This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation w/ Matthew Brensilver, Dharmette: When we’ve lost inspiration for dharma practice. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Let’s meditate.
On a dime, we practice stopping. What does it mean to stop? It doesn’t mean that we sever the present from the past and the future. It doesn’t mean that we disallow the trace of memory to arise. It doesn’t mean we disavow the concern or fear we might have about the future. To stop on a dime means to feel the convergence of all of this without being baited into the mode of fixing and addressing.
Establishing a sense of groundedness, a sense of Earth, gravity, a sense of your belly. It’s the stability of sitting in our bones.
Perhaps gathering your attention around the sensations of your breathing. Not by pointing the laser of attention at the sensations, but receiving the sensations within a sense of openness, receptivity.
If we can, we sense into the longing to be free. We let the force of that longing give us the courage to get very simple, to renounce, to let go. Dhamma-chanda1, longing for the dharma.
How simple can we be in this moment? How long is now?
How much space is there between the breath and the breather? The whole tragedy of human existence, Krishnamurti2 said, lies in the space between subject and object.
Our clinging and preference keep reminding us who we are, the sort of defensive functions of self keeping tabs on threat and opportunity. We do what we can to channel our wish to be free to a sense of courage, the okayness of this moment. Let go. We melt into this breath.
And just as the meditation ends here, sense your whole body in awareness, kind of bathed in awareness. As we open our eyes, we are not yanking ourselves back into a familiar, default position.
A question from the chat line: “What are some skillful means when you lose inspiration in the practice?”
First, just to say that we ought to have some measure of tolerance for the waxing and waning of inspiration. Every time there’s a period of lower inspiration, it is not a problem to be fixed. One has to bear with the vicissitudes of inspiration. We could say that the path is a dialectic between making a kind of comfortable dharma home and the rug being pulled out from under us. And it’s true, sometimes the cozy dharma home phase can last too long. Too cozy can be deadening.
The process of falling in love with the dharma sometimes resembles the process of falling in love with a person. There is falling in love and staying in love. And we all know people who love falling in love but aren’t so sure how to stay in love. Maybe partially, we need to relinquish the need for intensity and novelty, the kind of hunger for novelty. And maybe sometimes we cultivate the ability, even in times of low inspiration, to re-find why we fell in love initially.
Sometimes, with folks struggling with inspiration, I’ve asked them to imagine never practicing again. No sitting, no retreats, no sangha, no informal practice of mindfulness, no contemplation of wisdom and love—none of it. Then I ask, “How do you feel now?” And they say, “Horrible. That’s a horrifying thought.” So there’s something there. We’re going to have to keep going. It’s a question of how.
And so we investigate: what is happening in my relationship with the path? Where am I seeking refuge? What is the nature of the faith that’s been lost? Where are we now placing our hope? We’re placing our hope somewhere. Maybe there’s hopelessness. You know, sometimes we just feel flattened by the intensity of some sorrow, some deadness there. Are we comparing ourselves to some ideal of what’s supposed to be happening?
We might probe, “Okay, what got us into the path initially, and is that intention still alive?” At some level, every intention we got into the path with was a little bit naive. The dharma is always more than we bargain for. Sometimes we’ve outgrown that intention. The reason we started practicing has been satisfied in some way. “Okay, I began to practice because I couldn’t sleep, or my anxiety, or self-doubt, or whatever existential curiosity.” And okay, now that’s been satiated. It’s much better. Now what? And sometimes we actually have to put that intention down, recognize we’ve outlived it, in order for something new to arise.
Sometimes we feel stuck because we’re trying to ask the dharma to do something it cannot do. The dharma makes no promises about samsara3. It doesn’t. We examine the ways where we try bartering with the dharma: “I’ll give you dharma for samsara.” Dharma may be the only medicine for a certain disease, but that doesn’t mean it’s the medicine for all diseases. So as I often say, dukkha4, suffering, is an interdisciplinary problem. There may be some other lineage of wisdom—nature, therapy, 12-step, ritual, medicine, service, engagement, activism of some kind—it may be something else that is actually needed. We can’t ask the dharma to be the medicine for all forms of disease.
Sometimes we feel stymied. This is a variation on that theme of asking the dharma to do something it can’t do. We feel flattened when we know there’s an action we have to take, but we don’t quite feel the strength or courage to do it. And the dharma can kind of stagnate when there’s a life move that has to be made, but we’re not making it. Maybe our mind’s never going to feel ready. Normally we talk about, “Well, we change the inner life and then our behavior changes, right?” But sometimes we’re never going to feel ready. You’re going to have to jump before you’re ready. And sometimes that action actually kicks up the kind of debris or the freedom that feeds back into practice.
