This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Insight into the Three Characteristics (1 of 5): Introduction - Mei Elliott. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Mei Elliott at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So we’ll go ahead and get started. All right, welcome. My name is Mei Elliott. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in whatever time zone. My name is Mei, and today we’ll start with a simple meditation on the breath. The idea is that we’re doing a practice that helps to settle and collect and stabilize the mind. And this practice of settling and collecting the mind by focusing on a simple object like the breath, it’s a supportive condition for insight, and insight will be the focus of the teachings this week. So go ahead and find a comfortable posture. I’ll offer a very light instruction today.
So maybe finding a position that is both upright and relaxed. Maybe connecting with three deep breaths.
Taking a moment to relax, just soften the forehead and the temples. Release the jaw, relaxing the shoulders, softening the belly, and allowing any extra tension to flow on out through the legs and the feet.
For the rest of the meditation, I’ll offer guidance on following the breath. If you know that the breath doesn’t work for you, if there’s a better anchor for you, maybe the soundscape or a global sense of the body sitting, feel free to do that instead, and you can translate the instructions for yourself.
For those connecting to the breath, finding your home base, connecting with the breath where you feel it most easily, most predominantly, maybe in the nose or the rise and fall of the chest, maybe in the belly.
Receiving the sensations of breathing.
Putting aside thoughts of the past or the future, putting aside any judgments or interpretations of what’s happening now, and instead dropping into the felt sense of what’s happening now.
And you feel the full length of an inhale and a full length of an exhale.
Settling and stabilizing, collecting the mind which is so often fragmented, collecting and settling.
You allow the breath to be in the foreground, and anything that arises that isn’t the breath—maybe a sound, an emotion, a thought—can you allow these to be in the background? Keeping the breath in the foreground.
Receiving each breath, remembering that each is unique, that this breath has never come before and won’t come again. Feeling the breaths from inside the body.
Though our primary focus is on the breathing, here and there you might check the attitude. How are you relating to the breath? Is there straining or striving, boredom, judgment? If so, can you invite kindness and curiosity? Can you invite an attitude of okayness with whatever is arising?
Remembering that we’re not trying to make anything happen here, just training in how to meet our life more fully, how to be more free in our life. This begins by training the mind, training in being here.
And for these last minutes, seeing if you can maintain some continuity with the breath, almost like you’re polishing the breath with your attention, maintaining contact with the breath.
Welcome again. My name is Mei Elliott, for those who are just arriving. And this series is coming to you from Insight Meditation Center. If you’re someone who tunes in frequently, you probably know by now that what we’re doing here is often called Insight Meditation, or Vipassanā.1 And the word Vipassanā is a Pali2 word, Pali being the original language the Buddha’s teachings were recorded in. The “-passanā” in Vipassanā means “to see.” The “vi-“ is an amplifier, so Vipassanā could be translated as “really seeing,” but more commonly it’s translated as “clear seeing.”
So this, of course, leads to a question: what are we clearly seeing? If this is called Insight Meditation, what exactly are we having insight into? So this week, we’ll be answering these questions and more by discussing the three core insights of the Buddha, also known as the three characteristics or the three marks. And these three core insights, they include impermanence, also known as inconstancy; suffering or unsatisfactoriness; and lastly, not-self.
So this week, we’ll spend a day exploring each of these, and we’ll also talk about why these insights are significant for our practice. Why do they matter? And namely, they’re important because they facilitate letting go. And this letting go, it releases craving and it frees us of the causes of suffering. So it’s insight into the three characteristics that facilitates the end of suffering, the end of dukkha.3 And what we’re letting go of, by the way, is our greed, hatred, and delusion. When these sources of suffering are released, then beautiful qualities of mind can come forth, qualities like kindness, compassion, joy, happiness, patience, equanimity—these sorts of states can arise more easily.
The Buddha said that this freedom is available for all of us, and he gave us practices to realize this possibility for ourselves. So this week, we’ll talk about one of the practices for how to get there, and one of the ways we can put conditions in place that support insight, that support awakening. We’ll talk about the ways that samādhi4—collected and stable mind—can support insight.
