This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Motivation; Dharmette: Letting Go and Cultivation (1 of 5): Skillful Intention. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Kim Allen at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome, everyone. We’ll go ahead and get started. It’s delightful to be joining all of you this week, the week that will take us through the New Year, and I’m happy to see so many of you here.
This time of year, the turning over of a new year, is a time when people reflect and consider what changes they might like to make. That’s kind of arbitrary, of course; the turning of the New Year is all a continuous revolution around the sun. But not completely so. This time of dark and quiet is a natural time to go inward and consider what we would like to encourage to come forth when we have the renewal of spring.
Sometimes when people reflect like that, it’s about letting go of something, something that we could be doing less of. Other times it’s about cultivating or creating or starting up something. This week, we’re going to talk about various aspects of the Dharma that support, surround, or provide context to the actions of letting go and cultivation. We’ll say more about that after the sit. That’s a bit of a taste.
Let’s go ahead and get started with our meditation together. Find a posture for sitting and settling in, allowing yourself to arrive mentally for meditation. If you’d like to, you can close your eyes to bring the attention inward.
Softening the attention, bringing it into the body. Maybe taking a long, slow, deep breath, and on the exhale, allowing the body to settle down. Maybe bringing attention consciously down into the heart area, and even down into the belly.
Sometimes this time of year is actually quite a busy one with guests or other activities. Just allow yourself to release any sense of that kind of energy that may be lingering. We don’t have any rush in sitting here.
Inviting some softening into this posture. Softening the face, the forehead, around the eyes, the jaw. Softening the neck, the shoulders. Sometimes I imagine a little space between the very top of the spine and the skull, so there’s a little dropping of the chin. Letting the shoulders soften, maybe imagining the shoulder blades sliding down the back. Relaxing the arms and the hands, and then all down through the torso, chest area, diaphragm, down into the belly, and including the muscles of the low back.
As all of that gently releases to the degree possible, we can feel the weight really settling into where we’re sitting—chair or cushion, or maybe you’re lying down, that’s fine. Feeling the weight settling into what’s supporting us and allowing that to happen. Really feeling the contact with where you’re sitting and the stability it provides. And also softening and releasing the legs all the way down to the feet.
Feeling the relative stillness of being in a sitting meditation posture. As you release into that, see if there’s a way that the body will straighten itself up. Naturally, when we hold ourselves into certain positions, which we do all the time in subtle ways, the body can lose touch with a natural sense of uplift. But as we soften and trust what’s holding us up in this moment, there can be a feeling that the head gets pulled upward, the spine naturally straightens without any strain. Just seeing if that’s available for you. It works even if you’re lying down; the spine will straighten out.
Soften. If there are parts of the body that are sore today or have other issues, you can just let them be, bringing a sense of, “It’s okay, however the body is right now.” The body works hard for us. Just inviting it to be included as it is.
Perhaps sensing the breath coming in, going out. The natural breath.
Just temporarily, let’s direct the mind to bring up some sense of intention or inspiration or motivation for your practice. It doesn’t have to be anything grand. It could just be today’s sense of why you are meditating here right now. Or it could be something larger if that’s what comes to mind. But just tuning into that wholesome motivation, however it is for you.
In particular today, let’s really let that register in the body. One way to do that is to breathe it in. Or maybe you can just sense how the body feels while the mind is attuned to this inspiration. It doesn’t have to be any particular way, but just registering what it is in the body. Maybe you already do that, or maybe it’s novel to bring the body into this otherwise mental activity. Let’s just see how that is.
Perhaps you can feel the goodness of a skillful motivation and let that register also in the body.
Now we can release this deliberate thought or directing of the mind and just return to mindfulness of things as they’re unfolding. If you like to connect with the breath or the body sensations as your normal object, you can bring that in. Just being with the flow of experience in a natural way.
When you find the mind drifting off or caught up in thought, which is very normal, you may want to just touch in again briefly to the inspiration or motivation or intention that you had earlier. Not at all as a way of reprimanding the mind, but actually as a way of supporting it, encouraging it. Maybe feeling again that sense of uplift or what you felt in the body with it, and using that as something that attracts the mind back to the present moment. And then just go on with the meditation.
Sometimes the mind is like a small child in that it’s easily distracted but also easily comes back when reminded and redirected to the present moment.
Sometimes the mind can even develop a little bit of momentum around this inspiration or motivation. Kind of like when we have momentum on a bicycle, small deviations from being perfectly balanced will rebalance themselves. A spinning wheel will move back toward the center if it’s spinning fast enough. In the same way, if we’re in touch with this goodness of practice, it can actually be that when the mind goes off a little bit, it naturally moves back in. That doesn’t always happen, but sometimes we can tune into that energy. And if it’s not present, then just bringing it back each time with the reminder of our inspiration, strengthening that very quality.
