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Dharmette: Effort & Effortlessness; Guided Meditation: Renouncing the Narrative Impulse - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 12, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Renouncing the Narrative Impulse

Okay, welcome folks. Lovely to see all the names. So let's sit together.

Just maybe touching into the goodness in that chat, this global sangha¹ circle of goodwill.

It's extremely fortunate that one might ever know Dharma love. Extremely.

Just breathe and land in your body. Think whatever thoughts or feel whatever feelings need to be thought or felt in order for you to become available to the majesty of this moment.

Directing attention to the feeling circuits of your body, the building blocks of mood and emotion, a state of affective arousal, often along the front axis of your body: face, throat, chest, belly. But an affective feeling state might cover the entirety of your body. It may be relatively stable or flowing. It may be pleasant or unpleasant, maybe subtle or intense. But feeling encodes a certain kind of motivation, intentionality, moving towards or away. And one of the capacities we cultivate in meditation practice is to let feeling be feeling, and to renounce the ways we narrate feeling. Finding an object for feeling, the ways our longing finds an object, the ways our aversion finds an object, the ways that our body experience kind of blossoms into a feeling-thought loop.

And so here we practice feeling without the consolation of narrative.

Narrating our feeling life, staying oriented to threat and opportunity is a very natural thing to do. It keeps us feeling more secure. So to gently renounce the narrative, the attempt to read the tea leaves of our feeling body feels vulnerable, exposed.

And so it's natural for us to continually act out our hypervigilance: What is this feeling? What does it mean? What do I want? What must I avoid?

But maybe it feels okay to experiment with defenselessness. Knowing feeling is feeling.

To feel feeling, to be mindful of feeling, is to feel feeling. To do this begins to soften the compulsive energies that usually come along with the feeling-narrative cluster, the ways that feeling, when met unconsciously, creates a kind of imperative, a command.

Now, we're not trying to listen for the command, but just feel. In this way, we begin to soften something, begin to open to the possibility that nothing needs to happen right now. That we'd be okay if nothing whatsoever happened.

In this way, we learn to distill out the wisdom of our body from its compulsivity.

This helps us live well.

Dharmette: Effort & Effortlessness

Okay, what's good to practice with you? So, yesterday was confidence and humility. These kind of pairs—the pairs around more assertive qualities of mind and more receptive qualities of mind, and how they work together. So yesterday, confidence and humility, and today, effort and effortlessness.

I was alluding to the kind of effort we make in the sit, right? To actually feel our feelings, to feel feeling life, and in a sense renounce the need to understand everything moment by moment, to narrate it, to know its origins, its trajectory. All of this takes some effort.

And evolutionary pressures have exerted very potent effects. We're animals. It's so easy to forget because I wear a V-neck, but I'm an animal! [Laughter] I'm an animal, you know, and we're not far from chimps. We love predictable things, and pleasure, and security. Nibbana² was not at the top of evolution's to-do list. Peace, happiness—that's just one lever that evolution pulls.

Effort is a major theme in the suttas³ because for animals such as ourselves, greed, hate, and delusion are often the path of least resistance. I joke that my bad habits require precisely zero effort. Zero. Deep growth, in other words, is not always comfortable. It takes energy. We're renouncing less satisfying forms of pleasure for deeper forms of well-being, and that gesture of renunciation takes effort. This is especially true in the training period, which maybe is our entire life, but there may be a trend towards more effortlessness. But especially as we're establishing a practice, it takes a lot of effort.

The Buddha described anger, for example, with this beautiful phrase: "with its honeyed tip and poison root." We know the honey, we know the poison. To forgo the honey takes effort. Our problematic habits always have some honey. Even the most painful mind states, there's some honey, there's some solace. Even in our guilt, even in our self-hatred, there's often a kind of soothing underbelly to it: the honey. But this path is against the stream, and we're leveraging our effort to renounce.

Now, one way that teaching functions is that the teacher says what they need to hear. I don't think my Dharma talks are purely Matthew-directed pep talks, but it'd be good if I listened, you know. A friend of mine, a Dharma teacher, was listening to one of his own talks, and his response in listening to it was like, "Whoa, that guy really sounds like he knows what he's talking about!" [Laughter] To actually take our own best advice involves energy. We need to draw down on a finite pool of our energy in order to listen to ourselves.

So effort is very clear, but we can't just be told to bear down. If what we think of as practice is just bearing down—the effort side of this dialectic—one of the effects is it leads us to overvalue willfulness. Somewhere early in my practice, maybe right as it began, viriya⁴ and sakkāya-diṭṭhi⁵ got tangled together. Viriya—energetic vigor, the effort side; sakkāya-diṭṭhi—self-view, my effort. The very sense of that inner sanctum, the imagined headquarters of my effort, got yoked to the sense of me: some kind of deficient being that needed to fiercely exert his will. My effort and striving was this total tangle of chanda⁶—longing for the Dharma—and conceit, the melodrama of self.

Part of why we have to experiment with this other side of the dialectic of effortlessness is that we must all witness the limits of our willfulness. So the inquiry is: what does effort look like on the other side of your willfulness? Part of the emphasis on effortlessness is to actually perceive the selfing in our efforting. But part of effortlessness is just that we can't always be told to make more effort. "Remember to be mindful, to pay attention, to be present, to let go of cravings, to renounce the honey, to keep choosing the wholesome..." It's too much! I'm tired, I want a nap! That's why I always shudder when I hear some of the mindfulness instructions that feel so effortful. I just know that it's not sustainable. I want to be close to the Dharma right now, I really do, but the only way I can be close is if what I can do is something close to effortless. The only way I can be close is if it doesn't ask a ton of the effort system.

And many of the actual fruits as we train don't require effort to keep up. We develop Dharma habits—traits. And traits are about effortlessness. Just like the traits of greed, hate, and delusion take no effort, we develop good habits. We begin to entrust our Dharma practice to those good habits.

There is a famous piece from William James that says: "So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. [...] It follows first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists." He goes on to say: "The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy."

It's very, very beautiful to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy, right? We say Dharma is about effort, but it's also about making our nervous system our ally. And here we don't go against the stream; we enter the stream. It's kind of strange, the two sides of the way "stream" is used. We're propelled by the momentum of goodness, the effortlessness of awareness. Not marshaling the attention—that takes effort. To marshal the attention, even if it's just subtle, takes effort. But there is an effortless quality of awareness that we have more access to. It doesn't mean we have to burn attentional calories. There's no attentional burn in awareness, and that's not something we control, but we gain more and more access to the deep nourishment of it.

We talk a lot about choice and making choices in Dharma, and mindfulness giving us room to choose these things. But the truth is that making choices is tiring. In my practice, I don't really notice that I exactly make better choices; it's much more like the menu options are better. That takes less effort. The nervous system is an ally when wholesomeness actually becomes more pleasurable than unwholesomeness. Not wholesomeness as some idea, some "should," some "ought"—no, wholesomeness actually becomes more pleasurable.

The Dharma practice is a kind of behavioral modification. Usually, we're motivated by honey, but we actually condition ourselves, train the animal of our body, to learn from the poison. We get very clear on the poison. We do not blunt the experience of the pain of acting out in this way or that way with unconsciousness. The Dharma functions as a behavioral modification program. It begins to create its own natural incentive structure. The pain of being unaligned becomes more poignant, and then letting go feels like less effort than holding on. When love increasingly becomes the default position of the mind, it's hatred rather than love that takes effort. The nervous system becomes our ally rather than our enemy.

I offer this for your consideration, and look forward to being with you tomorrow. Okay folks, thank you.