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Guided Meditation: Noting

Okay, so let's go ahead and start. Nice to see everyone.

We have probably heard at some point that the Buddhist path is about letting go, and this is true, but there is a lot packed into that little phrase. What are we letting go of? What is the act of letting go? Letting go is actually quite multi-dimensional. It's sometimes volitional and sometimes not. Sometimes we need to go toward or into what we're aiming to let go of, and sometimes we need to pull back from it. Sometimes we actively engage, and sometimes we just watch.

In this series this week, we're going to be exploring seven methods for letting go that are useful on the path. All of these methods hinge in some way on discernment: what is the best way to let go of whatever's happening. That's just a brief taste, and we'll get into that more, but for now, let's go ahead and start sitting together.

Finding a spot that's comfortable where you'll be able to sit for a half hour or so, just allowing yourself to settle into your spot. If it's comfortable to do so, you can close your eyes and really allow your attention to come inward.

Just sensing the body sitting. Maybe consciously settling back a little bit. Sometimes when looking at a screen we can lean forward, so just settling back so that the posture feels very upright if you're sitting, and relaxed, allowing your spine to be straight.

Maybe beginning by sensing the place where you're sitting, your seat against the cushion or the chair, or if you're lying down, the place where you're lying against the bed or couch. Just allowing that to support you, feeling the support of what you're sitting on, the building you're in, and ultimately the Earth just holding us up.

And then softening into the body. Softening the muscles of the face, around the eyes, around the mouth. The eyes themselves in the eye sockets, letting those be soft. The jaw. The place where the spine meets the skull, letting that open so the neck can release. Down through the shoulders, letting those naturally drop. Maybe the shoulder blades slide down the back. Sensing the openness of the chest. Down into the belly area, letting that be soft. Maybe feeling the spine in the middle and letting both the belly and the muscles of the low back fall away from the spine. Softening through the hips down into the legs. And sensing that the hands and feet are relaxed and open.

All of this is an invitation to the body, but of course, if the body still has tension or if there's some pain today, that's fine. Let's find the body just as it is.

Just inviting some ease also in the mind. Bringing the mind also into the present moment. The sense of releasing ideas about the past or concerns about what we need to do after this or what might happen, and being willing just to be here for this time. Establishing mindfulness and allowing the attention to naturally move to the sensations of breathing. Often when the body is softened and the mind has been brought to the present moment, the clearest sensations are in the breath coming in and going out. Just allowing that simple awareness to come into the forefront of attention.

The invitation in this sitting, if you'd like, is to do a very simple practice that many of you will know, that's called noting. That means applying a simple, gentle label to experience in the present moment, like "breathing in" or "hearing," or if there are thoughts, "thinking" or "planning." It's not anything that we think about; we just go with the first label. If a word doesn't come, then you just skip that one and label the next one. The practice is really to help the mind know what it's doing and what's going on in experience.

And if the mind has wandered away into thinking, that's fine. We just gently note "thinking" and then continue with whatever happens next after that. Just gently be in touch with the normal flow of different experiences that we have. It can be helpful to keep the breath in mind as an anchor or a stable presence, a place to return to. But with the noting practice, we acknowledge that there are other things—sounds, body sensations, thoughts, and such—and that's all part of the meditation.

Just seeing what's in the mind and the body will tend to have a stabilizing effect. If we continue to note something that's difficult, it tends to ease that. It may still be there, but we're able to be with it. If we continue to note something that's already peaceful or happy, it tends to stabilize it and increase the sense of nourishment that comes from it. This is the effect of gentle, present-moment seeing.

As to what's going on in the general flow of experience, has there been any shift in the course of this sit? Perhaps an increase in wholesome qualities? Sometimes people think, "Oh no, not what I've been seeing in my mind." But sometimes we forget that mindfulness is a wholesome quality. So to the degree that we've had that, and noticed that, the mind is becoming more wholesome over this time.

