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Guided Meditation: Light & Curious as a Child

Hello friends, hello. Greetings from Mountain View, California, where I am on unceded Ohlone land^[1]. Good morning, good afternoon, and good day to all of you, wherever in the world you are. Delighted to be with you this week and supporting Gil^[2] and all of us. Greetings—oh, great, there's a technical glitch.

Feeling into gratitude for this moment in time, for us being together in this way, dispersed in space, and perhaps in time for some who will watch this later, but coming together with our heartfulness to practice together. It brings me a lot of joy to feel your presence all around the country and the world. I actually invite you to take delight. I see so many hellos and greetings from different places, from different time zones. Just start with that sense of appreciation, gratitude for Sangha^[3], for community, for the teachings, and with the possibility of waking up.

Having expressed my appreciation for our practice and time together, I'd like to invite us to practice together, to meditate together. I will introduce the theme for this week through the guided meditation ever so slightly, and more so I'll speak about it during the offering, the Dharmette.

So let us begin.

Thank you. Let us arrive in this moment in time. Let us arrive in our bodies. Let us land in the body.

Feeling the connection of our feet to the earth. Our legs, if we're sitting on the cushion, our sit bones. Relax. Let go of your weight to the earth, feeling supported.

Breathing this breath in the body, ideally in the lower body, in the abdomen. Greeting this breath, the sensations of the breath, as if spring, as if new in each moment. And not as if—actually, they are new and fresh in every moment. Arriving like they have never arrived before. A sense of possibility, openness, open-heartedness.

And now, can we bring an attitude of play? An attitude of curiosity, of interest. And the curiosity and interest are not so heavy. They don't have gravity, but they have a lightness, a playfulness to them about this moment in time, the experiences that arise and pass, all the possibilities arising in every moment.

I'd invite you to try this on for size, not in your head, but in your body. Breathing this reflection. Feeling it in your body. And the reflection is: What if this moment of awareness, this moment of being alive, this moment of being mindful, is not so tight, so serious, but giving it more space? This character who is you, this character in a play or a game, is playing an infinite game. An infinite game without winners and losers. A game with curiosity, with interest. Like children the way they play games—endlessly curious, creative, with wonder and awe.

What if we receive this moment, this moment's experience—the breath, sensations, thoughts, emotions, all of it, the whole catastrophe—what if we receive it all as if we're a child engaging in this adventure, this curiosity, this interesting game? Learning, growing, delighting.

These are the invitations for the practice. Can we practice with this perspective, this attitude?

With childlike curiosity, interest. Be light. Freshness, levity.

You know this. We've all been children or witnessed them. Your body knows how to do this. Receive each moment with this perspective.

Maybe from this perspective of lightness, judgments, distracting thoughts, ongoing et cetera—things that otherwise would feel heavy and tight—maybe through this perspective they feel lighter. The heart doesn't cling around them so much. They feel much lighter. They come and go. And this lightness of being, lightness of being. Lightness of being.

Maybe through this lightness of being perspective, the heart is lighter, the mind is lighter, the body is lighter. There are more possibilities in this moment. More space, more ease, more freedom.

Can we treat moments of life not with lots of "shoulds," making it a grim duty, but imbue it with lightness? Lightness of being, lightness of heart, possibilities. As if we're playing this infinite game.

With the delight of a child. Rekindling delight. In Pali, delight^[4].

And as we bring this to a close, appreciating any sense of delight, a shift in perspective to receive this moment with interest, lightness, curiosity, this lightness of heart where there are lots of possibilities. Appreciating if there was just one moment, or just a little bit of softening into the freshness of this perspective, and trusting that we're planting seeds—wholesome seeds individually and together. Seeds of goodness.

Offering all of these seeds and the ways they will flower their goodness to all beings everywhere. May my practice, may my life, my cultivation be of service to the well-being and freedom, not just for myself, but definitely myself, others, and all beings everywhere. May all beings be well. May all beings be free, including myself.

Thank you for your practice. As we take a moment's pause between the meditation and the Dharma talk, or Dharmette, you're welcome if you wish to type a word in the chat, maybe just one word or a short phrase as to what is arising for you right now, something to capture this feeling of this sit.

Dharmette: Life as Improv (1/5) Emptiness & Fullness of the Infinite Game

Hello again and greetings everyone.

It's lovely to be with you in this moment in time. Just having finished our meditation together, I asked if you would put some words to capture what's arising in this moment, and so many beautiful words are in the container. I'd love to just read a few of them. They're so beautiful, they just make my heart so happy this morning: Gratitude, calm, lightness, songbirds, grateful, ease, softness, spaciousness, peaceful, light, a smile. "How would I serve today?" Joy, increase the lightness, peace, calm presence, planting seeds, appreciation, enlivened. So many beautiful... yeah.

Presence, the whole catastrophe, karuṇā^[5], smile, buoyancy, curiosity, the delight of beginner's mind, appreciation, expansion, calm, secure, the tickle of childlike curiosity, happiness, gratitude, calm, friendship, love, and acceptance. So many beautiful ones and they keep coming! Thank you all, thank you. They're so beautiful. The last one I see right now: wonder, it's possible, surrender, relief. "Ah, my day just feels more open and light." So beautiful. So beautiful, thank you all. Infinite possibilities of delight. Seeing God as infinite possibilities of delight. Beautiful.

