This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relax and Let go; Courage and Fear. 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.
Welcome, folks. It’s nice to see your names. A lot of old dharma connections from over the years.
Okay, not sure how we meditate, but we’re going to meditate.
Finding your way into your posture.
Taking a few deeper breaths, much deeper.
Let the mind settle, like nectar settling to the bottom of a glass of juice.
A million ways to suffer, but only one way to be free.
So we marshall our courage to stop trying to solve our life.
In that gesture of renouncing the impulse to solve our life, it’s the implicit understanding of our death. That won’t get solved either.
And the poignency of that helps us be free now, helps us surrender.
Just paying attention to whatever is restful in you. The settleness of your body, the silence you might listen to, the blankness behind your closed eyes. The soothing that is Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.
We attune to what’s restful. Rest.
We relax and let go so that we can receive our breathing more fully. Noticing the beginning and the ending of the inhalation, followed very quickly by the beginning of the exhalation and the end of the exhalation.
Sometimes people find it useful to place the attention elsewhere, maybe the hands or feet at the bottom of the exhale. And so there are five distinct points in the cycle of breath.
We put down our redemptive hopes and worry. Clinging cannot do what your heart wants most.
We can’t exactly will our way to letting go, will our way to surrender. We relax and soften, widen. We develop conditions that make letting go feel more natural. Develop the confidence that we don’t need to keep tabs on our life at all times.
At some point, the doingness of attention wants to bow down to the effortlessness of awareness. That we’ve entrained enough stability somehow under awareness. But awareness is not manufactured in the house of self. And so we take our cues from that which is patently not me.
Okay, good to sit with you.
So, it was humor, grieving, awe, surrender, and courage today. I’ve been in a lot of videos over the course of my dharma life. I was doing stuff with IMC before, you know, in videos with Mindful Schools for some years with Megan Cowan and Chris McKenna, and those made their way to a lot of people. And so sometimes people have seen me in videos a lot but never in person. And one of the most common things people say when they see me in person is, “I thought you were shorter.” [Laughter]
I find it very endearing. “I thought you were shorter.” I’m not saying courage is correlated with height or something, but I do kind of hear it as, “I thought you were maybe even less courageous.” And I’m talking about courage today. Teachers speak about courageous effort, but not often about courage. And I don’t consider myself, temperamentally speaking, a courageous person. I’ve not taught about it. I don’t feel like I know quite enough about it. Temperamentally, I’m kind of risk-averse and harm-avoidant, meaning I’ve been very careful with my body and mind and careful with the bodies and minds of others. But I’m trying to take stock of the ways that fear manifests in my life and the opportunities for courage.
So dharma talks, they’re always partially addressed to the speaker. And there’s a kind of disorientation in courage, a sense that you must do something and know yourself in a different way. A sense that you cannot know exactly how your heart will be at the threshold of a courageous gesture, that you may discover something new about yourself. It’s intimidating. What kind of pain or disorientation might this bring if I take this step off this ledge?
Now, all along the way, there’s a fair amount of courage needed in the path. You know, just to start the path, sometimes it’s just desperation that might be it, but often mixed in with that is something like courage. Aspiration entails some measure of courage because we don’t know what we’re trading in, what we’re heading for. The path is about remembering what we’ve always loved, but it’s also about learning to love new things. And to love something new entails a measure of letting go of something old, and that takes some faith, some courage.
Ayya Khema1 said, “On the spiritual path, we do have to try something new. In fact, the spiritual path takes quite a lot of courage because it means chucking the old without knowing what the new one is really like. If we don’t have that courage, we can’t go on such a path.”
Because fear is such a pervasive experience, courage is needed at various points along the spiritual path.
I have a lot of respect for fear, how pervasive it is. And generally, we say on this path that ignorance is the wellspring of suffering, but fear strikes me as even more primal, more closely linked with clinging, with more potential to… and it’s not to demonize fear. You know, I think it’s probably wise to be afraid of extremely dangerous things. But the kind of pervasiveness of fear in the mind can distort cognition and feeling in profound ways.
Threat sensitivity and fear, it’s so deeply woven into our brain. I often cite the brain scientist Kay Tye2. She says something like, “Fear has an authoritarian command over the rest of the brain.” And so when the dharma teacher says casually, “Just let go,” some part of us is really skeptical about that. Really skeptical, because clinging is what feels like maintains our safety. Thinking is what feels safe. Thinking might be painful, but not thinking, that’s a lot worse. Worrying, for all the pain involved in it, feels like the best option we have.