Just sensing how you feel now as we near the end of the sit, in the mind and the body. We may get the sense of the protectiveness, the protective quality of mindfulness. The way if we know what's happening in our experience, we're less likely to get caught up or go down a rabbit hole or move in a direction that's going to be harmful for ourselves or others. How powerful it is just to know, and what a gift it is to the world to have some degree of awareness and some ability to direct our attention. So simple and so powerful. So being happy with this blessing that we can offer through our attention.

Dharmette: The Art of Letting Go (1 of 5) Letting Go by Seeing

It's very common for people to ask how they can let go of something troublesome or unwholesome that they have noticed. "How can I let go of anger? How can I let go of obsessive thinking?" Sometimes people seem to think that the teacher is going to just tell them, "Turn the red knob a couple of times counterclockwise, and that should do it." But as we know from doing this practice, it's not quite like that. Not only is there no exact formula, but having someone tell you is actually less effective than discovering it for yourself.

The practices we're engaged in do lead to letting go. We might distinguish between the practices that lead to letting go and the letting go itself. It's more like our job is to do those practices—without, to the degree we can manage it, so much expectation or attachment to results—and then the letting go will take care of itself. We also have to be a little bit careful about the language. Letting go is not the same as getting rid of. Our practice does lead to the ending or getting rid of dukkha^[1]—suffering, stress, struggle, or discontent—but letting go is not quite the same. In order to end dukkha, we might need to let go of a lot of things along the way. It's not only what we let go of, but what we let go into. New things tend to open when we let go of something.

This week, we'll be talking about various actions we can do that lead to letting go, and so the series is called "The Art of Letting Go." The Buddha said that certain things are to be let go in certain ways. Imagine that you're trying to get a container open. The openness is the aim, but you're going to have to do something for that to come about. If it's a glass jar, then it's to be opened by twisting the cap. If it's an aluminum can, twisting won't help, but you can use a can opener. If the container is made of fabric sewn together, like a pillow, then cutting it will work, or unzipping it if it has a zipper. But you can't use a can opener on a pillow. This is an analogy for the way that certain unwholesome qualities of mind can be best released by certain methods. Certain instances of experience can be let go of, or the attachment to them can be let go, by certain methods.

In one teaching, the Buddha talked about seven ways to let go, seven methods to open the mind and heart and release various kinds of dukkha. We only have five days, so we'll talk about one or two of these seven per day. Today we're starting with what's called "abandoning by seeing." The discourse actually uses the word abandon. Sometimes that has a negative connotation for people because it's not usually a positive word in English, so we'll mostly say "letting go." But it's nice to know that this word "abandon" is positive in Buddhist teaching. It means releasing the stickiness or the attachment around something. When you abandon that, then you feel freer and lighter; you can move more easily in a sense.

Letting go by seeing has to do with the directing of our attention. There are some ways that we suffer that can be eased by changing how we attend. In some sense, the basis of Dharma practice is our ability to, at least to some degree, direct our attention. If you couldn't do that, you couldn't practice. For example, right now you can just try directing attention to your right hand. And now direct attention to your left ear. That's pretty effortless usually, and somewhat possible to do deliberately. On the other hand, when I started speaking again, your attention naturally went to my voice, probably. You also know that if some part of the body is painful, it can capture our attention non-volitionally. So we don't have complete control, but we have some ability to direct the attention. Using that ability in a way that helps our spiritual practice has partly to do with what we pay attention to and partly to do with how we pay attention.

It's not actually that there are specific things that we should and should not attend to, like a list I could give you, or dos and don'ts. Instead, the teachings are a little more subtle and they say that we should wisely attend to things such that wholesome states increase and unwholesome states decrease. Similarly, we should not attend to things such that unwholesome states increase and wholesome states decrease. Unwholesome would mean that there's an increase in greed, hatred, and delusion, or various emotions and mind states that are associated with those. Wholesome is about the opposite, mind states that are about non-greed, non-hatred, non-delusion—things like generosity, love, compassion, wisdom, patience, integrity. If we're mindful, we can notice which of those sets is increasing or decreasing.

