This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver, Dharmette: Uprooting vs Allowing. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Okay, hi folks. Welcome. It’s good to be together. I want to sit with you. Let’s just follow the silence. So find your posture.
Finding your posture, finding your suppleness and your strength. Just letting gravity have almost everything. You’re sitting, maybe some energy in the spine, but you just give the rest of the body and mind to gravity and the Earth.
Just exploring ways of breathing that induce some tranquility, this aliveness. It’s only in imagining that we are permanent that we begin to acclimatize to goodness, to take things for granted. But when we understand finitude deeply, just this breath is enough, satiating.
Don’t wait to let go. The time is now. Everything looks different in the wake of surrender.
We absorb the body blows of the past, the pull of the future. We absorb those impacts on our body, and they too can be a cause and condition for arriving. Meeting the intensity of the human condition without resorting so much to words, to control. Keep breathing.
And because it’s all a little too much without love, will you practice loving? And just that word maybe does something to the body and mind. Just abide in almost like a certain frequency, a body sensation called love.
I see in the chat that a Dharma friend, somebody I’ve known for many years, died this weekend, Kathleen Havland. And it’s kind of shocking to see that. Somebody with a complex medical history, but I did not know she was critically ill, if she was.
I just feel pulled to say something about her. I knew her over many years, and she would always come to me with very multi-layered dukkha1. She would kind of paint both of us into this corner where there was no space. But I knew enough, I had enough patience and enough confidence in the Dharma and in her, that I was not going to be completely seduced by this claustrophobia. She would stop, and then we would just start unpacking a little, and then there was more and more space, and she could feel that. So I send my love to her and hers. Yeah, thanks for sharing that.
Okay. So, a question was submitted on the text line. I’ll read it here:
“In formal practice, there’s a distinction between taking a more receptive approach to whatever thoughts are going through your mind (i.e., open awareness style) and taking a more directed approach, redirecting to an object. I understand this in the context of formal practice but find myself unsure of how to approach various mind states in day-to-day life, especially negative ones: jealousy, fear, rumination, anger, sadness. Some teachings seem to suggest a more active uprooting of unwholesome mind states, and others suggest generally resting in more awareness of whatever is going on without trying to actively change it. I assume there’s some discernment needed about which approach is best under given circumstances, but I would love it if you could shed some more light on it. Is it a hierarchy? Is bringing more receptive awareness to what’s going on ideal, but revert to a more active approach of changing the channel if you’re overwhelmed or unable to maintain awareness? Or is dwelling in less wholesome states to be avoided through active means? Or is it totally dependent on what the mind is actually doing? You should bear with it, understand it.”
Okay, a few principles come to mind. The first is, don’t fetishize technique. This is all kind of made up, weird words, doing our best. Some is precedented in the suttas2, but even that’s made up. There’s no real hierarchy. The Buddha knew skillful means. Suffering, yours and mine, that is in the end what matters.
Some of the evolution is just gradual. The Dharma is better at preventing fires than putting them out. And over time, we don’t get backed into corners in the same way. The intensely unpleasant, destructive mind states don’t arise with the same frequency and force. That’s a function of training.
The two of the Four Wise Efforts are restraining so that unwholesomeness doesn’t arise, and abandoning the unwholesomeness that has arisen. To my mind, those are things that actually happen before the fact. We develop the trait of restraint, not stoking desires that get us in trouble, but it’s on automatic in a way. We develop the trait of letting go, where renunciation feels more natural than holding on. The distance between suffering and ease gets so much shorter as we grow. The suffering doesn’t feel thick anymore. We might still suffer, but it feels only like a stone’s throw from peace or love. What I’m saying is that kind of emotion regulation becomes very second nature, and we don’t even notice the skill as we’re wielding it.
Now, it’s going to be jazz-like and improvisational. The Dharma is a lot of experimentation and improvisation. If you’re just interested, like, “What is this? What is happening?”—just that is kind of enough, you know, being genuinely interested.
So we want to be careful not to mistake subtle spiritual aversion for equanimity. Sometimes the teachings seem to give license to some measure of aversion. “Abandoning the unwholesome” sounds a lot like, “Let me get rid of that.” And maybe sometimes it’s okay, but we don’t want to mistake that for a true turning towards the equanimity. Equanimity is made more of curiosity than desperation. We actually don’t need something to happen to the unpleasantness. If you’re in that realm of bartering, that’s a sign, like, “Okay, I actually have to let go more deeply. And if I can’t, I need to do something else.” With equanimity, whatever the time course of the pain is, we can feel it turning into goodness. When we’re actually poised in some measure of equanimity, we are not afraid of what craving might do to our heart or our behavior.
