This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxation and Waking Up; Dharmette: Crying; with Matthew Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing and Falling Awake; Dharmette: Crying - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 27, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Hi folks, welcome. It's good to be with you. I guess we'll meditate.

Let's find a posture that balances relaxation and alertness. If you're tired, err on the alert side. If you're ramped up, err on the relaxed side. Gently find your way into your Dharma posture—your body, but also your Dharma heart.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing and Falling Awake

See if there's something especially entangling left over from the day, or the week, or the year. Just appreciate what that is. Maybe you even give it a moment to think through, so long as you don't get more deeply entangled. Maybe it feels important to just feel the presence of whatever is left over as the fingerprint it leaves in your emotional body. Just give your blessing to that affective arousal. Give your blessing to it. We give our blessing to everything so we can put it all down.

Maybe you really notice the end of a few exhalations. Maybe you listen out for the most faint, distant sound in your soundscape. Maybe you don't even know if you're hearing a sound or silence. We look to see what is a skillful way of attending to vitalize the mind and tranquilize our body.

Greed is tension. Hatred, aversion is tension. Self is tension. Duality is tension. Any holding on at all is tension. And so we relax.

You can't exactly relax through more willfulness. We relax the way we exhale. There's a certain measure of faith required to relinquish control, to stop trying to engineer, to stop trying to solve the riddle of our life, of this moment. Instead, to be softened by the moment. Don't look for any foothold.

Just breathing into the space called "me" and "mine." Relaxing.

When we command ourselves to relax, it's just a kind of reiteration of clinging. The way we fall asleep is a kind of relinquishment of willfulness. Maybe it's the same for falling awake.

Your ground is just openness.

Dharmette: Crying

So, thanks folks. I put a link in the chat for any questions. I thought next week, maybe I'll respond to a question or two. So that's there, and it's anonymous if you wish to use it.

A few weeks ago, I was leading a sitting group out of town, and a dear friend and colleague happened to be in the same place at the same time, and she came to the class. Afterwards, we were talking, and I said something like, "Yeah, you know, during the meditation instructions, I actually teared up a little bit." She was just like, "Matthew, you always cry." And then on Sunday, I was finishing an online retreat, and while teaching, I was crying. I was like, "Oh my God, I'm a crier. I cry when I teach. What is the deal?"

So I thought I'd give a talk about crying, the different species of Dharma tears. I've interrogated it myself. I've wondered, what are these tears about? Are they appropriate? I've asked the question: are they a kind of over-disclosure? Are my tears a burden in any way for others, a kind of messiness that others must contend with? Are my tears somehow manipulative, an unconscious attempt to manipulate your emotions? Am I displacing something from my own private suffering, and somehow the emotion in the teacher's seat is a placeholder for other feelings that are alien to me?

Obviously, I can't be sure, but I don't think it's any of that, actually. Beckett said, "My words are my tears." I've read some research on crying—the functions and the triggers of tears. It varies a lot. Generally, crying is associated with unpleasant catalysts, but joy triggers tears too, as we know. Tears have intra-psychic and also interpersonal effects.

On the intra-psychic side, many people report some kind of cathartic relief from crying. The tears are somehow a resolution of emotional disequilibrium. There's some buildup of something, some activation or arousal state. We're tense, and then the process of crying de-escalates that arousal. I almost never cried as a young adult. Once I got a little bit older, I didn't cry as an adolescent or young adult. I still never cry about anything narrowly in my life, generally.

Infants cry, of course. The interpersonal needs are so obvious there; it's a kind of signal, and the tears announce a need. As adults, there may be interpersonal functions of tears too. People cry for many reasons, but apparently, one of the main reasons people cry is a sense of helplessness. A researcher said, "The inability to act behaviorally may be a common element of a whole range of different tears." We can see that sometimes. Sometimes our tears are a kind of plea, like, "I can't do this. I need you." And maybe sometimes our tears are just soothing our sense of powerlessness.

I barely cried, but then I started practicing Dharma, and especially when I would do heart practices—mettā, compassion—there were a lot of tears. I heard some teacher say, I don't remember who, "Practice doesn't truly begin until you cry deeply." There were a lot of threads bound up in those early tears, for some years really. Looking back, I feel like I was grieving the suffering of my past, feeling the suffering of the anger and aversion that had really defined my life. I was grieving the First Noble Truth in a way—the enormity of suffering, the ungovernable quality of it. How long might it take to truly comprehend dukkha¹? A long time. A lot of grieving.

I was also crying in joy, the tears of relief. Like, I cannot believe how beautiful the path is. Just overwhelmed with a certain kind of gratitude. Ajahn Amaro one time at a retreat off-handedly said, "As our path unfolds, there's more laughter and more tearfulness, a kind of weepiness."

Teaching, of course, is not a performance. We enter the Dharma together as children of the Buddha. In teaching and practicing, I've become very sensitive to when my words feel like they're bubbling up from my body and when they don't. When they feel very near, every word I speak, my body is right with it. Even though I prepare a lot and have a careful skeletal structure for most talks, I try never to abandon my body. I try never to leave space between my words and my body. In a sense, to stay with my body feels like a way of not leaving you either.

The tears come at unpredictable times. Sometimes they're some kind of grief. How does one understand anicca², the ungraspability, the changing of all things? How do you understand that and not cry? How can you know anything about the world—about war or oppression or wealth inequality or climate—and not cry sometimes? Sometimes the tears are a kind of public grieving. I feel like sometimes, for a person of my social location and privilege, tears are just more powerful than words in expressing a sense of solidarity.

But most often, the tears come when I sense this very stark distinction, the Buddha's fundamental distinction between suffering and peace. It's almost like one cloth being held up against another of different shades, and the poignancy of that difference between suffering and goodness, suffering and peace. There's a phenomenon in psychology known as "moral elevation," where you witness an act of moral beauty, and it inspires and elevates our own hearts. You see somebody do something really beautiful, and how can we not be lifted up by that? The sense I have is I don't even need to see a hero; just the actual perception of goodness, even in a vague way, in any moment is the experience of moral elevation. It makes me want to be better.

Maybe we can say that the whole of the Dharma is about becoming sensitive to goodness, attuning to it in any moment, taking our cues from it, sensing that in our body, and being lifted up by it. The goodness of letting go, of non-hate, of not trespassing on the hearts of others. The clear, wide openness. Mettā, loving-kindness, is being moved by your own goodness. The love for others just follows effortlessly from that.

So, yeah, a lot of tears. A lot of reasons to be moved, right? But tears are not the last word. In a 1977 interview with James Baldwin in The New York Times, he said, "People can cry much easier than they can change." A rule of psychology for people like me, picked up as kids on the street. I take that to heart too.

So we cry, and our tears direct us back to our body, to an embodied sense of feeling, a sense of the Dharma here. And then we take our cues from that and live well. I offer that for your consideration. I wish you a good week. See you next time.