This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Med: Arriving, being available and aligning; Practice Skills 1 – Aligning our intentions. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Arriving, being available and aligning; Dharmette: Practice Skills (1 of 5) Aligning our intentions - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Arriving, being available and aligning

We'll give a sound of a bell to begin. Welcome, friends. You may be a little surprised that I'm here this week. Nikki Mirghafori¹, who was supposed to teach this week, was not feeling very well, so I got a call yesterday and I decided to step in to be with you all. This is 7 a.m. meditation and practice.

What I had in mind was maybe somewhat simple, keeping our practice alive. This week, I thought we might explicitly bring in some ways of practicing that may enrich and enliven our practice. That's a hope; it doesn't have to, but you can join me however you are with a possibility to open to some of the perspectives if they are new to you. Then I'll talk about a set of practice skills in the dharmette to elaborate a little more in terms of how we practice.

This morning I wanted to start with a practice method that I have been practicing with for the last few years, and this is called the "arriving sequence." I occasionally have shared this in some of the daylongs and 7 a.m. sessions, but this week I'd like to exclusively name how we practice with this. This is something that I learned from one of my teachers, Phillip Moffitt². It has really been quite meaningful to me, and I'm hoping that this will be meaningful to you as well. I will be expanding from this arriving sequence that we start today to include some different elements of it as we go along for the rest of the week.

So maybe you can join me in this meditation by finding a posture, finding a space where you can sit quietly for about 45 minutes together. Maybe gently close your eyes, if that's part of your practice.

Arriving. This arriving sequence begins with arriving. Arriving here and now. Just this sense of arriving may already evoke some momentary sense of presence, mindful presence. Maybe the sense of a body sitting here or lying down here.

Arriving as if you're getting ready to enter the temple within. Gentling and feeling and sensing how it feels to be arriving here and now. Maybe there is a sense of energy settling down through the torso all the way down to the ground. Mindfulness becomes more and more front and center. And maybe heartfulness becomes more and more front and center. There is no rush to go somewhere else. We are arriving here and now.

What's the felt sense of arriving for you? Maybe you feel something in the body. Maybe you feel something with the breath. Maybe now you can hear the sound and the silence in between.

Allow arriving to be felt, sensed, and known with the body, with the heart. There is no need to figure it out. At some point, you may recognize that you've arrived. You're now here more fully, becoming available to the lived experience in this arriving sequence. Being available arises out of having arrived here and now.

What's the felt sense of becoming available for you? Maybe a kind of softening, relaxing of the body. Maybe the mind and heart is more receptive. Maybe there is a sense of opening, like the opening of the palms. Being available to the lived experience that's happening right now, whether it's pleasant, unpleasant, or everything in between.

Available to life. Letting go or putting down the demands and agendas. Showing up for this.

Maybe by being available, we can notice how we may be caught up in the stories, in the thinking, that we become unavailable to life. Without blaming, judging, criticizing, we simply are available to notice, to know, that the moment of caught up is happening. Feeling and sensing, the felt sense of being available is like this. You may know it through the body, through the heart.

From this open, receptive, relaxed field of availability and presence, we move to align our heart and mind with the deepest intentions. Aligning. Without jumping into concepts or ideas, can you feel aligned through the body? Aligning with what's wholesome. Aligning with something that's aspirational. You may feel something in the heart space. Aligning feels like this.

The torso may straighten up ever so slightly. You may feel a kind of uplift, and you may also feel a kind of grounding in the body and grounding in the heart. The heart can feel at ease when we are aligned with our deepest intentions, even when we may not know what they are just yet. The heart may know, and the body may have an expression.

And for me, aligning evokes a sense of taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma³, and Sangha⁴. Aligning my heart and mind with the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. My body can feel at ease with this. Stay connected with the felt sense. Words are not necessary.

Being aligned and available can feel so grounding. There may be a cellular level of relaxation, a deeper sense of ease in the heart. We're practicing in a wholesome field. The body may feel more alive.

It's a field of being aligned and available. It is a safe field with our body, heart, and mind, and trust. The totality of our being can soften into this field.

There may be emotional resonance bubbling up. A kind of tenderness, maybe sweetness, joy. There may be an innate response. Or this may feel disconnected. We're feeling a little lost. Allow the range of experiences to be what they are. Knowing this is a practice. Knowing this is a gradual cultivation. And we're simply willing, and that's enough.

Dharmette: Practice Skills (1 of 5) Aligning our intentions

And just reading that there's some background sound, I'm not sure what to do. Hopefully, this was good enough for everyone. I'm going to switch gears to say a few words around the topic that's in the guided meditation. Let me move my notes up here.

The topic I brought today is about aligning or setting our intentions. As I spoke a little bit at the beginning of the guided meditation, this week my intention is to speak about a set of useful—hopefully useful—practice skills. Even though sometimes the teachers would say that our practice is simple, most of us know that the practice is actually not easy to do. For most of us, we have to learn a number of different skills that may be appropriate at different times and under different circumstances.

