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Dharma Practice Cultivates Power

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 25, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Dharma Practice and the Cultivation of Power (link)

It's nice to practice with you.

We often talk about vulnerability and softening. We cannot truly open to our life unless we soften. We expand the mesh of our being to let experience in, totally allowing life to flow through. That softening brings a great deal of poignancy. We talk about the limitations of willfulness and the ways in which we cannot engineer our own awakening. We must learn to trust something other than our doing.

I talk about the importance of surrender and the dissolution of volitional energies making something happen—the dissolution of that. I talk often about helplessness, the experience of helplessness, which is really just another way of talking about dukkha¹, the first noble truth that there is suffering. We meet helplessness in ourselves when there are no moves left to make. We are offered this kind of insight into the ultimately ungovernable nature of suffering.

We talk about the limitations of our love, that it will never be enough, that we'll never be able to do what we want with our love. There will always be much suffering our love cannot reach, and we will have to find a way for our heart not to be obliterated by the limitations of our love.

I'm not walking back any of that. But now I pivot. It's important to understand something else which is also true: this path is about the cultivation of power.

That word felt a little weird coming out of my mouth. I associate it with aggression and delusion. Those who seek it generally cannot be entrusted to wield it. Power is often the power to harm. I'm wary. I'm just remembering many years ago, three of us very young Dharma teachers were at a very senior teacher's home for a kind of meeting and consultation. The teacher had us hold a very imposing, large, heavy sword and take a kind of fighting stance or something. I remember it did something to me just to hold that weapon. I don't know how I would feel about holding it now, but it's important to make no mistake about it: the dharma is the cultivation of power. All this talk of vulnerability and helplessness and love—it's the cultivation of power.

We're cultivating the power to meet life with courage and radical honesty, a kind of moral obligation of veracity. All our sad rationalizations, our confabulated life, is all a kind of expression of fear. "Truth is a portion to those according to their strength," Nietzsche² wrote. As I took that note today, I rewatched the courtroom scene with Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise: "You can't handle the truth." Actually, it's a pretty good scene. How much truth can we handle about ourselves, about the world, about death? Some strength is required.

Fear is often a form of intimidation in the face of pain, physical and emotional. Our path is becoming much less intimidated by pain, so the fear of pain does not distort us, distort our behavior, or distort our view in the same way. In other words, something like equanimity is the ultimate anxiolytic drug. When you know in your bones how every story ends, you become less fretful.

As we perceive causality more clearly, when we start to see the hinge points in samsara, we get better at getting what we want. The dharma is both a kind of radical relinquishment and also respecting our desires. Delusion weakens us. Clinging makes us weak. We cannot perceive ourselves clearly; we cannot perceive others clearly. So we keep colliding with conditions that we don't understand. We keep doing things and getting something different than we anticipated. When we are confused and we don't understand causality, we don't know how to intervene. So part of the strength that the dharma imbues us with is a richer understanding of causality. This helps us get better at getting what we want. And when we don't get what we want, that's not a big deal either.

Dharma makes us better predictors of our happiness. It's powerful to be able to forecast our happiness. We develop the power of independence in the dharma. Awakening, in a sense, is the death of the dharma student. You become independent in the dharma. That doesn't mean there's not incredible humility, but in a way, there's no more deferring to anything but the heart. We listen deeply, of course. Delusion is inexhaustible. Wisdom involves humility. But that deep internal wobble, that's gone. The tendency to ping to the mind of the other to see what's true, that's gone.

We cultivate the power to sidestep or refuse the carnival of defilements that constitutes popular culture. Just the endless distraction and rapidity, and the sense of warp-zoning towards death. We disengage from the half-hearted palliative measures of a confused system, the naive models of happiness that are proffered to us every moment.

I sometimes say self is a wound masquerading as a nurse. It's innocent, but it makes us cartoonish and vengeful, pitiful. Pride and shame and narcissism and arrogance and self-hatred—that's not power. Living under the spell of sakkayaditthi³, self-view, living under the kind of sword of Damocles, is just pure fragility.

Enough. Enough.

Dharma gives us power and happiness, less and less dependent on conditions. And that's something that we can trust. I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what's useful and leave the rest behind. We'll gather back next time. I will not do a silent sit. Okay. Wish you all well. Have a good week.