This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Settling Sensations; Insight & the 5 Elements (1/5): Intro & Earth. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
So, welcome, warm welcome everyone. I’m delighted to be here subbing for Gil while he’s on vacation. My name is Dawn Neal for those of us who we haven’t met in person or virtually.
I just want to say a few words before we start the meditation. For those of you who are already here, this week I’ll be covering, we’ll be exploring the five elements, which is both a contemplation and a practice that is intrinsically related to the experience of insight, especially as it is put forth and experienced in the classical Burmese (Myanmar) tradition that Gil and I have both practiced in.
So with that as an orientation, the invitation, once you’ve finished all of your greetings and warm hellos, is to settle back into meditation practice.
Noticing how it is to be in your body this morning. Maybe taking a couple of deeper, slower breaths and allowing awareness to come to the forefront. Allowing this moment to come to the forefront, this embodied moment.
Noticing the weight of your body on the cushion or chair or mat. Noticing the support behind or beneath you, whether it’s firm or hard or soft and yielding. Noticing the texture of any clothing on your skin or on whatever surface you’re contacting. Is it rough or smooth?
Tuning in also to the heaviness or lightness in your body. Right now I’m feeling a sense of weight at my hip points, a little bit of pressure against the back of the chair, the back of my body. Noticing for yourself this feeling of being held, rooted in your place, held to the earth by gravity.
Noticing too any feelings of lightness. Perhaps lightness in the chest or belly as air comes in. Perhaps a lightness in the heart being with Sangha1 or taking time for yourself to practice.
Then attuning to other dimensions of the felt sense of being here. Perhaps a sense of moisture or dryness in the air against your skin or as it enters the nostrils and becomes breath. Noticing any warmth or cool, heat or cold on the skin or inside the body. Perhaps a slight chill of air or warmth of clothing or a wrap.
And within this field of felt sensations, noticing the movement, the aliveness of this body. Perhaps the movement of the abdomen or belly, diaphragm, as this air breath goes in and out. Or the play of sensations at the tip of the nose or the top of the lip, shifting and changing.
And settling, anchoring the attention in the felt sense of the moment. If distractions arise, allowing your meditation, as the Buddha invited, your meditation to be like the earth. Not allowing thoughts, stories to proliferate through the mind but returning to this body. A sense of weight, integrity, sitting like a mountain.
From time to time, reconnecting with this experience, this embodied moment. Noticing there are places of density, weight, softness, lightness, even within the breath itself. Sometimes on the out-breath, there can be a sense of settling, drawing the attention inward and downward like sediment, settling the attention, the heart, in the body, in the moment.
Allowing the attention to stay close to the felt sensations, shifting, changing. Rooted in now. Grounded in now.
In the last remaining moments of this meditation, the invitation is to notice any ways that there might be more settledness, grounding, perhaps lightness or spaciousness than at the beginning of this time of practice together. Feeling into that.
And then from that place, whatever unfolded, noticed with appreciation and kindness, casting your internal gaze outwards to all of those your life touches. Wishing that just like me, just like you, they be happy, as healthy as possible, peaceful. That just like you, just like me, they may be free of suffering. May all beings be safe, peaceful, and free.
Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.
Good morning and a warm welcome to our online sit together. This week, as I mentioned to those who were on a little bit early, we will be exploring together the topic of the elements in Buddhist practice. Sometimes four elements, sometimes five elements. I’m offering a teaching on the five elements.
This is both a meditation practice and what’s called a contemplation. By contemplation, I mean there’s a number of different exercises that the Buddha gave for us to consider and frame our understanding of felt, embodied experience. Both the practice and the contemplation, the imaginative exercise, help to prime the mind for insight or a deepening of insight. So this week is offered in support of Gil’s unfolding series on insight in practice right now.
