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Living Kindness: Buddhist Teachings for a Troubled World - Talk 3 (5 of 6) - Kevin Griffin

The following talk was given by Kevin Griffin at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on October 08, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Living Kindness: Buddhist Teachings for a Troubled World - Talk 3 (5 of 6)

Introduction: The 11 Benefits of Loving-Kindness

All right, maybe we'll do a soft launch for the afternoon. We'll just gradually work our way back in. I thought maybe I would just share something not part of my day's plan. In one of the suttas, the Buddha tells us that there are 11 benefits of loving-kindness. If you practice loving-kindness—and we assume that this means to a high degree—let's say: you will sleep well, you will awaken happy, you have no bad dreams. That's three. You will be pleasing to humans, you'll be pleasing to spirits, deities will protect you. Fire, poison, and weapons will not injure you. Concentration will come quickly, your face will be serene, you will die unconfused, and your rebirth will be at least in the Brahma world. That's the 11 benefits of loving-kindness.

Some of them are more believable than others, but the one story that I love... I don't know how many of you are familiar with Abhayagiri¹ Monastery. It's a monastery up near the Ukiah area, called Redwood Valley. So kind of a sister city to Redwood City. And Abhayagiri is a Theravada Buddhist monastery in the Ajahn Chah² tradition, the Thai Forest tradition. It's a particular realm of Buddhism which I kind of come through to some degree, though I've never been a monk, obviously.

Several years ago, during one of the fire stages, which thankfully we're not having this year at least to any great degree, there were fires all around Redwood Valley. Actually, some of the fire swept up from the south. The monastery is built on a hillside. Actually, Abhayagiri means "Fearless Mountain"—abhaya is fearless, giri is mountain. Just as an aside, in ancient Sri Lanka, there were two competing monasteries: Amaravati and Abhayagiri. Amaravati is the Thai Forest monastery in England, and Abhayagiri is the one over here. They're sister monasteries—can we call them that? I guess we should call them brother monasteries since they're for men. [Laughter]

Anyway, for what it's worth, it's interesting that they chose those names of the ancient monasteries. They competed in the sense that the royalty—whoever the king or the royal family was supporting—would like one particular monastery, and they would give more money to them. Then the other one would kind of fall into, not disarray, but they'd lose some influence. And then maybe another king would come along who would like the other monastery. So they went back and forth apparently through time, which is sort of odd to think monasteries are competing with each other, right? But people will be people, even when you put them in monasteries, as we learned from the monks at Kosambi who were arguing about the toilet.

In any case, during this fire, the firefighters discovered that Abhayagiri, because they had a very strong infrastructure—a big parking area and good plumbing and everything—used it as a staging area. The monks had had to leave, but the firefighters were staying there. They were up on the ridge above the monastery, and the fire was coming toward them. They said that they were getting ready to abandon their position because it was going to be untenable. Just at the point when the fire was about to crest the ridge, which would have brought it straight down the hill into the monastery surrounded by forest—and then it would have just taken all the buildings, of course, with it—the fire just stopped and backed away and burned somewhere else.

Presumably, the wind changed. But the fire marshal said he had never seen this happen before. He said the hair stood up on the back of his neck when this happened. It was like, "This can't happen. It's over, this fire is coming, nothing's going to stop it." And it just stopped and backed away.

When Ajahn Pasanno tells this story, I haven't heard him specifically refer to the benefits of loving-kindness, but I know that in his mind, and in the mind of everyone who knows the benefits of loving-kindness, it is worth thinking: "Fire, poison, and weapons will not injure you." That the monks who practice loving-kindness there very deeply, that their energy protected it.

Now, I'm a very skeptical, scientifically oriented type, so I don't believe that. But I don't not believe it, because I don't know. I think we can overvalue science, and we can overvalue magic. But at the end of the day, it always seems like if you don't know something, it's best to take a stance of "don't know." Because that's a safe stance.

"Don't Know" Mind

It's actually the great Korean Zen master Seung Sahn³—that was his main teaching. His meditation instructions were this: "Breathing in, clear mind, clear mind. Breathing out, don't know." He would say that, and you would be like, "Okay, yeah." That was his voice: "Don't know."

