This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Remembering what’s Beneficial - Victoria Cary. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Victoria Cary at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hi everyone, and Happy New Year. I feel like I always celebrate two new years. I grew up in San Francisco, so we always celebrated Lunar New Year too. And happy Black History Month. It’s really good to be with you.
If you were here with me last time, you might remember that I’d like to start off not with a dharma talk, but with questions about your formal meditation practice. Not all of us meet with teachers or get to go on retreat and ask questions about practice. So how’s it going on the cushion these days? What did you notice, maybe this morning or at home? Are there any places that are sticky or confusing, or you don’t know how to work with something? If you’ve been practicing for a while and something new is happening, I’m happy to answer any questions like that from a few brave souls.
Angela: Hi, my name is Angela. I’m not even sure what Dharma means. I trained with Transcendental Meditation for a few years now, back in Boston. My question is, how important is posture? In Transcendental Meditation, we sit in a chair, and I have tried to sit on a pad, but my body… I’m not sure if that’s part of the practice. So my question is, what are your feelings about that?
Victoria: Thank you, it’s a really good question. And this is just a reminder for folks: the Buddha offered four postures—sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. So all of those are completely legit postures, and sitting on a cushion on the floor is not better than sitting on a chair. It’s so good to remind ourselves of this because sometimes our bodies cannot sit on a cushion, and it’s painful for folks who at some points in their lives have to transition to a chair. Then sometimes we have to learn how to meditate in that posture. So thank you for the question. I’m glad you’re taking care of your body.
Melody: Good morning, my name is Melody. I have a fairly long practice, maybe 15 years or so, but just recently my mind has been very, very busy, just chattering, chattering, chattering. It’s about something good, but I think it’s about a creative process that’s going on. And so it keeps going back to that. The way I’m working with it is I sort of gently step alongside it for a second or two or three, and then I gently come back to the here and now. I’m doing it all the time, more than usual. So in some ways, it’s really helping my awareness practice, but I just wanted to know if you have any thoughts about that.
Victoria: Is there any frustration or wanting it not to be happening?
Melody: There was some of that, but I resolved that yesterday by doing some dharma reading. So I’m befriending it at this point.
Victoria: Great. So it sounds like it’s not a problem; it’s just what’s happening. We can notice, oh, when causes and conditions change in our lives, content changes, doesn’t it? And so also, maybe noticing the content happens in the mind, the creativity. A couple of ways of working with it is what you’re doing, kind of like walking beside it and then at some point maybe putting it down, maybe actively. But also, we can check out what it feels like to be maybe excited in the body or enlightened, and then rest with that instead of just coming back to your anchor. Rest with the uplift of it.
Melody: Yes, that’s what I’m doing. The energy, the effort, you know, something wants to be born of this.
Victoria: And so be open for that. Be open for that. And then also watch, like, oh, it’s a little bit of a hook, like I’m going to figure out the next step on my creative process. It’s like, of course, and that’s exciting. And it is valuable to set aside time for dedicated practice. So sometimes when I have a lot going on, I just remind myself, “Okay, right now we’re just meditating. We can think about that in 20 minutes.” All right. Thank you for your question.
Online Question (from Eve): How important are retreats to the practice? I’m not at a place in my life where retreats are an option, and my practice is mostly daily meditation.
Victoria: Thanks, Eve. It’s a good question. So, retreats have their time and place. I’m a retreat teacher, so I see value in retreats. And there’s lots of value in daily meditation practice, daily dharma practice. I do emphasize and really focus a lot on us expanding our definition of practice. Because so often in this lineage, there is this preferencing, much like the cushion, our idea that it’s all about retreat practice and meditation practice. But the Buddha laid out many, many things for us to cultivate. So keep doing what you’re doing. Yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. And you know, if the time comes in this lifetime to go on retreat, then great. And if the time doesn’t come to go on retreat in this lifetime, not a problem. People have very, very deep daily life dharma practices.
I just want to say out loud what a gift you have in this community. Just that there’s, I don’t know, something like 50 folks here or more today. A lot of other communities haven’t bounced back like this since the pandemic; there’s like 15 or 20. So it’s really wonderful to be in a full room, really wonderful.
It’s a good inquiry for today for all of us: how, maybe in these times, to integrate these practices and to remember the value of bringing in these teachings of the Buddha into our day-to-day.
Maybe I’ll start with Howard Thurman1. Who in here knows who Howard Thurman is? Just a few folks. He was a Christian Mystic. He was a teacher of Martin Luther King when Martin Luther King went to grad school. He was one of the first people who influenced Martin Luther King around practices of nonviolence. He spent maybe five or six months in India, both lecturing and learning and meeting with people like Gandhi.
