This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxing into the Moment; Dharmette: Interpersonal Life (1 of 5): Introduction. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing into the Moment; Dharmette: Interpersonal Life (1 of 5): Introduction - Matthew Brensilver

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

Introduction

So, welcome folks. Good morning to most of you, not all of you. Whatever time it is for you, a warm welcome. My name is Matthew. I know a lot of these names, but not all of them. I'm one of the IMC teachers and substitute teacher, and happy to be with you. So, we'll do that meditation thing now and see what happens. Please settle in.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing into the Moment

Meditation is a way of being deeply honest with the moment and trusting that in meeting the moment as it is, the heart unfolds. Trusting that the deepest healing does not come from pretending, but from a kind of fidelity to how life is in this moment.

And so, taking some fuller breaths, a breath that reaches down into your belly, up into your shoulders. A breath that says to some part of your mind that doubts, "It's okay to be here like this now."

In the deep habit of treating the moment as a kind of problem to solve, we just relax and trust that whatever the raw material of this moment is, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, it all has equal potential to soften our heart, to wake us up. So we just relax into our life as it is through our breathing.

It's almost like we use our breath to give us the courage just to be here. So let your breathing animate the front of your body, but also the back of your body. It feels like life is in front of us, but it's all around us. Bringing awareness to the back of your body, letting the movement of your breathing ripple through not just your torso, but through the lower half of your body, too.

Our breathing can enliven what is numbed out and soothe what's overactive, activated. So there's a sense of our body being unified by awareness.

To solve our worries, we have to think, but to dissolve them, we breathe and relax into awareness. We don't insist that the knots and complexities, the worries and the problems, untangle themselves immediately, but there's a kind of trust that our whole life looks different from the vantage point of tranquility, of surrender. So we let our breathing ground us, help us sit more deeply in our bones, help us appreciate the subtle, soothing quality of gravity.

Maybe there is some place in your body that your breathing is most prominent—mouth or nostrils, your chest or belly, maybe a sense of the whole body breathing. You can just take refuge in this moment.

And the nature of thought is they all feel somehow important, but we come to trust that there is something even more important than our thoughts.

There's a sense that no matter how life unfolds, what problems get solved and which don't, this will have mattered. To have honored the moment in this way, to have developed a sensory clarity, a kind of refining the landscape of this moment, stabilizing the heart-mind, or attention, resting from the tussle with experience. This will have mattered.

Dharmette: Interpersonal Life (1 of 5): Introduction

Okay, so good to sit with you.

A friend of mine described moving from what she called "egocentric life" to "Dharma-centric life."¹ That means that we're moving out of a kind of narrow, self-referential existence. So much of our existence can be self-referential. Moving out of that into the sense of life animated by Dharma, Dharma kind of infusing all spheres of our life. And that, of course, includes our relational lives, the theme for this week: interpersonal life. A Dharma-centric life blesses the relational realm in many ways. We, of course, affect each other, right? A life has many ripples, and a Dharma-centric life, perhaps we say, ripples out joy and safety and peace. Those are the ripples emanating from the Dharma heart.

We might ask, what makes a life worth living? There are many answers to that, but one very good answer is other people. Delights that are simply not possible in isolation. There's some help we can never give ourselves; there's some healings we need others for. Tony Kushner said, "The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one. One is a fiction." From such nets of souls, societies, the social world, human life springs.

The sense of belonging, of relatedness, that's considered fundamental. Fundamental in the sense that if it's frustrated, we suffer. And how is this practice about perceiving ourselves, perceiving our minds clearly? But how do we do that? How do we actually see our minds, our habit energies? How do we see what is not conscious to us? We rely on other people. We cannot see the back of our head, and so we need others to develop wisdom. I was told in the Quaker tradition that revelation is never held by an individual; it is, in fact, a property of groups. I was always touched by that. Consider, maybe, enlightenment as a property of the group.

Sometimes I've thought that one aspect of mental health is something like the congruence between self-understanding—the story we tell about ourselves—and how a kind of collection of well-intentioned people in one's life would tell the story about me. How much do those converge between how I see myself and how a group of people of goodwill would collectively describe me or you?

