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Guided Meditation: Resting in the Wholesome; Dharmette: Step-by-Step Into the Dharma (5 of 5): Beginning to End, Cultivation - Shelley Gault

The following talk was given by Shelley Gault at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 21, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Resting in the Wholesome

Welcome. It is a Friday, the end of the week. I'm really pleased to be with you again today, my last day.

This week I've been talking a little bit about giving and ethical development. I touched slightly on karma¹ and on the dangers inherent in depending on sensual pleasures—the satisfaction of sense pleasures—for our happiness. I also spoke on the movements to renounce or let go of craving and clinging. These were the topics that the Buddha offered in sequence to people who were unfamiliar with his teachings.

Once his listeners had taken these all in and their minds were ready, receptive, free from hindrances, elated, and confident—that is how the texts often word it—he would go on to the teaching special to the Buddhas: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path leading to its cessation. The Four Noble Truths.

Of course, I can't talk about the Four Noble Truths in fifteen minutes this morning after the meditation. They are a topic that deserves a lot more than that. It deserves depth, time, and respect—lots of reflection. Actually, each topic that I've spoken about this week deserves a lot of time and reflection. So I hope you will continue to explore all of the topics that I spoke about.

But today, I do want to try to make a case for the way that the things I've talked about this week have implications for—and are actually ways of beginning to understand—these teachings special to the Buddhas. These are the truths that are not as easy to truly know and deeply see until we've had more time and practice. I hope I can make the case that these supposedly preliminary teachings point to understandings that are really right at the heart of how we eventually come to be free.

So, let's meditate now.

Taking your comfortable, upright meditation posture, even if you are lying down. Finding a sense of uprightness. Feeling into a sense of dignity that can come with a posture that is alert and respectful—respectful of what we are doing. Offering this gift of meditation to ourselves.

Just taking the temperature of your overall state right now. Mind and heart, your body. What does it feel like to be alive in your particular body right now?

Inviting ease, inviting relaxation. Letting those habitual areas of tension be soft. If they feel tight, just beginning to settle.

And then, letting the sensations of breathing become foremost in your awareness. Let them come into the foreground. Just sensing the sensations, knowing them as they arise.

Noticing if there is any pleasure in the breathing, any aspect of the breathing, any particular area of sensation. Breathing in a way that feels good, if that is possible for you. Appreciating the pleasure in the breath.

Letting whatever pleasure there is in breathing be the foremost thing in your awareness. Just resting in the most pleasant aspect of your breathing. Allowing the mind to rest in the breathing, to rest in the pleasure in the breathing.

Allowing the movement of the breath to be at the center of your awareness. Resting in the breath, resting in any pleasure that you feel in the sensations of breathing.

And as the meditation comes to its close, just thinking about the goodness that we receive through our practice, the benefit. Valuing that, appreciating that, and then sharing it outward. Just allowing it to inform all our interactions with others, all our activities during the day, so that the goodness can ripple out. It may ripple out in ways that are invisible, but I think they have an effect. And we share our goodness, our intentions, our benefits with everyone, with all we meet.

Dharmette: Step-by-Step Into the Dharma (5 of 5): Beginning to End, Cultivation

I started the week by saying that in this western insight tradition of Buddhism, based in the Theravada², my sense is that often our meditation practice is prioritized in a way that makes the other aspects of our dharma cultivation take second fiddle or be undervalued.

My intention has been to try to make the point that practicing and coming to understand what the Buddha expanded in his step-by-step introduction is just as much a cultivation of wisdom as the meditation cultivation.

Giving—dāna³—motivated by generosity. Ethical cultivation—sīla⁴—developing both the intention to act in ways that don't cause harm, ways that are skillful and wholesome, and then also developing the discernment to see the difference between what is wholesome and what is not. That is really key.

And then beginning to recognize that actions have results, and the results depend on whether the action arose out of a wholesome or an unwholesome intention. Beginning an understanding of conditionality—the heart of the dharma—of the workings of conditionality in the realm of our intentional human activity. That is karma.

And then being cautioned about the ultimate unsatisfactoriness of craving for sense pleasures, getting the barest hint perhaps that craving itself is dukkha⁵. Just a whisper in the mind about that.

I remember something that Bhikkhu Bodhi⁶ said in talking about giving. I spoke about it on the first day, on Monday. He said that it directly undercuts the tendencies to greed and hatred in the mind. Two of the kilesas⁷—the roots of craving that lead to suffering.

So right from the beginning, with this very simple, widely accepted understanding that it is good to give, it is good to be generous, it is good not to be greedy—there is this seed of liberating wisdom. It might be a seed that takes a long time to sprout and grow, but it is there. It has been planted right in the beginning.

Bhikkhu Anālayo⁸, the German monk, highly regarded teacher, translator, and scholar of Buddhist texts, has spoken of the whole of the path as a "progressive refinement of joy." I love that phrase. It is beautiful. And I also think you could call the path a progressive refinement of ethical behavior. I don't think those two are unrelated, either.

There is even what we call the "bliss of blamelessness" that can arise when we know we haven't done anything that would cause harm to someone else or to ourselves. That is a lovely feeling. And as our ethical sensitivity grows, there is more and more awareness of the dukkha, the suffering, the stress that we experience when we act unethically. That is, when we act out of the roots of craving: greed, hatred, and delusion.

