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Guided Meditation: Giving Attention & Letting Go

Hey, it's nice to see everyone coming on. I appreciate the way you often write hello and where you're from. It kind of gives that feeling of us all being together, and I'm always delighted with how widespread this Sangha^[1] is, so thank you for that.

Let's settle in for our meditation together, finding a posture where you can be upright and also relaxed. Allow yourself to settle in, feeling the seat where you're sitting or whatever you're lying on. Really feel that contact and connection so that you can let go and allow it to simply support you. Close the eyes if that's comfortable for you, bringing the attention inward. Sense the body in the posture that it's in, in a kind of an overall way, to help orient the mind.

We could say, "give your attention to the posture," and notice how it is that you're giving that attention. When you turn to the posture at the beginning of the sit, are you controlling it from the top down, making it relax and align in certain ways? Or are you not quite giving your full attention because you're just coming into the usual, habitual posture that you always do?

I'm drawing attention to this word: give your attention to the posture. I'm wondering how it would be if the attention is really a gift that we're giving. So, maybe offer your attention to the posture of this body, and see if that changes how the relationship feels. Maybe in light of it being a gift, the body feels empowered to orient itself, to straighten up appropriately, to relax into a form that feels supportive for meditation. It's nice to receive a gift, so let the body receive the gift of your attention.

Broadening that attention, give or offer attention to all of the bodily sensations as they are right now. Just let them be as they are, and let them be known as they are.

Now, broaden the awareness to include the emotions that are present, any thoughts that are in the mind, or maybe various intentions or aspirations. Just hold all of experience in a spacious awareness that we are giving as a gift to our experience.

As we practice with giving attention as a gift, we may notice how giving attention relates to letting go. We can't fully offer our awareness unless we let each thing be as it is, be known as it is, and have its life of arising, persisting, and passing away. To be fully aware, we have to let things be. Let them go. So we're just letting experience flow, and we'll sit in silence for a while.

With great generosity, let go of our stories. Let go of our ideas, our complaints, our judgments, our wantings. Just let go of entanglement with all of those things that grab at our attention. Let them come, be as they are, and go, without hooking onto them. Discover how that generous way of being actually settles the mind, slowly brings the heart into alignment.

Practicing this way, we may get a glimpse or a hint of how we might be that way with others also. With the right balance and under the right conditions, it can sometimes be best just to open. Let there be other viewpoints, let there be other ways of being, without leaping in and entangling ourselves. Somehow, that attitude can sometimes allow things to settle in our relationships with others. With that spaciousness, and with the gift of our full, unentangled attention, things can shift. Letting go is a contribution to peace.

Dharmette: Meeting Life Well - Five Dharma Resources (4 of 5): Generosity & Letting Go

Continuing with this list that pertains to meeting life well, it's a list of five items from the Pali Canon^[2] that are described as inner wealth, fortitude, inspiring things to reflect upon, and signs of spiritual growth. Today we're on the fourth one. The Pali word is cāga^[3]—that's spelled C, long A, G, A.

Cāga has two important and related dimensions. Sometimes it is translated as generosity, and that's the first dimension. It's the mental attitude or movement behind the act of dāna^[4], giving. We often hear dāna translated as generosity, but it more literally means the act of giving or the gift itself. Cāga is this wholesome motivation behind giving. It's about wanting to share, being happy about offering.

I'll read the standard language that's used in the suttas^[5]: "Here a noble disciple dwells at home with a heart devoid of the stain of miserliness, freely generous, open-handed, delighting in relinquishment, devoted to charity, delighting in giving and sharing." You can hear the description is actually about the state of the person's heart. "Freely generous," "delighting in giving," "devoted to charity"—these are heart words.

We can ask, how is an attitude of literal giving helpful as a Dharma resource? I think if we can be willing to be generous when under stress, that is an amazing spiritual quality. Usually, in challenging situations, the heart closes and easily succumbs to feelings of holding on, wanting to protect, or wanting to push away. But if we've cultivated generosity deeply enough, we will be more attracted to the good feeling of giving than to those reactive emotions that might come in the moment.

The Buddha encouraged us to investigate the act of giving by noticing what is going on in our mind: why we're giving and how we're giving. When we talked about virtue a couple of days ago, I suggested simply watching how we act and speak with mindfulness, such that we can notice when we're acting from wholesome motivations rather than doing some kind of top-down control of our behavior to try to be ethical. We can do the same thing with giving. Just watch how you give and notice what motivations, what emotions, and what mannerisms are present. When we do that, it will gradually purify our giving to come more often from the wholesome side.

To offer some specifics that we might notice: sometimes we can actually give a gift out of fear. Perhaps we're afraid of displeasing someone in power if we don't give. We can also give out of desire, hatred, delusion, or even as an insult. We can also give, of course, due to more complex relational and social reasons. Maybe we're giving to even the score with somebody who has given to us, or we're attempting to put another person in social debt to us. Or we may simply be following in the tradition of our family. We might feel obligated to give because we have more than someone else, or we might give in order to look good. We can also give because it makes the mind tranquil and happy, or we can give out of compassion or love. These are very wholesome motivations.

