This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Flow of the Moment: Insight & the 5 Elements (2/5) Oceans and Clouds. 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.
For those of you who maybe weren’t here yesterday, the theme of this week is practicing with the five elements, and how the practice with the five elements relates to insight—the direct experience of insight. This is intended to tie into Gil Fronsdal’s ongoing series on insight. So if you didn’t get a chance to listen to yesterday’s talk, it does offer a lot more background and orientation. You’re welcome to do that if you wish.
Meanwhile, if you were tuned in and practicing yesterday, take a moment to consider for yourself how practicing with the elements, especially the earth element, may have appeared for you in your practice. Consider any key takeaways from this series so far.
With that, we’ll start with the meditation this morning.
Adjusting this earthly body, maybe rocking back and forth on your sit spot or adjusting how you are on your cushion or chair or mat. Taking a couple of longer, slower, embodied breaths. Perhaps allowing a slight smile on your lips or relaxation in your face.
Allowing the outbreath to settle the attention inward and downward. And when you’re ready, if you haven’t already, allowing the eyes to close, allowing the breathing to be natural.
Noticing the quality of sensation on your skin. Is there dryness or moisture sensed by the skin? Perhaps you notice qualities of moisture or dryness in the breath as air becomes breath, perhaps in your nostrils or throat. Just noticing, allowing the in and out breath to be however they are today, but attuning to any wave-like motion of in-breath and out-breath. Perhaps a wave-like motion of the abdomen moving up and down. The movement of the diaphragm, chest, belly.
Allowing the whole body to be present with awareness at the forefront. Attuning to any sense of motion, of aliveness in the body, while maintaining primary attention on the wave-like motion, the flow of breathing.
Allowing the attention to settle again, like sediment through water, settling into the moment, the flow of the moment. If distractions or thinking arise, and they will, graciously, fluidly shifting the attention back to the moment.
Perhaps noticing moisture or dryness in the mouth, the lips, the eyes. Feeling into the pulsating aliveness of this living body, the whole body, while being devoted to attending to the flow of breathing and the flow of the moment.
As the attention settles, noticing the ripples of sensation, no matter how slight. Any sense of pleasure or energy, a flow of energy through the body, perhaps at the base of the pelvis or belly or through the torso. Attuning to that wave-like grace, allowing it to massage any contentment, ease, and embodiment through the whole body. Allowing the mind to float within the moment.
As this sit begins to draw to a close, the invitation, if you haven’t already, is to open to all of embodied experience: the shifting, changing, scintillating, flowing qualities of sensation in this moment, allowing everything just to move through. No need to get involved.
And then as we draw this formal time of meditation to a close, attuning to any sense of goodness, any settledness, fluidity, calm, or peacefulness. Any glimmers of goodness from this meditation, savoring them, letting them nourish your practice.
From there, the invitation is to let those qualities, any benefits here, ripple out through your own mind and heart and life, to all of the lives you touch and all of the lives they touch, outwards and outwards.
May all beings be safe, happy, peaceful, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, and peace in the world.
Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.
Welcome, dear Sangha.1 While I’m taking a moment to sip tea before the dharmette,2 I would just like to make a short announcement. If you enjoy sitting with me and with my dear colleague Kim Allen, both of us IMC teachers, we’re actually co-leading a retreat through my other home Sangha, the one that I lead, Insight Santa Cruz. It’s in the gorgeous redwoods in Ben Lomond, California, down here outside of Santa Cruz. It has a much smaller lottery than a typical IMC retreat, so I’m going to drop the link in the chat for those of you who might be interested in signing up in just a moment.
The topic for today is a continuation of the series this week on insight and five elements practice. There are different levels of five elements practice, but all of this is in the context of the insight unfolding that Gil is teaching over these weeks. They can be taken literally, as material stuff, and I spoke to that a little bit yesterday. It’s a Bronze Age framing, but we can kind of open our minds to all contemporary elements in the periodic table if we wish. They also can be the qualities of direct experience in the moment. So today I was talking about moisture during the meditation, for example, or flow. We can attune to those embodied experiences; that is a kind of direct practice.
Then there’s the level of inspiration or analogy, simile. For example, at the end of the dharmette yesterday, I mentioned that a later Buddhist tradition, the Tibetan tradition, had taken the Buddha’s simile that the mind could be like the ground for the seeds of cultivation of our life force, of good or ill. The Tibetan tradition sort of unpacked that and likened the mind to the earth element. So it’s not a literal assertion, but more, all of this is intended to inspire.
So today and in the following days, I will be addressing both the contemplation piece of this—contemplating how this way of interpreting or understanding experience might support insight—as well as the direct experience of the elements in our practice, and finally, how they might inspire us towards insight.
The five elements is one of many practices. In this case, it fits into the body part of the four foundations of mindfulness, which is in and of itself a skillful framework. And then within that, there are a number of skillful means, mindfulness of breathing being the most common, that can help to support insights into anicca3 (inconstancy), anatta4 (not-self), and others.
In terms of insight through the five elements, one key modality is contemplating them internally and externally. This is easy to do with water. For example, when sipping tea, when does tea become body?
Let’s start with internal and external contemplation with a quote from mainstream science. I was looking around to sort of fact-check some of this talk yesterday and ran across a wonderful series of posts on a Substack that quoted and referenced scientists as long ago as the early 1930s. One of them basically named that in mainstream science, even back then as today, and I’m quoting, “it is a common belief that blood is modified seawater.” The TL;DR on this is that concentrations of sodium and potassium in our blood plasma are remarkably similar to seawater. This is true of many animals, including humans, who from an evolutionary perspective emerged from the ocean. In a sense, we still carry that salinity within. In a sense, our bloodstreams are ambulatory oceans. That call to the ocean that we feel at the seaside, that soothing quality, there’s something about that that can evoke a sense of this internal flow, this internal wave-like sensation. Our bodies are over half water; some people’s bodies are over three-quarters water. So that’s kind of a bigger picture of this internal-external contemplation.
