This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Aperture, Vividness, Stability, Effort; Dharmette: Unitimidated by Suffering. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Aperture, Vividness, Stability, Effort; Dharmette: Becoming Unintimidated by Suffering - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 11, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Aperture, Vividness, Stability, Effort

Welcome. We will do the usual thing: I’ll say a few words, we will sit, and then I will offer a Dharmette.

Last time, my meditation instructions were something like, "Attention is just an appendage of our wanting. There is stress in trying to find, but relief in being found." You might ask, "What does that even mean?" Those were the opening meditation instructions, but sometimes we get more vague and impressionistic, and sometimes more concrete. This week, we are tacking back towards the concrete.

First, intention. The intention is to put down greed and distress with respect to the world. In a way, it’s like we have to have equanimity before we have even developed it, but that is the instruction. We put down, as best we can, greed and distress with respect to the world. That means we are actively relinquishing the intention to solve our problems. We relax the energy of problem-solving—the way meditation often becomes a workspace for that—and we offer up our heart to the moment, trusting that the moment will do good things to it.

So, intention. And then, attention. We set the anchor for the attention, and we set a kind of aperture. This is about where the attention is and how wide the spotlight of attention is. It is not totally right, but generally, the wider the aperture, the more concentration is required to stay out of auditory thinking. The narrower the aperture, the lower the level of concentration needed to stay out of thinking. So, we place the attention and determine the aperture. For example, focusing just at the tip of the nose is a narrow aperture.

Then, we are nurturing a certain kind of vividness. We know the difference between dull and vivid. We are looking for a vivid experience of our sensory world.

We are also stabilizing the attention. It is like ensuring the telescope is not shaking as much. We cultivate this kind of stability of attention.

The fourth piece is effort—the subjective impression we have about our current attentional state and how easy or difficult it is to sustain. We have to modulate the effort. I said vividness and stability, but that doesn’t mean the effort gets out of control. We modulate the effort so it is not too tight and not too loose. What kind of effort is actually entailed in this practice? What actually supports you? We are often modulating that to make an effort that feels sustainable. The more effortful our practice is, the more we get a whiplash of real depletion where the attention needs to go totally slack. So, how can we make a sustained effort while nurturing these qualities of vividness and stability?

How is the effort of letting go different from the effort to make something happen? The effort of receiving, of listening to the silence, and feeling into the stillness is a different kind of effort than engineering silence or engineering stillness.

With this as a preface, let’s sit together.

In whatever ways you can, reassure yourself it is okay for this period to contribute nothing to the solution of our problems, to the resolution of the First Noble Truth¹, or to the complexities of being human. We just put it down. Rather than extracting something from the moment, we offer ourselves up to it.

We treat our life for these minutes as good enough. Treat the moment as good enough. The energy around maximizing and optimizing—just relax it. Let that drain into the ground.

We place the attention somewhere: maybe our breathing, or our body more broadly, or maybe the soundscape. Maybe let the soundscape run right through your head and include external sound and the internal sound that we call thinking. But the attention has a place to rest.

And the how of our attention: vivid. Stable. But not vivid and stable by making an effort born of clinging, or by making an unsustainable effort. Gently nurturing and investing our interest in the object of attention.

When we become identified with the thought, mind wandering, or daydream, the sense of attentional agency collapses. We just live inside the content of that thought. And then we wake up, and it feels like the attentional agency is restored. Then maybe we pit one part of ourselves against another, thinking it is our fault for being lost. But this is unnecessary. It is all the same mind. So we re-establish that intimacy—some vividness, some stability—with the anchor of attention. Modulate the effort up or down slightly, or keep it the same, and keep going.

For these last few minutes, just notice the mind in a holistic way. In a sense, move from a very concrete anchor to something like "the anchor is everywhere." Or maybe we say, "nowhere." Just notice all that can be noticed.

Dharmette: Becoming Unintimidated by Suffering

It is good to stay with you.

Over the year, teaching a lot, a lot of pain has been shared with me in one way or another. That pain has the quality of being both sacred and quite ordinary. Some of the pain that has been shared involves things that I have directly experienced and know directly. Some of the pain involves things I have not known and must infer, drawing from other experiences to better understand.

