This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxing the tension called ‘me’; Surrender. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Okay, welcome. Welcome all. It’s nice to see your names. I see if I have any inspiring words to say before sitting. I do not, but I’m happy to practice with you. So, find your posture.
Over time, the months and years, maybe decades, just coming into stillness has so many connotations, a kind of muscle memory. The muscle memory of Dharma practice. Maybe we touch into some of the tranquility, the open-heartedness, the ways in which our practice is a kind of recollection of that which we’ve always loved.
We relax whatever can be relaxed, and whatever tension remains, we allow to remain.
The sense of self is the kind of locus, the headquarters for controlling samsara1, controlling this realm. In surrender, there’s this gesture of the self laying down. Always trying to grip experience, and then we release.
The machinery of thinking and feeling is kind of the tools we use to orchestrate our clinging. Our feeling system is sounding the alarms, and our words, mental images—visual thinking and auditory thinking—orchestrate the control. And so in practice, we become aware of these dynamics: emotion in our body, mental images, words.
We feel our feelings. We see our visual thoughts, the image of your body or scenes or memory, the image of me. And we hear our auditory thoughts. Rather than using our thinking to control samsara, we become awake to it and practice laying down, surrender.
We’re moving from a life of acquisition and control to the intention simply to be awake. Ordinarily, moment by moment, we’re forming the kind of ground for action, formulating strategy, even if it’s very subtle, drawing up our war plans for samsara.
In practice, surrendering, we don’t need any plans. The ground, the headquarters of strategy. And our knowing doesn’t have to know much at all. It doesn’t have to be quietly nursing some secret agenda of control, of acquisition. We lay down.
In a sense, we’re just noticing the contraction of self, the ways in which the sense of control is experienced as a tension, as a weight. We keep relaxing, renouncing, equanimizing the sense of uncertainty that sponsors the attempt to control. We habituate to anicca2.
Okay, good to practice with you. Let us continue.
Leonard Cohen, towards the end of his life, reflecting on his suffering and well-being, was asked if he still suffered the way he used to. And he said, “No,” and then added, “It’s not so much I got what I was looking for, but the search itself dissolved.”
So yesterday was awe, and today, surrender. And that’s a word that’s not used so much in our tradition, associated more with the monotheistic tradition. I love this from St. Augustine:
We are but a particle of thy creation. Thou awakest us to delight in thy praise, for Thou made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in thee. Hide not thy face from me. Let me die, lest I die. Only let me see thy face. My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains so much that you will not be pleased to see. This I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you.
I’ve always found that moving since I read that in college many years ago. And I was probably averse to it then in some ways, and now I kind of recognize something about it. In the Dharma, we don’t exactly surrender. We’re not surrendering to God, exactly, but you might say we’re surrendering to the moment, surrendering to love, surrendering to not-self, surrendering to the path.
So on the one hand, in practice, we’re encouraged to be independent, to verify, ehipassiko3—see, you know, explore for oneself, to verify the teachings directly. Right? The popularized Kalama Sutta4, you know, of “when you know for yourselves these things are skillful, then you should enter and remain in that.”
So there’s a measure of independence in that. And of course, surrender can be dangerous. Many of us, in one way or another, at some point have surrendered to bad ideas or bad people or bad habits. But the surrender of which I’m speaking… so much of the goodness of the path requires a measure of surrender. And maybe we can say in the Dharma, our power comes from a kind of surrender. We’re not surrendering to someone, not exactly surrendering to the Buddha or something like this, but we are surrendering to the moment and trusting that it will shape our heart well.
That doesn’t come naturally to us. The Dharma practice is about trusting that all phenomena can nurture freedom. No phenomena discriminate against freedom. And when the kind of confinement of this self melts, and all the agendas of control… all facts are friendly, to again quote Carl Rogers. The will to power, the urge to possess, to dominate, to control—that cannot take us deep into the Dharma. The practice can stay kind of like an adjutant of the ego or a tool of our control. But there’s a kind of phase shift in practice whereby we start letting go. We offer ourselves up. Meditation is no longer a kind of instrument of our controlling tendencies.