The four or five elements are earth, water, fire, air, and sometimes space. I just want to name this is a Bronze Age framework. So what does it have to do with us now? There’s a number of reasons that it’s still relevant. First, as many of you know, we still have elements. Those are not necessarily called elements anymore because we now have the periodic table of elements, and even beneath that, there’s a quantum level of elemental experience. So we think of them differently, but the basic notion that folks had in and before the time of the Buddha—that we are made of the same stuff as the world around us, as the earth—still holds. It’s just a bit more sophisticated now, perhaps.
This contemplation and meditative practice is a way of, pardon the pun, unearthing this felt experience. It’s one of many cases where a skillful means or a framework is introduced by the Buddha for developing insight into inconstancy, nature, and not-self or selflessness, anattā2.
I have an anecdote about this from my time as a practitioner in Myanmar (Burma). I was practicing with a contemporary of Gil’s teacher there, U Pandita3. My teacher was Sayadaw U Janaka4, and I was practicing within the framework of the progress of insight, the rough framework Gil is using in his teachings right now. I would have one-on-one or very small group meetings with the Sayadaw5 every day to see how things were unfolding.
In the course of these practice conversations, it came up that the elements were apparent, and it happened just after the insight into anattā. It was an organic arising that came up in one of these small group conversations. Seeing the shifting, changing, and impersonal nature of elements in embodied practice could actually be considered another form of seeing anattā. That’s what came up in the discussion.
Later I learned, maybe that same trip or shortly afterwards, that the form of practice we were doing, the Mahasi method6 it’s called, which really involves noticing the movement of the belly with the breath, was actually considered by the person who developed it for lay people like us, Mahasi Sayadaw, to be elements practice—a very classic mindfulness of the body practice from the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. I’ll say more about this as the week unfolds, but it is central. It’s one of the central practices in that foundational text of our tradition.
This is one of many forms of meditation and contemplation which involve shifting and changing our perceptual process, our perceptions. Among other things, this shows how the heart and mind shape our experience of reality for the purpose of cutting through forms of clinging that amp up or even cause and increase unnecessary suffering, dukkha7.
This week we’ll explore both the contemplative and meditative dimensions of elements practice, especially how it can support insight, including a practical perspective and more of a poetic or mythic perspective.
At the introduction to many of the Buddhist discourses, there’ll be this just kind of toss-away line: “This body composed of or comprised of the four elements or the five elements.” It’s just taken as a given, this notion that we are the same matter, the same stuff as the world around us. And that wasn’t just a lifeless sort of quantum physics of the time, though it was a material observation. Of course, there was also this cultural soup in which the Buddha lived and taught that was pre-Hindu, pre-Brahmanical. The idea in the ancient texts of the Brahmanas and the Upanishads8 was that these different materials, these different processes of earth, water, fire, kind of had a certain sort of aliveness.
The first four elements are experienced as objects of meditation on the body, the first foundation of mindfulness. In other words, touch, sensation, interoception—the feeling of what happens within our bodies. Attending to them has the power of bringing us here, now.
According to the commentaries, each element has experiential qualities and functions. So they’re ways of noticing the experience of the body in the moment as a process. In other words, direct experience of embodied change, inconstancy. Elements practice can be a skillful means for experiencing that river of change and for disidentification, decentering from our attitudes or imagination or cultural projections about our bodies. “I don’t like my skin now that I’m over 50,” or “I don’t like my hair,” or “I don’t like my belly.” Those are all thoughts. Instead, this is the lived experience of kāya9, the body, the aliveness, and our fundamental belonging to, and non-separation from, nature, the earth itself.
So, with all of that as context and introduction, we’ll talk a little bit about the earth element. To start with a nod to a more mythopoetic perspective, on the night of the Buddha’s awakening, he was assailed by the forces of Māra10—life-denying forces of doubt and ill will and the like. In all versions of this story, he touches the earth. You can see the earth-touching mudra on many Buddhist statues. In some of these myths, the earth shakes. “Earth is my witness. I belong. I have the capacity to awaken.” And in some of these stories, it’s described as the earth being “her.” She bears witness to him.
Earth can be an inspiration for meditation, as it is in that myth or as in one of the discourses in which the Buddha advises his very own son, Rāhula11, to take inspiration from each of these elements. “Make your meditation like the earth,” he said. We too can take the earth as inspiration for our practice: the strength, the solidity, the integrity, the settledness.
