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Guided Meditation: The Buddha's Five Daily Recollections: Losing the Beloved; Dharmette: The Buddha's Five Daily Recollections (4 of 5): Losing the Beloved - Mei Elliott

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

Guided Meditation: The Buddha's Five Daily Recollections: Losing the Beloved

Welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. My name is Mei Elliott, and here we are discussing the fourth of the Buddha's Five Daily Recollections. This one today is a really difficult one—the most difficult for many—and it goes like this:

I must be parted and separated from everyone and everything dear and agreeable to me.

As with previous days, I'll remind you to gauge your sense of well-being and resiliency this morning and proceed with caution. If you're feeling well-resourced today, this session might be really powerful for you. If not, just take care with what feels right.

As with each day so far, we'll practice with this phrase in two ways during the meditation. After sitting quietly for a while, we'll just drop the phrase into the mind, allowing it to ripple through without any sort of intentional engagement, just seeing what naturally arises. Then, after that, I'll offer some questions so you can actively contemplate the phrase using thinking—yes, thinking during a meditation—but keep a short leash on it so the mind doesn't get discursive. That's a little overview of what you can expect for today.

Let's get started with our meditation. Go ahead and find a posture that's supportive for you this morning. Find something that's comfortable. Given how these phrases are challenging, find something that allows the body to be relaxed and at ease. Begin to settle, letting go of past thoughts and future thoughts, inviting the mind to come into the body, into the now.

Begin with a few deep breaths if that's helpful for you, allowing yourself to land. Connect with your anchor—the breath, the soundscape, the global sense of the body sitting—whatever the anchor is for you that helps you stay here, that gives you a grounding point that you can come back to when the mind wanders. Let this anchor be something that's either neutral or even slightly pleasant. It can be challenging for the mind, and cause the mind to become weary, if our anchor is unpleasant. Go ahead and take some time now to settle, to rest, and to unify the mind with the body.

Before beginning our phrases together, it can be helpful to warm up the heart, to bring a little tenderness. You might consider an image of yourself as a child, or just the general sense of a younger you. Bring this to mind, thinking of some of the positive qualities of this being, of this little kid—maybe innocent, or loving, friendly, playful. As you do this, attend to the sensations at the heart center and notice any emotions that might arise.

That might be enough to warm up the heart just a bit. If so, you can rest in that feeling. If not, you might offer some phrases of kindness, or Metta¹.

May you be happy, dear one. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be at ease.

Just bringing in a little softness here.

Now, letting go of the Metta and shifting to our phrases. I'll offer you this fourth recollection, and when I say it, allow it to drop into your meditation. Just let it ripple through. Not trying to make anything happen, just seeing what naturally arises in the mind and the heart, and being mindful of that.

Breathing in with compassion, I gently remember that:

I will be parted from everyone and everything I hold dear.

Maybe thoughts or emotions arise, or maybe nothing arises. Any response is fine.

Breathing in with compassion, I gently remember that:

I will be parted from everyone and everything I hold dear.

Practice with this now on your own, at your own rhythm. At any point, you can return to your anchor, letting go of the recollection. Take care to hold whatever you find with gentleness and kindness. If it ends up feeling like too much, just let go of the phrases. You want to avoid weaponizing this practice, only doing it when the mind has enough bandwidth to hold it.

Maybe letting go of the recollection, coming back to your anchor, and again resting. If there are residual emotions, sensations in the body, or thoughts, make room for them. Take good care of them.

We shift now to our engaged contemplation. I'll offer the phrase again, and then I'll also share some questions. For this part, you can allow yourself to contemplate, to think about how you might reply to these questions. Make sure that the thinking is staying close to the question so that you don't end up on an entirely different topic. We're keeping an eye on not having the discursive mind get out of hand.

The phrase again:

I must be parted and separated from everyone and everything dear and agreeable to me.

How deeply do you know this? Do you know it conceptually only, or do you know it in your core?

Do you remember this when you interact with your loved ones?

What would it be like if you had this in mind when you engaged with those around you? How might it impact those relationships?

Does it change what you choose to say, or how you choose to say it?

Does it change your actions—what you choose to do and how you do it?

Does it even change how you think about people?

In this way, perhaps changing all actions of body, speech, and mind.

What reactions come up for you when you realize you must be parted from everyone and everything you love? Grief, acceptance, numbness? All are natural responses. Recognizing and accepting anything that arises. Allowing the mind to be wide with lots of space—lots of space to hold whatever comes up.

Letting go of the contemplation. Resting in the wide, spacious mind. Resting in loving awareness.

Bringing kindness to ourselves. Just as all beings wish to be happy, I too wish to be happy.

May I be happy, healthy, safe, and at ease.

May they be happy. May they be healthy. May they be safe. May they be at ease.

Dharmette: The Buddha's Five Daily Recollections (4 of 5): Losing the Beloved

Welcome back. So for those of you just arriving, my name is Mei Elliott, and today we are focusing on the fourth of the Buddha's Five Daily Recollections. For many, this is the hardest:

I must be parted and separated from everyone and everything dear and agreeable to me.

This is the phrase.

In the Tibetan tradition, the great lay teacher and householder Marpa², who was in the lineage of Naropa, experienced the tragedy of having his son die. One day Marpa was out in his fields weeping. His students, surprised to see that their teacher was so upset, confronted him. They said, "Master, why are you crying? You teach us that it's all an illusion, including death, so why are you crying?"

Marpa replied, "Yes, it's all an illusion. And the death of one's child is the saddest illusion of them all. And so, I cry."