"Don't know" is actually a great instruction. We have such a tendency to feel that we have to know. We have to have an answer. And it's actually led to a lot of blunders by human beings over the millennia when people don't know. Historically, people didn't understand science, so they made up things for why things happened. Rather than saying, "Well, I don't know why it rains," they said, "Well, it's the rain gods that determine it." Which, again, don't know. Maybe there are all kinds of energies, or maybe you just call the forces of nature "gods." That's not an unreasonable thing. But of course, beliefs like the Earth is the center of the universe were really wrong, and held back science for a long time.

I think it's interesting for ourselves in our meditation to notice how much time you spend trying to figure something out. What you discover is that the desire to know is a very compelling force. When you understand the Four Noble Truths⁴ that say that the cause of suffering is craving, is desire, and you realize that sitting there and trying to figure something out—you can tune in to feel the tension that's created in your mind when you could just say, "I don't know."

I'm going away on a retreat in a couple of weeks, and my mind goes into all this turmoil about what's going to happen, or planning things. "Oh well, okay, I should do that. I don't know." What about just letting it go? Just let it happen. So another one of those teachings that are implied in the Dharma, but not always openly explained, is the suffering caused by the desire to know.

Well, see, I keep talking and I just don't have time to finish my tea. So this afternoon we're going to go through two more suttas, but I think we should start with some more sitting, because that's where it all begins.

Any other messages in there that we need to check on? No. Good. I see a chat. The last message was 1:14. I guess it's before lunch. Okay. So what shall we do now?

Integrating Loving-Kindness and Mindfulness

For those who are more familiar with the traditional way that we teach loving-kindness, you may have noticed that I'm not doing that. It's not that I don't think that's valuable, or that I don't even use that myself, but I'm more interested this day in bringing in different aspects of loving-kindness, of the Brahma Viharas⁵, and of meditation practice.

One of the things that I think is a useful way to think about loving-kindness is as a partner with mindfulness, or a partner with Vipassana⁶ meditation, Insight Meditation. There can be a tendency to create these two different types of practice: on the one hand, we practice mindful breathing and Insight Meditation; on the other hand, sometimes we practice just loving-kindness meditation.

But for me, if I'm practicing Insight Meditation without kindness, it can become this dry, and at times even sort of self-flagellating kind of practice, where you're just observing your mind and then you're just like, "Oh, my mind, it's so bad. It's so messed up. Why am I having these thoughts?" So I really think it's important to have, as I talked about earlier, self-compassion and self-care integrated into mindfulness.

In another way, when we're practicing loving-kindness, if we're thinking of someone and trying to offer loving-kindness, and some negative mind state or feeling or thought arises, it can really take us off that track. If we're not paying attention—particularly if you're working with the difficult person in loving-kindness—you can completely lose the track of the loving-kindness if you're not being mindful.

So mindfulness needs to be in loving-kindness, and loving-kindness needs to be in mindfulness. I'm going to guide you in a mindfulness-centered practice and try to bring in elements of loving-kindness and compassion, and perhaps others of the Brahma Viharas.

Guided Meditation

Whether you can have your eyes closed, or just lower your gaze.

Are you sitting in a way that supports a balance of alertness and comfort? Of calm and clarity? If we are too rigid in our posture, then we will create tension in the mind. But if we are too casual in our posture, then the mind can become dull, flaccid. As with all the Buddhist teachings, the Middle Way applies to our posture.

Putting your attention on the breath, wherever it's easy for you to feel the breath. It could be the nostrils, the touch of air. Or the chest, or the belly, the movement. Just feeling the body breathing.

Breathing is how the body takes care of itself. Brings in oxygen to nourish the system, the cells. Expels carbon dioxide to purify. Breathing is an act of kindness that the body does for itself.

We can feel the preciousness of breath. We've all had moments when we had trouble breathing, whether we were sick, or underwater, or we got knocked about in some sports and lost our breath. Those moments are so frightening, and in those moments we know instinctively that we must breathe to stay alive. This precious breath.

The Buddha says that mindful breathing creates an ambrosial, pleasant dwelling. The breath is like the nectar of the gods. Resting in awareness of the breath creates a beautiful experience for us. Like ambrosia.

We can feel the grace of the breath, like the movements of a dancer, flowing rhythmically. Moving the body in this life-sustaining flow.

In our practice, when our mind wanders, we observe that. Not to get lost in those thoughts, but to notice what is the quality of the thoughts that take us away from the breath. And here we'll often see thoughts, ideas, and feelings that are harmful to us. Self-judgments. Resentments. As the Buddha puts it: sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

How do we meet these thoughts? How do we meet these feelings? Do we meet them with fear, with judgment, with resistance? Or instead, can we meet them with kindness? Acceptance, interest, curiosity. These are qualities of loving-kindness.

