This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Medt’n: The Leaning Heart; Dharmette: Buddhism Beyond the Lists (3/5): The Heart’s Orientation. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome, welcome and good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Hello. This is the third day continuing on this theme of Buddhism beyond the lists. And maybe some way we could understand this whole notion of Buddhism beyond the lists is something more than just intellectualization or memorization of information. Buddhism that includes the other parts of ourselves too. And today will be a little emphasis on the heart, maybe in a different way than we often talk about it.
So, but that is just a slight introduction. Again, meditation posture, if you haven’t already. Having a posture that expresses your intention to pay attention, but in an easeful, relaxed way. So can our posture have both alertness, a brightness, a brightness either literally or figuratively, as well as some ease?
Feeling the points of contact between the body and the sitting surface. Tuning into that feeling of pressure against the body, maybe against the back if you’re using a back rest. It might be in your seat as it’s in contact with the seat of the chair or cushion or couch. The back of the legs, chances are in contact with the sitting surface, and the feet. Feeling how they are touching the surface. Allowing yourself to recognize the support, this foundation upon which we’re sitting.
Inviting in some ease and relaxation. Allowing the jaw to be just a little bit slack. A reminder to have the shoulders away from the ears, shoulder blades sliding down the back. Letting the heart area, the chest area be soft, open in any way that makes sense to you now. Belly being soft. Hands relaxed. Noticing what the hands are touching without words. Just noticing whether it’s soft or rough, warm, cool.
In the same way, noticing the sensations of breathing, the experience as the body breathes. The experience of the body breathing might be in the chest as it expands and contracts with the breath. Maybe the belly as it moves, or the sensations at the tip of the nose as the air moves. Simply resting awareness on the sensations of breathing.
This is what minds do. We just very gently, simply begin again with the sensations of breathing. Nothing else to do, nowhere else to be. We are just here now, hanging out with the sensations of breathing. Maybe we notice sounds arising and passing. Okay.
And as we continue to rest, resting awareness on the sensations of breathing, is there a way you can allow the heart to lean toward what is beautiful, what is precious, what feels deeply worthwhile? It’s not so much that we’re using words. We’re allowing a movement or an experience, perhaps a feeling, a warmth. It’s perfectly fine if this is not clear. But can you be open, oriented towards maybe a subtle sense of yearning, longing?
And I’m going to drop in a question. No need for an answer. It’s just not something that we go and find an answer for, but more that we feel into. What feels most worthy of my heart? Maybe that language isn’t quite right. What feels like the fulfillment of my heart? This may be really subtle. This may not be clear. But whatever arises, can it be welcome? Including the absence of anything arising. Can that be welcome too?
When you’re ready, returning to the sensations of breathing.
Thank you. Thank you. So lovely to practice together. Sometimes I’m really struck by how meaningful it is to practice with others.
So for this morning’s little talk about the heart’s orientation, I’d like to start with a poem. And this poem, maybe some of you have heard it. It’s a pretty popular poem. Chances are that many of you have heard it. It’s called “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver.
Who made the world? Who made this swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean, the one who has flung herself out of the grass. The one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I’ve been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
This last line, right? “Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?” This is a lovely poem. And Rob Burbea, another dharma teacher, once described this poem as a teaching on devotion. Devotion to attention, or devotion as attention. In this poem, Mary Oliver doesn’t use overtly religious language. She’s not talking about temples or sacred texts or metaphysical beings or any of these types of things. Instead, she kneels in the grass and pays attention to this wonderful grasshopper and asks a question that we could say is really devotional: What are we doing with our lives?
And maybe we could reword that as, what are we serving? What are we bowing to? So we could say devotion is not always this striving or aspiration towards something. It can have a flavor of that. But maybe devotion is about receptivity, paying attention and cherishing and honoring perhaps just the ordinary, opening for the ordinary. Maybe devotion is this type of reverence for the is-ness, the thusness of things.
And to be sure, when we hear this word devotion, it can stir many reactions. This certainly was not a word in my vocabulary in the past. It felt foreign and unnecessary and frankly, suspicious. Many of you will know I’m a PhD biochemist. I have a graduate degree in Buddhist studies. You know, I’ve studied in an academic way all this Buddhist stuff and the suttas and done a lot of teaching on them. And so I had this orientation of using the mind to understand things, which to be sure is a helpful and powerful thing to do. But I’ve discovered, being an empiricist, I’ve discovered that the heart also needs to be nourished and supported.
Maybe that’s this way of this series I’m doing of Buddhism Beyond the Lists. This idea that practice is more than just acquiring more and more knowledge. If that were true, those of you who have been coming to 7 a.m. for a while would all be completely awakened, right? You’ve been exposed to a tremendous amount of information and knowledge you could have acquired. But I want to point to the heart’s orientation.