And I just want to rewind for a second there because I mentioned putting supportive conditions in place. And this point is of particular interest to me because many of us don’t realize that our daily meditation practice is a condition for awakening, is a supportive condition for awakening. Many of us have received meditation instruction, maybe to pay attention to the breath, how we did in our meditation today, but not everyone has an understanding of how that simple practice can lead to insight. It’s not always clear how following the breath can result in a heart and mind that’s completely free from stress and discontent.
So during this series, we’ll explore how this very simple practice of collecting and stabilizing the mind by following the breath provides an important condition for insight. And in doing so, my hope is to provide you with a like a mini-arc of practice, showing how our basic daily meditation practice, when done more intensively, can open into insight into the three characteristics and how this insight can facilitate freedom.
So I’d like to begin by discussing what insight is and how it functions. To begin, an insight is a non-conceptual experience of clear seeing. Sometimes people think about an insight as being sort of an “aha” moment, where it’s like, “Oh, I’m really seeing the true nature of things. I’m seeing the way things really are.” And this clear seeing provides growth in wisdom. So many people associate insight with a flash of clarity, almost like a strike of lightning or something like that. And sure, insight can definitely come about as a distinct, profound moment of clarity. But it took quite a while for me to learn that our insights into the three characteristics don’t always happen like that. And because most people associate insight with a distinctive “aha” moment, I’d like to offer another way that insight can show up. And this other way, it’s a little quieter, a little less dramatic, a little less obvious.
This less obvious form of insight comes simply through the way we’re seeing the world once the mind has stabilized, once the mind is more still and settled and collected. So once there’s some concentration in the mind, when samādhi is present. So when the mind is still, for example, it’s easier to see arising and passing, to see things coming and going. So when the mind is stable, we might just be able to see impermanence. Things are arising and passing over and over and over again. So we might see sights and sounds and smells and tastes and emotions, thoughts, etc., all arising and passing, arising and passing. It’s kind of like when we’re wearing the lens of impermanence, we begin to see the changing nature of everything. Kind of like if we put on rose-colored glasses, we’d start seeing everything with a rose tone.
So if we see impermanence for long enough from the vantage point of a very steady, stable mind, we begin to understand impermanence much more deeply. And it might not seem like a big “aha” moment. We’re just seeing things coming and going, but this begins to shift our understanding. We’re shifting from perceiving phenomena as permanent and fixed and unchanging to being in flux. And when we have the wisdom that everything changes, we’re much less likely to cling to it. We’re much less likely to take refuge in it. We’re much less likely to relate to it as “I,” “me,” or “mine.”
All to say, an insight can be very obvious and dramatic, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be very subtle, and it can arrive gradually, just simply through our way of seeing when the mind is collected. There’s a quote from Suzuki Roshi5 where he’s talking about progress in practice. He’s not talking about insight per se, but I think the quote actually applies nicely to how insight functions. So he’s talking about progress on the path, and he says, “It’s not like progress on the path, it’s not like going out in a shower, as in like a rain shower, in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know when you’re getting wet, but as you keep walking, you get wet little by little.”
So sometimes an insight is like stepping out in a downpour, and we do have a dramatic experience of being soaked by insight, and we very much know it when it happens. But sometimes our insights are a little more like walking in the mist, like walking in the fog, much more subtle. We’re just seeing arising and passing, doesn’t seem particularly special, but over time it shifts our understanding. It doesn’t feel like it’s raining out. We don’t know we’re getting wet, but if we’re walking in the mist, little by little, the mind’s being transformed. And over time, if we walk in the mist long enough, we’re drenched.
So insights can happen in both ways, both in more obvious ways and in more subtle ways, where we might not even realize we’re being transformed. So as we embark in a few days of talking about these core insights of the Buddha, you don’t need to strain or strive to make something special happen. Some people think if they strive hard enough, an insight will pop out or something like that. So don’t do that to yourself. Really efforting to make something happen more often than not, it can be aggravating and disappointing, and I don’t want you to fall victim to this.
