This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Purifying the Mind; Dharmette (5 of 5): Putting Emptiness into Practice. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Purifying the Mind; Dharmette (5 of 5): Putting Emptiness into Practice - Meg Gawler

The following talk was given by Meg Gawler at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 01, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Greetings everyone. I'm happy to be here with you this week. My name is Meg Galler, and I'm speaking to you from a remote part of the south of France. The Zoom coming out from my end is being transformed at IMC by our wonderful audiovisual team and live-streamed out to you on YouTube. Please know that I very much value your feedback in the chat, although I can't see it while I'm teaching, but I'll do so afterwards.

Last year around this time, I gave a series on training in emptiness but unfortunately had to cancel on the last day because of Internet issues. So today, I'll share with you the fifth guided meditation and talk for that week on training in emptiness.

You all came here for a reason, and the invitation is to begin our meditation by formulating our intention, which can be as simple as, "May my practice serve as a condition for awakening for myself and all beings." In the Buddhist context, awakening means freedom from suffering, and as you know, the suffering in this world is immense. So our job here is to free ourselves from suffering so that everything we do, we can then help free others, which is a tall order.

In every moment, we create the conditions for who we become in the next moment. So keep in mind that this is a gradual path, and it requires being patient with ourselves. The Buddha says the wise person gradually, bit by bit, moment by moment, removes their impurities. So our meditation practice is to purify our unskillful tendencies. We have to begin by holding ourselves in compassion, dropping any temptation to feel inadequate or to judge ourselves.

Guided Meditation: Purifying the Mind

Begin by closing your eyes or lowering your gaze if that's more comfortable. And whether you're sitting or lying down, settle yourself by aligning the spine into a posture that expresses the aspiration you formulated just now.

Inviting the grounding energy of the earth to hold you safely in its embrace. You can fine-tune the alignment of the spine by imagining that the head is suspended from the sky by a thread, an invisible one, and then letting all the vertebrae relax downward. Inviting the clear, open energy of the sky to come down through you, from the opening in the crown of the head, down through the torso and legs, and out through the feet.

Offering your body your heartfelt compassion. This is how it is right now.

So light a little flame of benevolence and compassion in your heart and let it protect you. See if you can open the edges of your body and let your little flame of compassion radiate out to all beings in all directions. May we and all beings be free from suffering.

Connecting to the breathing by taking one long, beautiful, deep breath, and then slowly let the breath return to its natural rhythm as you follow the whole cycle of the breath. Perhaps visualizing an oval if that works for you. In this oval, waves of breathing moving up the back on the inhale, at the end of the inhale over the crown of the head, noticing the little empty pause, and on the exhale, letting the breath cascade down the face and the front of the torso. The end of the exhale comes with another slight pause at the bottom of the oval as the breath moves past the perineum towards the back again for another inhale.

Feel the flow, the constantly changing nature of the breath as you breathe normally, following the whole cycle of the breath. Dwelling in the flow of breathing and appreciating its inconstancy, seeing how it's constantly changing. Staying peacefully with the breath is a way of dwelling in, abiding in, and knowing the ever-changing nature of your experience.

The one meditation practice that scholars are confident the Buddha practiced himself is Ānāpānasati¹: awareness breathing in, awareness breathing out. And in his instructions on Ānāpānasati, the Buddha tells us, first of all, to go to a wilderness with the foot of a tree or to some place empty to establish our awareness. I take this to include establishing our awareness, first of all, in a mind that's empty of self-preoccupation. The Buddha then instructs us very succinctly: "Always attentive, one breathes in with awareness and breathes out with awareness."

That's all we have to do with this practice. And resting in awareness of the breathing is to be protected from delusion. As we follow the breath, we can choose the wisdom of spaciousness, non-grasping, rather than self-referential thinking. Coming back as often as needed to awareness of this body breathing.

If you see thoughts arise, take a moment to recognize how unsubstantial they are. Thoughts have no real substance. And rather than choosing to follow your thoughts, you can choose a peaceful mind right here, empty of the preoccupation with "me, myself, and mine." And by dropping down into the breathing, perhaps you can taste, if only for a moment, the freedom of just breathing, being present, open, receptive. This is the freedom of emptiness, which allows you to be available for the experience of breathing, available for just being alive.

Feel and appreciate the wholesomeness of those moments, however brief, when the mind is empty of thoughts revolving around self-preoccupation.

Feeling the ever-changing, inconstant nature of breathing and letting the breath teach us the truth of inconstancy, the truth that everything we think of as solid is in fact a process of constant change.

To end this meditation, let's return to our circle of compassion for ourselves, for everyone in this sangha meditating together here, and for all beings.

May all beings be safe and protected. Being safe, may all beings, including ourselves, be happily at ease. May we all abide in peace. And may all beings everywhere be free.

As I join my hands together and bow to you all, I honor your practice. I honor your sincerity.

Dharmette (5 of 5): Putting Emptiness into Practice

Greetings everyone. I'm Meg Galler, and I'm speaking to you from a remote part of the south of France. I'm very grateful to the IMC audiovisual tech team who are taking the Zoom for me and sending it out to you on YouTube. For the last year, I've taken a sabbatical due to health challenges, and I'm really happy to be back here with you.