Sometimes there are things that we just shouldn't put our attention on because we're, at this moment at least, not able to find a way to be with them without our mind going off track. Maybe every time you read an article about a certain topic, you become angry, and then all you do is sit there and stew with the computer screen, or you start complaining to your partner across the room, which probably affects their state of peace. So maybe it's better for you not to read articles like that. Just don't put your attention there. A more extreme case maybe would be someone who's in recovery from alcohol addiction; such a person probably should not go into a bar. It's better just not to go there.

In our world, there are many forces out there that are trying to capture your attention. It's not at all trivial to be actively concerned about where your attention is going. There's a whole science behind getting you to look at things on an internet page, for example, and getting you to click on things. We need to know about this in our own mind. It's not something exactly that someone else can tell you precisely or abstractly. "Here's a list of what not to direct your attention to, or what to direct your attention to," because it might be particular to your mix of conditions. Far more important is to develop that discernment about whether wholesome or unwholesome is increasing as we pay attention to something.

And then, of course, things are going to shift as we practice mindfulness and get more aware of our own tendencies. It's not like we're going to have a "don't go there" list forever. Eventually, we would want to find a way to be with anything such that our mind doesn't tend toward unwholesome states and may even increase the wholesome. The teachings that we have suggest a lot of ways that we can be with things in a skillful way. In the interest of time, I won't go into lots and lots of those; that's the whole of Dharma practice. But we could just name one to be concrete, which is that we might bring in the wisdom of understanding impermanence. Whatever we're being with with attention, we can remember also, this is temporary. In that case, the mind might not be so reactive. It might not allow the unwholesome states to increase. We might not grasp at something pleasant quite so vigorously if we remember that it too will decay and break. Or similarly, maybe something painful can be endured more easily without sliding into grumbling or self-pity if we remember that it won't last. We could use the understanding that all people have difficulties; pain or difficulty is actually something that unites us all as humans. So compassion might come forth. There's a way even that wholesome states can increase as we're being with something difficult.

One thing that this practice of abandoning by seeing encourages is simplifying our relationship to experience. If we launch into a long story about what we're paying attention to, and especially a story about "me" or about what other people should be doing or why they should not be doing something, we're very likely allowing unwholesome states to increase. All that mental proliferation, especially when we have thoughts about ourself. Suppose we hear a sound outside. It's just a sound, and we hear it. But then we recognize it as our neighbor's leaf blower, and we remember a conversation that we had with them just last week where we pointed out that it's disturbing when they use the leaf blower before 8:00 AM. And here it is, it's only 7:42 AM, and they should not be doing that. "Don't they know that I'm meditating? Is their clock set wrong? I'm gonna go tell them how terrible this is," or whatever the mind is doing. Maybe it will make sense to go say something to them later, I don't know, but for sure in this moment, there's dukkha being generated in our own mind. Can we recognize that and maybe hear the sound in a different way?

In contrast, when we see something in a way that increases wholesome states, it doesn't tend to spiral into a story about "me." We might be taking a walk and simply enjoying the scenery, or silently wishing well to the people and animals that we see, or practicing with noticing the four elements, whatever it is that we're doing on our walk. This way of being is simple and in the present moment, and doesn't tend to generate those stories and anxieties about "me."

Abandoning by seeing means discernment about where a situation or experience is going. Is it going toward or away from suffering? If we seem to be going toward more suffering, then could we shift how we're attending to that experience? The suttas^[2] say that if we're very diligent and conscientious about paying attention to things such that the mind avoids an unwholesome relationship and encourages a wholesome relationship, what will be let go is pretty amazing. If we do that, we will let go of self-centeredness. That's worth doing.

We're talking about the practices that lead to letting go, and seeing in a skillful way is one thing that leads to letting go. Letting go is an art form. We don't exactly do the letting go part per se, usually, but we do have to be actively involved in practicing if we want letting go to happen. It's kind of like the way you can't really set out to make a great painting. Instead, you practice a lot and you just keep doing it, and then eventually something great might happen. With Dharma practice, maybe the heart will open, maybe the mind will be freed. Just keep seeing in a skillful way, and something will happen.

We're going to unfold all of this more in the coming days. This was a general overview with a method that's always useful. It will be relevant in all the other methods, and then we'll talk in the coming days about some more specific situations. Okay, so take care.