On the practical level, in the commentaries, within the body, the water element is traditionally represented by blood, sweat, and tears, also by urine, saliva, and synovial fluid, etc. My dear colleague and friend Bob Stahl every year does a meditation on what’s called the 32 parts of the body, which unpacks the ancient understanding of this and the way that these organs connect with the other elements.
In terms of felt experience, we can of course attune to the qualities associated with the water element: flowing, melting, dampening, wetness, or conversely, freeze or fixity, coagulation, dryness. Noticing the experience of the body in the moment, noticing that flow can be a direct experience of inconstancy. Wherever the experience of your body is, it is a direct experience of that river of change, that river of nature.
The commentaries also say that it’s impossible to directly experience moisture, that it’s a “mental capacity to imagine it.” I’ll just name that is not my experience. Water feels wet. So, you can play with that. It’s a useful exercise to do, to notice how much of what we feel like our direct sensory experience is actually concept versus sensation, recognition versus sensation.
Also from the ancient commentaries, water’s function manifests as cohesion, expansion, and holding together. For cohesion, consider the differences between dust and soil. Water is key. The association of water in the ancient teachings with social cohesion is also strong. So strong that when metta5 (loving-kindness) is described in those same commentaries as a social, relational force of cohesion, it is described in poetic terms of “making moist” or “adding wetness.” Samadhi6 is described the same way. As you can imagine, in ancient India, much of which is quite hot, wetness was prized.
There’s also, on a more inspirational level, considering the way that water and the water element link us to all other life. Not just all other life now, but all other life in the evolution of this planet. This is from scientist Michael McClennon. He writes, “There’s about the same amount of water on Earth now as there was in the Mesozoic period. All water that is breathed, drunk, and urinated by living things remains as part of the planet’s total water content.” Also included, I might add, is water absorbed by the skies, which are now thirstier, more absorptive because of climate change. In other words, the water we experience today in our bodies, rivers, oceans, skies, aquifers, embedded in life and trees, is almost exactly the same water element that’s been here since the inception of this planet. A vast, interpenetrating cycle of change. Sometimes meteors come in and bring water or ions, and individual hydrogen elements escape the atmosphere into space, but overall the vast majority is the same.
It’s not personal. It’s not self. We borrow water for a while, carry it around in our ambulatory oceans and bodies, and then it becomes external again.
To add an ancient mythic scale, this is from the Samyutta Nikaya,7 the connected discourses. The Buddha mentions that over lifetimes, you have cried more tears than there is water in all the oceans. I find that to be very poetic, whether you believe in rebirth or not.
On a more contemporary level, this is a simile that spontaneously came to me years ago: in a sense, we can consider ourselves, our identified selves, our bodies, like clouds. The cloud can drift from here to another town or another country. It gains and loses its water droplets. It changes shape yet remains a cloud. All of its parts may change, yet the cloud remains a cloud until conditions change and it returns either to the earth through rain or to the sky through evaporation. Like that, our mental identity remains in flux. We are processes, processes in constant flux, until we melt back into the all.
As this cloud simile highlights, water, like awareness, is a shapeshifter. It changes form and manifestation dependent on conditions, just like we do. And eventually, when the rain falls, that oceanic cycle continues.
The Buddha advised his son Rahula to make his meditation like water. “If you make your meditation like water,” he said, “agreeable and disagreeable things will not invade the mind and remain.” Like him, we can take water as inspiration: fluidity, adaptability, energetic flow through the body. In fact, in the later Tibetan tradition that I quoted yesterday, the mind’s continuity and adaptability is represented by water.
The Buddha said of the Dharma, “Just as in the ocean, there is but one taste, the taste of salt, so in this Dhamma-vinaya,8 this dharma and discipline, there is one taste: the taste of freedom.”
Water also represents the capacity of the soft, fluid, and adaptable to radically transform what is hard and rigid. Consider the Grand Canyon, or mountains eroding into rocks, boulders, river stones, and eventually sand in the ocean.
And with that, I’ll close with another Therigatha9 inspired poem. This from Uttara:
Life had always been hot, sweaty work. First I learned to control my hands, then my mouth, then my mind. As things slowed, I sank down, down to the bottom of the heart’s sea. There I dug out the root of all craving and swam back to the surface. The water had grown cool, and outside everything had grown cool, as though the heart had traveled north.
Thank you, Sangha, for your kind attention. If you wish, between now and tomorrow, notice internal and external water, that fluid relationship, and how water might inspire your practice and your actions. Thank you for your kind attention.
Sangha: A Pali word for “community” or “assembly,” referring to the community of Buddhist practitioners. ↩
Dharmette: A short dharma talk. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence” or “inconstancy,” one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. ↩
Anatta: A Pali word for “not-self,” the doctrine that there is no unchanging, permanent self or soul in living beings. ↩
Metta: A Pali word for “loving-kindness,” “friendliness,” or “goodwill.” ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for “concentration” or a state of meditative absorption. ↩
Samyutta Nikaya: The “Connected Discourses,” a collection of Buddhist scriptures, part of the Sutta Pitaka. Original transcript said “Samuta Nikaya.” ↩
Dhamma-vinaya: A Pali term for the Buddha’s teaching (Dhamma) and the disciplinary code (Vinaya). Original transcript said “dharma vineia.” ↩
Therigatha: The “Verses of the Elder Nuns,” a collection of short poems by early Buddhist nuns, part of the Pali Canon. Original transcript said “Terry Gata.” ↩