This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Breath & Air; Insight & the 5 Elements (4/5) The Winds of Change. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by an 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.
Good morning, good day, good evening.
This is the fourth of five talks and meditations on the five elements or five qualities or properties of embodied experience as they can support insight. Today we’ll be covering air. The main focus for our meditation today will be on breathing.
The invitation is to take a step back mentally and feel into this body. Maybe take a couple of longer, slower breaths, noticing the feeling of air on your skin and allowing your attention to move inward, downward. Exhaling tension and inhaling a sense of awareness.
Then allowing the breathing to be natural, normal, and noticing however your breath is for you today. Is there warmth or cool in the air as it comes through the nostrils? In the throat? Noticing a sense of motion in the chest and rib cage. Noticing especially movement of your life’s breath in your diaphragm and abdomen.
The flow of in-breath and out-breath. Noting perhaps gently in the mind “rising” as the chest or abdomen rise. “Falling” as the exhale happens.
Noticing moisture or dryness of the air as it becomes breath. Feeling your body rooted, grounded in the moment.
And especially attuning to the language of the body, the vibrancy. Maybe a sense of stretching or pulling on the in-breath, releasing relaxation on the out-breath.
Noticing the very beginning of the in-breath, the different changes in the abdomen, diaphragm, and chest through the whole inhale. Rising, expanding. Tuning into the feeling of fullness at the top of the in-breath. And then that feeling of release, softening, falling chest, falling abdomen, warmth of air being breathed out.
Allowing any thoughts of future or past to be known, acknowledged with kindness, and to fade to the periphery, inviting awareness, mindfulness to the forefront of attention. This breath. This moment of breath. This moment of warmth or cool, motion or stillness, heaviness or lightness. Immersed in the momentum.
If perhaps the attention is here just a little more, the invitation is to really dedicate the mind, the meditation, to the details of moving, movement and air. Noticing the difference between the beginning of the in-breath and a few pulses in as the abdomen or chest rise. All of the different sensations of expansion as the lungs fill. The tiny moment of transition where the in-breath ends and the out-breath begins.
And noticing, perhaps even noting, the falling of the chest and belly back down through the entire life cycle of the out-breath. Resting, when it occurs, in that small still point at the end of the out-breath. Softening, allowing the cycle of movement, the cycle of life to continue.
In the last moments of our meditation together, the invitation is to feel into all of your experience. Movement and stillness, warmth and cool, groundedness or lightness, moisture or dryness. And open to the heart and mind, how you are in this moment.
Especially attuning to any benefits—peacefulness, attention, calm, kindness—and soaking in them, letting them percolate through your system, nourish your heart.
And from that place, casting your internal gaze outwards towards all the others your life touches directly and indirectly, wishing that they may be happy, healthy, safe, peaceful, at ease, and free.
May all beings benefit from our practice here together. And may our practice be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, and peace in the world.
Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.
So, welcome to this fourth of five talks on the five elements, or five qualities, properties that we’re covering this week in direct experience and more metaphorically, inspirationally, to support insight.
So far we’ve covered earth, water, and fire. And today we are on air or wind. Here we’re starting to move into territory where the translation of dhātu1, the Pāḷi2 to “element,” starts not to make quite so much sense. Of course, air element, you could think of it as air molecules. That makes total sense. And it can also be more of a property, a potential in direct experience.
The ancient teachings describe the direct experience of air as being movement, pushing, pulling, stretching, expanding, contracting. Just like I led that meditation where the chest, the belly, or the diaphragm might expand, contract, rise, or fall. The function, according to the ancient teachings, is to convey. That air or wind conveys, which makes sense if you think about kites, for example, or birds kiting, soaring. More fancifully, if we combine the air element with the heat element, the fire element, we might get the conveyance of a hot air balloon or a blimp.
So how it shows up in meditation is that movement of breath, movement of the chest or abdomen or belly, and also in feeling the contact of the breath on the inside of your nose or your throat, your lungs. And air is, of course, the literal experience of breath. In stiller moments of practice, very quiet moments, it’s actually possible to feel the transpiration of the air without any movement of breathing at all. It’s kind of cool.
There are also, in the ancient discourses, different kinds of sensations and different kinds of feeling—pleasant, unpleasant, neither—are likened to winds from the north, south, east, and west. That all kinds of different feelings can be associated with those winds.
And speaking of wind, internal and external contemplation can be particularly evocative for practice with this element. Playing with the exploration: When does the air around you become breath? And when does that internal breath return to air? Not an intellectual answer to that or a conceptual answer, but a felt sense. When does it happen in your own experience?
