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Expressions

Letting the Waves Pass Through

8/7/2016

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​When I first began doing equanimity practice, an image spontaneously arose. I saw a person standing on the bow of a ship, but it was more like the transparent outline of a person. And then a large wave would rise above the bow – and pass right through as it washed onto the deck.
 
Over time, I have come to understand this image more fully. It is not about not feeling the wave – the transparency of the person does not indicate that they are insensate. Rather, the aim is to experience the wave fully by allowing all of it to penetrate awareness. Any solidity in the person blocks or distorts the complete experience.
 
This is basically the relationship we cultivate to experience. Waves can arise and move as needed without obstruction or distortion. Can you sense the peace in this stance? Even if the ocean is violently stormy, it does no damage because that energy passes right through. We might say it passes through the mind, but more accurately, the storm is also the mind.
 
I hear many questions beginning with the phrase, “What do I do about…” or, more subtly, “How can I work with….” Usually the thing to be “worked with” is some unpleasant emotion or mental state. Often what people mean is, “How can I get this to go away? How can I stop having this mindstate?”
 
Try shifting your viewpoint to the image of the wave passing through a transparent figure. In the end, you will be doing nothing, not trying to “work with” the wave. The very “working with” presents an obstacle in its path – resulting in a partial, manipulated experience of the wave. Mostly, the obstacles are stories, ideas, views, and interpretations that we impose without noticing. We may want to work with anger because we believe its story, because we fear it, or because we think meditation is the place to solve problems in our life. In meditation, anger is just anger – or more precisely, it is a cluster of sensations and mental states that we are invited to experience without resistance.
 
Now, non-resistance is the result. (First check if you are convinced that this is a worthy end; some parts of your mind may not be). But what are practices that help bring it about? There are indeed certain ways of working with difficult mindstates so that they are not overwhelming, such as applying metta/goodwill as an “antidote” to strong feelings of anger or fear. Or, in the case of physical states, diverting attention to a non-painful part of the body if pain becomes too intense. You may not be able to take in the fullness of the experience right now, in which case it is skillful to turn away. There are also methods that concurrently invoke investigation, such as the “RAIN” process devised by Michele McDonald and further developed by Tara Brach. These can be helpful methods.
 
In this article, I am highlighting the fundamental mental cultivation shared by all these methods: Developing enough capacity of attention, or strength of mindfulness, to simply allow the full experience of whatever is arising, whether it is a ripple or a tidal wave. Developing capacity is about stabilizing attention – the basic, unexotic practice of nondistraction. Not allowing the mind to get sucked into discursive thought, entranced by its own commentary, or overwhelmed by physical/mental feelings because of applying meaning or story to them. Don’t worry about perfection in this; that is just another idea.
 
Not that this is easy.
 
From Loreena McKennitt’s song Skellig:
Many a year was I
Perched out upon the sea
The waves would wash my tears,
The wind, my memory
 
I'd hear the ocean breathe
Exhale upon the shore
I knew the tempest's blood
Its wrath I would endure
 
Grounding in the body is the best method I have found to gain strength in attention. Just sit and sense the body – all the pulsing, vibrations, heat, thrumming, solidity, softness, sharpness, all of it. Forget the story or even the emotion. [There are also techniques from other traditions that use devotional energy to increase the capacity of attention].
 
Equanimity is considered a great blessing of practice. A mind that is stable and transparent even amidst the waves is a mind that is poised to know deeply how this life works, and to let go.

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Reliable Refuge

5/24/2016

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The full moon of May is the time for Vesak, a Buddhist holiday that, in the Theravadan tradition, celebrates the birth, enlightenment, and death of Siddhartha Gotama (who became the Buddha). It is also a time to reflect on what kinds of support exist in your life for spiritual practice and your overall health and development. Taking refuge in the Triple Gem -- Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha -- is encouraged.

But I see another approach to contemplating refuge. Buddhist teachings emphasize training the mind to see change: The impermanence and hence unreliability of experiences. Sometimes this is thrust upon us through life, and other times we encounter it through meditation.
 
As we open deeply to impermanence, there may come a point where finding a reliable refuge comes to the fore. Suddenly the common term "going for refuge" takes on new meaning. We are to seek refuge in Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha, but what does this mean?
 
