This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Knowing Where We’re At: Letting Go & Cultivation(2of5):Willingness, Capacity, & Know-How. 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.
Alright, welcome everyone. Nice to see you arriving. Let’s go ahead and start with our sitting together this morning. Finding a posture where you’ll be able to sit for half an hour or so, and just have the sense of arriving. You know, we can sometimes get doing other things on the computer or we had to rush a little bit to get here, and just acknowledging that now we’re here. Maybe allowing the body to settle back a bit. The computer can be a leaning forward kind of activity, so just allowing yourself to settle back, allowing the body to be naturally aligned.
Closing the eyes if that’s comfortable for you, and just having the sense of being here, being in the place where you’re sitting.
Sensing first into that contact where you’re sitting or lying down. So your seat against the cushion or the chair or the bed, and noticing if that’s a simple kind of contact where you’re just resting and allowing yourself to be held up. Softening any extra muscular effort so that you’re mostly just held up by the structure of the body, the bones, releasing extra muscle tension and allowing yourself to be supported. You may notice then that the body naturally aligns. Sometimes I rock back and forth a little bit or forward and back just to assure that I’m in that middle place of most balance. It makes a difference in the sit.
Then, softening the face, the muscles of the scalp, down through the shoulders and torso, arms and legs, just inviting ease.
Sensing the full three-dimensionality of the body. Can you feel the front, the back, and the sides of your body? With most of the sense organs on the front, sometimes that’s all we feel, but the body is quite three-dimensional, and we have senses toward the back. The idea of this initial part is to put the body in a position that is both relaxed and alert, and that supports the mind also to maintain being relaxed and alert.
Just inviting some ease in our connection to the present. There may be places in the body that are painful. There may be something present in the mind that’s not so much at ease today. And those things are fine as they are. And we can still have a stance of ease in relation to any unease or dis-ease that’s present. Seeing if you can tune into that.
So I’ll offer a few questions to drop in to the sit and just see what the response is, as if we’ve dropped a stone down a well and we’re listening for the splash. And this is only if you’d like. You can also continue with your meditation if you would like, but it’s kind of an invitation to tap in a little bit more deeply with where we’re at right now.
So the first question is, am I willing to meditate right now? And let there be any answer. Am I willing right now? Possibly there will be more than one answer from different parts of the mind. Perhaps you’ve never asked that question at the beginning of a sit. And we don’t need to do anything with the response except to feel it. What’s the level of willingness right now?
And then the next question, there will be three. The second one is, what is my current capacity to meet experience with wisdom? How much capacity do I have right now? This isn’t a question about how much experience you have, necessarily. Even a very experienced meditator could be having a tough day, could be strained in various ways such that there isn’t much capacity. Or someone quite new to the practice could be fully aligned, have quite a lot of capacity at this moment. What is the capacity to meet experience with wisdom right now? What’s available? And again, we just feel what comes back from that question.
And then the last question is, do I know what to do? Do I have instructions I’m intending to follow in order to meet experience? If I were silent for the rest of the sit, would you know what to do?
Alright, and then releasing this question-asking state of mind and settling back into perhaps feeling the breath or the body in the present moment. And maybe sense what kind of shift there’s been from these questions. For some, it brings in a sense of confidence or orientation, at least kind of knowing where we’re at.
And then open again to the experience of the body, various energies, sensations, the breath coming in and out. Open to how the mind feels, their emotions or thoughts present.
And the invitation for this sit is to have a fairly open kind of awareness where we allow anything really to arise and pass away and be felt, but without getting sucked into it. Finding that balance.
And when you find the mind wandering, losing connection with the present moment flow of experience, you could re-evoke these questions of willingness, capacity, and knowing what to do. Just reminding yourself where you’re at there, just briefly, seeing if that helps realign or adjust somehow what the mind is doing. Sometimes with an open type awareness, if it’s too open, the mind can wander off easily. And so we could bring it back, touch to the breath a bit, stay with one thing a bit, starting to develop wisdom in working with the mind in relation to experience, so that we’re able to be with things, feel them fully, and yet not get drawn in completely.
As you continue to sit, one subtlety you may notice is that these qualities we invoked change throughout the course of a sit. The willingness to be present may be strong at the beginning and then fade out as the mind gets restless. Or you may be a little reluctant to start, but now that you’ve settled in, you’re very willing to be present. Capacity changes, and sometimes we have more capacity to be with certain experiences than others. We may also know what to do in some cases and have other situations in the mind where we have no idea how to meet that experience. Have you noticed changes throughout this sit in those three things we talked about?