The questioner asked for skillful means, but this is, in a sense, tricky. Yeah, maybe there are some skillful means, but what we’re really looking for is intrinsic interest, intrinsic motivation. And interest cannot be imposed from outside. It can’t be imposed from inside either, in a way. Interest cannot be “technique-ified.” The lack of inspiration, in some sense, is a lack of dhamma-vicaya5—investigation. A lack of pīti6—not so much in the samādhi7 or jhāna8 sense, the jhanic factor of rapture, but in the sense pīti is sometimes used as wrapped attention, passionate interest. And that arises according to many causes and conditions, not a decision we make. It certainly can’t be imposed from the outside just to get very interested. But once we get very interested in whatever, that has its own karmic reverberations.
You may have to learn to love something new. It’s not a decision that can be made: “I now love this. I now want to nurture this.” It’s not a decision, but we make gestures repeatedly over time to breathe life into that new love, that new interest.
Sometimes practice stagnates and the inspiration stagnates when our practice orbits too much around the self. You know, sometimes it’s just like, “Ah, I really can’t get excited about practice for myself.” But the intention becomes very alive: “Okay, let me practice for others.” And you have to have a palpable sense that this matters. Your practice matters, maybe in ways you can’t even fully imagine. Okay, maybe that breaks through some of the stagnation, the deadening.
Sometimes interest comes from spiritual friendship, from inspiring practitioners, a friend, a teacher. It doesn’t have to be a teacher. Often for me, talking with practitioners, I hear something—it might be little, it might be big—but I hear something very inspiring. You might not even notice that I noticed it, but I have this feeling of like, “Uh, I didn’t quite know that. I didn’t quite know that in that way. I want to know it.”
“Great is this matter of life and death. Time waits for no one. Do not waste your life,” the Zen tradition says. Then there’s the Tibetan tradition’s four thoughts that turn the mind towards the dharma: appreciating the preciousness of human life; that this precious life will not last; that our behavior affects our experience (there is karma—it’s not that our behavior is the only karmic force, but it is one of them); and the fourth thought, the defects of samsara, the unquenchability of ordinary craving.
And sometimes we make the flatness an object. And maybe, in deeply allowing non-inspiration, deeply allowing confusion, a direction emerges. This is from Ken McLeod9:
A few times in my life, I’ve been in difficult situations, situations in which I could not see any way forward. In my morning practice sessions, I would, to the best of my ability, rest in the confusion that swirled inside me. I suppose it was the years of effort that made that resting possible, even though through all those years those efforts had seemed paltry and ineffective. When I could rest in the confusion, it grew quiet and dark, the quiet of a dark night with no moon or stars. As I rested in that darkness, a clarity would sometimes arise, and with it a sense of a direction. How or what discerned that clarity or that direction, I don’t know, but both were there. The clarity didn’t illumine anything, didn’t make anything in the situation clear, just indicated a direction. Where that direction led or what I would encounter, I had no idea. There was a direction, nothing more.
So I offer this for your consideration. May we continue on together, practicing.
Dhamma-chanda (Pali): A wholesome desire or intention, specifically the will to practice the Dharma and attain enlightenment. ↩
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986): An Indian philosopher, speaker, and writer. He was not a Buddhist but his teachings on the nature of mind, meditation, and human relationships often resonate with Buddhist thought. ↩
Samsara (Pali/Sanskrit): The cycle of death and rebirth, conditioned by karma, characterized by suffering, and from which liberation is sought. ↩
Dukkha (Pali): A core concept in Buddhism, often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “unease,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the inherent suffering in all conditioned existence. ↩
Dhamma-vicaya (Pali): “Investigation of phenomena” or “analysis of qualities.” It is the second of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, involving the discerning and analytical investigation of the nature of reality. ↩
Pīti (Pali): “Rapture,” “joy,” or “bliss.” It is a factor of meditative absorption (jhāna) and one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. It refers to a joyful and uplifting quality of mind that arises during deep meditation. ↩
Samādhi (Pali): “Concentration” or “unification of mind.” A state of deep, non-distracted focus, central to meditative practice. It is the eighth factor of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Jhāna (Pali): A state of deep meditative absorption, characterized by profound tranquility and concentration. There are traditionally four material jhānas and four immaterial jhānas. ↩
Ken McLeod: A contemporary Western teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, known for his pragmatic and direct approach to practice. He is an author and translator in the Kagyu and Shangpa Kagyu traditions. ↩