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Guided Meditation: Sitting with Things as They Are

All right, so let's go ahead and get started with our meditation together. Just allowing yourself to arrive, physically of course, but also internally for meditation. Settling into your posture, whether you're sitting or lying down, or maybe you're even standing, that's fine too.

Just having a sense of your body in the meditation posture. Perhaps feeling the contact points: your seat against the chair or the cushion, or whatever you're lying on, your legs or feet against the floor. And just letting yourself feel that support. Letting yourself be supported.

And then sensing the straightness of the body. Sometimes really letting go into the support gives kind of a counterbalancing upward release to the spine. Letting the spine and the head just naturally elevate upward, so that the body is both straight and relaxed.

And seeing if you can tune into any sense of ease in the body, some part or area that feels comfortable right now. And maybe tying that sense of ease to the breath. So as you breathe in, breathing into the ease in the body. And as you breathe out, maybe letting it spread through the body.

And if there are various thoughts happening in the mind, that's fine. They can just be more in the background. You can bring into the foreground the sense of the body and the breath.

Tuning into any feelings of stillness in the body. The body is a dynamic entity, and there's always some motion, especially from the breath. There may also be a sense of stillness. At least overall, the body is not moving much.

Maybe feeling how the ease is related to the stillness. So we may sense how the body provides a stable container for the breath, and also for various emotions or thoughts. The body can be the reference point, the anchor, and these other things move around the natural seatedness and strength of the sitting body.

Sometimes sitting is likened to being like a mountain, just there. While the wind and the sun and leaves blow around the mountain, it just sits there calmly.

And as you sit, you are invited to remain with the body in this mountain state, if you will. So that means not shifting around, not holding ourselves rigid. But if there is some kind of discomfort in the knee, or the back, or the hip, or the shoulder, the first inclination would be to just let that be like a little disturbance on the mountain, and just sit, perhaps breathing through it.

Meditation teaches us not to unthinkingly react, and that includes automatically adjusting the body. So with complete ease, smiling at the body, just sitting if there's some discomfort or an itch. And how does the mind deal with that? Maybe there won't be anything, so we need to create it. But feeling the deep rest of just sitting still.

It's always possible to turn the mind again toward the ease in the body, breathing into there and spreading that. And of course, if there's an actual physical injury or a real sense that there would be harm, then of course it's okay to move. But we would do so slowly, mindfully. So noticing the intention to move, and then gently moving. And as we do so, feeling how whatever pressure we were feeling slowly dissipates.

It's also quite useful just to sit with things as they are. That is the practice: to be with things as they are. Feeling your ease and the rest, and the beauty of sitting still.

And if there is coming to be any sense of inner joy, or happiness, or contentment, it's fine to breathe into that and allow it to spread into the body. Acknowledging that sometimes happiness is part of things as they are. Feeling into any sense of peace.

A combination of softness and strength emerges from just being with things as they are. If there's any hardness, there will be dukkha^[1]. There needs to be strength, so what is it like to have softness and strength?

As we come to the end of this sit, perhaps taking a moment to reflect how valuable it is, for both you and for others, to have the sense of a mountain-like presence and posture, just being able to be there. Sometimes what we encounter is dukkha in others, suffering in some way. And in order to be helpful, we have to be able to be present. Sometimes their suffering is coming out in the form of words or actions toward us that are unwelcome. And again, it's very helpful if we have some ease with being that. This kind of presence in the world keeps suffering from perpetuating farther, and it can even bring it to an end.

And it's very well cultivated through our meditation practice. So it may be a day of softness and strength, in order that the beauty of the Dharma^[2] can be felt.

The Art of Letting Go: Enduring and Removing

Okay, so we're continuing with our series on The Art of Letting Go, seven practices that lead to letting go. And yesterday we had the pair of using and avoiding. And today we have another pair that sounds like a big contrast like that: we have letting go by enduring, and letting go by removing. So is there some active removal of things, or is there a more passive endurance of them? And again, we have some discernment about that. When do we hang in there and tough it out, and when do we eliminate something that is unwholesome or harmful? So starting with what to endure.

