This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Immersed in the Breath; Wellsprings of Dharma Well-Being (3 of 5): Happiness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Immersed in the Breath; Dharmette: Dharma Well-Being (3 of 5); Happiness - Dawn Neal

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

Guided Meditation: Immersed in the Breath

Hi everyone. We are taking a moment to notice how it feels to be here, whether you're engaged with the YouTube chat or just listening to my voice. Take a moment to welcome yourself, say hello to your being, whatever state of mind or heart is present for you right now. Noticing whatever is there, beginning to turn inwards.

Noticing your posture. You're balanced over your hip points. If you need to make any adjustments, take that last sip of tea before settling into meditation. Softening the eyes, perhaps closing them, and inviting a couple of longer, slower breaths. Deeper. And letting go on the exhale. Letting go of any excess stress, anything it took to get here this morning. Letting yourself rest and relax here, alert.

Now, allowing the breathing to return to normal. Letting your belly be soft, your face, your forehead, the muscles to open and relax there. Letting the eyes be soft, the tongue. Turning your gaze inward, a friendly greeting to all that is there.

Noticing whatever is in your room—ambient sound, the contact of your skin against cloth or air. The feeling of being weighted, rooted, supported by the chair or cushion, whatever is beneath you. Supported by this time together, the sense of connection. Attuning to the sensations of aliveness inside this body. The gentle motion of breathing at the belly or chest. Maybe the broader field of sensations of aliveness, vibration in the body, whatever form vitality takes in this body today. And then resting. Resting in that.

I'll give brief instructions on mindfulness of breathing, but feel free to adapt them to wherever your practice is today. Allowing your attention to be supported by the rhythm, the wave of the in-breath and the out-breath. Noticing all the details, staying in contact with the full experience of breathing. The beginning of the in-breath, the middle, the fullness at the top of the in-breath. And then taking pleasure in the release of the exhale, relaxing. Noticing that still point at the end of the exhale and resting in it for a moment before the in-breath naturally emerges again.

Allowing yourself to be nourished by this life's breath, by this moment. We'll practice in silence for a while.

[Silence]

And in the last remaining moment of this meditation, consider turning the internal gaze back over this period of practice together with appreciation. Whatever unfolded, these moments of cultivating connection with your experience, of building the capacity for attention, awareness, being with the flow of the present moment.

And then turning that internal gaze outward, towards the others in your life, the others in this meditation session as well, included. And taking a moment to wish them well. May they be happy, safe from inner and outer harm, peaceful, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, wisdom, and clarity in our lives, all of the lives we touch, and all of the lives they touch, rippling outwards and outwards. May all beings know the joy and happiness of safety, peace, and freedom.

Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Dharma Well-Being (3 of 5); Happiness

So, dear Sangha¹, here we are on Wednesday. At least those of us on this continent, it's Wednesday.

I offer a few reflections on the theme of the week, which is cultivating qualities helpful for inner and interpersonal well-being, but especially focused on our practice and our internal lives. As I've mentioned, sometimes the Buddha would tell stories about difficult times in society, myths, often stories of the past. In each case, he would recommend ways of making the Dharma, of making meditation practice our home, our homeland, a place of peace no matter what's happening outside.

In one of these teachings, he was talking to his most dedicated practitioners about ways that practitioners can cultivate particular Dharmic kinds of flourishing, including spiritual empowerment or power, inner beauty, true beauty, happiness, heart wealth, and freedom. Yesterday we covered true beauty or virtue, and today is happiness. So I'm happy to be teaching a little bit about Dharmic happiness.

I'll start out with a little personal anecdote. This is from my childhood. As a little kid, I loved two things: horses and reading. Active and not so active. And I was a big reader. I would get completely, totally immersed in books on these long road trips my family took in our like old Buick station wagon, the kind with the wood grain on the side. My parents would stop at some beautiful spot or a rest stop, a vista, and they would get out of the car and be looking at this beautiful view. And then they'd realize, "Where's Dawn?" And they'd have to go back and sort of specifically jostle me awake, so to speak. I was quite awake, but I was completely immersed. It was my happy place.

I say this because the kind of happiness the Buddha talks about is a form of complete absorption in the moment, complete absorption in meditation. And that kind of absorption is available at one level or another to all of us. This kind of collected mind, this complete immersion in what is happening. So that was my first taste of a collected mind when I was, I don't know, six or whatever.

The Buddha describes this kind of happiness of being absorbed in meditation as being a skillful pleasure, wholesome pleasure. A pleasure not to be feared, but to be embraced. And this is the happiness of Samādhi², collectedness, a sense of being gathered together, unified. What some people would call "concentrated," though I don't really like that word. Samagga³ is the Pali word for unity, and it's used both to describe harmonious group deliberation, conversation, cooperation, and unifying in meditation. And this is not an accident; there's no coincidence here, I don't think. Somehow integrating, harmonizing with ourselves brings a kind of joy interpersonally and personally. That shared presence.