External wind, a breeze on our face or wind all around us if we’re in a windy or gusty area meditating outside or just sitting outside, that can be a very powerful meditation object. There’s this inconstancy of the touch of wind on our skin, or even the indirect feeling of it through clothes or a jacket, that is a direct experience teacher of anicca3, of inconstancy.
Not a few practitioners that I’ve known, including myself, have meditated in the breeze and the wind, and then when the wind stops, there’s a very interesting process that can happen in your own meditation. That constant contact stopping can allow a powerful dropping away of body.
And then a little bit more, shall we say, an emotional or mental exploration of this is to notice for yourself differences in how your heart, how your mind, how your body respond to breezes or wind based on conditions. They could be conditions of warmth or cool or humidity or dryness, dustiness or clean clarity, sweet breezes with the perfume of flowers. Or they could be more internal conditions. The same wind one day might feel bracing, invigorating, and another day feel overwhelming or like too much.
So this brings us to other air and wind similes that the Buddha used. The eight worldly winds is a very famous teaching, also translated as the eight worldly vicissitudes, which are pleasure and pain, loss and gain, praise and blame, and status and disrepute, or fame and disrepute as it’s sometimes glossed.
I don’t know about you, but for many people in my life and at many points in my life, those have been quite consequential for me in terms of emotional life responses, general attitude. And then as practice begins to deepen, as wisdom begins to gather, as maturity begins to happen, those vicissitudes, those winds don’t blow us around quite so much. Instead, there’s a stability. Mindfulness can be like the ballast to hold us steady. In fact, the Buddha talked about a wise person being like a large boulder in the wind, unmoved by praise or blame or the other eight worldly winds for that matter. A steady friend is also talked about this way. A true spiritual friend who doesn’t abandon you in bad times or flatter you and try to snuggle up close just because times are good and there’s something to gain.
A fully awakened person, an arahant4, is described as completely unruffled by the worldly winds or any wind for that matter.
So we see that the wind/air element is associated with more than just the sensations of pushing, pulling, movement, conveying. It’s also about the pushing and pulling forces of life and the way we move, the way we convey ourselves, navigate through the physical and metaphorical winds.
And there’s wind power. The Buddha advised his son Rāhula to make his meditation like air, like wind. “If you make your meditation like wind,” he said, “agreeable and disagreeable contacts will not invade your heart and mind and remain.” And he goes on to say, if disgusting or unwanted things are thrown at the air or wind, they don’t stay, they don’t stick. Instead, there’s no response.
This ties into another teaching of the Buddha to practitioners in daily life about wind and air, and that is not to respond, not to take it personally, to allow the wind just to blow through. It’s said that wind is not trapped by a net, and we can consider that the net of our opinions, the net of our views, the net of the way we want things to be. And instead, the wind is just untrapped. So we can be free like the wind.
We’ll close with a poem from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer5, a wonderful Indigenous American poet. And this ties together some of the elements, the properties we’ve been talking about this week. You’ll see.
She writes, “Sometimes a person wakes believing they are a storm. It’s hard to deny it. What with all the rain pouring out of the gutters of the mind, all the gusts blowing through, all the squalls, all the gray. But by afternoon, it seems obvious they are a garden about to sprout. By night it’s clear they are a moon, luminous, radiant, faithful. That’s the danger I suppose of believing any frame. Let me believe then in curiosity, in wonder, in change. Let me trust how essential it is to stumble into the trough of the unknown and marvel how trough becomes wings becomes faith becomes path.6 Let me trust uncertainty is a sacred path.”
So thank you all for your attention. And your assignments, should you choose to accept them in the next 24 hours, are to notice how including awareness of the sensations of motion shows up for you in your daily life. And notice what helps you weather the vicissitudes, the changing winds, even the storms of life.
So, thank you. May your practice sustain you through all weather.
Dhātu: A Pāḷi word for “element” or “property.” In this context, it refers to the fundamental qualities of experience (earth, water, fire, air). ↩
Pāḷi: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. Original transcript said “poly.” ↩
Anicca: A Pāḷi word for “inconstancy” or “impermanence,” a core concept in Buddhism. Original transcript said “ana and constancy.” ↩
Arahant: A Pāḷi word for a “perfected person” who has attained full awakening, or Nibbāna. Original transcript said “a hot.” ↩
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The speaker says “Rosemary Watla Tramer,” but the name is likely Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, a contemporary American poet. ↩
…becomes path: The original transcript said “becomes math,” which seems unlikely in the context of the poem. Corrected to “path” for clarity and flow. ↩