In the last few minutes of this meditation, we may wish to tune in to any effects that might have come from being more consciously connected to your intention or inspiration during this sit. Is there a different feeling in the mind in terms of mindfulness or alertness or ease or happiness? Is there a different feeling of energy in the body? It may be a subtle effect, or it may be quite noticeable, or maybe you don’t notice anything. The invitation is just to see if there’s been any effect.
Perhaps consider, even if there isn’t a direct feeling, is there some way that this seems clearly supportive for you, beneficial to have connected in this way? Is there any sense of nourishment or care in the heart that it brings? Just tune into that.
As we are coming to the end, you may consider also that what we’re carrying in our heart and mind as to what we’re doing and why we’re doing it—our various intentions—also affect others, even without saying them or having to do anything obvious. The very thing that we’re carrying inside does affect the way that we interact with people. There’s a way that they can kind of feel that at some subconscious level. So it does matter. It does ripple out into the world.
Going to the grocery store with the intention of just getting all the stuff you need as quickly as possible so you can get out is different than going to the grocery store with the intention to find all the things you need but to also be aware of those around you or supportive of other people in the store. That has a different effect. So what we’re carrying in our mind in terms of intention does matter. It can be highly beneficial.
Okay.
As I said just briefly before the sit, this is a time of year when people are often reflecting on the prior year and considering the upcoming year. Often, there is a sense that we could be letting go of or doing less of certain things, and maybe also picking up or cultivating or doing more of certain things. It’s kind of a natural time to reflect in that way.
There’s a sutta1 from the Dhammapada2 that kind of captures these movements. I’ll give Gil’s translation: “Doing no evil, engaging in what’s skillful, and purifying one’s mind, this is the teaching of the Buddhas.” So maybe we could say not doing what is unskillful, engaging in what’s skillful, and cultivating the mind. This is the basic teaching that all the Buddhas have offered, and I think it’s offered in other spiritual traditions also.
These verses kind of capture what many meditators are trying to frame in our so-called New Year’s resolutions. I hesitate to use that word a little bit; it’s a kind of a cultural idea that we have here about doing that because sometimes we can really create dukkha3 in our relationship to this kind of year-end ritual. It doesn’t always come out so well when we set some grand goal for ourselves that’s not really achievable, and we fall off of it within a week or two and then feel bad and somehow stumble on into February. We don’t want to be getting caught in that cycle. So we have to be wise in our actions of letting go and cultivation.
We can notice also that the Dhammapada verse is very general. It’s about just being careful about being unskillful and wanting to be skillful and developing our mind. So it’s not really about anything special for the New Year; it’s also just about how we walk the path. So even if your mode is, “I don’t engage in any of that New Year stuff,” that’s great. What we’ll reflect on this week will also help in just our normal walking of the path, doing the practice in our daily life.
This week, we’re going to talk about several key Dharma topics that support, surround, or provide context to these ideas of letting go and cultivation. Maybe it’ll provide some tools and perspectives that help us approach these activities in a wise way. These are things that will help make letting go and cultivation more effective, more likely to actually go in the direction that we want. We’ll talk about them over five days. You could think about using these five days as a way to explore the different ways that you engage with letting go and cultivation in your own practice, however that looks for you, whatever phase you’re in.
Sometimes our actions in that area are in the realm of relationality; we’re thinking about working on our connections with others. Sometimes they’re more about personal habits that we want to change. Sometimes we’re not into the kind of external cultivation at all, and we’re thinking about, “How can I structure my life so that I can go on retreat more? How can I fit in a one-month retreat during this year?” All of those things are things that we need to engage with in terms of things we’re going to let go of and things we’re going to bring forth. So wherever you are in your practice, I think these five days will be of benefit. The Dharma does not care that you have a clear, exact, well-articulated resolution on December 31st at midnight, so relax about that and just take all five days as a kind of a unit. You can spread it out.
One thing to first recognize about these activities of letting go and cultivation is that they are very intertwined. They seem like opposite movements, but they’re actually highly connected. In particular, sometimes I think we need something in place before the heart is willing to let go. Things that we have cultivated or put in place are sometimes needed to give us the strength to let go. So if you’re having trouble letting go of something, consider if there is something that might need to be cultivated first. That’s one way we can start to be wise about this.
I remember there was a time when I wanted to let go of resentment that I had toward a certain person. It was so clear that I needed to let go of that. It was only harming me; it was kind of continual in my mind. I could see that I really wanted to release this resentment I was carrying, and I did have a certain amount of metta4 for this person, so I felt like I should be able to let go of that. But these thoughts kept persisting. Finally, I discovered through meditation practice—it kind of came to me in an insight—that I actually needed to forgive this person first. When I did that, once I had deliberately turned to cultivating forgiveness instead of cultivating metta and trying to let go, once I cultivated forgiveness and that really came through in me, it was so easy to let the resentment go. I wasn’t able to let go until I had cultivated this other thing. So that can happen.
Because of the intertwining of letting go and cultivation, it goes the other way also. There are times where we can’t cultivate something until something else lets go. So if you’re having trouble cultivating something, maybe consider if you’re grasping onto something that is preventing that and it needs to be let go first. If your hand is closed around something, it might need to release that before it can pick up what you’re trying to cultivate.
