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Guided Meditation: Three Streams

Greetings and welcome. Welcome back to this exploration this week of the heart of practice. Each day, I'm just remembering now when I say welcome, I've tried to cast that welcome not just as the automatic thing that we say, but to give it a meaning that fits with the heart of practice. So today, welcome. Welcome to the flow of your life. I'll talk about it more in the Dharma, but the practice encourages us to be with the flow, but also of the flow. It asks us to recognize that we're inescapably part of this flow, and instead of turning away from it or resisting it, we can embrace it. Doing so does lots of good for us, and by extension, brings good to the world.

So let's begin by sitting, by preparing the mind for the Dharma, and today by bringing ourselves into the flow of experience in a way that leaves us free to experience it and enjoy it. Find a posture for the meditation that balances ease and alertness. We can get very hung up on posture, but these are the critical criteria for the posture: that it balances alertness and ease, and that it provides a way to be here with both alertness and relaxation. It's a relaxed alertness or an alert relaxation, and any posture that supports this is good enough. I've stressed the importance of "good enough" this week.

So, finding a posture, we establish a balance between being here with full presence and doing so in a way that keeps us at ease, unbound, and uncaught. We establish the balance and then we reestablish it. Just like riding a bike, we don't just balance once and then coast off; we continually reestablish balance.

We've also emphasized this week the way that the meditation balances effort and allowing. Maybe as you bring the eyes down or soften the gaze, as you bring attention inward and downward and settle into the body, you can notice the balancing of effort and ease. The path unfolds with our memory of it. Sometimes we add a little effort here or remove a little there as we recollect the instructions. Both remembrance and recollection have figured in this week's exploration of the heart of practice. Connecting with bodily sensations, connecting with the mystery of the breathing at the center of life, the center of our experience of being alive, as we explored yesterday.

As we bring attention to the breath, we can let some of the natural qualities and characteristics of the breathing rub off on the mind, as it were. The balance of the breath is always an instructive balance between alertness and ease; allowing and effort are right here in the breathing. It's a sort of balance of concern, confidence, and care. And we can settle right down into it.

To restate the essential instruction of the mindfulness practice: when we come to be aware that the mind, attention, or awareness has become tight, constricted, wrapped up, caught, or bound, we can gently, without hurry, open back up to the breath. Open back up to the balance in the breathing. If the mind or attention seems to leap away, bounce away, or wander away, we can gently tug attention back to the here and now. Reconnect with this breath here. It's not important that we got away or that we got all caught up in things. That is natural. It is the natural functioning of mind and body. With care, we just bring attention back. Open attention back up to here and now. There is sufficientness, enoughness, satisfactoriness, enough right here. Our practice doesn't ask us to be anywhere else but here and now.

For today's meditation, with just a little more guidance than in the last few days, I'll introduce something that I've heard called the "Three Streams" meditation. It is nothing particularly new or different. As in most of these forms, we are not imagining anything, just noticing what's happening within us and without us.

We can bring attention to the stream of the breathing happening. One breath after another. When we bring our attention to the breathing, there is just effortless knowing of the stream of inhalation and exhalation. One breath followed by another. Our attention just moving easily with this first stream. Resting in this stream, understanding that in some profound way, we're part of this stream of breathing; we are this stream of breathing.

We can also be aware of sounds arising and passing. Sounds in the body—maybe even the breathing produces a soft sound. Sounds in our immediate proximity. A fan, a clock ticking. Cars, traffic, children. Conversation, a dog barking^[1], whatever comes and goes. This too is a stream in which we can rest our attention and hold in our awareness.

And there's a third stream of ideas and thoughts that the mind generates. Like sounds, these just come. They bubble up. When we rest in these three streams, we can let the thoughts be sort of like the sounds or like the breaths coming and going. They just come and go. If one becomes particularly compelling and we get led off away, it's not a problem, it is an opportunity to come back to here and now. Connect with the breathing, connect with sounds, and just notice the flow of ideas generated, coming and going, bubbling up, passing through.

In the meditation, we have an opportunity to just be with this flow of experience. To rest in the stream of experience. If it's useful, the metaphor of a stream, a flowing body of water, may be useful. Just feel as if we're floating in a stream of experience. The breathing coming and going, sounds coming and going, ideas coming, going. We don't have to resist the flow. We can let the flow move within us. We can join the flow. And we can enjoy the flow. This resting in the flow, joining the flow, enjoying the flow: this is the heart of practice.

So, resting at ease in these three streams—the breathing coming and going, the sounds arising and falling away, thoughts coming, going, sometimes tugging us away—we just keep coming back, re-entering, rejoining the flow, resting here. Resting in the flow, enjoying the flow, finding comfort in the flow.

