This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Grounding; Our Stories (4 of 5): Letting Go. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Grounding; Dharmette: Our Stories (4 of 5): Letting go - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 19, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Grounding

We’ll get our practice period started. Feeling into the bodily experience, bringing an aliveness to the physical experience. Bringing in a sense of presence into what it's like to be sitting here now.

Feeling connected and grounded. I often start with the obvious sensations of pressure against the body—the feet. If you're sitting cross-legged, maybe it's the sides of the feet that are touching the ground. If you're in a chair, it's the bottom of the feet. If you're lying down, maybe it's the back of the heels. Whatever it is, chances are your feet are resting on something. Feeling the pressure, the contact against the body.

The back of the legs, the buttocks. Feeling the contact, the pressure from the sitting surface. We can use these three areas—feet, back of the legs, buttocks—as grounding. We're here, connected as a foundation.

Above this foundation, we feel the belly. Can there be some ease, some relaxation in the belly? Softness.

And the chest. Sometimes we can armor ourselves by having some type of stiffness in the chest. It's a way to protect ourselves, brace ourselves. Just for this small period this morning, can we let that soften?

Tuning into sensations in the lower back. Bringing some care and maybe some tenderness to this area, which often gives humans difficulties.

In the upper back, between the shoulder blades, can we rest our attention there with some kindness, some warmth? Letting the shoulder blades slide down the back.

If we discover there's tension, it might be that resting awareness dissolves or softens the tension, but it might not. Can you also be okay with that? Can you be okay with however the body is showing up this moment, as best you can? As best you can.

And then bringing awareness to the face and the head. It's not uncommon to have tension around the mouth and jaw, the eyes. Maybe there's a band around the head that feels tight. Is there a way that can be loosened?

And then lastly for this body scan, bringing awareness to our hands. The sensations of what they're touching and the sensations of having hands. What do hands feel like on the inside? Maybe a little bit tingly, maybe nothing in particular. It's perfectly fine, whatever you find.

And then allow the attention to tune into, to become sensitive to, the experiences of breathing. Just noticing how the body moves as it breathes. Nothing in particular needs to be happening, just tuning into the sensations of breathing. Can that be enough?

Dharmette: Our Stories (4 of 5): Letting go

Welcome. Greetings, everybody. This is the fourth day in this series that I'm doing on stories. I'd like to share a short little story that comes from the Suttas¹. Many of you might be familiar with this, but I like to look at it in a little bit different way than we often do. Maybe there's a way in which it can be a support for our practice in a bigger way than we often think.

The story is a simile given by the Buddha, and he's talking about teachings. This is the Simile of the Raft²: Imagine a person in the course of a journey arrives at a great expanse of water. The near shore is dangerous and the far shore offers safety, but there's no ferry, boat, or bridge to take them across the water. So the person thinks, "Well, what if I collected grass, twigs, branches, and leaves and bound them together as a raft? Then, supported by the raft and by paddling with my hands and feet, I should be able to reach the far shore."

So the person does this, and they succeed; they get across to the far shore. And then, arriving at the far shore, it might occur to them—"Wow!" (That’s Diana's little injection there, that's not in the Suttas.) "Wow, this raft has been very helpful indeed. What if I were to hoist it on my head or load it on my shoulders and then proceed on my journey?"

Then the Buddha turns to the people he's speaking to and says, "Now, what do you think? By carrying the raft with them, would that person be doing what should be done with a raft?"

The people listening to him say, "No, Venerable Sir."

The Buddha asks, "So what should a person do with the raft?"

The people in the audience respond, "Having arrived at the far shore, the person might think, 'Yes, this raft has been very useful, but now I should just haul it onto dry land or release it and set it adrift in the water, and then go wherever I want.'" In this way, the person would be doing what should be done with the raft.

Often when we hear this story, it's associated with what we should be doing with the teachings, the doctrine, the Dharma. But what if it's referring to stories in general? Stories have a role; they can carry us to a different place, but then there's a time to let go of them. They can be a support in some contexts, but not in others.

We might recognize that some of psychotherapy is to help us determine, acknowledge, or discover some of the stories we have from our youth or childhood. Those stories were once helpful, but then they turned into patterns of behavior that we carry with us into adulthood that are no longer helpful. Part of maturity—both conventional maturity and spiritual maturity—is to recognize, "Oh yeah, some of these patterns, some of these stories I have from when I was young are no longer appropriate now as an adult."

