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Guided Meditation: Putting Down the Project of Your Life; Dharmette: The Divine Abodes (1 of 5) Orienting to Love - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 09, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Putting Down the Project of Your Life

Welcome, folks. Good to be with you. Gil is teaching a retreat, and here we are. Let's practice together; I am very happy to be with you.

Please settle in. Relaxed and alert—that's what we're aiming to inspire with our posture. A kind of openness in your chest. Whatever phenomena arise, come what may. Don't be in too much of a rush to assume your inner Dharma¹ posture. Just give yourself a little time.

Be patient with the process of settling, with the wayward longings, and with the ways in which, before we settle, it feels like we have to worry. Just be patient with your mind as it gets enough reassurance from samsara² that it's okay to relax.

We use our breathing to speak to our vigilance. We breathe in such a way to signal to our body that it's okay to put down the defensiveness. To signal to our body that our clinging is not what's keeping us safe in this moment.

Almost anything your worry can do, your breath can do better. Our whole life looks different from the perspective of tranquility. It's very hard to determine what's actually worth worrying about when we're in a state of hyperarousal. So we breathe. We keep surrendering to the sensations of breathing. Keep surrendering to silence, to not knowing.

Being alive is amazing, but the project called "my life" is a burden. It's a burden, at least, to hold it as a project in all moments. And so we keep surrendering into the simplicity of the moment, knowing, "Yeah, we will pick up the weight of the project called my life again," but we don't need to carry it in all moments.

What would it be like to be alive, to breathe, without any sense of project—meditative or otherwise? Just put it down.

As we seclude ourselves in the moment and settle even just a little bit, the tranquility connects us with the wholeness of the Dharma. The burden of holding on, the relief in letting go. The fire of hatred, this soothing tenor of love, kindness. We settle down a little bit, and we can start to sense how actively our nervous system longs for the Dharma. For forgiveness and love. Sensitivity. Care for peace.

Dharmette: The Divine Abodes (1 of 5) Orienting to Love

Okay, it's good to sit with you. I sort of feel my brain coming online as the meditation unfolds. 7:00 is a little early; the caffeine drip started a little late, but I'm getting the hang of the hour. Happy to practice with you.

When you become committed to love, it matters a little less how everything is going. It still matters, but it matters a little less. And for sure you root for things to go well, but when they don't—and you know they won't—you know you have a secure net to fall back into. When you know, "I'm going to have to love my way through this life," and when you really know that things actually change, the texture of life changes. But you have to know that deeply. You have to know that in your bones.

I often ask myself the question: How deeply entrained is love in my heart? You can't always tell. Sometimes it's hard to know how deeply you've trained the love into your heart until you have a fantastic opportunity for hate. And maybe you've had such a moment.

This human realm is not Utopia. There will forever be things to object to. Forever there will be things that might be hated. And the truth is, even if we were not in a highly imperfect world—even if somehow, some way, we managed to find our way into Utopia—we'd literally start hating rainbows. [Laughter] No, I love rainbows. But we'd start hating rainbows, or something like them, because it feels like our problems find us. But that's often merely illusion. Often it's our pain finding a placeholder. It's got to be placed somewhere, and the best thing I got is rainbows.

So I'm beginning to talk about non-hatred. Non-hatred lies at the intersection of many Buddhist teachings. It intersects with the teaching on non-clinging and letting go. We sense this—what I was alluding to in the sit—that when we get a little bit quiet, a little bit still, we can sense that hatred requires us to hold on. Love is fully compatible with letting go.

Non-hatred intersects relatedly with renunciation. The flavor of relinquishment is quite alien to hate. Becoming truly sensitive to the pain of aversion... sometimes aversion is the best we can do in a moment, but it's never the last word. We start to become more and more sensitive to the pain, the burden on the heart that's created by it.

Non-hatred is illuminated by the teachings on sila³, ethical conduct, and the indivisibility of goodness and well-being. They are not separable, as much as it might look like it. People are pulling a fast one on Mother Nature, looking like they're happy even amidst shamelessness. No, it's not possible actually, given our nervous system.

Then there are all these teachings about love, all the species of love, usually the Brahma-viharas⁴. Here is Ajahn Sucitto's⁵ idiosyncratic description:

• Metta (loving-kindness): Willing something which comes forth. It is willing; it's offering itself.
• Karuna (compassion): Senses something to be protected here. Something to be protected. So it's quieter. Spread over, strong, sensitive.
• Mudita (sympathetic joy): Mingling. You can enter into something, play happily in it. The quality of swimming; body swimming. Mudita in the water celebrates itself, celebrates the medium. And here, of course, we're looking at the medium of skillful qualities. Doesn't matter who, where they are; we light up.
• Equanimity: Serene stillness. Still, but not rigid. Gently, the open wing of a bird when it's hovering, sensing the currents, turbulent or quiet. Sensing like the wing of a great bird spread over, hovering. Wide span. Equanimity.

So yes, Metta: willingness. A sense of very gentle offering, dana⁶. It's the generosity, the spirit of dana.

And compassion: something needs protection. What is vulnerable needs protection. And so compassion is this kind of strength, but sensitive, attuned, not intrusive.

And Mudita: the celebrating the medium of the skillful qualities. Rejoicing in that. And unthreatened by the welfare of others.

And then equanimity: sensing the currents, hovering, poised, open.

This is a beautiful list and is meant to be not some kind of Hallmark idealistic values that we just sort of elevate in some artificial way. No, this is actually meant to be where our mind comes to rest increasingly. Where does our mind rest? What is the default position of our attention? Where do you return to when you're done paying attention to me, or to life? Where do you go back to? What's the default position of attention when you don't need to do your life? Where does the mind go? The Buddha says we train in such a way so that it rests with these species of love. That it returns to the Brahma-viharas.

To do this, we actually have to train in love. In Buddhism, you can get the sense that we're having to make effort every moment of every day, no matter what we're doing: to be mindful, to be loving, to be tranquil, to be patient, to let go of hate. All this stuff—it's too much. I can't sustain that effort. We actually have to entrust our life to the momentum of good habits. And so we train in love such that hate takes much more energy than love.

These places of dwelling are meant to be varied enough so that one of them is often a good resting place no matter what's happening in the moment. One of those species of love is medicine. A birth or death, a marriage or divorce, a war or a peace—one of the Brahma-viharas has you.

And like the path, love has a depth dimension and a breadth dimension. The depth dimension refers to how radical love might be experienced in a moment. Our mind pervaded by love, the only thing of which we're aware. And there are jhanas⁷—meditative absorptions, the insight jhanas—and perhaps we need "love jhanas." Of course, love can be an entryway into the stillness, but maybe we need something like that. So there's depth.

And then breadth: how many spheres of our mind and our behavior remain encumbered by aversion, by apathy, hate? And so we spread the love downward to the depths and outward in all directions—the breadth. And this is grand, but not grandiose. This is not idealistic, not moralistic. In fact, the more loving we become, the less judgmental we are of non-love.

So this week, you're invited to pay attention to how aversion constellates in your mind and be flexible in how you meet it. We have to be improvisational. We have to be willing to learn, to be surprised by our own minds, to be surprised by love, by hate, by all of it. And this week I'll unfold these themes, these different species of love.

It's touching to be together. So I offer this for your consideration and wish you a lovely day. We'll keep going tomorrow.