This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided meditation: Gentleness & Equanimity; Dharmette: function of a dharma talk w/ M Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Gentleness & Equanimity; Dharmette: What is the Function of a Dharma Talk? - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 03, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Gentleness & Equanimity

Welcome, everyone. I appreciate seeing the suggestions in the chat for how to meditate, and "gentleness and equanimity" sounds reasonable to me. So, let’s settle into a posture.

Just being held by the silence. Even if there is noise, we can be held by the silence.

We are encouraged to bring a spirit of radical honesty to our experience. The Dharma¹ never asks us to pretend—ever. It is radical honesty, paired with a kind of radical non-violence directed toward the entirety of our sensory life.

This is our path: deeply honest, with a deep trust that we do not have to fight to heal. We do not have to fight to wake up. We just kind of cook in our own juices moment by moment, letting experience soften us, kneading the dough of our being. Just filling your body with awareness.

We don’t usually associate force with gentleness, but we can make it so. Our strength, our courage, and our willingness can be very gentle. The awareness just blends, blessing its objects with fidelity and gentleness.

We are connecting rather than controlling. We let go of the control, the push, the pull—that isn't gentle. And gentleness is not self-indulgence. We are being invited to stay; to give radical permission to the ambivalence that runs straight through the center of the world. We practice staying and being softened by what is here.

How gently might you wash a baby’s head? You make your hands soft but clear. Maybe that is the spirit with which we hold our experience. We just cultivate this deep trust and a kind of surrendering to the flow of the pleasant and the unpleasant.

You can only know your mind when you stop trying to do anything with your mind. Perhaps that is the ultimate gentleness. Clinging is busy; love is still.

It is good to sit with you.

Dharmette: What is the Function of a Dharma Talk?

Every now and then, I like to ask myself the question: "Matthew, do you know what you’re doing?" Regarding this whole teaching thing, this whole Dharma thing—do you know what you’re doing?

That might sound like it comes out of self-doubt, but not really. It’s just that, as a teacher, the way you talk about the Dharma gets shaped by forces you cannot clearly see. Just as our lives are shaped by a million unseen forces, the way one talks about the Dharma is also shaped by them. So I just ask the question: "What’s happening here?"

To answer that, I have to consider another question: What is the function of a Dharma talk?

Classically, according to the Numerical Discourses², the Dharma should only be taught with specific intentions: I will speak step-by-step (I'm not doing great on that front); I will speak explaining cause and effect (the sequence of cause and effect is also a little shaky); I will speak out of compassion (okay, fair enough); I will speak without being motivated by material reward; and I will speak without disparaging others or disparaging oneself. On that last one, I’m a little shaky—but the truth is, I only mercilessly make fun of myself because of love.

So, what is the function of a Dharma talk? Is a talk meant to be an exchange of information or something else?

In some ways, yes. This path is about learning, and some parts of the Dharma can be learned in the same way we learn anything else. The human condition is so bewildering. It is amazing that the Buddha and the tradition arrived at distinctions that are so valuable—"carving nature at its joints." It is really powerful to have maps: the three wellsprings of suffering³, the seven factors of awakening⁴, different aspects of mindfulness, or species of love. We have to learn those. In that respect, clarity is important. It’s not good for me to be massively confusing on that front.

But information transfer is not the only currency of exchange. Sometimes the Dharma is meant to be bewildering. We don’t usually like that, but if you’re not being bewildered, you might not be learning. A dear Dharma friend once told me that when she first started hearing Dharma talks, she didn’t understand much. There was not a lot of information transfer. But what she could hear—and what made her keep going—was that the teacher loved something and knew something that she didn’t. She wasn't understanding exactly what was being said, but she could sense the faith animating those words, and she followed that thread. Now, she knows everything they knew.

We learn more when we are not highly intolerant of uncertainty, when we can roll with ambiguity and consciously experience conflicts with our current mental models. Part of what spurs our learning is that we get hungry to resolve those tensions. It is an awkward place to not have a coherent model, so it mobilizes something in us to try to resolve those tensions—it motivates us to grow.

Sometimes a Dharma talk is just meant to inspire faith or love for the practice—to really gladden the mind. Sometimes I can be a bit focused on renunciation and the eagerness to experience unpleasantness with equanimity⁵, and that is a good thing, for sure. Sometimes we need to be willing to feel bad. But at other times, it is supremely good to feel good.

Sometimes a Dharma talk functions like a soothing bedtime story. When I used to teach teen retreats—groups of forty kids, ages fifteen to nineteen—it was part silent retreat, part camp, and part group therapy. Those retreats would end on January 1st, so the last night was New Year’s Eve. We would stay up late, have a dance party, and do a "no-talent show" (except they were all super talented). Then we’d dance the New Year in.

What are you going to do with forty rabid children on New Year’s Eve who are hyped up and having Vipassana⁶ romances all over the place? We’d just get the kids to lie down in the meditation hall, turn the lights down, and tell them, "Okay, it’s story time. It’s Dharma story time."

A Dharma talk is also a kind of co-meditation where we are offering each other attention. It’s that simple: I offer my attention, and you offer yours. In that currency, there is a lot of care. I’ve often quoted my friend and colleague Marc Belzer⁷, who said that the willingness to pay attention to another without an agenda is very closely related to love. To love well is to learn to pay attention well. In this way, we are both listening to each other. I’m trying to listen to how the words arise and the ways in which they facilitate a sense of connection with you. That means I have to stay really close to experience.

I am also very conscious that I don’t "own" my words. I don’t control the meanings they make. I often feel like my words might say too much or not enough. Literary critics say "the author is dead," meaning that you are left to construct the meanings, to find the resonances, and to discover something about yourself in these words. It is not my job, nor my inclination, to tell you what to do or how to live. There are a lot of right ways to live. In this sense, a Dharma talk merely clears a space where you can find yourself.

Maybe the most important function of a Dharma talk is simply to inhabit a "Dharma field"⁸ together. The space between us becomes sanctified. Even here, without seeing you, it is enough. That space becomes filled with Dharma; that space runs through us, and we become much more porous. When there is a sense that we’re doing something together—when that Dharma field opens up—I really have no idea who I am. but this is how we dwell together.

The Dharma is a transmission in a sense. It is modeling particular mind-states moment by moment. The teacher is inviting the practitioners into their mind and expressing whatever may be there in that moment: love, grief, emptiness, or compassion. I take care in how I structure a talk and the outline I follow, but the words are really only vehicles for expressing a mind-moment. When I’m putting together the skeletal outline of a talk, that is what I’m attuning to: what words can we dwell in together?

This is a function of resonance. I am only pointing to that which we already share. The teacher depends on the sincerity of the practitioner. There is no Dharma talk without sincerity. When I’m on my own during the day, I don’t feel like I know anything. The idea of "wisdom" feels comical. I don’t know anything—but then we get together, you show up, and then there is Dharma.

This is not a performance; it is co-meditation. There is some vulnerability in the exposure. I once saw a book on Tai Chi titled There Are No Secrets. I love that title. Here, too, there are no secrets—meaning some of you might know me better than I know myself. This is a way of abiding together in Dharma.

I offer this for your consideration.