah, wonderful. It's just this awareness of the constant birth and death and the processes in the body. And the way I hear you, because you've done this practice now with Bob Stahl on the 32 parts of the body, I'm hearing a sense of, 'Oh wow, this is what it is.' Because again, that sense of fear or disgust or whatever it might be, it can arise. But after a while, when one actually stays with it, the wisdom arises: 'Oh yeah, this is how it is. I usually ignore it. I push it under the carpet. Wow, isn't this amazing? This body, this body that is mine, but yet not quite mine. Like, how did this even happen? Right? I've been born as this body, and this keeps changing and moving and digesting, and I don't have any control over this.' It's just this awe, this amazement for being human can be born out of this sense of impermanence. Thank you. And again, all of this is about living more fully, being more fully human. It's not about nihilism, and if your practice goes into, 'No, it's all change, I don't care,' like it's gone off the rails though."

Audience member: "Yeah, thank you for what you both shared, I really resonate with that. And I just appreciated the metaphor of the snow globe. Oftentimes I find when I sit, it's like stopping the snow globe; I just want to control it to settle it down. And just allowing things to settle naturally was really helpful. So thank you."

Nikki: "Great, thank you for that. Yeah, I love the snow globe as well, yeah. It's just such a nice metaphor, so gentle, right? It takes a while for all the flurries to settle, and this sense of groundedness."

Audience member: "Thank you. I just had a question about the personal enlightenment that you talked about, as opposed to impersonal enlightenment, or..."

Nikki: "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for catching that. Yeah. This is interesting. So, I'm trying to find in the sutta that I shared... yeah, and the part that is translated as 'when it's not agitated, it personally attains Nirvana.' So, various interpretations about that. One is the personal versus the universal, right? Because these are universal insights that we have. But in order to have insights into the nature of things as they are, the only way to do that isn't to think about how things work—you know, that's not how this practice works. It's very personal. It's you, you study, you pay attention to your sensations, the doors of the sensations, sounds, thoughts, vedana^[13] (feeling tone, liking, disliking), all of the personal. You become the laboratory. And through the personal, when you study these personal things, when you realize, 'Oh, when I cling... wow, it really hurts,' you really get to see that, you really get to feel that. And when you see that, 'Oh, and I let go for example, ah, there is freedom, there is peace, there is ease, there's more space for love and care for others.' So all of these universal insights are through the personal. Through studying the personal, which seems nitty-gritty, like, 'Wait, I'm becoming really self-centered, I'm sitting on the cushion and just noticing my breath and sensations.' But it's really through the personal that we get to the universal. Otherwise, it becomes waxing philosophical. So one way to interpret this line that 'it personally attains Nirvana' is this: through the door of the personal to the universal. I'm sure there are other interpretations too, but I'll leave you with this one. Thank you."

Violet: "A few years ago, when I was meditating very regularly, I put the Five Daily Remembrances^[14] on my wall, and they were a source of great sort of joy and peace. And then, as my meditation sort of comes and goes in regular practice, sometimes I look at them and I'm like, 'Gross, I should take those down.' There's aversion to it. And I guess something I've experienced impermanence with in the last year is like impermanence in my belief and faith in Dharma teaching. And is that kind of impermanence okay? Like the impermanence of just belief. It's hard to maintain faith that contemplating impermanence actually brings more peace than suffering."

Nikki: "Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you for that, for bringing that in, multiple various things you've said. So when you talked about, you know, previously the five reflections being up and being a source of joy, and now it's like, 'Ah, this disgust,' and it seems like that is a part of this shift in your faith. And it seems like more generally, does contemplating impermanence really lead to freedom, or does it lead to more suffering? I mean, that sounds like that's part of the doubt, but it seems like there might be more to it, right? So I hear more... so does this path bring more peace, or does it bring more suffering? I wonder, or am I putting words in your mouth, Violet?"

Violet: "I think yeah, I think that's true, yeah."

Nikki: "So that's okay. You know, I think the crux of your question is, does one's faith or trust go, does it also shift and change? You're not the first practitioner I've heard of where the faith comes and goes, where this sense of trust becomes stronger or weaker. And I would say actually this is a natural part of the process, and it might be a maturing. It might be maturing. Because sometimes we might have a blind faith. Maybe this might be the case, may not be, but for some there might be a sense of finding the teachings, the Dharma, and jumping into it. So there could be a sense of blind faith. And then later wondering, 'Wait, actually does this work? Does this piece work for me? Does this piece not work for me?' And becoming more discerning about what pieces work for you, what pieces don't work. And then maybe in that discernment, maybe something happens that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. So that could be a part of what's happening, and that's okay, it's natural. So we throw the baby out, 'This doesn't work because it's terrible,' and it's like, 'Wait, actually I miss it. Wait, that thing did work, there were things about that that really worked.' So we start to bring in pieces, and with a verified faith. So you might be going through the phase of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Then hang in there. Hang in there. It's part of the path, it's part of hanging in there, so that your trust becomes a personal verified trust in what actually works for you. Because knowing you now for a while, I know that having heard from you firsthand, you've grown and you've become wiser, kinder, more compassionate, and that can't change. So going through this period is okay. Hang in there. Does that help?"

Violet: "I feel like that really describes what's been going on. Thank you."

Nikki: "Okay, all right. Thank you all for spending this time together, coming to IMC either physically or virtually. Thank you all for your practice. May you be well, may you be safe, may you be kind to yourself and others, and may our practice serve all beings, including ourselves. Thanks everyone."