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Lightly Guided Meditation

Welcome to you all. Good morning, afternoon, wherever you are.

My name is Matthew Brensilver, and I'm happy to be with you today. Gil asked me to step in for this week as he's away teaching a retreat, so we'll sit and I'll offer some reflections after that.

As we begin, I just looked to see what Gil had done on Friday. He was talking about two bodies: the body of which we're aware, the body of which we're not aware, the thinking mind that is aware and not aware. So we settle into awareness just as we begin. It's a subtle but enormous difference just to bathe the circuits of body and mind in awareness. So just settle in in this way.

So we relax whatever can be relaxed. The area around the eyes or the jaw, shoulders or the belly. Relax our hands and open the hands energetically. Relax whatever can be relaxed, and any tension that remains, we permit to remain.

Sometimes I'll give the instruction to stop, try to stop being aware. Whatever aspect of awareness you can't stop, just rest there.

Part of practice is directing our attention. Wise attention^[1], appropriate attention. So we direct it to the breath, or the body, to feeling, or sound. But sometimes, in our choreography of the attention, we miss this dimension of awareness that we don't hold up and we can't stop. That which doesn't require your effort to arise. Whatever can't be stopped, just rest there.

Suffering typically requires that our attention be glued to something, that we be identified with something. So we start to discover that whatever is the case, whatever our life is in this moment, when we are aware, awake, something else is always also true. In this space, this space makes all the difference. Subtle, but also dramatic. Just to know one's life as winds blowing through the space of awareness.

All the familiar ground from which we strategize and fret is just folded into awareness. And just keep folding our life into awareness.

Orienting to the Divine Abodes

It's good to sit with you.

This is Maslow, 1961, and a short reflection on peak experience. He wrote: "The goal of self-actualization seems to be simultaneously an end goal in itself and a transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. This is like saying its function is to erase itself."

Its function is to erase itself. Self-actualization, self-cultivation points to something greater. In other words, it erases itself, and it points to something. Maybe we even say enlightenment erases itself and points to something. What might it point to? I think it points to love.

When the self is not a preoccupation, what is left is everything else. What's left is everything else, and in that context, love becomes much more natural. We're really developing a practice, a way of being that feels very natural. Love feels natural. Renunciation feels natural. Samadhi^[2] feels natural. The awareness feels natural, and that's important. This practice is meant to feel natural.

It may be hard, it may be rigorously hard at times, but it's meant to feel natural. We hear so much about choice in mindfulness, to choose a response rather than a reaction, for example. And I honestly don't notice that I make better choices. It's more like my options are much better. It's more like I don't find myself backed into karmic corners where there's dukkha^[3] in every direction, suffering in every direction.

This is not a state-based practice. It can sound that way at times, like we're trying to engineer or create a momentary state of something, but we're really developing wholesome traits. Traits don't need our effort to be maintained. That's what I was pointing to in a way: that quality of effortlessness, the dimension of awareness that you can't turn on or off. It doesn't need your effort to be maintained. In the same way, we're developing traits that don't need your effort to be maintained. I would say we're developing a trait of love.

So where does the mind rest? What's the default position of our attention? It's kind of like asking, "Where do you live?" Where does your attention live when you don't need to do your life? Where does your mind go?

It tends to be a heavy mixture of self-referential thought, curating the image that others have of us, curating the image we have of ourselves: "I am this, not that." It tends to go to the future, which is gripping, and we predict and simulate futures. We try to strategize a way through samsara^[4], a way through this realm of threat and opportunity. And in that little bubble of self-referential thought and strategizing, it feels very much like little me contending with big anicca^[5], big uncertainty, this enormous intimidating world.

Some of that strategizing, prediction, and simulating is adaptive, no doubt, but we probably go quite a bit overboard. Where else might we live? Where else might the mind rest? To what baseline might the mind return? What might become the default position of our attention?

The Buddhist suggestion is that perhaps it's the brahmaviharas^[6], the divine abodes, the theme for this week. Loving-kindness, warmth, compassion, shared joy, equanimity—these places for the heart to rest are all expressions of non-clinging, facets of love.

I think of love as our nervous system just longing for the dharma. When I really consider, "What does the dharma feel like? What does this path feel like to me, just me?" It feels like relinquishment. And in the wake of that relinquishment, a kind of quiet love.

And so we have these four brahmaviharas, these facets of love. If I had to propose a fifth brahmavihara—Gil has not authorized me to do this, but if I had to propose a fifth, if that was my contribution to American Buddhist discourse—the fifth brahmavihara would be something like "puttering," I think. [Laughter] The four pretty much take care of it, but I just need one more: just puttering. Sometimes that's the place to rest for me.

These places of dwelling, they're meant to be varied enough so that one of them is always a good place for the heart to rest. No matter what's happening in this moment, one of those forces is medicine. The warmth, the compassion, the joy, the equanimity, the peace. One of them is medicine. A birth, a death, a marriage or a divorce, a war or a peace—one of the brahmaviharas has your back.

There's no control in these mind states. Clinging is painful, and trying to control is painful. It's really important to get that in our bones. Clinging is painful. We can kind of take that on faith, we hear that in dharma talks, but we actually have to know that for ourselves. We have to sort of run into the dead end of clinging enough times with enough vivid awareness that we sense the pain associated with it.

And that doesn't mean the best medicine is always to let go, but clinging is so painful. We get worried, "If I don't cling, maybe I won't get what I want." And maybe that's so, but you get what you actually need: just peace.

So metta^[7] (loving-kindness): this is love in the face of goodness, maybe we'd say. Compassion (karuṇā^[8]): love in the face of suffering. Mudita^[9] (sympathetic joy): love in the face of happiness. And upekkha^[10] (equanimity): as love in the face of the ungovernable, endless nature of samsara, this realm.

When you consider the state of sentience—just pleasure and pain, the waves of pleasure and pain, being human is like this—love becomes just one of the most plausible responses to that predicament. As we'll see, some brahmavihara practice highlights love, and sometimes the practice highlights everything that is not love but needs love.

Just to bathe in this love that is not born of clinging, that is not seeking to control, but that is deeply hearing... sometimes it just takes a moment of abiding in that to pierce a day, or a month, or a year, or a life of pain.

Michele McDonald^[11], a beautiful teacher in this realm of metta, once described a yogi who was a longtime, dedicated practitioner, and loving-kindness for herself just felt impossible, so remote. It was just a bizarre thought to actually express this kind of care for oneself. She kept trying over not months, but years of practice. Years of practice! And then, during one session of a silent retreat, in the silent hall, this yogi suddenly yelled out, "I could feel it! It was so sweet, I could feel it for myself!" She yelled it out in the hall. [Laughter] You're not allowed to yell it out in the dharma hall, as sweet as it is, but we can all yell it out on YouTube. "I can feel it for myself!"

So, this week we'll start tomorrow with metta, and then compassion, joy, and equanimity for each of the four remaining days. I'm happy to be with you this week, and I wish you all a good day.