This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided: Mindful of Leaning Towards & Away; Noticing Wanting/Not Wanting is Freeing (Attitudes, pt 1). It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Mindful of Leaning Towards or Away; Dharmette: Noticing Wanting and Not Wanting is Freeing (Attitudes, pt 1) - Dawn Neal

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

Guided Meditation: Mindful of Leaning Towards or Away

Warm greetings, everyone. Today, we're going to do the second day of a series this week that picks up on the introduction to mindfulness that Gil has been doing. As we talked about in my talk yesterday—and actually in the Q&A afterwards—we're going to be speaking about another layer of response or reaction on top of vedanā¹, and that is the wanting or the not wanting.

With that very brief introduction, and warm "good morning" greetings back to everyone, I invite you to settle into a meditation posture. Find something that exemplifies alertness and relaxation, maybe starting with a couple of longer, slower² intentional breaths. Allow yourself to soften and relax on the exhale, and then allow the breathing to return to normal, whatever that is for you this day and this time.

Again, scanning through your body, just a gentle "good morning," "good day," or "good evening" scan. Notice any places of tension or relaxation, pleasant or unpleasant. Just acknowledge them, letting them be there just as they are. Then, set the intention to have mindful awareness at the forefront of attention for these moments of meditation.

Allow the attention to set on breathing, body sensations, hearing, or whatever feels like the most natural anchor for your attention today. Dedicate the attention to the embodied experience of the moment.

Notice the alignment of your posture, whether you're sitting, standing, or lying down, and encourage your body to be balanced. Then, notice too the internal posture of the heart and mind. Is it balanced, or is there a leaning towards or away? A movement of wanting or not wanting?

From time to time throughout this meditation, the invitation is to check in. See if there's a leaning towards or away, a movement for or against. For now, settle and soften into the breath, the body, and the moment.

Check in on any pleasant feelings associated with breathing or just being. Notice any unpleasant sensations and allow them. Allow the vast territory in between, noticing any leaning towards or away.

From time to time, refresh the awareness and perhaps check in on what the overall mood or attitude infusing this moment might be. Allow knowing what is in mindfulness.

In these last few minutes of our meditation together, open the heart and the mind to the fullness of whatever is here, everything that wants to flow through. Noticing, bowing, resting.

Cast your mind back on these moments of meditation together, gathering up any goodness, mindful awareness, patience, or ease. Savor any good qualities, and be as kindly as possible with anything difficult that may have arisen. With that kindness, turn your internal gaze outward to the others in your life, everyone your life touches. May they, may others, be safe, happy, peaceful, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for that greater happiness, peace, and freedom to arise.

Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Noticing Wanting and Not Wanting is Freeing (Attitudes, pt 1)

Good morning, everyone. I am delighted to be back with you today, and delighted to see the bows and greetings in the chat. It's really lovely. A special welcome to those of you who slipped in a little bit late; I'm happy you could join us.

Today is the second day of a five-part series building on the introduction to mindfulness that Gil has been unfolding over the last number of weeks. These are other skills, capacities, and elements of mindfulness that are really helpful to bring to the practice.

Today is building on yesterday. Yesterday was a mindfulness of the very basic attribution of feeling tone, or vedanā¹—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—that happens in practice and in life. It's really basic. Today is about the next layer our minds tend to add onto that experience, which is a wanting or a not wanting, a leaning towards or away, a grasping or a pushing away.

This is known as the attitude of mind, or mind state generally, and this wanting or not wanting can otherwise be known as greed or aversion. It can range from the mildest wish to extraordinary desire, or the tiniest pulse of irritation all the way up through hostility and hatred. There's quite a range here. I'm going to talk about it mostly as wanting or not wanting.

These attitudes of mind can really distort experience. For example, desire can be like those rose-tinted glasses where everything looks beautiful and desirable. A dyed bowl of water is an ancient simile in the Buddhist discourses: whatever that water reflects takes on the cast of the dye, so it influences and tints everything.

For aversion, hostility, or hatred-tinted anger, the ancient discourses talk about boiling water at a roiling boil. You can kind of get a sense in your body of what that feels like. Another dramatic simile that's used is that hatred or hostility is like picking up a hot coal to throw at someone else. Well, who gets hurt first?

This kind of reactivity can be very obvious and like a pulse, like I'm describing with the hot coal, or it can be pervasive and kind of hidden or unconscious. It can be very strong or extraordinarily subtle. In any case, it tends to be instinctive, and thoughts can build on it all by themselves.

The attitudes and emotional reactivity that I'm talking about aren't the sort of movement of emotion that Gil was talking about last week, but more default moods, atmospheres, and ways of being that can shape the very way we take in experience. When pervasive, unconscious attitudes are there, it's more like the waves under a boat, the soundtrack to a movie, a filter or tint over the image, or the general atmosphere of the sky.

