This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Cultivating what’s Nourishing; Dharmette Wise Effort in Thinking: Cultivation. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ines Freedman at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome back. I’m happy to be back again, continuing this series on freeing the thinking mind.
In my own practice over the years, sometimes I felt the need to gladden my mind and heart, to inspire myself. So during different periods of my practice, I begin the first several minutes of my meditation with some form of bringing inspiration to my sitting. An example is something I used for quite a while was imagining an honored guest coming over to my mind. Sometimes the Dalai Lama, sometimes the Buddha. How would I be if they were visiting my mind? You know, I’d be really welcoming. I’d clean up my environment. I’d pay really careful attention to everything they said. So the idea is, can we treat ourselves as our honored guests?
And other times I begin my sittings with 5-10 minutes of loving-kindness phrases, a simple version of metta towards myself and all beings: May I be happy, may I be peaceful, may I feel safe, may I be free. And then, may all beings be happy, peaceful, feel safe, be free.
And so, I still like to begin my sittings with just a little bit of a warming of the heart in some way that touches me. So let’s begin this sitting with another version of gladdening our hearts and minds.
Take a comfortable but alert posture, gently closing the eyes.
Begin with taking a few deep breaths, and with each exhale, settling into the body, relaxing any obvious tension or holding.
Settling into our seats, into the earth or cushions.
And then allowing the breath, when you’re ready, to return to normal. Getting a sense of the whole body.
Taking a minute to allow the attention to meander freely throughout the body, relaxing any obvious tensions.
In close to the body, you can begin to notice the movements of the breath, finding the area where the breath feels like home, allowing your attention to rest there.
Settling into the rhythm of the breath, resting in this body, in this breath, in your home.
Now, take a moment to connect with a wholesome quality that might particularly nourish you at this time. Some form of goodwill—maybe kindness, goodwill, love, gratitude, peace—any form of goodwill that feels particularly nourishing to you.
You might imagine that you’re bringing this quality to the center of your chest. And in the center of your chest is a warm sun. And you can fill, you can permeate that sun with the goodwill, whatever form you chose.
And now allow the sun to radiate outward into the whole body, maybe beyond your body. And as you breathe, this sun can pulsate with each breath. With each exhale, it radiates outward, filled with kindness, goodwill, love, peace. A warm sun in the heart radiating outward.
And whenever you’d like, you can return to the simple rhythm of breathing in and out, this simple opening to our lived experience, however it is, not putting anything outside of our hearts.
If the mind has drifted, if it’s become lost, gently welcome it back home.
It’s good to be home. Back to the rhythm of breathing, back to this body, here and now.
Thank you. So, thinking is an essential part of human experience. And when people begin exploring the mind, they soon find out that the mind has a mind of its own. And then most of the thoughts we have arise automatically, just one after another. And it’s easy to believe that that’s just the way our mind is, that all we can do is observe it. And sometimes thoughts are just really strange too. You know, if you think about our dreams, which are kinds of thoughts, they can be quite unusual.
But in addition to observing our experience, the Buddha taught us to take responsibility for our thinking, and that when our thinking is harmful to us, to purposely change it. An essential part of the Eightfold Path is the sixth step, or Wise Effort. A simple way of describing Wise Effort is that it’s the effort to let go of any unwholesome thoughts and states and to cultivate the wholesome and helpful ones. The unwholesome thoughts and states are thoughts that are based on ill will or greed, and the helpful ones are the ones that are based on goodwill, generosity, love, compassion.
So because we tend to teach that mindfulness is being with our experience just as it is, allowing things to be, and non-reactive awareness, a letting go, sometimes we might not give attention to the other side of effort—the part that stresses the cultivation of these wholesome thoughts and states that support our wholesome thoughts and states. And this mindfulness practice needs both of them: letting go of the unwholesome and the nurturing of the wholesome.
Of course, just by meditating regularly and paying attention to the mind, we’re already cultivating the wholesome. Mindfulness is wholesome, concentration is wholesome, we’re developing patience. But there are times where it can be very skillful to consciously bring in something more directly, like the qualities of the heart I mentioned, or ideas that inspire us, like the Dalai Lama visiting.
We often don’t even realize we’re telling ourselves unhelpful stories, harmful ones. Much of the time, the most helpful practice is to drop the story and find the feeling. But at other times, it might be more helpful to tell a better story. It’s important for it not to be a huge fabrication that denies our experience, that denies our suffering, but just a different way to consider it.
An example might be, let’s say we’re out for a long hike and it’s almost the end of the hike, but instead of returning home, we just realized we took the wrong trail and we’re now over an hour away. And it’s really hot, and we ran out of water, and we’re really thirsty, and our feet hurt. You know, we messed up. We might feel angry with ourselves, and we might trudge along despondently, hurting and miserable. But without denying the reality of the situation, without denying the fact that we’re thirsty and our feet hurt and that we made a mistake, what if we saw this as a hero’s journey, with the hero trudging through the desert, thirsty and hurting? There would be a sense of dignity, a sense of presence as we finish our journey.