This question of whether to carry the raft or leave it behind... I appreciate so much that in this simile, the Buddha says that on arriving at the far shore—this place where there's safety—it might occur to them to hoist the raft on their head or load it onto their shoulders. This is like the definition of something that is burdensome, right? To carry this burden, put something on our head, and walk around with it. Maybe we don't recognize the burdensome nature of it, or we don't recognize the weight of it.

The alternative is to haul it onto dry land or let it go adrift in the water. Then the person is allowed to "go wherever I want." Carrying this raft is burdensome and limits what is available to us. Releasing it allows us to no longer be pushed around by the circumstances of our lives, no longer to be pushed around by the stories we're carrying. Instead, we have a certain amount of freedom.

How is it that we can even recognize that we're carrying these stories and that they are burdensome? For this, I'll tell a little story about myself from many years ago. This was when I was working in Corporate America. I was upset about something—funny that now I don't remember the details at all, but I remember this interaction that had a big impact on me.

I was complaining about somebody in another department. I remember telling this long, complicated story to my friend: "Well, this person said this, and then so-and-so was upset, and they sent an email to a whole bunch of people including me, and then I felt upset about the email because it was so clear that this person really doesn't care about other people and only wants to look good..." You know, a big, long, complicated story.

After my long story, my friend said, "I'm sorry that happened. Let's see if there are at least two other stories we can create using the same facts."

I was like, "What?"

She said, "No, no. So-and-so said something—you were there for that—and later you received an email. Those were two facts. What are some other stories we could create with this?"

I didn't understand what she was asking me. In fact, I even felt offended! "What do you mean? This is a story! They said this because of blah, blah, blah, and then they sent this email because of blah, blah, blah!" Even right now, when I'm telling you this, I'm feeling a little bit agitated! [Laughter]

I was eventually able to calm down and recognize that I was making meaning. I was trying to say, "They said this because of X, Y, and Z," and "this email they sent—reading between the lines—was A, B, and C." I didn't recognize that this was fabricated in my mind; it wasn't actually the truth. I don't actually know why that person said what they said. I don't actually know precisely what was "between the lines" in an email.

So, if we don't have a friend saying to us, "Using the same facts, what are some other stories?" what could highlight to us that we're making stories? (For the record, I did end up making all kinds of stories—outlandish ones, practical ones. It became kind of fun! "Maybe Mars came down and embodied this person!" Some were completely ridiculous, and some started to be like, "Oh yeah, maybe it has nothing to do with me. Maybe they have a child who is sick at home and they're worried, and that's why they spoke with that kind of tone.")

This simile points to this: the person making the raft says, "What if I collected grass, twigs, branches, and leaves and bound them together?" This is pointing to direct experience—what is here and now. Branches, twigs, and leaves are what the person was experiencing while they were on the shore. "Paddling with my hands and feet" is what they are actually doing with the body, how the body is moving. It's being present for our direct experience. Using the hands and feet is like feeling what the experience is that the body is having right there.

The story is what the mind is doing. What is not the story is what the body is doing. Often the story the mind is doing is very different from what's being experienced by the body. The body is in one place with the leaves and branches, and the mind is somewhere else.

That's one distinction we can make. The story also has this very quiet sense of "I don't want" or "I should." These two flavors—"I don't want" or "I should"—are often what the mind is adding on top of our direct experience.

The simile of the raft is about letting go of stories. First, we have to recognize what a story is, and that is to make the distinction between what's happening in the mind and what's happening in the body. Then, how do we let go of the stories? That is about being embodied. It's being with the felt experience. What are the leaves, twigs, and branches of this moment? What is the body feeling like in this moment? Feeling grounded, feeling our feet on the ground, feeling connected to whatever surface we're sitting or standing on.

That's how we let go. It's not that we have to push away the thoughts or negate them or say they don't matter; we're just bringing attention towards the felt experience of this moment. That's how we let go of the stories. When we're embodied from that perspective, we can start to see the sense of "I don't want" or "I should" that is very often quietly spewing up all these thoughts—thoughts that might be so familiar that we don't even recognize them as part of a story. Sometimes it's the story of "me," or the story of whatever happened.

I offer this as a way for us to feel how some stories are burdensome. We're trying to carry them on our heads and shoulders and they weigh us down, preventing us from going where we want to go and preventing us from having freedom. Part of it is to recognize: What are stories? What are the narratives that we are carrying around that are extra, that we don't need? So much of that is just being embodied.

Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow for our last installment of this series on stories.