This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Release into the Moment; Dharma Well-being (5 of 5) Freedom. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Release into the Moment; Dharmette: Dharma Well-being (5 of 5) Freedom - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 19, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Release into the Moment

Good morning, everyone. Warm welcome, Happy Friday. It is good to see everyone in the chat. I am happy to be with you this morning for our fifth of five days.

I am delighted to see all the names in the chat and all the greetings. I want to extend an invitation to report back: Did you notice any glimpses or glimmers of the heart qualities yesterday in your life? Any glimpses of kindness, compassion, appreciation, joy, gratitude, or equanimity? Just a quick homework report for those of you who want to do it. To be transparent, part of why we are doing this is to light each other up a little bit. Notice what it is like in your heart.

Warm greetings to those of you still pouring in. Notice in your own mind and your own heart over the past day if you experienced glimpses of those heart qualities we talked about yesterday. I see mettā greetings, warm greetings, joy in singing—I resonate with that—and increased awareness. Wonderful. Visiting a ninety-eight-year-old elder, beloved elder. All different kinds of joy, love, and care.

Thank you for those; they are meaningful. Those I don't have time to read now, I will read later. But as you are settling in, noticing in your own heart how it feels to read the greetings and observations of others, and how it feels to look back in your own heart at your day.

As you are taking—maybe as I am about to do—that last sip of tea before settling into the meditation, allow that to nourish you. Nourish your heart.

Taking a deep, intentional breath or two, beginning to bring the attention inward. Bringing a heartful, attuned quality to greeting yourself with the same warmth and friendliness you would greet an old soulmate or friend. Allowing a little extra relaxation on the out-breath.

Letting go into the moment, and letting the breath be natural. Inviting all of your body, all of your heart, all of your mind to be present here. Resting on the sensations of breathing. Perhaps on the sensations of the attuned heart of the body.

Making a gentle, loving determination that for these moments we are to be present here. This moment, now. Nowhere else the mind needs to be. Attending to the details of sensation: ambient sound, temperature, weight or lightness of the body. Aliveness in this body.

Each in-breath its own journey. With each out-breath, releasing anything extra. Letting go. Inviting experience to flow through each breath, each moment. Any flits of thought just to move through like birds floating across an empty sky. Being nourished, resting in the waves of the breath.

[Silence]

In the final few minutes of this meditation, the invitation is to let go into the stillness. The stillness at the end of the out-breath. The stillness between sounds in the room. The stillness between sensations. The gap between thoughts. To let go. Rest in quietude.

[Silence]

As we bring this meditation to a close, drinking in any moments of peacefulness, calm, or settledness. Appreciating and savoring them. Savoring any of the heart qualities, warmth, or attunement that emerged. Moments of engagement or immersion. Appreciating them all.

Appreciating with kindness even any moments of difficulty; those too can be onward leading.

Gathering all of this up, casting your intentions outwards to the others meditating here, and the others in your life. Making the determination that all beings your life touches, including yourself, may benefit from this practice. That this practice may ripple outward and bring more joy, nourishment, and freedom into their lives. And all of the lives they touch. Rippling outwards and outwards.

May all beings be free. Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Dharma Well-being (5 of 5) Freedom

Good morning again, everyone. Warm greetings to all of you, especially those who slipped in a few minutes late. I am delighted to be back with you for this fifth of five teachings on inner and interpersonal wellsprings of Dharma well-being.

This week's theme is on cultivating these qualities. The Buddha often gave teachings to all kinds of people, but occasionally he would give teachings about how to practice when things weren't going so great in the outer world. He gave the teaching of coming home to the practice, staying home in the practice, and making the practice our field of influence and our refuge.

In this teaching that I am describing this week, he talked about five wellsprings of well-being that get cultivated this way: an inner sense of spiritual empowerment, true inner beauty, happiness, inner wealth or heart wealth, and this last one that we are covering today: Freedom.

Freedom, or liberation, is freedom from any trace of mental affliction. Any trace of greed, hatred, delusion, or ignorance in the heart and mind. No more fuel for that internal, optional kind of suffering. It is freedom from causing intentional harm. Any experience of freedom of the heart, metabolized carefully, can be onward leading in the path towards Awakening. It can make for a much happier life.

In this teaching, the Buddha talks about two ways the heart becomes free. A fully awakened person has experienced both of these. The first is freedom by wisdom, freedom by knowledge—deep wisdom and knowledge. The second is freedom by meditative depth, or heart awakening. The Pali for these are paññā-vimutti¹ (Wisdom Awakening) and ceto-vimutti² (Heart Awakening). Now, the second can be temporary or permanent. In any case, it is powerful and nourishing. It resets an internal set point or reference point for the rest of life. This is possible.

I talked about empowerment the first day—spiritual power—and the Buddha really considered this freedom, this liberation of the heart and mind, to be the most consequential form of power. All the good qualities we have covered this week help contribute to it.

To unpack this topic a little more, I have one more story from the time of the Buddha. This is a story of two good friends, Upatissa and Kolita³. In Ancient India, they were born within a day or two to families in neighboring villages, and the families had already been friends. It is that beautiful thing many of you have experienced if you have kids, where your kids' friends become friends, or your parents were friends when you were born, so you have been friends with this person your whole life. It is a special kind of friendship.

