This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Gift of Attention; The Five Faculties (3 of 5): Complete Presence. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: The Gift of Attention; Dharmette: The Five Faculties (3 of 5); Complete Presence - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 17, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Welcome everyone. Today we'll take a little look at the middle faculty of these five faculties, Sati¹ or mindfulness. And as I promised yesterday, because this is familiar to so many people, I'm going to try not to say some of the same things that we might usually say, particularly to a group like this with some experience and some familiarity with mindfulness. Gil sometimes talks about mindfulness, Sati, in the context of these five faculties as complete presence. And to sort of take that as a theme for the dharmette and also for this guided meditation, complete presence seems to me to be a gift we receive, kind of a patrimony or an inheritance. Something like the other faculties, deep within, that we can access, that we can cultivate without reaching outside, without accomplishing something, but rather something we can cultivate by bringing our attention to it. Our ability, our capacity to be here now, our capacity for complete presence is a gift that, in addition to receiving, we can give.

In the first instance, we can give the gift of attention, as I like to think of it, to ourselves or to our experience, really paying attention to our experience, showing up for ourselves in this fundamental way. And the more we cultivate it, the more we feel comfortable giving our gift, giving the same gift of attention to others. So that's our theme for the guided: the gift of attention.

Guided Meditation: The Gift of Attention

Let's get comfortable in meditation posture. For me, that always means kind of resetting the body. This is part of the settling into the meditation we talked about yesterday, bringing some attention to the energy that we bring to practice and seeking a balance of energy. We might notice that when we seek to calibrate our energy to the present moment, the mind sometimes doesn't have a clue what that means. And so we look to the body to help us understand what's the appropriate balance. What does self-care mean right now? Oh, it means letting the shoulders relax a bit, noticing any tension around the eyes, bringing attention to the jaw. Each of us holds tension in different places, and yet many of us hold the weight of the world on our shoulders and the cares of the day in our faces, our eyes, our jaws, in our heads. So just softening around these areas, wherever we are aware of tension in the body. Our objective isn't to make it go away, but to show up, give the gift of attention to our bodily experience.

We can do this throughout the meditation practice. Think of giving a gift to our experience, this precious gift of attention, this ability to direct our attention, to hold our attention, to provide places where our attention can come to rest, is a wonderful and unique gift that comes along with human birth.

So maybe resting our attention in the breathing. And how in the breathing? Well, just in the sensations of breathing. We don't even have to think of it as the breath, which is adding a concept to our experience, but just noticing the rise and fall of the abdomen, the expansion and easing off of the chest, the gentle rise and fall of the shoulders. Just noticing the sensations of the in-breath, just this breath in here, and then the out-breath.

This gift of attention is one we give to our experience without adding anything onto it, just being with the first, the primary experience that comes up to us. We rest, giving the gift of attention to the body just as it is, just these sensations of bodily movement, perhaps of tension or holding or bracing in the body, tingling, throbbing, alertness, potential, whatever we feel in the body, just accepting body as body. And accepting is part of the gift. It doesn't mean we like it, doesn't mean it's pleasant. Maybe accepting it is really just acknowledging as it is what's coming up.

And today, in giving this gift of attention, we can make use of the fact that the mind will get caught up in things, snagged in things, get kind of concentrated or wrapped around things—usually thoughts of the future, thoughts of the past, thoughts of other people, thoughts of ourselves, the usual courses of the mind. And before we feel that we've gotten lost or wandered off or are doing it wrong, we could just notice some of the maybe bodily sensations or emotional currents that are related to those thoughts, bringing our attention slowly, gently back to the present. These things that come up in meditation, they want our attention: the body's sensations, the feelings of whatever they happen to be today—inadequacy, joy, loss, exhilaration. We can just notice these things and give them that little touch of attention. We don't have to think about them. We can just sort of go, "Oh, that's what's here now."

So instead of feeling, when we find that the mind's wandered off into the day coming toward us or the day past, these creations of mind, we can bring our attention, tug it back to the center of things, but also along the way give attention to how it feels to be here. Now, one way we can give this gift of attention is by, when we notice the mind's caught up in things or wandered off, is to not hurry. We're going to do this a lot in this sit and in our future sitting. We don't have to hurry. We don't have to jerk the mind back to here and now. In fact, we can notice what it feels like to come back to here and now. Feel the balance and ease and simplicity and slowness of being here now, in contrast to being there then. And today we can think of this as giving a gift of attention to ourselves, to our experience, just noticing what's it like to be here now.

So as we near the end of this sit, let's reflect a little on this gift-giving capacity. And one gift we can provide ourselves is a gift that's an absence of judgment. If we didn't get lost in thought, we wouldn't have the opportunity to come back here. And each time we return to give ourselves, give our experience the gift of our attention, the capacity to give to ourselves and to others, it needs exercise. It needs to be strengthened, and this is how we do it.

