There are a few other things to say about feeling tones.  

First, it may help to remember that feeling tones are not emotions like anger, joy, fear, grief.  Those emotions are not specifically singled out in Buddhism but fall under the heading of the Third Foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.  Feelings tones are simply the valance of feeling - the immediate positive, negative, or neutral tone that arises in response to a contact.

Last week we talked about feeling tones that arise from input from the body in the form of the five senses - sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations.  

In addition, feelings tones can have as their contact events that originate in the mind.  Here feeling tones link us to the third foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.  An example of a feeling tone that arises from a mind event would be when we suddenly have an unpleasant memory, or thought or imagining.  Or conversely, if we imagine how good chocolate cake would taste right now or how pleasant it would be to visit with family.  

These feelings tones are mind only events - starting with some arising in the mind that prompts a feeling tone.  These feeling tones can lead to more thoughts about the contact proliferating and expanding and taking us into more arisings that can each engender their own feeling tones, cascading one upon the next in a profusion of feeling tones each building or adding to the one before.  

These mind-induced feelings tones can be felt in the body as when the memory of an unpleasant event to come or just past is felt as an ominous feeling in the pit of the stomach.  Or the memory of the wedding of a loved one brings tears of happiness to the eyes.  

So feeling tones (vedana) link body and mind by responding to either bodily sensations through the five senses or mind events like memories, thoughts, fantasies, planning.  Whether from contacts with body or with mind, feeling tones are positive, negative, or neutral.  They arise in immediately response to an initial contact and are not under our control.  They may be influenced by situations which are under our control, but the feeling tone itself is not.  

The Buddha makes a further important distinction in our vedana/feeling tone experiences - the distinction between those which are worldly and those that are unworldly.  The basic distinction here is whether this contact and its ensuing feeling tone will lead us forward on the path - such as the pleasant feeling of deep meditation or will not lead us forward on the path such as a pleasant feeling that leads to craving chocolate.  Unpleasant unworldly feelings might include a sadness when it becomes clear to us that we are not awakened yet or perhaps when we did something unskillful we regret.  These feelings lead us forward in our practice.  Neutral unworldly feelings might be wisdom or equanimity - clear seeing and balanced view versus worldly neutral feelings of delusion or mind wandering.

So feeling tones (vedana) have an ethical component to them.  They help us know at any moment whether our thoughts and speech and actions are leading us forward on the path or not leading us forward.  It is reassuring to know that we have an ethical weather vane so close at hand.

This week we’ll listen to a different feeling tone meditation, this one created by Mark Williams, scholar, professor, researcher who co-developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and the new course "Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring feeling tone frame-by-frame”, an 8 week course similar in structure to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and MBCT which I mentioned last week.  

I’ve included a quote from from the website of the course again this week:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Freedom from suffering lies within us in every present moment and it begins with feeling tone.

Feeling Tone...bridge between mind and body

This week we move to the critically important second foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of feeling tone or Vedana in Pali.  

Feeling tone is our very first response/reaction to a contact through our 6 sense doors.  Remember the Buddha considered the mind the sixth sense door.  So through any of these portals, we can receive a contact - a sight, a sound, a physical touch, smell, taste or some mind event - a thought or memory or mind state.  We immediately get feedback through these feelings tones about that contact.  A large percent of these contacts are registered as neutral which for most of us is nothing at all.  Others register as pleasant - the scent of flowers, a gentle breeze on the face, deep blue water, a spring bird call.  And still others register as unpleasant - a loud screech of brakes, too bright light as we emerge from darkness, a sewer smell, hitting our funny bone. This initial feeling tone is most often a conditioned response - except for the more elemental ones such as loud noises or maybe funny bones.  And it is followed by other reactions.

Feeling tone occupies a unique position in our inner world - linking the information, the input from the outer world which is felt by the senses in the body (and mind) with our mind’s ability to receive and know the positive, negative, or neutral reaction that arises in response.  I call it a reaction because it is immediate - occurring in the first micro seconds of contact - and without moderation. When our minds register feeling tone, they kick into gear.  If the feeling tone is pleasant, the mind wants more and instructs the body to get it.  When the feeling tone is negative, the mind doesn’t want and, depending on the strength of the negative feeling tone, moves the body away faster or more slowly.  When the feeling tone is neutral, the mind registers it as nothing much and looks for happiness elsewhere.  

The important aspect of the reactions and responses laid out above is that the feeling tone, while a conditioned response, is automatic.  The response that follows - even as immediate as it is - is a choice. The choice is largely based on habitual patterns of attempting to satisfy our wants and cravings with immediate actions to obtain something, avoiding unpleasant contacts with evasion or direct opposition, or becoming distracted when it is unclear with mind wandering, fantasizing, searching for something pleasant - delusion.  

Mindfulness gives us a different choice.  

When we experience a pleasant bird call sound, we also experience and respond to the pleasant feeling tone that arises.  Then we begin to want, to crave, to take action to get more of the bird call and that pleasant feeling.  We stop and listen, cup our ears, hold our breath, and sometimes follow the sound deeper into the forest.  What we often fail to do is to turn inward and investigate that pleasant feeling.  Where is it arising the body?  How does it feel?  Expansive?  Soft?  Happy?  We may fail to notice the pleasant feeling turning into craving, even greed for more.  

Once that pleasant feeling has turned into wanting, the enjoyment has become anticipatory and in the future.  The pleasant feeling we initially had in the present moment of the sound has been transformed into a subtle suffering. 

In meditation, we can sit and notice the pleasant feeling of listening to the bird call and see how it turns into leaning forward into the silence for the next bird call and the feeling of disappointment when it doesn’t come right away.  With mindfulness we can enjoy the pleasant feeling, notice the beginning of the leaning in, release it and linger longer with the pleasant feeling.  We can be with the silence without the leaning forward for something to happen.  If the bird call returns, we can enjoy it.  If the silence remains, we can be content with silence and let it deepen.  

If the craving has progressed a little farther, we can notice the wanting and striving for more, the leaning forward, the tightening in the chest and we can let go right there.  Mindfulness can track these initial movements from expansion and softness to tightening and constriction and then mindfulness can investigate, learn how the suffering arose, then sit back, relax, and let go.    

Mindfulness can be introduced at any point in our experience.  But no where else are the forces of greed and aversion and delusion as weak as when they are first arising.  It is here at the feeling tone arising, the first breath of vedana, that mindfulness can be most effective, can interrupt the automatic habit patterns of suffering.

When I learned this on retreat at IMS many years ago, Guy Armstrong explained that vedana or feeling tone was a critical choice point in the chain of  reactions that lead to suffering.  Recently, its importance has grown in the field of psychology and mindfulness study to the point where Mark Williams, well known meditation teacher, researcher, and co-founder of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for prevention of depression, has created a new course which puts vedana squarely at the center of our investigations into the causes of suffering.  The course is called "Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring feeling tone frame-by-frame”, an 8 week course similar in structure to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and MBCT.   

This paragraph from the website of the course helps illuminate the quality and importance of feeling tone:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Tonight we will listen to Ven. Analayo’s guided meditation on feeling tone*.  This meditation deepens and widens with repeated listenings.  Once the meditator has become familiar with the guided meditation, it is beneficial to go through the meditation without the guidance taking time where time may be needed to explore more deeply the different arenas of feeling tone in the body.  

Freedom from suffering lies within us in every present moment and it begins with feeling tone.

*The mediation on Feeling Tone can be found on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website under Resources>Bhikkhu Analayo Resources.

Why mindfulness of death matters....

Was it only a week ago that a blizzard shut down the East Coast?  And now our fearless leaders have involved us in a war in the Middle East.

We’ve been exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a teaching we looked at last fall and now have returned to for a deeper look.  Why is this teaching so important?

When the young Siddartha Gautama who became the Buddha discovered the existence of aging, sickness, and death, he changed his life.  He gave up the comforts of life in the castle - security, beauty, sensual pleasures, position, career as head of his clan, even family, and went in search of a better response to what he had learned.  

What he discovered was awakening.  First he basked in the happiness of his enlightenment and reviewed how it had come about.  When he was persuaded that some people might understand, he went in search of his fellow travelers.  As he was walking along the road, he was met by a traveler who, noting his radiant countenance, asked him about his radiance.  The Buddha replied, I am awake.  The traveler hurried off without looking back perhaps fearing that this person was not only a nutcase but possibly dangerous to boot.   

But the new Buddha’s reply conveyed the essence of the fruits of the practice - why we all practice to this day.  To wake up.  To be awake, alert, clearly seeing, mind not ajumble with half-perceived thoughts and emotions, clouded by doubts and dark thoughts, endlessly pulled around by our desires and aversions.  He was awake, calm, peaceful, centered.  And thoughtful.  He realized he needed to be more subtle than to proclaim he was awake and expect people to immediately follow him.  He also realized that everyone he ever hoped to share the teachings with had to come to it from the same direction he had - from understanding suffering and wanting the end of suffering.  Thus, one of his first teachings was the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering and how realizing that truth deeply leads to the path out of suffering, leads to understanding the causes for suffering, that suffering can end, and the way out of suffering - the 8-Fold Path.

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness was the how of practice - how we practice to become free of suffering.  

The first foundation mindfulness is mindfulness of the body culminating in practices that bring us into direct contemplation of the fact of our own mortality, that this body is made up of interconnecting parts, of all the same qualities as all matter, and that this body is impermanent, will sicken, age, and die and when it dies, it will decay, crumble and return to earth.

Why is it so important to realize or understand the fact of death and dissolution of this human body?  

The answer lies in the fact that not being fully awake to our own mortality is largely responsible for our lack of clarity, our dark, jumbled half understood inner world.  We only need to have a near miss on the highway, or stumble on a set of steep steps or get a piece pf food caught in our throats to experience the spike of fear that tells us how we feel about dying.  Our settled stable life can be set a-jangle with a direct experience that threatens our lives.  Depending on a number of factors, our reactions can range from momentary upset to PTSD. 

But being awake is not about being in a state of terror.  To some extent, we already are there.  There is a field called Terror Management Theory.  On the one hand it sounds preposterous and on the other, it seems about time.  Existential terror is alive for everyone at some point in their lives - for some it can be held at bay until it can’t.  For others, it is more pervasive, closer to hand.

But one of the studies which is especially relevant today is that unacknowledged terror can have some extremely negative consequences.  This I learned from the course on Sattipathana I am taking with Venerable Analayo and can be found in his book The Sattispatthana Sutta: A Practice Guide.  Subjects were divided into two groups.  One group was driven by a graveyard everyday.  No mention was made of the graveyard, no attention was drawn to it.  They just drove by it every day.  The other group existed in identical circumstances except no drive by the graveyard.  In subsequent testing which involved questions of how much punishment or leniency fictitious offenders should be given, the group that drove by the graveyard recommended tougher sentences and less leniency than the group that didn’t get any graveyard exposure.  The implication seemed to be that the low level of exposure to death every day without any processing of what they saw or felt made the subjects less compassionate, perhaps more callous to the suffering of those being sentenced.

I’ve been a resister of AI from the beginning but I want to share what AI had to say when I looked up Terror Management Theory:

Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a social psychological framework proposing that human behavior is largely motivated by an unconscious fear of death. Developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski in the 1980s, it posits that people manage this existential terror by adopting cultural worldviews that provide meaning, and by building self-esteem.

Psychology Today +2

Key Aspects of TMT:

• The Problem: Humans are biologically driven toward survival but possess the cognitive ability to realize their death is inevitable, creating potential, constant terror.

• The Solution (Anxiety Buffers):

This overview may help us make a little sense of what we are living through right now.  In the past five years, the world has been confronted with a global pandemic larger than we have ever seen, a breaking point in global warming that suddenly made it clear to everyone through heat waves and huge wild fires on the one hand, and monster storms and droughts on the other that our world had lost the balance we took for granted for so long, and a shift in world view toward authoritarianism and intolerance. 

