This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Allowing, Dharmette: The Five Faculties (2 of 5): Energy. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Allowing; Dharmette: The Five Faculties (2 of 5): Energy - David Lorey

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

Welcome. Today we'll continue with an exploration of what are known as the five spiritual faculties. I've been calling them the five divine human capacities. I was just reflecting as I watched people come in for the chat just how remarkable it is that the ability to be awake in the world is something we're all born with. We don't have to go acquiring anything or looking outside. We look inward, and there we can find the capacity to awaken.

The second spiritual faculty is energy, Virya¹. There are times when it seems like the whole path of practice is about finding an appropriate, skillful balance of energy. In the guided sit, we'll bring some attention to noticing this balance, establishing balance, and rebalancing. Then, in the dharmette, we'll dig a little deeper to look into three aspects of the energy that we can call upon to strengthen and support our practice.

Guided Meditation: Allowing

Let's sit. I'll guide, I hope, just lightly enough to bring people some support. We can find our meditation posture, find ourselves into it, maybe make some adjustments to the posture. And as we do so, we balance our energies. The first thing we do, I think, is notice where the energy is. As we close the eyes or bring the eyes down or unfocus the eyes if we keep them open, focusing them in the middle distance, we can notice a rebalancing. We move from the visual attractions of our experience to the inner world, our inner life.

Typically, we rebalance a little bit from the head to the heart or the head to the body, bringing our attention inward and downward into the body. Then we connect with some aspect of the bodily experience in which there's natural balance. The breath being a typical go-to, the breath just doing its thing, finding its natural balance. Maybe we can just notice this moment, at any rate, how the breath is. Maybe it's a little quicker, maybe it's a little slower, maybe it's shallow, maybe it's deep. Maybe as we bring attention to it, it shifts toward a more relaxed state.

In all of these ways, we establish a balance of energy between effort and allowing. If we notice that we get a little drowsy, a little dreamy, we can, in various ways, add a little more effort, a little more alertness, a little bit more energy. And if we notice ourselves getting kind of caught up in the mind, maybe wrapped around a thought pattern, typically we'll notice that that involves a quickening and a tightening and sometimes a subtle or obvious sensation of being a little off balance, off-kilter. In that case, we can maybe take away a little energy, open up a bit, soften a bit. Maybe softening the body, letting the shoulders lower back down, relaxing any tension around the eyes, noticing any holding or bracing in the upper body or in the jaw.

In this way, rebalancing. As in riding a bicycle, pushing a scooter, flying a kite, sailing a boat, walking, we never just establish balance and then it's fixed. It's a practice of always rebalancing, coming back to balance.

So as we sit and the mind gets entangled in things, looking into the future, considering, reconsidering, replaying the past, thinking about other people, thinking about ourselves; as we bring our attention back to the breath, as we open our attention maybe back if it's become tight around ideas and thoughts, opening it back up to the breath, opening up to all that's available in experience, we can be aware today of the rebalancing that happens. Finding again our way back to a place of balance between alertness and being at ease, between the effort that's needed to maintain attentiveness and attunement and the ease that is central to the practice.

So, coming to the end of this sit, noticing where the energy is and once again reestablishing balance between alertness and ease. If we've gotten a little dreamy, a little foggy, a little unfocused, we can add a little spritz of attention, of attunement. And if we've gotten a little tight and over-efforting, we can relax back into a more skillful balance between alertness and relaxation.

Let's bring the sit to a close by sharing the benefits of our practice, which sometimes we hold a little close. Sharing the benefits of our practice with others. When we give freely of the benefits of practice, it doesn't diminish the store; it seems to increase the goodness. So, wishing all beings well, wishing all beings safety, security, good health, wholeness in body and mind. Wishing all beings freedom. Wishing all beings freedom from suffering. May all beings be content, know happiness, and live at ease.

Dharmette: The Five Faculties (2 of 5): Energy

Welcome again. Somebody has added to the chat, "love the silence," and it made me hesitant to break the silence to say anything. It was indeed, for me as well, kind of a nice quiet time.