Please know that I very much value your feedback in the chat, and although I'm not able to read the chat during the teaching, I do look at it afterwards. So as I said at the beginning of the meditation, last year around this time, I gave a 7 a.m. series on training in emptiness, but unfortunately had to cancel on the last day because of Internet issues. So today, I wanted to share with you the last part of that series on emptiness, focusing today on how we might put emptiness into practice.

My aspiration today is to give you some ideas for fostering an open, spacious mind rather than a mind caught in the clinging of self-preoccupation. Emptiness is essentially being empty of selfing. This preoccupation with "me, myself, and mine" is the motor behind our discursive thinking and our reactivity.

I'd like to begin with the first two verses of the Dhammapada², the beautiful collection of poems expounded by the Buddha. He says: "All experience is preceded by mind, made by mind, led by mind. Speak or act with a corrupted mind, and suffering follows as the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox. All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a peaceful mind, and happiness follows like a never-departing shadow."

So a corrupted mind is defined as having any kind of clinging, and a peaceful mind is what we need for unwavering happiness that stays with us like a never-departing shadow. Our job as practitioners is to learn how the mind works, to see our own reactivity to our experience and all the proliferation that comes from self-centered thinking. Without a mind that's empty of proliferating, self-centered thinking and is caught in reactivity rather than being at peace with what is, we can't even see the choices we have in each moment, much less make wise choices in order to be at peace with ourselves and with the world.

So in meditation, we're training the mind little by little to become more and more peaceful, so that rather than being caught in instant reactivity to our experience, the mind learns how to slow down enough so that we can see the forks in the road in each moment of our lives. So that we can then make the wise choices that foster happiness, confidence, serenity, rather than choosing clinging to the illusion of self, which leads us down the path to anxiety, fear, and suffering.

The Buddha stresses that this is a gradual path, and you may have seen for yourselves in the early stages of practice that we begin by seeing how wild the mind is, and this is totally normal. We need to befriend the wild mind and keep walking the path with perseverance and patience, understanding that it's part of our DNA to want to protect ourselves, to exist. And in meditation, this desire to exist is often expressed as discursive thinking with the self as the primary protagonist.

Many of you are familiar with the hindrances to awakening, the unskillful mind states that we need to abandon as we progress on the path of practice. In Pali, the word for these hindrances, Nīvaraṇa³, literally means "coverings." With the hindrances, these obstacles to enlightenment, we literally cover over the purity of our mind's potential for awakening. The Buddha's great discovery was that the obstacles to freedom from suffering had originated in his own mind, and he awakened to the full potential of his own nature: fundamental radiant awareness that is infinite and indestructible.

As you know, our usual mind is populated by proliferating thoughts that arise from ignorance and craving, and it's no accident that the Vipassanā⁴ tradition stresses cultivating mindful awareness. Ajahn Maha Bua⁵ from the Thai Forest tradition describes our true mind as "simple awareness, utterly pure." Our pure mind is unconstructed and has no reference point in the self. And the nature of this pure awareness is the ease of emptiness, the absence of all defilements and self-centeredness.

In our tradition, it's compassion that is the spontaneous expression of the fertile space of emptiness. So our path of practice involves recognizing this union of emptiness and awareness endowed with compassion, and then stabilizing our recognition. We know that everything is in flux, which is why the self doesn't last long enough to be able to be reified into something lasting and substantial. Emptiness is really the fertile possibility of endless transformation, and this means that we're not stuck with our wild mind or any of the difficulties in our lives.

This path of practice is transformative, and I'm speaking from experience when I tell you that we can make peace with our difficulties when we learn to settle the mind and to make more and more wise choices in our lives, moment by moment. What we perceive as our inadequacies are just the starting point for this transformative path of practice. And when we really see that every moment offers us the possibility of freedom, we can let go and transform our self-centered barriers and limitations.

My root teacher, Shunryu Suzuki⁶, said that "there is always a possibility of understanding as long as we live in emptiness... We should always live in the dark, empty sky. Even though clouds and lightning come, the sky is not disturbed." Suzuki Roshi also advised us, "When you study Buddhism, you should have a general house cleaning of your mind."

So the first way of putting emptiness into practice is essentially decluttering, which is a long process of letting go, letting go of unskillful mental habits and replacing them with wholesome mental habits. And the good news is that we have agency and we have a path of practice. We're learning how to let go of our unwholesome mental habits arising from greed, hate, and delusion. To do this, we need to constantly cultivate awareness and calm the mind sufficiently so that moment after moment, we can slow down enough to be able to see the forks in the road and make wise choices.

So if it's of interest to you, for the next 24 hours you can try cleaning and decluttering your meditation space. Another thing that's very important for decluttering the mind is to not be in a rush. So it's a good plan to, when you're going to meditate, arrive a couple minutes before your meditation to be able to settle down in your posture mindfully and calmly. I also like to remind myself before I start that for these minutes of meditation, I can leave all my worries, concerns, obligations, and responsibilities together with my shoes outside the door of the meditation room.

This ends the series from last year on training in emptiness. I hope it made some sense, and if not, and if you're interested, you can find the earlier meditations and talks on Audio Dharma. And tomorrow, we'll begin the four-part series for this week, which will be on the theme of trusting our practice. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your practice.