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Guided Meditation: Awareness of Balanced Mind; Attitudes that Transform Experience (part 2) - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 14, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Awareness of Balanced Mind

All right, good morning everyone. Welcome to the third day of our meditation this week. The series is on elements of mindfulness, from vedanā¹, feeling tone. Yesterday we started with the kind of wanting and not wanting that can layer on top of vedanā if we don't see it clearly and acknowledge it clearly. Today we will talk about some other attitudes of mind, other healthier or more helpful ways to move into dedicated meditation.

So warm greetings to all of you from Santa Cruz. The invitation is to begin to settle into a meditation posture. As I'm doing, you can balance yourself over your hips and align your head with your spine. It can be helpful to take a couple of slower, more intentional, deeper breaths, and just check out how your posture is, how your body is.

Maybe scan through briefly and notice where the weight is distributed. Maybe it is over your hip points, buttocks, or feet. If your back is against a chair, really take that support in. Scan through and notice the aliveness of your body. The vibrancy, warmth and cool, tingling or pulsing. The motion of your body breathing.

Then, check in with your internal posture. Are you leaning forwards towards, or leaning away against? Is there wanting or not wanting in this moment? Or is there a balance of internal posture, a balance of mind and heart?

The encouragement is to be receptive in these moments of meditation together and allow experience to flow through without leaning forward or backwards. It's fine if you do, just notice it. But notice also moments of okayness, peacefulness, and mindfulness. With that encouragement, relax just a little bit more on the out-breath, and then allow the breathing to be normal, natural.

Tune in to the felt sense of the moment, the wave-like action of the in-breath and out-breath, or the broader field of aliveness of sensations, or perhaps the coming and going of other sensory experience, like sound. Choose whatever anchor of attention or object of attention works for you, and rest. Receive, allowing the body, heart, and mind to come together in the experience of this moment, now.

Whatever your chosen anchor of attention is, dedicate yourself to being in contact with it. Have appreciative interest in each breath, each moment.

If anything unpleasant arises, acknowledge it simply. There is no need to push it away or lean away from it; allow space around it. If anything pleasant arises, allow it, perhaps savoring it without trying to hold on to it. Allow this to flow through unimpeded, balanced in the moment.

From time to time, check in on your internal posture, the internal stance during this meditation. Are you leaning towards, pulling away, or balanced? Allow the flow of experience to move through.

As we begin to come towards the close of this meditation together, the invitation is to recollect these moments spent in cultivation. Appreciate and steep in any moments of peacefulness and kindness. Accept any kind of goodness, and from that place, be with loving attention with anything that may have been not so nice, not so pleasant. Allow that too with kind attention.

From that place of an open heart, cast your gaze outwards to the others in your life—other beings, people, animals. If it feels right, set the determination that this time of practice, your practice in general, and perhaps your life, benefit them. May our practice here together benefit all who our lives touch.

Thank you for your practice.

Attitudes that Transform Experience (part 2)

Good morning, good day, warm greetings everyone. I appreciate our time here together meditating. It's lovely to see little bows in the chat and the warm greetings from my fellow Santa Cruzans. Hello, nice to see you! A special welcome to those of you who slipped in a little bit late to the Zoom room, I'm glad you're here.

Today is the third day of our series on core or essential elements of mindfulness meditation. This week so far, we've covered feeling tone, or vedanā, which is that very simple parsing of experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. Mindfulness of vedanā can undercut all kinds of problematic ways of spinning out or building houses of cards from thinking and stories. In Buddhist psychology, it underpins another simple layer of experience: wanting or not wanting, otherwise known as craving.

Wanting or not wanting can be as simple as a little pulse of wanting, or as strong as desire and greed. Not wanting can be a simple pulse of pulling away or aversion, all the way up from mild irritation to hatred and hostility.

The reason this is important is that between feeling tone and this wanting or not wanting, there is a choice. We can notice it, versus automatically starting to crave, want, or not want. Even when craving has appeared, it's possible again to notice it rather than having it run us, which it does a lot of the time. If I'm seeing my experience through the lens of greed, even my meditation might have the cultivation of greed as its outcome. If I'm seeing my experience through the filter of aversion, I might actually be increasing my aversion and dislike towards something.

Yesterday I talked about recognizing and working with these unhelpful attitudes or proclivities of mind. Today we're going to talk about some of the more helpful attitudes or frames of mind, how they can support practice, and touch on ways of recognizing and perhaps cultivating them.

Neutral Vedanā and Attitudes

First, I want to plug in neutral vedanā: neutral feeling tone, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. This can be a real source of instruction about our frame of mind, about the kind of filter we might bring or the attitude the mind might have when attending to an experience.

With an aversive frame of mind, even a very neutral experience can begin to feel unpleasant. You've probably all experienced this. For example, if I'm doing dishes, there's just water running over my hands, there's contact with the cloth, and contact with the dish. But if I'm resentful, rushed, or stressed, then it becomes an unpleasant experience.

On the other hand, if I am washing a dish for a good friend or with a good friend, and it's a point of generosity or connection, the experience can actually be quite pleasant. That generosity, that wholesome beneficial attitude of mind, shifts our perception of a lot of experience.

My parents are in their 70s and live in a ski town. One of their somewhat younger neighbors absolutely loves snowblowing or shoveling his neighbors' driveways. He'd far rather clear my parents' driveway than his own. You've all felt this, right? It's that generosity or impulse of friendliness and kindness—mettā²—that can infuse an activity and shift the valence of its feeling tone.

