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Guided Meditation: Intimate with Experience; Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (2 of 5) Well Proclaimed, Visible Here and Now - Shelley Gault

The following talk was given by Shelley Gault at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 07, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Intimate with Experience

Good morning, good day, or good evening, whatever time it is for you where you are located in the world. I am really happy to be here with you this week while Gil is teaching a retreat at IRC, our Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz.

Let's sit together. I can hear you all adjusting your posture, the chairs squeaking and cushions moving as if we were in a hall together. As I suggested yesterday, take a posture that allows you to stay connected to your experience, whether you are sitting on a chair or a cushion, or lying down. Standing up is also a completely legitimate posture for meditation.

Key into what is happening in the body. Is there upright lightness? Is there alertness along with a sense of relaxation? You might just scan for tension in any of the habitual places that you know you carry it and see if you can let that just relax a little bit. Ease up as much as possible. Check those common areas in the head, neck, and shoulders. The belly and sometimes the chest can be contracted so the breath doesn't flow well. Just take a little journey around the body to see where there is tension and see if that can ease up.

We want a posture that really supports us being present, that supports being aware of what we're experiencing in the body and in the mind. I encourage you to revisit any habitually tight places in the body occasionally during the sit, just letting them soften if possible.

Each time, just become aware of what it is like to be sitting here, preparing to meditate. Perhaps you can hear the sounds of the world around you, like the garbage truck outside my house. Sounds can just be heard; they rise and pass.

I invite you to let your breathing be at the forefront of your awareness for a time this morning. Let the rhythm of the breathing be a help to settling the mind and settling the body, if that works for you. The rhythmic aspect of the breath can help to calm the whole organism, both our minds and our bodies.

Our practice of mindfulness is to know our experience as it unfolds and become more and more intimate with our lived experience. To really know it—to know our bodies, to know our minds. It is quite simple: our experience can be known just as it happens.

So let the mind be awake and aware. Whatever is arising within you—whether it is bodily sensations other than the breath, sensations of breath, thoughts, emotions, movements of energy, tingling, or pulsing—just let it all be known.

If you find yourself not knowing but just lost in thought, you can always just turn the awareness back to whatever is arising. We get more and more closely, more and more intimately connected.

Even confusion and distractedness can be known when they show up. The Dharma¹ asks us to stay present, and when we get lost, as soon as we notice it, we become present again. Each time is just a simple activity: here again, knowing. Each time is simple, and over time we get lost less frequently and become present again more quickly.

We are practicing staying. As we learn to stay, our lives open up to us; we receive them.

This is our life: sitting, lying down, or standing. Breathing. Body, mind, and heart all in the same place. Sensations coming from the outside like temperature and pressure, sensations generated within the body. Sounds, breath, thoughts, emotions, moods—it is all here, and we can be open to all of it right now.

Our practice invites us to become so intimate with our entire life, every bit of it. To know it with a kind regard.

Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (2 of 5) Well Proclaimed, Visible Here and Now

I was looking at the chat just now, and it is so nice to see the greetings. So many names are familiar to me, seeing your names here before in the chat and also from retreats and other programs at IMC and IRC, and also from my home Sangha² here in Santa Barbara. It is a delight. I am so happy again to be part of this Sangha this week while Gil is teaching at IRC.

Yesterday, I introduced the theme for this week, which is a list of six qualities of the Dharma. These are qualities that all point to the Dharma being empirical, being something that is evident in our experience, discoverable through practice and life experience. It is not something that we simply learn from hearing others or from reading books. The Dharma comes alive in us through our practice, through living our lives, and through paying attention to our lives—really close attention.

I said yesterday that I would be relating these six qualities to a list of capacities that support what is called "performative literacy"—an ability to read difficult texts in a skillful way that leads to deeper understanding.

Many years ago, when I was young, I was in an English teacher credential program at UCSB here in Santa Barbara. I had a professor, Sheridan Blau, who is a very passionate supporter of investigating how people learn, especially about how people learn to read and write skillfully, and then teaching them how to do that. Over forty years ago, he wrote a paper that is still cited today by those who train teachers. He is still active at the Columbia Teachers College in New York City.

This paper identified a series of capacities or skills that those who are what he called "successful readers of difficult texts" display. They are all ways of relating to what is being read. I think that each of them also describes ways of relating to our experience that are really supportive of recognizing these qualities of the Dharma.

Each of us human beings on this planet could be called a "difficult text." I think we are all complex beings with so many threads of conditioning that have affected the way we see and approach all of our life experience, including the way we see and approach the Dharma in our practice. I think we are texts that are definitely worth reading and learning to read well.

The first two in the list of qualities of the Dharma are that it is "well proclaimed" (Svākkhāto)³ and "visible here and now" (Sandiṭṭhiko)⁴.

Well proclaimed (Svākkhāto) means taught skillfully, in a way that people can relate to, in a way that they will listen to and put into practice. It can serve us all the way along the path: good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end.

Visible here and now (Sandiṭṭhiko) means it is not just some promise about understanding the Dharma in the future, but it is accessible to those who are willing to look, who make the effort to pay attention. The Dharma is seen by us in our experience as we practice here and now. I was trying to point to that in the meditation. That is what we do: we look at what is going on within us, and we see it, and we come to see it more and more clearly. It is not just described somewhere that we are to take on faith; we see it.