Oh, this doesn't mean huffing and puffing to get to a certain kind of meditative state, to get concentrated. Instead, it's softening into the moment, softening into embracing, being held by embodied experience. In fact, the Buddha learned that the opposite—being hard on himself, striving, practicing austerities and self-denial—didn't work so well.

There's a story he tells from prior to his Awakening about practicing this kind of self-denial, austerity practice. It was actually common in the time of the Buddha. He had practiced denying himself so much, being so assiduous, so dedicated, that eventually he was on the brink of starvation and too weak to move. He ended up kind of lying in the grass by the side of the road and people mistook him for dead, so they were just walking on by. But he was conscious, barely.

Along came, so the story goes, a woman, Sujātā⁴, going to the day's work in the fields. She had with her some rice porridge or rice gruel. I'm not entirely certain exactly what it was, but some sort of liquid based on rice that was more sustaining than just milk. She saw him and she could tell that he was just barely alive. Out of kindness, out of compassion, she knelt beside him and she cradled his head in her hands and fed him her own meal for the day, sip by sip. Eventually nourished, he came to just a little bit. I imagine he sat up, he thanked her, somehow they parted ways.

So nourished, the Buddha sat in meditation again that day. And perhaps it was the kindness, the compassion, the connection. Perhaps it was the food—I suspect it was both—but his meditation was infused with this nourishment. And that kind of positive association we sometimes have with feeling good in the moment after a good meal, after sustaining ourselves. He had this memory from when he was a young boy. In this memory, he's sitting in the shade of a rose apple tree at his parents' estate and looking out over the fields. It's harvest time in the fields and he's comfortable, seeing his father and the other people working these fields. He falls into this very natural, very present state of being absorbed, completely attuned with the moment, content, at ease.

As this memory arose, a kind of wisdom voice came: "This is pleasure." And this is a pleasure that's not to be feared, not to be denied, not to be pushed away, but instead to be cultivated. That it's onward leading. And it was this moment the Buddha describes where he went away from the practices of self-denial, of striving too hard, and into the Middle Way. A way of embracing meditative pleasure and contentment as an onward leading, this sort of a natural absorption and presence, to be a hallmark, a signal that things are going well in the practice right now.

So allowing your practice to be infused with this kind of kindness, natural presence, contentment, easeful, completely natural absorption is a form of meditative happiness and is a form of onward leading meditative growth.

So I want to name here, in a technical sense, absorption can refer to very specific kind of rarified meditative states. I've talked about that in the past on this program; you can look back, I believe it was last year. This morning we're going to talk more about the broader forms of happiness available by meditation and Samādhi, well short of any concentration state. This experience of beginning to gather together, this coherence, begins to invite joy, happiness, ease, contentment even early on in practice.

The trick is to notice moments of it, notice glimmers of it and appreciate it without grabbing onto it. Grabbing onto it makes it go away. So that noticing, initially feeling good in meditation, being absorbed in meditation, can start to feel like being carried along on a stream, momentum. And it can be helpful to notice or sort of compare it to reference points from other parts of your life. So immersion, wholehearted engagement can happen when riding a horse, jogging, swimming, playing an instrument, even programming on a computer. It can even be available sometimes to short order cooks. If you look at a really skilled short order cook, they're just totally in the flow. Everything's happening and they're meeting it as it's happening. Nothing is extra, no distractions. This creates a sense of self-sustaining momentum—what Csikszentmihalyi⁵ called "flow"—and it's not so different than momentum in meditation practice.

And it can take a little while to get there. For example, in riding a horse, which I did as a kid and a teenager, there could be a lot of kind of bouncy effort initially. It can take real mindfulness to begin to connect and find a rhythm. But then when the rhythm emerges, there's this effortlessness, this unification of horse and rider. The Buddha likened skill in Samādhi to a mind like a well-trained Thoroughbred.

And as this happens, even glimpses of it, tiny glimpses, bring up joy. This rhythm can show up as an ease with connecting to attention and then sustaining it. Putting your hand on a cat and stroking it is an example Gil [Fronsdal] sometimes uses. That sustaining, staying with the moment is stroking the cat. And as this happens, the mind and body can begin to purr. It can bring along happiness, joy, a kind of thrill. Even a simple kind of joy of being present. At times the heart lighting up with confidence or appreciation. It can also feel like the glow after a good laugh, or soften into contentment like dipping into perfectly temperatured water on a warm day. This softens down even to serenity, a sense that just to be alive is enough. Just to be alive is enough.

So to say that experiences of meditative happiness, joy, flow are available to each of us in different ways—it can be as individual as your fingerprint. So there's no need to look for it like something you've read or heard about. Just trust. Trust glimpses of contentment, ease, joy, happiness whenever it arises in meditation and in life. It's onward leading and it's nourishing to a practice.

So thank you all very much for listening to my little rap about meditative happiness. I'll offer the reference for this in the chat at the very end. Meanwhile, notice little glimpses of happiness in your day or in your practice, moments of ease or contentment, and appreciate them. And I'll see you tomorrow to talk about heart wealth. Thank you for your kind attention.