This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Presence is not a Transaction; Wholesome qualities of mind (2of5) The Parami of Patience. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So, welcome. Good morning to most, afternoon in Ireland, I believe, Steph. Anyway, nice to see the chat and names and where people are. Happy to be practicing together.
So, find a posture. Take your time to attune to what little micro-adjustments are conducive for letting go. The posture that you feel satisfied enough with, that we can make a kind of truce with the imperfection of having a body.
You’ve likely taken quite a few conscious breaths over the course of a meditation practice, maybe a whole dharma life. And in this moment, we look for a way of breathing, just for maybe a few cycles, that signal to the deep mind that this moment is good enough to begin letting go.
The kind of frameworks and stories and models we have about our self and our life and our past and future… sure. It’s not even that they’re all wrong. We just notice that they require reiteration to keep being propped up. There’s some stress in them. There’s some relief in putting it down.
The worry in us says, “No, no, no. Not safe to put anything down ever,” as if our worry is what is keeping us safe. And we can come back to all of that. But for now, maybe the moment is good enough that we don’t have to track the landscape of threat and opportunity moment by moment. Instead, we can breathe. Can hear the sounds and the silence. Can attend to the restfulness of having our eyes closed. The restfulness of the exhalation. The restfulness of dropping the impulse to control life.
Even if in this moment the path feels hard, we can take deep consolation in the truth that the alternative to having a path, not having a path, is much, much harder.
Just receiving the moment, receiving in a kind of non-transactional way. Greed is transactional. Aversion is transactional. What would it be to trust the kind of moment as a medicine or teacher without trying to extract anything from it? Trust your nervous system.
It’s not that meditation takes its place amidst our life. It’s more like our life takes its place within the dharma. So we stop pinging to our life to check how meditation is going. Keep moving to surrender into the path, into this moment, into the wisdom and the love that keeps deepening.
Okay, it’s good to practice with you. I figure you all know how to meditate, so I just say random things. Trust that it fits in somewhere.
Anyway, Shinzen Young1 alluded to this in the sit. I was in a sweat lodge with a Lakota friend, and in the sweat lodge, the heat got quite intense. And she said, “I know this path is hard. I know this path is hard, but there’s something harder than this path. What’s harder than this path is not having a path.”
I started practice in a group that formed out of a Thích Nhất Hạnh2 young adult retreat. And what I remember of him was, I remember watching him walk and was kind of fascinated, like, what is this? Thích Nhất Hạnh would say, “The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and now. The question is whether you’re available to the kingdom. Our practice is to make ourselves ready for the kingdom so that it can manifest in the here and now. You don’t need to die in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, you have to be truly alive.”
And the main thing that came through in his movement, in walking from the dais out of the room, the main thing that came through to me was patience. And the very crystal clear recognition of, “I don’t have that.” But he made patience look so good. And he made my frenzy look so absurd. It just felt absurd to just rush out to the bathroom or whatever. All the frenzy, just in the light of that, it’s like, okay. It’s almost the nervous system being entrained by the model of another.
Patience. Not my peak pāramī3, but foundational. The Buddha said to comprehend dukkha4, to comprehend suffering, that takes patience. Patience.
Ordinarily, even very modest amounts of suffering set off many alarm bells in our system. And it rallies all of this urgency. It rallies all of this non-patience. Suffering is sort of startling and unbelievable. And to be patient with the complexities of being human is important.
We come to the path with a certain measure of confusion about our nervous system, about what deep happiness might look like, about what pleasure can and cannot do for us. And it’s very natural to try to impose some new kind of Buddhist order on our problems. But when we do that, it’s almost always a naive framework. When we kind of slot in our problems to the Buddhist concepts and try to tell that dharma story, there’s almost some naivete in it. And we have to be patient and receptive to suffering before slotting it into conceptual categories. It takes patience just to receive that. Let me not sort out my life, this pain, this ailment, this ache in my heart. Let me not sort it all out into this new Buddhist framework, but just let me be patient and receive.
To be patient with our path. So many problems arise out of this demand on very short-term return on investment mind states. And it’s true, sometimes dharma relief is instantaneous. Just one mindful breath or a few moments of mindfulness can change so much. We often feel like, oh, samadhi, stillness is so far away. But sometimes it’s like just a few breaths and something shifts. That’s real. But generally speaking, it is a gradual cultivation, and we cannot discern the goodness that is accruing. The goodness accrues beneath the radar of awareness. We have to be patient.
