This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Keeping the Balance; Six Qualities of Dharma (5 of 5) To be Realized by the Wise. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Keeping the Balance; Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (5 of 5) To be Realized by the Wise - Shelley Gault

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

Guided Meditation: Keeping the Balance

So here we are, it's Friday. For some of us it's the morning, for some it's later in the day. There might be some for whom it's earlier as well—I haven't seen people from the Pacific area, but there might be some off to the west of California.

So let's sit together as we do, taking a posture that supports being both awake and at ease. Take a little time to scan the body, breathing into areas of habitual tension or areas you feel tension now. Even if they aren't habitual, just breathing out and allowing them to soften.

You might take a few deeper breaths, really letting the in-breath expand the chest and the belly. And then on the out-breath, just letting go, softening everywhere in the body that isn't needed to keep you upright. Softening in a way that supports staying present, staying connected, staying awake to what's arising within you and in your experience meeting what's outside you as well—all the things that make up your life right now.

It can be useful to let this balance of wakefulness and ease be a kind of touchstone in the practice. In our bodies and in our minds, just occasionally checking in on that balance. Not getting really obsessed about it or tied to it, but just occasionally checking in and seeing: is there a balance? Is there ease and alertness? Are they both there? Are they balanced in a way that I can stay present to what's arising right now?

Trust that you have the discernment to see if the balance is right in this moment. If it might be beneficial to ease up a bit, or maybe to bring a little more energy into the mind and body. Trust that you know what's needed. This kind of balance is something that we need to attend to no matter how long we've been practicing. It's not just advice for people new to practice; we can always take advantage of it.

As we sit this morning, I invite you to practice in the way that is most useful to you. Maybe keeping the breath at the center, or some other sensation, or some other aspect of what's arising. Or opening to everything that's coming up inside you, and then your contact with the environment—temperatures and sounds. Whatever feels most useful this morning.

As we sit, no matter what we're attending to, we can be responsive to what's going on in the body and the mind. We can check occasionally in an easeful way, not straining to see something, but just noticing: am I awake? Is there awareness? Is there tension that needs to be eased? In doing that, if it can be done with little effort, just noticing. Bringing more interest, more curiosity into each moment that feels like it could use it.

It's the idea of balance—staying alert, staying awake to what's going on, and at the same time being in as much ease as possible as we sit. Making the adjustments like riding a bicycle, noticing if we're leaning too far one way or the other. It becomes intuitive, just making a little adjustment, coming back to a place of balance, a place of being awake.

So as we near the end of the sitting period, just checking again to see: is that balance of ease and wakefulness, of relaxation and alertness, is it still there in the body and in the mind? Invite it even at this late period in the sit. Just let that balance accompany you as much as you can into what comes next, into listening to the Dharmette, into the day as it unfolds, and into your interactions with others and with the world. I notice the effect of that. The world needs balance; among many things, it needs balance.

Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (5 of 5) To be Realized by the Wise

So today is our last day of the week, Friday. And I realized this week I've offered kind of a lot of content—two lists interacting that I feel are really useful to look at together. I just hope it hasn't been too much. If it has, I apologize, but there's more today of course.

I've been talking about these six qualities of the Dharma that are mentioned in a whole raft of Suttas¹ and that I've always found really inspiring. It's a list that I like to look at again and again, and I feel like it has become part of my practice, just seeing the Dharma in these ways.

To recap, the Dharma is said to be:

• Well proclaimed (Svākkhāto)
• Visible here and now (Sandiṭṭhiko)
• Immediately effective (Akāliko)
• Inviting inspection (Ehipassiko)
• Onward leading (Opanayiko)
• To be realized by the wise (Paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhi)

That's the sixth and final quality that I'll be talking about today: to be experienced or to be realized by the wise—Paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhi.

In the analogy that I spoke of before, that I once heard Gil use about having a pebble in one's shoe as an example of dukkha², the realization was obvious because the pain in the foot was really obvious. The cause was obvious, and the remedy, of course, was pretty clear. But it's not so clear or simple in many areas of life where dukkha shows up.