This week I wanted to start out today by speaking a little bit about cultivating the skills to set wise intentions for our practice. It may be appropriate since this is the beginning of the new year. Maybe the beginning of the new year does something in our psyche that makes it appropriate to reflect upon the intentions that we have around our practice—why we practice—and maybe do this consciously and contemplatively.

Without some conscious reflection around why we do our practice, it's easy for our practice to get misaligned with our wanting mind. You know that happens to all of us, and I'm certainly aware of that. Just one example, sometimes when we engage in, for example, Dharma studies—listening to talks, reading suttas⁵, or analyzing things—when we're not conscious about why we're doing this, unconsciously we can get into a kind of gaining mentality. We want to gain more information in our head and we want to know all the lists, suttas, and commentaries, as if knowing all the information becomes the point of the practice.

I've met people who seem to have all the answers by quoting the lines in the suttas and commentaries, and if you challenge them, they get very agitated. "How can the suttas be wrong?" right? And so that's just one silly example to show that sometimes we can miss the point of learning, studying, and listening to talks. If gaining the information is why we study the sutta, then we're all just trying to become Google, which has got all the information there.

This can happen in our meditative practice as well. Sometimes when we are unconscious of why we're doing it, we could be doing it because we want to get something that we like—you know, blissful states—or we want to get rid of something that we don't want or we don't like, like the pain in the body or the annoying boss. This may not be an issue when we're consciously choosing something that may be skillful that is aligned with our deepest intentions, because we know the choices support the practice along the way. But when we're unclear and unconscious, we can become the victim of our wanting mind even though we may have thought that we're actually practicing. So it's very important that from time to time we ask this question: why are we doing this?

This is why I brought aligning into our meditation today. There is an interesting teaching in the Pali Canon that I was reading recently, in the Anguttara Nikaya⁶ 4.6. In the sutta, the Buddha pointed out that regardless if someone has learned a little or a lot of Dharma teachings—through memorization, listening to talks, and all of those different ways—it is only when the person is intent on what they have learned that they will succeed in the Dharma. The key word here is intent; the person is intent on what they have learned.

The sutta goes on to explain how one is intent on what one has learned. It says that here someone has learned, having understood the meaning of the teachings, the person practices in accordance with the Dharma. And this is how one is intent on what has been learned.

What stood out for me in this line is that setting intention—intending—is not separate from the practice itself. In fact, intention orients and sets in motion the practice and the teachings in the immediacy of our lived experience here and now. Intending has this kind of aliveness, vibrancy in us. The Buddha in the sutta equates intent to practicing in accordance with the Dharma.

There are two aspects that jumped out in this line for me. One is that there is a clear orientation of the Dharma, that is, it's about practicing in accordance with the Dharma. The second aspect highlights that the significant aspect of intending is about practicing with it itself. In our classic teachings on wise intention in the context of the Noble Eightfold Path⁷, it invites us to orient ourselves to live in line with renunciation, non-harming, and loving-kindness. Whenever we speak, act, or think, we can feel and sense if our actions, speech, and mental activities are aligned with these wise intentions. Are they kind? Are they expressions of non-harming and non-grasping?

Often, when we're getting carried away by the flow of activities and reactivities, we sometimes can lose contact with these deepest intentions. That's when we are no longer living in accordance with the Dharma.

I want to say a few words about how we practice setting and cultivating intentions. Clarifying our intentions or making contact with our deepest intentions doesn't need to be only a cognitive or intellectual activity. It can be a part of it, but often our deepest intentions have a felt sense in the body and in our hearts, sometimes even before we have a word for them.

In our guided meditation, we experimented with this a little bit. Sometimes the deepest intentions have an embodied somatic expression. For me, I often feel a kind of uplift through my spine, my torso, and it's energizing. At the same time, I can feel my whole body, and the heart and mind have a kind of grounding. My heart can feel at ease, and there may be a kind of brightness in our heart and mind. Sometimes the heart can feel tender. Over time, we may recognize what these intentions are, maybe in terms of words and cognitive understanding. They don't always have to have words right away, but it's something deep inside of us; we can know this and we can trust this.

To practice setting intentions, it may be helpful first to ask ourselves: what are our deepest intentions? From time to time, maybe in meditation, you can drop a question kind of like dropping a stone in a pond. Without necessarily trying to figure it out, let yourself feel what bubbles up in the body, what bubbles up in the heart. There's no rush to get the answer. I remember Gil⁸ mentioned that he had spent a year to clarify his intention, and so there is no rush for this.

The second aspect of practicing with our intentions is to pause and turn inward often and feel and sense what's operating inside of us in our activities of body, mind, and speech. Gently touching if this is aligned with our intentions, our deepest intentions. Allow this to be an inquiry rather than judgment, blame, or criticism, and let this inquiry guide you to become more and more aligned with something our heart and mind knows deeply inside of us.

We'll continue to explore this for the rest of the week in various ways and expand on some different aspects of our practice. Thank you everyone for being here, and we'll resume tomorrow. Have a wonderful rest of the day.