This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Breath, Pleasure, Opening; Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (3 of 5): Assertion and Surrender. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Breath, Pleasure, Opening; Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (3 of 5): Assertion and Surrender - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 11, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Breath, Pleasure, Opening

Okay, welcome, welcome folks. I really appreciate all the hellos and names. Yeah, very sweet. A lot of names I'm very familiar with. I don't know who you are, but I know your YouTube name. Okay, let's meditate. Please, find your posture.

Maybe as we begin, an almost undetectable crack, just the slightest smile. And just let those sensations ripple through your face, maybe more broadly.

This is not an attempt to blot out the suffering given to any life, given to this world, but to know some measure of joy can coexist with difficulty. Our mind has a lot of difficulty with ambiguity, the mixed-upness of life, the experience of ambivalence—ambi-valent, different valences. Naturally, we kind of treat each moment as a problem to solve, and we can miss the simple delight of a quarter smile.

Relax whatever can be relaxed. Grant permission for any tension that remains to remain.

And find a place for your attention to rest that feels soothing or even pleasant, subtly or obviously. One facet of equanimity is letting go of the friction with difficult experience, but there's another aspect which simply allows difficulty or unpleasantness to be in the background while we highlight the subtly pleasant. Just stay there for a minute or two.

Then, just let that pleasant feeling mingle with your breathing. Just like the breath catches the gust of pleasantness. Just breathe in a way that makes you really want to be alive. Breathe in a way where we know each breath is dāna¹, generosity offered to us to enjoy.

Maybe it feels right just to stay practicing in this way, catching the thread of pleasure in breathing—the oxygen hunger that's satiated, expelling what's been used up, the relief in that. A lot of pleasure in that cycle.

Maybe practice in such a way that the anchor is not with our breathing, but the anchor is everywhere. That there is truly nothing outside the focus space; the circle we draw around the phenomena included contains everything.

In a sense, our suffering requires mindfulness to collapse. It requires identification with some afflictive phenomena. That which we're awake to never fully defines us, is never the last word. So we stay wide awake to all the arising and passing phenomena, not trying to cobble together a kind of vantage point, a lookout. We just open and trust in awareness.

Even to make sense of my voice, my meditation instructions, there's a subtle kind of identification. Maybe that's just fine; maybe that's part of guided meditations. But the hunger to make meaning is sometimes the charade of Māra². So maybe my voice and everything else just become sound. You let go of my instructions in order to practice them.

Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (3 of 5): Assertion and Surrender

Okay, good to sit with you.

So, we'll continue with this theme of the Dharma³ of other people. Relationships, maybe we can say, are a kind of dance of assertion and surrender, of holding power and sharing power, of accepting influence, being affected, being porous enough to be affected. How much surrender does love demand? Not everything, but not nothing. And how comfortable am I surrendering my views, acquiescing to the other? How comfortable am I, how native to my heart does it feel to accept influence?

And alternatively, how comfortable am I expressing my needs, asserting something about my own heart? Some people kind of feel okay only when they're holding on to power, and others feel okay when they're relinquishing power. It's a little bit like melting and freezing. Some are only comfortable as water, others only comfortable as ice. And we really need flexibility. We need the ability to melt into the other, but also to freeze and individuate. And maybe it seems like Dharma is all about melting, melting, melting. Actually, Charlotte Joko Beck⁴ has a very beautiful description of being an ice cube and melting, and once you get a little mushy, you can't get unmushy. It's very beautiful. This is a little different sense of freezing as a way of individuating.

I sometimes have mentioned this exercise I did as a yogi. I was sitting a retreat at IRC six years ago with Ajahn Sucitto⁵, and Ajahn, in his capacity for a long time as an abbot and as an elder within the monastic system, the Thai Forest lineage, he said very explicitly that he found meditation practices were insufficient for managing the interpersonal dynamics within communities and found that some explicit interpersonal practices were important in fostering communal harmony. And so he shared some of those practices with us in that week.

For one of them, we gathered—if you've been to Insight Retreat Center—we gathered in the community room, not the meditation hall, the big open room with those very high ceilings and the light flooding in. And it was a group of about 40, and the instruction was to pair up. Now, we've been sitting for, I don't know, five days of silence. And we were to pair up, stand maybe 10-15 feet apart from your partner, lined up in rows, facing each other. The goal is to explore connection and boundaries and intimacy. And the instruction was to walk towards each other. You can either signal stop, move forward, or slow down. The idea was, okay, how much can we negotiate our own inner life while remaining deeply connected to another person? You're feeling into where you can be safely connected, not relinquish yourself, the moments where you actually need to freeze rather than melt, and then melt again.