It has made me wonder how the world received the shocks of the Pandemic of 1917-8 and two world wars.  The McCarthy era, while bad, was probably one minor element of the aftermath.

It also made me wonder - and this is not scientific but intuitive - if, when the world is confronted with enough death and destruction, the reality of death and the vulnerability of all beings is finally realized by enough people that the arising of compassion and kindness overtakes the aversion and judgement and harshness that the unprocessed terror supports.  Maybe that’s more hope than intuition.  

Martin Luther King, Jr. said the arc of moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

But where does this leave us as meditators?  

Perhaps this.  The Buddha meditated as if his life depended on it.  Then he taught as if the lives of others depended on it.  Nothing less is at stake here. We have one precious life, one precious opportunity to wake up.  We’ve all allowed ourselves to go with the flow and to be lulled by the twin defense of “Not Me!” and “Not Now!”  And we’ve all had moments of clarity - this life is all we have.  This opportunity to wake up, to be awake is finite.  

And…and we have all had experiences of being awake, fully awake in this moment.  Perhaps what we lack is the confidence and the knowledge that it is possible for us too to be awake in more moments, to see clearly.  When we’ve had those moments, we understand those are the moments when we feel fully alive, with an energy and a love of life and of other beings that surpasses other more worldly pleasures.  When we are fully awake in this moment, we have a temporary experience of what the Buddha realized when he was enlightened.  

One of the words the Buddha used to describe enlightenment is “the deathless”.  Ven. Analayo has written about this deathlessness.  The realization of deathlessness is to attain a release from the fear of death, to no longer be held in its basilisk gaze, frozen to the spot.  

This is what is possible for us.  And the Buddha assures us this is so because he is a human, not a god, and that being awake is possible for all human beings.

Thus, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  The next critical step through this process of awakening goes through the second foundation which is feeling tone. The Pali word is Vedana.  It is the initial spark of positive, negative, or neutral feeling that registers upon contact with a sight, sound, sensation, taste, smell or mental input such as a thought, memory, mood.  

We will delve into this important topic of feeling tone and how it connects body and mind next. 

With an eye toward balance in practice...

People come to meditation and the Buddha’s teachings for a number of reasons.  Many of them involve suffering. A recent death, some disruption,  illness - one’s own or that of a close family member or friend.  And the overarching desire is for peace, for a sense of calm and ease, to be free of the clamorous voices of need, of want, or inadequacy when we can’t satisfy those needs or wants for ourselves or for others, when we can’t prevent the inevitable, when we can’t stop the suffering.  

Breath awareness practice is often the first practice we learn - the gentle awareness of breath entering the body, breath leaving the body.  Bringing the mind back from its wanderings to rest on this moment’s breath, this experience of breathing in and breathing out.  And we might learn to add a single word to keep our minds focused.  In. Out.  Rising.  Falling.  Budd—ho.  We might learn to sense how we breathe in new life on the in breath, let go a little more on the out breath.  We begin to feel this rhythm - breathing in air, life, energy, and breathing out tension, holding, suffering, just letting go, relaxing, allowing, letting be.  

And our bodies relax, our minds begin to let go, the misery and suffering begins to seep out of us.  We begin to feel peaceful, tranquil, serene.  

These past few weeks we have been exploring the first of the four foundations of mindfulness as taught in the Sattipathana Sutta.  And Indeed, mindfulness of breathing was the very first practice.  In conjunction with that, the Buddha taught mindfulness of the body in all the postures - sitting, standing, walking and lying down, and in all activities throughout the day - getting up from a chair, washing the dishes, dressing, walking to the car, driving.  Any activity we engage is can be mindfully held in awareness.

The next three practices in that foundational teaching of the Buddha have been a bit more challenging - mindfulness of the anatomical parts with an eye to their lack of beauty so that we don’t idealize the body and get lost in our own fantasies about it, mindfulness of the elements which helps us see how our bodies are made of matter symbolized by earth, water, fire, and wind just like all matter everywhere with the reminder that each of these qualities of matter is empty of a solid self directing the body and mind, is impersonal and is not entirely under our control.  The third practice which we will take up later is mindfulness of the body in death - the process of disintegration after death and a practice which reminds us that our bodies are impermanent, death is inevitable for all living beings.

These, especially the last, are challenging as noted above.  The Buddha wanted to wake up his students to the realization of the impermanence of life and how it applies to all of us.  He knew that we shield ourselves from our own inevitable ending with two main ideas - not me and not yet.  Both are powerful defenses against what we intellectually know to be true.  But the Buddha also wanted these contemplations to be done from the serenity of the mindfulness of breathing practice.  With this serenity as the base, the meditator would be able to loosen the bindings of desire and aversion, ownership and appropriation, and gain freedom from the weight of those delusions.

Nevertheless, those contemplations can be disturbing.  A sudden insight into the body as made up of skin, flesh and bones can be disorienting until we get more acclimated to seeing the body as it is.  Clear seeing.  We might lose our sense of calm and composure for a time, however, feeling unsettled or restless.  This is a normal part of the process.  

The practice is never straight-forward, unfolding in a straight line.  Tranquillity found is not to be owned or kept.  It is impermanent like the breath - coming and going.  We might have periods of calm where insights and revelations unfold.  Those may be followed by periods of confusion and suffering, doubt about ourselves, our teachers, and our practice.  I’ve heard it said that the periods of calm are islands of purity which prepare us to dive a little deeper into the sources of ignorance within us, to swim in the depths, and eventually come to the surface a little lighter and freer for having done so.

So it’s important to think about balance in our practice.  If we have engaged in the elements practice and are feeling out of sorts, disturbed, it might be useful to return to the mindfulness of breathing practice for a period.  Or we might engage in a compassionate body scan such as that of Christopher Germer’s body scan. https://chrisgermer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Compassionate-Body-Scan-Germer.m4a   Perhaps some loving kindness practice or hand over the heart compassion practice would soothe our minds and spirits.  

Tonight we’ll explore balance in practice - how do we recognize we are out of balance, can we allow that out of balance-ness to be?  Do we try to push away the disturbing thoughts and feelings or can we turn towards them?  What practice will help restore our balance without judging ourselves for being out of balance in the first place?  

These disturbances themselves are not in our control. We may feel responsible for them and as if we failed as a meditator for being out of balance at all, but it is helpful to know that these disturbances themselves are empty of a solid sense of self.  We did not will the disturbances into being and we can’t will them into not being.  But we can gently incline the mind towards peaceful practices of mindfulness and compassion.

Today I am drawing on Thich Nath Hanh for re-inspiration around breath awareness and mindfulness of breathing.  In my early days, I practiced exclusively with his gatas - verses of mindfulnesses especially the one he writes about below:   

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment!

I found remembering that practice and hearing his words on mindful breathing brought me back to the serenity of breath awareness practice.  The peacefulness in his heart comes through in these passages below and may remind us of the peacefulness we all wish for ourselves and each other.  

Mindful Breathing

Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. In Plum Village, mindfulness practice begins with mindfulness of our breath and our steps. It is very simple, but very deep.

As we breathe in, we simply become aware that we are breathing in, and as we breathe out, we become aware that we are breathing out. It can be very relaxing and pleasant to follow our breathing flow naturally in and out of our body. We may choose to follow our breathing at our belly or at our nostrils. As the air enters our body, we can feel it refreshing every cell. And as the air leaves our body, we can gently relax any tension we find.

Following our in-breath and out-breath brings us back to the present moment. We arrive in our body in the here and the now.

Our breathing is a stable solid ground that is always there for us to take refuge in. Whenever we are carried away by regret about something that has happened, or swept away in our fears or anxiety in the future, we can return to our breathing, and re-establish ourselves in the present moment.

We don’t need to control the breath in any way. We simply encounter it, just as it is. It may be long or short, deep or shallow. With the gentle energy of mindfulness it will naturally become slower and deeper.

Conscious Breathing

There are a number of breathing techniques you can use to make life vivid and more enjoyable. The first exercise is very simple. As you breathe in, you say to yourself, “Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.” And as you breathe out, say, “Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.” Just that. You recognize your in-breath as an in-breath and your out-breath as an out-breath. You don’t even need to recite the whole sentence; you can use just two words: “In” and “Out.” This technique can help you keep your mind on your breath. As you practice, your breath will become peaceful and gentle, and your mind and body will also become peaceful and gentle. This is not a difficult exercise. In just a few minutes you can realize the fruit of meditation.

Breathing in and out is very important, and it is enjoyable. Our breathing is the link between our body and our mind. Sometimes our mind is thinking of one thing and our body is doing another, and mind and body are not unified. By concentrating on our breathing, “In” and “Out,” we bring body and mind back together, and become whole again. Conscious breathing is an important bridge.

To me, breathing is a joy that I cannot miss. Every day, I practice conscious breathing, and in my small meditation room, I have calligraphed this sentence: “Breathe, you are alive!” Just breathing and smiling can make us very happy, because when we breathe consciously we recover ourselves completely and encounter life in the present moment.

Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

In our busy society, it is a great fortune to breathe consciously from time to time. We can practice conscious breathing not only while sitting in a meditation room, but also while working at the office or at home, while driving our car, or sitting on a bus, wherever we are, at any time throughout the day. There are so many exercises we can do to help us breathe consciously. Besides the simple “In-Out” exercise, we can recite these four lines silently as we breathe in and out:

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment!

“Breathing in, I calm my body.” Reciting this line is like drinking a glass of cool lemonade on a hot day—you can feel the coolness permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel my breath calming my body and mind.

“Breathing out, I smile.” You know a smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face. Wearing a smile on your face is a sign that you are master of yourself.

“Dwelling in the present moment.” While I sit here, I don’t think of anything else. I sit here, and I know exactly where I am.

“I know this is a wonderful moment.” It is a joy to sit, stable and at ease, and return to our breathing, our smiling, our true nature. Our appointment with life is in the present moment. If we do not have peace and joy right now, when will we have peace and joy—tomorrow, or after tomorrow? What is preventing us from being happy right now? As we follow our breathing, we can say, simply, “Calming, Smiling, Present moment, Wonderful moment.”

This exercise is not just for beginners. Many of us who have practiced meditation and conscious breathing for forty or fifty years continue to practice in this same way, because this kind of exercise is so important and so easy.

Hanh, T. N. (1995). Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. Random House. (pp. 8-9)

The body as earth, water, fire, wind....

In this first foundational teaching of the Buddha called The Four Foundations or Establishments of Mindfulness, the first of these is Mindfulness of the Body.  The body’s centrality in our meditation practice is evidenced by mindfulness of breathing which is almost universally taught in Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions alike.  Mindfulness of breathing is of course centered in the body and a number of variations of that practice off shoot from that - mindfulness of hands and feet or touch points or various body scans.  Some of these practices have the purpose of calming and healing, stabilizing, stilling the mind and body.  Some have a different purpose which is to wake us up to the realities of our bodies - that they will age, that they are vulnerable and bound to suffer sickness, and that they will ultimately die, are not permanent.  Along the way we learn that the body is in the process of constant change.  If there is a state we like, we can be sure that will eventually disappear.  If there is a state we don’t like, we can be sure that will eventually disappear.

Last week we investigated the first of three practices designed to calm our reactions to the body - the anatomy of the body - especially skin, flesh, and bones.  The purpose of the meditation was to loosen any idealization of the body, to contemplate the body as made up of anatomical parts and therefore get a little perspective on our bodies.  All human bodies have skin, have flesh, have bones.  We are united with other human bodies in these similarities.  To reflect on this body with dispassion, with calm contemplation, allows us to see the body more objectively - with less idealization and also less denigration.  The body is just the body.  Some parts may be appealing but that is temporary.  Some parts may be disgusting but that is an emotional reaction beyond the practical function of those parts.  The body is just doing its job of keeping us alive and not all of it is pretty.  This meditation allows us to let go of our fierce attachment to the body being a certain way and also let go of our aversion to the body being just the way it is.

