This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Wise Nourishment; Inspirations for Insight (2 of 5) Receiving the Moment. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by an unknown speaker at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Before we get formally started, I’m curious if anyone has any observations from noticing moments of simplicity or contentment, or anything that took you away from those moments yesterday. You can pop that in the chat or silently reflect on it. Consider what cultivated contentment, what supported simplicity if it emerged for you yesterday.
With that, the invitation is to settle into a posture that will support you this morning, a posture that balances a simple groundedness in this moment and allows for some relaxation and settling in. Perhaps allow a couple of longer, slower breaths.
Tune in to whatever soothing, simple qualities of breath invite your mind, your heart, your attention to be present. When you’re ready, let your eyes soften, allow your tongue to soften, and let the attention go inwards. Notice the weight of your body, perhaps the sounds in the room or wherever you are. All of the sensations in the body are grounding through your feet and your hip points, letting your hands relax.
Then, attuning, attending, settling on your primary object of attention, your primary anchor—perhaps the sensation of the body or the sensation of breathing.
The invitation now, as you’re settling into present awareness, is to intentionally call up an image, just a simple frame in time or a felt sense of some time where you felt very relaxed, at ease, comfortable, and safe. Receive the feeling tone and the emotional tone of this memory. What does it feel like now in the body, in your heart? Recall a moment of simple, pleasant contentment.
Rather than getting lost in that image or thoughts about it, acknowledge it. Allow it to inform your feelings in meditation right now. Allow that sense of simplicity and contentment to spread through your own body and heart for the moment. Breathing with it, breathing through the experience of this moment.
Allowing the attention to be called by the breath, inviting the breath to spread through your whole core. Allowing this moment to fill the attention and rest on the sensations, texture, and motion of breathing.
If distractions are there and pull the attention away, acknowledge them, noticing them as thinking or hearing or feeling in the moment. Appreciate the return of awareness of this here and now.
If the heart and mind are not steady, the invitation is to call up a feeling of a time of contentment and safety. Let that feeling resonate through your body now in this moment, breathing with it. Allow any feelings of groundedness, simple pleasure, and breath to percolate through all of experience.
From time to time, rededicating the attention to this moment, allowing it to fill you, perhaps being nourished by each breath connected to this moment.
As we approach the end of our sitting together, the invitation is to notice any ways you might feel more settled, present, even a hair’s breadth more relaxed. Also, recall and recollect any bits or glimmers of goodness throughout the meditation. Hold them in mind, let them nourish your body, your practice, the heart of your practice.
Then, perhaps with an internal gesture of generosity, offer the benefits of this practice out towards the others your life touches.
May they be safe, happy, healthy. May they be peaceful, at ease, and free.
And may this practice be a cause and condition to bring about more love, liberation, and peace in our hearts and in the world. May all beings be free.
Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.
So friends, the theme for this week, as many of you know, is stories and inspirations for insight that I’ll be unpacking over the course of the week. I’m weaving in some practice tips and things that have worked for me and for practitioners I’ve supported to support insight as it arises in practice.
We’ll start with an opening story this morning, which is one that some of you are probably well familiar with, but we’ll be evoking and soaking some of the wisdom from it. As you may know, the Buddha went through a long phase of practicing austerities. In his practice, he had this little band of spiritual colleagues, and together they did these practices that were common in ancient India, where it was basically punishing their bodies, starving their bodies, eating less and less, drinking less and less over time, with the idea that it would separate them from being bound to the entanglements, sensual pleasures, and karma of their lives. At one point, he describes in an ancient discourse as being down to a grain or two of rice a day.
So it was in this period before he was awakened, he was still striving for awakening, that this story unfolds. He is sitting under a tree, quite starved and thin, and nearby a young woman, the daughter of some well-to-do farmers, had a dream encouraging her to go make a food offering to someone. She trusted this dream. She went out and encountered this emaciated man sitting under a tree and was moved to offer him rice porridge, a high-quality food at the time.
Although the Buddha had been committed to this path of austerity and deprivation for quite a while, something stirred in him, and he accepted the offering and ate it. The myths around the ancient teaching of his awakening describe him being nourished by this, and I imagine by the kindness of the offering as well, and going to sit in meditation. In the discourses, he describes a memory from childhood arising of being in the shade of a rose apple tree, looking out over the fields at his father, the king, in a plowing festival—a happy time. And that in this content, relaxed way, he became absorbed in the moment, very pleasurable. As he sat there in meditation, this memory arose, and the recognition came to him, “Oh, this is a wholesome pleasure. This is not to be feared.” That memory and that recognition caused him to let go of this austere, punishing way that he had been practicing and conceive of the middle way of Buddhist practice. In some versions of this story, he actually became awakened that very night.
So, a familiar story to many. What inspirations towards insight, what qualities supporting our minds might be evoked from this? I invite you to evoke your own.
When I reflect on it, it strikes me that the Buddha actually received three forms of nourishment for his practice that day. The first was the physical nutrition of food. The second was contact with this person’s generosity and kindness, and the receptivity of being able to take it in. This nourishment, this perhaps nurturing of kindness, appears to have shifted a mood or quality in his heart and mind. And that brings up the third form of nutrition that he received that day, because that change of heart somehow called up an associated, related memory from his childhood, which in and of itself inspired this wise, volitional shift in his practice.