Often we don't recognize that there's pain in the situations, and sometimes we don't see the pain for years. It sneaks up on us. When we start to practice the Dharma, we see there are perhaps attitudes in the mind—just very subtle varieties of greed or aversion—that have been causing a lack of ease, a lack of peace, a lack of freedom in us, and having an effect on others as well. So things like anger, resentment, anxiety, craving for some kind of sense contact—craving for a flavor or a substance or some kind of experience. Those can occur both at very intense levels and also very subtly.

When there's an attitude in the mind like anger, resentment, or craving, we may not see it. We may not see it for a long time because we're looking through it; we're not looking at it. We often use that analogy of a fish that can't see the water it's swimming in. Any attitude in our minds colors what we see. We can go on and on in life believing that we just need to get a handle on our anger, just learn to be more patient, and if we can refrain, it appears to be very beneficial and skillful. And it is beneficial and skillful. But at some point, if we're practicing diligently, we'll see that we need to look squarely at whatever is arising in our minds that is obstructive—some kind of hindrance, some kind of defilement.

We need to become really familiar and really intimate with them, not indulging and not repressing. We want to be in the middle—not indulging, not repressing. Dukkha is to be understood; that's the instruction for the First Noble Truth, to understand dukkha. If we get very familiar with the obstructive mind states, we might begin to get a sense that those ways of relating to the world—because mind states affect how we relate to the world, they become the flavor of our interactions with the world—that they arose as defenses against some pain that we've been unwilling to feel. And then we can investigate more deeply into the pain. We keep looking, we keep being curious.

Luckily, in the Dharma, we have many tools to work with to become aware of dukkha and to release it. We don't just depend on one strategy. Another strategy of taking off our shoe and removing a pebble: we might offer ourselves kindness, warmth. We might just be able to see the conditioned nature of anger and impatience, for example, and that can be enough to let it go. Just seeing, "This is not me. This is not me; this is just something I learned." Maybe we see how attached we've been to a particular way of responding, that we've identified with being a particular kind of person: "I'm a judgmental person," "I'm a really optimistic person," "I'm a really impatient person." Some kind of identification.

When we see and recognize that, we see that just because we've learned to behave and to act out of a certain kind of mental orientation, it doesn't mean that's who we are. It's just something we've learned. Gradually, any reactivity in us begins to weaken. Awareness reveals that what we thought of as our character, our personality—the character traits—they are just simply habits. Habits that we learned, and they can be unlearned. They can be abandoned.

Sheridan Blau³, in his essay on "Performative Literacy," describes a capacity to monitor and direct one's own reading process: metacognitive awareness. That's an interesting term, metacognitive awareness. It's a big term in the education world, but it applies all across the world of thinking, which is the world of humans I guess. It's an awareness of how our minds work, how we tend to approach situations in life. It includes awareness of what we find easy, what is more difficult for us mentally, kinds of skills that come easily to us, and the kinds that don't come easily to us.

To have that kind of awareness of how our mind works—learning how our mind works in the most subtle ways—that's really at the heart of how we become free in our Buddhist practice. We see where we grasp and where we push away at base, because those are the base movements of mind that get us in trouble: grasping and pushing away. Where there is good discernment, we begin to see where there is good discernment and where we're driven by old habits. Where there's peace and where there's stress. Gradually, we incline our minds more and more in the direction that doesn't have dukkha in it.

To become skilled in practice, each of us needs to be able to discern where effort might be needed, how much effort we need to apply in a particular situation, and what are the particular skills or qualities from the Dharma that would support our growth.

I mentioned impatience a couple of days ago; it's one of my companions sometimes on the path. We might notice that we're more impatient or we're more easily annoyed than we'd like to be. And we can apply antidotes to that. We can take a pause, we can cultivate more patience, we can practice loving-kindness, we can practice gratitude—always useful. We use different strategies at different times depending on what the external situation is and what our mental state, our mood and attitude, seem to ask for in the particular situation we find ourselves in.