The second investigation which we’ll do this week called "The Reflection on the Material Elements” looks at the body as made of elements - earth, water, fire, and wind.  These terms may seem outdated and esoteric but are very useful ways of looking at the qualities that make up our bodies and seeing how these qualities are common to all matter.  Our bodies are matter just like trees, earth, rocks, oceans, other animals.  The earth element represents the qualities of hardness, that which is unyielding or tough.  The bones of the body are the prime example but tough connective tissue comes to mind as well.  The water element represents qualities of wetness but also qualities of cohesion.  Nothing sticks together without water.  The third contemplation is the fire element - qualities of temperature, of heat and cold in the body which we mostly feel through our skins.  The fourth element is the wind element - the breath in the body but also movement.  

This meditation helps us reflect on these qualities inside the body and outside the body - in other bodies and in all matter.  The hardness of tree trunks.  Wetness and water in streams and lakes, cohesion in mud.  The fire element can be found in all warm-bodies animals, in rocks in the sun, but also the coldness of snow and icicles.  And the wind element surrounds us in every breeze, but also the movement of grasses, birds, clouds, branches. We can begin to see our kinship as matter to all matter.  We are a part of nature, of the universe.  

We can also see how nature/other objects of matter outside our bodies enter our bodies and become part of them - food, water, heat, air.  In fact, our dependence on these other objects of matter is complete.  Without food, water, air, warmth, we would perish.  

This meditation also helps us see more realistically how much control we have over our bodies.  Less than we think is the answer.  We have control over certain aspects of our movement and our activities but our bodies carry on the process of digestion, circulation, repair, elimination without our help.  In addition, there is a whole grey area of automaticity where we think we have control but a mechanism of habitual behavior has actually taken a lot of the doing out of our hands - like walking and tying our shoes, brushing our teeth, walking up and down stairs.  If we have to think about these activities and direct our bodies to do them, we’d still be telling each body part how to move in order to get dressed in the morning.

Such reflections can help us begin to see that our identification with the body as me is perhaps overstating the case.  It’s not that it is anybody else’s body.  It’s just that a lot of the body does itself.  We aren’t directing our breathing (99.999% of the time), digestion, blood flow and oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange, etc.  And when we look a little deeper, we realize we are not even directing our thoughts.  Speech flies out of our mouths and we realize we didn’t actually intend to say that.  We make a plan to go get the mail and end up cleaning out a closet instead. We might wonder just who is in charge around here?  

This contemplation can be challenging.  Reflecting on our own impermanence goes against the way most humans live.  Or animals for that matter.  So self-compassion is a helpful practice to remember when we feel resistance to letting go of the body (even in thought) or lessening our identification with it.  These practices are meant to be done over time and incrementally.  When we feel ourselves approaching a wall in our own ability to let go, we need to turn to self-care and more soothing practices, breath awareness, loving kindness and compassion, body scans which center on the experience of body in this present moment, sensations of pressure, temperature, vibration.  

Forcing ourselves to look at our own impermanence can stiffen our resistance to it.  

Some aspects are easier and more pleasant to contemplate such as our relationship to nature and to others.  When we see that all humans have similar bodies, it can help us connect to others, to have empathy for their struggles, to be in community.  And such connections can feed and energize us, can fill us with the abundance of love and kinship for all.  And compassion for our own vulnerable bodies, our own pain and suffering can spill over our boundaries and radiate out to others opening us to the shared endeavor of being human with other humans.

What the Buddha discovered for himself is that attachment to and identification with the body are impediments to freedom from suffering encountered on the path. These practices are skillful means to investigate and loosen these bonds

Ground Hog's Day...and the Body Scan

Today is Ground Hog’s Day.  And maybe the proverbial ground hog came out and saw his shadow.  He or she could.  It’s certainly sunny enough.  The question is whether his or her burrow is still buried under mountains of snow.  

An NPR discussion likened it to a modern day illustration of samsara.  A man wakes up and bumbles through a day and then has to spend eternity repeating that day to get it right before he can move on to another day.  The original script called for 1000 nights (Arabian?) narrowed down to 40 for Hollywood.  Nevertheless, a fairly lengthy undertaking reminiscent of many of our own struggles for real change in our lives.  

Those who took MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) know that body scan is the first practice introduced. The instructions are to lie on the ground or sit in a chair, to close or lower our eyes and begin to pay attention to our bodies starting with the left big toe, then the next toe and the next, moving our attention from body part to body part from toe to head paying attention to what can be sensed in each part - pressure- hard or soft, sensations and textures - rough or smooth, rigid or pliable, temperature - warm, cool,  vibrations, resonances, air moving on skin.  If there is no sensation, simply noticing that and moving on.  The practice was experiential and over the three weeks of practice, students became more sensitized to the variety of sensation that might be present in the leg or the upper arm or the belly or even inside the head.  Sometimes the experiences were thoughts or feelings, memories, fears, old injuries, grief about what was missing.  Certainly many of the thoughts were about body image, not liking this, liking that.  

Some people thrived on this practice - becoming more relaxed and more attuned to the body with each passing day, learning what the word embodiment meant from the inside out.  One teacher was famous for putting whole swaths of the class to sleep during his guided body scans. Others struggled to feel comfortable in their own bodies. 

This was the body scan developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 for MBSR.  The body scan predated JKZ, however, developed probably in Myanmar with the lineage of S.N. Goenka and taught in living memory by Goenka himself.  A more general body contemplation from which it was derived has roots in the Buddha’s teachings as in the Sattipathana Sutta in this way:

 4. The Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body

And further, monks, a monk reflects on this very body enveloped by the skin and full of manifold impurity, from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down, thinking thus: "There are in this body hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney, heart, liver, midriff, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, saliva, nasal mucus, synovial fluid, urine.”

Here “from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down" is thought to mean a comprehensive contemplation rather than a systematic scan developed by the masters of Myanmar and later by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  The experience of contemplating skin, flesh, and bones is more conceptual rather than experiential investigation of sensations but the purpose of rooting mindfulness in the body is the same.

Venerable Analayo introduced the topic of the origins of the body scan in this way:

This article explores the historical background to the body scan practiced in MBSR by tracing it back via vipassanā meditation taught in Myanmar to a particular interpretation of the third step in the canonical instructions on mindfulness of breathing. Although the body scan as such would presumably have been unknown in early Buddhism, its practice does appear to have developed from an aspect of perhaps the most popular meditation practice in ancient and modern Buddhist traditions: mindfulness of breathing.*

I have practiced the anatomical parts contemplation a number of times.  But it wasn’t until taking this Sattispatthana course with and as developed by Venerable Analayo that I more fully comprehended how different the practice was in MBSR from what the Buddha instructed in this teaching.  In the Sattipathana Sutta, the contemplation of the anatomical parts is less about the experience of different sensations in the body and more about bringing mindfulness to the different parts of the anatomy, mostly unseen and unfelt, and holding these parts - the pleasant, the unpleasant, the neither pleasant nor unpleasant in calm non-reactive awareness.  The Buddha called this section “Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body.”  The practice was intended to balance or offset the sense of desire the body evoked in the young monks - to bring a balanced view of the body to the celibate monks and to enable them to root their mindfulness in their bodies without getting carried away by desire.  

The idea of the practice for modern day practitioners is to gain a more balanced view of the body - tempering any aversion we may have to our bodies, how they look, how society judges them and calming any sensual cravings inspired by our bodies and the bodies of others.  In this practice we are invited to view our bodies much the way a farmer would view a bag of grains that he plans to sow: 

 Just as if there were a double-mouthed provision bag full of various kinds of grain such as hill paddy, paddy, green gram, cow-peas, sesamum, and husked rice, and a man with sound eyes, having opened that bag, were to take stock of the contents thus: "This is hill paddy, this is paddy, this is green gram, this is cow-pea, this is sesamum, this is husked rice." Just so, monks, a monk reflects on this very body enveloped by the skin and full of manifold impurity, from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down…”

Tonight we’ll practice the body scan in this style as developed by Venerable Analayo and found on his resources page on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.  Ven. Analayo simplifies the scan to three general body parts - skin, flesh, and bones.  A practitioner can expand upon these three general categories or not as suits their practice.

This practice and the two that follow - The Reflection on the Material Elements and The Nine Cemetery Contemplations (Reflection on Mortality) - are not generally taught in the west in Vipassana or Insight courses as they are powerful practices and can be uncomfortable and unbalancing without the firm establishment of mindfulness to monitor the impact of the practice and its effects.  Many  practitioners are better served gaining a basis of mindfulness of the body rooted in breath awareness or in experiential or sensory investigations of the body first.

We will follow this practice with other more nurturing body scan practices before moving to the next practice in the teaching. 

*Anālayo, B. Buddhist Antecedents to the Body Scan Meditation. Mindfulness 11, 194–202 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-019-01259-8

Mindfulness of the Body, the Anatomy...

Mindfulness as we have learned and discussed is the quality of being aware, of knowing our experience in this present moment.  It is not the same as consciousness as we can be conscious but not really paying attention to what we are experiencing.  So awakening to our present moment experience is our goal in practice.  In Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Jon Kabat-Zinn added that there is a quality of non-judgement to mindfulness.  Joseph Goldstein, esteemed meditation teacher and one of three founders of Insight Meditation Society (IMS) goes even further to say that mindfulness has a compassionate quality to it.  And mindfulness is about seeing things clearly, as they really are.  A judging mind is distorting that seeing.  

So the first foundation or Satipatthana to be explored is mindfulness of the body.  The mind can find stability and a sense of calm in mindfulness of the body.  When we cultivate mindfulness of the body and integrate it into our daily lives, we inhabit our whole bodies with awareness and can find a refuge and also a more intimate connection with what our present moment experience is - moment by moment.

And the very first practice the Buddha taught was mindfulness of breathing.  From Access to Insight, the English translation of the relevant passage in the "Sattipatthana Sutta:  The Foundation of Mindfulness":

And how does a monk live contemplating the body in the body?

Herein, monks, a monk, having gone to the forest, to the foot of a tree or to an empty place, sits down with his legs crossed, keeps his body erect and his mindfulness alert.[3]

Ever mindful he breathes in, mindful he breathes out. Breathing in a long breath, he knows, "I am breathing in a long breath"; breathing out a long breath, he knows, "I am breathing out a long breath"; breathing in a short breath, he knows, "I am breathing in a short breath"; breathing out a short breath, he knows, "I am breathing out a short breath."

"Experiencing the whole (breath-) body, I shall breathe in," thus he trains himself. "Experiencing the whole (breath-) body, I shall breathe out," thus he trains himself. "Calming the activity of the (breath-) body, I shall breathe in," thus he trains himself. "Calming the activity of the (breath-) body, I shall breathe out," thus he trains himself.*

The Buddha advised practicing this breath awareness practice internally and externally, arising and passing away, with a clear mindfulness that there is a body "to the extent necessary for knowledge and mindfulness,” and without clinging to anything in the world.  So the purpose of this meditation is to bring awareness to our internal experience of breathing, our awareness of the experiences of others breathing (external), the impermanent aspect of the breath (arising and passing away), with bare awareness of the experience of the breath (without add ons) and with detachment toward the breath and the experience of the breath.  The breath arises.  The breath passes away.  Without judging or desire for a certain kind of breath, the breath arises.  Without clinging, the breath passes away.  

The Buddha then urged mindfulness in all the four postures - sitting, standing, walking, and lying down - meant to cover all the postures of the body.  And he urged mindfulness in all activities - eating, resting, caring for the body, moving around, lifting an arm, talking with others.  

Then the Buddha introduced practices that would address various attitudes we all have or develop toward the body.  Perhaps the most pressing for teaching young monks was a practice to counter sensual desire.  Sensual desire is like a flame that pulls the meditator away from practice and into a fantasy world of the mind.  If only this, then I would be happy.  The fantasy is that true happiness can be found through sensual desire.  

