This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Noticing Ease; Inspirations for Insight (4 of 5) Honest Reflection. 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.
Find a meditation posture that helps connect you to the moment, after you’ve finished whatever last bits of settling in need to happen. Perhaps take a couple of longer, slower, deeper breaths, inviting the attention inwards. Relaxing, softening, allowing the breath to connect you with your core.
Then, allow the breathing to be natural and settle in. Notice the sensations of being alive: warmth or cool, a feeling of weight, and feelings of lightness. Notice motion and vibrancy in the body, inviting attunement to that vibrancy, the language of sensation. Allow attention to settle on the process of breathing.
Set aside concerns of “there” or “then” to tune in to the natural rhythm of your body.
Attend with care and kindness to any thoughts, emotions, or distractions that come up. Notice them, allow them to persist, and reconnect with this breath, this moment. Notice whatever arises with simplicity.
Allow the mind and the heart to rest in contact with whatever is soothing, whatever is connecting in embodied experience at this moment.
As you settle into this meditation practice, notice anything that contracts the heart and mind, that brings up more tension. See if it’s possible to soften around it. Perhaps take a step back and allow space for it to move through.
Notice any sensations or feelings of ease, comfort, or pleasant sensations. Appreciate those without hanging on, allowing them, resting in them.
In these last minutes of meditation together, notice how it feels in this moment in the body, heart, and mind. Take a moment to reflect back. If there were any moments of challenge or difficulty, meet them with compassion. And if there were any moments of goodness, of benefit—kindness, calm, steadiness, awareness—appreciate those. Notice them. Perhaps reflect on what fed or supported them. Allow them to soak through your own system, to nourish your practice.
Then, from that place, perhaps with an internal gesture of generosity, offer the benefits of this practice outwards to the others in your life, the others in this world.
May they be safe, happy, and healthy. May they be peaceful, at ease, and free. May the goodness of this practice ripple out through our own minds and hearts and lives to all of the lives we touch, and all of the lives they touch, outwards and outwards. May all beings be safe, happy, peaceful, and free. And may this practice be a cause and condition for the growth of love, liberation, and peace in our world.
Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.
So, warm greetings. Today, as I mentioned earlier, is the fourth of five talks in a series on inspirations for insight. These are stories from the time of the Buddha, and we are soaking some of the wisdom out of them together in ways that support the arising of insight in our practice.
Today, when we left off yesterday, the Buddha had just awakened. We’re fast-forwarding some time now to a story that happened not long after his young son, Rāhula1, joined the order and ordained. This particular story happens when Rāhula is about seven years old, and it starts in mid-conversation. It’s clear from the first question the Buddha asks that young Rāhula had told a lie, a lie which was later discovered. We can all relate to this, having been kids and maybe having lied since then.
The Buddha gently shows his son, using a bowl, that progressively lying can have a negative effect on spiritual practice. He describes a bowl being almost empty of water as being as empty as a person becomes in the spiritual life if they repeatedly lie. Then he kind of dramatically turns the bowl over and then turns it back upright to show no water is left, and that that is the effect over time. We can imagine that his young son became sharply attentive in this moment. It wasn’t a shaming conversation or a blaming conversation, but it was direct.
The Buddha, rather than castigating him or finger-wagging, then provides a teaching, a kind of pithy teaching to guide him, a compass for behavior in the future. A compass to empathize with others and to recognize the impact of his actions on himself and others. The teaching starts out with the Buddha asking, “What is the purpose of a mirror, son?” And Rāhula says, “Well, for reflection, sir.”
The Buddha then says, “Just like that, you should reflect before each action of body, speech, and mind. Will it cause affliction, suffering in myself, the other person, or myself and the other? And if so, don’t do it.”
Then the Buddha goes on, and I’m paraphrasing here because it’s actually quite long, I’m summarizing: “You should reflect during each action of body, speech, and mind. Will this cause affliction or harm? And if so, stop doing it right then.” And then, “Reflecting after each action of body, speech, or mind: Has this caused affliction or harm in myself, in the other person or people, or in all concerned? And if so, make a resolve not to repeat that.”
On the other hand, the Buddha says if you reflect before, during, and after each action of body, speech, and mind and discover, “Oh, this action led to benefit, to goodness for myself, the other person, or all involved,” then it is fine to do, to continue the action, and to repeat it.
So again, the image of a mirror reflecting on inward and outward actions. It’s another way of talking about karma2—action and result. It’s also a teaching on conditionality, cause and effect, and empathy. It’s a powerful guide to behavior, simple enough for a seven-year-old. And we’re not talking here about absolute standards of right and wrong. Instead, what’s offered is a simple way to use self-reflection as a compass for all of the actions of life. Is it harmful or beneficial? Is it afflictive or conducive to healing, to peace, to care?
