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Guided Meditation: Sensitivity all the way down

Welcome folks. Nice to be with you. Nice to see all the well wishes and chats. Okay, we'll do what we do and settle in.

So the citta^[1], heart-mind, that which gets liberated on this path—I'm not exactly sure what citta is, but Ajahn Sucitto^[2] characterizes citta, heart-mind, primarily as a receptivity system.

So we make ourselves porous. Rather than coming to conclusions about life, about ourselves, let me sit poised in receptivity.

Compassion is said to be the quivering of the heart, but in a sense, our whole being is always quivering, always being touched by phenomena. The relentlessness of samsara^[3].

When we sit here, deeply embodied, our skin is sensitive to everything, our heart sensitive to everything. Our affect, emotion, and feeling signal various urgencies: the urge to fiddle with samsara. Sometimes there's wisdom in it, but for right now, we treat everything as a kind of false alarm.

Sitting poised in receptivity, which is another way of saying we're not landing in conclusions about ourselves, about life. We're poised in receptivity. It is riding the intensity of embodiment, the intensity of this human realm, the intensity of time, of pleasure and pain.

It's the intensity of the human condition, your porousness. It almost can feel like we have to brace against the world. And the way one braces so as to minimize the pain in a certain part of our body—if we're injured, maybe we brace, trying to quarantine the pain. In a deeper way, we brace so as to protect our sense of self. The Matthew within Matthew needs protection from all this receptivity, but it's just sensitivity all the way down.

The opening. The skin quivers. The heart quivers. No more fake urgencies. No more protection. Safety in the openness.

In our receptivity, we're not trying to go anywhere, to get anywhere, become anything. The goodness is already here. We can feel that when there's just a kind of faith in the logic of the Dharma.

Dharmette: Dharma Practice & Beginning Again

Okay, so surrender, humor, playfulness, grieving, and now, five days in the week, the final factor in this made-up list. I needed a factor that acknowledges the iterative nature of the path. Our understanding of what we're doing, of what the Dharma is, is continually updated.

We get comfortable. There are alternating phases of getting comfortable within a certain view of the Dharma, and then the rug being pulled out. Too much comfort for too long is stagnation, and so there's the iterative nature of Dharma. I wanted to emphasize the way that a Dharma life is a kind of continuous feedback loop: giving, receiving, growing, giving, receiving.

And I felt like I needed a factor that acknowledges the permanent possibility of being wrong—a possibility that will never really be dispelled. And so today: beginning again.

On this path, we're going to have to begin again. It's not a linear path of practice, progress, practice, progress. And if we can't begin again on the path, practice can become humiliated^[4], and maybe we stop altogether. There are plateaus and descents, and times when we're super inspired and the Dharma feels so fresh and alive, and times when we have zero motivation. And so we learn to begin again.

At the micro level, we begin again when we're attending to the breathing, or whatever, and notice that we're encased in fantasy. Let me begin again.

And at the macro level, the level of our life, sometimes our past is just too messy to sort it all out. The day was too messy to sort it all out. We begin again. Sometimes our family history is too messy to sort all out. We begin again, redeeming the pain of the prior generation.

In our lives, how easy it is to forget the Dharma, to become in one way or another alienated from our wisdom and from our love. So it's meaningful to me that sati^[5], which translators render as mindfulness, has connotations of memory. We begin again when we remember the Dharma.

In suffering, there's a sense of it being a kind of forgetting. In the dream—you know, they say life is kind of dreamlike, but suffering definitely feels dreamlike—something about the Dharma is forgotten, utterly forgotten in our sorrow and despair. And we remember. We begin again.

Of course, we make messes. The debris of greed, hate, and delusion. And sometimes we're embarrassed by the messes we make. It can be humbling, but we just begin again. Guilt, in a way, is just an overestimate of the wisdom we had at the time. Of course we made a mess. How could it have been otherwise? Of course they made a mess. We learn the lessons of the defilements as deeply as we can, and then we completely forgive ourselves and begin again.

We begin again within relationships. Within the various relationships of our life, sometimes there's a dense tangle, a discord, conflict, or a seemingly irreconcilable pain of one kind or another. There can be this tendency to want to tie up all the loose ends, to iron everything out. Sometimes that can be done, sometimes that's appropriate. Sometimes it's utterly vital to talk things through to come to some kind of détente^[6], some kind of resolution. But sometimes the loose ends won't be tied up, and we just let them lie, and we begin again.

Norman Fischer^[7] said, "It's hard being a human being. There's a lot to it." It really is. So I want to say in conclusion, let's all agree to accept the reality that we're not going to be able to do a very good job at this. There's too much to do. Isn't it a relief to know it's not gonna work out, and you can just forget about that to start with? You're not going to get it right. You're not going to get it perfect. Well, don't worry, just remember there's no hope! But the important thing is, despite this, and recognizing and embracing this reality, don't worry about finishing the job or doing it perfectly, but start, you see? Start and continue. This is the thing. You can really trust that if you will start, and if you will continue with commitment, that will be enough. That will be enough.

Our intentions for practice change over time. We have to begin again. Sometimes we achieve or we outgrow what brought us to the path. We came here to manage anxiety, or for some circumscribed reason, and now, "Okay, I feel better. What's practice now?" We have to find new sources of motivation. We begin again with new intentions for practice.

And sometimes we leave behind things as we begin our practice. We leave behind pieces of ourselves, pieces of our history, things that were meaningful—the ways we used to play, or read, or pray. We leave these things behind, but practice has this weird way of looping back to old currents in our life, things that were meaningful that we've put down. And then we pick them up, but in a new way. We begin again with old loves.

We begin again at the macro level. We begin again in each moment.

So I offer this for your consideration. I feel honored to be with you and appreciative of a sense of freedom I have to speak my heart. So thank you all, thank you.

And I appreciate the scheduling mistake here with our session, thanks for your flexibility with that. Thanks for all your support of IMC^[8] and your practice. I'm grateful.

Okay folks, so we'll wrap up and see you somewhere on the YouTube/Zoom circuit and or elsewhere, and I wish you all a good week.