This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Stabilizing in the flow; Crossing the flood (3/5) Unhurrying and untarrying. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello. Hello everyone. Good to see the chat messages streaming in, getting a sense of being together here again. For me, it’s a Wednesday morning here in a quite sunny California. So, welcome everyone.
This week, we’ve been practicing with this simile called “crossing the flood.” In the last couple of days, in our meditation, we started with this metaphor of stepping into the flow of our lives, the moments of our lives that form a flow. And then yesterday, we shared a little reflection about crossing. Crossing requires us to really be in the current, in the flow. And so we practiced not just stepping into the flow but also staying in the flow.
Now today, we’re going to expand a little more in that process, which is to stabilize ourselves in the current, whether there may be waves, a larger amount of water, or small streams. We’re learning to stabilize ourselves. And so in this meditation, we’ll continue with this water flowing metaphor by stepping into the flow of our moments, and then staying there and learning to become stabilized in the flow.
So let’s meditate together.
Maybe taking a few long, deep breaths. Maybe three to be exact. Breathing in deeply, breathing out fully. Again. And the third time.
And as you breathe out, settle into the space you’re in, right here, right now. Stepping into the present moment. Stepping into sati1, mindfulness. There is a felt sense of nowness. Now, this moment, it feels like this at this moment. And this moment.
I can begin to notice the shift and changes that happen in the body. A kind of a gathering of energy, a settling of the energy. It’s like the weight settles down. Mindfulness, sati, can become fuller, more expansive. You’re more staying with the here rather than going to the objects in the mind. Resting. Resting in the mindfulness.
Things come alive in the field of mindfulness. Maybe there is a felt sense of being available to the embodied sensations, movements in the minds. We are not in a hurry. We’re learning to steady ourselves in the here and now.
There is an energetic participation of the flow of life moments, and we’re not in a hurry. What’s the felt sense for you, not being in a hurry? There may be ease in the body, relaxation in the heart, and the mind may be more soft.
Fully immersed in this moment, there can be an aliveness. And so there is no complacency. Maybe even a hint of delight to be unhurried, steady, stable in the open presence.
If there are any degrees of wholesome feelings present, register it. The stability, the steadiness is calming for the nervous system, and maybe there is a slight uplift in the heart. The delight of walking the path. Unhurrying, untarrying, centered. All right. There may be quiet joy here in the stability.
And of course, in the steadiness, our mind can slip out into the past and future, narratives, stories. It’s not a mistake. It’s just what it is. When you notice it, right here, right now, there is a choice to come back to the present moment, mindful and aware, without the second arrow2.
Just now. Just now. You don’t need to count how many times you come back to this moment. What matters is this moment. You come back to this moment. That’s enough.
In the steadiness and the stability of your presence, might you meet life in a new way? What becomes available in this steadiness and stability? Maybe the felt sense in the body expresses a kind of goodness, well-being in the midst of non-well-being. Might that be a possibility for you, for us, and for the people we encounter?
So in crossing the flood, there’s a simile that we’ve been unfolding. We spoke about the symbolic meanings of flood: greed, hatred, delusion, the unwholesome forces that tend to overwhelm us. And we spoke about crossing. Not so obvious, you know. But the Buddha said, “I crossed the flood.” And so the deity who asked the question got really curious. The deity asked the Buddha, “How did you do that? How did you cross the flood?” Here is a rather cryptic answer.
The Buddha said, “By not halting, not straining, I cross the flood.”
Not halting, not straining, I cross the flood. There are often other words when teachers share their expressions of this. In the meditation, I also used “not tarrying,” this sense of not freezing, and “not hurrying,” not getting busy, engaging in overstimulation. Sometimes a teacher might also use “not overexerting” or “under-efforting,” not being complacent, but not being overly stimulated. I’m using all of the words to point to what the Buddha is pointing to: the common phenomena when we’re stepping into the water, stepping into the flow, what tends to happen, and inviting us to a different way to go through this, to go through this choppy water, so to speak, at times.
I remember being in choppy water, kind of swimming in the ocean once, and there were some moments that the waves got a little bigger. I was not so far into the ocean, still close to the shore, but it was far enough that when the waves came, I got panicky. I started to swim furiously, but very quickly, within seconds, I knew I was exhausting myself. I wasn’t so close to the shore that if I kept on doing this, I would not make it. And so I had to slow down, to just be steady in my strokes to move towards the shore.
So there’s a sense of hurrying or straining. We may often notice that we’re in a hurrying culture. We’re quite in a hurry. We’re always in a rush, often rushing from one appointment to another, one meeting to another, or one thing to another. I remember when I worked, there was a time that I was literally running from one meeting to another. I wouldn’t have my whole foot on the ground before I’d take the next step. So, it was almost like tipping my toe forward, tipping my body forward to go, lean forward. And that’s easy to fall, right?
