This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Grounded in the Heart; Wellsprings of Dharma Well-Being (2 of 5) Beauty. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Grounded in the Heart; Dharmette: Dharma Well-Being (2 of 5) Beauty - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 16, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Grounded in the Heart

So welcome, welcome, welcome. We are in the second of a five-day series this week. I am happy to be with all of you. The series is on these Wellsprings of Dharma well-being, inner and interpersonal well-being. So, start by noticing the well-being of being together with Sangha¹, of sitting, of being here.

Since we start with a sit, I want you to start by noticing if you're one of the folks who engages in chat. Notice how it feels to be engaged. Notice how it feels to see greetings from old companions, long-term companions, and new companions on the path. Take that into your heart.

Take that into your heart, including acknowledging the beauty of love, even love lost. So a warm, warm, heartfelt Metta² to all of you, especially anyone experiencing loss and grief. Noticing those of you who are tuning into the conversation, the feeling in your heart, and letting that spread through your actions, through your thoughts, through your body.

When you're ready, turning inward. Maybe taking that last sip of tea, finding a comfortable posture, softening or closing the eyes, and attuning to any sense of care, beauty, or well-being within.

If it's helpful, noticing the way you feel supported and held by the chair or cushion. Perhaps feeling your feet in contact with the floor, held by gravity, by the boundless support of the Earth, by the presence of virtual Sangha.

Taking a deep breath or two—longer, slower, gentle breaths—and allowing the exhale to soften your body, heart, and mind into presence. Being here.

Allowing the breathing to be natural. Tuning into the felt sensations of this life's breath. Noticing the ambient temperature, warmth or cool, weight or lightness, spaciousness. Inviting the body to relax. May my body relax. May this heart and mind soften and relax.

Meeting whatever arises with respect and care. Simple acknowledgement. Allowing the breath, the body, the moment, this awareness to be your compass. Allowing the moment to flow through.

[Silence]

In the last five minutes of this meditation, the invitation is to stay grounded in your whole body in this moment. Attune to your emotional center, perhaps your heart or heart center. Tuning into whatever intention brings you to practice together today, or in general. Be nourished by it.

Then, gathering up any moments of goodness, inner silence, mindfulness, care, compassion, patience—any little glimmers of goodness from this meditation practice—and offering them to yourself, through yourself, out towards the others in this global Sangha. Offering them friendliness, care, kindness, Metta. Knowing as you're offering it that you're also receiving it.

Then turning your inner gaze outwards to all of the others your life touches directly and indirectly, and offering them these good wishes too. May they be safe, happy, free from inner and outer harm. May they be peaceful, know ease. May they be free.

Radiating these wishes outwards and letting go of them, trusting they will reverberate through your mind, heart, and life. Resting in the moment. Noticing the quality of the heart and mind in this moment.

Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Dharma Well-Being (2 of 5) Beauty

Dear online Sangha, today is the second of five days dedicated to exploring Wellsprings of Dharma well-being—inner ones—and how they flow from our hearts, our minds, and our lives out to the others in our lives. We'll mostly be talking about the internal part, but keep it in the back of your mind that the benefits of practice in general, and the benefits of what we're talking about this week, naturally spill over and flow into relationships and into others' lives as well. Trust that.

As I mentioned yesterday, sometimes the Buddha would tell stories about difficult times past—myths—and make recommendations to his followers, particularly to his practitioners, for practicing in a way that created an inner home, a sense of an inner homeland or field of goodness. In this teaching that I'm teaching from, he talked about the way that practitioners can cultivate particular Dharmic kinds of well-being and even flourishing.

Yesterday we talked about spiritual power or empowerment, a teaching known as the Roads to Power. Today we'll talk about true beauty. Then the rest of the week: heart wealth, happiness, and freedom. So that's the road map.

Today, by way of introducing this topic of true beauty—inner beauty—I'm going to continue a Buddhist myth or fairy tale that I started at Insight Santa Cruz last Tuesday. It's the story of a humble, beautiful, confident woman, Jasmine, the daughter of flower growers. Based on her confidence, kindness, and generosity, upon meeting King Piti, he fell in love with her immediately and they eventually became married.

This story happens after that. She's traveling back to visit her family, and the King has a series of sixteen horrible nightmares all in one night. Those kinds of nightmares where voices are yelling or groaning, and it's all confusing, tormented, and emotionally laden. He wakes up that morning quite disturbed. His wife, whom he has become accustomed to relying on for wise counsel, is out of town; she's gone. So he turns to some of the local soothsayers, fortune tellers, and advice-givers. Maybe they're in the court, maybe they're just in the town. They convince him that his nightmares portend a terrible invasion of the country with mass amounts of suffering, and that the absolute only way to prevent this invasion and all of this death and suffering is to hold a big sacrifice. This is back in the Bronze Age; this is ancient times.

The King resists this at first, but he really does not want greater harm to befall his country, so he sets his mind on it. He orders preparations to be made. Pits are being dug, fire stations are being set up, the animals are being gathered. It is to all this hubbub that Jasmine returns. She looks around and asks, "What's going on?" Someone tells her, "Oh, we're preparing for this mass sacrifice."

