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Guided Meditation: Meditative Action

I'm here in the meditation hall at the Insight Retreat Center, and I feel very lucky to have about eight or nine people here. Some of the residents and some of the people who've been part of this program came down to teach for a couple of days. I've been very fortunate to be here. I miss Patacara. I said I would be able to be with her these two days, but the technology doesn't work so well, so this works much better here.

At some point in my meditation practice on retreat, I learned an interesting technique, and I had an image that went along with it. The image would kind of come up when I used this technique at the back of the mind. That image was of a horse that had escaped from its corral, or needed to come back to the barn. So a rider would get on another horse, go out to find the first one, and then would ride up right next to it, almost bringing them together. Then the new horse with the rider would gently make a big curve, turn 180 degrees around, and the stray horse would then just follow along and come back to the barn.

And so that image was how I worked with some of the thinking that would come up for me. I would start thinking about something, and rather than being opposed to it, or rather than being troubled by it, it was just a horse that had kind of gone off. I would imagine myself coming up next to it, letting it continue to think, and letting it just keep going. But then over a few seconds, I would turn it around and bring the whole thing back to being grounded and centered here in my body, back in my breathing. That was such a harmonious way of working with my distracted thoughts. It's been something I've done ever since; it's been quite wonderful to do.

It's very different than how I was when I was a new meditator, when it was a little bit of a war between me and my thinking, like, "This is terrible that it's happening." Or it was a little bit of a whack-a-mole kind of exercise, where I pounded out of existence the fact that I was thinking. But this harmonious way of just coming around and bringing it back... one of the arts of that was coming up next to the horse, next to the thinking, and coming up next to some place in the body that was associated with the thinking, that was somehow pleasant, or the right place to be—the place where it felt like I'm connected to this event of thinking.

So I was stepping away from the content of my thoughts, but I wasn't stepping away from thinking. That could continue, but I shifted the orientation from thinking about the content to something that felt right to me. It felt occasionally cozy, sometimes a little bit pleasant, enjoyable, or bright. Sometimes a sense of aliveness, a vitality that was cozy or connected in my body. So this idea of learning to shift the attention—not from one thing to another, but shifting attention within what's happening to some aspect of what's happening that feels like a better place to be centered.

And so we're not rejecting anything or letting go of something necessarily, but we are shifting the perspective; we're shifting how we're aware of it. One of the important places is around thinking. It's so easy to be caught in the contents. Or if there's a lot of emotion, it's so easy to be involved in the thinking, the meaning, the memories, the projections into the future of what this emotion is about. But even there, there's some place that feels like a good place to place attention, to be in relationship to the emotion. A place that feels right. Yes, it feels alive in a very good way: pleasant, enjoyable, bright. Same thing with pain.

Not to reject the pain, not to fight it, but is there some kind of harmonious way of being present for it, by not necessarily being with what's most difficult about the pain, but something that feels like a rightness to it? I kind of agree with that with pain sometimes. For me—and I'm not saying it should be for other people—the way of working with the pain as the horse, what often feels like the most right thing to do, is to sit in the middle of where it's most painful. There's something about sitting there that changes the nature of the pain for me, where I just go, "Okay, now I can be here." But if I'm not there in the center of it, then the thinking mind and the reactive mind still kind of have a freer rein.

So this is what I'd like to suggest for today. If you sit here in meditation and something arises that takes you away from being present for your breathing, present here, not to fight it or even let go of it, but think of it as a horse. Where do you ride up next to it to accompany it? When you're up against it, what is it that feels right about the composite, the whole experience of whatever it is? What is it that you can feel has a rightness, a pleasantness, an aliveness in that experience that supports you to bring the horse back home, back into the body, back in here and present?

So, taking a comfortable, alert posture. And then gently closing the eyes.

Taking a few moments to feel and experience how you are right now. All the different ways you might be at any given moment.

Now allowing it all to be there. Where could you center yourself that feels the most right or the most pleasant? The most sense of being alive in a nice way, a balanced way?

Maybe on the exhale, relaxing around that spot.

Being centered on that spot, taking a few long, slow, deep breaths to settle in more fully here.

And letting the breathing return to normal.

Where is it in connection to breathing where it feels most right to center your attention? Where in the breathing does it feel most pleasant? Most alive, most clear?