So the Buddha taught the practice of meditation on the anatomy.  This is called The Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body.

This meditation on the anatomy has the purpose of countering the fantasies one might have about the beauty of the body when in the grip of sensual desire.  The anatomy is broken down into 32 body parts. Venerable Analayo simplified this practice into a body scan of three major body parts - skin, flesh, and bones - from which the rest can be added or not.  The body scan is familiar to MBSR grads as the first three weeks are spent engaging in a scan of the body part by part from toe to head or head to toe. 

The purpose of the body meditations contained in the Sattipatthana Sutta is several fold.  The mind can become trained to focus on first one area of the body and then the next improving the ability to stay present.  The mind contemplates different areas of the body and becomes more sensitive to sensations that are experienced there.  And the mind can experience the different experiences of liking or disliking, approving, judging, fantasizing about, elevating the body within the context of this meditation.  One might become aware of aversion to one’s own body.  Mindfulness can help us see these judgements as distortions added by messages from the outside world - media especially.  Or conversely one might become enamored of the body of self or another.  This meditation brings a more balanced view of beauty and repulsiveness to our view of the body so that we can become more detached, not clinging to anything in this world, not clinging to the beauty of our own bodies or the beauty in the bodies of others.  But also not gripped with revulsion toward the ordinary, messy processes that keep this body alive even into aging and sickness.  We can learn to let go of these judgments and simply see the body as this functioning foundation of our existence, similar to other bodies in that regard.  Comparisons to other bodies begin to fall away.  The body is simply a body.  

Ven. Analayo quotes the Buddha as urging us to see our bodies as dispassionately as one might study a collection of grains in a bag, simply, There is a shoulder, there is an arm…there is a body just as one might say, there is a grain of rice, there is a grain of wheat, there is a grain of millet.  

Tonight we’ll listen to the first guided meditation on the body - the anatomy of the body - offered by Ven. Analayo on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website.

Initially, the add-ons, the judgements, opinions, wishes, frustrations, desires we have about our bodies may surface in an active 

way.  But with repetition, our minds settle, extraneous thoughts become less frequent and we begin to see the body as just a body, the skin as just skin, flesh as just flesh, bones as just bones.  The experience will tend to become more neutral and perhaps more interesting as we open to what is actually there in this examination of the skin of the foot or the leg rather than the distortions of beauty ideals.  

We may become more aware of sensations in different parts of the body that are pleasant or unpleasant or neutral.  We can become more accepting of these differences - there is discomfort here, there is a pleasant sensation there, there is no sensation or only slight sensation in a third location.  We become more accepting that our feet might not be model perfect but they are feet and they get the job done.  Or if we are missing a body part, we can become more compassionate to the suffering of the body, more accepting of the loss and grateful for our continued existence.  We will also surely become more aware of the impermanence, the vulnerable nature of the body, and learn to be more accepting of that too.

And with the repeated practice of mindfulness of the body, we will learn to inhabit our bodies more fully throughout our days, in touch with our experiences through the sensations of touch, feeling, emotion, moods that come through the body. This embodiment helps us stay grounded and not so easily pulled, enticed, cast down by the quick silver passing of thoughts in our minds. 

For some, the body scan may be more problematic if, for instance, there is considerable pain or injury in one area or if there has been trauma in the body that activates when the body scan is practiced.  Here it is important to use our mindfulness to tell us how we are doing with the practice and, rather than blindly soldiering on if it becomes difficult, to discern difficulties and make a compassionate assessment about whether the practice is beneficial or not. The practice can modified or omitted in favor of one of the other body-centered practices if meditation on anatomy is triggering.  

*https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.010.nysa.html

MIndfulness in daily life?????

In many ways this has been a tumultuous time and part of what I having been doing is to engage in vigils, in visibility campaigns, and in actually organizing an event to protest ICE on our streets and to remember the many people, many fellow human beings who have been killed, died in custody, and been disappeared by this unjust, violent, undisciplined, and misguided group in our federal government.

These recent events and others like them throughout the year lead us to wonder how we can be dedicated practitioners of the Buddha’s teachings and relate in wholesome ways to the difficult times we live in.

I am currently listening to the teachings on the Satipatthana Sutta given by renowned Buddhist scholar, teacher, practitioner, Venerable Analayo.  This is familiar territory for me as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness is the basis of most of the retreats I have ever sat.  These teachings are famliar to many others as well as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness formed the backbone of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course.  In that context, the teachings had been adapted to omit the Buddhist references as it was believed (and was true in 1979) that Buddhist references would “scare off” folks.  In this past year we have visited these teachings again in these pages from the Buddha’s point of view referring to the text of the Satipatthana Sutta as found in the Pali Canon. 

So, much of what the Satipatthana Sutta is familiar to me.  However…

First, this is a deep teaching and with every pass something new can be learned, some new understanding of the path from suffering to freedom can be gained, some deepening of practice into more of what we already know.  Venerable Analayo has spent considerable time and three books learning and investigating this teaching and has come to a new understanding on how to integrate this teaching into a path of practice. 

Second, the course material asked us to consider how our practice is integrated into our daily lives.  Practice on the cushion, or walking meditation, or any other form of formal practice is practice dedicated to the cultivation of mindfulness beyond all else.  Daily life is what happens as soon as we get up off the cushion or bench, leave our meditation spot and go make our coffee or whatever else we do.  

And as much as meditation teachers can urge us to maintain continuity of awareness, off our awareness goes as we slip back into the tasks we have before us.  

Venerable Analayo urges us to remember that this forgetting to be mindful is not under our control.  Does that sound familiar?  Most of us have heard this in MBSR or in almost any retreat on mindfulness.  Mind wandering is not under our control.  And you might remember its corollary that waking up to the wandering mind is also not under our control.  But what happens when we do finally wake up is very much our decision to make.  Do we stay mindful?  Or allow our minds to slide back into the slipstream of living life while not paying attention?

If we are to integrate our practice into our daily lives, which many of us have attempted and been somewhat successful at from time to time, how do we go about being mindful more of the time?  Forget being mindful all of the time.  That just isn’t going to happen.  Some of the time, like when we stumble on the curb, have one of those near misses on the highway, watch a mother snatch her child away from its beeline toward the street, mindfulness is no problem.  It’s there – fully and completely, with pounding heart and wide-eyed breathlessness.

How do we nurture our mindfulness so that it arises more often in normal, non-emergent, daily life - when we’re walking through our homes, shopping, paying bills, cooking, showering and taking care of our bodies?  And even more difficult, how do we stay present and mindful when we’re talking on the phone, texting, having lunch with friends, returning emails, having a disagreement with a family member?

To step back a bit, do we know what this mindfulness will look like?  And do we fully understand that being more mindful can help reduce our stress and suffering?

This week I confronted the question about integrating practice with daily life.  How much was practice integrated into my daily life now?  How would I increase it?

I found my first answer to the questions was I don’t know.  It really is outside my control. I know I am mindful at times throughout my day.  If I have an emotional reaction of fear or irritation or anger or even joy, I am usually mindful. So how come I’m not clearer about the moments I’m mindful and the moments I’m not?

This morning an insight came to me. 

It was simply because while I might be mindful of seeing a sight, hearing a sound, feeling a sensation, even thinking a thought, the moments or experiences I best remember as mindful moments are the times when I am not just aware of an object, but I am also aware of being aware.  Awareness turned inward.  Aware of the experience of awareness itself.  

The Pali word sati is about remembering.  When we are aware and alert, when we pay attention, we are more fully experiencing that present moment – uncolored by thoughts and opinions, memories or expectations (or we are also aware of all these distorting internal inputs).  When we more fully experience the present moment, we see more clearly.  We understand more fully what actually is and what we are adding to it.  And because of our heightened attention, we have a clearer, more accurate experience of that moment suffused with kindness and compassion and retained as a clearer, kinder memory.  This clear seeing and clear, compassionate remembering allows us to make wiser choices in our current and future actions.

We will explore the many ways we can strengthen the presence of mindfulness in our every day lives in the coming weeks.

I am deeply grateful to all of you for your support of my ability to share the Buddha’s teachings.  It has been a joy to share these teachings and to know that many of your lives have been profoundly changed by learning and practicing what the Buddha taught.  That I could be a part of the dissemination of the teachings at this place and time in history has been a precious gift to me. 

My life has changed around me, has moved into a new phase. This happens.  You may recognize it.  One of my closest friends, an anchor for me and many others, is no longer in my life.  She has left a huge hole in the lives of her community of friends and we are all adjusting.  The waters flow toward the sea.  The truth of impermanence has temporarily stunned with its brilliance and clarity.  And I for one need to spend some time updating my understanding of my days that I can flow more easily on these waters.  

Just as the seasons of the year are suspended in the shortest days, the darkest nights before the light returns, just as each breath is suspended at the end of the out-breath in a stillness born of boundless space before the next in-breath begins, the seasons of our lives come to the briefest of standstills, the end of something, the beginning of something else.  Can we feel it?  Enter into it?  Suspend all thought, effort, struggle?  Listening, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado says, on the rim of vast silence?

Has My Heart Gone to Sleep?

Has my heart gone to sleep?
Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped work, the waterwheels
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?

No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming - 
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of vast silence.

~~ Antonio Machado

Silent night...

The holiday season is now upon with all its divergent energies.  The winter solstice has arrived and the season is suspended in a balance.  Nothing is actually reversing in the physical world.  The earth is still on its 23 degree axis, spinning more or less around its own magnetic poles.  It still moves through space on its elliptical journey around the sun.  All amazing facts we've learned about our world.  Other planets in our solar system continue to do the same at their own rates, on their own tilts, each one reaching out with its gravitation pull to affect each of the others.  And yet the effect here on earth is that the days get shorter and shorter, finally reaching a nadir, a point of stillness for a pause of some days (which isn’t really a pause, just that the increments of change are less than a minute), until slowly, almost imperceptibly, the length of days begins to increase again - first by a minute, then two, three, four.  Our experience of it is quite dramatic, that the days get shorter and shorter and then reverse and get longer and longer.  Yet the movement of the planets continues forward in an elliptical pattern.  

And into the still point in the seasons, all over the world our various cultures and religions have plunked down the pagan Solstice, the Christian Christmas (even though Jesus was apparently born in what we know of as July), the Jewish Hanukkah, and the African American kwanzaa, all brightening the darkness with light and celebration that serve to distract us from the night.  I sometimes feel the frantic activity around the holiday season is akin to primitive peoples going out with drums and noise-makers, fires and sacrifices, to reach into the inky darkness and will the light to return by desperate wanting and sheer volume.

These movements of the planets that change our days and nights remind us how vast are the forces of nature that create the conditions for our lives.  

The effect of all these celebrations is a great coming together of friends, of families, of communities.  Gift giving binds us together with generosity and gratitude.  Cooking and breaking bread together, creating complex meals with sumptuous Yule logs or pecan pies or decorated Christmas cookies please the senses and create an atmosphere of plenty and contentment.

While we can easily see how all the celebrations get thrown out of balance by the need to make profits at Christmas and the greed that can overwhelm the nobler forces of the holidays, it’s perhaps helpful to come back to what we love about the holidays and keep the twin wholesome qualities of generosity and gratitude in mind.  

We are grateful for many things - our families, our friends, our communities, our pets, our homes, our safety, our earth, air, water, food, for the gifts, for the celebrations, for moments together.  We offer those we care about presents, celebrations, song, colored lights, invitations.  We make donations to organizations in order to help brighten the lives of beings around the world, to ease the suffering, to comfort and help sustain.  Our caring in this season and throughout the year is why this world works as well as it does.  And it does work as well as it does.  

