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Guided Meditation: Steadiness

I want to welcome everyone. Welcome back. I'll be continuing the topic this week in the art of being nobody and somebody, exploring the self and not-self.

Before we begin the meditation, I wanted to reflect on one of the teachings that was a turning point in my own meditation practice. It came from a Buddhist nun, Sister Susila^[1]. I'd been practicing and doing what I did most of my life: trying to accomplish things, approaching meditation with lots of energy and intensity. But something wasn't working for me. I wasn't getting settled and concentrated. What she said to me was actually very simple. She said, "Contentment is a prerequisite for samadhi^[2], for concentration."

Over time, that kept resounding in my mind. I allowed it to sink in, and I learned to relax the quality of my efforts. But I sustained the steadiness of my efforts, until I found my own way to be both tranquil and alert. That teaching continued to deepen in me. I saw that I could be content with a sad mind. And content with an agitated mind. And even content with pain in my body. So maybe we can approach this sitting with an attitude of being content with our own minds just as they are right now, within our own bodies just as they are.

So, let's begin this meditation.

Taking an alert and a relaxed posture. Gently closing the eyes. Allowing ourselves to arrive. Here. Leaving behind any plans for later today, the conversations, the roles we play. The things unfinished—just putting them aside. Just this body here. Always here. Always now. Immediate.

Now taking a few slow, deep breaths. And with each exhale, allowing the body to relax a little more. Settling into the cushion, the chair, the ground.

And when you're ready, allowing the breath to return to its natural rhythms. You might bring some gentle attention to how you are holding yourself. If sitting, perhaps upright with a sense of dignity. If lying down, perhaps allowing the body to feel long, open, and awake. Resting in presence.

The posture itself can support the mind. A posture that's both relaxed and awake can support our steadiness and confidence. See if the body can rest with a sense of dignity, a sense that this moment matters, that your presence matters.

Perhaps imagining ourselves as a mountain. Steady, grounded, belonging exactly where it is. Storms come, fog comes, wind, sunlight. The mountain allows all of it to come and go. There's nothing to hold together perfectly. Just supported by the earth.

And with this sense of openness and dignity, allowing ourselves to receive the breath just as it is. The body breathing itself. Maybe feeling the rise and fall of the breath. The gentle expansion and softening of the body. The breath moving in and out with the same air that moves throughout the whole world around us.

And if thoughts, sensations, or feelings arise, we can allow them to simply move through awareness the way clouds move through the sky. Like weather moving through the sky. The sky doesn't struggle against the clouds. It doesn't cling to the beautiful ones or resist the dark ones. The sky has room for everything. Sounds arising and passing. Sensations. Thoughts, feelings arising and passing. Awareness is like this open sky. It's spacious enough to hold this moment exactly as it is. This moment is enough.

Resting like a mountain. Open like the sky. Breathing. Aware.

If the attention has drifted, kindly bring it back to the breath, to the body. Just welcome it home. Here. Now.

And now, as we near the end of this meditation, you might take a few deeper breaths, staying intimate with this body. Here. Now.

Dharmette: Being Somebody and Nobody (3 of 5); The Skillful Self

One of the things that mindfulness begins to reveal is how many different versions of ourselves appear throughout a single day. There's a self that maybe feels confident in the morning, and the self that's lying awake at 3:00 a.m. replaying a conversation. Or a self that feels very generous and giving, and a self that wants credit for being generous and giving. The self that wants to meditate every day, and the self that would rather snack, distract ourselves, and have a different life.

One way that the self has been described is as if it's made up of many committee members. Depending on conditions, different members tend to dominate. Maybe the controller, the perfectionist, is at play. The pleaser. The critical parent. The judge, the fearful one. The playful child. The bratty child. The angry one. The smart one. There are so many of these different selves that can show up.

One of the great gifts of practice is that we begin to see them not as fixed identities, but as habit patterns—conditioned ways that the mind organizes itself. When we notice these patterns, we see that this self is not a fixed entity. The bratty child doesn't seem at all similar to the controller. Something is being continuously created, continuously changing. And because of that, it can be shaped. We call it neuroplasticity: that ability to shape, to recondition the mind. Not shaping it perfectly, not permanently, but skillfully.

We can cultivate a self that's more compassionate, less reactive, less driven by conceit and fear, more capable of wisdom, and more capable of love. The healthy self, the wise self, is not the perfect self. It includes our contradictions, our foibles, our unfinished places. This practice allows us to discover in a very real way that freedom never comes from creating this perfect identity, but from learning how to hold all of this just a lot more lightly. And to cultivate the things that are helpful in our lives, and to discourage the things that are harmful to us.

In psychological systems—a common one these days is Internal Family Systems—they speak about there being a wise self underneath all the various parts. A kind of compassionate presence that can hold all the different voices without completely identifying with any one of them.

