This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Vitality and Release; Dharmette: Aperture in Meditation and Life w/ M Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Vitality and Release, In Breath, Out Breath; Dharmette: Aperture of Attention in Meditation and Life - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 21, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Vitality and Release, In Breath, Out Breath

It’s good to be with you, good to come back and practice—kind of just the rhythms of a weekly thing. Just check in with our heart now. How is it to be alive now?

A friend of mine, a Dharma friend and fellow teacher, said something to me recently. She’s very direct with me and she’s always right, so she can kind of say whatever. She said, "Some people like the in-breath, some people like the out-breath. You like the in-breath."

I was like, "Okay, what does that mean? I thought I liked the out-breath. I thought I liked relaxation. I thought I liked tranquility. I thought I liked non-vigilance."

But she said, "No, no, there’s some intensity. You like the intensity. And there’s some part of you that’s very ambivalent about actually relaxing at a deep level."

I kind of took that in. Maybe so. What’s maturity in practice? I think it’s coming to love the in-breath and the out-breath. The kind of vitalizing energy and intensity of the in-breath, and the soothing surrender and ease of the out-breath. No control. And we maybe all have a predilection, where we’re more comfortable perhaps. But some of what we’re doing is learning to revel in the in-breath and revel in the out-breath. To revel in alertness, to revel in surrender and tranquility. And we can do that, I think, at great depth. I do kind of know how to relax; I do talk about surrender. But we’re always beckoned to let go more deeply, to wake up more brightly. So let’s find our way between these enlivening and soothing rhythms of our body breathing.

So finding your posture. Just getting cozy. Getting bright.

[Silence]

We breathe in. Kind of a rush of energy into body and mind. Sense of brightness and not wanting to miss our lives. It’s possible, actually very possible, to miss our lives. The in-breath helps break the monotony, the assumption of permanence. Brings a certain kind of poignancy into our lives.

But the in-breath must end sometime. Sense the tension of having used the oxygen. And then soothing, the out-breath. It’s almost like breathing out the vigilance and the fear. In the sense that it’s irresponsible to neglect our worry, concern—breathe it out.

All the subtle ways we try to grab hold of life, of this moment... all the subtle impulses towards ownership... we breathe out.

The cycle of breath. The in-breath the perfect complement to the out-breath. Out-breath a complement to the in-breath. Moment by moment. Clarity, release. Brightness and darkness.

Letting the out-breath wash away the impulse of becoming, bhava-taṇhā¹—copying and pasting our being into the next moment just a little better. We breathe out, softening the becoming.

With the in-breath, we shake off the notion that this moment is just a dress rehearsal for the rest of our life. Sense the vividness, the human condition.

Can feel like when we’re meditating our life is elsewhere. Our "real" life lies in the other 23 hours of the day. But it will only ever be in-breath and out-breath, thought and feeling, seeing and hearing. In this sense, this is our life.

Dharmette: Aperture of Attention in Meditation and Life

In meditation practice, we sometimes talk about the "aperture of attention." If we think about attention as a spotlight, the question would be: how wide is that spotlight? Focusing on our breathing at the tip of the nose, say, is a narrow aperture. Whereas being open to all six sense gates², doing choiceless awareness, that’s a large aperture.

And with the pupil, if our eye’s brain is working okay, when there’s a lot of light, the pupil contracts. When you enter a dark room, the pupil dilates. And there’s no rule for when to meditatively adjust the aperture, no algorithm for exactly how to do that. But generally, in the process of settling into tranquility and clarity, we make the aperture small. It’s like the rest of the world of experience is too much. It’s too much light. It’s too sticky. To be open to it is to be pulled under. And the changing and uncertainty is intense. And so we need a kind of smaller pasture; we need to perceive less.

The risk of going too wide too early is that the line dividing awareness and thinking can get quite fuzzy. And so when we start a retreat, or even just starting a sit—sitting on one’s own or in a group—we often begin with a kind of limited, narrow aperture. And then when there’s some stability, when phenomena are a little less intoxicating maybe, we open wider.

