This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation; Dharmette: Reflection vs. Rumination. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing into Love; Dharmette: Reflection vs. Rumination - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 05, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

So, welcome folks. It's nice to see the names in the chat. My lighting situation is different. I want to thank Rosie for sending this light to me. With no overhead lighting, you can see my face more clearly, which may be a good or not good thing. [Laughter] But we're here to practice, and I'm happy to be together. As always, there's significant love and loss in the chat, so let us practice together.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing into Love

To fully contact our heart, we often need to relax. If you're sleepy or if it's late, you can still relax, but counterbalance the relaxation with a certain kind of—if you're sitting—expression of your spine reaching upwards towards the sky.

Maybe you take some fuller breaths, just kind of filling out your body with your breath.

And we breathe and relax so that we might become more sensitive to love, the kind of love that spreads. The more settled and still we become, the easier the awareness takes the hue of love, of kindness.

No contracts with the moment, just offering your heart-mind up to it.

The posture of our heart is one where, no matter what comes its way—pleasure or pain—we trust that it will become love. Can you put your heart in that posture?

Just breathing into your heart center. A kind of deep willingness to feel our life as it's constellating in this moment, its joy and sorrow.

We sense the pains in our life, the knots in our heart, and just practice bathing them in care, in kindness. Sometimes it's harder to believe from the inside, but you're no different than any other person, and pain is worthy of care, of kindness.

Maybe there's an image, or a word, a phrase that kind of catches the thread of your breathing, just letting your heart soften, be softened by life.

It's almost like our breathing refines out some of the holding and pushing so that love catches the thread of our breath. Maybe it starts to feel natural to intone the words, "May I be well."

May my heart be as wide as the world. May I take refuge in love.

Just abiding in care.

If the attention wanders, meanders away from this theme of love, just forgive. Forgive yourself. Just re-establish yourself in this abiding. Like all the cells of your body become animated by non-violence. The heart becomes aligned because it has no faith in hate or apathy.

Maybe just for this minute, we go all in on love. Don't worry about the details of life right now. Just now, it's okay, in fact, very good, to go all in on love, kindness, compassion.

Even though we know it can never be, it still makes a lot of sense to affirm the wish: May all beings be well. May all beings be safe and protected. May all beings know peace.

Dharmette: Reflection vs. Rumination

So, I have a lot of very reasonable thoughts and a lot of kind of dumb thoughts, but my dumb thoughts generally don't get me into trouble anymore. It's not that I listen to my reasonable thoughts and ignore my dumb thoughts; it's more that I no longer ask my thoughts to do things for my life that thoughts can't do. We ask our thoughts to do so much. When you get down to it, how do they function in our life? In a lot of beautiful ways, but we ask them to do too much. We ask thoughts to game out and protect us from uncertainty, to digest emotionally painful experiences, to make us feel good about ourselves, to provide meaning.

A question arose in a recent sangha meeting where a woman, Sarah, asked, "What's the difference between reflection and rumination?" On the one hand, we can say that conceptual understandings of the Dharma are not themselves liberating. But there is a vital place for contemplation and reflection on the Dharma path. We're often instructed to hold the teachings in mind, to investigate and reflect, to recall the beautiful qualities of the Buddha, to recall our potential for awakening, to recall the karmic reverberations of causing harm. We're asked to reflect on all of this with thinking.

But rumination gives thinking a bad name. Rumination, we might say, is a particular species of thinking that tries to accomplish with words what can only be accomplished with action, wisdom, and letting go. Rumination, defined in the clinical world, is something like repetitive, prolonged, negative, very loopy thinking about oneself, one's feelings, one's current concerns, and often one's upsetting experiences and memories.

The ruminative mind is a little like looking for the last missing puzzle piece, except you're playing chess. Sometimes rumination masquerades as existential seeking. Ruminative questions can sound like Dharma questions, but they're not. It's known to compound suffering, magnifying and prolonging negative moods, interfering with problem-solving, and making people typically less effective in action. It reduces sensitivity to changing conditions and the context of how to adjust.

