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Guided Meditation: Feeling and Verbal Thinking; Dharmette: Meaning and Purpose - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Feeling and Verbal Thinking

So, welcome folks. Good to be with you. Okay, let's sit.

We'll practice a technique, guide us through something, but even reaching for a technique is sometimes sponsored by bhava-tanha¹, the craving to become. We reach for a technique out of a certain kind of bubbling or agitation, craving. Techniques are beautiful; I used one today sitting. But we don't want to act from compulsivity, even subtle compulsivity.

And so we explore, what would it be like to sit just for a minute undefended, a certain kind of nakedness without our techniques and routines? What would it be to give up all gestures of coping? To trust in surrender, maybe we say trust in what's already here.

Maybe now, having seen some of this, we take some full breaths. A kind of cleansing, releasing kind of breath that reaches up into your shoulders, down into your belly. You might even feel the kind of ripples of relaxation of your exhale all across your body.

Bringing attention to the affective circuits of your body, those body sensations that seem emotional or reactive in nature, often felt along the front axis of your body. But intense feeling states will coat your body as if with a thin film of feeling. We can appreciate the location, the intensity of the arousal state, the valence—the pleasantness or unpleasantness—the stability or the changing of the feeling. Often, there's a kind of lava lamp-like movement of emotional sensations expanding and contracting: face, throat, chest, belly.

It's like we're just bathing these feeling circuits, this moving pattern of emotional sensations, just bathing them in our attention, our patience. Radical permission for those sensations to live out their life, whatever that life should be, however long they are before they self-liberate, as the Tibetans say.

We can investigate the relationship between this feeling experience—affect, anger, fear, sadness, joy, love, tranquility. We can investigate the relationship between all of that and thinking. So one of my teachers, Shinzen Young², would have us listen to auditory thought. You can sense where you hear it spatially. Of course, it's not actually happening there; it's the genius of our brains. But the way that auditory thinking arises is as a kind of sound, often sensed in your head, maybe between your ears. When we don't hear it as sound, we simply obey it, live in the confines of the world created by that thought.

This is subtle, of course. Sometimes thought kind of sneaks up behind us and grabs the attention. Then we keep waking up to thinking as just hearing. We listen more and more deeply.

And so we have words and feelings. Maybe we now open the aperture of attention to include both, noticing those phenomena, noticing their interactions. Sometimes a charged thought seems to catalyze a whole set of feelings in our body; it's kind of the basis of cognitive therapy. Sometimes feeling bubbles up from deep within, and it begs for an explanation, begs for a story. And we give that feeling a story; we give it words. Sometimes that story feels like a way of explaining the feeling, neutralizing the feeling, making it safe.

Just stay poised in awareness, noticing these very central experiences of being human: feeling in the body, words in our mind. To have equanimity is usually to have equanimity with these two aspects of experience: the kind of urgency fostered by feeling, affect in our body, and the orchestration of our craving through words in our mind. So we practice just knowing and allowing, blessing these experiences with awareness, patience, love.

Dharmette: Meaning and Purpose

So this is from the Stoic philosopher Seneca³: "If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable."

I was talking to a friend about meaning and purpose, and they asked, "Are there any Dharma talks about meaning and purpose?" I thought about it. It's like, well, on the one hand, no. There are very, very few that probably explicitly address those themes. Those words are maybe more familiar to Western philosophical traditions. But on the other hand, the whole of the Dharma presupposes some ideas about meaning and purpose.

And I ask myself the question, do I reflect on meaning and purpose? Not really. Do I have it? I think so. But the meaning has been a kind of byproduct of my love, not a goal to which I've aspired. This topic, it strikes me, is quite tricky, right? Because Dharma talks are meant to be, at least partially, a way of inviting folks into a new view. "Come see for yourself," right? But there's an invitation to a new view. And the tricky part is that meaning involves intrinsic motivation. It cannot be prescribed by me or anyone else to you. This is very personal.

Intrinsic motivation is the pursuit of an activity for its inherent interest, or enjoyment, or enrichment. We're doing it, and doing it is its own reward in a way. Some of this is drawing on a body of research known as Self-Determination Theory.⁴ Extrinsic motivation is instrumental. It's pursuing a goal, pursuing a kind of outcome, doing something to get something, rather than doing something because it's inherently enriching. I don't want to say, and no one would say, that extrinsic motivation is bad and intrinsic is good. But I think we can say fairly that thriving is a way of living that is focused on intrinsic motivation. That if our lives are going to be animated, full of meaning, it's going to feel intrinsically motivated.