The teachings say, "What taints should be abandoned by enduring? Here, a person reflecting wisely bears cold and heat, hunger and thirst, and contact with gadflies, mosquitoes, wind, the sun, and creeping things." And it also goes on to say various kinds of pain we have. So this one starts with various kinds of discomfort. After all, we don't always have a choice in life about what we have to endure, and particularly with our body, right? These are about our body. Have you noticed how much of your attention and energy go toward making things comfortable for the body?

That's not inherently bad, of course, but it's also not so reliable. And is it, you know, that we're always going to be able to make it the right temperature and avoid hunger and thirst, and contact with things we don't want to touch?

When I lived at Insight Retreat Center about ten years ago, at that time there wasn't much control over the temperature in the building, and I really suffered when it was too cold. I tend to run a little cold, and there were various mental machinations I could apply to that. I don't know if they really helped, things like, "I'm supposed to be a good Buddhist, and I'm supposed to just be mindful." And then the mind would just answer with, "No wait, I need to care about myself and have compassion, and it should be like this, and it should be like that." So I was enduring in a sense, but there was a little bit extra added by my mind, let's say. And eventually I realized, in a very undramatic way, that I was fine, actually. I could handle the temperature variations, and it really wasn't that big of a deal.

So enduring, and seeing the way the mind tries to endure but with a little bit of greed or aversion added onto it, and then finally just settles down into actual equanimity, gives the confidence that this practice of just being with something does actually work. You know, if one actually uses mindfulness, it will eventually engender genuine equanimity, and not the false equanimity of putting up with something. And obviously, it's not just gritting your teeth and bearing it. That's not what this is referring to. It says enduring. I don't know what other word we could use, but it means actually enduring in a way such that there's letting go, and there is peace in the mind and body. You just come to peace with how it is. So these are practices that lead to release.

And it's important as we go through the enduring process that we see how the mind doesn't want to endure, doesn't want to actually just have equanimity. And then it will eventually settle down, because there's dukkha in that extra that's added. This is like the second arrow^[3] teaching. There is the first arrow of how it's not always easy for the body, and then there's the other ones we add on about, "I don't like it. It shouldn't be like this. How can I stop it? Who's responsible, and how can I talk with them?" These kinds of things.

So life is definitely going to give you opportunities for this, but we can practice with it deliberately also. I remember one time Gil^[4] coming back from a vacation he had been on, where I think he was camping in the mountains somewhere by a mountain lake. And those lakes are often snowmelt, and I think it was in the spring maybe. And I said, "You didn't really go in the lake, did you?" And he said mildly, "It was cold for 22 seconds." So clearly he had timed it.

So we can practice with this deliberately also at times in order to challenge our system. So when we endure, we get the chance to make the all-important distinction between unpleasant feeling and wanting it to go away. Those are different. And looking at our mind, we contact our relationship to powerlessness. How do you relate to having no control over something? That's actually a big one to work with.

So then one fruit of this is that we gain the confidence that we can handle certain things, which is important. How is it going to be in the end, when you die? You know, when you get very ill, and your body is not able to move or function properly, there may be very unusual feelings. Being able to endure them is good. I don't know, it might be painful or it might not, but it will certainly be very bizarre, out of your normal zone, the feelings that come with dying. So being able to endure that can allow a more clear-minded death.

And then the suttas^[5] also ask us to endure, besides the gadflies and the cold and the heat, ill-spoken, unwelcome words. And those, I know, can be very hard to endure. It's another area where we don't have a lot of control, though. People say what they do. Even if we live our life trying to be kind, we can't guarantee that we're not going to receive ill-spoken, unwelcome words. And how do we... can we endure those, or do we react and defend immediately? I know that's not easy. The texts say that one of the best resources for handling unskillful speech coming at us is mindfulness of the body. It helps, I've found, to literally put attention in the feet and stay grounded, if you can remember. And another good way to do it is to expand awareness to include the whole body, and even the space beyond the body.