I think it’s so helpful. I marked a couple of pages. Sometimes when things are changing very rapidly, like they have over the last week or so, we have a very short memory. But maybe Howard Thurman wrote this in the 50s or 60s. He says, “Remain at peace. Accustom yourself to remain at peace in the depth of your heart in spite of your restless imagination.”
I’ve talked to a lot of students this week, and some of the imagination is going to… some of it’s not imagination, it’s actually happening, and there’s an overlay of extra worry. Howard says, “Peace anywhere seems to be wishful thinking during days of turmoils within and violences without. Peace of mind, peace of heart, peace of home, peace of country, peace of world, peace of cosmos. It does not matter which, the same sense of pinpoint unreality pervades. There seems to be a vast stirring of energy, malignant and unstructured, that catapults to the surface all kinds of disharmonies, conflicts, and disorders.” And he goes on to name all these places, including the United States. “Always there is present a turbulent quality, the out-of-hand aspect of the common life. Accustom yourself to remain at peace in the depth of your heart in spite of your restless imagination.”
It’s a reminder, right? That this is this human life, these vicissitudes. And I think it’s so helpful to remember how can we find our center in the midst of it all, again and again and again. This is what our practice trains us to do, doesn’t it? Notice the mind getting caught up and come back. Notice what’s happening in real time in our hearts and minds. Noticing if we’re caught in grief and despair, and then knowing how to meet that with a lot of kindness. For some folks, that’s the practice right now. It’s some grieving practice. For some folks, it’s the practice of being with anger or rage.
Someone yesterday asked me a big question around, “You know, I’m feeling so much anger, so much rage, and I know that I’m supposed to have compassion, but how can I have compassion?” They were just really upset. And then I gave like a classic teacher answer, but we misunderstood each other, and then they were upset with me, which is okay. I’m like, “Oh, we missed something.” But really, the miss was that I was saying to start where you are. Start with incapacity and grow that capacity to meet the harder things. This person thought I was saying, “No, be compassionate with all the folks who are causing harm.” Like, maybe you’re not there yet. Can we know we’re not there yet and then be compassionate for what that feels like for ourselves, for our anger? Because that’s suffering, isn’t it? For most of us, I mean, there is rage that sometimes feels good, and also it’s painful, isn’t it? Or what’s underneath it is painful. It’s a response to something.
So I’m just going to give lots of tips today about how to be with things right now. And some of them are from the Dhammapada2. This is in chapter 8, “The Thousands”:
“A single word of Truth which calms the mind is better to hear than a thousand irrelevant words.”
So maybe there’s one word that can bring you back, that can remind you about what Howard Thurman was talking about: peace. Remaining at peace. What’s that word for you? Maybe it is the word peace.
“A single verse of Truth which calms the mind is better to hear than a thousand irrelevant verses.”
I think this is pointing to, you know, maybe there’s a chapter in a dharma book that’s helpful for you to remember, a reference to come back to again and again. I bet some of you here have quotes on your walls or reminders on mirrors. Maybe we need to expand those, put them in our wallets, just post them everywhere. It was so nice walking up here. On the side, it says “Insight.” Oh yeah, insight. And then that reminds me, what builds to insight? If we think about the Eightfold Path, there’s this bucket of Sila3, our ethics, and then there’s this bucket of concentration, and this bucket of wisdom arises. [Laughter]
“Reciting a single verse of Truth which calms the mind is better than reciting a hundred meaningless verses.”
So maybe that means we say them out loud, or chanting. Maybe some of you have a chanting practice that’s supportive to you. They’re just all reminders.
And these are more towards how to live our lives:
“A single day lived with conscious intention and virtue is of greater value than a hundred years lived devoid of discipline and right restraint.”
It repeats, and then it says, “devoid of discipline and wisdom.”
So isn’t a single day… how we spend our mornings can start to really pay attention. How we spend our afternoons, our evenings. And are we bringing ourselves back? We get lost, get confused about what we’re here for, what the possibilities are.
I love that the Buddha gives us so many ways to integrate these practices into our daily lives. Maybe we can just for a moment make an intention. I’m going to give many different ideas, and maybe one sparks you. I think that what can happen when things are chaotic in our world is that we can get overwhelmed and have a lot of doubt, and then not know what to do, or not think that we have any power to do anything. Is that true? It is not true. We all have influence in our own ways. And so maybe because we have these practices, we’re the ones in our families or in our friend circles that can remind people of other possibilities when they’re lost and caught in despair or worry. Or we can be the steadying presence, just by listening to them. Like, “I hear you’re worried.” Sometimes people just need to say, “I’m so worried.” They just need someone to listen. Or maybe you’re the one who says, “Let’s go on a walk together,” or “I know this really cool meditation center.”
