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Guided Meditation: Trust in Meeting Experience

Okay, well, I think we'll go ahead and get started as people continue to arrive. Nice to see everyone.

So this week the theme is called "Meeting Life Well: Five Dharma Resources." One could say that Dharma practice is a series of encounters. We sit on the cushion, and we meet the state of our body and mind in detail, and then we go out into the world and we meet other people and situations in our life. And amid all of that, we have our own mind's reaction going on also. So there's a lot going on in the human life.

And as we encounter our life, on what resources do we draw in order to meet it well and to respond well? Are there supportive qualities or assets that can come forth in particular when things get challenging, or surprising, or unfamiliar?

Of course, I think we all know that mindfulness is essential, so we might call that the foundational resource. But the Buddha also named other qualities as forms of inner wealth or fortitude. And there's a list of five items that I like to call the five Dharma resources. That's my term, not the Buddha's. What you'll see as this week unfolds is that these five, when they're readily available for us, can serve as highly helpful resources to meet life well. And the first of them is confidence.

So we'll see the others as we go on, but let's go ahead and start sitting. So finding a posture where you can be upright and relaxed, or at least have a straight spine, just allowing yourself to settle into a position that's relaxed and alert. Perhaps sensing the contact points where you're sitting or lying down. Maybe some of you are standing, so feeling your seat against the cushion or chair, your legs or feet against the floor, or your body against the surface. And just feeling the support and groundedness of that. Allowing yourself to be supported.

You may find that as we connect with and trust what's supporting us, there's kind of an upward surge of energy, allowing the body to be drawn upward. Just allowing that also. As we soften down, the body straightens.

And softening the muscles of the face, the eyes, and the eye sockets, the jaw. Softening down through the shoulders, allowing the shoulder blades to slide down the back, which tends to put the chest just a bit forward, leading with the heart. Allowing there to be ease in the arms and hands, and down through the torso. Softening the rib cage—front, back, sides. Sensing into the heart area, just allowing that to be as it is. Down into the belly, just connecting in and inviting any ease through the belly area. And then down through the hips, the inner thighs, the knees, and all the way down into the feet. Just connecting in with the whole body however it is right now, and inviting ease. And if there are still parts that are sore or tense, or you couldn't feel them very well, that's fine. We can just have ease in the mind also about how the body is right now.

And gently turning the attention toward the sensations of breathing, toward the breath. And if we can, we want to connect in with the very basic, elemental sensations of breathing. So rather than an idea, or even an image of our lungs or something, really feel the touch of the air on the nostrils or the upper lip. Some sense of expansion and coolness as it moves through the air passages. Maybe there's a shift of clothing against the skin as the chest inflates. Maybe you feel it even into the belly.

And then at some point the inhale ends, and there's a shifting feeling as the exhale begins. The lungs soften and begin to release, and there's a different movement of air—maybe warmth. So it's all part of breath, but there are these minute, simple sensations that we can allow attention to just flow along with. And all of that is in the service of establishing the quality of mindfulness, being in the present moment. This is the foundational resource for us, and the five that we'll talk about this week all rely on some degree of mindfulness.

And as we get used to being with the flow of the sensations of breathing, we can of course be aware of other body sensations. There's also the sensations in the legs, and maybe you have other sensations coming forward. There's the sound of my voice or other things in the room or the house where you are, and we can just breathe along with those.

There may also be some emotion or mood present for you. It may not be prominent, or it may be—we may have a sense of tiredness or sadness, ease, joy, or irritation. It could be anything. We can breathe along with that also.

And it's common also to have thoughts going on. Meditation is not about eliminating all thoughts, but we can simply be aware when there's thinking going on. So if you have some thoughts present, you can try to breathe through them or along with them. Let them be kind of in the background, like a radio playing in the background. Not trying to shut it off, but also not turning toward it.

And when the mind has wandered away, it's fine to just gently reopen to all these objects. When awareness returns, just start again with the breath or the body. Being with what's present, just being simple.

Anything in our experience can be touched or known by awareness. Anything, actually. This may generate some trust in this quality of knowing as the initial, foundational way to meet life.

Reflections

So I'd like to drop in just some very brief reflections, and then we'll keep sitting in silence after that.

So please recall how you first encountered the Dharma, or meditation, or mindfulness. How is it that you somehow came into contact with that? And then move on to recalling what kept you going with it. Even if you're quite new, or if you have started and stopped a number of times, what is it in the heart that wishes to practice, or that keeps you with it, keeps you coming back?

And then, if you can kind of feel underneath the specifics, if there's some kind of quality like trust or confidence—you really might even call it faith—in what you're doing with this practice. It doesn't have to be anything you can name or explain; it's more like the underlying feeling there. Let's see if you can tap into that.

And perhaps with a bow to our heart, we can just go back to sitting with the flow of experience, perhaps infused a little bit with this sense of trust in the process of meeting it, however that feels for you right now.