So even for the highly realized or the steadiest of practitioners, there's no denying the grief that can come forth from confronting the loss of a loved one. When the Buddha's two foremost disciples died, the Buddha said it was like having the sun and the moon going out at once—these two bright lights dropping from the sky.

There was a time for me, as my practice deepened, where I was grieving the loss of my loved ones. But what was odd was that the loved ones hadn't died. Not only that, they weren't even sick or particularly old. I was having this kind of mysterious and unprompted sense of loss despite the fact that no one was lost yet. I started calling this emotion "pre-grief," and I thought something might be wrong, or I needed to figure out how to get it to stop.

Then I came across these Five Daily Recollections, and this one specifically—the fourth one: I must be parted and separated from everyone and everything dear and agreeable to me. I began to realize that my pre-grief was actually a textbook example of how the fourth recollection functions and how it can unfold for us as we come to terms with the rules of the game: that we all die, even our beloveds.

As we realize how Samsara³ functions, this sense of grief is really a natural response. As I got to know this practice, I began to realize that my pre-grief actually wasn't a problem at all. On the contrary, it was a healthy purification of the mind and heart. Even though my dear ones were healthy, alive, and present, that wouldn't always be the case. So it was my system coming to terms with the way things are. This loss is the truth of things, and my mind needed to grieve through these losses before it could make peace with them.

I share this so you know that these phrases can bring forth a lot of strong feelings. You can think of it like a purification practice. If you put a dirty towel in the wash, ultimately it'll clean the towel, but in the process, a lot of dirt comes out in the water. So as we begin to wash the mind with this practice—though it ultimately cleans the mind, purifies the mind and heart, and brings it to a place of greater clarity and freedom—in the process, a lot of dirt comes out in the wash. That dirt might be grief, or anger, or other challenging emotions.

So we need to be prepared to meet these feelings. They should be seen, they should be known, and tended to. If difficult emotions come up in this practice, can we give them the kind and loving attention that they're asking for? Tenderness, patience, companionship? Let the feelings move through you. Don't block them, don't stop them. But maybe you don't have to take them so personally either.

Rather, if you experience, say, grief, know that this is the great grief handed down through the generations of beings, moving through all of these lives. Not personal. Showing up now in this body, asking for our loving attention. Here in this body, we're receiving the inheritance of fear, of anger, of all the beings that came before. And you hold the power to meet that inheritance with the love and attention it has been asking for since time immemorial. What a task. Can we meet our emotions in this way? Can we meet these feelings with that sense of purpose, that sense of care?

Now, of course, we don't do this practice just so that we can feel difficult emotions. Ultimately, we do this practice because it leads to greater freedom and happiness. By reflecting on this recollection, it can invite more patience, a reduction in irritation, easier access to forgiveness. When we don't remember that we'll lose everything we love, it's really easy to become trivial with people. We get wrapped up in our problems and we forget the great matter of birth and death.

Suzuki Roshi, founder of San Francisco Zen Center, would sometimes say: "Sometimes I think that you think that your problems are more important than being alone."

This reflection on loss puts things into perspective. Perhaps just being alive is enough.

This remembrance doesn't just purify the mind, leading to more freedom; it also shapes our actions. How do we act with the ones we love? Someone asked the Insight teacher James Baraz, "What can I do about my fear of having my son die?" And James responded, "Tell him how much you love him every single day."

That's a significant action—enough to change a son's life. What if every child had someone tell them they're loved every day? Maybe that's an action that can change the whole world.

Stephen Jenkinson, a teacher who works with people who are dying and their families, would say, "You can't really love something until we love its ending too."

What this points to for me is our attachments to the things we love. We might love something or someone, but we don't love its ending because we're attached. So one way that this fourth recollection functions is to weaken and overcome attachment.

It may be worth remembering that this fourth phrase isn't only about losing our loved ones, but it's about losing anything that is dear to us. Not just our possessions, but say, even our senses. Someday we'll need to say goodbye to seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. What would it be like to say a tender goodbye to each one? This recollection invites us to weaken attachment to our favorite music, our most relished foods, the sights of sunsets, and all the beautiful things. We're not rejecting these things, but we're seeing that we won't have them forever. So there's something that can awaken us to them while simultaneously weakening the attachment to them.

Fundamentally, these Recollections are engaging with the Second Noble Truth⁴: the source of suffering is craving. When we cling, we suffer. So these Recollections are functioning to loosen our grip. As we learn the art of awakening, we have insight into the true nature of things. We see how our clinging leads to suffering, we see the selfless nature of phenomena, and we see that all things are impermanent. This last insight into the impermanent nature of things is really awakening to loss.

I had a friend who said her entire Buddhist practice was a grief practice because everything, at one point or another, will go. As Joseph Goldstein says, "Loss is just another word for change."

If we're grasping a rope tightly and it's being pulled through our hands, what happens? We get rope burn. So as all things slip through our fingers, we can either grip them as tight as we can and get rope burn, or we can learn to let go. Our intention with this isn't to try to get rid of our attachment—that just ends up being attachment to being unattached. Instead, we hold our attachment gently, with open hands, with great care and respect, and let it soften in its own time.

I'll close with some quotes from Francis Weller, who's a master of working with grief:

"This life we have is incredibly short, but we've been blessed with it. When we shut off our grief, you forget that to let grief work its alchemy on you yields gravitas, by which I mean the ability to be present with a bittersweet reality of life, which always includes loss. The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by them."

So may you have the courage to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, such that you are stretched large by them. As you go about your day today, I hope you can experience the preciousness of all the other beings that you encounter, the preciousness of encountering everything you love. And so you can stay close to that feeling.

And as always, please be gentle with yourselves today. Thank you so much everyone, great to be with you. Have a good day.