They grew up together, went off riding horses together, swimming in creeks, and going to forests. They were both, in their own spheres and their own villages, very popular and well-liked.

They went to a festival one day as young men, maybe adolescents, together. It was a three-day festival. The first day was wonderful, and they had a lot of fun—folk music, entertainment, plays, and tricks. They signed up for the second and the third day. But the second day, they were both less into it. Then that night, each of them in their own beds had difficult nights of tossing and turning.

It turns out that when they went back that third day, each was much more withdrawn and pensive. Upatissa was having these thoughts: Well, death is universal. Why are we spending our time doing this when we could be finding a way to completely end suffering? To know the truth of life before we're gone? Classic young person wisdom, young person seeking.

He notices that his friend is also pensive and asks, "We are withdrawn, what's up with you?" And wouldn't you know, his friend Kolita said the same thing. They realized, "Oh, we are of the same mind. We should leave these villages and go off and find a good teacher. Find a way to really understand the meaning of life, break through our suffering, and discover freedom."

And so they did. As the story goes, around the time they did this was around the time that the Buddha-to-be was getting married, still in his household life. It was years before the Buddha left and became a teacher, and later brought his son into the order.

So they wandered around finding teachers and were not satisfied with any of them. Eventually, they found one teacher who was brilliant with knowledge, skepticism, and analysis. He really taught them to critically look at what they were learning—empirically look at it—but he didn't have any of the deeper teachings. They learned a lot from him but were becoming dissatisfied, realizing that they really hadn't come to a full understanding.

So they went on and searched out still other teachers. Then one day, Upatissa is off asking for his food for the day in the neighborhood when he encounters a fully awakened man.

He was immediately struck by this person's presence. The calm, the stillness that radiated from him, the sense of peace. After they had both gotten their meal, he bowed down to him and said, "Who is your teacher? What have you learned? You've clearly learned something, and I want to learn it."

This monk was a little bit shy, and maybe a little bit skeptical of the newcomer's intentions—people often challenged themselves and each other in those days. But he told him the teachings of the Buddha in brief, just four stanzas. Then he told him who his teacher was and where his teacher was. Upon hearing those four stanzas, something in Upatissa's heart just opened up and he knew: This is it. This is the way. There was a deeper understanding, a significant awakening in him.

He went and found his friend and told him. They went to see the Buddha and joined a cohort of incoming practitioners. Because they had been so dedicated for years, even decades, and had such keen powers of mental analysis, understanding, and meditation, both of them became fully awakened pretty quickly. The Buddha, recognizing their capacity, made them his two primary assistants of the order.

That was an honor, but it was also a lot of work. You got to run the Sangha, handle a lot of administrative and interpersonal stuff, and they also helped him teach. These two men were Sāriputta and Mahāmoggallāna⁴. Those of you who are familiar with the ancient teachings are familiar with them already.

I am telling this story in part because of the importance of spiritual friendship as you are mucking along on the path, and in part because these two people exemplify two different expressions of Liberation. While they both woke up both ways—through wisdom and through meditative depth—Sāriputta was much more of a wisdom type. He became a great systematizer, a lot of details. He was kind of like that day's version of a software engineer or an information architect: highly logical and rational.

Whereas Mahāmoggallāna was extraordinarily skilled in meditative subtlety—subtlety of the inner workings of the mind, of meditative depth, of different states. Sāriputta tended to bring people into the first beginnings of Awakening, the first levels of it. Mahāmoggallāna tended to train the more advanced practitioners in depth.

Those are a couple of examples of the expression of freedom. I think you can get a sense of their different personalities. There are others. Dhammadinnā⁵ in the Buddha's time was eloquent, unsurpassed in her eloquence among the women, foremost in teaching, especially of lay people. Her Dharma sister, Paṭācārā⁶, exemplified and modeled this inner beauty that just shone from her, and this dedication to virtue. She became the foremost instructor of new nuns and had quite a following.

So it can take many forms of expression, this Awakening. I have heard stories of Awakened people in the Sagaing Hills of Burma from colleagues and friends of mine. One exemplifies utter peace and just radiates it to the point where it is palpable even walking into his space. Another was happy and light and joyful. All of these are dimensions of the free heart.

So again, this Liberation is freedom from being impacted by affliction, from the life-denying forces that can come to us through society, our own inner more primitive urges, or our upbringing. It is freedom to respond with clarity, without reactivity, to whatever life brings. Not to make things worse for self, others, or anyone. It is freedom to be okay, to flourish in any circumstances at all.

To recap, this kind of freedom is what the Buddha considered the most potent form of power. This week, all of these other good qualities we have covered feed into that, nourish that capacity for the heart to free itself. Each glimpse, metabolized, can be onward leading. All of them together represent a kind of efficacy in life, a healthy spiritual life spoon.

Whether you are cultivating spiritual empowerment, healthy desire, energy, heart qualities, engagement, willpower, virtue, samādhi⁷, or moments of freedom—it is all onward leading. Each contributes to joy, connection, self-sufficiency, and peace.

So your assignment over the weekend, should you choose to take it, is to notice moments in your life when your heart feels free, not entangled. Metabolize it. Each moment, be nourished by it. And if you like, share it with your friends.

Thank you so much for your kind attention. It has been an absolute joy being with you this week. May all beings be free.