This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: This Moment Too; Dharmic Reciprocity (4 of 5): Seasons of Now. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: This Moment Too; Dharmette: Dharmic Reciprocity (4 of 5): Seasons of Now - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 24, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: This Moment Too

Good morning, good day, good evening.

Sangha¹, warm greetings to you. It’s nice to be with you again. I love seeing all the warm greetings in the chat and just sensing the much wider group of people practicing together in silence that your chats represent. I am imagining comments about whether you can hear me, which would be great—just to confirm.

Great, thank you to those of you who responded about the sound; I appreciate it. For those of you offering your warm greetings to others, and those of you who are offering or not offering greetings externally, please offer warm greetings internally to yourself.

Perhaps take a slower, longer breath and attune to how this body, this heart, and this day are living within you. Take a moment to adjust your posture, take a sip of tea, and then allow the eyes to soften, perhaps close. Set the intention to show up wholeheartedly in this moment—this time set aside for your own cultivation.

After a second or third slower, deeper breath, allow the breathing to be natural and normal. Notice your surroundings as they contact your body: a sense of air or cloth on your skin, the weight of this body on a cushion or chair. Soften the eyes, the jaw, the tongue. Notice sound and sensation. Bring mindfulness and awareness to the forefront.

Tune in to all of the little sensations, movements, and signals of aliveness in the body. Choose whatever anchor of attention feels best for you today. In mindfulness of breathing, allow the attention to settle inside the experience of the breath—a full flow, the rhythm of breathing.

Notice when there is an in-breath; notice the out-breath. Notice the change in between in this cycle of breathing. Receive the awareness with each in-breath, and offer yourself—your attention—completely to the out-breath. Letting go, relaxing, resting in the still point at the end of the out-breath before allowing the next inhale.

Allow the center of gravity of your attention to move inward and downward within embodied experience.

[Silence]

When you notice thoughts, emotions, or any phenomena—anything at all that pulls the attention away—perhaps smile internally and graciously receive the return of awareness, attuning to the body and the moment.

[Silence]

In the last remaining moments of this meditation together, the invitation is to reflect back on this time, these moments. Reflect appreciatively. Acknowledge any challenges or difficulties with compassion, trusting that this too is part of the season of practice. Such difficulties can be composted—are composted—by the light of awareness and mindfulness, especially when kindness is present.

Then, turn that kind attention to savoring and harvesting any of the good moments: calm or joy, mindful awareness or patience. Search all the corners of the heart and mind, gathering them together and letting them nourish you and your practice by appreciating them.

Then, cast that internal gaze outwards to your fellow practitioners here, near and far—anyone who does or has supported your practice. Send them a pulse of goodwill, of mettā².

Then, opening your heart and sending those good wishes to the others in your life, including yourself too:

May they be safe. May they be happy. May they be healthy. May they be peaceful, at ease, and free.

May the goodness of our practice ripple outwards through our lives to all of the lives we touch and all of the lives they touch. May all beings everywhere know safety, peace, and freedom.

Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Dharmic Reciprocity (4 of 5): Seasons of Now

So, dear Sangha, we have reached the fourth talk in this series of five on Dharmic reciprocity—this unfolding journey of inquiry that I’m exploring with your kind attention and your ideas.

I’m going to open right away with a story. This is a teaching story recorded as having been given by the Buddha. Once upon a time, there were four brothers, sons of a king. Over the years, their father had told them about an almost mythical, hard-to-find tree. In the ancient language, the name roughly translates into something like a "thingumy" tree or a "whatchamacallit" tree³.

They grew curious and decided to go find it for themselves. But because they were busy princes, the charioteer could only take one at a time, a few months apart.

The first one travels off and is taken to a clearing where he is shown this tree. It looks like a gigantic, charred stump, blackened, but with little green specks—little buds—all over it.

Sometime later, the second brother goes. On his journey, he sees what looks like a gigantic banyan tree with big, fresh, green leaves and a huge canopy.

The third brother goes sometime later, and what he sees is a flame of color—red and pink.

The fourth brother goes still later and sees in that clearing strips of bark hanging down, the tree kind of limp and weighted down with these huge fruits.

After they all returned, they had a discussion. One talked about the tree as being a blackened, hulking stump. The next said, "Oh, it's a banyan tree." The next said, "No, it's like a flame or a cooking piece of meat" (an odd description of a tree, I find). The fourth said, "Oh, it's an acacia tree."

They disagreed and got into a mild argument over who was right. At some point, they had a chance to have dinner with their father and explained the disagreement. They asked, "Who's right? What is this thing that you've been telling us about?"