If we like this metaphor of entering a stream, we can add a visual. Perhaps we're a small or medium-sized branch that falls upon the water of a mountain stream. We settle into the water, we become suffused by the water, and we move with the water. And because we're a green branch, and it's a smallish mountain stream, it's natural that we occasionally get caught up on the side, or that we get caught in an eddy, or sucked into a whirlpool. Whirlpools happen. But as the river broadens, the current deepens. We rest in the flow.

We join a river of experience. All of it can be part of the meditation. Is the river in a hurry? No. Does the river know where it's going? Nope. The river is just flow. So, we can develop comfort in this flow, even with its eddies and whirlpools, even with bumping up against the banks or getting caught up occasionally on a rock or an overhanging branch. And, we can be in the flow without concern about getting somewhere. Nowhere else needs to be got to. We can just be in the flow, of the flow, not separate from the flow, enjoying the flow. This is the heart of practice.

(Bell rings)

Dharmette: The Heart of Practice (5 of 5): Of the Flow

Good day. Welcome back. Day five of exploring the heart of practice. If Gil^[2] asks that I do this again, I'm thinking I might just continue. I think we've only scratched the surface of the heart of practice. There's a lot of richness in the practice.

Today I want to talk about this idea of being in the flow and of the flow. On Monday we talked about—and I tried to evoke some of this in the guided meditation as it came to me—this idea that all of who we are and all of our experience can be brought into the meditative container. We don't want to exclude anything or push anything away. There's nothing different that should be happening. There's nothing that doesn't belong.

On Tuesday we talked about this place, and particularly about memory: remembering the path and recollecting the instructions. These are two meanings for the Pali word sati^[3], usually translated as mindfulness.

On Wednesday we talked about satisfactoriness, "good enoughness." In a way, it's the wholesome pleasantness or pleasure of the practice. This was a way to explore samadhi^[4], a word I don't think I used, as the heart of practice.

Yesterday we talked about here, now, and nowhere else. There is no place to get to. In fact, coming back here is where we find the heart of practice.

And so today, continuing with this set of themes, the heart of practice is this flow of experience that we can rest in. Full disclosure, I'm feeling a little spacey, spacier maybe than usual. I don't know if it's the theme for today, the effect of the guided meditation on myself, or something I ate for dinner last night. But, just putting that out there. If we attend to it, spaciness has its place in the practice for sure. I'm going to think it's just about being in the flow. I'm going to stay in the flow.

If we attend to practice, if we attune to it—that is, if we pay attention to it, meet it on its terms, and settle into it on its terms—we find that what develops is a propensity to incline the mind in the direction of wholesome. A momentum of practice develops.

This idea of a propensity is important. Sometimes hardwired and sometimes developing as a result of our personal histories, we have these natural tendencies or dispositions to behave in certain ways and react to our experience in certain ways. The practice helps us to counter the force of habit that happens without thinking about it, without mindful attention, and without really being present with what's coming up. It helps us develop new habits, new ways, and new, more wholesome mind states that can meet the world with skillful action. Eventually, these new habits become second nature. That's the idea of a propensity to act in a certain way when we meet certain conditions.

I think of momentum, which seems to me very much in line with the idea of the stream metaphor, the three streams meditation, and the general idea of being in the flow of our experience and welcoming that experience into the meditation. Momentum means that the practice gathers steam and carries us along. "Gathers steam" is maybe a newer industrial metaphor, but in the Buddha's day, this momentum was obvious and apparent all around everybody in the way water moves. Water is such an important thing for sustaining life.

There's a well-known passage in one of the Buddhist discourses that says this. It's like this, practitioners. When rain pours down as mist or in thick droplets on a mountaintop, the water flows down along the slopes of the hills and fills the clefts, the gullies, the creeks. And when these are full up, they fill up pools. The pools are filled up, they become lakes. These, when full, feed streams. The streams as they get fuller become rivers. And these rivers make their way and fill up the great ocean. The Buddha, when he says, "It's like this," is talking about the practice. This is how the practice is. It gains momentum. It gains forward direction. It moves as we develop it with an almost inevitable momentum toward freedom, toward the ocean. Just like streams do.

We can see this in the practice of our meditation. I introduced the idea in the guided that maybe at first we're a twig or a branch in the stream. We get caught up on the edges, but as the stream widens, as our practice deepens and broadens, we move more easily in the flow. We bump up against the sides less. We're more kind of in the middle of the current. This doesn't mean we don't get caught in eddies or have whirlpools suck us down and pop us back up, but we become accustomed to all that, comfortable with all that.

Something that's interesting to me in this metaphor is that the people in the Buddha's time didn't understand gravity the way it's understood today. It was clear that water flowed downhill, that mist and raindrops at the highest peaks in the mountains would gather, and eventually streams and rivers would make their way down to the ocean. But it wasn't conceived that there was this additional force moving the water down toward the center of the earth and that gravity makes that happen. I think this is useful because what it implies, at least to me, is that we can be in the flow, we can understand the flow, we can feel that propensity developing, and we can come to love the momentum of the practice without knowing exactly what's making it all move.