And I was in a weird, altered state. It was enough sitting and beautiful Dharma that I was very thinned out and very loving, very much on the melty side. And the practice kind of starts immediately, like, "Okay, pick a partner." Even though I talk to large groups of people regularly and feel unashamed to do so, I'm actually shy and live to avoid certain species of social awkwardness. It's my reason for living, just to avoid certain species of awkwardness. But I got to find a partner, right? And I'm just there as a yogi, but some people there knew that I taught there, and that adds a layer of complexity.

And I remember, okay, I'm in this very melty kind of state. I don't want to go slobbering on some poor yogi like I'm this big dumb mettā⁶ dog. I was just like, alright, I'm just going to let somebody come to me. I just stood there a little frozen, waiting for someone to approach. And then we see, how does it feel to be in their presence? I knew the person, I remember them warmly. We didn't know each other well, but I remember very warm feelings towards him.

And okay, how close can one get while staying connected to yourself? What does it mean to be deeply porous but not abandon yourself? And so this is a kind of dance of feeling into one's needs, sensing one's boundaries, sensing when to melt, when to freeze, sensing when you can no longer take that person in. So we're seeing them, but we're also seeing our own mind. We try to attune to them, but they also function as a kind of screen on which our mind is projected. And the gaze of another, especially in the context of all the silence, the gaze of the other is evocative, right? Sometimes that can really freeze us into a sense of self, and that form of freezing is a kind of static that interrupts intimacy.

What does it feel like to feel that they see me? That sense of, "I'm being seen, I'm an object in the mind of the other." And we sense what it might be like in their mind to see me. And there's a kind of subtle, or maybe sometimes dramatic, pain of duality in that, of an object being seen by another, an animal being viewed by another animal. And to even feel like you're behind your eyes is a liability. The face is so potent. In seeing, in being seen, it does not have to conclude with self. We melt, and in that melting, we start to sense a whole kind of ethics in the face of the other. You look really carefully at somebody's face in their undefended, just relaxation. You look carefully at that face, a whole ethics is in it.

So okay, we start walking towards each other, and it feels so good. How open can things be? How vast can they be? Just open. As I remember it, just pervasively open space mingled with mettā, and the field was so bright. It was a bright room, but it was the kind of luminosity of the mind, and everything just so run through with space. And we start to open in this way, and the perception of the other person occurs in the same field as all self-referentiality. Self and other arising in the same field. And where am I then? The sense of having melted behind my closed eyes, frozen behind my closed eyes, located back there, that fully dissolves.

And so this is a kind of state of very deeply forgetting oneself, who you are, how you're seen, what's right or wrong about you. Every self-story is a million miles away and utterly irrelevant to the project of living. Almost everything falls away except a sense of knowing. And the knowing is very satiating, very unpartitioned space. "Unpartitioned epistemic space" is the way philosopher [Thomas] Metzinger characterized it.

And so there's all this melting, and then what actually happened was self-view gripped my mind. There was a certain kind of freezing that happened that I didn't notice. And I had the thought, "You know, I'm a sensitive New Age guy, I should get really close to this person." But I could feel I was betraying something. I was sacrificing my boundaries because I had some ideal of what I was supposed to be. And instantaneously, the vast, open mettā-field just dissolved. And a very dramatic form of freezing that didn't have to happen if I actually could have just frozen in a more relaxed way, right? As I was sensing, "Okay, so now this feels like too much," or "Something's intrusive about the presence of the other," I needed to say, "Okay, let us pause." And I couldn't. And that is what led to this kind of the other end of the spectrum, a really deep freeze.

So I was, you could say, identified with being like water. I couldn't be ice. But then I strangely created the experience of really freezing. That inflexibility, that identification with being water, became a problem. Some of us need more practice being like water, some being like ice. And we probably all need more practice in the transition, of moving between water and ice. The dance of yes and no. If you don't trust somebody's yes, it's hard to know what their no means. If they can't say no, it's hard to know what a "yes" means. The dance of yes and no, assertion, surrender, water, ice.

Okay, I offer this for your consideration. And some of you know, but I do a Wednesday night class certain Wednesdays. Today is one of the certain Wednesdays. I'll be doing this exact same format, 7:30 Pacific on the same channel, literally the same Bat-Channel. And the topic tonight, to stay with this interpersonal theme, is to talk about sexuality, lust, Dharma. See you back tomorrow morning. Sorry I ran a little long, and I look forward to reconnecting.