The father smiled and gently chided them. He asked, "Why are you all confused? You didn't check with the charioteer as to what the tree is like in other seasons."

The Buddha told this teaching story to underscore the freeing power of different forms of meditation—different manifestations of it. Equally powerful, insightful, and useful practice can look different in different seasons. This could be due to external conditions, just as the temperature and the light changed the tree’s cycle, or it could be more about an internal cycle without such obvious external conditions.

Our age, health, the amount of concentration or energy available, biological processes, and what is unfolding in our emotional life all play a part. Practice during grief is different than practice during the joy of a new baby. These different internal conditions can be honored, expressed, acknowledged, and recognized.

The encouragement of this story is to honor these natural seasons, cycles, and rhythms. Regardless of the season, meditation practice can be deeply helpful, especially if we open to some of the other "offerings" we have talked about this week: trust (whether borrowed, bright, or verified), wholehearted attention, respect, and a dedication to non-harming.

The word "season" is fortuitous in another way. The ancient language, Pali, has a word for meditation: bhāvanā⁴. It translates as "cultivation"—mental cultivation or internal cultivation. Within each person's process, sometimes it's time to till the soil, sow the seeds, develop capacity, lay the groundwork, and build the skills of mindful awareness over and over again. Other times, it's definitely time to compost—to trust that even what "stinks" could be a cause and condition for more growth later if we attend to it properly, kindly, and appropriately.

Other times, it's the season of growth. This could be a slow, gradual process of maturation over time, or a growth spurt—just like a baby having a growth spurt. Kindly observing with the sunlight of awareness and watering our practice and our relationships with kind attention creates the usefulness and the benefits of the practice over time.

In some seasons, it's time to harvest: to gather the fruits and reap the bounty of the meditation practice, whether they be benefits of insight, confidence, beautiful experiences, or a simple maturation, grounding, and steadiness. In my own experience, this harvest time often ends up cycling right back to one of the other seasons of meditation practice.

To be gracious and to recognize the moment, the season, and the unfolding that you and your practice are in brings much ease, joy, steadiness, and simplicity. Flowing with the season of the practice can be a real gift.

Timeliness also applies to attuning to the amount of effort or acuity that's possible or helpful on a certain day, during a retreat, in a meditation session, or over longer cycles of time. It also applies within a single moment. It's so helpful not to assume, but rather to attune to what is. Comparing ourselves to the future or the past is not so useful. If you do it—and we all do sometimes—kindly recognize it and say, "Okay, this too. This is this moment." That helps us disengage from these potential blockages to the practice.

Attending precisely to this experience, this moment, this now, and letting go into it is an art. For the purpose of mindfulness meditation, the immediate process of letting go into the "now" is helpful because the only time we have is now. It's the only present moment you get—one moment at a time. This sense of timeliness and precision in the practice—connecting and sustaining honestly with the fullness of each moment—can open into a potent kind of timelessness: the flow of the Dharma⁵ of meditation. This can be a beautiful and very nourishing experience.

Mindfulness of this larger scale of time—the unfolding of seasons—is incredibly helpful when contemplating afterwards, as I guide us to do at the end of each of these meditation sessions. It can also be helpful beforehand in developing a broader sense of context before entering a formal period of practice.

And I probably don't need to tell you that all of this applies to relationships. Timing in relationships—reconnecting, recognizing when it's time to reach out, when it's time to support, when it's time to give space—applies to relating to others every bit as much as it applies to relating to ourselves. As we've been exploring all week, these relational and internal applications mirror each other and flow into each other. The timing of when to respond, when to speak, when to stand up, or when to step back—all of these are dimensions of wisdom.

As I was contemplating this morning, I was considering how a sense of timing and wisdom are so closely interrelated. It is about being able to settle back and graciously be with this moment. As Byron Katie⁶ says, "I'm on the side of reality because reality always wins." That doesn't mean we can't be involved or impact what's unfolding, but rather it is an encouragement to have a deeper understanding of the larger flow of cause and effect as it unfolds over time—conditionality.

Offering with a sense of the seasons and the larger ecology is part of what we'll explore tomorrow. Thank you for your kind attention.

Your assignment for tomorrow, should you choose to accept it, is to notice how you relate to timing and the seasons in your life—the season of this autumn, if you're on this part of the planet. You're welcome to add thoughts about that in the chat or to reflect on them silently in this moment as well.

Thank you all. Be well. I will be with you tomorrow.