I found this teaching supports insight both directly and indirectly. As a direct support for insight, reflect on your own mind. With mindful awareness, it’s possible to observe one’s own internal speech and actions of thought, to assess which are afflictive to oneself or others, and to refrain from giving them any excess energy. For most people, it’s usually easiest to start this by reflecting after meditation, maybe right at the end of a meditation, as we did at the end of this meditation preceding my talk. With practice, what this repeated reflection does is help a spontaneous, wordless understanding to arise during meditation, during an act of mental speech, during an act of thinking.
Using this kind of reflection is not an invitation to fight the difficult forces in your own mind. Rather, it’s an invitation to meet them with softness, care, and understanding of their conditioned nature, and to notice. Notice the impact. Eventually, through this process, that which causes suffering dissolves, it softens, or is transformed into wisdom. Arrows into flowers. We learn from our own dukkha3.
Lama Surya Das, I was at a talk of his once, and he was asked if any of his neuroses had disappeared over his many, many years, decades of meditation. I was so struck by his answer. He kind of laughed and he said, “Nothing’s gone away, but it’s so light now that I don’t pay any attention to it. It has no affliction for me. It’s just the mind doing its thing.” I’m paraphrasing there. So eventually, the suffering is transformed either into wisdom or into something that we can just shrug at, smile, and say, “Okay, nature of the mind.” The system, our systems, learn through this process that, for example, generosity feels better than stinginess, that kindness has a much more beneficial effect than harshness, that simplicity is more easeful than complication.
Another thing I take from this story is that mindful awareness is a form of honesty. You’ll notice this in your own practice: the understanding and capacity to see one’s own mental activity can get sharper, keener, subtler, more conducive to insight. Especially if we get interested in this reflection—before and after, affliction, harm, benefit, ease—that begins to invite more discernment into the mind. This simple teaching invites us to turn our life energy and attention to cultivating those internal mental actions that are beneficial, whole-making, and simplifying. Gradually, there’s more contentment and space, ease and lightness.
Then there’s an indirect support for insight by reflecting on our actions of body and speech in the world. Not incidentally, this also serves as a compass for navigating life harmoniously. Reflecting outwardly—well, inwardly on the outward process—has there been benefit or harm to another? This is another way of talking about ethical conduct, Sīla4. It’s also a way of continuing to learn and grow from reflection on actions.
Many centuries after the Buddha’s time, the field of clinical chaplaincy training evolved. I was a chaplain for a while; I went through that training, at first not with the idea of becoming a professional, which I did, but with the idea of it deepening my practice. In particular, there was a model in that training of action-reflection-action. A priceless opportunity, because we learned from each other. Those of us that were embedded in the hospital, or wherever the people are embedded, we learned our impact on each other through honest, reflective conversations for the purpose of being as safe for others, as skillful, and as self-aware as possible. A lot of time would be spent writing and in reflection on our own interactions with others.
This process actually, in some ways, echoes the Buddha’s last piece of advice to his son. If Rāhula discovered that he’d done something that caused affliction or harm, the Buddha advised him to tell someone that he respected and trusted. And this itself was not for the purpose of being punished, but for the purpose of learning, changing, adapting. It’s a growth mindset. It’s helpful to work through these things. It’s said that the purpose of a spiritual teacher, a spiritual friend, is to hold a mirror up to the back of our heads to help us see what we can’t see.
Just like in meditation, the vast majority of us learn this kind of reflection by noticing the impact of an action afterwards. If this is you, you’re in good company. The Buddha presents this teaching in chronological order, but most of us experience it in reverse. Reflecting on the effect of thought, speech, and action afterwards, and even during, can be more of a contemplation. And Naomi Shihab Nye, the poet, glosses the word “contemplation” as “a long, loving look.” A long, loving look.
So gradually, with this kind of honesty, care, love, compassion, mindfulness, awareness, and ethical sensitivity increase, and we notice actions and their valence that I’ve been discussing here during and even beforehand. It’s a gradual cultivation of wisdom and compassion, and it gradually leads to more confidence, strength, lightness, and joy.
So, dear Sangha5, my invitation to you for the next 24 hours—your homework, should you choose to do it—is to reflect either during, after, or before one action of body, one action of speech, and one action of mind. What do you notice? Harm or benefit? Affliction or lightness? And how are you able to be with that? The most important thing is to hold whatever you discover in kindness.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Rāhula: The only son of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). He later became a monk and one of the Buddha’s disciples. ↩
Karma (Pali: kamma): The principle of cause and effect, where intentional actions influence one’s future. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” ↩
Sīla: A Pali word that means “ethical conduct” or “morality.” It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Sangha: The community of practitioners. In this context, it refers to the audience of the dharma talk. Original transcript said “Sana.” ↩