This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Med: Meditate like a Breathing Mountain; Savoring Flavors of Refuge (2/5) Refuge in Dharma. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Meditate like a Breathing Mountain; Dharmette: Savoring the Flavors of Refuge (2 of 5) Refuge in Dharma - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 27, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, good day. It's so nice to see the messages coming in and get a feel of the Sangha¹ forming together. Greetings.

So, good morning, good day, everyone. We are gathering here to practice together. This week, I've been using a metaphor of sitting like a mountain as a way to ground ourselves. Today, I'll be building upon that metaphor to evoke something else in addition to being grounded here. Join me if you like. I'll offer some guidance at the beginning, and then we'll be sitting together in silence. I'll begin with the sound of the bell.

Here we are, gathering together, practicing Dharma².

Guided Meditation: Meditate like a Breathing Mountain

If you like, you can take a few long, deep breaths as you settle in. Feel that we're practicing in community, coming and arriving here and now in the present moment. Knowing that we have all these fellow practitioners practicing together, maybe we feel uplifted, inspired, and happy. So we arrive here with a measure of happiness in the midst of all that is here in the body, mind, and heart.

Allow mindfulness and heartfulness to come to the foreground.

Feeling and sensing the overall posture of the body. Sensing contact of the body with the floor, our Earth. Underneath, there is a gradual sense of gathering, collecting, composing. Inwardly, releasing the weight of the body towards the Earth. We don't have to do anything; it's natural for this body to settle itself. Allow the earthy body resting on Earth.

The earthy feeling of the body is grounding, grounded, stable. You may feel a sense of rootedness of this body on Earth, sitting like a mountain. You adjust according to how you feel, resting here in the quietude of the mountain within.

You may hear a sound. You may feel a temperature, a smell.

It's natural in the quiet mountain that we can feel and sense the breath, the movements of the breath. The breathing mountain. Within, include in your lived experience the movements that come with the breath, with breathing.

Sitting like an alive, breathing mountain within.

Being curious about this alive mountain within, like a naturalist being curious about the nature of this body, mind, and heart.

In these last few moments of the meditation together, if you like, you might invite an opening to a kind of vast, inclusive field that includes all of us that are practicing together. We're sitting in the refuge of Sangha, and a feeling of gratitude may naturally arise, a connectedness.

And when you open your eyes, imagine yourself being an alive mountain in a range of mountains—a mountain range, alive, vibrant in its own way, each of us. Thank you. Thank you for the practice.

Dharmette: Savoring the Flavors of Refuge (2 of 5) Refuge in Dharma

This week I've been sharing some reflections about refuge. Today I'd like to bring in this notion of refuge in Dharma. Some of you have probably done this before, but I'd like to invite us to feel and savor this sense of refuge in Dharma in our daily life.

The word Dharma has many meanings, and as such, refuge in Dharma can have many different aspects to it. One of the many meanings of Dharma is "teachings"; the Buddha's teachings are called Dharma. Dharma also means "nature," and in our meditation I was pointing or hinting at a sense of nature within. We can say that the Buddha's teachings are related to clearly seeing or knowing the nature of our body, mind, and heart. So in practicing Dharma, we're learning to come to know this nature—the Dharma within ourselves.

So what did the Buddha teach? Some of you know that over the years of this 7 a.m. sit, many lists have been offered. And yes, the Buddha taught a lot. There are huge volumes of the Pali Canon text that gather the teachings of the Buddha and his disciples. And yet, if I had to summarize what the Buddha taught, we can also say that there is a core theme to the teaching. The Buddha was concerned about suffering and the end of suffering. That was what brought him to his own path and also what motivated him to teach after his awakening.

Many of you probably know the shorthand form of this teaching: the Four Noble Truths³. There is suffering, or the Pali term Dukkha⁴; there is the origin or the cause of the suffering; there is a ceasing or a cessation of the suffering; and there is the practice path that leads to the cessation of the suffering. This is the core theme that the Buddha taught. Many of the different lists you've heard, in one way or another, are ways to elaborate the different aspects of the Four Noble Truths.