Given a niche in fear, it disrupts the process of letting go. We need courage. What’s on the other side of this surrender, of this softening, of this letting go? We need courage to see. And we study fear and worry and anxiety—those are all a little bit different—but we study this at the micro-level. How does fear constellate in the mind? How does it make experience more dense? How does it necessitate clinging? How does it disrupt attention? Fear disrupts samadhi3, the gathering and unification of our attention. It doesn’t feel safe to take our eyes off threat, even for a moment.
So we marshall courage. It takes courage to open to the truth of dukkha4, you know, that there is suffering. The truth of change that we talk about so casually, but it’s really not for the faint of heart. You know this when something big shifts, when the ground becomes groundless, when the line, as Michelle McDonald says, between everything being okay and everything not being okay—the thinness of that line is realized.
It takes courage to open to this. It takes courage to open to ourselves. Immanuel Kant described the sincere intention to be honest towards oneself. That’s the heart of spiritual practice, and self-discovery is a kind of courageous act.
And if we sit retreat, there are times deep in retreat, deep into the silence, when our brain feels highly plastic, you know, no friction in it. And that makes bliss and love and peace much more accessible, but it also opens the door to states of terror too. And sometimes it’s kind of a nameless dread. There’s no object of the fear. Sometimes the fear is fear of bodily dissolution or annihilation or total loss of control. And it’s really hard not to be in problem-solving mode when the terror runs deep.
And sometimes it’s right to just problem-solve our way out of it. It’s fine. But sometimes we just wait. The IMC teacher, Mei Elliott, said when you get lost in the woods, the impulse is to go looking for help, to go find someone. But she said the advice actually is to stay still, let the help find you. And the way she said that touched me, you know, to let the help find you.
So in cataloging the fear and courage on the path, it strikes me that fear has made my life smaller than it might have been. And there’s a difference between sensitivity to suffering versus fear of suffering. Now, I’ve always been, ever since I was a kid, very sensitive to suffering in myself and others. And generally speaking, that’s been a gift. I’ve been careful and tried to lead a life that does not trespass on the hearts of others, that’s sensitive to their suffering and to my own. But I’m recognizing that I’m more afraid of suffering than I realized. And there’s a way in which Buddhism can be marshaled as a means of controlling suffering.
And we never say it that way. We talk about being free from suffering, letting go, all these beautiful things. I don’t walk those back. But there’s another sense in which maybe the path has been about controlling my suffering. And we don’t say it that way, but maybe that’s how my fear construed it. And fear involves the need to control and the aversion to the sense of being out of control. And developing courage likely means we must relinquish the need to control, the willingness to experience helplessness, the willingness to let help find us.
And yesterday I was with a group of IMC Sangha members and teachers, and I was just inspired by their presence. And the phrase that I felt like I was attuning to in each person was the kind of courage of each person. Everybody has their own species of goodness, their own species of courage. And the phrase that came up in me, which is not a phrase that sounds like my mind, but the phrase that came up in me was, “Don’t die a coward.” You know, that’s not language I use. It sounds very martial. And yet, there it was.
St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Courage is a condition of each and every virtue.” Everything that’s good depends in some ways on courage. We can see this in the paramis5, the perfections: dana6 (generosity), renunciation, truthfulness, adhitthana7 (resolution), compassion, meeting suffering, grieving. Courage, it’s needed. It’s needed.
And I’ve been asking myself, and I’ll ask you: what does your love look like when it’s less afraid?
It’s a time for moral bravery.
Okay, I offer that for your consideration. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you for having me. And I appreciate the sweetness of this morning crew and the Sangha. Gil will be back on Monday. Keep going. Okay, folks, you take good care. See you somewhere on the Dharma campus.
Ayya Khema: (1923–1997) A German-born Buddhist nun, teacher, and author who was instrumental in establishing Buddhism in the West. ↩
Kay Tye: A neuroscientist and professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, known for her work on the neural-circuit basis of emotion, motivation, and social behaviors. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes unified and still. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism, referring to the inherent unsatisfactoriness of all conditioned phenomena. ↩
Paramis: A Pali word meaning “perfections.” In Theravada Buddhism, they are a list of ten wholesome qualities to be cultivated on the path to enlightenment. ↩
Dana: A Pali word for “generosity” or “giving.” It is one of the ten paramis. ↩
Adhitthana: A Pali word for “determination,” “resolution,” or “resolve.” It is one of the ten paramis. ↩