We don't feed these kind of thoughts, but we don't fear them either. We watch them come and watch them go, and then we return to the ambrosial dwelling of the breath.

(Silence for meditation)

So as we sit, things keep changing. The principle of impermanence is quite evident. And so our mindfulness, our attention, also needs to adapt to changing experiences.

One of these is the changes in energy as we sit. Familiar with the hindrance of sleepiness and the hindrance of restlessness. As we become calmer, quieter, sometimes drowsiness takes over. And so we need to strengthen the posture, open the eyes, take some deep breaths. Engage the mind.

Or at times, restlessness takes over as the stillness starts to become challenging. And we need to soften, make the mind spacious, give room for that energy. Calm the body with the exhalation.

At other times, the mind will become absorbed in some excursion of the mind. The mind traveling off into some seemingly vital exploration. And so we have to step in, interrupt that proliferation by drawing it more strongly back to the breath, back to the body, to this room, to the present moment.

We may find ourselves swept up in some emotional state. Sadness. Fear. Resentment. And here we must open the heart, allowing feelings to move through. Letting the breath hold us to the present moment. Letting go of fear. Trusting that mindfulness will hold the feelings, whatever they are.

So our practice is not one thing, but requires this careful attention that adapts to the changing aspects of our experience in mind and body.

(Silence for meditation)

All right, thank you. Again, for those who can't hear the bell, it has been rung.

Q&A: Discipline and Motivation

I'd like to just open it up for general questions about meditation. Surely I have a lot of questions, so I'd be surprised if you don't. But sometimes they aren't questions, they're just the challenges that we face. Oh Maryann, yes, there's a hand up.

Questioner 1 (Kim): Thank you. Hi, my name is Kim, and this has been very enjoyable. But meditation... how come it is that I can be so disciplined in some areas of my life, and struggle so much to be disciplined with my meditation? I have theories, but I'd like to hear yours. One of them is being an addict and alcoholic; I'm looking for instant results. And it's not instant. It's faster than I usually expect when I meditate regularly that I begin to see or feel differences. But it's perplexed me my entire time of following a spiritual path.

Kevin Griffin: When do you meditate? Or I'll put it in another way: what inspires you to meditate?

Questioner 1: Usually not liking where I'm at. Or making a commitment with a friend to meditate every day for X number of days. My brain takes off so fast in the morning, and my body quickly follows. It's the interruption of that pattern of behavior that I have a difficult time doing.

Kevin Griffin: I don't have an answer, but I think it's a useful reflection because it's a common thing I hear from people. I'm not sure why it's not a problem for me, but I think it has a lot to do with my father. He would get up at the same time every morning, go through his calisthenics, take his shower, put on a suit, go to the kitchen, eat a soft-boiled egg, and go to work.

My father was a lawyer, but they had a time clock apparently at his office at the Bethlehem Steel company. My brother said he was once at my father's office and saw his time card, and that every day he checked in within like three minutes of the same time. He would always arrive home at 5:20, which coincidentally was the same time that my mother's first martini was poured—but we don't have to go into that story. He would then say, "I'm going to go upstairs and change my socks," and then he would come downstairs in a completely different outfit, having taken off his suit and put on khakis and a different shirt. So he did not just change his socks. However, it was the same routine, day in and day out.

He was a creature of routine, and it drove me crazy. I vowed to never be like him, as one does with one's parents. And so I became a musician living a life of chaos. At a certain point in my life, I realized when I wake up in the morning, I do this, I do that. I roll a joint, I get high. I get out my guitar, I practice scales, I go to rehearsal. The gig starts, I have one beer. After the first set I smoke a joint, after the second set I have another beer. I was my father, just in a crazy alcoholic musician way.

When I started to meditate, I learned TM (Transcendental Meditation), and they tell you in TM: "Meditate twice a day for 20 minutes, no matter what." I was like, "Okay." And no matter what—that was before I was sober. Drunk, stoned, or sober, whatever—I got up in the morning, I did my 20 minutes, and sometime later in the day I did my other 20 minutes. And it just became a habit.

