This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Intimacy with Breath; Dharmette: Reflections on Sexuality w Matthew Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Intimacy with Breathing; Dharmette: Reflections on Sexuality - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 12, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Intimacy with Breathing

Okay folks, so welcome. It's nice seeing names. Let's practice together. I'll find my way. All right, let's meditate.

That familiar breath that's also so fresh.

The visual imagery of breathing is often prominent. We're feeling our breath, but the subtle visual images, even with our eyes closed, are like guiding the attention to the sensations of breathing.

And what if we were surprised that at the end of the in-breath, an out-breath followed, rather than somehow miraculously another in-breath?

How do we give ourselves to thinner and thinner slices of time?

A sense of intimacy with the constellation of sensations that compose our breathing.

We just let our breathing awaken the senses. This memory of putting too much kind of spicy mustard on a spring roll and it just blows out the nasal cavity or something—just wide open. That's kind of how the breath can be, just for all the senses, even if you're tired, even if it's the end of a long day.

We elevate peace above all else. Sometimes we abide in peace, sometimes we're making peace—making peace with the loose ends of the day or the life. Just don't be seduced by fake refuge.

We forgive our minds for all the patrolling that they do and all the foraging—foraging in the realm of thoughts. We reconnect with this moment, with Dharma. Let the breath breathe life into our attention.

Just make your home in your breath.

It's very soothing when our world of experience gets simple and small. Very soothing when all the arrows in our being start to line up in one direction. And just to be alive is enough, just to breathe together is enough.

If there's something especially sticky in the heart-mind, something that repeatedly pulls your attention, maybe it's good to move into the felt experience of that stickiness, the sense of emotional activation in our body that makes something feel urgent or draws our obsessional tendencies out. And maybe we linger with that affective, emotional arousal until it settles a bit. And then maybe it feels inviting to come back to the rhythm of breathing.

Dharmette: Reflections on Sexuality

Okay, so it's good to sit with you. I thought to just carry on with the theme that I've been developing at the morning sits, and that's—if you haven't been—Dharma and interpersonal life. And I thought to say something about the theme of sexuality, a neglected Dharma topic.

And as I was putting together thoughts about this, it struck me as: are the Buddhists going to make this depressing too? And by the Buddhists, I mean me. Even sex, depressing? [Laughter] A little bit, maybe. Maybe a little bit. It's a complicated issue, and I speak about it knowing the range of experiences, meaning, beauty, and harm—all of that. What's empowering for one person is very much not that for another. So, it's an important caveat on all of this, but I felt like, okay, I can say something about this.

To love is to risk, and to desire is sometimes to feel destabilized. I read somewhere—I don't remember where—but it was some psychoanalytic writer, and they said something like, for Freud, God was merely a way of gratifying sexual desire. For Jung, sexuality was a way of expressing a longing for God, for the sacred. And I think they're both kind of right.

So this is a zone where lay life, which may or may not include sexual relationships, really must chart its own course. It's not easy to translate the monastic teachings to this realm. There are some basic principles, of course, that are incredibly important—harmlessness being obvious—but how to actually enrich and refine sexual life, that's an open question.

I have genuine sympathy for the impulse to say it's too much, it's too complicated. Sexual desire acts like a magnet that pulls too many other corrosive forces to the surface that are painful. And even sex itself, which might be wonderful, sexual desire moment by moment, generally speaking, is not pleasant. A monastic many years ago, I heard him say something characterizing the blessings of the monastic life. He referred to the peacefulness of celibacy. We might say many things about sex, but "peaceful" would not be one of them.

Leonard Cohen, in the last album of his life, singing really about his death, said, "You don't need a lawyer, I'm not making a claim. You don't need to surrender, I'm not taking aim. I don't need a lover, no, no, no, the wretched beast is tame. I don't need a lover, so blow out the flame. The wretched beast is tame." And then there's a kind of openness to death. And how do we think about that? Is that something to celebrate?

Joseph Goldstein told this famous story of Sayadaw U Pandita¹, the Burmese monk and beloved teacher, who was talking about sense desire, sense craving. He goes on for 10 minutes in Burmese, and then the translator renders the last 10 minutes with four words: "Lust cracks the brain." Lust cracks the brain. And I agree with that wholeheartedly, but I don't think that's the only thing lust does.

