This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver, Dharmette: Uprooting vs Allowing. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: don't wait to let go; Dharmette: Uprooting vs Allowing - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 28, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: don't wait to let go

Welcome. It is good to be together. I want to sit with you and just follow the silence.

Find your posture. Find your suppleness and your strength. Just letting gravity have almost everything. You are sitting with perhaps some energy in the spine, but you just give the rest of the body and mind to gravity and the Earth.

Exploring ways of breathing that induce some tranquility. This is aliveness. It is only in imagining that we are permanent that we begin to acclimatize to goodness or take things for granted. But when we understand finitude deeply, just this breath is enough; it is satiating.

Don't wait to let go. The time is now. Everything looks different in the wake of surrender. We absorb the body blows of the past and the pull of the future. We absorb those impacts on our body, and they too can be a cause and condition for arriving—meeting the intensity of the human condition without resorting so much to words and control. Keep breathing.

And because it's all a little too much without love, will you practice loving? Just that word maybe does something to the body and mind. Just abide in a certain frequency of body sensation called love.

Dharmette: Uprooting vs Allowing

I see in the chat that a Dharma friend, Kathleen Havland, someone known for many years, died this weekend. It is shocking to see. She had a complex medical history, but I did not know she was critically ill, if she was. I feel pulled to say something about her.

I knew her over many years. She would often come to me with very multi-layered dukkha¹. She would describe things in a way that painted both of us into a corner where there was no space. But I had enough patience and confidence in the Dharma, and in her, to not be completely seduced by that claustrophobia. She would stop, and we would just start unpacking a little. Then, there was more and more space, and she could feel that. I send my love to her and hers.

Question: In formal practice, there's a distinction between taking a more receptive approach to whatever thoughts are going through your mind—an "open awareness" style—and taking a more directed approach, like redirecting to an object. I understand this in the context of formal practice, but I find myself unsure of how to approach various mind states in day-to-day life, especially negative ones like jealousy, fear, rumination, anger, and sadness. Some teachings seem to suggest a more active uprooting of unwholesome mind states, while others suggest resting in awareness of whatever is going on without trying to actively change it. Is there a hierarchy? Is receptive awareness the ideal, reverting to an active approach of "changing the channel" only if overwhelmed? Or should unwholesome states be avoided through active means?

Response: A few principles come to mind. The first is: don't fetishize technique. These are all just words we use to do our best. Some are precedented in the suttas, but even those are skillful means. There is no real hierarchy. The Buddha cared about skillful means to address suffering—yours and mine. That is what matters in the end.

Much of our evolution is gradual. The Dharma is better at preventing fires than putting them out. Over time, we don't get backed into corners in the same way. Intensely unpleasant, destructive mind states don't arise with the same frequency and force; that is a function of training. Two of the Four Wise Efforts² involve restraining unwholesomeness so it doesn't arise and abandoning the unwholesomeness that has already arisen. To my mind, those things actually happen "before the fact." We develop the trait of restraint—not stoking the desires that get us into trouble—until it becomes automatic. We develop the trait of letting go until renunciation feels more natural than holding on.

As we grow, the distance between suffering and ease gets much shorter. Suffering doesn't feel so "thick" anymore. You might still suffer, but it feels only like a stone's throw from peace or love. Emotional regulation becomes second nature, and we don't even notice the skill as we are wielding it.

The Dharma involves a lot of experimentation and improvisation. If you are genuinely interested in what is happening, that is often enough. However, we must be careful not to mistake subtle spiritual aversion for equanimity³. Sometimes the teachings seem to give license to a measure of aversion. "Abandoning the unwholesome" can sound a lot like "let me get rid of that." While that might sometimes be okay, we don't want to mistake it for the true "turning towards" of equanimity.

Equanimity is made more of curiosity than desperation. We don't actually need something to happen to the unpleasantness. If you are in the realm of bartering with your pain, that’s a sign you need to let go more deeply. And if you can't, you need to do something else. Equanimity means that whatever the time course of the pain is, we can be poised. We aren't afraid of what craving might do to our heart or our behavior.

We should also be careful not to overestimate our equanimity. It is humbling to admit, "I haven't got it." We must distinguish "being with" from "marinating in." When you are drowning in unwholesomeness, there is often a lot of "should"—as in, "I should be able to sit with this." But if you are just marinating in it, the experiment isn't being run fairly.

In those cases, we might use something like cognitive therapy on ourselves. We hear so much about "allowing," but the Buddha relied extensively on active cognitive approaches as well. In the Vitakkasanthāna Sutta⁴, he says that just as a skilled carpenter might knock out a coarse peg by means of a fine one, so too when one gives attention to some other wholesome sign, unwholesome thoughts connected with craving, hate, and delusion are abandoned.

Sometimes we are encouraged to reflect on the danger of indulging states that get us into trouble. Sometimes we simply redirect the attention. This isn't a brittle avoidance; it's a constructive turning away because we know that to pay attention to a certain thing right now is to drown in it. The line between "being with" and "collapsing into" is incredibly permeable.

Other times, a more investigative approach is needed. We may need to listen deeply to the feeling. There is often a kernel of information tangled up with the delusion, and the feeling may not let go until we hear what needs to be heard. You might ask: "What is the information in this jealousy or anger?" It isn't 100% delusion. Most likely, there is something valuable to be understood. If we follow that wisdom, it will terminate in love, not in jealousy or anger.

Bound up with that kernel of need, we can detect the nature of the clinging. Where did this pain come from? What habits of mind made the ground fertile for this pain? What deeper pain is this merely a symptom of? A doctor is more interested in the infection than the associated fever.

Generally speaking, clinging falls into two categories: self and death. These are related, involving the melodrama of "I-am-ness" and the urgency around security and protection. I often say we have to "grieve the homelessness of the ego." Self-aggrandizement in all its manifestations must register as a dead end. We have to get that deeply so we can drop it.

As for fear, sometimes it simply has to be accommodated and honored without further interrogation. Sometimes we call on the certainty of death as a way of simplifying everything. Other times, we do a little reality testing: "I am safe enough for now."

Ultimately, what we really want is freedom and peace. Everything else is just a proxy for that peace.

We will stop here. May even one sentence be of modest use in your practice. I will be away at Crestone next week, so we won't have class, but I will be back the following week. I wish you all well.