And as we approach the end of this time of meditation, I’d like to offer that one of these three is particularly helpful in our daily life, being aware of. In particular, the second one: our capacity to meet experience well with wisdom and care. That’s something worth tuning into as we go throughout our day. And we’ll notice that as we’re tired or stressed or busy in some way, then we have less ability to connect well with what’s going on. And that’s normal. We don’t have to control that too much, but if we know it, then we have greater ability to connect well in our relationships. And we can also have the compassion to realize that others may simply not have the capacity at this moment to be as we want them to be, or to be as good as we think they should be. There’s a lot of wisdom around knowing where the mind is at in that regard and having some gentleness around it. It’s not easy to live in this world, all the inputs and changes and things we have to do as humans. So just bringing in that simple bit of wisdom can greatly increase our compassion and help our relationships to be more smooth with others and with ourselves. So may that guide you today.
Okay, so this week we are talking about letting go and cultivation, these actions that people think about around the turning of the new year. And we’re being guided by the sutta from the Dhammapada1, the verse that says, I’m changing Gil’s translation slightly: “Not doing what is unskillful, engaging in what is skillful, and purifying or clarifying one’s mind. This is the teaching of the Buddhas.” But the question is, how do we do that wisely? So we’re talking about different perspectives and aspects of this that are relevant in our wanting to direct our intentions well in the world and for the new year.
So today we’re going to talk about three qualities that support being able to succeed at any spiritual aim, any one that results, for example, from the three wise intentions that we talked about at the end of yesterday: renunciation, non-ill will, and non-cruelty, which effectively amount to letting go and non-harming. So, you know, we can intend or wish all we want, but without these three qualities that we’ll talk about today, it may not be able to come about. So if there’s something that you want to let go of or cultivate, you might consider if these three are in place. And we’ve already previewed them in the meditation, but we’ll go ahead and go through them in a little bit more detail now.
The first is willingness, right? So I see a link here to the foundational spiritual faculty of faith, saddhā2. Some people don’t like the word faith, but the five spiritual faculties underlie our ability to develop anything, and the first of them is some kind of confidence or trust or faith, or the word I’m using is willingness. The simplest form of faith is willingness. Are you willing? And you might think, “Well, of course I’m willing. I’m making an aspiration to let go of something or cultivate something, aren’t I?” But actually, probably quite likely, there are some parts of the mind that are not actually on board with that. And that’s the reason that many of our resolutions fade away fairly quickly, because something in us isn’t actually willing to do that.
So it’s worth checking just how much internal resistance there might be to whatever we are intending. And it’s fine if there is some, you know, that’s to be expected. We’re making a change, going against maybe some kind of habit that we’ve developed. So what’s important really is to be aware if there’s any internal resistance so that it can’t kind of sneak in sideways and change whether or not we’re able to fulfill that.
As an example, I remember a time hearing a Buddhist nun talking about wrestling with her desire for food. So nominally, she was on board with this wish because, you know, she’d become a nun, and a lot of that is about living a life where you’re not acting on desires. But nonetheless, she felt like in the corner of her mind, even though in the front of her mind she was very willing not to be attached to food and worried about that, there would be this continual fascination coming in with what she would eat tomorrow. You know, and Buddhist nuns receive all of their food from others, so you don’t know what you’re going to eat tomorrow. And there would be this interest in it and concern about it. And so she started looking at her mind, you know, what’s going on with that? And she described it as seeing a fire burning before her and trying to put it out, you know, being very willing to put the water on it, calm it down, but then kind of looking off to the side and noticing that there was a part of her mind that was throwing wood on the fire from the side. So I really liked that image that she gave, and it’s like that, isn’t it?
So check out, you know, is there something that’s right in front of you and you’re very willing to work with it, let go of it, cultivate it, but on the side, there’s something undermining it? So sometimes it helps to kind of expand our vision and just take in, “Oh yeah, there is a part of me that’s really not very willing to do this,” and to acknowledge that and to have compassion for that part so that we can include it and, you know, have everybody eventually getting on board.
That’s kind of the top level of willingness, but more deeply, this quality of willingness is also about willingness to meet the unknown, willingness to embrace this process of the Dharma that’s unfolding and changing us in ways that we can’t completely predict. How willing are we to undergo a transformational process? This path is not so easy, and certainly the ego and other parts of us that are very concerned with safety and predictability are probably not fully on board with that idea. So it’s a process for us to work with these parts, and it’s okay, you know, just keep at it gently. But the willingness is important, to have some degree of willingness.