It's worth noting that the original Pali texts contain few details on what refuge really means. One thing we can notice about it is that it tends to be voluntary; the Buddha does not solicit it, nor does he express approval when a follower spontaneously declares it. Only in the later commentaries is it defined more clearly.
 
This gives us some free reign to consider personally what refuge in Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha means to us. If this sounds like something extra to take on, consider:
 
We are always taking refuge in something – perhaps our job, relationships, body/health, status, etc. So it's not so much a matter of taking on something new, but looking at the quality of the refuge(s) we already have. We're not starting from zero. The first question to ask is, how reliable is your refuge?
 
For myself, I started with some pretty unreliable refuges. As a 30-year-old, I was devoted to my career and also enjoyed my healthy body through being an athlete. None of this was particularly unskillful, but it certainly wasn't reliable.
 
Fortunately, I received a great gift. Through longterm illness, my body was shown to be out of my control, which initially caused confusion and despair – as well as opened my heart to faith and wisdom. The three refuges offered on the path (also called the Triple Gem) are more reliable than the usual things we choose. We can feel this intuitively, especially when the world of experience is bringing pain.
 
A few years later, I had a chance to participate in a formal Refuge Ceremony at a lay Dharma center. I knew I wanted to do it, but could not say quite why. I was amazed at how meaningful the experience was, filling my body with light energy and a deep sense of satisfaction. I knew I was "home" and was doing something really important – more important than I could really comprehend.
 
Over the years, I continue to contemplate the Triple Gem. At this time, I could say of each one:
Buddha: Trusting awareness over story. Opening to mystery.
Dharma: Trusting the process.
Sangha: Those who help illuminate or nurture my sense of trust, sometimes by their mere presence.
 
The subtitle of Sharon Salzberg's book Faith is, "Trusting your own deepest experience." This is the Art of Refuge: Trusting my own deepest understanding, even when there is no confirmation, approval, or even comprehension of it from others. Sometimes it even goes beyond my own comprehension.
 
Walking the Path feels to me like learning to live from this place, and this takes practice. How can we stay in touch with that freedom and still live in the world?
 
Here is a talk I gave on the Refuges in 2015.

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Balanced Practice: Faith and Inquiry

3/13/2016

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​The art of Dharma practice includes engaging skillfully with complementary aspects of practice. Sometimes there can even seem to be "paradoxes" in the instructions. These are invitations to expand our understanding of what practice is; in the end, practice isn't any one thing. 

One domain where we can develop balance has to do with our attitude in approaching and engaging teachings. How do we relate to instructions from teachers, Dharma talks, and suttas we read? These things play the role of guiding and shaping our understanding, our behavior, and our practice. What is our relationship to them? (For more in this topic, here is a talk I gave).

Faith/ Trust/ Surrender

One possibility is that we have the attitude that the teachings are wiser than we are, and it’s best to just let them do their work on us.
 
If the teacher says “bow 108 times before every sit,” this trustful attitude means that you just do it. You don’t add your opinion about it, try to analyze whether it’s working, start playing around with it, or start checking for results. It takes some humility, but you just do it. You let the process do its work on you.

In this practice, we really do have to be able to do things where we don’t know the reason or result. Where it might get a little (or a lot) uncomfortable. And if not from a teacher telling you to bow 108 times, then it will come from the practice itself -– at some point, your heart or mind will demand something that you were not expecting and are not totally convinced about.

The Buddha, in at least one sutta, was very clear that his followers need to have this kind of faith. (MN 70, At Kitāgiri. This teaching is for ordained monastics, and doesn’t apply to people who are not declared followers). He states: “For a faithful disciple intent on fathoming the Teacher’s Dispensation, it is natural that he conduct himself thus: ‘The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple; The Blessed One knows, I do not know.’” And someone who thinks this way, it is said, the teachings are “nourishing and refreshing," and the disciple will go on to achieve the fruits of the path. The Buddha also criticized an overly rational, thought-based mindset (see, for example, MN 63, The Shorter Discourse to Malunkyāputta). 