Gil one time spoke about these qualities of the Dharma using the example of having a pebble in your shoe that is causing pain with every step you take. A pebble in the shoe is something pretty obvious, something that we can see here and now. The solution—removing the pebble—is pretty obvious too. Unless we are seriously distracted, we don't need a lot of mindfulness to see that problem and its solution.

But more subtle kinds of pain and stress might require a bit more attention. For example, maybe I text a friend suggesting that we get together, and the friend doesn't respond. Then some sense of being ignored or unappreciated arises. I might make an assumption that my friend just doesn't want to see me, and then some resentment might arise out of that. If I don't notice what's happening pretty quickly, there might also be memories of other times this friend seemed to ignore me or wasn't kind—all that associative thinking that can happen. I can get lost in a maze of speculation and blame.

But if I am actually looking, if I am being mindful, I can see pretty quickly—before spinning out in recrimination or other unproductive thought—that I am projecting meaning onto the situation. I am making an assumption, and that assumption really is the source of the dukkha⁵ I am creating for myself.

There is the Dharma right there: seeing the arising of dukkha. When there is resentment, defensiveness, self-righteousness, impatience—any of those niggling things that arise in daily life—I can see them. When I am mindful of resentment, for instance, sensing into how it feels—it doesn't take a long time to see how it robs me of my peace. I see immediately, "Oh, my mood has changed." When I see the clinging, the contraction in the mind, and I am able to let go, that is visible also right here and now. Both the arising of the dukkha and the ceasing of the dukkha are plainly visible right where they happen.

To bring in the capacities from the literacy essay, the first skill listed is a capacity for sustained, focused attention. It is pretty clear, I think, the relevance of that to our mindfulness practice. To see clearly, in order to develop mindfulness, we need to sustain focus on what is arising.

Blau points out in his essay that often students who complain that they can't understand a text assume that it is because they just don't have the intelligence or the skill to understand it. The problem is actually that they just haven't given it close, sustained attention. This is really resonant for me in relation to seeing the Dharma here and now. So many of us are just used to taking for granted that what we are thinking and feeling is simply how things are, the correct picture of our life. We have to be trained to look more closely. We assume without actually looking, and our practice is a training in looking beyond assumptions.

We learn to be more attentive, to be more mindful, in order to see the Dharma here and now in our experience. New meditators trying to develop mindfulness often complain that when they are sitting, their minds just go crazy, thinking non-stop. Often they imagine that means that they can't meditate—just like the students Blau speaks of who imagine they can't read difficult texts.

Students can have the expectation that simply being able to read should result in deep understanding. Meditators can have a similar expectation that simply closing our eyes and deciding to pay attention to the breath will make staying present and becoming mindful just happen. But I think we all know that what is needed is developing this capacity for sustained, focused attention.

We learn to stay by coming back, of course, again and again. That is how we develop the capacity. Minds really like to think. After twenty years—maybe even more—of web surfing, swiping left and swiping right, and following links from one topic to another, modern minds are way more distractible than they were in the past. It takes more effort to develop this capacity, but the only way to develop it is to practice coming back again and again.

Another of the capacities in Blau's list that is related to this is a tolerance for failure, a willingness to re-read and re-read again. That is what we are doing when we talk about cultivating continuity of mindfulness, trying to string the moments of mindfulness together. We are really staying present, and this is the key: not giving up when our mind wanders, when we are sleepy or bored, or when we really would just rather go do something else.

We don't give up on cultivating mindfulness because our minds like to chatter. It doesn't usually take too long for new meditators to recognize that it is not just in meditation that their minds are pretty much out of control. It is the nature of the mind to just do its own thing: to think, plan, react, and reflect on its own time schedule. In daily life, if we aren't engaged in some activity that requires a lot of focused attention, our minds will usually just wander where they want.

Coming to realize that is the case is often a big motivator for many of us to develop more mindfulness. Those of us here in this worldwide Sangha didn't give up because our minds have minds of their own—as Jack Kornfield used to say. Instead, we saw the need to develop steadiness, a capacity for sustained attention. We came to recognize that the way mindfulness actually gets established in the mind is due to our willingness to fail at it again and again, to keep returning to our present moment experience.

"Learning to stay"—that is what Pema Chödrön calls it. And it comes after not staying many times. After failing to stay, the Dharma can really reveal itself to us. We recognize that it was always right here, visible here and now; we just weren't paying very good attention. As we more and more develop the habit of paying attention, the Dharma becomes more and more visible to us. We learn to read our experience more skillfully, to become more and more intimate with it, and to understand it in deeper, more subtle ways.

I would like to close this morning with a reading of something I am sure a lot of you have heard before. It is often read in Dharma talks. It is called Autobiography in Five Short Chapters by Portia Nelson.

Chapter 1 I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless. It isn't my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2 I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I am in the same place. But, it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3 I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in. It's a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4 I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5 I walk down another street.

Mindfulness allows us to see the hole and to see the way to avoid falling in. It is visible here and now, right here, right now.

That is what I have for this morning. I thank you for your attention, and we will continue tomorrow looking at the third and the fourth qualities of the Dharma and some skills that really support them coming alive in us. So again, thank you. Have a lovely rest of your day.