No matter what happens during the meditation, ask yourself that question: given what's happening, where in all the different parts and aspects of the experience is it most pleasant? Alive, right? Be aware of it. In the body and the feelings, emotions, mind states. Where it feels like it's most right to feel.

There's a gentle turning to be more fully here. Coming home here.

(Silence)

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, we appreciate that we are multifaceted. There are many different components of what makes up our personal experience in any given moment. Components of how we are.

The meditation practice is one of the practices that shifts that. From being stuck maybe in the thoughts, ideas, concerns, to being somehow energized in an agitated way, to being able to focus on how we can feel grounded and centered, embodied, maybe a little bit more connected to our hearts. More centered here.

And to have more fluidity to be able to move between the component parts of ourselves. At the end, maybe to move the attention to the heart center. To the place within your body where you feel compassion, care, love, kindness. Sometimes felt as a tenderness. Sometimes a warmth, sometimes a kind of inner strength.

You breathe with that heart center. To gaze out upon the world from your kindness, your love.

To end the meditation with directly establishing a connection in goodwill for the world around us. Goodwill for the people we know, we don't know, people who it's easy to love, and people who it's not so easy. And then to say goodwill. To extend that goodwill intentionally, purposefully, choicefully, with words that are something like:

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: The Dharma of Challenges (2 of 5): The Importance of Action

Hello everyone again, and I'm greeting you from the Insight Retreat Center here in the redwoods in Santa Cruz County. Right now I don't think it's raining. The major entryway highway into Santa Cruz was just blocked with big landslides yesterday. It's kind of dramatic at times here in this area—usually lots of landslides—but we've been safe here at IRC and comfortable. It's nice to be here. A nice degree of you on YouTube get a little taste of the retreat center here. You don't see much of it now, but maybe at the end of it we can zoom out and show you more of the meditation room.

So this week the series is on the Dharma of challenges. It's following last week, where the topic was "What is the Dharma?" and I offered five different meanings of the word Dharma. I'm building on that, looking at how each different meaning of Dharma can be an approach to how to work and practice with the challenges we have. This is still laying down a foundation, so it's not getting into details, but the foundation of a series now as we go along on working with challenges in particular ways. I'm not sure exactly how this is going to unfold over the weeks, so I've been hoping that it's a bit of a journey into a deeper connection to oneself around this topic of the challenges we have being human beings.

One of the meanings that I talked about last week regarding what Dharma is, is Dharma as action. There are places in the ancient texts where the Buddha is called the teacher of action, or his teaching is a teaching of action, kammavāda^[1], kind of related to the word Theravāda^[2] with the same vāda at the end. So, a teaching of action. That is one way of understanding the Dharma and even understanding insight practice: it's a practice of action. It's an acting; there's a doing that involves insight practice, meditation. Sometimes it's useful to emphasize that it is an action, it is a doing, because otherwise sometimes we don't recognize we are doing something.

Sometimes we have language in this tradition of not doing anything, just allowing and just being. But there's a way in which that also is a doing. If we stop doing—we're busy in the mind and very active, and we choose to stop it all and be still—there's a way that's also a doing. It's a doing of stopping. And then we do that, we don't stop our life; life continues and there's all this vitality. So if you're sitting in meditation upright, then there's action involved in being present for that posture, present here. Some people practice non-doing, just a radical letting go of all the normal doings of the mind and the body to just be still. But there's still the doing of being aware of that. The doing of action, the action of awareness that maybe we're not doing, but it's being done. It's action happening, it's really happening.

The reason why I would like to emphasize action in relationship to challenges is that when we're challenged by life in simple ways and deep ways, something inside of us has sprung into action. We've been activated in some way, or maybe we find ourselves thinking a lot about it and trying to figure out how to problem-solve. Perhaps we're physically activated in some way. We want to run away or we want to attack something because something is really wrong, or we want to shut down. Sometimes my default when I'm challenged is the ostrich approach, sticking my head in the sand and pretending it's not there. Some people's default is to attack, to get angry and blame. Some people it's running away and shutting down. And those are all actions. Some people, their common thing is just spinning out in projections, fantasies, and ideas of "what if" or "what could have been," and all these are actions.

So we're already doing something. And it turns out when we're really challenged, it's very good for the heart, the mind, and the whole psyche to feel like we have some agency, that we can do something and we can act. And if the challenges are big—challenges squared, or challenges cubed—when we feel it's too much and we feel like giving up, it's hopeless. The feeling of hopelessness or helplessness is really one of the greatest challenges within challenges. Feeling like giving up or feeling there's no opportunity to do anything.