So I’d like to offer something that can help temper the tendency to turn your meditation into a project. Sometimes when people learn about the three characteristics, their meditation becomes a project, and that’s not so useful. So I’d like to say something about conditionality. Our practice, it has a lot to do with putting certain conditions in place. When the conditions are there, then the path of practice unfolds. So the primary insights of Insight Meditation are revealed when we put the appropriate conditions in place. And there are many conditions that are supportive, and I emphasize this so it’s clear that we can’t force insight with our will. We can’t command it, we can’t muscle it to be here. We’re in a process with our practice. We’re in a process of allowing the Dharma to grow in our heart.
If we’re growing a plant, for example, we can’t pull on the stem to make it grow faster. Instead, what we can do is provide supportive conditions for a plant to grow. So if we’re growing a plant, supportive conditions are things like sunshine, water, good soil. And likewise, in our meditation practice, we can provide supportive conditions like faith, contentment, samādhi or stability. And we can supply these conditions, but we don’t control when our seeds germinate. In the same way, we don’t control when insight arises. So insight, it happens naturally on its own time when we put the appropriate conditions in place.
So tomorrow, I’ll be talking about one of the primary conditions for insight: the condition of stability or samādhi. And I’ll also be talking about conditions that support samādhi itself. So in addition to kind of exploring how to cultivate samādhi or concentration, we’ll talk about how it functions to support clear seeing, how it functions to support insight.
So I hope this has given you a lay of the land for what’s to come and provided you with an introduction to the topic of insight. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for an exploration of samādhi. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for prioritizing your practice and being here. Take care.
The following talk was given by Mei Elliott at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So, we’ll go ahead and get started. All right, welcome. My name is Mei Elliott. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in whatever time zone. Today, we’ll start with a simple meditation on the breath. The idea is that we’re doing a practice that helps to settle, collect, and stabilize the mind. This practice of settling and collecting the mind by focusing on a simple object like the breath is a supportive condition for insight, and insight will be the focus of the teachings this week.
Go ahead and find a comfortable posture. I’ll offer very light instruction today. Maybe find a position that is both upright and relaxed. Maybe connecting with three deep breaths.
Taking a moment to relax, just soften the forehead and the temples. Release the jaw. Relaxing the shoulders, softening the belly, and allowing any extra tension to flow on out through the legs and the feet.
For the rest of the meditation, I’ll offer guidance on following the breath. If you know that the breath doesn’t work for you, if there’s a better anchor for you—maybe the soundscape or a global sense of the body sitting—feel free to do that instead, and you can translate the instructions for yourself.
For those connecting to the breath, find your home base, connecting with the breath where you feel it most easily, most predominantly. Maybe in the nose, or the rise and fall of the chest, maybe in the belly. Receiving the sensations of breathing.
Putting aside thoughts of the past or the future, putting aside any judgments or interpretations of what’s happening now, and instead dropping into the felt sense of what’s happening now.
And you feel the full length of an inhale and a full length of an exhale.
Settling and stabilizing, collecting the mind which is so often fragmented. Collecting and settling.
You allow the breath to be in the foreground, and anything that arises that isn’t the breath—maybe a sound, an emotion, a thought—can you allow these to be in the background? Keeping the breath in the foreground.
Receiving each breath, remembering that each is unique, that this breath has never come before and won’t come again. Feeling the breaths from inside the body.
Though our primary focus is on the breathing, here and there you might check the attitude. How are you relating to the breath? Is there straining or striving? Boredom? Judgment? If so, can you invite kindness and curiosity? Can you invite an attitude of okayness with whatever is arising?
Remembering that we’re not trying to make anything happen here, just training in how to meet our life more fully, how to be more free in our life. This begins by training the mind, training in being here.