I don't know that my guidance is that helpful, but I will tell you what I suggest: schedule it into your day. Put it on your calendar. It's part of my routine. I think most people have some kind of routine when they get up. As soon as you're moderately awake, do your meditation. For me, that's a shower. I don't drink coffee. I'll have tea after my meditation. But if I take a shower, I'm awake. If I don't take a shower, I'm not awake. If I meditate before a shower, I'm spaced out. So it's just my routine. As soon as you're moderately awake, do your meditation, because just as you say, the mind goes off. And where the mind goes, the body follows. As soon as you start moving and doing stuff, it's too hard to stop. You say, "Oh, it's 11:30, well I'll meditate now before lunch." When does that happen? No.

I think routine is the thing I recommend. Now, on another level, the reason I asked you what inspires you to practice is exactly what I thought you would say, which is: when there's some difficulty, when I'm distressed. That's why we get sober, because things are so bad that we're willing to make this radical change. And I think that generally applies to meditation. There's that phrase, "Suffering is the touchstone of spiritual growth," and the same applies here. If I'm not suffering enough, then I'm not motivated enough to meditate.

The thing is, you're always suffering enough. It's just that you're not paying attention. Dukkha⁷ is pervasive in our lives. If we really pay attention to our mind, body, and emotional state, we will see that we always need meditation. But what happens is that our habitual response to the energy of that agitation, that dukkha, is to try to do something to fix it. Change things, get away from it, push it away. And meditation is saying, "No, stop and be with it." And that's not appealing.

That is definitely part of the resistance to meditation. We know that if we sit down to meditate, we have to be with our own mind. I'm going off on this six-week retreat, and really the thing that's agitating my mind is, "Oh my God, I'm going to be with my own mind, and it's not a great place in there all the time." I'm capable of getting into wonderful meditative states, but I'm also capable of getting into completely crazy, distressed states. I think the main reason people avoid meditation is to avoid being with themselves.

And yet, that's the exact reason to meditate. Because meditation is the place where we can learn to be with ourselves, where we can cultivate awareness, cultivate kindness, let go of the obsessions. Practice creating space between the stimulus and response, as Viktor Frankl⁸ says. Seeing, "Oh, that's just sensation. That's just a thought. That's just a feeling." Just observing. We have to cultivate all those qualities, but the instinctive response to that stuff coming up is to move away from it, to not meditate.

So I think we just have to be diligent, ardent, and resolute. We have to be committed. The reflection on dukkha, on its causes, and on the end of dukkha can be our reminder: "Oh, this dukkha is not solved by running away. This dukkha is solved by engaging it with wisdom and kindness."

He got me going, or I got myself going there. Or maybe the tea got me going. Other questions?

Q&A: Noting Thoughts and Categorization

Questioner 2: I find it difficult to more specifically name my thinking when I'm meditating. I'm able to identify very generally that typically I'm planning. But I want to move more deeply into it and get better at being more specific about what I'm either thinking or feeling. Do you have any suggestions?

Kevin Griffin: It's a good question. It's a particular style of Vipassana to name the thoughts, right? The noting practice. And there's certainly a value in that specificity, and the demand that it puts on our attention. It forces us to ask, "What is that?" So it is useful, but I don't think it's necessarily necessary. It's one approach.

First of all, let me just say that each of us has to find the forms of meditation that seem to work for us the most. At different times those might be different things. You might find, "I need to work on loving-kindness," or "I want to work on this kind of very precise attention," or "I want to work with a more spacious awareness." Each of us has proclivities that make us resonate more with certain types of practice.

My own practice evolved away from that kind of precision. Most of my practice is more focused on a feeling experience rather than a cognitive one. Rather than bringing things into conscious verbal expression and verbal understanding of what's happening, my practice focuses more on: "How does that feel when I have that thought?" So I'm not interested so much in, "What kind of a thought is that?" as I am in, "How does that thinking trigger these feelings of dukkha?" And then watching how those feelings set off trains of thought.

That relationship is tied into dependent origination. We're really looking at cause and effect, which is what karma is about, and what dependent origination is about: this leads to that, that leads to that. When I stop doing this, then that stops happening. So watching that relationship between thoughts and feelings, and then trying to interrupt it, is more what I'm interested in.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to bring things more intentionally conscious and verbally identify things. It's a useful practice, but if it's not really working for you, you're not missing out on something necessarily if you're working with other forms. The form that I'm talking about is less structured, and therefore there is more of a risk of drift, where it's just like, "I'm just sitting and I'm kind of just out there."

Questioner 2: I primarily see myself—I think I tend to be the deluded form of personality type. I think what I'm looking for is just a sort of more self-awareness and clarity. I was thinking if I can better identify what my thoughts are, the next step then would be to move into the feeling side of that. That's how I was viewing it.

