This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Med: Concentration, Clarity, Equanimity; Interpersonal Dharma (5of5)A Training in Loving Well. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Concentration, Clarity, Equanimity; Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (5 of 5): A Training in Loving Well - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 13, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Concentration, Clarity, Equanimity

Welcome. I received feedback that the bell was too quiet. I've been ringing it at that level for about seven years—this is the importance of feedback! It may render differently on YouTube than when we are together on Zoom. I will take that into account when we finish meditating. It is lovely to see all these names and be with you this week.

Let's settle in for some practice together.

Maybe just beginning with whatever gratitude you have for having a path. Even though you could say you were pretty happy before finding practice, there was another way in which life felt unworkable—that there were existential questions and challenges for which I had absolutely no answer. The path didn't answer everything, but it answered enough. For that, there might be some good bit of gratitude in your life. Just let the gratitude you have for your path soften your heart as we begin.

Where the attention goes is much less important than the qualities of the attention. Shinzen Young¹ defines mindfulness as a threefold skill set working together: concentration, clarity, and equanimity.

Concentration is the sense of stability—the stability of the attentional focus. If the telescope gazing at the stars is shaking, we miss the grandeur of the sky. We stabilize the attention, which means we detect distractors and nurture this stability, this fidelity to the object of attention.

Clarity is perceiving phenomena with much higher resolution, both temporally and spatially. We perceive time in thinner slices and perceive the object with greater magnification—a higher-resolution picture of the breathing, our body, or whatever it may be.

Equanimity is becoming frictionless in the face of saṃsāra². Frictionless even given the tides of pleasant and unpleasant, the tides of change. We might still have preferences, but equanimity settles the compulsive energies to enact those preferences. For our purposes of freedom, everything becomes "good enough."

Maybe the anchor is your breathing or your body more broadly. Maybe it's sound. Maybe the anchor is everywhere or nowhere. We're cultivating concentration, clarity, and equanimity moment by moment, undaunted by the pull of frenzy, muddiness, and grasping. We have some reverence for the power of those forces, but we're undaunted—humbly, moment by moment, nurturing a kind of alertness and stability: higher resolution, frictionless.

Sometimes it seems like each moment is freedom beckoning us. Maybe I can't be totally free right now, but I will rehearse my freedom in this moment. I will not underestimate the Buddha Dharma.

Don't let your mind land anywhere. Don't give it the security of conclusions—the security of having a place, a ground, reference points, or a story. Don't give it the security of doubt and spectatoring. Don't give it the hope that greed or hate might work out.

"Silent, absent, walking an empty road, all praise says..." — Rumi³

Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (5 of 5): A Training in Loving Well

It has been good to be with you this week; I appreciate our time.

When I was first getting into practice, I read Jack Kornfield's⁴ A Path with Heart. I remember a chapter where he suggested that at the end of our life, one question will loom large: "Did I love well?" That felt very true, and it led me to wonder: "How do I do that? Tell me what to do."

It's a beautiful question, but it strikes me that we have perhaps overemphasized choice and choicefulness in the Dharma, and sometimes underemphasized the training dimension. We often talk about how the Dharma allows us to make wise choices—we come to a fork in the road and choose the healthy and wholesome rather than the unwholesome; we respond rather than react; we choose letting go rather than holding on.

Fair enough, but that doesn't quite capture the flavor of practice for me. I think some of the emphasis on choice is about our preference for control and a kind of instant gratification—giving agitated energy a channel into which to flow. While we talk about "beingness," a lot of what Dharma teachers (including myself) say is: "Do these things." Whenever I say, "Here are four things to do," people take out their pencils as if it's the most important part of the talk.

I don't mean to belittle that—there's a place for it—but the training aspect, the quiet accumulation of merit in the heart made over a long period through many micro-choices, strikes me as the heart of the Dharma. I often say the Dharma is better at preventing fires than extinguishing them. It is a training about creating good habits and momentum, elevating the "trait" levels of mindfulness, equanimity, and love so that it doesn't feel like a choice we have to make to love rather than hate. Hate is actually off the table, but we don't know exactly when that possibility fell off.

If an athlete is being coached in a match, there might be some strategy, but mostly the advice is: "Trust your training. You've been playing for twenty years; trust your body." Similarly, we commit to training. This entails a measure of patience. The impulse to see everything change now is sometimes naive. We trust the logic and the unfolding of the path, making small gestures of the heart today—not hoping to be totally free of dukkha⁵ right now, but training ourselves in a Dharma life. This grants us less compulsivity in our evaluation of how we're doing. We aren't "sampling" ourselves every moment to see how much suffering is present.

In the interpersonal realm, we aren't shocked or heartbroken when we get tangled up in the same ways we used to; we just recommit to training. The Buddha was not a couples counselor or a family therapist, but much of the Buddhist path is a training in loving well—this gradual cultivation of loving well. There is no part of the Dharma that should make us more annoying to others. Sometimes my highest aspiration is just to be a little less annoying. I know you stayed through the week, so you may not think I'm annoying, but many people do! I'm trying to be less annoying—that's my peak bodhisattva vow.

All the teachings are a way of bringing the blessings of this path into our interpersonal lives. Sīla, samādhi, and paññā⁶—ethical training, mind training, and wisdom—are all a training in loving well.

With sīla, we train in becoming a refuge for others, increasing our ethical sensitivity and becoming attuned to our impact. As our sensitivity grows, we feel "cleanly bad" when we do harm. Muddled guilt is sometimes just a defense against the simple pain of remorse. We start to feel cleanly bad: "Oh, that wasn't quite right." It's no big thing; we just feel it and consolidate our intention to love well and be careful with the hearts of others. This same love helps us understand the care that we are worthy of. We don't "decide" to be good; we become gradually more devoted to minimizing harm. That is a training.

Mind training (samādhi) also has profound dimensions for interpersonal life. Training our attention has a profound place in all of our relationships. What does it mean to love? Is it the deepest feeling or the strongest commitment? We can love even with quiet feelings or with ambivalence. My friend and colleague Mary Belzer⁷ said that love is the willingness to pay attention. To love a person is to be willing to pay attention to them; it's not more complicated than that. Paying attention to yourself or another is love in action. When you cultivate what it means to pay attention, you can sense how much love is in that.

We train in the receptivity of awareness and we stabilize it. We learn to tolerate more and more energy coursing through our bodies while staying poised. Much of the harm we do interpersonally occurs when the body is overrun by energy and we cannot stay poised. We train in that poise. We learn how to deeply melt into the field of awareness to experience self and other within the same space.

Our wisdom (paññā) about our existential condition makes love more urgent. To let anicca⁸ truly inform our love is a product of training; we cannot take it in in one gulp. We train in living not in light of immortality, but with the understanding of finitude. Nietzsche⁹ said that truth is apportioned to one according to their strength. Dharma training makes us stronger.

If we don't understand craving, loving-kindness, and renunciation, we cannot love well. If we don't understand self-deception and the ways in which much of our life is a confabulation of greed and aversion, it's hard to love well. We are stepping out of self-deception. Rodney Smith¹⁰ noted that when we live in deception, we confuse ourselves and others and become defensive.

All of this is a training. We often look for fireworks moments of breakthrough, but we often miss the slow melting of dukkha and the slow accumulation of the pāramīs¹¹—the strengths of our heart. Maybe this sounds like "craving to become" (bhava-taṇhā¹²), but given the intricacies of the Dharma, we can simply say: "May it continue."

I offer this for your consideration. I look forward to seeing you somewhere on the larger Dharma campus. Be well.