So let’s talk about those second two forms of nourishment. The way the Buddha appears to have processed his experience has wisdom that might inform or support your practice. The Buddha was literally practicing austerities in a way that he later discovered weren’t helpful. Now, as then, it’s really easy for anyone to have this kind of inner attitude of austerity, stinginess, contraction, self-punishment—all of which are unhelpful attitudes to the practice. There’s even a milder version of this, which is a scarcity mentality. The same experience in meditation can be very differently received, very differently framed in terms of a lack or a loss or a problem, or on the other hand, in terms of absence, a beautiful kind of spaciousness, even dissolution, allowing wisdom.
Mindset and qualities of mind are core. For example, there are three different ways that practitioners I’ve accompanied have related to the ending of a sublime state of concentration, of Jhāna1. One, the state ends, and like most humans ending something very pleasurable or unusual or interesting, the person grasps at it, tries to keep it, feels irritated, bereft at the fault for being distracted, or maybe makes up a lot of stories about what’s wrong with them or what went wrong or how great I was that it happened. All of that grasping, aversion, and story-making isn’t necessarily a mistake per se, because it’s part of the training. However, it isn’t onward-leading in the sense of helping to evoke insight in the moment. It’s part of the muck that the lotus grows from. So, very human, so very understandable.
Okay, another way, a second way a practitioner might relate to the same exact event, the dissolving of a concentration state: it’s gone. They might accept it lightly and shrug, like, “Oh, gone, okay.” And there’s a lightness and a sense of equanimity or even delight and gratitude for having had it. So that’s a more wholesome, onward-leading way of relating.
And then third, a practitioner might attend to the end of the exact same beautiful experience, but attending to it with continuous mindfulness and attention, and notice all of the details of the change in their state of mind and the change of what’s arising in the moment, and experience the end of that concentration state as insight. Same event, three different mental conditions and qualities of mind. And I want to stress, these aren’t necessarily anyone’s fault or that they should be lionized for them; they are conditions coming together. To recognize our part in those conditions is noticing, appreciating, and gradually cultivating more and more capacity for mindfulness, awareness, steadiness, and for noticing the qualities of mind.
And that brings us to the story. What the story implies about how the Buddha related to the memory of being this content, absorbed kid under a tree. Early in my own retreat practice, I definitely became entranced with similar memories. Maybe you have too. Most of us, one memory arises and all of a sudden, all these unfolding similar memories come along for the ride. Or we might compare, “Why can’t it be like that now?” or get pulled off into other trains of thought—in this case, related trains of thought about trees or childhood or family or even farming.
It’s clear from this story that that’s not what happened for the Buddha that night. Instead, rather than being entranced, he was attentive. However, he didn’t necessarily follow the basic mindfulness instructions that are often given and simply label that memory as “thinking” or “remembering” and discard it. Instead, he took the wisdom from it. He allowed it to inform him in the moment. So this isn’t an invitation to discursive thinking in your meditation, but rather an invitation to be open to the quiet wisdom, the quiet messages that our psyches may produce as the heart and mind settle.
As a sense of kindness and safety, contentment, and simplicity begin to be more accessible, more wisdom also becomes available. It may take the form of a still, small voice that speaks a few words that turn the practice. It’s quite a different tone and sensibility than internal chatter or narration. Or it may take the form of an image, like being under a tree.
There’s an art to being able to sense the goodness, the wisdom in the content of whatever is arising in our minds, while seeing the content and the arising in the present moment. “Oh, a thought.” If we’re not pulled into thoughts as realities, they become potential signals, now and then, or simple ways of knowing, very simple, for shifts in the practice that can move the mind closer to insight, freedom, and happiness. It’s a way of using our dharma intelligence to include the content of the mind and heart as well as the process. And if done with discernment, without magical thinking, without assigning retroactive meaning, then we can experience conditions and connections in the moment that are like a breadcrumb trail towards insight.
It’s a different way of structuring and understanding present moment experience. Some people, some teachers—Sai is one—call this inclusion of both process and content “50/50 mindfulness” or “50/50 awareness.” One teacher calls it “360-degree awareness.” For some people, at a certain point in the deepening of Samādhi2 or at certain levels of approaching insight, visual images are common, like this, or a felt sense in the body. If there’s continuous mindfulness and awareness—and by continuous, I don’t mean all the time; little bursts of continuity are fine, a few seconds is all it takes—if there’s this continuous awareness of our general mood, mindset, or mind state, even for a few seconds, such arisings in the heart and mind (kinesthetic, heard, seen) can become part of a wisdom-oriented way of seeing, like signposts in the moment pointing to a wiser way to navigate our hearts, minds, and inner lives.
So in conclusion, wise nourishment invites depth of practice and insight. I want to encourage you over the next 24 hours to allow a kind of receptive, kind quality of mind and see what emerges, what might release from a contracted or scarcity mentality. This kind of nourishment of the goodness within helps to develop discernment, to deepen wisdom about relating to both the process of our minds and hearts and lives, and everything that we see within them.
Thank you for your kind attention.