Actually, everything I read there is mentioned in the Buddhist teachings; they're all from the suttas. People have been giving for these reasons for at least 2,500 years. They're not given, I think, to judge various motivations, but rather to suggest that it's good to know why we're giving. The mind has many intentions, as we know, and as we observe, it will naturally move toward the more wholesome ones. This is what roots this quality of cāga deeply into the heart and helps make it into a Dharma resource.

There's also a choice about when to give. It can be good to give immediately when we feel the urge to do so, especially if it would help to counteract some negative mind state that we have. I'm remembering one time I was talking with a friend, and I mentioned that I was intending to give some fruit to a neighbor—a neighbor with whom I had disagreed. This was a Dharma friend, and she sat up straight and said, "Would you like to go do that right now?" I was a little bit surprised, but I agreed. In a short time, we had done it, and I felt lighter. There was a letting go. It was nice that I was intending that, but why not actually just go do it, right?

That leads to the second dimension of cāga, which is letting go. It's the letting go that we do along the path, distinct but related to the actual act of giving a gift. It's more subtle, maybe, this letting go that we do as part of our practice. The Buddhist path is about letting go more and more deeply. There is cultivation on the path, but even if we're actively cultivating a certain quality, we're generally going to have to release or dissolve the obstacles to doing that. So the idea, eventually, is to let go of the craving and clinging that are at the heart of dukkha^[6].

Cāga is used in a powerful verse from the Dhammapada^[7]. It goes like this: "If by giving up a lesser happiness, one could experience greater happiness, a wise person would renounce the lesser to behold the greater." It seems to make sense in the abstract, and we'll talk about it in a moment. But cāga in this verse is the word that's translated as both "giving up" and "renounce." Both of those are the word cāga.

So we see that letting go is related to happiness, and particularly to finding a pathway toward greater forms of happiness. Sometimes this is relatively clear. Which is the greater happiness: getting some kind of enjoyable food, or creating a harmonious relationship with your partner? Some kind of material gain, or being honest and truthful? We can see that ethics, kindness, and compassion are ordinary and quite accessible examples of these greater forms of happiness. We don't need to be thinking way high up.

But another greater happiness is the kind that comes from meditation. We gather the mind in meditation by letting go of the five hindrances^[8] and other reactive mind states and thoughts that prevent us from settling down. We give up the lesser happiness of being involved in our thoughts and emotions for the greater happiness of meditative calm, when the conditions allow us to do that. There's a quote from the suttas, and this is the Buddha talking: "Should anyone say the five cords of sensual pleasure are the utmost pleasure and joy that human beings experience, I would not concede that to them. Why is that? Because there is another kind of pleasure, loftier and more sublime than that pleasure. And what is that?" I'm summarizing to say that it's the pleasure of meditative composure.

So the Buddha was clear about that. There are also various meditative insights that emerge along the path. These are typically realized when the mind releases its grip and is suddenly able to see differently in some way that can't easily be unseen. That's one of the qualities of insight. As we practice with both literal generosity and this act of letting go, we can condition our heart to realize that in many cases, relinquishment is better than acquisition. In general, relinquishment is better than acquisition. That's actually kind of a deep spiritual thing to start realizing. We still have to discover in each situation what it is that we need to let go of. There is some discernment about that. It is possible to let go unwisely, which we wouldn't want to do, but it's also very wise sometimes to let go.

We can meet life with this attitude of letting go, maybe when we're struggling. We could have the internal question: "What would I have to let go of to make this easier?" Sometimes we need to literally give something, like offering a gift to someone that we find difficult. Or sometimes we need to release something that we're gripping internally, like an emotion, or some viewpoint or opinion.

Thanksgiving Reflections

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States. In the mythology that surrounds it, it's a celebration of a good harvest that would be sufficient to carry the early settlers in New England through the winter, and apparently, there was some cooperation with the local Native Americans. So there's this image of a shared feast together, which is about generosity and gratitude, much of what we're talking about today.

This is the story that many people in the United States grew up with, so it's a holiday that centers around family and food. But for Native Americans, of course, there isn't such a rosy view of the interaction with colonists that came from Europe. That didn't play out very well, and it continues to be very painful. Some Native Americans even call today a day of mourning. But I've also heard that some Native Americans are now reclaiming Thanksgiving Day as an expression of values that are deeply inherent in Native culture. Gratitude and giving are prominent in Native American history, and why let white people co-opt that?

There's an example of flexibility in order to find a way through differing views. This is something that comes out of our ability to let go and be generous: to understand that there are different ways to perceive any given situation. It's helpful to find a way that isn't so much involved with dukkha, to find some view or perspective that is not related to suffering.

Regarding this day, maybe in a more down-to-earth, practical sense, you might find that there are some conversations at the family dining table with relatives who hold differing views. I would like to recommend experimenting with the idea of releasing adherence to your own views in favor of being together peacefully. It's a lesser happiness to win an argument or make a pointed statement than the greater happiness of appreciating a chance to have a meal and spend some time together. You'll navigate it in your own way—I don't want to give specifics—but at least consider this idea about the lesser and greater happiness, and maybe try to look for what you could let go of in order to behold a greater happiness.

We can be so generous with our mind and heart, and so flexible. Doing that actually makes us resilient in the world, and it's a wonderful resource for meeting life well. I wish you a beautiful day. If you're in the United States, a day of celebration; if you're farther out, a day of peace, letting go, and generosity. So, cāga—this resource of giving and letting go. Thank you.