We give ourselves an important gift when each time we return, we don't kick ourselves for having found a need to return from wherever the mind got tangled up. No, it's an opportunity to give, and it's an opportunity to strengthen the capacity to give. May we benefit from this growing capacity to give in our lives, and may other beings also benefit, not just from the gifts but from our capacity to give.

May all beings be safe, secure. May all beings receive the gift of presence. May all beings be free from suffering.

Dharmette: The Five Faculties (3 of 5); Complete Presence

Good day and welcome again to everyone. Turning now from a guided meditation focused on the gift of attention, the gift we give ourselves and the strengthening of our capacity to give, we can take a look at the third faculty of these five faculties, that which is frequently characterized as mindfulness, Sati, and a faculty that Gil sometimes refers to in this context of the five faculties as complete presence.

What might complete presence be, and how might it be related to this idea of giving? In the classic instructions that support this practice, many of you probably know mindfulness is never defined. Rather, we are given instructions on how to cultivate and strengthen this capacity to be present. So it's not something we acquire, it's something we do. It's not something that we achieve and hold and make our own. It's a way we meet experience over and over again. And this I tried to point to even in the guided, you know, the return to here and now, the return to presence. It's the return that's important. And the returning, I said yesterday, it's not like we hang on with our fingernails as much as we celebrate this ability to keep returning. And in part, I don't know if celebration is the right word, but maybe just the enjoyment of the ability to return is that each time we return, and each time we enjoy it—enjoy its balance, enjoy the simplicity, enjoy the slow pace of it, the lack of entanglement, the absence of attachment—each time we enjoy that, we strengthen it. So we should enjoy it fully. And the instructions we get, the encouragement we have from the tradition is to enjoy it fully, to cultivate that enjoyment of being here, being present.

So in the instructions that undergird the practice of mindfulness, the cultivation of mindful attention or complete presence is the idea that we meet the experience of the body as body, that we meet the experience of bodily sensations and mental sensations as bodily and mental sensations, that we meet the mind and mind states as mind states. And finally, in the fourth foundation, that we meet patterns of experience as they are, as patterns of experience. What does that mean exactly? Body as body, Vedanā² as Vedanā, or feeling tone as feeling tone, mind as mind, Dhammas³ as Dhammas, or patterns of thought, patterns of mind as patterns of mind. It means that we're not adding anything. We're just aware of, for example—and this is why we come back again and again to the breathing—we're not even labeling it is breathing. We're just noticing this movement of the body, this in and out, this up and down, this expansion and contraction as it is, without adding opinions about it being different or what it's going to be like in two breaths from now, regretting the way we took those breaths three breaths ago. They weren't as good as they should have been. All of that is adding to our experience. And the reason we begin with the breath in the body is it's easier there to not get all entangled in what it means or how it might be better or different, because it's just easier to accept as it is.

Each time we move forward, it gets a little bit more challenging to take the feeling tone, Vedanā, we could say the quality of sensations in body and mind, whether they're pleasant or unpleasant, that's a little harder to take without adding something. If something we feel hurts or something feels good, the mind tends to add extra, add more, like, "Oh, I want more of that," and, "Oh, I don't want as much of that." And the being completely present with that means being there without going down those roads, but just noticing, "Oh, this is pleasant, this isn't pleasant." This is in the first instance, that is, as we first, as experience first arises and we meet it with attention, we just notice, observe, feel, know with that effortless knowing that's free what's going on. Similarly with mind states, we notice, "Oh, the mind seems foggy," or, "The mind seems clear." We don't add anything to it. It's not that it shouldn't be foggy or it shouldn't be clear, or shouldn't be foggy and it's nice that it's clear. We just notice, "Oh, it's like this now." And this is a gift that we give ourselves, the gift to just be here without adding a bunch of stuff onto it.

Yet—I say yet because we have a choice about what to add onto it. We can meet experience with a mind that's open, or we can meet experience with a mind that's already judging how things should be, should have been, might be, might have been, etc. And finally, with patterns of experience as patterns of experience, we can meet our experience noticing, "Oh, is there a lot of self-doubt creeping in here?" That would be the fifth hindrance, to name it. Is there a lot of doubt happening? Is that part of the attitude with which experience is being met? Or is there, "Oh, confidence and some energy and some presence and maybe some stillness or collectedness with which experience is being met?" Just noticing, neither has to be labeled good or bad. Just the gift of saying, "Oh, it's like this now."

That's what we mean by complete presence and why it's useful to characterize Sati as complete presence. It's a way of saying, maybe getting beyond the label of mindfulness, which has become almost universally used to characterize a wide range of experience, and to be very specific about that, it's a gift of attention that, in fact, or in part, is a gift because it doesn't add anything.

So having said this, I also want to add this, which is maybe when we hear the phrase "complete presence," we might understandably think that what's being referred to is perfect presence. Maybe that's just the way our minds go. I don't know about you all, 206 of you, so I can only speak for myself, but there's a perfectionist streak that runs through a fair amount of my life. If not focused on perfection, certainly on accomplishment, achievement, and all that has been useful actually in certain realms of life, doesn't need to be pushed away or excluded. But there can be a recognition that this is a path that moves in a different direction, this path of practice where perfect isn't the goal. Maybe complete presence can be a useful aspiration. In fact, I think it is. And yet that doesn't mean that we need to achieve, accomplish, strive for perfect presence. Instead, what we seek to cultivate is sufficient presence, sufficient mindfulness. Sufficient for what? Sufficient to develop a mind that's free enough of all that extra that it can see clearly.

