This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Med: Confidence Here & Now; Trust (4/5) Overcoming Doubt, Whether Gross or Subtle. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Med: Confidence Here and Now; Dharmette: Trust (4/5) Overcoming Doubt, Whether Gross or Subtle - Nikki Mirghafori

The following talk was given by Nikki Mirghafori at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Med: Confidence Here and Now

Greetings, friends. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world, whatever time zone. It's lovely to join you at this moment in time. This is our fourth day of exploring the topic of saddhā¹, confidence and trust in the practice.

So, let's begin our sit together. Let's begin to meditate, and I'll introduce the topic of the meditation for today, with the reflections later. Let's begin. Let's arrive, settling into our seats, settling into our bodies in this moment in time. Arriving together as a community spread around the world, and arriving intimately on our own, in this body, in a way that only I can know this body.

Inviting this precious human body of ours to relax, to soften. Feeling the connection of the sit bones with the cushion, the chair. Landing. Landing through the points of contact: our sit bones with the cushion or the chair, our feet with the Earth. Feeling the contact points. Inviting our spine to be upright, to rise up on its own without being pushed up, but as if there is an invisible thread on top of our head pulling up, vertebrae by vertebrae. The rest of the body, the rest of the muscles, can relax.

Knowing the body, knowing the sensations of the body right now, in this moment in time. There might be tingling, a sense of heaviness or lightness in various places of the body. Knowing the movement of the breath in the body, the sensations.

I'd like to invite you to drop in a reflection as the seed for our practice today. Dropping the reflection not in the head, not in your thinking space, but in your heart and your body, as if you're dropping a pebble in a pond. Dropping it in, letting it resonate, reverberate. Thinking about it as if you're planting a seed to see what happens.

Here's the reflection: May I trust during this period of practice. May I trust, may I know, may I have confidence in this practice right now. May I have trust that this is the most worthwhile way to spend these minutes, instead of thinking or planning or the juiciness of daydreams. I have full trust that this is the sweetest place, the kindest, the calmest, the most fruitful place for my mind to be: to be mindful, to be aware, to be present. May I fully trust this, know this through my bones. No doubt. Dropping this reflection in: I fully trust awareness, presence, is the place for my mind and heart to be.

Connecting with the breath, with the sensations of the breath in the body, mindfully, after planting the seed of trust, of confidence.

Watering the seeds of confidence and trust we planted earlier, reflecting in our hearts that this practice of loving awareness, mindfulness, what you're seeing, is the most nourishing place for my heart, for my mind to be resting right now. More nourishing, more onward leading than thoughts of the future, the past, planning this and that, distractions. I can pick them up later, but this is the most nourishing, supportive place for my mind to land, to rest right now. It's where I want to be. Letting the reflection rest, resonate. Connecting with your breath, sensations of the breath, sensations of the body, mindfully knowing what's arising and passing in this moment, with presence.

Watering the seeds of confidence and trust right here, right now, through mindfulness and trust, confidence and loving awareness.

As we turn to bring this sit to a close together, pay attention, noticing how mind and heart feel. If there is any more settledness, confidence, stability, or peace compared to before, or anything else that might be present in the wholesome states. Recognize the shift, the change, as tiny and subtle as it might be. Let it be a source of confidence to water the seeds of confidence more, of trust.

Appreciating yourself and the community for showing up, and for the teachings to be available in this form. May all beings everywhere benefit from our practice in ways we cannot imagine. May all beings everywhere be happy. May all beings everywhere be free, including myself.

Thanks, everyone. I'm going to take a moment to transition the recording.

Dharmette: Trust (4/5) Overcoming Doubt, Whether Gross or Subtle

Okay, hello, greetings everyone, and welcome again, wherever in the world you're joining from. Whether you're an old-timer here on this channel, on the 7 a.m. sit—7 a.m. California time sit—or whether this is your first time, welcome. It's lovely that you're joining the community and practicing at this time.

Introduction

The theme we've been exploring together, the teachings this week, have been on saddhā¹. Saddhā, the word in Pali, is translated as trust or confidence.

A quick recap of the past few days. Today is day four. On day one, we started with how a sense of trust and confidence is needed in practice before you begin. There has to be some, perhaps, borrowed trust—"Oh yeah, this seems to be working for others"—borrowed trust that later becomes verified trust, verified confidence after you see how it actually impacts your life and the way that you are yourself. So, the importance of trust for beginning and for continuing practice.

On day two, we talked about the importance of confidence and trust in the Triple Gem²—Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. That, yes, it is possible someone woke up. It's possible for me, I can do this too. Trust in yourself and trust in the teachings, that the teachings are available. There are recipes, people have tried them for centuries. And trust in the support of the Sangha, that I'm not doing this alone; I have support. So, trust in those three.

Yesterday, day three, we talked about cultivating saddhā through practice and reflection. How the more we practice, our confidence in the practice grows, and how by reflecting, both during practice and also after practice, over short time frames and long time frames, we can water the seeds of saddhā, of confidence in our practice. It's through practice itself, as well as—we also talked about—ethical conduct, which is very important. Otherwise, our confidence gets eroded in ourselves, in our capacity to wake up, if we keep intoxicating ourselves or stealing, lying... the sense of trust gets eroded. So, not helpful.