It is up to each of us to offer our hearts and compassion and generosity and caring to the world - near to us and far away.  The beautiful thing is that we want to do that.  Our hearts are tender and responsive and can be moved by the plight of our friends and neighbors and also by those on the far side of this round earth tilting on its 23 degree axis, spinning around its magnetic poles, and flinging itself through space on an elliptical journey around the sun.  Millions and millions of people are giving and sharing, comforting and caring, raising our voices in song, cooking meals, decorating cookies and homes, giving clothes and money, greetings and love to as many beings as we can during the stillness of this season and then later throughout the year-long mystery of movement.  It is the best of us.  And we can feel that quality of love and good will spilling forth from us.  We can feel it especially strongly in this suspension, this stillness, this emptiness, this vast space of being.  

That emptiness allows us to open to spaciousness, to include more and more beings in our widening hearts, to contemplate the idea of good will to all.

For nestled in the heart of all religions, all celebrations, all contemplative practice is the strange and beautiful, uplifting and transformative notion of good will to all and peace on earth.

I wish you all a beautiful holiday of connection - first with yourself and then in ever widening circles, with all beings.

Beginning again..

In January through the beginning of March, I myself will be taking Venerable Analayo’s 8-week course on the Sattipathana Sutta - or the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  These four foundations are Mindfulness of the Body, Mindfulness of Feelings, Mindfulness of the Mind, and Mindfulness of the Dharma (or the way things are).  We explored this teaching last year and earlier this year.  I always intended to go through it with you again because it is a life long teaching which deepens as our practice and understanding deepens.  So this will be a wonderful iopportunity for all of us to delve into the Four Foundations of Mindfulness again - with the understanding of one of our great teachers, scholars, and practitioners in the background.  

The opportunity and the invitation here both for those of you who are familiar with this teaching and those who may have missed all or part of the previous teachings is to start over, to begin again at the beginning and go all the way through exploring the very foundations of mindfulness - both in the teaching itself and in our own experience of mindfulness - as Andrew Olendzki wrote last week -  “investigated moment by investigated moment.”  

T.S. Eliot’s famous lines from “Little Gidding” also come to mind:  

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."

Many of you who took MBSR first learned of mindfulness of the body, of feelings and of the mind during that course.  Mindfulness of Dharmas was not called that in MBSR, of course.  Nevertheless, mindfulness of hindrances, of the enlightenment factors, and of the four Noble Truths also were part of the MBSR experience. 

This Sattipatthana teaching is fundamentally a teaching about how to practice mindfulness, how to bring mindfulness to every aspect of our experience.  The field is vast and the task can be daunting but the experience is rich and the practice fruitful.  And this Sattipatthana Sutta is the clearest, most complete teaching in the entire Pali canon (body of teachings) on how to understand and enlarge our practice of mindfulness.  This deepening of mindfulness goes to the very core of our practice and of our being as Andrew Olendzki made clear in the last week’s teaching.

And so we are cloaked in igno­rance and tied to craving; and we are also incapable of discerning a beginning or an end to the flowing-on known as saṃsāra (Samsara). Taken as a whole, this passage is laying out the nature of the human condition and the limitations of our ability to see the impermanence of our own ex­perience. It shows how, from one mo­ment to the next..., we are compelled to move on and on and on, continuing to construct and inhabit our world. And both the be­ginning and end of the entire process are entirely beyond the capacity of our minds to conceive...

So this passage sets the stage for us…No story is going to help us much in figuring out what we’re doing here. All we have is what is right in front of us, and that is obscured by the ignorance and craving we continue to manifest.

But this is by no means an insignificant starting point. The beginning and end of the process might be unknow­able, but we can know what is present to our immediate experience. Since there is no point in wasting energy on speculation about origins or destinies, our attention is best placed on investi­gating the present and unpacking the forces that keep it all flowing onward. This is really where Buddhism starts and where it thrives—in the present moment. We have no idea how many moments have gone before or how many will yet unfold—either cosmically or individually—but each mo­ment that lies before our gaze is, poten­tially, infinitely deep.

The critical factor is the quality of our attention. If a moment goes by unnoticed, then it is so short it might not even have occurred. But if we can attend very carefully to its passage, then we can be­gin to see its nature. The closer we look, the more we see. The more mindful we can be, the more depth reality holds for us.

The Buddhist tradition points out some of the dynamics of the present moment—its arising and passing away, its interrelatedness to other moments, its constructed qualities, the interde­pendence of its factors—and then we have to work with it from there. The only place to start is the only place to finish—in this very moment. And that of course is why the experiential di­mension to Buddhism—the practice of mindful awareness—is so crucial. You can’t think your way out of this. You just have to be with the arising and passing of experience, and gain as much understanding from the unfold­ing of the moments as you can.

Step by step, investigated moment by investigated moment, the illusions that obscure things and the desires that distort things will recede as they yield to the advance of insight and understanding. In this direction lies greater clarity and freedom.

**"The Context of Impermanence" (Insight Journal, Fall 1999) https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/the-context-of-impermanence/. 

Impermanence...

In Insight Meditation, investigation of our experiences in each moment as they present themselves to us through our six senses (five sense and mind in Buddhism) is key to developing insight and liberation.  So we investigate it all - sights, sounds, bodily sensations, smells, tastes, and mental arisings which encompasses every mental and emotional experience we have, thoughts, feelings, moods, mind states, memories, fantasies, projections, and on and on… 

Every single one of these experiences has three characteristics - impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not self.  This writing will concentrate on  impermanence bringing in an introduction by Normal Fischer, poet, essayist, and Soto Zen Buddhist priest, and a deeper exploration by Andrew Olendzki, Buddhist scholar, author, practitioner, and professor at Lesley University and the director of its graduate program in Mindfulness Studies.  

We all have some understanding of impermanence.  The evidence is all around us.  Breezes arise, get stronger, cease, begin again.  The sun rises, passes through the sky, and sets.  Our hearts beat and pause, beat and pause. New Year’s Eve marks the passing of another year, the beginning of another.  

As Norman Fischer points out in  his Lion’s Roar article “Impermanence is Buddha Nature,”  "Practitioners have always understood impermance as the cornerstone of Buddhist teachings and practice. All that exists is impermanent; nothing lasts. Therefore nothing can be grasped or held onto. When we don’t fully appreciate this simple but profound truth we suffer, as did the monks who descended into misery and despair at the Buddha’s passing. When we do, we have real peace and understanding, as did the monks who remained fully mindful and calm.

As far as classical Buddhism is concerned, impermanence is the number one inescapable, and essentially painful, fact of life. It is the singular existential problem that the whole edifice of Buddhist practice is meant to address. To understand impermanence at the deepest possible level (we all understand it at superficial levels), and to merge with it fully, is the whole of the Buddhist path. The Buddha’s final words express this: Impermanence is inescapable. Everything vanishes. Therefore there is nothing more important than continuing the path with diligence. All other options either deny or short-shrift the problem."

Andy Olensky invites us to share in his exploration of impermanence, anicca**

"Let’s start by recognizing the roots of this word, anicca. Like many other important words in the Buddhist vo­cabulary, it’s constructed as a negative. The prefix “a-” reverses its meaning, and what is negated is the term nitya in Sanskrit or nicca in the Pali spelling (the two languages are very similar). This word nicca means everlasting, eternal, unchanging. In what sense was the word “permanent” being used in ancient India? What exactly were the Buddhists negating?

In the intellectual environment in which Buddhism evolved, the concept of something being stable and lasting was very important. Many religious traditions of the world take this view: clearly the world of human experi­ences is constantly changing, the data of the senses and all they reveal is in constant flux, but underlying all this change surely there must be something stable, something that it all rests upon…

This idea works on both the micro-cosmic and the macro-cosmic level. There is a sense that all the way out there, at the very limit of this world or world system, there is something per­manent (nitya) from which this world emerged—Brahman or God. And all the way in here, deep in the innermost world, there is also something stable—the soul or Self. In the profound mysti­cal intuition of the Upanishads these two are not separate, but are two mani­festations of the same reality....

This is the background against which Buddhism was working. And the Buddha, with his several excursions into the nature of human experience, basically came to the conclusion that this is an entirely constructed concept. The claim of stability articulated in these traditions is really just an idea that we project onto our world; it is not to be found in actual experience. So one of the principle insights of the whole Buddhist tradition is that the entire world of our experience—whether the macro-cosmic material world or the micro-cosmic world of our personal, inner experience—is fundamentally not per­manent, not unchanging. Everything is in flux...

Let’s be­gin by looking at this issue from its broadest perspective, as an idea of change or non-change, then gradu­ally, [moving] from the level of con­cept to the level of experience, becom­ing intimate with the details of look­ing at change in our experience, mo­ment after moment after moment...

A natural feature of all our experi­ence is that it’s accompanied by an af­fect tone or feeling tone. Everything we experience generally feels pleasant or unpleasant. Sometimes we can’t tell whether it’s one or the other, but that too is a natural part of our sensory ap­paratus. Unfortunately, because we have this underlying tendency for gratification, we want—we crave—for the pleasurable aspects of our experience to continue. We also have an un­derlying tendency to avoid pain, and so we yearn for the painful aspects of our experience to stop or to remain un­acknowledged. So this force of crav­ing, in both positive (attachment) and negative (aversion) manifestations, arises naturally (though, as we shall see, (not necessarily) from the appara­tus of our sensory experience.

The problem is that, when this crav­ing is present in experience, it prevents us from being authentically in the mo­ment. For one thing, this craving impels us to act, and in acting we fuel the pro­cess of flowing-on (Samsara).  It also prevents us from seeing our experience “as it is,” and inclines us to view it “as we want it to be.” This, of course, contributes to a sig­nificant distortion of reality. The wanting itself is the fetter, the tie, the attachment. Because of our wanting to hold onto the pleasure, and our wanting to push away the pain, we are both tied to craving and tied by craving.

You might think of it as a ball and chain that we’re dragging around with us. As long as we’re encumbered by this burden, it is going to influence how we confront each moment’s experience. The intriguing thing about this ball and chain, however, is that it’s not shackled to us—we clutch it voluntar­ily. We just don’t know any better.

It is important to recognize the way in which these two factors—ignorance and craving—support and reinforce one another. If we understood that the objects we cling to or push away are inherently insubstantial, unsatisfying, and unstable, we would know better than to hang onto them. But we can­not get a clear enough view of these three characteristics, because our per­ception of the objects is distorted by the force of our wanting them to be the source of security, satisfaction and substance. If we could let go of want­ing experience to be one way or an­other, we could see its essentially empty nature; but we cannot stop wanting, because we don’t under­stand these things we want so much are ephemeral.

And so we are cloaked in igno­rance and tied to craving; and we are also incapable of discerning a beginning or an end to the flowing-on known as saṃsāra. Taken as a whole, this passage is laying out the nature of the human condition and the limitations of our ability to see the impermanence of our own ex­perience. It shows how, from one mo­ment to the next and from one lifetime to the next, we are compelled to move on and on and on, continuing to construct and inhabit our world. And both the be­ginning and end of the entire process are entirely beyond the capacity of our minds to conceive...

So this passage sets the stage for us…No story is going to help us much in figuring out what we’re doing here. All we have is what is right in front of us, and that is obscured by the ignorance and craving we continue to manifest.

But this is by no means an insignificant starting point. The beginning and end of the process might be unknow­able, but we can know what is present to our immediate experience. Since there is no point in wasting energy on speculation about origins or destinies, our attention is best placed on investi­gating the present and unpacking the forces that keep it all flowing onward. This is really where Buddhism starts and where it thrives—in the present moment. We have no idea how many moments have gone before or how many will yet unfold—either cosmically or individually—but each mo­ment that lies before our gaze is, poten­tially, infinitely deep.

The critical factor is the quality of our attention. If a moment goes by unnoticed, then it is so short it might not even have occurred. But if we can attend very carefully to its passage, then we can be­gin to see its nature. The closer we look, the more we see. The more mindful we can be, the more depth reality holds for us.

The Buddhist tradition points out some of the dynamics of the present moment—its arising and passing away, its interrelatedness to other moments, its constructed qualities, the interde­pendence of its factors—and then we have to work with it from there. The only place to start is the only place to finish—in this very moment. And that of course is why the experiential di­mension to Buddhism—the practice of mindful awareness—is so crucial. You can’t think your way out of this. You just have to be with the arising and passing of experience, and gain as much understanding from the unfold­ing of the moments as you can.

