This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Soothing, Space, Love; Dharmette: Post-Election Reflections; Matthew Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies.
Guided Meditation: Soothing, Space, Love; Dharmette: Post-Election Reflections - Matthew Brensilver
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 07, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Guided Meditation: Soothing, Space, Love
So, welcome folks. I'm glad we can be together this evening. I'll talk about this moment or how it plays out in my heart, for whatever that's worth. But let's sit. Let's remember what hasn't changed about this practice, even on a day like this.
So maybe you begin just gently massaging some part of your body. It might be as simple as your thumb and your index finger gently rubbing against each other. It might be a hand to your belly, face, or just a gentle massage for your leg. Just anchor to the subtle pleasantness of that sensation.
And maybe the warmth of that sensation, that kind of expression of care, sensitivity to your own body—maybe that warmth just kind of ripples out, thaws out whatever may be braced or frozen. And breathe. Sensing your breath expanding your belly, up into your shoulders, the effects of your breathing on the back of your body.
We sort of enliven our body, and enlivening it makes more room to feel our way through this moment.
There's a certain kind of eerie calm that's settled over people. But when that frozenness thaws out, it's actually just some clarity and calm left. And so maybe it feels natural just to let the mind get very vast. Maybe we say: recognize vastness.
You don't need to create the vastness. It doesn't depend on whatever you call "me." A sense that we arise within space; we arise as space. Don't fight the solidity within space, certain zones of density—body or feeling. Don't need to melt that down into space. Stay open.
Maybe it sounds remote in this moment, but we can experience ourselves as a kind of gust of wind. The world is a gust of wind. And when those gusts meet, there's a very subtle kind of collision. When those two gusts meet, it's called love.
So maybe we attune to love in some way, to the poignancy of life. It's almost like we're massaged by that.
Maybe there's other things arising. Maybe there's fear rising, grief, or anger. That's all good. But give it back to love. It kind of arose out of love; give it back.
Dharmette: Post-Election Reflections
Okay. It's good to practice with you. I didn't know what I would guide or what I would say. We just have to find our practice.
No matter how you're feeling, I think it's good that we're here together now. It’s a time for spiritual friendship, Kalyana1. It seems like something more has to happen than just feeling kind of bad together. But I don't think so. It's actually enough for right now. That is enough. And Kalyana... that doesn't mean we all have the same views. This is not a political action committee. If this were a different election, I would be saying different things. But given that we were really voting on greed, hate, and delusion, that makes it a special moment. I don't assume we're all united by ideology, but we are united by a certain orientation to suffering. We are united by knowing the danger of greed, hate, and delusion. We're united by our wish to alleviate suffering in self and another. And that's Kalyana. That's enough.
Now of course, I'd love to say that everything will be okay, but I cannot because it won't. But something will be okay, and something very important.
I've been tracking my mind carefully in the last 24 hours, partially just for my own well-being, practice, and clarity, and partially so I could teach, so I could say something. Michelle McDonald said the line between things being all right and things being very bad is thin, and the thinness of that line is called Anicca2—uncertainty.
Years ago a student said to me—I think maybe it's from the 12-step tradition—but they said to me something like, "We teach from our scars, not our wounds." And that's very good advice. I don't want to spill my pain on you. I don't want to enlist you in some way in which I'm working out my own karma. But sometimes you just got to show up. And there's a certain kind of freshness in sensing the unprocessed pain and speaking from it.
So I've cycled through a range of mind states. Shock. Even though I knew it was, in my mind, 60-40 or something like that, so whatever happened shouldn't be a shock—but it's a shock. And it takes time for the mind to catch up with Anicca, to catch up. And so we are sensitive to the kind of cool or cold frozen... just a little static that buffers us from contact with body, mind, Dharma.
It's been cynicism. Just like, oh my goodness, we're just a terribly designed animal. Given the challenges of being human, given the challenges of living with other human animals—just not well designed. And then there's been energies of just sort of laying down. Sort of like an animal that knows it's the end or something. And there's been a certain kind of relief. Like, no more waiting for the biopsy. I know the results. Okay, malignant. Now what?
And of course, a kind of cascade of grief. Just like... this is what we do to each other. The heart is designed for love and designed to be broken. Again, I call on Michelle McDonald. I think one time she said something like, "The near enemy of Metta3 is naiveté." Well, our love just became a little less naive. And groundlessness, as we know, can make us love or hate.
There is a beautiful line from Mother Teresa: "May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in." It’s a very beautiful line. I went to her website and there's a whole page that says "stuff Mother Teresa didn't say," and that was on there. That was at the top. But I want to give her credit for it, even if that's just a meme on Twitter. That's a good line. There's a grief that's debilitating, and a grief that sweetens. That's the opposite of naiveté.
Leonard Cohen's song: "I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it'll reach you everywhere. I sing this for the captain whose ship has not been built, for the mother in confusion, her cradle still unfilled. For the heart with no companion, for the soul with no king, for the prima ballerina who cannot dance to anything. I greet you from the other side."
In the successive breakings of the heart, there is more and more light that gets in. I do know that. And I've been trying to sort through the elements of my pain that arise crystal clear, pristine, from love. Love binds us to a certain measure of pain. But I want to distinguish that from the pain of my own righteousness, or aversion, or vindictiveness, or lack of courage. I want to be discerning. We become connoisseurs of our own pain. And those threads of the pain that involve the purity of love and care—we don't have to do anything about those threads.
One of the effects of practice—we don't talk about it so much, but it's been so prominent to me—is I just think about my life much less. My life as an object. And it's not like I'm trying to be a good Buddhist or ignore myself or be selfless or something like that; it just doesn't arise so much. But I think about others a lot. And sometimes it seems to me I think about unknown others in the same entangled way I used to think about myself. The ways in which the energy of the self-system has been freed up to flow outwards into the world... it still holds a kind of trace of the same slightly entangled forms of care that I would before practice direct towards myself. And it's like, okay, what is a mature, differentiated way of caring?
Comprehend Dukkha4. The Buddha says comprehend Dukkha. What on earth did he mean? What illusions must perish in order to truly take in the enormity of this truth of Dukkha? What to do with the power one has? What does love ask of us? And how to refine our relationship to helplessness? Is there a way to keep your heart from collapsing even on the other side of your power? Is that possible? We explore that together.
And I wondered, you know, is the Dharma the same on a day like this or is it different? It's been a perennial question for me; there have been a lot of days like this. Is it the same or different? To say it's the same feels cold and mis-attuned and like a lack of empathic courage. I really want to give deep permission to feel your pain and mine. And I don't want to leapfrog into a kind of fake, brittle equanimity. But to say that it's different forgets all the things love has already seen, all the upheavals the Dharma has already observed. And so we probably need to ask the question of ourselves: how is the path the same, and how has it changed? What's deepened?
On Monday night I had the thought there might only be one consolation for a day like this—for me, for my heart. And it was the sense that a Harris victory might have induced a certain sense of moral complacency in me. Shinzen Yang said, "Don't get stuck in a good place in practice." And I don't know if I'd say I'm stuck—still growing and practicing, heart very alive—but there's some deeper expression of care that needs to be born. I don't know exactly what shape that takes, but it sort of crystallized in the phrase that I want my whole life to be a nonviolent protest.
So I offer this for your consideration. Take whatever is of value, leave the rest behind. We'll keep going. Quite grateful to know the Dharma, to know you, to be together. Practice.