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Guided Meditation: Ease Makes Letting Go Safer; Dharmette: Rivers are just rivers - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 20, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Ease Makes Letting Go Safer

Okay, welcome folks. It's good to be with you. Thanks for the theme ideas, and also for the feedback on Zoom versus YouTube. We'll figure something out in the new year, whether we make some switch.

Yeah, let's practice. Thanks for crowdsourcing the inspiration. I got chaos, grief, love, patience, stillness, equanimity. We'll see what happens.

Okay. See if you can find a way of breathing that carries the signal of ease to your body. And don't demand that the ease erase the agitation. Just if there's somewhere in your body-mind that is soothed, just rest the attention there for a few moments.

We summon some confidence that the way we can tend to the future and the complications of our life is actually to take very good care of what's here now. Of course, that doesn't always feel sufficient. But it's what we can do for now.

Our agitation begs us to solve it. But awareness doesn't solve our problems; it dissolves them. Meaning they don't weigh on our heart in exactly the same manner. Everything looks different from the vantage point of stability.

The ear is so buoyed by a kind of network of care that connects us all. We breathe. Relax. Let's make our attention very simple. We put all of our hope into this moment.

To let go is not to pry the clenched fist of grasping open. It is to soften in the recognition that holding on itself is a kind of illusion, like grasping the armrests on an airplane at 30,000 feet. So we practice relaxing. Sometimes the relief comes immediately, and sometimes the unclenching of the fist feels like grieving.

The necessity of opening supports us—the wisdom of no escape. As we settle, feeling our body, feeling our breath, letting go starts to feel a little safer.

And what is left in the wake of letting go? Something like love. The poignancy of the human condition. The innocence of all habit. [Laughter] And we have respect for even our pain, confusion. Maybe we abide in a kind of subtle warmth. Maybe it's the tiniest, even indiscernible, smile. And we just take our cues from our face. Just to abide is more than enough.

Dharmette: Rivers are just rivers

Okay, folks. So, I will be away for a couple of weeks; class will resume on the 10th. And before then, there are still some spots for the daylong in Berkeley on Saturday—I think "Empathic Connection and the Refuge of Spiritual Friendship" or something like that—on December 6th. So you can register on InsightRetreatCenter.org, or if you're in the area, I’m happy to have you.

So, okay, I think this is Dōgen¹, but I'm not certain. Very famous. Doesn't matter who says it, it's good.

"Before studying Zen, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. When I had more intimate knowledge, I came to see mountains not as mountains, rivers not as rivers. But now that I have attained substance, I again see mountains just as mountains and rivers just as rivers."

Our path describes a kind of progression. Maybe we could say from deluded to weird to ordinary. A lot of ways you could chop up the path, but that might be one.

So we begin the path with so much unquestioned. Our conditioning is our truth. Mountains are so inarguable. They're the kind of metaphor for stability and permanence. [Laughter] And our life initially on the path is like the mountain—just unquestioned. My life, my problems, my hopes, my life. And we're sort of unaware of how much we've assumed about our life, about the nature of happiness, how much we've assumed about who and what we are.

A mountain is a mountain. A river is not a mountain. A river is a river. I want that. I am me. You are you. Life is life.

And the Buddhist path is a kind of addition to our assumed life. And in the early phases, the Dharma never truly calls into question the foundations of our life. And so we tend not to ask the deep, dangerous questions that threaten the illusions we stand upon. And that's the first phase, and it might be many years.

Then we begin to look more deeply, to interrogate the ways, as the Dhammapada² says, "mind precedes phenomena." Mountains are not mountains. We begin not with mountains, however, but with ourselves. As familiar as we are with mountains, we're all too familiar with ourselves.

I was reading some brain science meditation research about the way that our brain distinguishes self-generated internal sensory experience from external experiences. And as it turns out, we're so used to most signals in our body that our brain kind of down-regulates its responses to those signals, to those internal events. And we're afraid of the world, but not afraid of ourselves. In some sense, it should be the reverse. The Buddha might say it should be the reverse.

This says, um, Yuval Schweitzer³, Stephen Fulder, and other colleagues:

"The human brain constructs a boundary between self and world by distinguishing self-generated sensory events from external ones. For events that are self-initiated, the brain attenuates its response—what's known as the sensory suppression effect. This effect is regarded as a proxy of the sense of agency, our feeling of being subjective agents controlling our actions and ensuing events in the world. In deep meditative states where the self-world boundary blurs, phenomenological reports indicate a reduced or absent sense of agency accompanied by neural changes."

We're vigilant about the world, about the mountains. That's where the threat is. And very casual about our breath, for example. And meditation, in a sense, is the reversal of the sensory suppression effect.

Maybe it's just for pretend, but we assume saṃsāra⁴ is safe, and we enter our mind as if it's unknown land. We enter with high sensitivity. This is, I believe, what Suzuki Roshi means when he spoke about the "beginner's mind" or the "soft readiness of mindfulness."

And we get very still, and all the lurching and fidgeting and agitation comes to rest. All comes to rest. And we renounce so much, not because we should, but because everything but awareness is a hassle. And we see what the world looks like when our knowing is less and less entangled with wanting.

And emptiness is expressed in many, many ways—necessarily poetic ways. We often hear something like non-solidification, de-reification. And of course, it's not that we walk through the wall rather than the door. Just that every perception is fluid, melty, run through with space. The perception of mountain is not what it used to be.

This is from the Zen tradition, Nanyue⁵:

"To truly hear the songs of the rivers and mountains, to communicate and be intimate with the grasses and trees, to develop sincere, love-filled exchanges with all our relations, a maturing intimacy is called forth. For this, a deepening connection and grounding supports our movement beyond the edge of what our minds have framed this life to be. Meeting life with the practice of going beyond. We polish ourselves into the spotless place, steadily dissolving into this unknowable source of being. We begin to hear the song and walk the path with increasing presence and awareness, becoming aware of its edges. As we follow the scent of the path's edgelessness beyond the edges—the edges that define things—the path invites a letting go. The edges that define and separate it from the unknown. Here is where the mountain is no longer a mountain."

This edgelessness is an empty spaciousness of no-thingness. This is our "weird" phase. You know, you really have to watch your conduct at, say, a dinner party with civilians. Mountains are not mountains. And I remember feeling very divorced from the world. Not exactly alienated, just really not of the world. And it felt like a kind of heightened period of neuroplasticity. My brain felt very malleable.

And then things stabilize. Maybe we say reconstitute, but reconstitute in a freer way, in a way that we don't forget that process of reconciling, the process of melting. And for many practitioners, things kind of mellow out. Actually, I don't know how universal that is, but the samādhi⁶ is less energetically disorganizing. The insights are less dizzying.

And part of the intensity of "mountains are not mountains" is that the gap between the ordinary solidification of self and these rarified states on retreat or in the silence—that gap is large. And so part of what's jarring, part of what feels wild, is that the gap between the ordinary level of solidification and the meltiness.

But then one's baseline changes. And so the kind of dips into more fluidity are not jarring in the same way. Today, the baseline solidification is different.

Shinzen Young says, "Spiritual practice is a sequence of acclimatizations to a progressively less fixated, more attenuated sense of self."

And there's some... in the "mountains just being mountains," I think it's fair to say there's some disillusionment along the way. Sobriety⁷ about what the path does, what the path does not do. Purity, in other words, is a primitive psychological need. Mountains are just mountains. Rivers just rivers. But one thing's very different: Love becomes very prominent. Love is that kind of face of emptiness.

Ben Lerner⁸ says:

"The Hasidim⁹ tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come. Where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."

I offer this for your consideration. And see you in December.