So this can help ratchet down from complete presence as an unattainable goal to something that we can do right here, right now, in this moment, which is be sufficiently present. You may have some distractions going on. There may be kids—I saw somebody with canines and kitties. There may be other things going on. There may be a meeting coming up in 21 minutes. So presence may not be complete or perfect, but it can be sufficient to be here now with enough absence of extra being added on that it can help us see clearly. And a phrase I love that I think I may have made up, so I'm going to trademark it. I'm kidding. It's freely given, take it and use it. I hope it can help serve your practice. It came up in a conversation with an old friend, yet another perfectionist I know, I've known many, many just like me, that this person said, for this person, they said, "For me, only perfect is good enough." And I said, "Well, what if good enough is perfect?"

So you might keep that in mind. In this practice, it's not about getting perfect. It's about developing sufficient mindfulness, sufficient collectedness of mind, as we'll talk about tomorrow, sufficient samadhi, so that we can see sufficiently clearly. Anyway, this helps reduce the striving, the orientation toward accomplishment, the orientation toward making achievements that are mine. It frees us up a little bit to just be here now without all that stuff added in.

And on that, I think we have time for a story. I was going to try to leave a few minutes for a story. I think this is a story from Gil's book, A Monastery Within. It just came to me in the meditation. It may not be, it may be another story, but I'm going to put it in the framework of Gil's book, A Monastery Within. And if you don't know the book, it's a book of very short stories that all work with the idea of creating within ourselves these capacities, among others, that we've been talking about this week, creating a space of seclusion and safety and refuge from which we can, or in which we can cultivate the mind states that allow us to meet the world skillfully, the world of experience, the world around us.

So the story goes something like this, if I remember it well, which is one day a person, a practitioner like ourselves, shows up at the monastery and has a meeting with the abbess. And they say to the abbess, the person who leads the monastery and provides counsel to the practitioners in the monastery, this person says to the abbess, "So if I practice really diligently, if I practice hard, if I sit daily, if I read all the right books, how long will it take me to awaken?" And the Abbot says, "Probably about 10 years." And the person says, "10 years? I don't have 10 years. I'm used to accomplishing things and getting ahead. What if my practice is perfect? What if I make my practice perfect? I have perfect mindfulness, perfect samadhi, perfect wisdom. You know, I think I can really make that happen because I'm good at that kind of thing, making things perfect. Then how long will it take me to awaken?" And the abbess says, "In that case, it'll take you 20 years." And the person says, "Wait, wait, why? What if I really redouble my efforts like I've done in other realms of life and I work really hard, and I don't just sit once a day, I sit twice a day and I go on long retreats and I read even more and I find all the best teachers, then how long will it take me?" And the Abba says, "In that case, it'll take you 30 years."

You probably knew that punchline was coming. The point here is that we don't need to develop a perfect practice. In fact, that orientation towards perfect is counterproductive. And who knows if it will take longer, because the practice eventually teaches us this. It teaches us that we don't have to be perfect. It teaches us that one way we can be with ourselves in complete presence, one way we can provide this gift of attention, this mindful attention to ourselves, is to let go of all that that gets in our way. Whatever it is, for others it's different things, but for many of us, this kind of striving approach can really hamper our efforts to develop a practice that supports us in life, can really diminish our ability to give, because it diminishes our ability to cultivate this capacity to give this gift of attention to ourselves, to our experience.

And with just a minute remaining on the clock, I want to point out that in the chat feed that's scrolling along, somebody, a few minutes ago, makes mention of the concept of "good enough parenting" that was developed by Donald Winnicott⁴. And this is a sort of obscure reference to many of us, although Winnicott's work, if you know anything about him, it absolutely is universally referred to in many ways. The importance of play in childhood development, for example, is something that develops with Donald Winnicott's work. I just mention it because this idea of good enough parenting is very closely related to this, and it's one of many ways that psychotherapeutic approaches can support our practice and vice versa. Because the same idea is that striving for perfection in parenting can be counterproductive, not only for the parent but also for the child. That in our practice, we need imperfection. We need the road to be bumpy. We need the mind to wander off so that it can be drawn back. We learn something really important about this practice: that it's not about perfection, it's about meeting our experience with sufficient wisdom so that we can be free.

So enough said for today. I appreciate everybody being here. I hope the rest of your day goes well, and we'll meet again tomorrow, same time, same place, where we'll take up the fourth of these faculties, which Gil characterizes as wholeness, others say unification or collectedness. And this is particularly true in the meditation practice, but I think it's a quality of experience and a capacity that really helps us in meeting the world we live in. So take care everyone, till tomorrow. Bye.