In the Dharma, there is always something we can do. And maybe we can't do something to fix this challenge, but we can find where we have some agency. What can I do here? How can we act?

I remember many years ago I talked to a woman. She was going in for major surgery, and she had had a lot of surgeries. One more time. I taught her to do loving-kindness meditation. After the surgery she told me, "Gil, that was so helpful because in the past I felt once I'm on the gurney and waiting to go into surgery, waiting in the hallway, I feel helpless. Like my life is in the hands of someone else and I just can't do anything. But now I felt empowered. There's something I can do: I can do loving-kindness." She felt so engaged and empowered. She had her agency back at this crucial moment in her life of going into surgery. So she could find what she could do in a situation and learn she doesn't have to be helpless.

Even when it's time for people to die, that is not necessarily a time to give up. There's a time to let go in a healthy way, which is also an action. If we learn the value of letting go, then it's an action which is invited. We appreciate doing it, we see the value of it. "Okay, now I can let go of so many concerns and so many things. Now there's an opportunity to do something else here, not to be snowed under or covered over with a sense of helplessness or hopelessness." Even though the person might be dying, which is a challenge or a crisis for some people, if it's happening anyway, then a Dharma practitioner finds, "What action can I engage here that meets this nicely?"

So one of the actions that we do in mindfulness practice, meditation for example, is the choice to settle. In our physical body, we choose not to move the body too much within reason (maybe you have to move it if it's uncomfortable), but to be still for a period of time. We might have a choice to still some of the thinking mind. There are some of the things we think about where we realize, "You know, I've done this a lot, I don't need to do this anymore." And so there's a healthy, appropriate way to say, "I stop, I'm not doing this." That is an engagement of our agency, of our choice, of what we can do. And there are things we can't have a choice about stopping, and we have to learn to practice with that. So for someone who's doing mindfulness meditation, one of the doings, one of the actions we do is to meet it with attention. Meet it with investigation, meet it with curiosity to be present here. And that's something we do that I think sometimes people undervalue—the action of showing up for our experience. "Okay, here I am with it." That's taking agency, that's saying you have something to do. We're not helpless when we bring attention to something.

And sometimes what we can do is be present for the experience of the challenge, but learn how to be present for it in a useful way. One of the ways is to realize when we're challenged—the more challenged we are, probably externally. It's a way of saying that sometimes the challenge is out there, maybe it's objectified somehow. But I propose that the bigger the challenge is, the more we're activated with our thinking mind, our emotional minds, our fear, anxiety, or concerns. And that activation is something to bring attention to, but to bring attention to it in a careful way to explore and discover: Where am I activated? What's activated here? And where does it feel most right to bring the attention? Where within it does it feel most grounding, most centering? Where and how I'm feeling now—which I'm feeling so agitated, so unstable—is there some place where it feels pleasant or enjoyable to have the attention?

I remember yesterday when we had some trouble with the technology and making it work, I sat down and I was a little bit more activated, more energized, spinning a little bit more than I usually am when I sit down to do the YouTube stream. So as I sat there, I brought my attention to the way I was energized, a little bit agitated, and where it was most pleasant was in my arms. There was a flow of energy there. Usually my arms, I don't feel that strongly when I meditate, the upper arms. But now there was a flow of energy there that was part of the activation, but it actually felt kind of nice, that flow and aliveness and tingling there in the upper arm. And so I wanted to be present for how I was, but I wanted to also be present for it in a way where I wasn't going to spin out more in the thoughts and the ideas and the concerns. But to be present for it in a way that entered into it in a way that allows for a deeper connection, or a subtleness, having a calmness in the middle of the storm. So finding that place where it was pleasant—sometimes that's too high a bar to find, but to find where there feels a rightness to it. I love this idea of "where is the rightness?" It feels right. Given how challenging it is and what's going on, where does it feel like the right place to be present, to be centered or be attentive to it? And I find just to ask that question is the beginning to take on agency. I can do this, I can do something.

So the Dharma as action. The Buddha was a teacher of action. And we're learning how to act, to engage, to do in a way that is freeing, that brings peace, that brings a sense of well-being. And that path can go through learning to feel confident in our capacity with agency. Even if we can't solve the challenge, we don't have to give up. We find a way to be present and alive in a way that we feel like we can do something and we don't have to feel helpless.