We could argue this is a false dichotomy between mind and heart, but I want to put that aside. I want to point to the way the heart aligns itself with what matters most. This can look like reverence or awe or maybe praise, maybe even longing or yearning. Or maybe sometimes, as we saw in this Mary Oliver poem, it just looks like paying attention with a tenderness, honoring and cherishing what is before us, what’s being experienced.
And I mean, honestly, all of us have this certain amount of devotion that’s getting expressed whether we are aware of it or not. There’s this way in which we are sometimes devoting our energy or orientation to success or status or something like this. Maybe family, love, awareness, liberation. So maybe the question is not so much if we are devoted, but to what are we devoted?
Because we could understand also devotion as this orientation, but also as this quality of offering oneself and opening and softening. And maybe like softening and letting go and putting aside, or not only focusing on this need to fix and to solve. But is there this way that we can give our energy, offering our care, offering our attention to something meaningful with the heart?
There’s this way in which devotion sometimes gets dismissed, and I know I certainly did for most of my life because somehow it’s associated with, or maybe I shouldn’t say somehow, I should just say devotion is often associated with some belief in some metaphysics. Maybe we have this idea that devotion is linked up with some metaphysical beings. But I want to say, and I’m inspired by Rob Burbea saying, it’s not the same as belief in any metaphysics. And in fact, I would say this whole notion of devotion is wide enough that it can encompass many of our inclinations or styles and personalities.
But I would say maybe the measure of devotion is, does it touch and nourish or feed the heart? Does it open us to compassion, generosity, the draining away of fear perhaps? Or a letting go of things having to be more and more. Devotion maybe is, can we allow ourselves to be oriented and surrendered and aligned with love and truth and care?
I’m not saying that we have to get rid of all the knowledge and the wisdom and what we might traditionally say is the mind stuff. I’m saying let’s not leave behind the heart. Let’s include devotion. Let’s honor and respect it. And I would say for me personally, it has shown up sometimes with chanting with others. Usually when I’m not leading the chant, but I’m just chanting with others. There’s something with voices coming together. And chanting is a way in which I feel like I’m definitely touching into something bigger than just myself.
There also has been a way in which I’ve been studying the suttas, and studying them deeply, like again and again and again, in a way that I could share them with others. I realized that maybe I didn’t recognize it during the studying of the suttas, but afterwards I felt like, oh, there was a certain nourishment of the heart. There’s this way of giving some devotion, some reverence to these teachings of the Buddha that touched me in surprising ways. Maybe I started thinking, okay, I’m going to analyze this and figure it out and use the mind, but then ended up being really touched by it. That’s part of the reason why I continue to do sutta study.
But I’d also like to connect this idea of devotion with some other concept that we hear about maybe more frequently in these Buddhist teachings, and that is with this idea of Saddhā1. Dharma teachers usually pronounce it as saddhā. Pali people pronounce it as saddhā, but who cares about the Pali? It’s often translated as faith or confidence or trust or maybe even inspiration. And in the teachings, it’s often what helps bring us into this path of practice. It’s something that maybe provides some of the motivation to step onto the path.
And it’s not meant ever to be a blind belief. Instead, some of you might know in the five faculties, right? Faith is always partnered with wisdom. Maybe in the way that I’m using language today, we could say the heart and the mind together, like balancing each other. Because faith without wisdom, we could say, is just being gullible. And wisdom without faith is dry, and it looks at everything as a problem to be analyzed and figured out. And that’s not what practice is really about.
So when we speak of devotion in the way that I’m using it today, it’s the same orientation as saddhā, faith, confidence. It’s this trust, confidence that greater freedom is possible. It absolutely is. And we can say that maybe this devotion or faith is associated with this letting go. The more we let go of having to do it perfectly right, perfectly understand it or solve it or analyze it, the more we let go of something like that, there’s this deeper way in which the heart can show up and speak, but speak without words. And the more we trust or follow the heart, maybe the easier it is to let go. And we all know that letting go, in whatever way is appropriate and available, is the way to more freedom. The second noble truth is about clinging. Letting go of any clinging is the way to freedom.
So maybe this way we could understand devotion as related to saddhā is the heart’s movement beyond the self, which is a mind-constructed thing, and this heart movement into alignment with what is perhaps most meaningful for us.
So I would say that devotion is wide enough to encompass many personalities and styles and inclinations. And maybe I can end here with Mary Oliver’s question:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Thank you.
Saddhā: A Pali word often translated as “faith,” “confidence,” or “trust.” In Buddhism, it is not blind belief but rather a confidence that arises from personal experience and understanding. It is one of the five spiritual faculties. ↩