So this week I've been revisiting the five faculties. I'm certain, I know for absolute certainty that Gil has talked about the five faculties, and I think he's spoken at length about the second one, which we'll just explore a little bit today: energy, Virya. The way we bring energy to practice and the various aspects of energy that are available to us. Again, I would emphasize before plunging into a little discussion of this second faculty, this second competency or quality of mind or capacity, that all of these things are found within. Something just strikes me as very wonderful about that today, that the capacity to awaken is within. We don't have to go looking for something outside. Maybe that's an important aspect of effort we expend or energy we expend. We expend so much effort trying to get things, trying to acquire things. And this is true, I think, for spiritual goods as well, that we put a lot of effort in. So how we use the energy we have, and particularly how we balance it, is a critical part of the practice and an important support for practice.

Let me just mention three aspects of energy that we're all probably aware of, but by spending a little time thinking about them and perhaps more consciously bringing them into practice, noticing their role in practice, we strengthen them. I'll emphasize that too, that sometimes the mechanism of the practice can be a little unclear. What is it that we do when we bring attention to things, when we're mindful of things, when, in the case of energy, we seek to establish sustained mindful attention to our experience? One of the very important things that's going on when we do that is that it's by bringing attention to those things that we strengthen them. This is true of bad habits of mind or unskillful habits of mind and unwholesome mind states as well; when we give attention to them, they're strengthened. Over time in the practice, we seek to balance and increase the attention we give to wholesome states and skillful actions, knowing that as we do so, those capacities are strengthened.

A first really important aspect of energy is what we can call initial energy. Obviously, maybe most obviously, there's quite a bit of energy and skillful effort that's needed just to begin practicing. This is true day-to-day. Sometimes it takes a lot of energy just to sit, just to make that time and get to the cushion. Once we're sitting, it can take additional energy to keep bringing attention back to the here and now of our experience. Maybe for each of these, we can emphasize a particular aspect of energy. For the energy needed to sit, sometimes it's useful, in terms of bringing the energy to a place of balance, to start to think about the sit maybe 10 minutes before it starts and start to bring the energy down to a place where it's easier to sit. You've probably noticed that if you're rushing around doing things, and you're rushing around getting a bunch of stuff out of the way so that you can actually make the sit, that creates a certain energetic imbalance. That can be addressed by starting to practice maybe 15 minutes before you sit down, starting to let a little bit of that energy go. So by the time the butt hits the cushion, there's already a rebalancing happening.

Then within the practice, this initial energy that's needed shows up in the commitment to begin again. When we return to the breath after the mind's gotten all tied around something, we can spend a lot of energy beating ourselves up about it: "It shouldn't have happened," "I'm not—it's not working," "It's not happening today," "I'm no good at this," "This practice isn't any good." Any of those kinds of doubts that arise, which, by the way, take a lot of energy away from just getting back to the here and now, can be addressed by just beginning again. We begin again and again, new, in this practice. It's true each time we sit down that we can balance energy by bringing the mind into a mode where this is the first time I've ever sat in meditation. Similarly, each time we go back to the breath, it is, in fact, the first time we've returned and met this breath, this moment of experience. To the extent we can just begin again without any baggage about anything that's just happened, anything that might happen, what other people might think, what we think—letting all of that go and just beginning again is an important aspect of this initial or initiating energy that we bring to practice.

A second type of energy is continuous energy. The well-known translator of many of the ancient texts that undergird this tradition, Bhikkhu Bodhi², says somewhere, "This practice is very straightforward. There's really only two steps: one, begin, and two, keep going." It makes it sound very straightforward, but this "keeping going" part... initial energy maybe is taking that first step, sitting down, preparing the mind to do so, and then each time we return to the here and now, beginning again. The "keeping going" part, the sort of energy that is more sustained over time, is super important. I think it's where the faculty we talked about yesterday—the confidence that comes from meeting our direct experience, knowing that this is true for this moment, that this is happening, that it's like this in my mind—bringing that confidence forward in a sustained way provides this sort of energy of return. So that each time we come back to this moment, we're able to do so in a way that creates momentum.