Thank you all. I feel in this space of practice with you really engaged, so engaged.

So, in many ways, I think the theme for this week has been introduced through this guided meditation and the way that all of you have engaged with it. It's just so beautiful to feel the engagement in any way that was accessible and possible.

The theme for this week... let me introduce it in this way. Delight, bliss, gladness, happiness—so many gifts that the practice gives us. But also, when we support these beautiful qualities in our life, in our practice, the practice deepens. Our life finds other dimensions of beauty, service, and goodness.

As the opposite of this grim duty—"I should," "you know, I have to sit," "I have to practice," "I have to become awakened," "I have to serve"—all of these are so heavy, and in fact, they get in the way. This tightness gets in the way. Whereas when we have curiosity, interest, awe, delight, this zest—this childlike zest, which we've all had at some point, of course we've all had it, every child has it, we know this—curiosity, interest, lightness, zest. And that is the theme of this week.

This week is about ways of bringing this sense of play, this sense of freshness, to practice and life. To see life as a divine play, as a divine game that we're engaged with.

For the teachings this week, what I'm finding inspiration in is actually—you know, as it's said sometimes, art imitates life, or artistic endeavors support life, and vice versa—it is the artistic endeavor of improv. Improv, for those of you who may not be familiar with this term, is considered by some to be a comedy performance. But it's not so much a performance, actually. Well, it is a performance from the outside, that's how it's viewed. But internally, there's quite an art to the way of being an improviser in the art of improv comedy, which actually ties in so beautifully into practice.

In fact, we're all improvisers. If I just said the word "improv" and you froze up—"Improv? I can't do improv!"—guess what? You've been improvising your whole life. We're all improvisers. We don't know the next thing that's going to come out of our mouths, or the next thing we're going to do necessarily. Your interactions, or life itself—life is an improvisation. All of us are improvisers. We don't have a script. Things happen, and then we improvise responses, we improvise our thoughts... everything is improvised.

So can we actually take the art, be a little more skilled in the art of improvising our lives, and improvising in the moments of our practice, with more lightness, with more interest and curiosity?

As some of you might know, I have studied and performed improv for many years, and actually have taught workshops on improv and mindfulness, and how the two can support each other. How improv can support mindfulness really, as an art, as a way of being lighter in the world and deepening our practice. It can actually be very, very deep and insightful. It can bring so many deep insights, this way of approaching life. I'd like to introduce some of these concepts this week to support our practice and bring some lightness, some ah, some delight, some freshness, some interest, childlike curiosity. So that is the frame for this week.

The frame is, as I mentioned during the guided meditation, a frame of what's called an "infinite game" versus a "finite game."

A finite game is a game where there are winners and losers, and there are rules that are set ahead of time. For example, chess, backgammon, or any sports—they're finite games.

An infinite game... dancing is an infinite game. Infinite games are played for the delight of the game itself. There are no winners and losers, and the rules keep shifting and changing and they're made during the game. Dancing, when it's done for its own sake, for the delight of dancing, is an infinite game. There are no winners and losers. Improv is an infinite game. It's just for the delight, and the rules get shifted and changed.

In fact, the ultimate infinite game is said to be life. There are no winners and losers per se. We are all born, we all die. It's so important to have the sense, the freshness of this life for the sake of itself. It's not a "winning" that we do, but the sense of awe, curiosity, exploring. This actually brings emptiness^[6], and it's a marriage of emptiness and fullness. Because in the Dharmic sense, emptiness means nothing exists independent of anything else. There is inherent emptiness to everything that is. That emptiness brings so many possibilities, because things are not fixed in a particular way. And then, in that emptiness, there is the fullness of possibility. So life as an infinite game really is an expression of acknowledging the emptiness of all things, and the fullness—this marriage of emptiness and fullness.

Just to set a bit of the frame this week. There's a lot more that I'll bring in this week, but just something else to leave us with: I often think of improv as kindergarten for adults. It's a way of playing, bringing this sense of curiosity, play, freshness, and possibility to each moment of life. Similarly, what if we saw our lives as this kindergarten? We're here to learn, we're here to explore, we're here to express our fullness in the midst of this emptiness and possibilities. This freshness, as if it's a spring sunrise.

So thank you all for your practice, for exploring this, bringing more delight, curiosity, and interest to engage in this infinite game from this perspective of emptiness and fullness with delight. I'm excited to practice with you, to share these insights, these teachings with you this week. Thank you so much. Be well and be light today.

Oh, yeah, I forgot! Actually, maybe I'll say one more thing. The invitation for the rest of the day: if you can, still have this attitude of lightness, childlike curiosity, through your life. Perhaps even the things that are routine, can you approach them with new curiosity, with new freshness? Make a different choice, shift things a little bit. Just bring this freshness of this infinite game, this infinite play, the interplay of emptiness and fullness with delight.

Alright, thank you so much. Take good care. See you tomorrow.