She says, "Oh, no, no, no, this is terrible." She goes and finds the King. She can see from how set in his mind he is, and how anxious he is, that he's not going to listen to her immediately. So she recommends that he go to the Buddha, whom he has met before. On her recommendation, he agrees to seek counsel from the one more sage, this last sage, the Buddha.

In conversation with the Buddha, the Buddha offers a different interpretation of the dreams—one that points to virtuous behavior. He explains that suffering results from killing, and that the suffering the King was experiencing may have been a sense of the suffering others experience when they do horrible wrongdoings. The Buddha encourages the King not to kill, and the King takes his counsel. There's something about the Buddha's clarity that cuts through his fear, his confusion, and his agitation. He returns and calls off the sacrifice. Not only that, he bans the practice of animal sacrifice from then on.

I tell this story because Jasmine's role in it, as well as the Buddha's, is significant. Not only are they committed to not killing, but they also encouraged the King not to do this horrible act. In the Buddhist teachings, it's beautiful—very, very beautiful—to refrain from doing harm and to do good. But what's more beautiful than beautiful is to do good and inspire others to do good, to inspire others not to harm.

So that's the story. In this short talk, this inner beauty, as by now you're hearing, is about virtuous conduct—walking through the world in a way that is non-harming. I won't go into the classic Five Precepts, the guardrails on behavior. I'll just name them briefly: not killing, not stealing, not engaging in sexual misconduct, not lying, and not engaging in harmful intoxication.

As important as these conventions and guardrails are, the focus today is the guiding principle, the underlying intention. That is that we can use a compass, an internal compass, for the path of practice, for navigating life. In Pali, it's the compass of kusala and akusala³—skillful or not skillful, harmful or not harmful. Wholesome or not wholesome are sometimes the words used. This simple distinction can be a compass of care that guides behavior and even decisions. It guides the journey. The true north of the compass is where wisdom and non-harming meet.

This discerning factor of wholesome or unwholesome, skillful or unskillful, is a form of contemplative analysis—a thinking through—for a lot of people on certain levels. Then, as we begin to really take it in, it becomes more of a visceral, heart-based, gut-based guide for intention. It is a way of embodying the great intelligence and wisdom of the Dharma in each moment. It can be a visceral feeling. A friend of mine recently talked about how, for her, it's almost more of a feeling in her heart or her body, a sense of "not quite right" or a contraction. That resonates for me as well. It's this kind of subtle "not-rightness" in the body, in the heart, that checks us for a moment. We stop—"Oh, what's happening here?"

That can cut through all kinds of confusion, ambivalence, flurries of thought or worry or justification, even strong ambivalence, desire, or fear. It's a powerful form of strength and discernment. If there's not a strong gut feeling or heart feeling, sometimes dropping in a simple question can be really helpful: "Will this lead to greater benefit or greater harm for myself, for the other person, for both of us, or for everyone concerned?" It's that simple question.

This kind of respect for non-harming "right-sizes" your relationship with reality. It right-sizes our relationship with ourselves and with all other sentient beings. The benefits can be significant. The Buddha described ease of concentration, better relationships, greater trust in oneself, and greater trust from others. A sense of integration, inner wholeness, and integrity. And finally, the bliss of blamelessness—the bliss, the happiness of not having to worry about having done something wrong. And I'll add, because most of us have not lived perfect lives up to this point, that bliss of blamelessness also spills over into a sense of self-forgiveness.

There are more and more subtle levels of mindfulness that come into being when we start to focus on the inner beauty of virtue. It's a mark of development in the practice. Something that might be barely noticeable at first, like a human hair in the hand, eventually becomes more like a hair in the eye.

I'll close with a short story. Another myth from ancient times, ancient India. This comes from the Jataka⁴ tales. It's about a king who offered half the treasure of his kingdom and the hand of his daughter, the princess, in marriage to any man who could steal something without anyone at all finding out about it.

This announcement was proclaimed throughout the land, and lots of young men started showing up with various items of stolen, purloined treasure—necklaces, chariots, the whole thing—saying, "No one saw me do this. No one knows." Each time the King would say, "Forget about it. Thanks," and people got quite confused.

Except one day, a young man showed up with nothing. He said, "I don't have anything."

The King said, "Well, why not?"

The man said, "Well, it's not really possible to steal something with absolutely no one knowing about it, because I myself would know about it."

This was the right answer. The King was seeking an heir with wisdom and an heir with integrity. So this little story points to the link between discernment, wisdom, and the beauty of virtue.

For a mature practitioner, virtuous conduct becomes more and more of a mindfulness practice, a wisdom practice. As practice matures completely, it becomes a natural expression of Dharma, of maturity. That is what the Buddha considered the most profound beauty of all.

Thank you so much for your kind attention. Tomorrow we will talk about happiness, so stay tuned, and thank you for your practice.