This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Vulnerability and Courage; Talk: Sensitivity to Suffering vs Fear of Suffering. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Vulnerability & Courage; Dharmette: Sensitivity to Suffering vs. Fear of Suffering - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 14, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Vulnerability & Courage

Welcome, friends. Nice to be with you. Let's practice together.

Get cozy, but not too cozy. Relaxed, but with a kind of energetic openness to body and mind. We've asked the question a million times: what is it like to be human? But with a kind of fresh interest and curiosity, we ask again.

Sincerity is the willingness to be surprised by experience, by the moment, by life.

We can never really anticipate when insight will arise, so we just stay evenly suspended over this moment—breathing, relaxing, waking up.

We emphasize tenderness and vulnerability, the intimacy with experience. But what sometimes gets lost in that is that vulnerability is what confers power and strength. Courage braced against pain and uncertainty yields a kind of brittle, fake power. But really becoming porous to the moment, letting imperfections flow through—this softens our heart but deepens our power. It soothes our fear.

Our heart, body, and mind undefended against samsara¹, undefended against the intensity of the human condition. But undefended doesn't lose its center; it doesn't misplace its strength.

"What doesn't bend, breaks," as the song lyric goes. Flexible, fluid—that's what permits strength. The strength of our clarity, of our love. Just see if you can attune to a kind of felt sense of your power.

We cultivate a certain kind of courage in meeting this moment, knowing that the winds of feeling will blow, but they won't blow anything over. The energetic openness is conveyed in our posture, the openness of our chest. Come with: "May I make my heart available to the moment."

Aristotle said that between recklessness and cowardice lies courage. Find that, meeting this moment.

When you "got nothing," the Leonard Cohen lyric goes, "got nothing to lose." Dharmically, meditatively, maybe we say: when you claim no territory, have nothing to defend, you surrender this "somethingness" of your being up to awareness. There is no more defensiveness, but a lot of confidence.

Dharmette: Sensitivity to Suffering vs. Fear of Suffering

I'm not a temperamentally patient person. That's not my parami². Thich Nhat Hanh would not be impressed by how I wash dishes. Someone said to me, "You wash dishes like Poseidon in a bad mood"—the god of sea and storms.

But in other ways, I am patient. For example, I'm very patient with pain, very patient with my grief. I don't ask it to crystallize into meaning before it's ready. Sometimes we're in too much of a rush, and we prematurely impose some order on pain. That does healing a kind of disservice. I'm comfortable not knowing what grief means, not knowing what it entails, not knowing what it asks of me, not knowing how it will change me.

I managed to get Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan in the guided meditation; here's Leonard Cohen: "I heard the soul unfolds in the chambers of this longing, as the bitter liquor sweetens in the amber cup."

All this is to say, I'm still finding my ground after November 5th. I am in no rush to find hope, although I know I will. I'm in no rush to find equanimity, although I know I will. And I'm in no rush to make everything feel better than it does, although I know it will.

All a Dharma teacher can do is really teach their own heart and hope that it's useful for at least a few others. Teaching is always striated with the teacher's pain and wisdom, with their particularity. I don't want to hide that, nor do I assume that it's right for you. I'm grateful that there are many Dharma voices and many Dharma doors. I offer what I can.

The Buddha said the Dharma is found as a kind of middle path. Classically, that's between self-indulgence and self-mortification—between obsession with senses and a useless punishment of ourselves. For me in this moment, the middle path is something like between melodrama on the one hand and insensitivity to suffering on the other.

I have no doubt fallen prey to melodrama at times—the ways that some concern in my mind collects so much attention that I lose contact with the vastness of space, of time. I lose contact with the austerity of the Dharma. Maybe sometimes I'll look back on notes that I had for some old talk years ago, and I can see in those notes: "Oh, okay. A little swept up. A little precious maybe." The vastness somehow got lost. Maybe I think, "Well, Matthew, you were in some awkward intermediate phase. The grief hadn't yet given birth to wisdom and love fully."

We're invited to become disenchanted with samsara. Disenchanted. That is so much more radical than we tend to realize. The space that opens is amazing.

But on the middle path, the other extreme is a kind of denial, numbness, or insensitivity to suffering—some kind of muffled compassion. I got into this path because I cared deeply about suffering. I felt it before I knew it had a name. And why should greed, hate, and delusion only matter when it's inside me? Of course, the ascendancy of unadulterated greed, hate, and delusion outside is harrowing.

I agree, the Buddha focused primarily on freeing oneself from suffering rather than the Dharma as a kind of medicine for society, as a utopian vision. The Buddha never claimed that the Dharma scales. It's not really a treatment for samsara, although it has tremendous diagnostic power. But as far as treatment, I don't know.

In giving up on utopian dreams, this disenchantment actually has made the suffering more poignant rather than less. A lot of the care and the movement in my heart feels clean, pure. But even a pure heart can be heavy. And some of my care is more like the entangled species of care—the pain of the world somehow resonating with my own clinging, with my own fear. That's not where our deepest love comes from.

Something that's become clear to me in the last week—maybe overdue—is there's a difference between sensitivity to suffering versus fear of suffering.

I worry very little, but in the end, I am a "fear type," meaning that risk is dramatically more salient than reward for me. From taking care of a child or something, I'm very conscious of the ways they might get hurt. If I'm directing a project, I'm very conscious of the ways things can go wrong. I'm awake to suffering, to anicca³, to the way the world trembles in all directions. That's part of why I can be useful as a teacher. But I'm realizing now that I'm more afraid of suffering than I recognized.

To be afraid of suffering is not exactly the same thing as actually comprehending it. "Comprehend dukkha⁴," the Buddha said.

I don't consider myself a courageous person, so I've not taught about courage. But that's what's been coming up for me. Compassion involves courage. Maybe it's too dramatic to say fearlessness, but it involves the recognition I was pointing to during the sit. All this talk about helplessness, about refining a relationship to helplessness, about porousness, about sensitivity, about vulnerability, about shuddering in the face of harm—all of these things actually direct us towards a certain kind of strength. Courage.

Aquinas⁵ described courage as a condition of each and every virtue. I was reflecting on the paramis—the Perfections. Courage is woven through a lot of that. In dana⁶ (generosity), renunciation, and truthfulness. In adhitthana⁷ (resolution), perseverance, upekkha⁸... there's courage.

So maybe it's time to find some of that very fluid, supple strength we call courage. Nothing needs to happen now; it's just in me, a kind of gathering of the energy, a pooling of a certain kind of strength, confidence, and love.

I say all this because, for me, I realized some part of me was just tired of being afraid, and maybe tired of the ways that fear encumbered my love. So the question, "What does your love look like when it's less afraid?" may be worth asking.

I offer this for your consideration. We'll keep going and keep tracking the evolution of your heart in this time. I'll do the same. We'll gather back next week.