So there is this idea of “just take the medicine.” You are not wise – that’s the problem – and you just have to trust if you are really going to transform.

Inquiry (including thought!)

But the Buddha didn’t consistently demand some kind of total capitulation. He wanted to foster people who are self-reliant. Overall, the Buddha didn’t really like obsequiousness, and valued people trying to figure it out for themselves, even if they made some wrong turns along the way.
 
One clue is to notice that people often came with questions, as shown throughout the suttas. Obviously this mode of learning was important and valued.

More directly, there is the teaching of the Kalama Sutta (AN 3.65): “…don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering' — then you should abandon them.”
 
We are encouraged not to just blindly restrain behavior, but to go ahead and act, but to act with awareness, so that we can discern if something is leading toward harm or benefit. We are to investigate.

Finding Balance

Bhikkhu Bodhi says (in his essay: Two Faces of the Dhamma):  "When we try to determine our own relationship with the Dhamma, eventually we find ourselves challenged to make sense out of its two seemingly irreconcilable faces: the empiricist face turned to the world, telling us to investigate and verify things for ourselves, and the religious face turned to the Beyond, advising us to dispel our doubts and place trust in the Teacher and his Teaching."

The Buddha himself used both Faith and Inquiry. He had to have faith in something he couldn’t see yet, because there were no teachers for him once he struck out on his own. And his path included consideration, like assessing that the ascetic practice wasn’t working and remembering a deep jhana experience as a child -– so there was “analysis” (wisdom) also.
 
We don’t necessary understand how to navigate this easily. Even as dedicated practice develops, we will continually be called to let go and have faith in the next step unfolding. Experience gets different as meditation deepens, and our life may start to flow in unexpected ways. Can we ride this? And can we continue to inquire and bring order to our life, changing/honing/clarifying our intentions so that the engagement remains strong?

It may be interesting to consider the following in your own practice and life:
In your own practice and life:
​
  • When has it been good to just accept?
    • Have there been times when something amazing opened up that you could never have imagined, and which your judgmental mind might have rejected?
  • When did you need to dig in, make assessments, and ask questions?
    • Were you ever too gullible? Or did you ever just hover around on the surface believing something magic would happen, and you realize now that you could have engaged more fully and gotten a deeper experience?

Image: Great Rift Valley.jpg – By Xiaojun Deng (Flickr: Great Rift Valley) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Where is the freedom

2/19/2016

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I am reading a book called The Invention of Wings -- the partly historical story of Sarah Grimke, a Southern woman who dared to find her voice as an abolitionist. Against her wishes, Sarah owns a slave named Handful, and their complex relationship forms the basis for the book.

As Sarah is struggling to gain the courage to leave her social and familial position, travel north, and discover more about life without slaves, Handful aptly says to her, "My body is a slave, but my mind is not. Seems like for you it's the other way around."

It's important to understand where we are enslaved and where the freedom can be found. Now, in conventional human society, some people can be considered "free" in body through ease of movement, acceptability, and other conventional measures, while other people do not enjoy such freedoms of body.

But from a spiritual perspective, the body is never quite free. It is part of nature, following its own laws, and will one day cease to support life. It is a magnificent process, a vehicle for practice, and a tool for exploring the world and encountering other beings... but it is not the place to find the deepest freedom. That can only happen through the mind, or heart.

The mind has the potential to keep developing, gaining insight, and opening to the mystery right up to the moment of death. It can go beyond itself in ways that the body cannot.

It is important to notice in our behavior and practice if we are acting from the perspective of freeing the mind, rather than the body.

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The Art of Perception, and the Perception of Art

1/12/2016

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For the past two weeks, I have led a guided meditation at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, accompanying an exhibit by Jim Campbell in collaboration with Jane Rosen. The Development Director there had the vision to see that Campbell's art requires slowing down to truly take in, and imagined this way of helping people to experience his low-resolution light displays more deeply.

Campbell plays with the faculty of mind called perception: How we translate sensory information into a conceptual label of "what something is." We see a white blob contrasted against the blue sky, and we know it is a "cloud." We walk into a room, and we don't see a confusing montage of light, dark, and colors; we automatically parse the input into the floor, the walls, the furniture, the people, etc. Similarly, we can recognize the sound of a bird and the wet touch of our dog's nose against our leg. This is a remarkable faculty of mind, and we couldn't live without it.