And for these last minutes, seeing if you can maintain some continuity with the breath, almost like you’re polishing the breath with your attention, maintaining contact with the breath.
Welcome again. My name is Mei Elliott, for those who are just arriving. This series is coming to you from Insight Meditation Center. If you’re someone who tunes in frequently, you probably know by now that what we’re doing here is often called Insight Meditation, or Vipassanā.1 The word Vipassanā is a Pali2 word, Pali being the original language the Buddha’s teachings were recorded in. The “-anā” in Vipassanā means “to see,” and the “vi-“ is an amplifier. So, Vipassanā could be translated as “really seeing,” but more commonly it’s translated as “clear seeing.”
This, of course, leads to a question: what are we clearly seeing? If this is called Insight Meditation, what exactly are we having insight into? This week, we’ll be answering these questions and more by discussing the three core insights of the Buddha, also known as the three characteristics or the three marks. These three core insights include impermanence (also known as inconstancy), suffering or unsatisfactoriness, and lastly, not-self.
This week we’ll spend a day exploring each of these, and we’ll also talk about why these insights are significant for our practice. Why do they matter? Namely, they’re important because they facilitate letting go. This letting go releases craving and frees us from the causes of suffering. So it’s insight into the three characteristics that facilitates the end of suffering, the end of dukkha.3
What we’re letting go of, by the way, is our greed, hatred, and delusion. When these sources of suffering are released, then beautiful qualities of mind can come forth—qualities like kindness, compassion, joy, happiness, patience, equanimity. These sorts of states can arise more easily. The Buddha said that this freedom is available for all of us, and he gave us practices to realize this possibility for ourselves.
This week, we’ll talk about one of the practices for how to get there. We’ll discuss one of the ways we can put conditions in place that support insight, that support awakening. We’ll talk about the ways that samadhi4—a collected and stable mind—can support insight. I just want to rewind for a second there, because I mentioned putting supportive conditions in place, and this point is of particular interest to me because many of us don’t realize that our daily meditation practice is a condition for awakening, a supportive condition for awakening.
Many of us have received meditation instruction, maybe to pay attention to the breath as we did in our meditation today, but not everyone has an understanding of how that simple practice can lead to insight. It’s not always clear how following the breath can result in a heart and mind that’s completely free from stress and discontent. During this series, we’ll explore how this very simple practice of collecting and stabilizing the mind by following the breath provides an important condition for insight. In doing so, my hope is to provide you with a mini-arc of practice, showing how our basic daily meditation practice, when done more intensively, can open into insight into the three characteristics, and how this insight can facilitate freedom.
I’d like to begin by discussing what insight is and how it functions. To begin, an insight is a non-conceptual experience of clear seeing. Sometimes people think about an insight as being sort of an “aha” moment, where it’s like, “Oh, I’m really seeing the true nature of things. I’m seeing the way things really are.” And this clear seeing provides growth in wisdom. Many people associate insight with a flash of clarity, almost like a strike of lightning or something like that. And sure, insight can definitely come about as a distinct, profound moment of clarity. But it took quite a while for me to learn that our insights into the three characteristics don’t always happen like that.
Because most people associate insight with a distinctive “aha” moment, I’d like to offer another way that insight can show up. This other way is a little quieter, a little less dramatic, a little less obvious. This less obvious form of insight comes simply through the way we’re seeing the world once the mind has stabilized, once the mind is more still and settled and collected. Once there’s some concentration in the mind, when samadhi is present.
When the mind is still, for example, it’s easier to see arising and passing, to see things coming and going. When the mind is stable, we might just be able to see impermanence—things arising and passing over and over and over again. We might see sights and sounds and smells and tastes and emotions, thoughts, etc., all arising and passing, arising and passing. It’s kind of like when we’re wearing the lens of impermanence, we begin to see the changing nature of everything. Kind of like if we put on rose-colored glasses, we’d start seeing everything with a rosy tone.