Intrinsic value doesn't exist for the sake of something else. So this is from the researchers Ryan and Deci. They write, "Consider the value of wealth. If we asked a person, 'Why are you working so hard?' one common answer might be, 'To accumulate money or wealth.' If we then ask, 'Why do you want wealth?' there might again be various answers. One might be, 'Because I want to be admired.' We would then need to ask, 'Well, why do you want to be admired?' Again, various answers might emerge because, so far, we've not reached a bottom line. But suppose the person answers, 'Because I want to feel loved.' When we get to this answer, we can ask again, 'Why do you want to be loved?' But here our interviewee is likely to be puzzled. When it comes to love, we seem to have hit an irreducible. One subject might say, 'I don't know what you mean. Everyone wants love,' or 'Because love is good.' At a fundamental psychological level, love is irreducible. It is a good that explains itself."

So you might reflect on your life: what are the goods that are not a means to something else? What is irreducible? This is not something you think you should feel; it really must be native to your heart.

Meaning, it's said, is linked to satisfying these basic psychological needs. Basic psychological needs are hypothesized to be universal and fundamental, meaning that if thwarted, we suffer. And there are no replacements, no compensations for the failure to meet these three basic needs. In this body of research, it's autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

So, autonomy in this context means being engaged in an activity with a full sense of willingness, volition, choice. Choiceful. And generally, that's linked to spending one's energy doing work with a sense of engagement. I would say, but it's not limited to that. Dharma practice itself, I would say, engenders some—we don't use this language much—but a deep sense of autonomy. We become deeply, willingly engaged with life, whatever shape that is. And there's a certain sense of—we also don't use the word "independence," we say "interdependence"—but there is a sense of independence and confidence engendered by practice. Our energy feels freely offered. Sometimes, a sense of autonomy and meaning may be related to some leisure, you know, when we have the choice to do this or that. Even when we just have a tiny bit, maybe it's just 10 minutes. Maybe you're busy with life and children and all of it. It's like, okay, just 10 minutes. But it's like, okay, that actually, maybe rest can become very meaningful. A sense of autonomy in the free flow of where you place your attention.

The need for competence refers to a sense of efficacy, of finding channels for your capabilities. So Maslow⁵ writes, "If you deliberately plan on being less than you're capable of being, I warn you, you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities." So this is not some kind of grandiose fantasy. I'm bad at like a million things and good at like three, and I'm unashamed of the enormous swaths of my incompetence. But I know what I can cultivate.

I also associate competence, this kind of basic need, with something like wisdom and understanding. If you cannot understand yourself, your choices, your behavior, the behavior of people around you, it's very hard to find life meaningful. It becomes a kind of puzzle that we don't quite get. And so part of the sense of competence, meeting this kind of basic need, is supported by our Dharma practice, where we're growing in understanding—understanding ourself and, partially through that, understanding the inner lives of others. One of the fruits of Dharma practice is the capacity to predict our own feelings in response to this or that, to predict the behavior of others, to understand how their mind relates to their behavior. This supports this sense of competence in the world, not being ambushed by surprises at every moment. We have to know a lot about human nature, about our nervous system, about dukkha⁶ and anicca⁷, about unsatisfactoriness, about the changing of all things. We have to know a lot about all of that to navigate the world skillfully, to be more and more competent.

And then the need for relatedness. The need for relatedness is the sense of feeling connected to and cared about by others. This is about spiritual friendship, about Sangha.⁸ It's about family and loved ones and heart companions. It's about those we serve. And this engenders a lot of meaning. I think Daniel Kahneman⁹, the Nobel laureate, at the end of his life was asked to sum up his learning in behavioral economics and all this stuff. And he was like, "Well, spend time with people you care about." That was what he said in an interview published just a few days after he died. We know our life counts when love is its main currency. That engenders a lot of sense of meaning.

Meaning, in other words, will be shackled by a fixation on "I, me, mine." Yes, we have to know ourself, we have to take good care of ourself, we have to protect our boundaries, all these things, right? But meaning, to the extent that there's a fixation on me as a kind of island, that really squelches the possibilities for meaning. Meaning, in other words, is engendered by the other.

So, these kind of basic psychological needs—autonomy, competence, relatedness—it's connected to a sense of intrinsic meaning, meaning in our life, a sense of purpose. And so maybe we reflect on this as a way of understanding our own needs and ways in which life might become even richer.

So I offer this for your consideration. And yeah, I wish you all well. Thank you.

Okay folks. So I'm on retreat next week at IRC. Maybe some of you will be there; I know some of you will be there. So I won't have class then, but we'll be back the following week, I think September 4. Okay folks, thank you. Thank you all. Yeah, I wish you all well.