So here are some words.
Generosity. Are there ways that in your daily life you can practice generosity? And here’s the thing: when I say, “Are there ways you can practice this?” what people’s minds go to is external. Did anyone go to internal? All right, we have one advanced practitioner. So everything is both externally and internally. And we can’t forget to remember ourselves.
Wise Speech. The Sila piece. How can we practice doing no harm in thought, word, or deed? Internally, externally, and both. Internally, that might be being a little softer, noticing the harsh critic. It’s tough enough out there, y’all. No one else can talk nicely to you internally like you’re doing that.
Renunciation. Is there something to be let go of right now? For some folks, it’s news-lite right now.
Wisdom. Is there a way to cultivate wisdom? One of the ways I think about wisdom or insight is, are there ways right now to cultivate our intuitive knowing and really deeply listening to ourselves? Which is not so easy sometimes, because sometimes we don’t like what we hear. The other day, I was talking to one of my best friends, just getting caught up. And then I started complaining about one of my siblings who I complain about a lot. They probably complain about me a lot too. And I could tell my best friend was so irritated with me because I complain about this sibling a lot. I was like, “Oh, there’s something in me that knew I need to stop complaining about this sibling.” So we can notice what we are complaining about that isn’t actually helping anything.
Energy. We can notice how we are spending our time and energy. Are we spending it complaining? Are we spending it avoiding that which maybe should be met with some care, which is the definition of suffering?
Other options are patience. We have to have so much patience in this life and in these practices, don’t we? Because it took a while to get ourselves into this predicament, and we’re not going to get ourselves out of it overnight either. So we have to have patience. The upside is then we’re practicing patience, so we’re cultivating patience.
Truthfulness. Oh, this is a hard one. Maybe it’s not so hard for you, but maybe it’s a little harder if it means putting yourself in a risky situation. I’m a classic people-pleaser. I want people to like me. I’m getting better; it’s okay if you don’t like me. But this truthfulness sometimes means that people won’t like you if you’re being honest, if you’re saying it out loud or sharing it, if you’re standing in your truth, if you’re standing in your power. And that’s okay. It’s not so easy all the time. But it also means truthfulness with ourselves, really being honest with ourselves. Also not so easy.
Determination. To me, this is this willingness to show up. Show up for our hearts, show up for our minds, show up for our community, show up for each other.
And then these ones that we know, the Brahmaviharas4: loving-kindness (more friendliness), compassion (where our kindness meets suffering), and let’s not leave this one out, Mudita5 (happiness for other people’s happiness in all the places where joy can be had). And it’s not all suffering, is it? Newer folks to practice sometimes think the teaching is “life is suffering.” Is that the teaching? No. There is suffering, but life is not just suffering, although sometimes it can feel like it is. So remembering those places that uplift, that bring joy. Yesterday, I called a friend who has a four-year-old. They just turned four. Sometimes I just need to see this four-year-old being’s light. So I FaceTime’d, and they just take me out of any worry. I’m like, “All right, this four-year-old’s got it. We’re in good hands.”
And then Equanimity, finding some balance in the middle of things. Not so easy.
So how do we remember? How do we remember when our hearts are heavy, there’s a lot of worry in the mind, when we don’t know which way to turn or what to do or what’s up or what’s down? Can you just remember one thing? Not one thing I tell you to remember, but one thing that’s sparked in your own heart, whether it’s to be more loving, be more honest, be more truthful, remember peace, the possibility of awakening, even wisdom, insight.
Anybody care to say a word? I’ll repeat it. You can just say it out loud. Anything came to you like, “Oh, that’s mine. I’m going to work on that one.”
Audience: I liked the quote from the Dhammapada about a single day. I don’t remember the characteristics, but of mindfulness and discipline, it’s better than 100 years without, because I waste most of my time.
Victoria: I hear you, and it is such a good reminder. It’s a single day. You know, what if it’s this day? Always this day that’s a practice day, a wholesome day. And watch the mind being judgmental, include that too. Like, “Oh, I can say it cheerfully.”
Audience: Generosity. I really appreciate that, kind of holding that in awareness. And there’s something around generosity of spirit, too, that comes up for me. Entering into the meditation and being here today, I was having a lot of physical and mental tightness, and I noticed just a settling and an opening up. And with that opening up, this feeling of generosity towards everyone in this community and outside of this community. And it feels so supportive of some of those other things like Mudita. So I just really appreciate kind of dropping that into awareness today.