I remember Venerable Anālayo^[6] saying that he was once in a conversation with another monk who was very angry that Anālayo had done some scholarly work defending women having the opportunity for full ordination. There is some conservatism among monks that say that shouldn't be allowed. And this one came and was very angry with him. And Anālayo said he just sat there while the other monk attacked him and his work, and he just focused on the space between them and around them. And he didn't react, and eventually the other monk finished his tirade and left. What else was there to do? And so he just stayed present with it. So it is important; there are times when we will need to endure.

So then, the text also says that we can sometimes let go of things by removing. And what is it that we are supposed to let go of by removing? Generally, they are unwholesome mind states: greed, hatred, and delusion. We don't remove them immediately though. Generally, we would do it once we have investigated them enough. There's a reason that this method comes fairly late in sequence. I think we want to go with removing only when we're very clear on what we're doing, and how, and why. So basically, we have to be careful not to mix a removal with aversion, which means it can be kind of an advanced practice. It might be that we have to endure for a little while so that we have equanimity and care when we do remove. And also we'll see actually that removing can have a very gentle flavor as well as a stronger one. So we can maybe look at some examples.

Sometimes we do need to remove actively when the mind is in a really bad state, like we would get a snake out of our house, but of course we'd do that carefully, right? So if we can see—and seeing was the first method—if we can see that the mind is repeatedly getting caught in harmful thought patterns, maybe we would try just having mindfulness at first and see if that works. Just noting anger or irritation. But if that doesn't work, then there are other things we can try. We can try redirecting our attention, or we can try reflecting on the difficulties that come when we have an unwholesome mind state, or we could just kind of withdraw our attention from it. That's kind of like the avoiding, just waiting for the energy to dissipate by being careful not to feed it. It's a little bit like what Anālayo was doing.

And if all of that doesn't work, then we have set ourselves up well to be able to firmly say to our mind, "No more of this. No more of this." And if we do that too soon, I think there can be aversion, but when it rises up out of genuine strength, then it's compassionate. Another teacher has said that we remove unskillful thoughts this way by saying in our mind, "You will not get one more minute of my life." I mean, do you have thoughts where they've had too many minutes of your life? Your life is valuable. Why waste it thinking these terrible thoughts that are only harming you? So it's like setting a boundary: "You will not get one more minute of my life."

And there are other times when removing can be so gentle. We might get free of something by just applying wisdom quite directly, such that it dissolves. There's a sutta that distinguishes using mindfulness to let something go, and using wisdom. It actually sets up a series of conditions. So first it says that maybe a person just tolerates various unskillful mind states, hardly even knowing that they're unskillful. And it says that that person is completely fettered. I think about maybe how my mind was before I even knew the Dharma. All kinds of stuff ran through my mind, and I never thought about whether it was skillful or unskillful, or if it was harming me or going to harm others. I mean, maybe I did sometimes, but not a lot. So there's a lot of fettering there.

And then there can also be the case where we see with mindfulness, and we see what's going on, and we gradually are able to release through our practice of daily life mindfulness. That person is said to be on the path, still fettered like many of us, but moving toward awakening, because there's mindfulness of what's going on in the mind.

And then according to this sutta, there is a person who divests oneself from unwholesomeness. It's like it arises, and it's just immediately quenched, or maybe it eventually doesn't even arise. So we're not always in such a clear, wise state, but it is good to know that abandoning by removing can be just straightforward and gentle. It doesn't have to be some kind of a battle. That's the message I want to impart.

So we have letting go by enduring, and letting go by removing. And again, there's a matter of seeing which one is going to be effective. We have to know something about what it means for something to let go. What does that feel like? And then we can know whether a given method has worked. And if so, great. And if not, we might have a sense of which one to try next. Maybe for those really sticky knots, we're going to need more than one. Actually, probably we will.

So we continue exploring this art of letting go, and we'll continue with that tomorrow. Have a beautiful day or evening.