How much information is needed to perceive something -- to change the raw sensory input into a constructed idea? We live in a world of extreme resolution; digital screens seem only to increase in pixel density. The above image was created by Leon Harmon of Bell Labs in 1973, based on a picture of whom? For most people (who also know American history), it's not difficult to identify Abraham Lincoln. So little information gets translated into a definite concept! Campbell's work uses moving images -- really flickering white LEDs -- to impart the concept of birds flying or people swimming with a similarly sparse amount of data.

Consider what this means for how your mind operates in the world. With scant information, your mind can construct entire worldviews, epic stories, and full-scale theories. (This goes beyond what is called perception in meditation, into the realm of "proliferation"). A glimpse from a stranger, and you have a whole story about their motivation and life story. An overheard phrase, and you instantly imagine the whole conversation. If you don't think you'd jump to such conclusions, just watch the show unfold in meditation.

Perception is a 2-edged sword. Essential for navigating the world, and highly prone to error. (A good study to undertake: What misperceptions are currently driving your life?)

Over the course of an hour at the art gallery, I guided participants through a "tour" of the body and mind, encouraging people to slow down, drop their habitual ways of seeing themselves, and open to the play of the senses. After a good amount of time to settle in and begin to experience the world more freshly, I asked them to open their eyes and view the art around the room. The pieces are simple, just light and dark and motion. They ask us to join their simplicity, while also serving as temptations for the proliferating mind to build judgments, stories, and ideas.

After today's session, the Development Director who had organized the meditations told me that she had a profound experience upon opening her eyes during the meditation. She suddenly saw the art "without any idea of what I wanted or didn't want. There was no overlay from my own desires."

Exactly. This is the world that meditation opens: The world as it is, not as we want it to be.

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Non-resistance

12/13/2015

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 Going about the day, it is useful to tune into just how much of our experience we are resisting in some way. We judge it as inadequate, unworthy, inappropriate, or unwanted, and the associated energy in the body is some kind of tension.

But really, whatever is arising must arise because the conditions for it are there. To align with reality, we can learn not to resist the flow of experience. That is not the same as compliance or approval; it is merely not to resist. It takes attention to do this, and doing this also develops attention. Non-resistance is also an act of love.

Perhaps the most direct mode of training is to feel the body, look for areas of tension, and invite relaxation. I find it is best to do this with a broad attention that includes the space around the body. Whatever is passing through, be it anger, sadness, joy, or boredom, can be perceived as a wave through the body or some other configuration of the body's energy. Not blocking this (non-resistance) allows it to move through. There is trust involved in letting that happen.

Adyashanti said of the obsessions in the mind: "You think you resist these things because they are there, but actually they are there because you resist them." A wave passes freely through open space.

A powerful place to see this is in the projections of others. People interact with us through their own lenses of how they see us. Especially around this holiday time when we may find ourselves stepping back into habitual family roles, it is easy to resist the ways we are treated, snapping at people verbally or otherwise defending or defining ourselves. 

But projections only land if there is a screen. If your body and mind are solid from your own fixed views and preferences, the movies will keep playing out in your body and mind. If you meet the world as open space, non-resistant, nothing will land. You can go about freely, acting instead from wisdom and compassion. You may indeed respond to what is happening, but it will be from a place of spaciousness.

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"Live, Without a Net"

11/22/2015

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Just like fabric, or food, or a recording can be of higher or lower quality, our attention has a gradation of quality to it also. We can learn to detect this – and other people can detect it too. High-quality attention is stable (not wavering), and has both depth and lightness to it. That is, there is some substance and strength to the attention, but it is not heavy and penetrating. In addition, it feels open, receptive, and allowing – it is not colored by views or judgments. (Here is a talk I gave on Quality of Attention)
 
Mindfulness and Dharma practice have the effect of increasing the quality of our attention over time. I have also found that practice makes me more sensitive to noticing the quality of attention (in myself and others), and that I have started to value this. I find that I value having higher-quality attention.

I have heard this phrase for advertising a circus performance: "Live, without a net.”
 