In general, these kinds of attitudes and mind states can be broadly helpful or unhelpful. Today I'm talking about the unhelpful ones; I will cover helpful ones more tomorrow. Unhelpful ones within the context of mindfulness meditation can be kind of like an old, rippled pane of glass or a hall of mirrors—it distorts whatever is seen. It can feed this recursive process of building more and more thinking or delusion on top of it. It can even distort the process of mindfulness itself, which is not so helpful.

A simple example here: I used to work at pain clinics for many years teaching meditation, and many practitioners have discovered that being mindful with unseen aversion to, for example, knee pain actually cultivates more aversion. It cultivates more pain and more perception of pain. This is a well-documented phenomenon. Being mindful with the attitude of greed can also increase greed—greed for more experience, greed for more of that pleasure, or another state.

In either case, sooner or later—and often sooner—this kind of wanting, leaning in, or pushing against increases suffering. Part of it is inherent. Greed itself has the function of wanting, but it also has the function of narrowing the gaze of attention, a kind of leaning outwards that isn't so pleasant in and of itself, regardless of how pleasant the object of attention seems. Aversion has the function of wanting to separate from or even destroy strong aversion, and it also has the function of creating more tension and stress.

So, what to do? Mindfulness of wanting or not wanting, greed or aversion, inputs something different into the system. These are subtle. Here, it's not mindfulness with the aversion or greed, but mindfulness of it, and it flips it from being a distortion filter to something that's seen. This, just like noticing feeling tone, offers space and a choice.

When approaching these kinds of states—greed, aversion, wanting, not wanting—as objects of meditation, we can notice them as events or processes in the mind and heart. Rather than allowing them to have authority or masquerade as truth or reality, they're seen. They're no longer in control, and that's good news.

It's the difference between meditating with a default state or an attitude versus noticing it. The noticing can come with a bit of clarity, mindfulness, and perhaps even a bit of kindness or equanimity. This is kind of the magic of mindful awareness: it transforms what's seen. Instead of believing in it, feeding it, or pumping it, noticing without spinning out allows greed and aversion to become a basis for wisdom and self-awareness. They become food for discernment rather than fuel for delusion.

It can be super helpful to cultivate curiosity and interest with these attitudes. One way of getting interested is to notice cause and effect—notice the effect on your body and the effect on your mind.

With mindfulness, our systems begin to recalibrate towards ease and simplicity, and away from stress or tension. It's possible to take respite in the presence of mindful awareness itself and to begin to notice whatever attitudes arise with interest, patience, and even joy. Over time, this can transform unhelpful attitudes of wanting and not wanting, and cultivate helpful ones: especially a stronger mindfulness, a stronger equanimity, compassion, and even stronger wisdom.

To recap these attitudes: wanting or not wanting, greed or aversion, are just a microsecond away from pleasant and unpleasant. There is a space in between, and there's also space to incorporate them into mindfulness afterwards. This itself can help us utilize them as food for wisdom and awakening rather than continuing to be hooked by these states.

That's my little wrap today, and as we did yesterday, rather than talk at you continuously, I want to offer a moment or two for questions. In the chat we have a lag, so I'm going to mute, have a sip of tea, and wait for the questions to come in. But thank you very much for your practice. It's a real gift to the world.

Q&A

Oh, a question about where the guidance for this kind of practice comes from. Sherry, I can't think of a single discourse off the top of my head. It comes from many, many discourses, but it is included in the Satipatthana Sutta³, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

As a Buddhist and chronic pain practitioner, how much of your Buddhism do you bring to treating patients? I don't do that work anymore so much, but it is very much about the compassion, the kindness, and the acceptance.

And then Andrea, I'm not sure I understand your question. I did give an example of knee pain getting worse if we're aversive to it; it gets much worse. The alternative is to back away and notice the attitude towards the pain rather than the pain itself. This principle works with all kinds of things in meditation. If there's an attitude toward something that's making it worse, you can always take a step back and notice your relationship to that emotion or attitude. That allows for a little bit of space. So it's taking a step back.

Okay, I'm having trouble keeping up with all the chats here. We have one minute left, so we'll see what I can do.

There are two excellent questions. Julie, yours is going to take longer, but just to simply say that mindfulness absolutely is a mirror reflecting back what is. However, greed or aversion distort the mirror—creating ripples like a funhouse mirror. Equanimity and wisdom cause the mirror to be completely clear, whereas delusion might put a mist or fog or another distortion over the mirror.

Regarding re-explaining mindfulness if beneficial: there's a difference between leaning into aversion and being mindful of aversion. Noticing the noticing of the aversion actually starts to transform the aversion into information. That's the best I can do with a few seconds left; I hope that's helpful.

Finally, a couple of people were asking about neutral vedanā¹. Neutral vedanā is a shorthand for a neither pleasant nor unpleasant feeling tone, and that really is the vast majority of our experience. It's just kind of filtered out or ignored. There is an association sometimes, not always, with neither pleasant nor unpleasant feeling tones and with delusion.

I hope that's helpful. The topic today isn't really vedanā anymore, so I'll try to address this in a blog post later in a couple of weeks. Thank you all very much for your practice, thank you for your questions and your engagement, and I'll look forward to being back with you tomorrow. Thank you, everyone.