Often, when we look at it, rumination is trying to use thoughts to make things go away. It often refuses the truth of Dukkha¹, you know, that there is suffering. The ruminative mind is sort of obsessively looking for some Dukkha-free pathway forward, and that just does not exist. The ruminative mind is essentially trying to outsmart the First Noble Truth, but it just keeps spinning because, intuitively, we know we can't outsmart this.

Rumination fails to learn from regret and past disappointment. Our mind might be going over and over the past, but it's not actually extracting wisdom. There's a sense in me that until we've extracted the wisdom from the pain of the past, our mind just will not put it down. Rumination is often a kind of rationalization of inaction. It feels like we're so busy thinking, so hermetically sealed off in the world of thought. The thought is intense and busy, and it feels like we're doing something, like we're getting somewhere, but we're just spinning.

In the ruminative mode, we're not actually facing our problems head-on, but in fact, often avoiding feeling what needs to be felt. Maybe it's some disappointment of how something unfolded, or regret for the ways our own pain overflowed from our own heart and spilled into the lives of others. Maybe rumination is the way we avoid opening to the ambivalence that runs through the center of the world. Maybe our ego has been titillated in some way, and we're trying to smooth the story of self with more words, to treat the wound of self with words. In other words, rumination is really trying to solve what is, at its base, an emotional puzzle with thought. The word itself means chewing, you know, trying to digest suffering with our thoughts. But as I said, thoughts do not function well as digestive enzymes.

Language is so powerful, and it's also limited. Language is kind of possessive and domineering. This is Maggie Nelson²; she writes, "afraid of assertion, always trying to get out of totalizing language, language that rides roughshod over specificity, realizing this is another form of paranoia." The literary critic Barthes³ found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that, quote, "it is language which is assertive, not he." He says it's absurd to try to flee from language's assertive nature by adding to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble. Our stories don't tremble; they assert.

So what are we to do as practitioners? Well, first, Dharma practice is about perceiving the imperfection of thought. It's really vivid on retreat, but we can see it elsewhere. We perceive the building up, the construction, the fabrication of this world of thought that we temporarily inhabit, that we often can't see beyond the horizon of. And then, because we're paying attention, we see that world collapse. When we see that enough with enough vividness, we do not forget the emptiness of thought. We might have to see it a million times, but then we become just slightly estranged from all words.

We digest feeling by feeling. That's what it is to be mindful of feeling—it is to feel. This is really equanimity: the development of this kind of supple relationship with emotionally charged body sensations. My sense is that we must be willing to actually feel our way through something if we're to extract wisdom from pain.

Rumination thrives on avoidance, and mindfulness is an approach. The orientation is one of approach—gently, in our own time, with a lot of support behind us, but an approach. Sometimes that support is love or faith, but in our own time, we approach.

Sometimes the antidote to rumination is just... because it's such quicksand, to even direct attention to it, to try to be mindful of it, to try to let go of it, to work with it in any way, is like a gravitational force field that just keeps pulling us under. And so we do something else. Maybe we move our body. One of my teachers, Shinzen Young, said sometimes equanimity is expressed not by being with something, but by being able to put it down. That's a different species of equanimity. When we allow something to become distant background, that's not avoiding; it's a kind of equanimity. And sometimes, to break the inertia of the mind, we just must act. We do something, anything that moves against the quicksand.

And maybe lastly, I should note spiritual friendship. The ruminative mind often needs company, the stability of another, the stability of their heart. So, reflection, rumination—I offer this for your consideration.

Closing

Okay. I appreciate being with you. Thinking of you, Ela, in the chat. I'll be doing Gil's morning thing at 7:00 a.m. next week, so for those five days, I'll do something on Dharma and interpersonal life, that kind of relational Dharma. And I'll be back next week at this time. It is a certain Wednesday next week, the 11th. I send you all warm wishes. Okay.