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Gratitude for the Four Elements - Jim Podolske

The following talk was given by Jim Podolske at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 28, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Gratitude for the Four Elements

Good evening, everyone. Welcome. How is the sound? Is it okay? Okay, yeah. My name is Jim Podolske. I'm filling in for Diana this week while she's away.

Exactly one year ago, I gave a talk here the Monday after Thanksgiving, and so here I am again a year later, also here to talk about Thanksgiving. Last year, I spent about a week reflecting on what things I'm thankful for, what things I'm grateful for. I came up with lists: first and foremost, my parents who brought me into being, who raised me, fed me, educated me, and loved me. The rest of my family: my sisters and my brother, my aunt and grandparents, uncles and aunts. My community: our neighbors, people we went to church with, my friends, people I went to school with, my schoolmates. My educators, my teachers: I started school when I was three in preschool and I ended when I finished graduate school at age 29. So I spent a lot of time in formal education settings and had a lot of teachers. Some I absolutely loved, some were kind of so-so, but all of them I felt had my best interest at heart and inspired me to keep going, to learn about science and math, and many other things.

Who else? People I knew from school, fellow students. And then I came to IMC in the late 90s. I guess in January it'll be 26 years since I started coming here. And so, the teachers that I had here—Gil and many other teachers—who just offered the Dharma open-handed for so many years for me. And the friends that I made here, people that I consider my Dharma brothers and Dharma sisters, or Dharma siblings, who I spent time with in kalyāṇa-mitta¹ groups discussing the Dharma, or just on one-on-one discussions, having meals, going on retreats. It's been a very rich community for me to be part of.

So those were some of the people that I'm thankful for; I probably didn't remember all of them. And then also being thankful for my health, both my physical health and my mental health. I've mostly been pretty healthy and when I haven't, I've had good medical care.

I think it's important, certainly for me but I think for everyone, to do some conscious reflection on who and what they're grateful for. The mind has a tendency—it's sometimes said the mind is like velcro for the negative and like teflon for the positive. So for things like gratitude, it may take some actual conscious effort to bring that forth, to keep that in your awareness.

When I started thinking about what I was going to talk about tonight, I thought, well, I could cover that same ground. I'm sure there's other people that I haven't acknowledged or things that I haven't acknowledged. Institutions: I've worked for NASA now for over 42 years, so my gratitude to NASA. The universities I've been in.

So about a week ago, I was laying in bed doing mindfulness meditation. We call it lying meditation, which means that I'm in a prone position, not that I'm lying to myself about whether I'm doing meditation. [Laughter] And I thought, well, I wonder what will come up. Actually, I was laying there and I was paying attention to my breath, and I thought, you know, I don't know that I've ever felt gratitude for the breath. It's there all the time. It's one of the main things that supports this body being alive. I've certainly been aware of it. In Buddhism and in many other traditions or practices, the breath is one of the central elements, things that we pay attention to. It can be used for mindfulness, developing an ability to really pay attention to what's happening in the present moment. It can be used for soothing the mind and the body. Particularly long, slow out-breaths can bring some sense of relaxation and ease. It can energize the body; that's one of the things that I do in the morning is use the breath to start waking up my mind and waking up my body, getting it ready to launch out into the day. You can use the breath for concentration or for unification of the mind, just staying with the breath continuously, not going off to other phenomena like you might in mindfulness. I know there's yogic practices of using the breath. I'm not an expert on this at all, but I know that if you breathe in one of the nostrils it tends to warm the body, and if you breathe in the other nostril it tends to cool the body. I don't understand all of that, but people have been using the breath for years for cultivating states that are helpful.

And yet, I think there's something that I was missing out by looking at the breath simply as a tool, simply as this impersonal phenomenon. It's not really a thing, right? It's not like you can point at the breath as something different than this body. It's a process of the body. And so over the last week or so, I've been reflecting on how I can treat the breath as something other than just a tool, something other than some impersonal phenomenon.