Step by step, investigated moment by investigated moment, the illusions that obscure things and the desires that distort things will recede as they yield to the advance of insight and understanding. In this direction lies greater clarity and freedom.

**"The Context of Impermanence" (Insight Journal, Fall 1999) https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/the-context-of-impermanence/. 

Letting go...

Ajahn Chah writes: “If you let go a little, you will find a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you will find absolute peace and tranquility.”

Among Buddha’s earliest teachings was the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the Noble 8-fold path which is the path from suffering to liberation.  

The cause of suffering in the second noble truth is attachment, sometimes called greed, sometimes craving or wanting, sometimes striving.  It has been illustrated as a closed fist. We have all known moments of grasping and moments of letting go.  In our national scene recently, we may have been aware of our own deep wanting for things to be different from what they are. As meditators, we may have also experienced this deep wanting and the frustration of it as intense suffering.  And many of us have turned that wanting into action.  If this action is wise, it can be freeing.  It allows us to do what we can to bring a different energy to the situation.  We get caught, however, when we have expectations of a certain outcome.  Certainly, we may wish for a certain outcome but our expectations are what cause us sorrow.  If we can’t get what we want when we want it, we will suffer.

There are so many areas where this wanting comes to the fore.  Certainly around our basic survival needs - air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, shelter from the elements, from dangers.  These are healthy needs and satisfying them is essential.  But these needs and their satisfaction must also be in balance. Wanting too much food, too much in shelter and safety can lead to suffering of a different kind.  

This applies to our meditations as well.  It is wholesome to want good things from our meditation, to want to be free of our entanglements of mind and heart, to be free of suffering.  And yet, we can get out of balance in our meditation by striving too hard which is a common pitfall for meditators.  The mind can be so stubborn, so flighty, so uncontrollable that we may bear down harder to concentrate on our breath, striving to force our minds to stay with the meditation object.

Ajahn Passano in his book on metta called Abundant, Exalted, Immeasurable, says it this way: “For the mind to settle, there needs to be an application of interested energy and ease.  If there’s too much forcing, it creates tension; if it’s too loose, the mind gets nebulous and cloudy and drifts. We need to balance the mind by working with what is.” (p.6)  He further advises, “Pay attention to what the mind is doing.  Balance is an important quality to bring to the practice.  How can you best sustain the continuity of awareness?  That’s where the mind becomes peaceful.  It doesn’t become peaceful just by forcing the mind onto the object and holding it there.  Even it you succeed in doing that, it doesn’t actually make the mind that peaceful.”  

So relaxing, allowing, being easeful, letting go of results, accepting - these are all words and expressions we can use to talk ourselves into letting go a little.  If we let go a little, we get a little peace.  We all know how this feels.  When we let go of our anger towards a family member… or let go of our desire to have what someone else has…or finally see through an obsessive thought pattern and let it go ….    We get a little peace.  And the peace feels wonderful.  And we might want more of that peace and begin striving to let go until we see ourselves grasping again.  Then we can sit back and allow just as much peace as there is.

This great attachment and letting go is nowhere more stark than in the dying process.  Wanting to live is hard-wired into our DNA since we were the smallest amoebae.  All beings want to live; all beings want to be happy, to be comfortable, to be peaceful; beings of all kinds don’t want to die.

Part of our practice of letting go is learning to be with what is.  When we sit in one position, we may be happy for 15 minutes or so.  And then our knees hurt or our back aches, or our foot goes to sleep, or we realize we are thirsty, hungry, or we have an itch.  Then we have choices.  We can change our position.  That may lead us to change our position over and over again looking for the perfect position.  We can turn our attention to our breath with greater diligence and sometimes the discomfort is forgotten in the concentration practice.  And we can choose to do nothing but to observe  the discomfort.  This takes some discernment.  We don’t want to injure our knees in meditation but we may find we can tolerate some discomfort without lasting harm.  Or we may discover the pain is mixed with fear and once we have allowed the fear, it dissipates and the pain is less noticeable.  

So our practice is not just about sitting blissfully.  It is also noticing what arises on our way to blissful sitting.  It is experiencing the frustration, the discomfort, the fear and anger of not getting the sit we want.  And it is finally remembering to let go, let be, not to get too involved in solving our transient wants and desires, aversions and discomforts.  

And this process is practice for the increasing pains and discomforts that the body and mind will experience on the way to dissolution.  Many people fear the ending of the body and the inevitable suffering that attends this end more than they fear the end of consciousness.  However it is for us, letting go is a practice.  Our mindfulness and meditation practices have been helping us relax into the vagaries of life all along.  Things will not always go our way.  What we like will not last long enough.  What we don’t like will come all too soon.  We learn to allow, to abandon our striving, to open our hands to what is.  It’s called practice for a reason.  

People often think the Buddhists are too pre-occupied with death.  Yet our elemental existence is at the core of all of our beings.  Some people live in such a way that they don’t think about it.  The Buddhist point of view is that if we live knowing our death can come at any time, we value each minute of our precious lives and do what we can to live each moment fully - up to our last breath.  And this may mean practicing to let go a little, a lot, and, if it is meant to be, completely.

"Compassion is a verb..."

The second of the sublime abidings or Brahma viharas is compassion - Karuna in the Pali language.  Compassion is what arises when the loving heart encounters suffering.  And out of this encounter arises the desire to help.  Thich Nhat Hanh famously said, "Compassion is a verb.”    
 “From his Love is Compassion in Action...Thich Nhat Hanh writes , “Compassion is a mind that removes the suffering that is present in the other. The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves ‘inside the skin’ of the other. We go ‘inside’ their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the object of our observation. When we are in contact with another’s suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, ‘to suffer with.’”  *From the Humane decisions website:  https://humanedecisions.com/thich-nhat-hanh-said-compassion-is-a-verb/

This is something we all have experienced - in hearing of the suffering of someone close to us or far away, an individual or residents of a city, from the youngest baby to the oldest adult, compassion is a natural response to witnessing the suffering of others.  This doesn’t mean that we always feel compassion when we encounter suffering.  Sometimes our own suffering blinds us to the suffering of others.  In that case, we need to offer compassion to ourselves.  This self-compassion may be an action if, for instance, we have overcrowded our schedules and need to decline to take on another project or turn over an existing project to others.  We may encounter adversity with a barrage of self-criticism or turn straight to solving a situation before acknowledging and caring for our own pain and confusion.  When we can stop and remember to offer ourselves self-compassion, this compassion has a quality of soothing and nurturing, caring for, holding, reassuring, and offering kindness.  It helps restore us to balance, to make us whole so that we can then move from a place of love and wisdom to solving, repairing, making the situation whole again as well.

But there is another kind of compassion that Kristin Neff has called “fierce self-compassion.”  This kind of compassion is more action-oriented, as when a firefighter rushes into a burning building to rescue the terrified inhabitants.  And it often has an element of anger as that of the Mama bear protecting her young.  This fierce compassion seeks to protect and rescue.  There is no desire for revenge or destruction beyond freeing the suffering one from danger and harm.

Thich Nhat Hahn and other Buddhists in the Zen tradition called it “engaged Buddhism” which pointed towards the element of action to protect and aid suffering beings, often in the social justice arena, but also with help in the basics of living - food, shelter, safety.  In 2007 Bhikku Bodhi, a well known and revered American Buddhist monk, founded the Buddhist Global Relief with its primary mission that of relieving hunger.  
In July of this year, he circulated a beautifully written petition asking the president to stop the starving in Gaza.  His goal was 10,000 signatures.  It received 9,228.  And raised awareness in many individuals that more can and should be done.  

From this example, we can see that the compassionate actions can be large, they can be small.  But each one has an impact.  

Joseph Goldstein tells a story of a woman who made sandwiches and handed them out on the streets.  A local newspaper wrote an article publicizing her efforts.  She started getting checks in the mail from inspired well-wishers to help her enlarge her operation.  She returned the checks with a note, “Make your own sandwiches.”  

Her message was clear.  Do what we can, where we can, when we can.  Our efforts will naturally join with the efforts of others to multiply our impact on the world.  But the purity of our actions depends on the purity of our compassion.  If the anger is vengeful, more self compassion is needed.  Our actions have the greatest power of good when they spring from a place of love.

The many benefits of metta or loving kindness...

This week we’ll continue ourinvestigation of metta or loving kindness - the first and the foundation of the sublime abidings, or states of minds.  The other three are compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity and grow out of different conditions encountered by loving kindness.  

Each of these states can be confused with a mind state that has a great similarity to it but is not pure, that can distract from the development of the sublime abiding.  These similar states are called the “near enemy” and often take the form of the hindrances.  The near enemy of loving kindness is the love that tends toward attachment as in attachment to pleasurable sights and sounds.  Sometimes loving kindness and its near enemy can arise at the same time as in spousal or familial love which has the sincere wish for the well-being of the other but also the grasping for connection and attachment that can cause suffering.  

Metta or loving kindness is important to all aspects of the path to awakening.  Sean Oaks writes this about metta in the Spirit Rock Practice Guide*:

"As a fundamentally wholesome quality, mettā is woven throughout the path, expressed as sīla (ethics), samādhi (meditation), and pañña (wisdom). Because it is impartial and supports non-grasping, mettā has a strong wisdom aspect to it. Tending our relationships and communities through taking care with our actions is love as an expression of ethics. And mindfulness, which deepens our intimacy with ongoing experience, brings the quality of loving awareness to meditation and daily life.”

And metta or loving kindness brings wonderful benefits which are enumerated in the Buddha’s teaching called Metta (Mettanisamsa) Sutta (AN 11.16) as follows:

"One sleeps easily, wakes easily, dreams no evil dreams. One is dear to human beings, dear to non-human beings. The devas protect one. Neither fire, poison, nor weapons can touch one. One's mind gains concentration quickly. One's complexion is bright. One dies unconfused and — if penetrating no higher — is headed for the Brahma worlds.”

Whether or not we are swayed by protection by devas or heading toward the Brahma worlds, we can see that loving kindness can suffuse our lives and bring us many daily blessings. 

This week especially may have been a time when we were increasingly anxious and disturbed by the suffering of our neighbors far and wide.  Food insecurity is more pervasive in this country that is right and just considering how wealthy a nation we are.  And yet millions of people we learned this week depend upon federal assistance to buy enough food for themselves and their families.

So we might reflect that this week our open-hearted well-wishing for others may have encountered suffering and turned to compassion.  When our hearts encounter suffering, the natural arising is compassion - the second sublime abiding.  But sometimes the suffering of others overwhelms us and we may feel pain and suffering ourselves.  When this occurs, it is wisdom and a part of the practice to offer loving kindness and compassion to ourselves.  This turning towards ourselves is a necessary and wholesome first step toward lessening suffering in the world.  We are able first to sooth and mend our own hearts and then with our wholeness, we can reach out to help others with hearts filled with compassion.

Training the heart...

Daylight savings came to an end Saturday night. As the season deepens into darkness, anxiety and suffering rises with each day the federal shutdown continues.  The threat to SNAP benefits increases and access to food becomes more precarious.  Health insurance premiums are beginning to rise.  Tariffs are finally landed at home as manufacturers pass along increases to consumers.  Families in Venezuela grieve and their country waits with hearts in their throats, while we wonder what we have become.

Our small individual lives continue with the daily to-do list, family worries, friends in need.  We get up, brush our teeth, make coffee, go to work, hit the gym, shop for food, cook a meal, feed pets, write emails, read and avoid the news.  And sometimes the background worries just suck the vibrant colors out of our lives.   