We can just notice this tendency in our practice, the way it pulls us along or pushes us along, and notice that it's a natural force that we can be aware of. We can know it through direct observation of our own experience. It's not really about all the teachings, where it's going, and Nibbana^[5]; maybe that's my theme for today. Just to throw in another big word and concept that we can just let go of and focus on our direct experience of the momentum of practice, being in the flow of it.

I said the other day we don't really even have to understand the ultimate end of the practice. In a way, when we're in the flow, that becomes irrelevant. I'm going to paraphrase a teaching colleague and say, "We don't really have to know where we're going." Just like the river that I brought into the guided meditation. "Knowing how to get there is good enough." Feeling the momentum and continuing to move that way, keeping our attention, our awareness, and our lives inclining with the momentum that we can feel developing in the practice: it's good enough. In fact, it's perfect. You may remember me saying the other day that although we frequently in other parts of our lives come to feel that only perfect is good enough, in this practice, good enough is perfect.

I've been saying today to feel the flow and rest in the flow. Becoming aware that there's this flow happening and then resting in it is the heart of practice. I would add to this—I'm just going to write this in my notes—that we want to be of the flow. We feel it, we rest in it, and we recognize that we're of the flow.

I'm going to explore that idea a little bit more in just a moment, but first I want to say there's another metaphor that I drew on for the guided meditation from a discourse. It says, "On one occasion the Buddha was dwelling on the banks of the river Ganges." The Buddha sees a great log being carried along by the current of the river. He addresses the practitioners who are around him and asks, "Do you see that log being carried along by the current in the river?" They say, "Yeah." He says, "If that log doesn't veer towards the near shore or the far shore, if it doesn't get caught up on either side, if it doesn't sink in the middle for being waterlogged or rotten, if it doesn't get thrown up on a wave on the side, if it doesn't get picked out of the river by humans and used for something, if it doesn't get caught in a whirlpool, if it does not get caught in eddies, it will 'slant, slope, and incline'"—which is the phrase in the discourse^[6]—"toward the ocean." Why? Because the current of the river moves toward the ocean. Again, this is the idea that we're joining a flow or moving in a direction when we cultivate our practice. Feeling that momentum can help cultivate it in our lives.

For this idea of being the flow and being of the flow, I'm going to tell you a very quick little vignette. I was once meditating in a room with a clock. Sounds like the beginning of a parable. You probably notice sometimes in meditation that there can be sounds happening, and then sometimes one or more of them become a noise. The mind has decided, "Oh, this isn't just a sound coming and going. There's a problem with it. It shouldn't be there. I don't like it." Or, I really want to know if it's a conversation or music; the mind is drawn into it.

So, I'm meditating in a room with a clock ticking. I perceive it to be noise. It's bothering me and feels like a distraction. Then I noticed that that was because it seemed to be ticking sort of through time. I realized that what actually was happening is that my experience was moving at the same pace as the ticking, that both this time moving forward and the meditation happening are part of this larger flow. And then, all of a sudden, the sound of the ticking clock disappeared.

This idea that experience is unfolding at the pace of life, and that we're in time, in the flow of things, and that we're of the flow of things, is an important part of the heart of practice. That's why when we step out of the flow, when we make things hard and fast, when we impose our preferences on the flow of our experience, when we get caught in eddies and whirlpools—to use the metaphors available to us in the sutta^[7]—we're interrupting the natural flow of experience. That is a great way to characterize suffering, or dukkha^[8]. I've been leaving out the Pali words, but they're here in the teaching.

One way to think about suffering or stress, or what we're adding, is that we're stopping the flow of things. This doesn't mean that this is a passive practice, or we just float down the stream of life without concern for violence, justice, or the suffering of the world. Rather, we find a place in the meditation where we can rest in the stream of experience without adding extra, without reacting, and without strengthening the old unskillful patterns and habits of our mind that end up hurting us and others, even when we're trying to do good.

Resting in the flow of experience helps us practice being awake in the world without prejudgment and without preference, being open to experience in a way that helps us respond in ways that are creative and relevant to each of us. As we experience our freedom and awakeness increasingly in different ways, we can figure out the best ways to be a force for good in the world.

So, we come to the end of it. I appreciate our week together. This has been an exploration of five days of saying, "This is the heart of practice." But, there's so much more. I could say teachers are the heart of practice. I bow to each of mine: Gil and Andrea^[9]. Dharma friends are the heart of practice. I see many of you chatting in the chat, and many of you who are not chatting in the chat, but Dharma friends we have and we rely on. Dharma community, like this gathering—this is the heart of practice.

I look forward to exploring such themes with you in the future, if that happens. Until the next time our paths cross, take care, and enjoy your practice today. Thanks.