So in this practice, the Buddha said we’re not in a hurry, not hurrying. We can be in a big hurry to want what we want. Maybe it’s this outcome orientation, result orientation. And even in meditation, we can get spiritual ambitions. “If I’m not calm within the first 10 minutes, somehow I’m not doing it right, or I should be quitting doing it all together.” And so this kind of striving, overdoing, actually hinders us. It does not cultivate this capacity that the Buddha is pointing to, this capacity of being steady with our experience.
And then there’s a sense of not halting, not tarrying, that may manifest in many different ways for us. Halting, tarrying, sometimes it may manifest as a kind of complacency, lethargy. Not halting in going through the current means there is actually a kind of alive, energetic engagement with life. There is a kind of soft vigilance, but it’s not a freezing either. If we’re freezing in the current, guess what? It won’t help. It won’t help crossing the flood.
There are many manifestations of this kind of freezing. Sometimes it can be a physical kind of freezing because of anger in the body. It can also be psychological or emotional, where we can have a kind of sinking, a stuck feeling, and we’re not quite present for our experience. It may be spacey, spaced out. And so those are the things for us to begin to notice. What are the manifestations of this? What does it feel like to be not halting, not hurrying?
Another kind of halting is when we’re stuck in some kind of fixation in our ideas and views. If we are identified or defined by our patterns or the waves of emotions—fear or anger or whatever else that might be here—we can freeze ourselves into a kind of belief: “This is who I am.” We can’t move beyond it, and all that we’re relating to in our experiences can now begin to be seen through that lens. That lens of, “This is who I am. I’m always agitated. I’m always anxious.” So we can’t see the possibilities of momentary freedom from anxiety.
This hurrying and tarrying have many manifestations, and so does the unhurried, untarried mind. The Buddha uses rather specific words, but it’s also pointing to a whole range and a whole territory. They’re not a fixed thing; they are very situational. An important step in practicing towards this orientation of non-hurrying, non-tarrying is to learn to recognize the subjective experiences of this. The unhurried, untarried—how does it feel for me in this moment, in this situation? The Buddha didn’t really say, “You always walk at 5 miles per hour or in the 65° direction.” No, this is something that is rather alive for us to feel into in the different situations that we’re in, because the current, the flow of our lives, is ever shifting and changing. So what might be needed is quite different.
In meditation, sometimes, maybe on retreat or on a long retreat, there are very few or smaller waves of wanting and not wanting, of aversion. The flood streams are not so big, and this crossing the flood can feel effortless. It’s this kind of effortless effort. Not much to do. We’re more learning to be present just as it is, and that’s enough.
And other times, it can be on retreat or in daily life, there may be streams of fantasies and very juicy stories that take us away from the present moment. And so what might be needed is for us to learn a skillful way to allow ourselves to come back to the present moment. That may be a little uplift in us to be present more fully, to be more embodied again and again. And also, as best as we can, we’re not pushing ourselves, demanding ourselves. Our effort is in sync with some degree of stability. We’re not looking for perfect here.
And sometimes when there are big eddies, big storms, what may be needed is to turn our attention away. Maybe we go walk in nature, do some gardening, or talk to some friends to get support. The Buddha didn’t say that you can’t walk with other companions on the path. In fact, he said to walk with other companions on the path. So why do we limit ourselves? Our ego mind sometimes can come up with certain ideas and then lock ourselves into those ideas. It can get grandiose or result-driven, demanding ourselves to go conquer the biggest waves in our lives right now. No, we’re learning to cultivate a capacity. So the measure is not based on our ego’s ambitions, but it’s based on the sincerity of the practice, coming back here and now, not some kind of outcome in the future. Our effort is in some kind of proportion to what’s available in our capacity. So we start small and we let ourselves be steady in the baby waves first, and then we grow from there, and we learn from our experience.
This is something that we will continue. In the sutta, the deity wasn’t satisfied with this one-liner the Buddha offered, so we will explore more that we can learn from our experience as well.
So for today, as you go about the day, recognize the felt sense of hurrying, tarrying, and the absence of hurrying and tarrying. Be attuned to what the effect is for you. How does it affect me in my heart and mind?
And we will continue tomorrow. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful rest of the day.
Sati: A Pali word that translates to “mindfulness” or “awareness.” It is the first factor of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. ↩
Second Arrow: A Buddhist metaphor explaining the difference between pain and suffering. The first arrow is the unavoidable pain of life (physical or mental). The second arrow is the suffering we add on top of it through our reaction, judgment, and resistance to the initial pain. The practice is to learn to experience the first arrow without firing the second. ↩