The Buddha taught us how to be in the present moment, how not to catastrophize, how to breathe in and breathe out.  And we can stay afloat reasonably well.  But the Buddha wished more for us.  He taught us we could be free from suffering, we could be happy.  And we might need a little help from the sublime feelings  - loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.  These are also sometimes called the Divine Abodes - divine dwelling places.  He taught the sublime feelings so that we might cultivate and dwell in these beautiful emotions.  

It starts with loving kindness or metta - an open hearted, open-handed well-wishing towards ourselves and towards others, extending to all beings around the world and in the 10 dimensions.  May we be safe from inner and outer harm.  May we be happy and peaceful. How does it feel to wish that safety and happiness for yourself and others?  Do you instantly feel a softening in your heart?  If not for yourself, perhaps you can wish safety for your pet, for a child, for yourself as a child?  We call up this feeling by bringing the image of our dog or cat or niece or other small, helpless beings into our hearts and wishing them safety.  

And once we know that loving kindness is present, we treat it like a vulnerable flame, blowing gently on it and feeding it small bits of fuel to help it grow.  As it grows, it warms our hearts and lights us up in all directions.  As we nurture this kind, caring heart, the light spills out onto wider and wider circles of beings in our awareness.  We can begin to see how loving kindness doesn’t distinguish between good and bad, worthy or unworthy.  At its best, it shines in all directions, illuminating and warming our hearts towards all.  This generosity of spirit takes practice and infinite kindness and patience with ourselves.  Our hearts may not open to those who have wounded us.  Nevertheless, we can begin to reflect that those who do the most harm were once helpless and vulnerable, deeply wounded and bring those unhealed wounds into the present moment with them - unaware that their injuries are showing.

Metta or Loving Kindness is the foundation of the four sublime feelings.  When the heart filled with loving kindness encounters suffering, it turns to compassion.  Compassion is not to be confused with pity which has a quality of looking down upon and not being with the pitiable.  Compassion has a flavor of empathy, of sitting with someone in their misfortune but not drowning in it.  Thich Naht Hanh said that compassion is a verb.  Compassion urge us to help when we encounter suffering.  And when that desire to help arises, it brings with it a joy that we want to help end suffering.  

This November is already becoming a time of increased suffering for our neighbors, our communities, our countrymen and women and children as food suddenly becomes unaffordable, health insurance premiums require impossible choices, when families dip into retirement savings to get by, and those on the edge fall out of living situations and become homeless. Our compassion can be aroused.  

Sometimes, however, it can feel overwhelming.  There are too many people who need help, too much suffering.  Equanimity helps us see we can’t do it all.  But we can do something.  We can help whoever is in front of us.  Paul Farmer, renowned doctor and humanitarian who founded Partners in Health, would cross mountains on foot for two hours to visit one of his patients.  His staff would plead with him to remember he needed to pay attention to this or that situation in several other countries.  He would say simply that he was helping the person in front of him.

Kristin Neff, researcher and teacher of self-compassion says this, "Loving-kindness is a traditional meditation practice that uses language and imagery to generate feelings of goodwill. It often involves using phrases such as "May I be happy," "May I be peaceful," or "May I live with ease" as a way to grow the muscle of goodwill toward ourselves and others. 

"Some mistake this goodwill for good feelings, but when loving-kindness encounters distress the feeling-tone changes. As one monk put it: 

'When the sunshine of loving-kindness meets the tears of suffering the rainbow of compassion appears.'"

Tonight we’ll spend some time in practice with loving kindness and compassion.  In succeeding weeks, we’ll turn toward sympathetic joy (or joy in the good fortune of ourselves and others) and equanimity - the sublime emotion that balances all the others.  When compassion turns into our own suffering, equanimity can restore our balance.  And yet when equanimity gets a little cool, compassion can warm it up, bring us back into intimacy with the suffering of others.

Happiness is an inside job

We live in extraordinary times.  The news recently has often been devastating bad, prompting feelings of shock, anger, grief, enough to take our breaths away.  With these continual onslaughts, our first action needs to be the fresh intake of breath - breathing through it.  Guy Armstrong urges stopping and breathing right after we’ve been exposed to shock of bad news, spending a few minutes right then in that moment experiencing, processing what we’ve read, heard, seen.  

At the same time, there is surprising goods news. I haven’t yet quoted Paul Krugman or Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) in these pages but there is a first time for everything.  HCR wrote this morning:  "In fact, as Krugman notes, solar and wind are unstoppable. They produced 15% of the world’s electricity in 2024 and account for 63% of the growth in electricity production since 2019. Green energy will continue to grow even if U.S. policy…” “Solar and wind are unstoppable.”  How amazing.

In addition, there are more resources than at any time in the history of the world to support us, to help us manage the barrage of news and the emotions that arise with it.  Ever since Covid sent us all indoors, mindfulness and meditation resources, teachers, courses, retreats have exploded on-line.  

Fifty plus years ago, our leading meditation teachers travelled to India, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka at no small personal cost to sit with the masters of Buddhist meditation.  These travelers returned home and started the great retreat centers we have today.  Suddenly, western meditators could travel to retreat centers without leaving the country.  And they did.  

Nevertheless, a meditator from Minnesota or Missouri might not even hear of these retreat centers or have the means to leave home to sit for 10 days at a center across the country.  

Now, since Covid and the rise of Zoom, the sincere meditator is faced with a plethora of choices - in person or on-line retreats and courses, sitting groups and study groups, marathon weekends of 20 or 30 distinguished teachers in a survey of health, wellness and resilience practices or a single teacher you’ve never heard before who has been quietly teaching advanced practice after years of study with great, but lesser known masters.  If there is internet, there is access to a vast dharma library.

All the different traditions of Buddhism which developed in so many different countries began rubbing elbows with each other.  Joseph Goldstein wrote about this in his book One Dharma examining the great and awe-inspiring mingling of teachings in the West that flourished in far distant regions for 2500 years, but also the perplexing and contradictory views on ultimate and conventional reality, whether enlightenment is impermanent or not, that these teachings presented when they collided here in the West.

Never before has the meditation student been faced with so many opportunities for practice - and so many traditions to practice with.  Never before have meditators been able to choose their own paths toward freedom.  Some may start out in Zen, move to Insight meditation (Theravadan), and eventually sink into Dzochen (Tibetan) or any combination of the three.  Even our most esteemed teachers have found their own personal practices conjoining different traditions and perhaps only then finding more of the whole of the Buddhist teachings.  

That which was split apart is being patched together in a new way, different for each culture, each region, and each student.

It can be bewildering and exciting, but also disappointing and frustrating.  A boon when the sincere curiosity of the student finds fulfillment in different teachings, different teachers or simply an extension of our habits of grasping and attachment if the student is continually distracted by a new and more famous teacher over here, a different teaching over there.  

In this, as in everything else, where ever we go, there we are.

So we are left with the same dilemma we’ve ever faced.  In the welter of opportunity, how to find the best resources without being led astray by our own desires and aversions.  The answer is always to start with ourselves.  Learning how to be happy is an inside job.  The key is listening to our own hearts.  

The practices of the Brahmaviharas can become trustworthy companions on all our journeys.  Cultivating loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity towards ourselves and others can ground us in our own deepest being - nourishing, healing, encouraging, and steadying our hearts in this very moment so that we can experience the next with all possible resources.  

These lines from Free and Easy, a Tibetan Buddhist spontaneous song, point the way.  The full poem is below:

Don’t search any further
looking for the great awakened elephant,
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.

Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing –

Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.

Full poem here:

FREE and EASY
A Spontaneous Vajra Song
By Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche

Happiness can not be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already present,
in open relaxation and letting go.
Don’t strain yourself,
there is nothing to do or undo.

Whatever momentarily arises
in the body-mind
has no real importance at all,
has little reality whatsoever.

Why identify with,
and become attached to it,
passing judgment upon it and ourselves?

Far better to simply
let the entire game happen on its own,
springing up and falling back like waves
without changing or manipulating anything
and notice how everything vanishes and reappears, magically,
again and again, time without end.

Only our searching for happiness
prevents us from seeing it.

It’s like a vivid rainbow which you pursue
without ever catching,
or a dog chasing its own tail.

Although peace and happiness
do not exist as an actual thing or place,
it is always available
and accompanies you every instant.

Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences;
they are like today’s ephemeral weather,
like rainbows in the sky.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you open and relax
this tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there –
open, inviting and comfortable.

Make use of this spaciousness,
this freedom and natural ease.
Don’t search any further
looking for the great awakened elephant,
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.

Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing –

Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.

The Fourth Tetrad: Insights Leading to Freedom...

The Buddha’s teaching on Mindfulness of Breathing is one of the most important teachings in Buddhism and the fruits are implicit in every breath awareness meditation you have ever heard and are ever likely to hear - in yoga studies, on meditation apps, in therapist’s offices.  Mindfulness of breathing can lead to complete freedom.  As the Buddha said - and I paraphrase, “If this were not so, I would not have told you."

Venerable Analayo’s Mindfulness of Breathing guided meditation series on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website follows the 16 Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing that the Buddha offered. Earlier, we had touched on the first three tetrads, each tetrad composed of 4 instructions for moving the Mindfulness of Breathing practice along the path.  I have included the entire teaching below.  

It starts with the instruction to find a place of seclusion, then to adopt a posture that promotes stillness and alertness, then it launches into the 16 steps.  In the first four lines, the focus is on breath and body.  You might remember this is the first foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of breathing and of the body of which breathing is a part.  

The second four lines are on feelings - rapture, pleasure, and mental formations.  This corresponds to the second foundation of mindfulness - positive, negative, or neutral feeling tones.  

The third tetrad focuses on the mind - experiencing the mind, gladdening the mind, tranquillizing the mind, liberating the mind.  This corresponds to the Third Foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.  

Then we come to the fourth tetrad.  After calming the body, calming the feelings, gladdening and tranquilizing the mind, deeper states of concentration are possible.  And the deeper states of concentration prepare the mind for deepening insights.  This is the focus of the fourth tetrad - the deeper insights that arise when the mind has freed itself from the hindrances and is able to see clearly.  And in seeing clearly, the first insight is impermanence.  Everything arises and passes away.  Good things, happy states arise and pass away.  Bad things, miserable states arise and pass away. 

When we are finally able to see deeply into the irrefutable fact of impermanence, we begin to realize the futility of holding on the the good states, happiness, good fortune, all of it, and the futility of continually battling to keep out bad states, bad fortune, bad feelings.  It’s like trying to stop a waterfall or a landslide.  Lasting happiness is not to be found in the passing pleasant experiences of the body, feelings, and mind.   

These states, happenings, phenomenon - every single one of them - will arise and pass away.  Impermanence.  This realization leads to dispassion, loosening our grip of attachment to the good feelings and aversion to the bad feelings - the fading away of passion.  This leads us to begin to see, not just the beginning of things, but the end of things - cessation.  This ends, that ends.  This minute ends.  That day ends.  This coming together with friends ends.  That relationship ends.  This person’s life ends.  That country’s existence ends.  The stars explode.  Suns burn out.  Our universe is constantly changing.  That is the only constant we can count on - whatever it is, it will change.  And we begin to let go of our useless insistence that things stay the same - relinguishment.  The end of the path laid out in the 16 steps of mindfulness of breathing that began with being mindful of this long breath, this short breath culminates in letting go or relinquishment into freedom, into the unconditioned, that which has never been born and never dies.  This is called, among other names, enlightenment and is possible in every human life.  We may or may not find our way to this ultimate freedom but we can experience small moments of freedom, of the unconditioned, all along the path.

To end, I want to just add another word about retreats.  I may take up the subject of retreats again later as I received several emails from teachers this week alone talking about retreats.  I suspect it is because the retreat experience can take us deeper into our practice to places where real change manifests, where deeper acceptance can be cultivated and realized, where equanimity and compassion can be fostered and take hold as bulwarks to help us live in these times joyously and productively.  And retreats can effect changes which are more lasting, increased insights into our stuck places, increased ability to see the ego-I, to see our own propensity to think and act from the place of I and mine, to begin to recognize the freedom of letting go of the concepts of self that were never intrinsic in the first place.