I start reminding myself the breath is what keeps me alive. That's pretty important. That's a pretty important function. And although it's not the only way to bring gratitude to it, it's realizing that that may not always be the case. There's people that have respiratory issues where the breath is difficult. People that use CPAP machines to help them get enough air when they sleep at night so that the body can function properly. People who have had either illnesses or damage to their lungs. My late grandfather used to work in a mining town and he specifically made the decision not to work in the mine. He was a blacksmith so he could repair equipment, and he didn't make as much as he would have if he had gone into the mine. But he also knew that working in the mine, you would get mineral dust in your lungs that basically would lead to an early death.

So being thankful for our breath while it's still pretty easy, and we actually most of the time just ignore it, is one of the most accessible things that we can cultivate this gratitude for.

There's the process of breathing, and then—excuse me for a little discontinuity in my thoughts—there's people that use CPAP machines for breathing. I know people that rely on having machines that either enhance the amount of oxygen that they breathe or actually breathe pure oxygen. At the beginning of the pandemic, you heard a lot about ventilators that people would use, machines that would help them breathe. And even in the middle of the 20th century, there were these machines called iron lungs that people would be in that would help them breathe if they couldn't breathe on their own. So I think appreciating it and learning to enjoy it while you can.

In addition to thinking about the body breathing, I think of what it is that we breathe: the air that we breathe. Here in the Bay Area, our air quality is quite good. I just looked at a website called PurpleAir before I came here, and there's a little bit of particulate in the atmosphere right now, probably from fireplaces this time of the year, but mostly it's pretty good. Now, of course, if you were here in some summers while the wildfires are going, you see that the air quality really decreased. There were a lot of particulates, a lot of soot. You were advised to wear N95 masks and maybe stay indoors. Fortunately, here that wasn't the case for very long, for too many days, but it did make me appreciate more those days when the air is clear and safe to breathe. I've also worked in parts of the world where that's definitely not the case. I've worked in South Korea, I've worked in Houston, I've worked in other places where air quality is definitely an issue. So I'm thankful for the air.

Where my reflections went from there is, in ancient India at the time of the Buddha, everything was thought of as being made up of four elements. There was the air element, the water element, the earth element, and the fire element. So I started to think, what about those other three? I started to think about the water element. As a physical chemist, we don't usually scientifically describe the world anymore with those four elements, but I think they're worth looking at. They're qualities of matter, but it gave me a framework to think about what I could be grateful for, what I could be thankful for.

So in addition to the breath and air, water—that's pretty prominent as a human being. I looked it up on the web today: the average human being is about 60% water. For some people, it's as low as 45% and some it's as high as 75%, but probably most of us are somewhere around 60% water. So we're intricately tied to the hydrological cycle, intricately tied to taking in water hopefully every day in sufficient quantity to make the body work. To aid digestion, to get rid of metabolic waste materials, to keep our eyes clear of dust and other things. Sweating to help keep our body at the right temperature. And of course, every breath we take that we exhale, there's water going out. We're continually breathing out water. You'd see that most noticeably if you've ever lived in a cold environment, where you breathe out on a cold winter day and you can just see this big cloud of condensed water. So we're a flowing process. This body is a flowing processor of water.

Seeing that, acknowledging it, appreciating it, being grateful for it, are all possible. And just like air, water is something we can just take for granted. Here on the Peninsula, you turn on the tap and there's water. That's not true in a lot of parts of the world. Fresh drinking water in some ways is a gift. It's a gift to us from all of the people that work to make that possible. Over the last five years, we've had, I think, maybe three years in a row of drought, and so that was kind of a time when I think people's awareness of water increased. They started to say, "Oh yeah, it's starting to get scarce. We may not be able to do everything that we're used to with water. We may not be able to water our lawns and wash our cars, maybe even wash our bodies as much as we're used to." I know some restaurants took it as far as not giving you water with your meal unless you asked for it. That was just a wake-up call. We had a wet winter last winter, and it's expected that we'll have an El Niño winter, so it's amazing just as waters become more plentiful, how that awareness of water is kind of diminished for me. It's like, okay, well now it's over, now we're back to there being plenty. But that may not always be the case. So I think now is the time to be grateful. Now is the time to be aware. Now is the time to be appreciative.