Kevin Griffin: That's a really wise response to that insight about yourself. Just to clarify for people who aren't familiar with this particular teaching, one of the suggestions—and this comes out of the commentaries, not necessarily what the Buddha said, but later commentaries—is that there tend to be three different personality types.

The type of person who's a greedy or desire type, someone who's looking for stimulation and new experiences. The aversive type that tends to avoid discomfort and is more interested in finding stuff that works, not necessarily exploring a lot. And then the deluded type, which is harder to characterize, but tends to not have a lot of clarity about what's going on.

Indeed, I think you're exactly right that if you identify yourself as a deluded type—which is actually very difficult to do; usually deluded types don't know that they're deluded types for obvious reasons, because they're deluded! [Laughter] So being more specific and really taking time to ask, "What is this? What is this?" is a really wise antidote to that tendency. So I think it's great, you should do it.

Any suggestions for how to get more specific? The way I learned noting practice was the first thing I learned to do was not identify whether it's a thought... identify whether it's a thought of desire or a thought of aversion. That just gives you two nice categories, rather than getting into "it's planning, it's judging." Just start with that binary.

And even that can be tricky, because when you don't want something, you want it to go away. So there's desire in aversion. They're not actually different, but they have different qualities. I found that really helpful to just see. Since those are the first two hindrances, and they're basically the cause of suffering—the Second Noble Truth—they give you a lot to work with.

Questioner 3: I just tend to label them as "thinking", irrelevant, go back to the breath. And they fall off. They might come back, but then again I say, "Well, thinking." Is that okay? Or it needs to be "this kind of thought, that kind of thought" and try to label it?

Kevin Griffin: There's certainly nothing wrong with that. The first question to me is, is that working? Does it seem like there's value in that? If just by naming "thinking" and coming back to your breath the thoughts tend to fall away, then that's a really productive way of practicing.

Different strategies are associated with different goals, in a sense. By naming things more specifically, you're getting more information about your own personality's tendencies. And that can be useful, because it helps you to become less identified or less attached to your personality.

But I also find that sometimes when I get into that, it becomes this struggle to figure out, "What is that thought?" and it takes me out of the natural flow of meditation. You're just sitting here being with the breath, and all of a sudden you're like, "What's that? This is that," and it's all up here in the head. I want my meditation to be my whole body.

When you're off the cushion, that's already going on in your brain. You're thinking, you're judging, you're doing this, that, and the other. When you are on the cushion, it's a little easier because the mind is a little thinner because of the concentration.

I would say your practice was wrong if you're not practicing. If you're sitting down and trying to be present and cultivate wholesome qualities, then there's nothing wrong. It's just different forms. We can get too caught up in the idea of form. When I say form, I mean the mechanics of our meditation. To me, meditation is meant to take us beyond form, but we start with form because that's all we have. You can't just start with "Okay, just sit there and open your mind to space." We need something to start with.

The practice of following the breath, noticing thoughts, letting go of thoughts, and coming back to the breath starts to build neural pathways towards the mind naturally being more present, more mindful. And then with time, we can start to drop into more subtle forms of awareness, where we're tuning into the subtle emotional energies in the body. Where we are starting to see how our perceptions create a sense of a self. We start to see the impermanent nature, the dynamic nature of mind and body, how nothing is stable.

We're moving toward these insights, and this is where the practice is meant to take us: to insight, which then is meant to take us to letting go of clinging, which is then meant to take us to liberation, awakening. So the form is just a jumping-off point to cultivate insight and awakening.

The question to ask ourselves about form is: "Is this form bringing me more toward that, or moving me away from it?" One of the ways that form can move us away from insight is when we become overly attached to the form. It's like the simile of the raft, where the Buddha says you use a raft to cross to the other shore. When you get to the other shore, you don't carry the raft.

The raft is the form. The raft is your mindful breathing or your noting. And then there can be a point where you realize, "Oh, I don't need this form anymore. It's not serving me. I can let that go, because that's not the purpose." We can get very obsessed with, "Oh, I'm really good at concentrating," or "I'm really good at doing loving-kindness," or "I'm really good at being mindful of the breath." There's no Olympics for meditation. You're not going to get a gold medal. It's not going to solve anything. We're trying to get to something else.

So let's take a break, and then we're going to dive into another sutta. We'll take 15 minutes and come back around 3:30.