Victoria: Thank you. So, generosity of spirit. And the generosity that created this place, right? It is all built on generosity. If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t be here. If we weren’t here, the teachings wouldn’t… right? That’s how it all goes. The generosity of the Buddha to share these teachings with us, the compassion of the Buddha to share these teachings with us.
Any other sparks or words that were supportive? It’s going to be your word today, this week, this month.
Audience: Patience.
Victoria: Patience, yeah.
Audience: I was kind of sparked by “no complaining.” Don’t complain. And I wonder what is the… that’s the negative of it. I can see where complaining kind of releases some of that rage or helplessness or frustration, in little things and in big things. But what’s the positive, the flip side of it?
Victoria: To me, it’s a motivator to take action. So, you know, I can complain about my sibling, or I can just have a difficult conversation with my sibling. Or I can choose something else. Their birthday’s coming up, so I can express love.
Audience: I’m about a step behind you because I’m still on what sparks. For me, it’s truthfulness. I’m going to be visiting a friend in Florida, not my favorite place, but she’s a dear friend. The other day she said something about hurricanes and climate change, and she said, “Oh, you know, the jury’s still out on that.” And I thought, okay, I’m going to be spending time with my dear friend. So for me, it’s finding, being true to myself, but not picking a fight that is not going to be helpful for anyone.
Victoria: Yeah, and to not sow more division. It’s like, where can we meet? We can know for ourselves when we’re stuck in a position, there’s no amount of anybody telling us anything that’s perhaps going to convince us otherwise. So it is good to find those common places to meet.
Audience: I really appreciated your quoting Thurman. I recently read one of his books. He came out of a different tradition, he was a Christian, but yet there’s a lot of overlap with our practices. The only thing that also came up for me, and it wasn’t prompted by any one specific thing you said, but I find myself more and more overwhelmed by the neurotic egotism of the times we live in, this preoccupation with ourselves, and contrasted with the truth of non-self and that we’re all connected. And so I often find myself, when I’m outraged and seeing what’s going on, I think of that and realize that a lot of the stuff that we feel is coming from that connection with everybody else that’s experiencing other stuff.
Victoria: And how do we balance that, right?
Audience: This is a question on the practice. How does the practice look like and feel like when you’re not formally sitting?
Victoria: It’s all of these things, everything that I’ve said. So it’s, “Oh, can I be patient while waiting in line or waiting for my family to come out to the car?” “Can I find ways to be generous with my spirit, maybe smile at another?” “Can I find ways to, when the critic comes, meet that critic with some kindness?” “Can I notice when joy is happening and be with it fully?” These are the ways we integrate these practices into our daily lives. “Can I notice if I’m about to say something or do something that might cause harm to another or to myself and not do it?” Or, “Can I at least reflect on it afterwards and vow to not do it again?” These are the ways that we must integrate these practices into our daily lives. And then in our more formal practice, maybe we notice some settling because we’ve practiced these wholesome, uplifting qualities of heart and mind.
Audience: In the sense of practicing the virtues, but I’m also wondering about observing the nature of mind while you’re doing things.
Victoria: So I think it’s helpful to build in some pauses. If the mind is not knowing what’s happening when it’s happening throughout the day, build in some pauses or cues to help bring you back. It could be every time you walk through a doorway, you just take a beat and take a pause. Or every time a plane flies overhead, you pause and you send metta. But get the pause in there. Or right when you wake up in the morning, you lay with yourself and with your breath. You know when you’re about to be upright, you’re sitting up. You know when the legs are moving out of the bed and feet are going on the ground. You know when you’re standing up. Make these habits, and this way you’re bringing in moments of mindfulness throughout the day. Is that helpful?
Okay, so we have to stop.
I’m really appreciating being with you today. We want to dedicate the merit of our practice—our practice of meditation, of mindfulness, our practice of letting the teachings land in our hearts and minds, our practice of showing up for each other and for ourselves in this community.
May the benefits of our time together first be of benefit to ourselves, and then for all beings everywhere without exception.
May all beings be safe and protected from all internal and external harm. May all beings be peaceful and happy as possible. May all beings be healthy and strong. And may all beings live with ease.
Thank you all for your kind attention and for showing up. So good to be with you.
Howard Thurman (1899-1981): An influential African-American author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader. He was a key mentor to leaders within the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. ↩
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 “DAP,” which has been corrected to “Dhammapada” based on the context of quoting Buddhist scripture. ↩
Sila (Pāli): Virtue, morality, or ethical conduct. It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Brahmaviharas (Pāli): The four “divine abodes” or “sublime states” in Buddhism: loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). ↩
Mudita (Pāli): Sympathetic or appreciative joy; the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being rather than begrudging it. ↩