Moving on from water, the next element is the Earth element. And that's what supports us. The earth is supporting us. It's also holding us here. One of the things that we don't escape for a millisecond is the gravitational field of the earth. It's holding us in place. It's holding all these chairs in place. We set things on tables and desks and everything else and just assume they'll stay there, but the Earth supplies gravity. Gravity we take for granted. Quite honestly, if there was no gravity, there'd be no atmosphere; all the air would just float off into space.

One of the aspects of the earth is it lets us know which way is up right—the gravitational field. It also feeds us. Plants use the minerals from the earth to grow. They hold it in place. The earth holds the water. If you eat a plant-based diet, the earth supplies everything directly. If you're an omnivore or a carnivore, at least some of the animals that you eat are fed by plants that grow on the earth.

And then the final element that I'll talk about tonight is what's called the fire element, and that might be exemplified by the Sun: that which produces light and heat. I know when I wake up in the morning, I look forward to sitting at my work area because I have a southern-facing window, and the sun coming in really does something for my mood. It certainly helps heat up the house. The circadian rhythms of the body get tied to that, and almost all of the energy that we use has either currently or in the past come from the sun. Either the solar energy that we might be using, or wind energy that's coming from the sun driving the winds, or from fossil fuels that took sunlight and stored it for millions of years.

So being grateful for the sun, being grateful for heat. If you've ever been really cold—and I grew up in Wisconsin, and I've worked in Alaska and Northern Sweden in the winter—I know what it's like to be cold. It's very easy to be grateful for heat when you walk inside a building and feel that.

So that's just a brief listing of the reflections that I had on those four elements and being grateful for them. I'm not a historian and I'm not a mythologist, but I have read history and mythology that cultures current and past have recognized the importance of these things—of air, of water, of the earth, and of the sun—and have had a sense of reverence for them. Reverence for the air, reverence for the water, reverence for the earth, reverence for the sun, recognizing that our lives depend on all of those four things. We may not want to think about it; we may think that our water comes out of the tap, our food comes from Whole Foods or Safeway, our heat comes from PG&E. And all of those are partly true, right?

But I think there's also some level of seeing clearly or honestly if we really see how tied we are to those four elements, how they're integral to us being alive, and that we're not separate from them. In some ways, breathing is a communal activity. I'm breathing the same air as you are, and as you are, and as you are. There aren't some boundaries; it's something that we share with each other. So having some reverence for the air and the water and the earth, and treating them well so that we can continue living the kind of lives we're living now.

I'm not suggesting that we worship those as though they are some deity, but having reverence for them, having respect for them, doing what we can to support them. How can we change what we're doing that leads to better quality air, better quality water, better quality soil and earth? And this is a little bit more far-fetched, but what do we do altering the sunlight that comes and hits the earth? We've actually now reached the point where human activity can affect how much of the energy of the sun gets trapped in the radiative balance of the earth. So how do we recognize that and work with it in a way that will be beneficial for all?

So those are some of my thoughts about Thanksgiving this year, of thanking the natural world. Not just that it supports us, but that we are part of it, that we are not separate from the natural world, and how do we respect it and care for it? I leave you with those questions to reflect on. Thank you. And if there's any questions or comments, Martha has a microphone.

Q&A

Speaker 1: It's more of a comment. Is that on? Yeah. When you were talking about air, water, fire, and the earth, I thought of what you brought up later, which is that feeling of connection. That there's something... and also the other thing, you know, people you were thankful for, that I thought of feeling connected to everyone and the elements. What a warm feeling that is, and respect for all those things also being a warm feeling. So that's all.

Jim Podolske: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, they all do connect us, right? Breathing, the water, the Earth, Sun. Thank you.

Speaker 2: I'm grateful for emotions, joy and sorrow, the whole gamut of human emotions. Yeah, thank you. Your talk is wonderful. Thank you.

Jim Podolske: Okay, well, if there's no other questions, thank you for coming tonight. I'll stay up here afterwards if you want to talk individually, and I hope things go well for you. Thank you.