Ajahn Sucitto5 says the Buddha famously declared patience to be the supreme purification practice. He pointed not to physical asceticism, which he frequently spoke against, but to the restraint of holding the heart still in the presence of its suffering until it lets go of the ways in which it creates suffering. All the pāramīs contribute to the lessening and dismantling of that dukkha. But the specific quality of patience is to carry the heart through the turbulence of existence so that it no longer shakes, sinks, or lashes out.
Holding the heart still in the presence of its suffering. That’s the pāramī of patience.
Practice is about states and traits. A momentary state of mindfulness and the trait of mindfulness, the dispositional quality, the kind of set point of mindfulness. And generally speaking, states are valued insofar as they translate and harden into traits. When we enter practice, a lot of times there’s some kind of fetish about bliss or peace. It’s like, okay, this is not a state-based practice. No gold stars for states. There are moments of clarity or insight or love or ecstasy, bliss, whatever. Not dismissive of that, but they become kind of not a big deal. They are valued insofar as they develop into traits. And traits do not require effort to be maintained. This sense of, “I have to be mindful. I have to remember mindfulness. Am I being mindful? Am I being reactive or responsive?” It’s too much. We’re going to have to entrust ourselves to our good habits, right? How do we remember when we’re forgetting? We entrust our life to good habits.
And we have to be patient. Patient as states harden into traits. We have to be patient. You could say, as we come to love new things. The dharma is about loving what we’ve always loved, remembering that love, refinding it, and it’s also about coming to love new things. That takes patience.
When someone says, “I want to meditate each day, but I can’t,” what they’re asking really, in the end, and why there’s no simple answer, is, “How do I love something new?” When someone asks, “How do I stop hating myself, all the self-harshness?” they’re asking, “How do I love something new?”
And when we make an intention or a New Year’s resolution or something, we’re trying to value something new. But to love something new is not a simple thing. We know we cannot force ourselves to fall in love. That’s not a decision that we make. It’s not a simple in-the-moment choice. What we value, what we come to love, it grows over time through patience, through small gestures of commitment.
I like this from Agnes Callard6:
We can all think back to a time when we were substantially different people, value-wise, from the people we are now. We care about things we once did not care about. How did this change come about? The transition from indifference to love cannot typically be effected by way of doing any one thing. No matter the strength of my will, it does not seem that I can muscle myself into suddenly caring. To be sure, the path to valuing something sometimes includes momentary expressions of commitment: the moment when you say, “I do,” sign the adoption papers, or buy the one-way plane ticket to a foreign country. But these moments are themselves only part of the story, punctuating a longer process. Coming to value something tends to represent a deep change in how one sees and feels and thinks. Acquiring a new value alters the structure of one’s priorities by demoting or even displacing something one valued before. Such changes take time, over the course of which one has done many different things in service of value appreciation. The later actions are shaped by the small changes that the earlier ones have engendered, in such a way as to allow someone to slowly develop new priorities, concerns, and attachments. The process as a whole is not structured as a single moment of intention or decision at its inception.
The patience of coming to love new things. Coming to love the simplicity of letting go rather than the complication of clinging. That’s not a decision we make. We make small gestures in service of value appreciation, of valuing something new, of coming to love something new. We sit quietly. We sign on to YouTube. We go to a group. We reflect on goodness. We sit down each day. We have a conscious moment of suffering, of willingness.
And then we plant these seeds. It doesn’t seem like a big deal. Keep planting. Who knows what led to what? But at some point, there’s some clarity. Okay, I’ve lived my way into a dharma life.
I offer this for your consideration. Wish you well. May we be patient with our hearts and those of others today. And I’ll try to do that too. Let’s all keep each other honest. Okay. All right. See you tomorrow.
Shinzen Young: An American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. He is known for his algorithmic, scientific approach to meditation. ↩
Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022): A Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition. He was a major figure in the transmission of Buddhism to the West. ↩
Pāramī: A Pāli word meaning “perfection” or “completion.” In Buddhism, the pāramīs are virtues or qualities of character that are cultivated on the path to enlightenment. Patience (khanti) is one of the ten pāramīs. ↩
Dukkha: A Pāli word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism, referring to the fundamental suffering or unease inherent in all conditioned existence. ↩
Ajahn Sucitto: A British-born Theravada Buddhist monk of the Thai Forest Tradition. He was the abbot of Cittaviveka (Chithurst Buddhist Monastery) in West Sussex, England, for many years. ↩
Agnes Callard: An American philosopher and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. The quote is from her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. ↩