Here is a quote from Ajahn Sucitto⁹, a British monk and great teacher, from an essay he wrote on this topic about the graduated talk that the Buddha would give:

Although this graduated path may seem to be of a basic nature that we could easily get or even skip over for more esoteric teachings, I don't think the Buddha wasted his time in presenting soft options. Instead, I consider this graduated path to be essential, to be constantly cultivated, and of far-reaching significance for the world in general. Even after forty years of practice, I still seek and enjoy development in terms of this graduated path, looking for how I can give and share to people and other creatures, to how I can broaden my field of ethical concern, and how I can live in a way that uses material resources with wise restraint.

Beautiful.

The Four Noble Truths are an example of cause and effect, or more accurately, they are an example of conditionality: conditions and what arise in the wake of the conditions. So, the First Truth, dukkha, arises conditioned on the presence of some kind of craving or clinging. And the cessation of dukkha arises conditioned on the path of practice.

When the Buddha introduces people to this idea that their ethical behavior and generosity can result in living in the heavenly realms in the future, he is drawing their attention to the relationship between actions and what arises dependent on them. The seed of understanding of this deep subject of conditionality, of karma, is already there in that teaching. The seed of the understanding of karma lies at the heart of the dharma. Conditionality lies at the heart of the dharma.

And when the Buddha describes the shortcomings and the dangers of depending on sensual desires for well-being, he is underscoring the connection between craving and dukkha, which is right there in the First and Second Noble Truths.

This gradual introduction to the dharma then converges on the last topic I spoke about yesterday: renunciation, letting go. Maybe some of the people who were hearing the Buddha give such a talk would actually go forth into homelessness, letting go of virtually everything, becoming monastics. But probably most listeners would not go that far.

But hopefully their minds would be turned towards some degree of letting go, or some awareness that that is a possibility and that it might be beneficial. Just a way of attenuating the craving that is so pervasive in this world, because they've been introduced to the idea that craving doesn't really live up to its promises. Maybe they are recognizing, in a very limited, preliminary way, that craving is related to dukkha, to stress.

In the same essay that I quoted from before, Ajahn Sucitto spoke about sense desires as being like balloons on strings that we are always kind of clutching after, trying to keep hold of. He said:

You grab the string of the balloon and up you go, and then crash back to earth again, a little stirred up. So you grab the string of another balloon. Same thing happens. But a pattern is established, and the mind gets used to that pattern to the extent that the purpose of life becomes one of grabbing balloons.

He goes on to speak of renunciation as the way to break this pattern.

The skill of letting go of the string is renunciation. It is not that you don't feel pleasure, but you know how to let the string run through your hand and not to clench it. Then you don't get pulled away. This skill is developed through stepping back from sense contact and enriching the inner life. Much of Buddhist meditation practice, in fact the Buddhist way of life, is about this—about generating happiness from an inner heart base, or citta¹⁰, to counter the attraction of the senses.

Remember, I spoke yesterday about Ajahn Thanissaro¹¹ talking about "trading candy for gold." It is the same thing that Ajahn Sucitto is speaking of: developing this generating of happiness from an inner heart base rather than depending on sense pleasures. The wholesome happiness that comes from skillful action.

All our skillful actions, including meditation—and this is the place where the meditative bhāvanā¹² comes into the picture. Sometimes Gil speaks of letting go as letting go into something that is more satisfying, like samādhi¹³. That is the promise of the Buddhist path: that what we let go of is eventually what allows us to let go into a place of supreme freedom and ease. So letting go of leads to letting go into this place of incomparable peace.

I came to the dharma twenty-something years ago from a spiritual tradition that put a great deal of emphasis on transcendence experiences and meditation. And I put a great deal of emphasis on them myself. There was an assumption that those experiences would automatically lead to more ethical living, to doing less and less harm.

But my experience was that without a grounding in the importance of ethics, the deep meditation experiences were more likely to lead to just building up a sense of ego, of self-involvement, reasons to compare myself with others, to imagine I was pretty far along on the path, pretty advanced. I really wanted to believe that if I just meditated deeply enough, my whole being would be transformed. All my bad habits would just disappear.

But I could see that was not the case. It took me many, many years to realize that. I have to admit, the beautiful states of mind that we develop in meditation, they don't just automatically transfer into beautiful ways of behaving in daily life. We need to train in becoming more skillful. We need to cultivate what is wholesome. I really could have benefited from one of the Buddha's graduated talks back then.

When I came to this Buddhist path, this insight path, although I didn't hear a lot of teachings explicitly about ethics and generosity at first, I could sense really palpably the integrity and the wholesomeness in the structures, in the organizations, and in the people that I came in contact with. And that gave me confidence that I had found a path where true liberation was possible. There was just a palpable sense of people acting carefully, acting with care for each other, that inspired me right from the very beginning.

At this point in the journey, twenty-something years later, I am really convinced that developing ethical sensitivity and discernment about what is skillful and what is not—choosing the skillful more and more often—I really believe that has contributed just as much to my growth in the dharma as have any profound experiences in meditation, which I value highly. I don't mean to put them in some second-best place, but all three legs of the stool need to be strong and balanced for a full engagement with the path.

Here is one last quote from Ajahn Sucitto:

If we want to live and pass on the way to a good and awake life, we establish this path. Generosity, morality, and renunciation bring happiness, strength, and freedom. Therefore, they are for our welfare and lead to Nibbāna¹⁴. This is why the Buddha taught them as a path, because real life is in the goodness, truth, and beauty of heart.

So I'll leave you with that. It has been a pleasure to be with you this week. I hope it has been beneficial. Gil will be back next week with something new for you. And in the meantime, practice well, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and thank you.