This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Tranquility; Dharmette: Between Gravity and Grace, with Matthew Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Tranquility; Dharmette: Between Gravity and Grace - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 19, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Tranquility

Welcome. I’m happy to be with you. I don’t know how your day was; I’m curious. It feels good to close the day with some practice.

If you're sleepy, breathe some life into your body and mind. If you're restless, breathe some soothing into your body and mind. If you're sitting, allow the spine to reach ever so gently towards the sky, and give the rest of your body to gravity. The body has a kind of longing for the earth—the heaviness and groundedness of our physical form.

Dropping down into your belly, out of your head. It’s like the center of gravity of your own body moves down to the belly. Often, it feels like our point of view is located in our head, in that "headquarters." What is the point of view from the perspective of your belly? A soft belly, releasing tension, the belly relaxing.

If there are pockets of hyperarousal—little zones of your body where the emotional circuits are firing off very actively—just gently massage those zones with your awareness and your breathing.

For so long, our bodies have been convincing us that everything is urgent, that something must happen. We're no longer willing to listen to that. If there is a true alarm, we will know. In the meantime, we treat all these phenomena as false alarms, unifying the body in a field of tranquility.

It seems like problems find us—the loose ends of our day or week. But sometimes it is not so much that problems are finding us, but that our agitation is finding a placeholder. When we realize this, we can withdraw the projection and become radically accountable for what our body-mind is doing moment by moment. Radically accountable, yet blameless. We keep unifying the body into a field of tranquility and vitality—tranquil, yet vital.

If there is any thread of pleasantness, follow it. Rest in it, abide in it. Let the pleasantness and the tranquility exist in a kind of virtuous cycle.

Dharmette: Between Gravity and Grace

I recently saw a review of a new biography of Leonard Cohen, whom I sat with briefly at a Zen center in Los Angeles. This is how the biography begins:

Leonard Cohen's art derives from a very specific visual acuity: he sees men fall, and with them women, saints, and angels. Hence, a fascination for falling bodies. In a career devoted to a methodical and quasi-amorous exploration of the laws of gravity, his subject is how and why we fall, from what heights, and along what trajectories. His stated goal: to assert with required rigor the unfathomable beauty of falling bodies. Armed with the visionary force that alone makes you see the world exactly as it is, he sharpened his tools along the way—a voice so deep it leaves us charred, a terse and increasingly lethal writing style, and his unique combination of angst, Jewish mysticism, and Christian and Buddhist flirtations. Along the way, he fashioned a world that is uniquely his own, yet a lot like ours. Quite predictably, the result is ferocious songs that comfort us with little waltzes but are also spiritual weapons that aim for the heart and never miss. What do they say? What we already know: the invincible gravity of existence. That we die. That our heart cooks and sizzles like shish kebab in our breasts. That the apocalypse has begun and the flood has already happened. That God has summoned us for a game of hide-and-seek that he clearly intends to win. In a word, that we hang dangerously between gravity and grace.

So, why do we practice? We've all figured out by now that it's not reliably fun. It can be, but it's definitely not always fun. We are between gravity and grace. The Dharma was never "Plan A." None of you, when you were a child, said, "When I grow up, I'd like to hear Matthew Brensilver talk about dukkha¹." Not one of you. It takes time and effort. While practice is not meant to be humiliating, sometimes it is. You can't really sit with yourself and look at your own heart-mind for long without being humbled, at least sometimes. At moments, it feels like we're swimming against the stream of a million years of evolutionary conditioning. It’s confusing. The question can linger for a long time: "Am I getting it?" That sense of being a defective person longing for something remote. We feel a little homesick, as if we’ve lost something and don't know how to find it. That feeling can linger. It’s almost like our basic worthiness, our innocence, is so big we can't see its edges. It covers the entire field of vision, so we can't even see it.

Cohen wrote about twenty-five years ago about his Zen master². He said, "I never really understood what he said, but every now and then I find myself barking with the dogs, or bending with the irises, or helping out in other little ways."

No one can understand what the Dharma is at the beginning—how deep it runs, how wide its scope, what it might strengthen and what it might tear down in our so-called lives. You really don't know what you're consenting to. Gravity and grace. It's a little bit like going to the doctor and giving informed consent to remove a tiny mole, and then she says, "We're going to operate for decades." And so here we are, together. The blessings of the Dharma raining down through the centuries, and we're here together, somehow, on YouTube.

Why do we practice? We each have to answer that question, and we'll have to ask and answer it many times. We outgrow old intentions. Maybe the initial reason was immature, or maybe we solved the problem that brought us here and that intention dissolved. Then it’s like, "Okay, what now?" No teacher can really answer that for you. Practice is purely about intrinsic motivation, and that isn't something anyone else can give you.

For me, asking why I practice is a little bit like asking why you love someone. You could give answers—you could cite their kindness, their humor, their characteristics—but that doesn't really capture the love. Somehow, love feels beneath the level of conscious awareness; we cannot fully specify why we love someone or something. It's like that with the Dharma. There were points when I really didn't know why, and "why" seemed beside the point. I just knew I wasn't going to stop practicing. Sometimes the Dharma is simply about having ruled out the alternatives to wisdom and love. The path is hard, but the alternatives are unbearable.

Ajahn Chah³ said the cup is already broken. The flood has already happened. I really don't know how people live without some practice, some relationship with the sacred. Once you develop enough sensitivity and clarity around suffering, you know you need a path. It doesn't have to be this one, but something is needed. "God summoned us for a game of hide-and-seek that he clearly intends to win."

As a kid, the life in front of me—even when I could imagine it going pretty well—didn't look like a path to me. It looked maybe like pleasure, but offered no fulfillment, no heart-satisfaction. I was hanging dangerously between gravity and grace. I wondered, "Is it supposed to be this hard? Am I doing something wrong?" Even with all the good fortune in my life, it actually felt like falling. Life felt cyclical, and I was fatigued by a pervasive ambivalence. I lived in the shadow of that ambivalence, and I wanted my heart to point in just one direction. I wanted something that allowed all the arrows of my being to point in one direction.

Of course, even when I was young, I could sense the "heavenly messengers" ⁴: aging, sickness, death—the reality of losing everything. I saw how utterly unprepared my heart was. Cohen says the body ferociously insists on its gravitational rights. Just before he died, he noted that the body ferociously insists on its gravitational rights. The Dharma is not a perfect consolation for all of that, but nothing else except wisdom and love seems to matter at all in the end. It's not a perfect consolation, but it's enough. It’s enough.

I began practice—and stayed with it—because I was desperately seeking a path where wisdom and love could coexist with a deep honesty about the fall. We open to this, and perhaps we find ourselves helping out in other little ways.

I offer this for your consideration.