Or maybe we’re meditating and the mind is filled with a recurring aversion. Over and over we try going back to the body, back to the breath, and there it is again. “It’s hindering my meditation,” we might think. But what if we look at it with the idea of, “What can I learn from this?” The question can bring a wholesome curiosity into the process, where we’re no longer caught in the aversion, into trying to get rid of some thoughts, trying to get rid of something, but now we’re learning about it. Or sometimes, when we’re really caught in something like that, it’s like just recognizing, “Oh, this is dukkha1. This is why I practice.” Being aversive is painful, and we can bring compassion to our suffering. “I’m hurting. May I be free of suffering.” And that changes the story completely.
One of the scientists who studied happiness, Daniel Kahneman2, spoke of two aspects of the self: the experiencing self, who lives in the present—they feel the warmth of the room, we notice the lighting, we’re listening to this talk. In meditation, it’s the felt sense of our experience, the moments of our lives, this moment-to-moment sitting here, listening, feeling the body. It’s the experiencing self.
The other aspect is the remembering self. The remembering self keeps score; it maintains the narrative of our lives. “Boy, that was a great meditation.” The remembering self is a storyteller. What we actually keep of our experiences is a story. “That was a great meditation” doesn’t come close to the 30 minutes we just spent showing up, and some of them may not have been great. Some of them may have been great, but that’s just an evaluation, the way we remember it. What tends to define a story are the changes, any major moments—a door slammed in the middle of the sitting—and the endings. You know, maybe we’re really calm at the end of the sit.
In researching happiness, one of the things they found is that there’s a great discrepancy between the quality of our moment-to-moment experience and our memory of it. That there can be a significant difference between being happy in our lives minute by minute and being happy about our lives or with our lives. The story that he tells is about a man who was at the symphony. He said for the first 20 minutes, the music was awesome; it was just amazing. He was deeply, deeply moved by it. But near the end, there was a horrible screeching sound. He said, “It just ruined the whole experience. That was a terrible symphony.” But it really didn’t. He still had those 20 wonderful minutes, but it was the memory that was affected, and that’s what he kept. That was the symphony that got ruined by this loud screeching sound. But his conclusion about the concert wasn’t true. And that’s what we often do about our lives. We come up with conclusions, with ideas, and assume that that’s reality.
And these stories that we habitually tell ourselves, they have a very deep effect on us. The experiencing self lives its life continuously. Those moments are lost forever. How many of the moments of our whole lives do we remember? And most of them are ignored by the remembering self. That’s most of our life. But the quality of how we spend these moments is essential, but it isn’t essential to the remembering self. And it’s the remembering self who makes the decisions in our lives.
So for instance, for our experiencing self, we can ask, “How happy are the moments of our lives?” That’s what’s important. For the remembering self, we ask, “How satisfied are we when we think about our lives?” They’re very different. What brought happiness to the remembering self was achieving goals, success, status. What brought happiness to the experiencing self was spending time with people we like or activities we enjoy. When we think about life, it’s very different than how we feel when we experience it.
In mindfulness practice, we bring the remembering self closer to our experience. That’s part of what sati3 is, one of the meanings of sati: to remember. So we keep bringing that remembering self very close to our experience so you can see clearly and appreciate our moment-to-moment experience. And that helps decrease the discrepancy.
The Buddha taught that whatever a person frequently thinks and pores upon becomes the inclination of one’s mind. Attention is like food. When we repeat the harmful stories, we feed them; they grow stronger. So if we have a lot of judgmental thoughts, it becomes easier to be judgmental. If we have a lot of insecure thoughts, it becomes easier to be insecure, to feel insecure. But if we have a lot of loving thoughts, it becomes easier to be loving.
So it’s very helpful to shift the mind away from unhelpful thinking. If we’re in the habit of judging people negatively, seeing what’s wrong with them, that’s what we tend to see the most. But by purposely taking time to notice what we like in someone, it begins to weaken the judging habit. And especially with ourselves, we can shift from focusing on what we think is wrong with us, what isn’t good enough, to noticing all the good things within us, our intentions.
Our stories are just stories. They’re not the full reality of our lives, and many of them are not even true. But they shape our lives, they influence our lives. And as we bring mindfulness to the stories we tell ourselves, we can reshape the stories in the service of more and more freedom, of more and more happiness, of more and more love.
So may all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings feel safe. And may all beings everywhere be free. Thank you.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Daniel Kahneman: The original transcript said “Daniel Conorman.” This has been corrected to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics. ↩
Sati: A Pali word that means “mindfulness” or “awareness,” but its root meaning is “to remember.” In a Buddhist context, it refers to remembering to keep one’s awareness on the present moment. ↩