Mindfulness lets us discover something quite similar. We may not call them by those exact names, but we notice, "Oh, fear arose," instead of "I am afraid." Judging arose instead of "I am judging." Striving, comparing, hurt. As we see this process more clearly, we gradually stop assuming that any passing state is who we are. They are just the voices of the fearful committee member or the judging one. As wisdom begins recognizing these as passing states, we can begin to relate to them with kindness instead of hostility. Kindness instead of seeing them as something to fix. Because even these difficult parts are usually trying in some confused way to help keep us feeling safe, loved, or protected.

The perfectionist wants safety. The controller wants certainty. The comparing mind wants reassurance. Many of us were raised with fairy tales like Cinderella: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the prettiest one of all?" And of course, there's only one winner. We're conditioned to comparisons so early into this idea that our worth depends on being smarter, prettier, more handsome, more successful, more spiritual, better than others. Better meditators^[3] than others. And that creates so much tension in the heart.

In decades of practice and retreats, there was only one time in all the retreats I sat that I ever left a retreat early. I think it was my fifth retreat. It was a 10-day retreat with a Tibetan teacher who was teaching through a translator. It was a completely new method for me. On the eighth day, the Dharma talk was on faith. The teacher kept saying, "You need faith to do this practice." Ironically, one of the reasons I came on the retreat was because I had doubts about my practice. I thought maybe trying a different approach would help. I asked to meet with the teacher privately, and through the translator, he kept repeating, "You need to have faith to do it." Finally, I thought to myself, "Well, I guess I don't." So, I left the retreat.

Many years later, I had a chance to meet with the teacher again, who now finally spoke pretty good English. I discovered the translator had left something essential out. What the teacher actually meant by faith was much closer to confidence, to trust—to trust in the practice itself. Over the years, I've really come to appreciate the Pali word saddhā^[4].

Oops. Lost my hat, at least not my head. [Laughter]

Saddhā is often translated as faith or confidence. But literally, it means "to place the heart upon." The trust Sylvia Boorstein calls "trusting in your own deepest experience." Not a blind belief, not becoming a perfect meditator, but learning to trust that we can meet this moment, just this moment, even when it's challenging.

Many of us learned a version of confidence based on success. If I'm doing well, I'm confident. If I'm struggling, I'm failing. But practice teaches another kind of confidence: the confidence to meet difficulty. To say, "Yes, this too. I can know this. I have room for this." When we stop fighting our experience so much, struggling with it, something in us begins to relax very deeply.

Confidence in practice is not so much about succeeding. It's the confidence in not needing to cling. The confidence that when fear appears, insecurity appears, grief appears, restlessness appears, that it's actually safe to stay present, safe to feel what's here.

I remember Jack Kornfield used to joke about the restless mind. He said, "I'll be the first meditator in the world to die from restlessness." But sometimes it takes courage to be present for our suffering. I know the experience of just being with an itch and feeling like I cannot stay with it. It's insufferable. I cannot stay with it. But it's staying with it, and seeing it to the other end of it. And opening to it.

Arjuna Tsering^[5] said, "Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering." Usually, when suffering appears, the self mobilizes almost immediately. It wants to fix it, escape it, become something else, protect the identity. But the practice teaches us to turn towards the suffering, the uncomfortable, the unwanted, with curiosity, with courage, and with kindness.

So often it's not the deep, very painful states that trigger the desire to escape. Sometimes those are even interesting. But the restless, unsatisfied mind—we often might judge it, "Oh, that's not worthy of my attention, not worthy of showing up for it. It's too trivial."

For much of my life, I had a regular yoga practice. I had a pretty severe injury some decades back, and I became really discouraged because so much of what I used to do physically no longer worked well. A friend of mine who was a yoga teacher told me, "Don't stop doing yoga. Just focus on what you can do, not what you can't do." I did that. Though it wasn't much at first, it changed everything. Instead of organizing my mind around the loss, I began organizing my mind around participation, around intimacy with the body, just as it was.

And that's part of practice. Not becoming perfect. Not becoming invulnerable. But trusting that we can meet life as it unfolds, not as we want it to be. One breath at a time. One moment at a time. Over time, confidence becomes less about self-image and more about just being available. Available to life. To joy, to sorrow. To uncertainty. This is a kind of healthy self-esteem that can be equally at ease being nobody going nowhere, or winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Confidence no longer depends so much on who we think we are, but in trusting awareness itself. Trusting in presence. Trusting in the capacity to meet what arises.

As the self becomes healthier and more wholesome, it becomes less rigid. Less defended. More compassionate. More playful. More transparent. Our personality doesn't disappear; it's just held a lot more lightly. The point of practice is not to create a particular kind of self, but a self that is less burdened. Less burdened by comparison, by fear, by the need to constantly prove, defend, or become. A self that can be honest and tender and strong without becoming rigid. The skillful self becomes the unburdened self—not because life becomes perfect, but because we stop carrying so much extra.

I'll finish this with a short poem by a 13th-century Zen master, Wumen Huikai^[6]:

Spring has its hundred flowers. Autumn, its moon. Summer has its cooling breezes. Winter, its snow. If your mind is not clouded by pointless things, this is the best season of your life.

Thank you.