On this recent retreat, I began to slip into another way of viewing the world - a bit more cosmically.  It was prompted by a form of meditation called awareness meditation - which basically means we start to shift our focus in meditation from an object (the breath, the body, emotions, mind states, a mantra, a color, feather, flame) and turn our attention to the awareness itself, with consciousness itself.  By asking the question, am I aware? you can settle back a bit and acknowledge the fact of awareness.  You can explore the awareness that is seeing, hearing, feeling, cognizing, without getting tangled in the object of the seeing, hearing, feeling, cognizing.  It goes straight to the heart of the inquiry, how did you get in there?  Another way of asking the questions is Who is knowing?  or even What knows?  As Ajahn Sumedho, well-known monk and meditation teacher said, it’s akin to trying to see your own eyes.  Another way of exploring it is to begin to imagine boundless space and then realize that consciousness is as boundless as any imaginings of boundless space we can have so then you are contemplating boundless consciousness. 

It opened up a lot of space around current and global events including the rise and fall of civilizations.  

On retreats...

As most of you know, I have been on a meditation retreat for a month.  The retreat experience is relatively new and unfamiliar to most of Western society.  But it was commonly referenced in the Buddha’s teaching and still widely practiced in Buddhist countries where it was and is also known as the rains retreat.  During the rainy seasons, monks were not welcome wandering around the flooded rice paddies messing up the newly planted beds, so they retired to the monasteries to meditate and the villagers committed to supplying food.  In return, the monks offered teachings, meditations, and rituals.

Retreat time allowed monks to deepen their meditation practice by going into seclusion and removing themselves from the activities and influences of daily life.  Today this includes separation from work, household duties, jobs, family pressures, community involvement, and input from the wider world - news, cell phones, computers, television, blogs, posts, papers, magazines, etc.

All this sensory deprivation from our everyday lives can be quite challenging.  With fewer distractions, the mind has nothing to feed on but itself.  As my meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg would say, the mind empties itself of its own content.  So in the solitude of retreat life and meditation, the mind obligingly coughs up any and every memory, feeling, mood, belief, conversation, song - recently heard or decades old - it can think of, some of it to entertain, some of it to distract, and some of it to allow the airing and resolution to knotty and/or painful unresolved stuff buried under the mountain of trivial input. 

What is interesting to me is that, while on retreat, I did not ruminate or obsess about the news all that much.  It faded without the steady every day reinforcement.  What persisted was all the uniquely personal unresolved stuff we all know so well.  It often surfaced as quite challenging feelings, mind states, moods, beliefs, emotional darkness. Beneath the ruminations, it was intensely visceral.  And then it would dissipate.  

Much of the worst stuff our minds have to offer is kept in place by a thick layer of thinking, rationalizations, imaginings about what we would say or do.  In the silence of retreat, the thinking weakens, sticky knots are loosened, and the bonds begin to fall around our feet.  The hardest stuff emerges, threatens to overwhelm, and dissipates in the space of a day or so.  We have gained some measure of freedom.

And it is this freedom from some of our deepest entrapments that allows us not to be so caught by the exhaustingly incessant external news.  It triggers deeply held fears and beliefs that isolate us by catching on the rough edges of our vulnerable, unresolved deep past junkyard.  

We may not have the ability to change the news but we always have the ability to change how we relate to it.  MBSR grads will remember this.  And the more balanced and resilient we can be, the better, healthier, and more effective our response will be.

Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine writing in her book Focused and Fearless (and excerpted in Wisdom Experiences’s "Joy of Seclusion," https://wisdomexperience.org/wisdom-article/joy-of-seclusion/ ) has this to say:  

“... ‘seclusion' does not imply repression or denial; it is not a state of alienation, loneliness, or division. The seclusion that supports a meditation practice is rooted in wisdom and clarity. Knowing what leads to suffering, you wisely choose a path that leads to happiness. The Buddha addressed this point quite simply:

          If, by giving up a lesser happiness,
          One could experience greater happiness,
       A wise person would renounce the lesser
          To behold the greater.”

"Sparked by this basic instinct toward happiness, we follow the trajectory of training that will eventually carry us beyond conceivable delights.

"The Buddhist teachings describe three kinds of seclusion: (1) physical aloneness that is experienced as we remove ourselves from complex social dynamics; (2) mental seclusion that describes the aloofness of the mind while it is absorbed in jhana [deep meditation] —this marks a separation from unwholesome states and sensory pleasures; and (3) liberation as detachment from the root causes of suffering. This implies a suspension of conceptual proliferations.

"...Physical solitude creates a temporary separation from the distractions and activities that fill daily life, but true external simplification involves more than renunciation of material possessions. It is a process that divests the heart of the activities and roles upon which personality relies. The Buddha suggested, “A bhikkhu resorts to a secluded resting place: the forest, the root of a tree, a mountain, a ravine, a hillside cave, a charnel ground, a jungle thicket, an open space, a heap of straw.”  We could, of course, expand that list to include the modern option of a formal retreat center.

"At the rudimentary level, this detachment may be likened to a spiritual vacation. A retreat may be for any length of time, from a single day of silence to many years. It can be a relief to take time away from the exaggerated responsibilities of your routine. Most people need some degree of periodic solitude to learn to calm the anxious heart and quiet the distracted mind. Alternating time for inner retreat with time fully engaged with career, family, and social concerns makes for a balanced approach to the lay lifestyle. Ultimately, silence supports depth in meditation, but it is through our social interactions that our understanding matures and is tested. The Buddha’s life is an exemplary model for balancing seclusion with the compassionate engagement with society. There were periods in his ministry when he remained aloof from his disciples, and many times when he taught, led, and served the community.”

I read recently that our reactions of anger, anxiety, irritability, sadness, grief, horror, and overwhelm are actually quite appropriate reactions.   They are understandable and very normal human feelings to what we see and hear.  This is a time of horrible happenings.  This is how human beings respond to horrible happenings - at least human beings with functioning hearts and minds.  

Normal and appropriate as these reactions may be, they can unbalance us.  And it is not healthy for us to be in extended unbalanced states.  

Hence, retreats  - and other forms of separating ourselves from the persistent irritation and assault of bad news.  Retreats can help us restore balance.  They also deepen the foundation and stability of that balance for increased resilience.  

There are other means to those ends but they all involve some period of separating from the ordinary and extraordinary input of our lives.  

As Shaila Catherine put it, "A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.”

One point I want to emphasize which may be obvious is that it is not just physical seclusion that is pointed to in the retreat idea.  It is creating conditions in which mental and emotional seclusion can occur on a deep level.  It is possible to find temporary seclusion of a deep sort in other circumstances such as a busy NYC street.  The mind turns inward when conditions are right and can access the silence within any number of situations.  But this kind of seclusion depends on a greater stability of mind that may be harder to find if the mind is stirred up to begin with. 

So finding available paths and conditions to offer the mind this respite is becoming more and more critical to balancing the extremes of assault to our perceived safety and well-being.  

"I shall breathe in gladdening the mind..."

For the past several weeks, we have been exploring Mindfulness of Breathing, one of the fundamental meditation practices.  Most meditators are familiar with mindfulness of breathing in some form.  It is available and rewarding to beginning meditators and also presents a rich path forward for experienced meditators toward liberation from suffering.  It is accessible to every one, convenient, portable, and can be practiced on a crowded elevator or a deserted mountain top.

The basic instructions are to pay attention or to bring mindfulness to the “in" and “out" of breathing.  It can be as simple as observing the physical sensations of the breath to contemplating the impermanence of each breath and its connection to the very process of our living. 

As I have written before, mindfulness of breathing as a practice predates the Buddha.  But the Buddha’s Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing (the Anapanasati Sutta) with its 16 steps of instruction, lay outs out the entire path to freedom in four tetrads.  We began our exploration with the first tetrad which instructs the meditator to discern the length of the breath as long or short, to train oneself to breath in (and out) sensitive to the entire body and to calm the entire body.

Thus, the first tetrad is about mindfulness of breathing while contemplating the body.  This practice calms and tranquilizes the body. 

The second tetrad instructs the meditator to breathe in sensitive to different feelings as they arise in the calm of the first tetrad - rapture and pleasure.  These pleasant feelings are precursors to the deeper absorptive states of practice.  Then the meditator is instructed to become sensitive to mental fabrications or in Bhikku Bodhi’s translation below “mental formations” which refers to our own volitional formations and to calm these volitional formations, to see our motivations at work and to calm them.  This second tetrad addresses the second foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of feelings, our perception of positive, negative, or neutral feeling that accompany very experience we have. All the while contemplating the “in” breath and the “out” breath.

We now turn to the third tetrad which speaks to mindfulness of mind through our awareness of breathing.  Meditators train themselves to “breathe in (and out) experiencing the mind", “breathe in (and out) gladdening the mind", concentrating, and liberating the mind.  I have switched translations here and below having finally found Bhikku Bodhi’s translations which I first learned and prefer. This tetrad brings the contemplation of the objects of mind into direct awareness with the breath practice.  Objects of mind are thoughts of past or future, plans, memories, moods, emotions, mind states of wanting or aversion - all the proliferations of mind pointed to in the Third Foundation of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Mind.  These are all progressively calmed and the mind begins to experience temporary freedom from these distractions.  With this freedom arises gladness of the mind which leads to concentration and liberation of the mind in a deeper way.

“He trains thus: ‘I shall breathe in experiencing the mind’; he trains thus: ‘I shall breathe out experiencing the mind.’ He trains thus: ‘I shall breathe in gladdening the mind’; he trains thus: ‘I shall breathe out gladdening the mind.’ He trains thus: ‘I shall breathe in concentrating the mind’; he trains thus: ‘I shall breathe out concentrating the mind.’ He trains thus: ‘I shall breathe in liberating the mind’; he trains thus: ‘I shall breathe out liberating the mind.’ (Bhikku Bodhi Translation)

This is what one of my teachers Shaila Catherine wrote about the first three tetrads in her article for The Lion’s Roar, Aug. 2, 2022 https://www.lionsroar.com/all-you-need-is-breath/:

The practice of mindfulness of the breath gradually exposes all areas where attachments might fester—to the body or meditation object, mental functions, mind, or insight knowledge.

The first tetrad corresponds with mindfulness of the body and refines the meditation object—breath. Beginning with “breathing in long, one knows: ‘I breathe in long,’” the first four instructions emphasize skillful attention by knowing the long and short breath, experiencing the whole body (of breath), and tranquilizing the bodily formations. In this tetrad, you can learn a variety of ways to attend to the breath and discover how to know breath so that the perception produces calmness, clarity, and the conditions conducive to concentration and insight.

The second tetrad recognizes and strengthens the wholesome qualities that develop in conjunction with mindfulness, such as joy, pleasure, volition, and attention. As you focus on these qualities, you can come to understand how feeling functions, allow joy to refresh interest in the breath, recognize the powerful role volition plays in directing attention, and tranquilize mental activities.

The third tetrad spotlights the mind’s clarity, purity, and readiness for deep concentration. The experience of the mind at this stage will reveal a remarkable absence of hindrances. Having directly seen the profound purity of your well developed mind, you can confidently let go of excessive effort, attachment to spiritual gains, or the habitual tendency to manipulate the meditative process. The stability, gladness, and confidence that is evident at this stage of practice matures as the mind inclines toward deep concentration and temporary liberation from obstructive states.

At the same time, the mind is developing the wholesome qualities of mindfulness, investigation, energy, tranquillity, joy, concentration and equanimity, the seven qualities the Buddha called the Factors of Enlightenment.  Each of these factors creates the conditions for the next to arise.  They all support each other and they lead to enlightenment.  You can see for yourself that paying attention to the breath immediately calls mindfulness into being, which supports investigation as we look at the length of the breath, and energy as our curiosity grows about the length of this breath.  Tranquillity follows as the mind calms in this focused attention to the breath.  And joy arises…