We should be careful not to overestimate our equanimity. It’s very humbling just to have to say, “I don’t got it.” We have to be careful to distinguish “being with” from “marinating in.” When you’re marinating, kind of drowning in unpleasant unwholesomeness, there’s a lot of “should,” like, “I should be with this.” But when we marinate, it seems to prove that equanimity didn’t help. The truth is the experiment was just not run fairly.
Sometimes we do something like cognitive therapy on ourselves. We hear so much about allowing, but the Buddha relied extensively on active cognitive approaches. We have this whole vocabulary around equanimity, allowing, permission, and non-interference, but sometimes he is just very active. This is from the Majjhima Nikaya3, the Vitakkasanthana Sutta4. It says, “Just as a skilled carpenter might knock out, remove, and extract a coarse peg by means of a fine one, so too when one gives attention to some other sign connected with what is wholesome, then any unwholesome thoughts connected with craving, hate, and delusion are abandoned and subside. With their abandoning, one’s mind becomes steadied internally, quieted, brought to singleness, and concentrated.”
Sometimes we’re encouraged to reflect on the likely results of indulging states that get us into trouble—the word is rendered as “the danger” of following this thread. Sometimes we redirect the attention. It’s not such an active cognitive uprooting, but it’s a turning away, a constructive turning away. It’s not exactly the same brittleness as avoidance, but sometimes we just know that to pay attention to that is to drown in it. There are certain zones of the heart-mind, certain moments where the line between being with and collapsing into is incredibly permeable.
Sometimes it’s a more deconstructive, investigative approach. We may first need to listen deeply to the feeling. We can assume that there’s something in it, some kernel of information tangled up with all the delusion. We want to hear it. The feeling will not let go until we actually hear what needs to be heard, and then it can be put down. So maybe there’s a question for you to interrogate: “Okay, what is the information in this jealousy or this anger, this whatever?” It’s not 100% delusion, most likely. There’s something valuable to be understood. If we follow that wisdom, it will terminate in love. It will not terminate in jealousy or anger. But we have to listen.
Bound up with that kernel of something, some need that’s being testified to, we detect the nature of the clinging. Where did this pain come from? It’s not a theoretical thing. It’s like, what are the habits of mind that made very fertile ground for the arising of this pain? What deeper pain is this merely a symptom of? A doctor is more interested in the infection than its associated fever. What must be seen, recognized as empty?
Generally speaking, the clinging will fall into one of two categories—this is not an official list—but something like self and death. Those are related, but that’s another topic. The melodrama of “I-am-ness” and the urgency around security, fear, and protection.
We often have to do something like grieve the homelessness of ego. That self-aggrandizement in all its manifestations has to register as a dead end. It’s like, “I cannot land there.” We have to get that deeply, and then we can drop it.
As for fear, sometimes that simply has to be accommodated. Sometimes we just have to honor that, not move, not interrogate it any further. And sometimes we call on the certainty of death as a way of simplifying everything. Other times we do a little reality testing: “Okay, safe enough for now.” And then sometimes it’s like we know how the story ends.
One way of reading the suttas is that what we really want is freedom, is peace. In the end, that is what we truly want, and everything else is just a proxy for peace.
So we’ll stop here. I don’t know where that leaves you, but may even one sentence be of modest use in your practice.
All right, I wish you all well. I’ll be away at Crestone next week, so we won’t have class, but I’ll be back the following. Wish you all well.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain inherent in conditioned existence. ↩
Suttas: Discourses or sermons of the Buddha, which form a major part of the Pali Canon, the sacred texts of Theravada Buddhism. ↩
Majjhima Nikaya: The “Middle Length Discourses,” a collection of suttas in the Pali Canon. ↩
Vitakkasanthana Sutta: (MN 20) A discourse from the Majjhima Nikaya on the “Removal of Distracting Thoughts.” The speaker refers to it as “Paka Suta,” but the content described matches this sutta, which outlines five methods for dealing with unwholesome thoughts. ↩