This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation w/ M Brensilver; Dharmette - Themes from group: mortality, grief, anxiety, love. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Relax into Alertness; Dharmette: Crowdsourced Themes - Death, Grief, Anxiety, Love - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 10, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Relax into Alertness

Welcome. Welcome to you all. I invited folks to share some Dharma themes in the chat for our talk today. I appreciate everything that’s been said; I’ll find something in there and try to speak to it. But first, let’s settle in.

Beginning by sensing the presence of other beings—the goodwill in this network we call Sangha¹.

Just checking into the energy in your body and mind. Are you tired? Wired? Both? Settled? Bright? Just incline yourself toward balance.

We relax what we can relax, but we relax so that we know more, sense more, and feel more. There is more brightness. We relax, in other words, so that we can be genuinely alert.

We’re not practicing hypervigilance, but there is a quality of poise in the attention such that if some phenomenon sprung up and became prominent, we would appreciate it quickly. We’re cultivating an attention that selects its object and magnifies it. We soak into it: the breathing, sound, mental images, body sensations, emotional sensations.

As we are alert and oriented, we develop a kind of fidelity to the object. We might call this samadhi² or concentration, even if only very briefly—as if the attention soaks into the object and the rest of the world remains in the background.

It can feel almost neglectful not to tend to the landscape of threat and opportunity in every moment. It can feel neglectful not to think and worry, or not to give thought its due. But that’s just habit. For right now, it’s not neglectful to be very, very simple.

We practice putting down our life—the busyness that is samsara³. There is always something to worry about, something at stake, something vulnerable. Part of our practice is opening to all of that, and another part is giving our heart rest so that we can meet all of that lovingly.

Don’t miss the goodness that’s already here. Don’t miss that which you don’t need to engineer or strive toward.

Now, making the object of attention the mind itself—the affective feeling, the tonal qualities of our mind. Notice the energies and flavors: brightness or dullness, agitation or tranquility, grasping, aversion, or peace. Just to notice that is enough. Awareness does its own work without you.

If there’s some measure of stability, maybe stability itself becomes the object. It becomes more grounded, more open.

Dharmette: Crowdsourced Themes - Death, Grief, Anxiety, Love

Thank you, everyone. I saw themes in the chat regarding grief, mortality, contemplating one's death, anxiety, our relation to the world, and equanimity. I think we can talk about those.

I don’t recall who said it—perhaps someone who has worked in nursing with hospice patients—but they said something like: "The degree of one's non-enlightenment is correlated with the degree of fear around death." I don’t know what I think about that, exactly. I thought I was pretty free, but who knows?

I remember once cleaning the windows in the community room at the Insight Retreat Center⁴. If you've been in that room, it has a very high ceiling. I was on the roof, and I really didn't know what I was doing. My job that day was to clean the skylights. Some were accessible, but some were unprotected with a clear thirty-foot drop. I was out there cleaning those windows, considering just how unenlightened I am, because I was definitely not ready to die on an IRC work day! [Laughter] That is a visceral dimension; perhaps our bodies are always in some state of resistance to death.

I recently read a piece by the nurse who cared for Ram Dass⁵ at the end of his life. She described how, as the end was coming, he tried to take a breath and couldn't get enough air. After all these decades of teaching so beautifully about letting go, the nurse described seeing a touch of fear on his face. How do we know we're ready to let go of this life? I don’t know that we can ever know, but it is a worthy object of contemplation for many reasons.

One reason is to clarify what is actually important in our lives—to sweep away what we know will be absolutely meaningless at the end. There is a lot that seems important now that really won't be then. It's humbling to see that gap. On a truly hard day, the "stuff" of life offers absolutely no consolation. So, it's worth looking at what does offer genuine consolation. We practice clearing away the unimportant.

Perhaps the question of death doesn't clarify everything; we shouldn't necessarily take the counsel of death 100% at face value. There may be things that won't feel meaningful then but do feel meaningful now, and that’s okay. But we want to live in the shadow of finitude. Part of the function of death contemplation is to "pre-grieve" loss. Loss for which the heart is utterly unprepared is always more gruesome. In a sense, we're trying to open to finitude while we still have time, allowing our hearts to acclimatize to the truth of anicca⁶—uncertainty and impermanence. No matter how prepared we think we are, anicca is startling.

But we can make progress. I remember Michelle McDonald⁷ sharing a story about a revered Burmese Sayadaw⁸ who was in his nineties. When asked how he practiced, he said, "When I breathe in, I say: I know I will die. When I breathe out, I say: I know everyone else will die." He added, "And so, when I do, I will not be surprised."

We contemplate death because anxiety is unimaginable without a future. Anxiety is directed toward the ungovernable. The notion of "futurelessness" leaves no room for anxiety. In some sense, death is the intersection of all anxieties. The threat to our life is ultimately what gives fear its power. To become equanimous, even a little bit, with the reality of mortality is a way to cut through anxiety. We know how the story ends. There is a "wisdom of no escape." When there is no drama about the ending, what does that do to the heart?

Perhaps we see how that can free us up. But in the process of freeing ourselves, we grieve. Before the "Three Characteristics"—dukkha⁹, anicca, and anatta¹⁰—become freeing, we grieve them. That grief is the growing pains of the Dharma. For many, that is how it feels to grow. It is onward-leading. We get to practice with small losses or deep, brutal losses to find ways of bearing it—letting our hearts thaw out and wake up. This is the law; this is the lawful unfolding. We appreciate the law and try to live in accord with that understanding.

This is also important when beginning to open to the enormity of suffering in the world. From the perspective of my "small life," it's too much. When I was a kid, my parents told me my favorite phrase was "too much." It was my way of saying "dukkha." It still feels that way sometimes.

Even though my life was protected and privileged for a long time, I intuitively knew about anicca. Now, as I contemplate global suffering—the ascendancy of greed, hatred, and delusion in politics, or the climate crisis—it needs a broader view. My life is too small a portal to understand it all. Of course, we stay tactical. As Thich Nhat Hanh¹¹ said, "Compassion is a verb." We act now. There is a lot we can do.

But to truly open to the fullness of what the Buddha was talking about—to truly give up the utopian fantasy—takes a lot of strength. If my view isn't vast, the world overruns my heart. There is something about contemplating our own death that reminds us the moral horizon is beyond the scope of our individual lives.

Let us plant good seeds. I offer that for your consideration. I will be away on retreat next week, but I'll be back on the 23rd. I will not rely on you for topics then; I will come with a prepared heart.

Thank you all.