And so there’s this sense of space expanding and contracting. And it’s not a hierarchy, you know, of "this is the beginner’s phase and this is the advanced." It’s not like that. As we cultivate our practice, we find we can move easily between the kind of comfortable, secluded home of the narrow, to the open, homeless, centerless awareness.

And that same dynamic—"What’s wise attention now in my practice?"—it strikes me that our life, in the broader sense, not just meditation, functions a little bit like that. What’s the aperture for the rest of our day? We open and we close. We’re in the world and we retreat. We love and we rest. And what’s the rhythm of the small and vast aperture in our lives? To what ought we attend? Where do we draw the line around the kind of focus space in this moment or on this day? We draw the line around the tip of our nose maybe in one sit, or around the body in a sit. Well, around what are we drawing that line on this day?

And I think typically we Buddhist types have the assumption that our life, its scope of concern, needs to be expansive. Feels like contraction is just self-absorption. The small aperture, to not pay attention in a sense to saṃsāra³, that’s a species of self-absorption.

And we have the sense that maybe when we’re grinding or there’s some internal friction, we’re struggling in some way, we tend to get small. And I think that’s true, that suffering is inherently absorbing. And then we have the sense of, okay, we feel better, we open the aperture. The big aperture we tend to think is compassion—caring for others, for the world, for society. I get that. Fair enough. But I think we want to be careful in concluding that the contractive energy is bad and the expansive energy is good. The question is much more: what is skillful?

We do grow over time so that the self-system absorbs less energy. And it’s natural for us to turn outwards. When the self is not such a preoccupation, the project of our life is not such a preoccupation, the gaze naturally turns outwards. But everyone sometimes needs to get small. And that’s actually not a sign of cowardice, but health. To simplify the rhythms of our life and to focus: what’s right here? Just this book, or this nap, or this person, or this TV show. And so that sense of, "Oh, it’s a sin to get small, to take our gaze off of saṃsāra," I don’t know. Just like it’s not meditation detention to go back to the breathing. The Buddha went back to it very often.

And sometimes it’s very skillful to be small when the alternative of open awareness is overwhelm and confusion. It’s skillful to get small when any attempt to open runs into a kind of debilitating helplessness, and it feels like, okay, you should be able to do something but you just can’t see how. That’s not a productive way of suffering. It’s not an efficient way of spending your love. Marinating in certain cyclical forms of pain is not onward-leading. Narrow the aperture back to the breath, metaphorically.

And so I say this in part because I want to be careful. You know, how much of the ignorance coursing through the country’s veins gets into my bloodstream? And I only want to take that into my bloodstream if it will help others. And I fear that much of the time it does not. In 2016, without knowing it, I was sort of trying to do tonglen⁴ at the national level. That was not an explicit thing, and I don’t even know how to practice tonglen really... I spent a year practicing in Tibetan tradition when I first started practice, I don’t know the practice. But the sense of breathing in the pain, breathing out love—I was trying to do it and failing. Mostly failing. And it was like: okay, narrow the aperture.

Now there are other times, perhaps counterintuitive, when meeting one’s own distress or smallness actually requires that we get much, much bigger. I think of that example sometimes people early in recovery from addiction are given the instruction: "Go serve. Get out of your mind." Heal yourself through giving. And so sometimes we address our depletion through love, through getting bigger. And the aperture actually needs to expand radically. But we want to look for the ways to spend one’s love wisely.

Now, nothing I’m saying about the contractive side of practice, of just pulling the energy in, is about passivity or resignation. It’s not that I won't be in the streets, you know, like I was. But we want to be careful with our mind. And we want to be respectful of the limits of our equanimity and the ways in which we subtly devolve into a certain kind of marinating in pain rather than holding it in awareness, metabolizing it. And that line gets fuzzy sometimes. So we’re careful.

Small aperture, wide contraction, dilation, rest and love and service. We look: what’s wise attention now? What’s appropriate attention now, given the state of my heart, given what’s needed, given my energy, given my stability? What’s wise attention now?

I offer this for your consideration. I wish you all a good week of practice.