We can also attune to those qualities associated with the earth element. Are we feeling in this moment sensations of heaviness or lightness, hardness or roughness, softness or smoothness, attending to their changing nature? If you want to feel into what heaviness or hardness might feel like on a more material level in the body, the classic instructions are to notice the teeth. Kind of put them together. Notice your nails. Feel into the way our bones, our skeletons hold us up. There’s an integrity there.
Then there’s the function of each element. The function of the earth element is that it is the basis from which all else grows. On one level, it’s the base for the other elements. In the Saṃyutta Nikāya12, the connected discourses, the Buddha likens the mind to the earth element, that it’s the ground for the other experiences. This is picked up by the later Tibetan tradition, and I’m quoting here from a wiki on Tibetan Buddhism: “The mind’s ability to serve as the ground for all experience is the quality of earth.” So, essentially the Buddha’s words, but a little bit more contemporary in their saying. Earth element supports all of the seeds of our minds, all of the cultivation for good or for ill of our minds.
I’ll close with this poem attributed to Paṭācārā13, from the Therīgāthā14:
Farmers turn up the soil, plant seeds and wait. All by itself, water pours down from the sky and turns the earth into food. After all these years, sleeping on the ground, waking before dawn, and begging for every meal, where’s my harvest?
Late one evening, I was washing my feet after another long day of sitting and walking. The water poured over my feet and onto the ground. I let my mind go and it flowed downhill with the water towards my little hut. I went inside, sat on the bed, and lowered the wick of the lamp. All by itself, the flame went out.
And she awoke. In some versions of that poem, there’s talk about settling the mind with the flow of the water. This awakening poem sets us up for tomorrow’s topic: water.
So, your homework assignment, should you choose to accept it between now and tomorrow, is to notice in the felt sense of your experience how sensations of heaviness or lightness change, roughness or smoothness, density or soft spaciousness. Notice this in your day, maybe a few moments in formal meditation or informally through the day, and see how it connects you to the moment, or doesn’t.
Thank you for your practice.
Sangha: A Pali word for the community of Buddhist practitioners. ↩
Anattā: A fundamental Buddhist doctrine of “not-self” or “non-self,” the understanding that there is no permanent, unchanging self or soul in living beings. ↩
U Pandita (1921-2016): A highly respected Burmese Theravāda Buddhist monk and meditation master, known for his teachings on the Mahasi method of Vipassanā meditation. ↩
Sayadaw U Janaka (1928-present): A prominent Burmese meditation master in the Mahasi tradition. The original transcript said “Sid Jonica,” which has been corrected based on the context of Burmese meditation teachers. ↩
Sayadaw: A Burmese honorific title for a senior, respected Buddhist monk. ↩
Mahasi method: A form of Vipassanā (insight) meditation practice popularized by the Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982). It emphasizes the continuous, moment-to-moment observation of the rising and falling of the abdomen during breathing. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism. ↩
Brahmanas and the Upanishads: Ancient Sanskrit texts that are part of the Hindu scriptures (Vedas). They contain philosophical and spiritual concepts that were part of the cultural milieu in which the Buddha taught. The original transcript said “brahinss the aananishads.” ↩
Kāya: A Pali word for the physical body. ↩
Māra: In Buddhism, a demonic celestial king who represents the forces of temptation, spiritual obstruction, and death. He attempted to distract the Buddha from his path to enlightenment. ↩
Rāhula: The only son of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). He later became one of his father’s disciples. ↩
Saṃyutta Nikāya: A collection of the Buddha’s discourses, part of the Sutta Piṭaka of the Pāli Canon. It is known as the “Connected Discourses.” ↩
Paṭācārā: One of the most renowned female disciples of the Buddha, known for her profound suffering and subsequent awakening. ↩
Therīgāthā: A collection of short poems of early enlightened Buddhist nuns, meaning “Verses of the Elder Nuns.” It is part of the Pāli Canon. ↩