This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Attuning to our efforts; Crossing the flood (4/5) Effects of hurrying & tarrying. 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.
Good morning, good day everyone. Just sitting here quietly in the silence to see the chat messages flowing through, there is a kind of warmth in my heart. I’m so happy to be here with you all again at this 7:00 AM Pacific time. It’s quite a peaceful morning around me here in my own room.
This week, I’ve been sharing some reflections related to the flow of water, the flow of life, and the floods that can come from time to time, and how we cross the flood. For the last few days, we’ve been going with a sutta, unfolding it as a way to develop and cultivate a capacity for us to cross the flood. We started by stepping into the flow of our lives and learning to stay in the current, in the flow, with some calm and steadiness. Yesterday, we spoke about cultivating stability and steadiness in being with the flow of life, whether there are pleasant or unpleasant difficulties, challenges, or joys.
Today, we’re going to deepen even further as this sutta unfolds. As we become steady with our experience, more and more things can get nuanced. We can become attuned to the various effects that our activities, our efforts, and the movements in our minds and hearts have on us. By being attuned to the effects of these activities and movements, we can begin to learn and to make choices—maybe wise, wholesome choices—to guide us to cross the flood.
This word “attuning,” becoming attentive to our experience, is what we are going to practice with. It’s a continuity from what we’ve been doing, and you can stay with what we’ve been doing also. But if this attuning becomes available to us, allow that to come forth as well in the practice.
So here we go. Let’s sit together.
Maybe take a few long, deep breaths. As you breathe out, enter into your lived experience inside, a kind of entering into an inner temple. Maybe the body, the breath. We are arriving. Arriving at here and now, where life unfolds. This moment.
Being present. Sati.1 It’s got a flavor of an inner value. We’re valuing being present. It’s valuable to be present here and now. Your heart knows. Here, you can deeply feel, deeply know life with all its dimensions and layers.
Gathering, centering around mindfulness, letting sati become established to whatever degree that may be available right now. We’re not in a hurry. It’s an unhurried presence, not jumping to the next moment. Let this moment of experience become full. Maybe the felt sense of the breath can become full. You can sense the beginning, the middle, and the end. Or maybe you can register a range of experience in the body.
There may be a sense of becoming steady, stable, grounded in mindfulness. It has various effects in us—in the body, heart, and mind. Maybe the heart feels open, the mind is spacious and quiet. Might the body be a little more at ease, at peace? The aliveness may come forth, like an energetic aliveness. There may be more sensitivity that’s available here, so you can be attuned to your experience.
Feeling and sensing, being attuned, is more like things are clarified or clear, crisp, a little bit or a lot. There is not one way. You may start out unhurried, energetic, alive, and you may notice the mind may move towards hurrying or sluggishness. It’s not something wrong. You’re just curious about the phenomenon. What’s the effect of this? A deeper part of ourselves, the intuitive part of ourselves, can naturally respond without fixing or judging. It starts by being attuned, gently, softly.
From time to time, you may notice the mind has wandered away, and you remember, “Ah, this moment.” You come back to this moment. And you let yourself register in that moment the effect of coming back to sati. Sometimes this feels like a light has turned on in the room, or you just woke up. It feels like this, coming to the present moment.
You remember the value of being present. So there is a gathering of heart, mind, and body together, here and now.
Might there be a kind of a joy to be present? The mind has some kind of a brightness. The heart has a kind of a glow. The body has a kind of vibratory feeling. Let this wholesome feeling expand and share with others you may encounter. May the practice benefit all beings.
Thank you for practicing together. We will continue to unfold this simile of crossing the flood. Yesterday, I spoke about the attitude that the Buddha offered to a deity who asked him, “How did you cross the flood?” The Buddha first said, “By not halting and not straining, I crossed the flood.” It’s rather cryptic, right? What does that mean? We unpacked it a little bit yesterday, but the deva was not satisfied. So, there was a second question: “How did you do that?” The Buddha answered in what to me is an even more interesting way. Today we’ll unpack this next line.
Here is the Buddha’s answer. He said: “When I came to a standstill, friend, then I sank. But when I struggled, then I got swept away. It is in this way, friend, that by not halting, by not straining, I crossed the flood.”
I found this really curious and interesting. He said, “I tried halting or standing still, but I sank. And I struggled, I tried straining, and I got swept away. This is how I learned to not halt and not strain. Then I crossed the flood.”
