This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Staying in the flow; Crossing the flood (2/5) “Crossing”. 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.
Good morning, everyone. It’s very nice to feel the silent greetings from the chat and just know a sense of presence from all of you all over the world joining to practice together. It’s a blessed morning for me to begin this way. Hello, everyone.
I’d like to start by saying a few words before our meditation together, and then we’ll do a meditation, followed by a dharmette.
Yesterday, we began this week with a series around water-related similes. We started yesterday in our meditation with this idea of stepping into the flow of our lives. Sometimes this phrase is used to describe one’s life flowing like water. Today, I’m going to expand a little more in our meditation. Now that we’re stepping into the flow of our life, we’re also learning to stay in the flow, staying with the ups and downs of our lives. This is an important cultivation, and we’ll see why when we get to the dharmette.
So, the sense is that we began by stepping into the flow, and then we’re staying with it. That’s the orientation that we’ll be going with in this meditation together.
So let’s begin. I’ll offer some light guidance at the beginning, and then we’ll just sit in silence together.
Maybe taking a few long, deep breaths. As you breathe in, imagining you’re stepping into this life, the flow of this life. And as you breathe out, it’s as if you’re touching the floor of the river of life, here and now. Maybe you feel the body settling down to the ground, arriving. Arriving here and now.
The flow of life only happens in this moment, not the past or the future. Not in a hurry, but steadying ourselves one step at a time, one breath at a time.
You feel present. Let the mindfulness grow fuller, so it can receive the wide range of experiences that’s happening in the flow of life. Sounds, silence, smell, temperature. As you step into the flow of your life, there may be a kind of aliveness coming forth, like you’re touching life in an immediate, direct way.
Let the breath sweep throughout the body. Let the earthly parts of the body settle down, like the stones settle to the bottom of the lake. Steady, grounded, and alive.
Let the mindfulness grow big, vast, spacious, available to receive a wide range of life phenomena happening this moment, in this moment. And at this moment, let the body relax and soften in whatever way it may be available to us. We are not demanding for it, but we’re available. Let the heart be at ease to whatever degree that’s available.
Let yourself settle into staying, being with whatever may be present or absent in this moment. Sensations, thought bubbles, waves of emotions. We are dropped in inside the experience, below the surface-level narratives, concepts, and ideas. It’s a quiet feeling, sensing, knowing from within your experience.
Letting loose the words, the quiet stillness. There’s a power level. This being with our experience can be felt, can be known, without words to justify itself. The heart can feel tender.
And gently and firmly, staying with the experience. It may be pleasant or unpleasant. It may not be what you prefer to have. Staying in the felt sense of it as best as you can. This being with our experiences has wholesome qualities in itself.
Might you feel grounded to some degree, or settled to some degree, or calm to some degree? This too is available. This too is present, in addition to the thoughts, emotions, and sensations in the body.
Soft, gentle, staying. Resting in this capacity of being with whatever is flowing, going through. Let this capacity to stay with our experience expand. Let it expand so it can hold a wide range of experiences all around and in this world with care and with wisdom, as best as we can.
Thank you, everyone, for practicing together, meditating together.
Today, I’d like to continue the “crossing the flood” simile. I was doing this symbolic exploration of this simile. Yesterday, I shared some reflections about this word “flood,” which often in the Pali Canon is associated with destructive or harmful forces of craving, grasping, greed, hatred, and delusion. Today, I’d like to unpack the word “crossing” a bit. I find this quite evocative.
I’ve read “crossing the flood” many, many times in the Pali suttas, but at some point, it occurred to me that these two words don’t come together in a normal mind. Why would one cross the flood? When it comes to a flood, in a real flooding situation, what do we do? Our survival instinct would be to run away, right? And get safe, protect ourselves. And so this notion of crossing the flood, to the normal mind, kind of makes no sense.
It was interesting for me to reflect on this. I was noticing that often in the suttas, the Buddha would put two things together that don’t always make sense to the normal mind. Why would he do that? I thought maybe this is the richness of the symbols that is being pointed to.
As I was reflecting upon this a bit more, reflecting about this notion of crossing the flood of the forces within us that are harmful—greed, hatred, delusion, grasping—maybe, just maybe, the Buddha is pointing to a kind of capacity within us that is capable of overcoming the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion. Not by running away from it or by skipping over it, but by really meeting them in some way.
For the Buddha, he explicitly said that he crossed the flood. He didn’t skip over it. He didn’t fly over it. It wasn’t some kind of magical thinking, but he crossed over it. Might there be something in us, a kind of inner capacity that is available, that is bigger and deeper, that is to be discovered in this process?