Closing Meditation

Gently bringing the attention to the body sitting, just in these last few minutes, just touching in again to the upright posture. Particularly centering into the chest area. Breathing in and out of that space, allowing the shoulders to soften, the heart to be forward a bit the way it is on our Buddha statue.

Buddha rupas^[1] are meant to express confidence in a certain way through their posture. There's a way in which our own sense of trust and confidence in the practice is conveyed, even silently. It definitely doesn't need to be overt or verbal.

When I first attended a sangha—just a local sitting group—I was struck by how it just seemed like the people who were the more experienced leaders of the group just seemed comfortable with themselves. That was what I noticed, because I was not at that time.

So is there a way that whatever your sense of trust in the Dharma or in mindfulness might somehow just be part of your being as you go about today? With the hope that somehow that will be picked up by others, not even in a conscious way, but our way of being does subtly influence others.

The world needs people who are confident in being present for whatever's happening. May that be something that we can offer from our practice.

Dharmette: Meeting Life Well - Five Dharma Resources (1 of 5): Confidence

So someone once asked the Zen teacher, possibly Suzuki Roshi^[2], what is the essential teaching of Zen? And the reply was, "An appropriate response."

So we'll be talking this week about five Dharma resources that support our ability to meet life well, maybe to produce an appropriate response in the moment. They're inner strengths that can rise up to meet the moment, and they come forth in happy times as well as amid suffering. But they're especially useful if we encounter something that is confusing, or alarming, or painful, or just outside of our typical experience.

So I'll name them all first. They are: confidence, virtue or ethical conduct, listening and learning, generosity and letting go, and discernment.

So this list of five is actually from the suttas^[3]. It appears in a variety of suttas in the Pali Canon^[4], at least ten that I counted. And to name them in Pali, these qualities are saddhā, sīla, suta, cāga, and paññā^[5], which we'll go through this week. In these various discourses, they're not always applied in the same way. Let's say the Buddha called them types of wealth, ways of fortifying the mind, modes of spiritual growth, accomplishments, and inspirations. That's kind of a range.

But I like to sum up all of those diverse terms into the single term "Dharma resources." Resources from which the heart draws to respond well to situations both on and off the cushion. And we can strengthen these through practice, and we can also observe how they might naturally arise to meet situations if we're mindful. They all have the basis of mindfulness, and the stronger that they become in our heart, then the more readily available they are to meet life.

So today we're talking about confidence, saddhā. I just watched a new film that was made about the founding of the Insight Meditation Society, IMS, which is kind of the mother institution of insight practice here in the West. I think it's fair to call it that; we have several long-standing institutions now, but IMS was the first that was aimed at training laypeople in the practices that the founding teachers had learned in Asia, and it was formed in the late 1970s. Those founding teachers are Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg, and also Jacqueline Mandell was involved at the time. Joseph and Sharon remained at IMS and are the kind of grandmother and grandfather there.

What's striking about the film is how much trust and faith and confidence were needed to create IMS and the insight retreat form that we have, when there was really nothing like that in the U.S. before. These were young people in their 20s, and they had just come back from Asia, and they were buying a huge Catholic novitiary for a lot more money than they had really dealt with before. They'd been looking at a bunch of different places, but they saw this one one morning, and they were pondering, "Well, is this the one?" Because it seemed to meet all of their needs, although it was really a lot bigger than they expected. But they thought about, "Should we buy it?"

And so they went into the town square in Barre, Massachusetts, which is where IMS is located, and they were kind of hanging around. They noticed that there was a statue in the middle of the square that had the town motto on it. The town motto for Barre is "Tranquil and Alert." So they thought, "Perfect. Perfect for a meditation center. Let's go for it."

So they went forward, they signed the forms, but they didn't have all the money for the down payment yet. So they did some fundraising, but they were still short, eventually by fifteen thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in the mid-70s. And it was a lot of money for a group of essentially hippies in their 20s. How to get fifteen thousand dollars? No clue. But Joseph at that time was teaching at Naropa^[6] in Colorado, and he was there for an extended period doing some classes and living in an apartment there. A woman came to his apartment who had been to one of his classes, and she said, "I'm wondering what to do with some money that I inherited. It's about fifteen thousand dollars. What do you think I should do with it?" And he said, "Well, I have an idea for that." So it kind of appeared for them.

And then, of course, they bought the building. I have a lot of stories today, by the way. Once they had the building, they were learning to operate it and keep it going, and they found that it had three massive oil tanks in the basement, 60 feet long, and it was not even possible to remove them from the room where they were. But it turned out, as they checked them, that only one out of three was actually working. The facilities person was a little worried about this. Three tanks, only one functioning, and you can't even really get the other ones out. So he was a little bit at his wit's end, and he said to Joseph, "What are we going to do about these tanks? And what if this one doesn't work anymore?" And Joseph simply asked him, "Well, is it working now?" And he said, "Yes." Joseph said, "Not to worry, there will be a way. Something will work."