So it might be interesting for today as you go through the day that you explore this for yourself. If you feel challenged by things, first look and recognize if you've been activated and you are already acting, you're already engaged. It might be saying, "This is hopeless and I'm a disaster." That's an action, that's a doing. So see when you're challenged what you're already doing, and find one of two things or both: what you can do instead that gives you a healthy agency to do something appropriate here, and the second is to be more present for how you feel challenged, but to feel where it feels most right. What aspect of your psychophysical experience—maybe even it's kind of pleasant in the middle of this very unpleasant event that's going on—where does it feel most calming to connect to it?

Maybe as an exercise today, you don't want to choose the most difficult challenges of the day, but maybe there are some small challenges that would be interesting to explore this with.

So thank you. I'm a little bit aware also that yes, last week was a foundation for this week and what's coming, but in fact the last week of the year of 2022, I talked about right effort, which is also maybe a very important foundation for what's coming, the prequel for it. If you didn't listen to it, you might want to go back.

So here I am at IRC. Thank you all for being here. I thought I would take a couple of minutes here just to introduce you to our wonderful retreat center we have. I don't know, can you zoom out so we see the whole meditation hall? Obviously there's a delay between going from our computer to Zoom to YouTube, it's longer than the delay when I go directly to YouTube from IMC.

I don't know if you can look out the windows, but we have wonderful redwood trees just outside. And now we have this wonderful hall. We're on the second floor of the building. When we moved into this building, bought the building, it was an unconstructed, kind of unfinished space up here. When we walked into the space up here, we all felt this is the place for the meditation hall. It had a presence here that, "Ah, this is it." And now it's our meditation hall.

We have a few people here who live here and who've been involved with IRC for a long time. I wonder if any of you would like to come and introduce yourself to the YouTube community, partly because you're very important for this wider IMC community. You're part of what supports it all and keeps it all going, supports me. I know I'm asking you kind of out of the blue, but would anyone like to come and say hello?

Introductions at Insight Retreat Center

Yes, Eliza. Say hello. Eliza is the managing director of our retreat center, and a longtime practitioner, and she's training now to be a teacher. That's what she's here for, the teacher training.

Eliza: Good morning everyone. I'm really happy to be here at IRC with some of the many, many volunteers that help make IRC happen. There are people who reside here who take care of the building and all of the retreats, and all the people who come here to volunteer. And then there are just hundreds of people who volunteer who I don't even see, who make sure that we have good volunteers. And I'm kind of sitting here making sure that we have online retreats that happen, or webcasts that happen in our retreats. So I just wanted to acknowledge all those people and say that volunteering here is a really great joy. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Michelle, please. Michelle Sterling has been a resident volunteer here before, when we first opened up, and she's recently returned to do another round.

Michelle: Hi everybody. That's a pretty good introduction, I can't think of anything more to add. I'm really glad to be here. I just moved in two days ago. I'll be in the kitchen probably a lot, and I love being in there.

Gil Fronsdal: Great. Oh, you want to come? Fantastic introduction. Thank you. So here is Lin. She's been here now for about nine months, and is a wonderful member of our community who's been working hard on the admin side of it all and the housekeeping side of it all. And the reason I come down here, I smile when I see her. Thank you.

Lin: For those of you who couldn't hear, as I was walking up I was asking for my introduction! Yeah, I am thankful to be here. The first time I walked into this retreat center almost a year ago, it was February of 2022, the walls exuded compassion. And that's something that's definitely very, very present, and I continue to feel that during my time here. So I hope you all have a great afternoon, morning, evening, wherever you are. Thank you.

Yingmei: Hi everyone. I'm Yingmei and I've been here for almost three years, throughout the pandemic. I was away for three months for a retreat, and just came back. I just feel gratitude for this place. And it brings me a lot of joy to think you are the circle of IRC communicating broader and all over the world. Yeah, so much love. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: [Unintelligible]. So thank you. And thank you again Lin, and Kristen, and Yingmei for helping. Some people who are here, some people come here to volunteer and help, and I think some people come here to practice, and some people come here to teach. All kinds of things that go on here. And it's wonderful, wonderful to share this with you. And someday maybe some of you will come here and practice with us. Thank you.