This interpersonal realm is one of incredible humility and longing and grief and ecstasy and courage and vulnerability and shame and grace and healing. It is like many, many Dharma themes in this interpersonal life. And as I sometimes say, other people are like steroids for our paramis² and our kilesas.³ For the beautiful qualities of our heart and for the habits that get us into trouble, other people act like steroids for those habit energies. And so Lisa Feldman Barrett, the brain scientist and emotion researcher, says the best thing for a human nervous system is another human, and the worst thing for a human nervous system is another human.

When I was like three or something and my younger brother Gregory just learned how to sit up on his own, you know, had the whatever abdominal strength to sit up, and we were at some family gathering or something, and everyone's cheering my brother on as he's demonstrating this newly acquired skill. And I did not appreciate the relative balance of attention being paid. And I don't remember saying this, but I believe it, I just whispered, "Me knock Gregory down." And I ran and tackled my brother, which he was not able to sustain. He was knocked off center by that. And still to this day, anytime I'm being a little domineering or something with my younger brother, he just says, "Me knock Gregory down," you know.

That was three. I was like eight, really kind of seeing the fallibility and suffering of my parents, and not being able to stand it just spun me so deeply. Their simple fallibility, their inability to insulate me from dukkha.⁴ At 12, being heartbroken over some social drama, and I concluded, I remember, the conclusion in my young mind was like, "insecurity is at the center of emotional pain, it's the bedrock." As a teen, being so angry and having no idea how to deal with it, discharge it, channel it, diffuse it, and just spilling out, you know, exclusively within my family. I sort of managed it outside of the nuclear family, but it spilled into home life in a really profound way. At 16, not having had a sexual relationship, any kind of significant romantic something, and just like, "Am I going to be okay? Is there something not okay with my heart?" And at 18, going off to school, to college, and feeling so intimidated by others and kind of quietly becoming more judgmental and competitive and arrogant.

We all have our moments, and those are moments from what is a very fortunate life. There are, of course, moments of incredible cruelty and danger. So our relational life, our life, is about sending and receiving, sending pain, receiving pain, sending love, receiving love. And so our practice must be a kind of relational practice.

Now, on the one hand, it's important to have some aspects of practice that are untethered to any outcome. We don't do it for any result. We don't do it to get better, to heal ourselves, to be better neighbors, partners, whatever. It's like, no, just for the richness of it, just for the delight of it. If this were the only moment, and there were no future, I would want to just be poised in awareness. But from another perspective, our practice is indeed dedicated to an outcome, and the outcome is the welfare of others, that our practice be a blessing in our life.

And so we fold in these relational questions and dynamics to our practice. How much have the lessons we've learned on the cushion generalized to the interpersonal realm? We know, like, "Oh yeah, greed, hate, and delusion, those are dead ends." But all of a sudden, often in the context of other people, they seem pretty appetizing, right? When I'm alone, my neurosis doesn't bump up against other things. And then it does, usually aided by another, and it sort of shatters some idealized vision I have about myself. I want to have fidelity to those realizations. When I teach or practice, I try never to forget my freedom nor my suffering. And the interpersonal realm is this zone where we investigate what aspects of our insight have stabilized and what hasn't, what's generalized and what hasn't. What have I realized? Meaning, what parts of the teachings are real, not merely intellectual, but like muscle memory, they're real. We see in the interpersonal realm what's been realized and what remains a slightly intellectualized understanding of the Dharma.

This is a realm of courage and patience and self-forgiveness. And we approach it with some wonder and freshness, an opportunity to see our minds, to realize the teachings more fully, with a kind of reverence for what gets evoked in us, what we evoke in others.

And so as we come to the end of our time this morning, the invitation is to something like, investigate. You know, what happens to your mind when alone, when with others? What gets soothed by others? What gets activated? The gaze of the other is a very reliable way of evoking the conceptual sense of self. What happens in that? Just notice with care.

Yeah, and so we'll gather back tomorrow. We'll sort of unfold this theme together. Happy to be with you and wish you a good day. Look forward to practicing together tomorrow.