If you think about it, rebalancing energy on a bicycle, on a scooter, flying a kite, walking, sailing a boat, whatever metaphor is useful in your life, whenever we rebalance, we're also taking advantage of the momentum that's there. This is true on a bicycle, it's true on a scooter, a sailboat, walking. In walking, for example, which the vast majority of us do with some facility, we're not just balancing in a particular three-dimensional space, we're actually also moving forward and creating momentum as we go. So the second kind of energy is that way of balancing energy that creates momentum in the practice. This is a lot of the rebalancing that I mentioned in the guided meditation, where we're constantly noticing, "Oh, getting a little foggy here," or "getting a little tight," and doing whatever it takes. It becomes very second nature to go, "Oh, I need to ease back this way." Sometimes it's physical, it's in the posture; the shoulders have gotten hunched up around the ears. Sometimes I become aware that... I don't think it really looks like this when I'm sitting, but basically in my body my shoulders are up around my ears, and I can simply, usually on an out-breath, just notice, and without doing very much, the shoulders go back down and the momentum and the sustained balance of energy is recreated.

This sustained sort of effort or energy attracts all sorts of wholesome mind states. The capacity we begin to develop of bringing mindfulness to everything is an outgrowth of this ability in the meditation to keep sustaining that momentum. So that when we meet a new situation—in the meditation it may be a snippet of conversation, a door slamming, a disturbing thought, a memory—we get better and better at just coming back to balance. Similarly, in daily life practice, when an energetic conversation happens at work or at home, something comes up, we have a way to just keep sustaining that sense of balance without getting thrown off. This is the kind of sustained attention or balance of energy that allows us to stay here, to stay open, to remain receptive to what's going on in experience, to continue to be connected to our experience, to be very much a member of this moment, a member of the community of this moment, instead of kind of floating off into other moments, the past, the future. And like I emphasized yesterday, this sustained kind of energy is very pleasant, very pleasurable. That is to be enjoyed because it helps further strengthen our ability to get back here. We know something very that builds confidence. We know when we come back to this feeling of restfulness and ease that this is good, and that helps us. Drawing on that confidence that comes with it, it actually also helps strengthen the balancing and rebalancing of energy. We go, "Oh, this is right. Now I'm back here. Now I'm back here in the center of things because I can feel it. Now I'm more at ease, but also very much here, very present, very alert."

Finally, at least for today, because one could go on and on, the third aspect is something that we might call effortless effort. We get to a place where the energy hardly needs attention and we really get in a flow of it. The kind of flow that maybe we associate with playing a musical instrument, if we play one, or being engaged in a hobby where we lose track of things like time and the self—very profound, actually, those flow states. In the meditation, we actually can harness that sense of effortless energy to be very easeful around things like time, the constraints of the past and future, or around self, all the baggage and the ways we expend and possibly waste energy to some extent defending the self, aggrandizing the self, creating new selves. All of which have their place, some of which are skillful, but all of which have stress in them, all those identities we create and use.

In the final minute, each of these three forms of energy, ways of thinking about the capacity that we have to bring balanced energy to our practice, involves some letting go. I just mentioned that in the case of the third one, but to review them in this way: that first one, that initial sitting down and then as we meditate beginning again and again, has this letting go in it in terms of sitting down, just letting go of other activities, but also letting go of our sense of preference or judgment, coming back to the present moment without any sense of having done anything wrong or anything having gone wrong. We're letting go of something important there. With the continuous or sustained energy, we're letting go of a lot of preoccupation with things, a lot of worry about things. We're just floating back to the here and now, keeping connected with it in a way that's sustained, constant, quite soft. And then third, this idea of effortless effort or energy that's extremely well-balanced. Here there's a lot of letting go around things like self and holding on to things, attachment. Even if it's momentary, even if it's brief, it's extremely easeful and restful for the mind, these small moments of freedom from attachment, freedom from suffering, freedom from holding on.

So each of these five faculties, and this one in particular today, has within it the seeds of freedom. When we connect with it, when we bring our attention to it, when we notice the balancing, when we're explicitly and consciously aware of the energy, we're actually bringing our attention to the letting go that happens in the practice too. So it's not just something we're trying to build to strengthen, but also something that has within it the teachings of the Buddha around letting go and being present for the letting go of suffering in particular.

That's it for today. Tomorrow we'll talk about the third faculty, the third divinely human faculty as I'm calling it: that of mindfulness. You may have heard of mindfulness. We'll take a look at some different, less thought-about, less considered forms of this very important faculty which lies in the middle of these five for good reason. It's the fulcrum, it's the center point, it's the point of balance. Look forward to looking into that with you tomorrow. Take care, everyone, today. Take care of one another, take care of yourselves, and see you tomorrow. Bye.