Overcoming Doubt

Today, building on all of that, I'd like to offer for your consideration the role of saddhā, trust and confidence, in overcoming doubt. Doubt is one of the Five Hindrances, or the five nīvaraṇa³, the five veils. Doubt, in Pali, vicikicchā⁴, can show up in different ways. Doubt can show up as, "Oh, I can't do this. Everybody's got this, but I can't do this. I have a monkey mind, nobody else does. I can't do this." Or it can show up in the teachings, like, "Yeah, I'm not quite sure about these teachings," or, "They're not for me." It can show up in the Sangha, in the community: "I don't know about this community." And it also can show up in so many different ways: "The teachers, they don't know what they're talking about." Anyway, doubt can show up in so many different ways, and saddhā, trust, is a way to support ourselves through periods of doubt.

Now, I'd like to offer a more subtle way to see doubt, which we usually don't. So, this is—we're going to go a little bit off, but you can see how it can relate. Consider that subtle doubt can also show up in the ways that our mind moves minute by minute, moment by moment. So, if we're sitting and practicing, for example, practicing mindfulness as we did just before, then the subtle doubt can show up as, "Oh, it's more juicy, it's more fun, it's more rewarding, it's more onward leading for me to think about my plans for this afternoon." So the mind goes there, instead of trusting that this is the place, this is the most onward leading, rewarding, supportive place for my mind to be: right here, right now, with mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of the breath, mindfulness of impermanence. There is this subtle pulling away, not quite trusting that this is it, this is the most nourishing place to be.

Practitioners report that sometimes this insight arises for them when they are really steeped in their practice. This thought arises, "Oh, this is the most nourishing place for me to be right here, right now. Not the thoughts, not the distractions, not this, not that, not the desires," and thinking, "Wow, this is it." It comes up as a sense of trust. This is the most nourishing, the most onward leading, wisdom-producing place for me to be. So that is a sense of trust. Trust not just on a larger scale of supporting our practice, but also on the minor scale of supporting our practice to stay. This subtle trust. And again, remember self-judgment is not the answer to trust. It's not like, "Oh, you're a bad meditator, you don't have enough trust." It doesn't work that way. So please let go of self-judgment and just come back to trust. "I trust. I trust that this is supportive, this is onward leading."

Doubt can also show up in a slightly different way. It can show up in the subtle way of us not connecting to the practice. For example, not being a regular practitioner, like practicing one day and then taking a week off or a month off, and then realizing and remembering our trust. "Oh yeah, when I was practicing, when I was connecting with the Dharma, when I was reading, when I was listening to Dharma talks, I was kinder, I was less reactive." Remembering, tapping into that trust can often bring us back. But in those periods that we're not connecting, then trust is not as strong, right? Because we don't have unshakable trust that this is what helps my humanity grow, this is what helps me wake up in this very life for the benefit of myself and the benefit of others, to be transformed into another version of myself, a better angel of myself. So doubt can show up in these subtle ways of our behaviors, which, not so subtle actually, is doubt in the practice that can show up as, or doubt in ourselves, or doubt that it's working, etc., in a subtle way. It's not a clear expression of that, but it's got more subtle, kind of takes us away. It's a lack of confidence that shows up as lack of commitment.

A couple of other things I wanted to say today. Saddhā, confidence, is an antidote to doubt. And again, we build trust by noticing, by really bringing reflection to how this is working for us, how the shifts and changes are happening. And to say that again from the first day, I want to repeat that it's very important for saddhā to be balanced with paññā⁵, with wisdom. So trust needs to be balanced by wisdom. If not, it can fall into blind faith, which is not helpful either. In fact, it is said—the same way that you've heard the metaphor that wisdom and compassion are the two wings of the bird of Awakening—it is also said the two wings of the bird... let's try that again... [Laughter] the two wings of the bird are wisdom and trust. So wisdom needs to support trust so that it doesn't get out of balance.

There are many stories in the suttas, and maybe I'll just share one with you briefly. There are stories of various disciples of the Buddha—venerable Sāriputta and Moggallāna⁶—who were initially skeptical and had doubt, but through confidence and hearing the Dharma, they had confidence and they fully awakened and became disciples of the Buddha.

There's also another story, a typical story of Khemā Therī⁷, who became a leading disciple of the Buddha. Similar to venerable Sāriputta, she was likened to him in the nuns' order, as Sāriputta was in the monks' order. The story is that she was very beautiful and was a consort of a king, King Bimbisāra. She was very attached to her beauty and her youth, and King Bimbisāra wanted her to practice with the Buddha and know the Buddha. So they arranged for her to pass by the Jeta's Grove where the Buddha was teaching. The Buddha, through his powers, created a vision of a very beautiful woman. While Khemā was passing by, she saw the vision of this very beautiful woman and she admired her. Then the Buddha, again through his powers, having created this mirage, made this beautiful woman decay and get old in front of Khemā's eyes. In that moment, Khemā really had insight into impermanence, that beauty and youth are impermanent, they're not for her to hang on to and to cling to. Through wise reflection of impermanence, she overcame doubt that, "Oh, these practices are not for me, I don't know." And then she practiced with the Buddha and became fully enlightened and became one of the prime disciples.

So, wise reflection, listening to the teachings, practicing, etc., are ways to overcome doubt, whether in strong ways or in subtle ways of lack of commitment during practice, distractions, or practice falling by the wayside.

Okay, so thank you so much for your practice, for your commitment, for doing this practice for the sake of all beings everywhere, not just ourselves. May all beings be well. May all beings be happy. Take good care. Oh yes, I always want to end with an invitation: notice doubt. Notice subtle doubt in your practice, in your way of being today. If there are subtle ways of doubt, and ways that you can connect with confidence and trust in yourself, in the practice, and in the community today. All right, thank you. Be well, take care. See you tomorrow.