The Dharma, when we come to learn how our minds work, we become able to use them in a more skillful way. By skillful I mean kusala⁴—wholesome, what tends in the direction of the end of dukkha rather than more dukkha. So sometimes just being with what's going on in our minds and hearts with mindful attention is the wisest choice as a way of operating. And sometimes we need to apply some kind of antidote, we need to take some kind of action.

As our practice goes on, we develop an inner compass that can keep us headed in the onward-leading direction, away from what's unskillful, what will ultimately lead away from dukkha for us or for others, towards peace, towards care—care for ourselves, care for the world.

It's useful from time to time to kind of evaluate our practice to see: are we just skating along? Have we become complacent? Are we feeling like, "Oh, I'm mindful enough, my meditations are calm and pleasant, so that's all that's needed"? Or maybe we're straining. Maybe we're developing a tight mind, feeling like we're not getting anywhere and we really need to work hard at it, and as a result not feeling any ease or peace. If we have discernment as a result of coming to know our minds, coming to know the Dharma, we can recognize that it might be more useful to practice in a different way—to be more relaxed, to be more receptive. We learn about how we respond to different situations and what's the best way for us individually to respond to each situation that we come across in our lives.

We each walk our own individual path. No two paths are the same. As I said before, and is often said, only we can walk our own path. The Buddha can't walk it for us; no one can walk it for us. So we come to know our minds, we come to know all our strengths and all our quirks. I think it makes a lot of sense to compare walking the path of practice to its end—to its complete blossoming, let's say—to the reading of difficult texts. Each one of us is a complex of so many variables, so many threads of conditioning going back all the way to our birth, or further if we accord to the idea of rebirth. We're all one-of-a-kind creations.

The Dharma is to be realized by the wise—that's us. Only we can realize the Dharma. And realization—becoming wise, becoming the wise one who can realize it—is a result of walking the path. We don't actually need to understand the conditions that have given rise to who we are right now in order to become free. But by reading ourselves carefully, being open to new interpretations, being willing to change our minds, to try new behaviors, new ways of looking at our experience—Ehipassiko, come and see for yourself—we can come to see beneath the major conditioning forces of our individual lives. We can begin to see the commonalities that characterize all human experience in the Buddhist view: anicca, dukkha, anattā⁵—inconstancy, stress/suffering, not-self.

Treating the path as a long exploration of what it is that makes up our inner lives, it takes us from the purely personal into the realm of what we call wisdom in the Buddhist tradition. We don't become free by taking on beliefs about what life is all about, about who we are in the deepest sense. We discover these things; they reveal themselves to us. They become visible here and now. They reveal themselves to be immediately effective when we approach our experience with focused attention, with curiosity, with willingness to start over again and again. To be in the place of not knowing, to be in the place of uncertainty, of willingness to question our views, to change our minds, to be open, accepting, and of course to be kind. To come and see again and again. That's our practice all along the path.

As we practice and learn, we see these six qualities showing up: well proclaimed, visible here and now, immediately effective, inviting inspection, onward leading, and to be realized by the wise. And as we continue, I believe we'll all come—I hope we will—to the conclusion that the Dharma is good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end.

I'd like to close today's Dharmette with a poem from a poet who I really like. His name is John Daniel. I believe he lives in Oregon; I think he's an Oregon poet. He's a contemporary American poet. His poem is titled "A Prayer Among Friends," and I want to share it with you.

A Prayer Among Friends

Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive with one another, we walk here in the light of this unlikely world that isn't ours for long. May we spend generously the time we are given. May we seek a vision that serves all beings, may we honor the mystery surpassing our sight, and may we hold in our hands the gift of good work and bear it forth whole, as we were borne forth by a power we praise to this one Earth, this homeland of all we love.

So that's a prayer for us, my friends. May we enact our responsibilities as thoroughly as we enjoy our pleasures. May we see with clarity. May we each seek a vision that serves all beings. May we honor the mystery surpassing our sight, each of us, all of us. May we see the Dharma playing out in our lives and share what it gives us freely with others.

It's been a great pleasure to be with you this week, and I thank you for your attention and your kind words in the chat. It's been a delight. Next week May Elliott will be with you, and the week after that it will be Ying Chen. Lovely teachers.

So until we meet again, thank you. May you be well.