I was savoring this line for quite some time, and I realized the Buddha didn’t give specific to-do instructions. It’s not like, “Take your left foot, put it on this step, and with your right, do this.” No, he didn’t do that. What’s curious is that the Buddha actually offered a reflection of what he learned in terms of the effect of straining and the effect of halting. It seems to me the Buddha was very attuned to his experience, and he learned from watching and being with his experience. He didn’t push the experiences away.
He was meeting those moments when he tried halting and he realized, “Oh wow, I sank.” And the same thing when he struggled or strained, he got swept away. Notice the way he answered. He just described his experience, and that was it. He learned from it, but he didn’t get identified by the experience, which happens so often to us. We think, “Oh, you know, I halted, I froze when this happened, and I sank. Here I am, I am a big failure.” The Buddha didn’t say that. He struggled, he got swept away, but that doesn’t mean it was a big mistake.
So often, we can pile on a lot of grand conclusions, our perceptions, our judgments, that actually prevent us from learning from our experiences. For the Buddha, as he was attuning to the effect of his experience, something else bubbled up and became available to him. He could begin to discern, “Oh, by doing this, it has this effect on me. Might there be a different choice?” In this way, we’re actually allowing something deeper in us to bubble up to make choices, rather than our fixed views, our ideas, and our judgment to decide for ourselves.
The other aspect that jumps out in this one line is that there is a lot of humility and dignity in what the Buddha was practicing as he was crossing the flood. He wasn’t humiliated by sinking or by being swept away. So there is humbleness in stepping one step at a time and learning from it, rather than giving in to being humiliated by all of that.
I know our ego mind tends to gather the counts for various reasons, trying to get better or collapsing. And sometimes it counts endlessly, you know, “Oh boy, I failed a hundred times.” That tends to be the selfing strategy. And then it huffs and puffs and tries to do something to fix it. But in this practice, it actually does not matter how many times. I remember in a different sutta, the Buddha spoke about how when we’re not seeing the insights into the Four Noble Truths, he used a very specific word. He said, “When we’re not seeing things clearly with insights, you and I have transmigrated for a long time.” That’s enough. You don’t need to know how many times. We just have a bigger orientation that we know what is needed here is to come back to this moment and learn from our experience.
When we’re attuned to the experience, when we’re attuned to the effects of our experiences and then being available to the shifting changes of it, there is a natural clarity that comes from within. There is an inner capacity that can discern, “Oh, this ongoing rage that burns, that burns me and that burns others.” And when that is being known, being seen clearly, it’s like the hand naturally opens, not wanting to be burnt. “I don’t want to hold on to that burn anymore.” So there is a naturally arising kind of clarity that comes from within ourselves, but only if we begin to see this very clearly and begin to be willing to be in this process to allow the clarity to come forth.
In our meditations, sometimes I would notice that when my mind may be in a kind of unhurrying and non-tarrying attitude or approach, and it was kind of steady for a while, then I just noticed the mind began to lean forward, kind of wanting to reach out to the next moment. And often, when I’m not trying to fix that, trying to pull it back or trying to leap out, just being with this movement, things began to clarify themselves. And you can see, “Oh, this is actually leaving the moment.” And so it’s like the heart knows, “Oh, it’s valuable to be meeting life here and now.” By leaving the moment, we are losing touch with life in an immediate way. And so that movement just kind of naturally fades.
Not always. Sometimes the momentum to leap out is fast, it’s quick, and you might get lost for a bit. And then when you remember to come back, as in the meditation we did just now, if you just become attuned to that moment, you can feel the contrast. “Oh, this losing ourselves, losing our connection with sati, it actually feels like something got lost.” We’re losing touch with something, and then when we’re coming back, there is this kind of wakefulness right in this moment. So this way, we can begin to learn by the effects that our experiences have on us, and not be diminished by the habitual tendencies of the floods of judging ourselves, comparing ourselves. We actually have a kind of inner dignity in us to say, “Yeah, this coming back to this moment is good enough. It doesn’t need to be more.” We don’t need to be some sort of a special person to cross this. We are just wholeheartedly meeting the moment as best as we can.
So this is what I’m inviting for all of us to explore for today as we go through this sequence. We’re learning to step into the flow, staying with the flow of our experience, our life, unhurried. And then we’re also learning to be attuned or observant of the effect of the different forces in us, wholesome and unwholesome, and learning that those are characterizing the moment, but they are not defining you. I really love this teaching from Phillip Moffitt, this idea that momentary experiences are characterizing our life in the moment, but they don’t have to define us.
So see what you learn from this, and then we’ll continue tomorrow. Thank you everyone for your attention. Have a wonderful rest of the day today.
Sati: A Pali word that translates to “mindfulness” or “awareness.” It is the practice of remembering to be present with one’s experience in the current moment. ↩