When I am receiving something like that—somebody sharing in a conversation or a retreat—I try to convey from my own being, from the stillness in me, this message: "I am unafraid of your pain. I will not diminish the sorrow, but I am unintimidated by your pain." That is what I wish to convey. Of course, I feel it; it resonates with my own pain. We feel its weight together, but I am not scared by it, and I am not scared by you. That feels important because people need to learn to trust their own capacity to heal. People need to know, "Oh yeah, me too. I am also included in the Buddha's grace."

There is this intriguing way that our pain gets threaded together with shame. Why is it like that? I don’t really know, but our wounds and our shame somehow become one. It is odd that what most needs compassion somehow becomes the object of shame. The need that is bound up and expressed in our pain somehow feels like it must be hidden.

I have read that evolutionarily, shame is sometimes considered an appeasement display. In the social history of our animal species, shame is a signal: "I submit. I’m hurt. Don't hurt me." It is like the gesture of a submissive dog that rolls over and exposes their belly. It is hard to be seen in our pain. It is vulnerable to be witnessed, and something in us often feels like we must hide.

So much of Dharma² is about normalizing suffering—normalizing dukkha³, destigmatizing it, and draining some of the shame that gets threaded together with the wound. Shame always has an audience, even if that audience is just the internalized harsh gaze. We want to see through what eyes we are perceiving our pain that compounds a sense of shame. It can be very healing to have our pain witnessed in a field that is devoid of shame.

It is almost as if we have to begin by treating our pain as sacred. But then, as the shame begins to melt, the pain becomes very, very ordinary. It loses its electric charge.

To actually receive another's pain, we must know our own with incredible vividness—to loop back to that word. We must deeply know our own suffering, our own pain, and experience it a thousand times with a lot of vividness. Until we become unintimidated by our own pain, we remain afraid of the pain of others, and maybe afraid of them in some way.

Norman Fischer⁴, in Training in Compassion, writes:

"If you’ve ever been ill, physically or emotionally or otherwise in need of compassionate caring, you may have noticed that many people will offer help and kind words. But somehow, most of these offerings seem either insincere or otherwise miss the mark. They don't feel good; they don't help. It's as if these people, though they clearly mean well and their offers are touching, are not capable of really receiving your pain. They want to make you feel better, help you somehow by offering remedies and recommendations, cheerful words, or distracting gifts. But they seem unable or unwilling to do what you need them to do: to simply feel and acknowledge your pain. They want to be compassionate, but they can't seem to do that. And so their presence makes you feel more lonely and isolated in your misfortune. This is because they are actually terrified of their own pain, and you can feel that they are also terrified of your pain, even though, of course, they would never say so and may not even realize they are feeling this."

As we sit, and as we struggle with optimizing and maximizing the moment, looking for spiritual pleasantness of one kind or another, we can miss dukkha. We can miss experiencing it with vividness. The precondition for empathy is having a very rich, vivid experience of knowing our own suffering in an undefended way—to know it time and time again.

The Buddha said, "Comprehend dukkha." To really know. And to really know dukkha doesn't mean we marinate in our pain; it means we know that suffering, pain, and difficulty in awareness. We really cannot understand dukkha if we are identified with it. We can suffer vividly, but we will not comprehend suffering vividly unless there is space. The space of awareness is what is necessary. So, suffering and understanding suffering are very different.

How many opportunities do we have to comprehend dukkha? Count the ways. As we come to understand and comprehend it, part of what happens is we become less intimidated by it. We begin to drain out the moralism and shame that is so often attached to our own pain.

When we do that—when we begin to comprehend dukkha and really become unintimidated by it—then we can begin to offer others our confidence. We have swum in that pool many times. We know those waters. We may not know exactly their suffering, but we have had the vivid experience of swimming in those waters in one way or another.

As we become less intimidated by our own pain, we can gaze upon the pain of another and just see innocence. Maybe we say innocence is the opposite of shame. We gaze upon the pain of another and see the Dharma—the unfolding of suffering and the freedom from suffering. We offer our heartfelt conviction that pain is practice, that there is a kind of innocence in it, and that our heart actually can be nurtured by it rather than corroded by suffering.

I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up whatever is useful and leave behind the rest. I wish you all a good week. May we be happy.