So yes, one must consciously consent to some measure of suffering in this realm. A dukkha-free² path is a fantasy. There's a really fantastic short story from Lydia Davis, a story after a brief, very intense love affair. The narrator is trying to decide if it was, quote, "worth it." So he's pricing everything out, everything he loved about her, the ecstatic description of passion and tenderness and care. And then it ends, the breakup. And Davis writes this character, the narrator, "I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you, three feet away, lying in a box, an open box in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, 'All right, I'll take it. I'll buy it.' That's what it is, because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn't that you can say afterwards, 'The pleasure was greater than the pain,' and that's why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can't measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, why doesn't that pain make you say, 'I won't do it again,' when the pain is so bad that you have to say that? But you don't."

But we don't. And so here we are. And can we make the best go of it? So what forms of well-being are on offer? Even if we know... not that, of course, celibacy guarantees its own species of suffering. Can we consent to the suffering involved in this whole realm and then look? What are the possibilities? What kind of forms of well-being are on offer here? What forms of spiritual growth are on offer? There are whole traditions about that that I don't really know, a different scene in the insight world.

But what are the possibilities of applying attention to emotional and physical intimacy? Attention, that kind of most basic currency of a human life. We know the power of attention when applied to our breathing, or an emotion, or mettā³, right? We know the power of that. You do that with a certain kind of fidelity just to the breathing, and a lot can happen.

What can happen with attention applied in the realm of sexual connection? What can a kind of trained, open attention do in the context of intimacy? How intuitive and embodied and undefended might one become? You know, how completely might the self melt in this realm?

I was talking to a Dharma friend about this, and they wondered, as a kind of parallel, would a deeply enlightened person feel grief? And they concluded, their conjecture was, "Yeah, but there would be a freedom in it." And that feels right to me. And then they asked, might that also be the case with sexual desire? Is that inherently like bondage of some sort, or is it possible to experience that in a very free way? Is it possible to be free and experience—redeem, really redeem desire from the clutches of compulsivity?

Jezelle Jones, a couples therapist and mindfulness person, a friend, she defined intimacy as "the willingness and ability to see and be seen." The willingness and the ability to see and be seen. And in this realm where we're seeing and being seen in a very deep way, the question maybe is, how unashamed might one become? How unencumbered by a certain kind of self-consciousness might one become? How unencumbered by ideas that create static when one asks the question, "What do I want?" How unencumbered might we be?

Sexuality is, you know, we do things together, right? But sexuality may be like the deepest way of doing something together. Maybe raising a child is like that, I don't know, but of doing something together, of coordinating desire and need and generosity. This is a zone where the more supple we get with our roles, the more fluid we can be around power—yielding or asserting, the yes and no that I spoke about this morning. The more supple we can be in that, the more fluidity there is in the whole realm. In other words, the sense of self must be flexible for us to be truly available for delight and connection.

This is also the realm where there can be a very deep relief from the confines of duality that is on offer here. Where do I end and they begin? What is my desire or horror? You know, it gets very murky. And that sense of being confined behind one's eyes becomes more and more porous naturally.

Spiritual approaches to sexuality tend to emphasize the tenderness and the love and the warmth and the non-duality or something like this. But it's also a realm of other kinds of energies. It's a realm where sometimes very usefully, anger is diffused or forgiveness offered or knots untangled somehow better than words might ever do. You know, "I'm sorry," but how do we say that with our bodies?

So in this realm, we must learn to tolerate some measure of disorientation. We're playing with very potent forces. That's why the precepts around sexual misconduct and harm and all of that are so important. This is why we must be careful with it, because this sexual energy can be like a magnet that draws lots of other forces to the surface.

This is again the analyst Stephen Mitchell from a book, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. Mitchell writes, "Erotic passion destabilizes one's sense of self. When we find someone intensely arousing who makes possible unfamiliar experiences of ourselves and an otherness we find captivating, we're drawn into disorientation. We tend to want to control these experiences and the others who inspire them. Sustaining romance requires a struggle to resist the inevitable efforts to draw moving but unsettling experiences under our control. Our journey in the otherness of the other often surprises us with unknown features of ourselves."

So, wisdom, love... maybe sometimes it's just as simple as pleasure, but it also can be wisdom and love. I offer this for your consideration, and please pick up whatever is useful and leave the rest behind.

Okay folks, thank you.