And then the second thing that we talked about is capacity, right? So even if we’re willing to leap across a chasm, if we don’t have enough strength to get to the other side, it’s not going to work. So we need the capacity to actually do what we’re intending, to actually do the letting go or the cultivation that we’re interested in. And this capacity is typically developed in meditation. So that’s one of the main functions of meditation. Much of the capacity that we need is simply the ability to stay with experience without getting sucked in or reacting to it. That’s it. Just being able to stay with strong emotions, with bodily pain, with storms of thinking. That’s a lot of what we develop on the cushion, that kind of capacity.
Basic mindfulness is enough to start us off. So we learn to be able to see experience, know what’s happening without just getting immediately drawn into it and becoming it, essentially. And then we also have various practices like RAIN, or at IMC we talk about the acronym RAFT, which stands for Recognize, Allow, Feel, and Tease apart. These are techniques for working with strong emotions that come up. And then eventually, we want to develop the capacity to have open awareness where everything is allowed, everything can come and go. And there’s some way that we can develop our capacity to really be with anything that really helps a lot when we can start to be willing, have the willingness to be open to anything and start to develop that capacity.
So, you know, the cushion is like the spiritual gym. It’s the place where we strengthen our ability. And of course, all the time we fall off and get lost or find that we can’t be with something. That’s fine. The idea is that we’re kind of working the edge without going over into the realm of overwhelm or stress or too much. So then you back off, “Oh, that was a little too much. Okay, no problem.” But we want to keep kind of working that edge, in the way at the gym you keep trying to lift a little bit more, and if it’s too much, then you go back, but eventually you’ll get stronger.
And so this is the development of capacity. And even as the mind gets calmer and more tranquil, more concentrated, more able to be with a lot of things, there is still the need to develop different kinds of capacities, such as the ability to be with experience that is very subtle or that is unfamiliar. That’s also a capacity to develop. You know, can I stay with experience when it gets very, very fine and there’s a tendency to want to know what it is or do something with it? And then we have to learn, “Oh, okay, now I can also be with experience that’s very subtle.” One teacher said that we’re eventually developing capacity in non-conceptual knowing, so trusting the knowing that doesn’t involve the rational mind. That’s yet another capacity to develop. So there’s all kinds of capacities we’ll need to learn on and off the cushion. So practicing off the cushion also helps develop capacity. You know, we can learn to sustain some level of mindfulness throughout our whole day or throughout our whole drive to work, for example. Can we refrain from unwise speech with a person who triggers us? All kinds of capacities. So that’s a lot of what practice is about.
And then the third thing I mentioned is knowing what to do, or we could call it maybe know-how. So even if we are willing and we have some kind of potential capacity, we do have to have instructions on how to do whatever it is that we’re wanting to do. I suspect that many of you have the know-how already. Here in the West, we get a lot of instruction, and the instructions are actually pretty simple. The problem is that they’re hard to do, right? And yet, you know, there are also times where we need specific instructions for a particular thing that we’re meeting. And that’s why it’s important to have a teacher, to talk with a teacher. A basic principle of Dharma practice is to learn how to fully experience something without either expressing it or repressing it. There’s kind of a middle way to walk, and this is not intuitive for most of us. We like to go onto either of those extremes. So we might need to learn this way of practice and talk about it and get specific instructions from a teacher.
And then you’ll find that as you get more specific instructions, we might again have to deal with willingness. You know, if a teacher says to you, “You know, Kim, what you really need to do is X,” because they’ve seen something in me that I haven’t seen, something in me might say, “No, I’m not willing to do X. I don’t want to do that. Wait a minute, I didn’t think this was going to involve letting go of that.” Right? We’re back to willingness. So these three—willingness, capacity, and know-how—are interrelated, and we have to keep checking where we are in each of those areas.
So you might check out in yourself, in regard to whatever feels important at this new year time, do you have all three of these in place? Are you actually willing to do what it is that you’re intending? Do you have the capacity, and if you don’t, what might need to be cultivated there? And do you know how to do that? Do you have instructions that will help you when you realize that you’re going off course or not being able to achieve that?
So I think these three are kind of an interesting reflection to do around any kinds of intentions in letting go or cultivation that we would have. Do we have the willingness, the capacity, and the know-how? And I wish you very well in that reflection and consideration because it helps support being able to move forward on the path with what we want to do. So on this last day of 2024, may it be a day of joy and care and consideration of your own heart and mind so that you can direct it well. And we’ll continue for the next few days to talk about the unfolding of that. Remember that you don’t have to have it all worked out by midnight tonight. So Happy New Year. Be well.
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. The original transcript said “dhap.” ↩
Saddhā: A Pali word that is commonly translated as faith, confidence, or trust. It refers to a sense of conviction in the Buddhist path. The original transcript said “sat.” ↩