Often when we meet unpleasant or difficult situations, whether it’s mind states or emotions, our habitual ego-survival tendency is to get out of it right away. Our ego has this kind of strategy: get really busy, let’s solve it, let’s fix it, or let’s run away. It’s the ego’s job to do that. And when we’re so busy doing this, in the current of greed, hatred, delusion, or ignorance, it never occurs to us that the way out is actually through. Get wet, so to speak. Step into this.
In the teachings of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha started with the insight into the First Noble Truth, and he used the word specifically that is to really fully understand. Sometimes teachers would translate it as penetrating dukkha1. For me, it’s this invitation for us to feel the “ouch.” Maybe feeling and sensing the physical, emotional pain, but we’re feeling it in a different way. Not by the ego strategy that often gets kicked up, but rather we’re resting in the direct, felt-sense experience of it. There is some kind of capacity deeper within that is not on the surface level of mental activities.
I love that in these last few weeks, one of the IMC teachers, Diana Clark, has been unfolding a sequence on how to meet fear—quite a potent emotion that exists in all human beings. She was unfolding it in this way of feeling it, sensing it, meeting it in a different way without collapsing under it. I love one of the titles; it says, “Fear is not a flaw.” When we are deciding, “I’m flawed because I’m fearful,” what happens? We’re actually collapsing into it. We’re being defined by something that is just momentarily characterizing the situation. We’re not denying that this is not here, but it doesn’t have to define us. It doesn’t have to lock us into a box.
So this feeling, sensing the current, stepping into the water, stepping into the flow… Now, I don’t mean that there’s not a time for us to get out to be safe. I think there are times to do that when it’s really overwhelming, when it’s really overpowering our capacity. Because this capacity that the Buddha is pointing to is to be cultivated little by little. So we’re stepping into crossing the flood by doing this little by little, which is something that we’ll be exploring in the next couple of days.
But this crossing is pointing to that, in addition to sometimes keeping ourselves safe, we’re also turning to some other possibilities that may be available to us, that may be within us. There are multiple effects of this word “crossing.” We are cultivating this inner capacity that allows us to be present, to stay with a whole range of our experiences without being pushed around by our automatic reactivities.
I’d like to read a quote from Dancing with Life, the book that I was reading from yesterday also. It speaks to this capacity to be with something, to stay with something. It says this:
When something difficult arises, the mind often wants to jump in to comment on it or try to fix it or move away from it. Anything but stay with it. This may seem like healthy, self-protective behavior, but the truth is that if you can’t be fully present with the difficult moments, chances are you won’t be present with the best moments of your life either. In other words, when you work directly with your capacity for being with pain, you’re also working directly with your capacity for being with joy.
Just pause for a moment. Can you feel the truth of that? When we’re training our mind to skip over, to leap out of our present moment in the difficult moments, it’s true, even in the pleasant moments we leap out. Because it’s like a monkey, it goes to grab the next thing. Our satisfaction, even for the pleasant things, could be very short-lived.
So this learning to be with our experience, to be present, embodied, feeling and sensing it… In the meditation, I used the word “we drop inside of our experience.” The insight practice is this sense of seeing from within, sight from within. But we have to drop underneath, inside of our experience, rather than hovering over our projections, our interpretations, and our automatic associations of what it means. For example, “If I’m fearful now, I’m flawed,” borrowing Diana’s words. No, that is just trapping ourselves.
So here, when we’re dropping in, we are more curious about the phenomenon and the experience of fear as an alive phenomenon. We’re asking ourselves, “May I notice the phenomenon of fear more fully, more deeply?” It has effects in our body, mind, and heart. In this way, we are shifting and changing our relationship to our experiences, and that is not based on the energetic holding, collapsing, or tightening, but we’re kind of opening to it. We’re allowing it to inform us, to shed light.
Through this being with our experience, we can begin to actually tease apart or separate these habit tendencies that are happening versus the experiences themselves. So it’s a very important process here that we’re stepping into the flow of our experience and we’re staying with it.
For today, my invitation is that as you continue to live out these teachings in your day, so to speak, maybe pause for a moment of your day and notice, “Oh, can I meet this experience? Can I stay with this experience, whether or not it’s pleasant or unpleasant?”
And then in the next days, the Buddha gets a little more nuanced in terms of how do we stay here? How do we become present for this and not be swept away by the flood?
Thank you for your attention. May you all have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