That sense of self is just the locus of control. And for me, willfulness seems to draw its energy from something very young. It feels like very deep in my biology, feels like a kind of white-hot core of very primal anger. Maybe anger is too much, but it’s like this doing-ness will not be stopped, will hold control. The sense of self almost constellates as the locus of control. That’s what I was pointing to in the sit, the way in which we’re always cobbling together the ground of our headquarters. And a lot of the ground that we make, that sense of peering out on experience from headquarters, is about controlling experience. And the doing-ness of the self begins to surrender, begins to rest amidst surrender.
And so we don’t like this process, but we want to look, to examine, you know, what does our practice look like on the other side of our willfulness? And we don’t like it, but the most transformative practice often unfolds when the ego is all out of moves. That’s when we really discover the necessity of love.
We surrender, in some ways, at the beginning of our path to acknowledge, “I don’t really know how to live,” which we’re too ashamed to say explicitly, maybe even to ourselves. But look, if you’re sitting, if you’re on this path, this path is not plan A. Sitting with Matthew Brensilver at 7 a.m. Pacific Time, listening to him ramble about suffering—that’s not plan A. None of you dreamed of that as a child. I didn’t either. But here we are. We don’t quite know how to live. That’s the intensity of this realm.
And to be present is to surrender, to stop trying to predict and govern the future. That’s surrender. Mindfulness is a kind of surrender. We don’t emphasize it so much. We emphasize generally the active, attentional marshalling of the spotlight, and that’s one dimension of it. But then the receptivity and the openness is the self laying down. And we often want to do something to the moment, rather than be changed by experience. And a lot of this path is about just the trust: “I want to be changed by this moment, by this breath.”
To stop fidgeting with samsara, to let go of ownership and acquisition and control, this entails a measure of surrender. To forgive the imperfection of this realm, we have to surrender, at least in some moments, in order to relinquish the kind of stories that no longer serve us, the frameworks that have animated our life. We have to surrender to not knowing. The need to know, to always be oriented, to always keep tabs on self and other, like and dislike, past and future—the need to know is suffused with volitional energies, urgencies and motives, intentions, control. And everything looks different when the volitional energies dissolve.
Surrender is the dissolution of volitional energy. Surrender is the dissolution of volitional energy. And that’s not resignation. There’s a lot of dignity in that.
Many people on this path describe the sense of self getting thinner. And as they’re thinning out, getting deeper, quieter, they’re sort of jerked back into the self by their kind of oldest habit, you know, maybe fear. And we’re practicing surrendering to groundlessness and trusting that the stillness is refuge, that’s protection enough. The heart is, maybe we say, protected by Dharma even when we’re disoriented or lack the ordinary reference points of I, me, mine, ownership, and acquisition.
With the cultivation of samadhi5 that Gil has been speaking to, there’s effort involved, but often less than we imagine. And at some point, the effort is just more agitation. We actually have to surrender. The dissolution of volitional energies of control at the gateway of samadhi, of jhana6, meditative absorption—that gate is patrolled by willfulness. And we actually have to let down, trust that the silence will not harm you, trust that it’s safe to fall into the present.
And insight—this is Insight Meditation—which is discovering a radically new way of perceiving the world, that requires surrendering the known, relinquishing the control. And yet, this path is about cultivating our power. It’s about cultivating our power. A lot of what we do on this path is cultivate something like power, but it’s in surrender that we find our true power.
So I offer this for your consideration. And I wish you all a good day, and we’ll be back tomorrow. You take care.
Samsara: The cycle of death and rebirth, characterized by suffering, to which all life in the material world is bound. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence,” one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. ↩
Ehipassiko: A Pali phrase meaning “come and see for yourself.” It emphasizes the importance of direct, personal experience in verifying the teachings of the Dharma. Original transcript said “aaso.” ↩
Kalama Sutta: A discourse of the Buddha that encourages followers to not blindly believe religious teachings, but to investigate and verify them for themselves through personal experience. Original transcript said “kalas.” ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes still and unified. ↩
Jhana: Meditative states of deep absorption and tranquility. They are stages of deep concentration that are cultivated through samadhi. ↩