Art students or photographers sometimes notice that the simplest subject becomes far more interesting the more they study it and recognize the details. Naturalists notice this too. It could be a very simple plant, but you start noticing all the details of the leaves, the way they interact with the stem, and the habit of the way it grows. It suddenly becomes more interesting and more pleasant.

The breath in meditation can be like this. It can move from neutral, or maybe unpleasant if we have expectations or are having a tricky time breathing, over to very pleasant if we're on a roll and the attention settles and rests on the breath. These shifts in the breath can reflect changes in what is actually happening physically, but many times it's less about the object of our attention and much more about the frame of mind, the attitude of mind, or other mental factors such as interest or steadiness of mind.

Shifting to a Helpful Frame of Mind

Attitude of mind is key. Balance of mind is that clear, undistorted form of mindfulness and awareness, and the attitude or the mind state that we're having can become the object of our attention itself.

A number of people were calling today "St. Metta's Day." I love it that today could be a Metta day. Mettā—kindness, loving-kindness, friendliness—is another attitude of mind that is often intentionally cultivated in this tradition of Buddhism. We notice it, and it becomes a source of wisdom when we begin to notice its absence versus its presence, or the intention behind it versus its arising.

Sometimes, no matter what you do, it seems you can come into a period of meditation with a very unhelpful attitude: irritation, wanting, or sadness. Sadness doesn't have to be a problem, for example, if mindfulness is brought to the experience of sadness, if it doesn't need to be another way, and if we don't necessarily believe all the thoughts that spin up from it. Mindfulness brought to unpleasant states of mind is a completely different experience than mindfulness experienced through them. Mindfulness brought to wanting or not wanting, greed or aversion, transforms them.

Here are some ways that it can be possible to shift from an unhelpful attitude, or frame of mind, to a helpful one:

First, notice the simple knowing itself, the mindfulness itself. Sometimes this is enough. Knowing that you're mindful, being aware that you're aware, allows you to begin to simply be with whatever is arising. If that doesn't seem accessible to you—for some people it feels quite easy, for other people it feels impossible—then simply notice the absence of problems. Thich Nhat Hanh³ called this "noticing the absence of a toothache."

Second, take a step back. If a difficulty feels charged, notice the charge. If possible, bring kindness, compassion, and patience to it. With body pain or knee pain, if you notice the pain with aversion, that will make the pain worse. If you notice the aversion with aversion, that will make the aversion worse. If instead you notice the aversion with kindness, things can start to transform.

Finally, trust the process. Confidence or trust in the process is so helpful. It can be a key condition for emerging from dukkha⁴, from suffering, into joy or into other beautiful states of mind.

Awareness of what is happening is key, and our attitude towards what's happening can shift the experience, no matter what level of experience you're talking about. Simple contact with experience and the parsing of vedanā can be shifted by attitude. Even an unhelpful attitude like despair or anger can be shifted by kindness, patience, and trust in the process.

That was a lot, but just to name that: discerning what conditions and attitudes are helpful for your practice is a learning process. It's helpful to keep in mind that practice benefits from the acceptance or acknowledgement of what's happening, rather than contention. Cultivate a sense of allowing, open interest, and kind regard.

All of the things I just named are beautifully balanced attitudes to bring to meditation and to the craving-based attitudes that you may notice. For the purpose of mindfulness meditation, any object of attention is valid. Get interested. It can be fuel for wisdom, discernment, and awakening.

Thank you. Friends, we have spent another 45 minutes together, and I just want to dedicate our time together for the benefit of all beings. Thank you for your attention. I will stay back for another three or four minutes to answer questions for those of you who put them in. Thank you for your practice.

Q&A

Charles asks: "Is it possible to have rapt interest in neutral vedanā, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant vedanā, without the experience becoming pleasant or unpleasant?"

I would say check that out for yourself. In my own experience, rapt interest is actually a synonym for pīti⁵, which is a synonym for joy or pleasure. So I would say it's possible to be very immersed in an experience and have it be neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but probably not if you are experiencing rapt interest. Again, check it out in your own experience.

Someone asks: "How does frame of mind relate to vedanā?"

I was using the term "frame of mind" as synonymous with attitude, craving, or wholesome states of mind. If you think of it as a layer cake, contact with sensation or contact with an arising vedanā (feeling tone) is the simplest parsing of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The attitude of mind or frame of mind is the response to those things. Sometimes, if we're very mindful, it can be the response to bare sense experience. More frequently, the attitude of mind is more of just the gestalt. The frame of mind is a gestalt, an attitude towards the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, or an attitude towards the attitude. They do interplay with each other, but usually, vedanā is more fundamental.

Leila asks: "What is the relationship between equanimity and neither or neutral vedanā?"

That's a great question. Equanimity, again, is most often a mind state or attitude of mind. We can have extraordinary experiences of pleasant or unpleasant, and still be equanimous about them. And there's a form of embodied equanimity in deeper states of meditation where all experience can be experienced as neither pleasant nor unpleasant. I hope that's helpful.

Lorraine comments: "A shift: bringing mindfulness to worry from blame and hostility."

Yes, good observation, Lorraine. Exactly. It walks it down to a simpler level of experience, and that is part of what this practice can teach us: ways to simply be with our experience without needing to project outwards and to blame or have hostility.

Thank you very much, everyone, for your kind attention, for your questions, and most of all for your practice and your sincerity. We will be back tomorrow. Hope to see you then.