The classic example that goes with this is people want to cultivate concentration or samadhi5. A lot of people would like to have that on the cushion, and so they sit down and they try very hard to be on the breath to cultivate concentration. They’re told, “Just be on the breath, be on the breath,” and somehow they’ve forgotten that concentration happens when we’ve let go of the hindrances. That’s actually when concentration comes. It’s actually more about letting go. We’re often caught up in the hindrances, and one reason that we can’t release them is that we’re actually grasping them. We like the hindrances. That’s one of the issues with them, which would be a whole separate discussion. But just as a small example, there’s a way often that we grasp onto aversion or unhappiness or something negative in our life. We’ve grasped on to that; we think it’s important that we oppose that, or we’ve identified somehow with our depression or our unhappiness in some way. Until we release the idea that that’s necessary for us to have and to keep going back to, we won’t be able to be happy enough to be concentrated. So sometimes we have to let go of something and really turn toward it and figure out how to release it before we can cultivate what we wanted to cultivate.
That’s a sort of a technical meditation example, but I also recently watched a documentary that included a story about a woman who had been told for a long time that she couldn’t do math. She was kind of pushed aside and told, “Well, you’re just not a math person, you can’t really do that.” She wanted to pursue a job that required her to take some math classes and pass those in order to get this degree. But she had been told her whole life that she wasn’t really a math person, and so she was carrying a false view that this was just impossible for her, very difficult. She would have all kinds of aversion and struggle every time she had to learn math. Eventually, she realized that this was just a view that she had been told. So she worked hard instead to release that idea about herself, and she also had some support from teachers who cared about her. Once she released that view, she discovered that she could actually do math. She didn’t want to be a mathematician, but she had to pass these math classes in order to get the degree to get the job she wanted, and she did. But she had to let go of a view of herself before she could achieve that. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t until she let go. So we may find that in ourselves also. Is there some view perhaps about yourself that you’re holding, that you can’t cultivate something until you let it go?
These are very intertwined, and sometimes we can’t just choose to let go of something or to cultivate something; we might have to do the other one first. Sometimes our personality favors one of these movements over the other. Like, it’s easier for us in general to let go and not as easy to cultivate, or it’s easy for us to cultivate and go out and pursue and develop but not as easy to let go. So check that out in your own mind, because we’re going to have to learn both of these skills at some point and gain wisdom around balancing them.
Let’s also mention today, in addition to this idea of how these intertwine, that the Dharma mentions that there are three wise or skillful intentions in our practice. I want to just name them so that we can see how they relate to these ideas of letting go and cultivation. One thing about the word “intention”—of course, all these words are translations. I hope that the word intention, even though it sounds kind of future-oriented… the way I think of the difference between, say, an intention and a goal or resolution is that goals and resolutions are about the future. They put a pin into the future and say, “That’s the point I’m aiming for.” Whereas I feel like an intention is something that I’m putting in the present. I don’t know exactly where it’s going to go in the future, but at the moment, I’m pointing myself in a particular direction. When I walk there, I don’t know quite what I’ll find. So it’s a little bit different. I think of intentions as being in the present and goals as being in the future. And so intentions are really what we have in this practice, more present-oriented.
The three wise intentions are named as: number one is renunciation, or letting go. So there we go, right there, it’s named as a wise intention. The second is non-ill will. That’s how the Pali is listed; it’s non-ill will. Sometimes it’s turned into goodwill or metta, something as the positive movement. And the third is non-cruelty, and sometimes that’s turned into compassion, although we’ll talk more about that term later this week. So we have letting go, and then the cultivation of something that’s in the realm of non-harming, trying not to harm in some way. So we see right away that in the three skillful intentions, we have letting go and cultivation of certain qualities. Those will maybe frame us as we go forward in the week.
In addition to the quote I gave at the beginning about not doing what is unskillful, doing what is skillful, and cultivating or purifying the mind, we can bear in mind one other sutta quote I want to just finish with, which is that the Buddha said, “It is possible to abandon what is unskillful. If it were not possible to abandon what is unskillful, I would not say to you, ‘Abandon what is unskillful.’” And on the other side, “It is possible to cultivate what is skillful. If it were not possible to cultivate what is skillful, I would not say to you, ‘Cultivate what is skillful.’”
So this is all quite doable. This is all quite doable, but we do have to understand the dynamics of the process. We have to be wise about balancing these and doing them in the right way and at the right time. So that’s what we’re going to get into over the next several days of this week, and I hope you’ll join and find some application of it in your own life and practice. Thank you.
Sutta: A discourse or sermon of the Buddha or one of his senior disciples. ↩
Dhammapada: One of the best-known texts from the Pali Canon, it is a collection of the Buddha’s sayings in verse form. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain inherent in conditioned existence. ↩
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, goodwill, or benevolence. It is one of the four “brahmaviharas” or sublime states of mind. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption. It is a key component of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