As I was reflecting about this, I remembered that the very first discourse that the Buddha offered after his awakening to his first five disciples was the Four Noble Truths teaching. And then, towards the last days of his life, as documented in the Parinibbana Sutta⁵, you can find the Four Noble Truths there again.

So that's the core teaching. But how can this teaching, this Dharma, be a refuge for us? How do we understand this and how do we feel into this?

For most of us, if we are fortunate enough to have lived long enough to have experiences of a wider range of being human, living this human life, going through a lot of ups and downs, happiness and distress, and the Eight Worldly Winds⁶ that Gil spoke about a few weeks ago—pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute—all these kinds of swirling opposites of our lives. Sooner or later, we may begin to ask ourselves, "Is this it?" This endless going around from wanting and not wanting, having and not having, good or bad, right or wrong, "I like" and "I don't like." We know at some point, maybe even under the best circumstances of our lives, these kinds of spiraling patterns can persist in small and big ways. It can begin to stir our hearts: What is all of this? What is this about? If the questions are not touched in or answered in some way, it can be very unsettling for us. I felt this kind of stir in my own heart at some point in my life.

Inevitably, we'll begin to seek. We'll also notice that this kind of pattern happens not only on the larger scale of our lives, but it can also happen in micro-moments, moment by moment in our days. If we observe our lives just in a day, closely, you may begin to see that there are some times that you're very comfortable physically, but after a while there is discomfort and pain. Or, "I'm very satisfied and content with things," followed by discontentment. It goes on endlessly throughout the day if we begin to notice this.

So how do we relate to this? Is there a way to meet this? Is there a way that we can live with this without getting caught in the swirling patterns? This is where the Four Noble Truths teaching comes in. It acknowledges the vicissitudes of life, and it points out the root cause—craving—of these vicissitudes. And there is a possibility to be free from being caught by the ups and downs of pain and pleasure. Most importantly, there is a practice path that each of us can engage in that naturally leads to the possibility of being freed from the "caught-up-ness." Being caught up is what is being freed. It's not that we won't have pain or pleasure, but rather how we relate to them becomes different.

When I heard this the first time, boy, it was like a light in the dark night. I had the sense, "Sign me up, I'm in!" Maybe that's one way to experience the refuge in Dharma. I'm in. I'd like to give myself over to this. I want to know this. I want to practice this path.

Taking refuge in Dharma, on one level, just means that we give ourselves over to the teaching. We learn it, we practice it, and we immerse ourselves into it. We let the teachings and the practice come alive in us, so they become real in our lives. The Buddha offered the practices that we can engage in—like all of us have been practicing at this 7 a.m. sit and in many other ways, on retreats and in our daily life—so that we can see that it is possible to break out of this locked-in pattern of reactivity: wanting, not wanting, pushing, pulling, demanding, or avoiding. This is done through gradually getting to know the nature of our mind and heart.

We can get to know the patterns of Dukkha and we can deeply understand how it manifests in big ways or in very subtle ways. We get to know how it arises and how it passes away. So in a way, it's good news that when we're feeling anger, frustration, jealousy, happiness, or feeling depressed, we are not too quick to dismiss them. This is the nature that we are to explore, to understand, to see, to really know what this pattern is. In this exploration, the Dharma, the wisdom, naturally flows. The care, the compassion, naturally flows. And that's the nature of the Dharma. The release of this caught-up-ness, of the swirling, becomes available to us. It's through our curiosity in getting to know this nature deeply.

For me, taking refuge in such a process, a practice, is like a homecoming. I bow to this. I give myself to this as best as I am able, trusting this gradual shifting and changing that may become available to us through our sincere practice.

I'll end this dharmette by inviting you to savor a little: what does it feel for you to be in the refuge of Dharma? Maybe dropping that as an inquiry in your day, and let yourself feel what that feels like for you, what gets evoked.

Thank you for your attention. May our exploration be a source of benefit to all beings. Have a wonderful rest of the day. I'll be there tomorrow with you again.