People repeatedly in this film referred to Joseph's faith in slowly growing IMS. To him, it was just doing the next thing, doing the next thing, and somehow it all worked out. Of course, there were many problems along the way, but this kind of just meeting the moment, this kind of sincere confidence, is often behind institutions that actually endure and evolve over decades or longer.

And we can see some similar things, I think, in the evolution of IMC, where we're based here. Just one small example maybe is the financial model at IRC, the Insight Retreat Center that's associated with IMC. The financial model there is that there's no registration fee and the retreats are offered on a dana^[7] basis, and the donations that people make somehow pay it forward and keep it going. And I've heard people talk about Gil's^[8] faith in this regard. It's not really a common business model in the world to not charge for what you offer, and many people said that it wouldn't work, and yet it does.

So this is meeting the moment as it says in the comments. And this is, you know, I'm talking on an institutional scale, but it can work on a personal scale too. I'm remembering talking with Ayya Tathaaloka^[9], who is now one of the very senior nuns, bhikkhunis, in the Western world. And she, way back when she was thinking about ordaining, very young in her 20s, was going back and forth, "Should I ordain as a nun? What should I do with my life?" And she happened to be flying back home, which was in Portland at the time, Portland, Oregon. She got off the plane, and that was in the time when Nike had their slogan, "Just do it." And there were all these ads in the Portland Airport from Nike that said, "Just do it. Just do it." And then she walked off the plane and saw these signs, she said, "Okay, I think I'll ordain. Just do it." [Laughter]

So there's a way that honest openness to the Dharma connects us into some larger flow. I've heard Gil call this "hidden pathways" that we don't know are there. And sometimes this approach of simply having confidence is a way to meet the uncertainties of life. And it's not even that we have confidence or trust in some specific thing that we could name, we just have trust. There's a saying, "The Dharma supports those who support the Dharma." And you know, this has to be done with some sincerity and humility. We can't rely on it from a purely cognitive perspective, or we can't have a demand or an expectation in following that maxim in our life.

And it's useful also to remember that we might not get the exact solution that we were imagining, but there will be some shift that addresses our problem if we take this approach of meeting life confidently. So here I want to give a somewhat pointed example that I heard from another Dharma teacher in a Dharma talk, and I found it striking. They were saying, "Suppose a person has the problem of wetting their pants when they get nervous in public, and they desperately wish to end the suffering of this terrible condition. And so they place their trust in their Dharma practice. But instead of stopping the wetting of their pants, what they find is that they become equanimous about doing it." So either way, the suffering subsides. I mean, it's kind of a humorous and somewhat overblown example, but it points toward the idea that we can't quite demand how the issue is going to be addressed. But we can have confidence that the Dharma will find a way to ease the suffering. Maybe things change, or maybe we just learn not to be so concerned, or any other of a myriad of possibilities.

It may not even be about a problem, per se. I know somebody from a sangha in another location who was sometimes asked to give Dharma talks when the teacher was away, and one time she was asked and she said no because she didn't really have any ideas for a talk. So that's one approach. But another approach is to just say yes, and trust that because the talk is on the calendar, an idea will come. You don't need an idea for a Dharma talk when there isn't one coming up on the calendar, but as soon as there is, then maybe an idea will come.

So I don't know, do you have any examples of this from your own life? If you want to, ask that as a question for your contemplation. Have there been examples of that that you've seen?

There's even a story from the suttas about this. Maha Kassapa^[10], who was one of the Buddha's chief disciples, knew from an early age that he wanted to ordain as a monk, but his parents wouldn't allow it, and he ended up married. He didn't want to get married, but he ended up marrying—turned out—a woman who really wanted to be a nun, but her parents wouldn't allow it either. So they did their best, being married and running a farm to make a living. But eventually, the calling to the spiritual life was too strong for both of them. And without even having met the Buddha—Kassapa had never met his teacher, but he just knew he wanted to ordain, he wanted to live that life. So without having met the Buddha, Kassapa and actually also his wife, they just put on the yellow robe anyway, kind of effectively ordaining themselves, and set out on the road. And the Buddha had sensed at that point that a great disciple was in the area and was coming, and he went to meet Kassapa. But Kassapa couldn't have known that when he set out.

So this quality of confidence, saddhā. Sometimes the best approach is to just go forward sincerely, not knowing how it's all going to work out, but trusting that we'll be able to meet it. Whatever comes may be pleasant, may be unpleasant, but we trust that we can meet it.

So confidence becomes a Dharma resource when we have some clarity in our heart about what we're devoted to, or what we're following, or what we're aspiring to. We have some clarity, like, we want to build a Dharma Center in America. We want to orient our life around practice. We want to find a way to meet a terminal illness. Something. And then we step forward and we meet the next moment, and the next. We maybe have a big picture in mind, but big pictures come about moment by moment by moment. And there's a way that we can bring our full heart to that.

So may you find that confidence is a Dharma resource for you today, and broadly in your life. Thank you.