So if we see impermanence for long enough from the vantage point of a very steady, stable mind, we begin to understand impermanence much more deeply. It might not seem like a big “aha” moment; we’re just seeing things coming and going. But this begins to shift our understanding. We’re shifting from perceiving phenomena as permanent, fixed, and unchanging to being in flux. And when we have the wisdom that everything changes, we’re much less likely to cling to it. We’re much less likely to take refuge in it. We’re much less likely to relate to it as “I,” “me,” or “mine.”
All to say, an insight can be very obvious and dramatic, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be very subtle, and it can arise gradually, just simply through our way of seeing when the mind is collected.
There’s a quote from Suzuki Roshi5 where he’s talking about progress in practice. He’s not talking about insight per se, but I think the quote actually applies nicely to how insight functions. He’s talking about progress on the path, and he says progress on the path is not like going out in a shower, as in a rain shower, in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know when you’re getting wet, but as you keep walking, you get wet little by little.
Sometimes an insight is like stepping out in a downpour, and we do have a dramatic experience of being soaked by insight, and we very much know it when it happens. But sometimes our insights are a little more like walking in the mist, like walking in the fog—much more subtle. We’re just seeing arising and passing; it doesn’t seem particularly special, but over time it shifts our understanding. It doesn’t feel like it’s raining out; we don’t know we’re getting wet. But if we’re walking in the mist, little by little, the mind is being transformed. And over time, if we walk in the mist long enough, we’re drenched.
So insights can happen in both ways: both in more obvious ways and in more subtle ways, where we might not even realize we’re being transformed. As we embark on a few days of talking about these core insights of the Buddha, you don’t need to strain or strive to make something special happen. Some people think if they strive hard enough, an insight will pop out or something like that. So don’t do that to yourself. Really efforting to make something happen, more often than not, can be aggravating and disappointing, and I don’t want you to fall victim to this.
So I’d like to offer something that can help temper the tendency to turn your meditation into a project. Sometimes when people learn about the three characteristics, their meditation becomes a project, and that’s not so useful. I’d like to say something about conditionality. Our practice has a lot to do with putting certain conditions in place. When the conditions are there, then the path of practice unfolds. The primary insights of Insight Meditation are revealed when we put the appropriate conditions in place. There are many conditions that are supportive, and I emphasize this so it’s clear that we can’t force insight with our will. We can’t command it; we can’t muscle it to be here. We’re in a process with our practice. We’re in a process of allowing the Dharma to grow in our heart.
If we’re growing a plant, for example, we can’t pull on the stem to make it grow faster. Instead, what we can do is provide supportive conditions for a plant to grow. So if we’re growing a plant, supportive conditions are things like sunshine, water, and good soil. Likewise, in our meditation practice, we can provide supportive conditions like faith, contentment, or samadhi (stability). We can supply these conditions, but we don’t control when our seeds germinate, in the same way we don’t control when insight arises.
Insight happens naturally, on its own time, when we put the appropriate conditions in place. So tomorrow, I’ll be talking about one of the primary conditions for insight: the condition of stability, or samadhi. And I’ll also be talking about conditions that support samadhi itself. In addition to exploring how to cultivate samadhi or concentration, we’ll talk about how it functions to support clear seeing, how it functions to support insight.
I hope this has given you a lay of the land for what’s to come and provided you with an introduction to the topic of insight. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for an exploration of samadhi. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for prioritizing your practice and being here. Take care.
Vipassanā: A Pali word that means “insight” or “clear-seeing.” It refers to the practice of meditation aimed at seeing the true nature of reality. ↩ ↩2
Pali: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the language in which the earliest Buddhist scriptures, the Pāli Canon, were composed. ↩ ↩2
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism, referring to the fundamental suffering inherent in life. ↩ ↩2
Samadhi: A Pali word that refers to a state of meditative concentration or a collected, stable mind. It is a key component of the Buddhist path. ↩ ↩2
Shunryu Suzuki (Suzuki Roshi): A Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. He founded the San Francisco Zen Center and is the author of the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. ↩ ↩2