In that case, we are supposed to be awed that someone would do acrobatics up high without a safety net. Truthfully, this sounds unwise to me. But in the realm of Dharma practice, it is the perfect phrase.
 
"Live, without a net” is what practice moves us toward. 

What are the “nets” that we use? I am using the word “net” to mean something that we bring into an encounter as an extra, often unseen, prop. It lowers the quality of attention. It hangs in the wings or beneath us, not as a beneficial support, but as an appendage / something awkward. It is not an accident that a net is also something that can bind us. When a net like this is not seen, it ties us up.
 
One such net is actually called that -- the Internet. The mere presence of a cell phone on the table during an interaction has been found to reduce both the cognitive ability and emotional / empathetic connection between the people.

But if the nets were only external, it would be a pretty easy problem to solve. The far bigger issue is the internal nets that bind us. One is the past.

Important and often unseen components of our experience are the past associations that come up based on what’s happening now. For instance, someone we meet might resemble an old romantic partner or college roommate, and so we bring in emotions or reactions associated with the older experience and not necessarily relevant to what’s happening now. Sometimes this happens subconsciously if the association is subtle, such as the person’s accent or way of walking.

It’s not so much that we need to delve into the psychology and figure out what relationship issues are coming up through this past association. A more Dharmic approach is simply to notice how perception works in the mind: Past experience automatically comes into present-moment experience, and we need (a) mindfulness to see that, and (b) wisdom to know whether the past association is relevant or not.
 
If we lack sufficient mindfulness or wisdom, then the past association divides our attention, drains away energy, and generally lowers the quality of the attention we have to respond truly to this person right in front of us.
 
Our views (or ways of seeing things, or orientations toward things), have quite an influence too. If I carry the view that meditators are generally boring to talk with, then I am much more likely to be bored at a meditation center than if I didn’t carry that view. I would walk in with that filter, and it would influence my experience.
 
And that actually lowers the quality of my attention because I am only attending to part of the picture. Remember that high-quality attention is fresh and receptive, open to what is actually here. Fixed views limit and confine what I can see.

So stepping back, we have now talked about internal conditions that may prevent us from having high-quality attention: Memories or past associations, and also views. When are they an actual distraction? In general, we get distracted by internal events if we don’t have enough attentional strength. We have a reaction or a response because of our past or because of views, and if we can’t hold it, it can take over. 

Quality of attention is part of the path – it shifts and changes over time. And each moment of awareness is an advance; you never go backward. The quality gets higher and higher, on average. More and more, we are "live, without a net." And as we get used to practicing this way, it can actually feel as if there is “no net,” no ground. Or sometimes it feels more like having no reference points. This too is practice.

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To Care and Not to Care

11/16/2015

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Sometimes it is said that practice includes developing the ability "to care and not to care." Commonly this refers to the balancing of compassion and equanimity: Through spiritual practice, we are learning to care for ourselves, others, and this world -- and this caring must be done wisely such that we are willing to accept things as they are. We need equanimity to accept that sometimes the suffering cannot be alleviated right away, or in the manner we would like.

Another way to look at the phrase "to care and not to care" is as an invitation to challenge habitual relationships to experience. Our conditioning tells us to care about (make important) things that are pleasant, make us look good, and otherwise confirm or prop up our sense of identity. We also care about things that threaten this sense of identity. On the other hand, habitually we do not care much for things/people that aren't connected to us or are otherwise neutral to us.

Spiritual practice takes a different, somewhat orthogonal approach. We train ourselves to care about (notice, make important) the aspects of experience that are uncomfortable, unsatisfactory, or bring a feeling of contraction. We learn to care for what hurts. And conversely, we learn to care less about fame, fortune, pleasure, and other things that are mere temporary hits. Interestingly, over time, these together create a new caring for what is peaceful, tranquil, or sublime.

The emergence of this new type of care is surprising to some, but also tends to feel familiar. Many practitioners discover that "neutral is more pleasant than pleasant." To find the peace in a given situation, it is necessary both to care and not to care -- to be connected and engaged, but with an openness to what will unfold.

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Domains of Practice: The Mind

11/16/2015

 
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We’ve been looking at body, speech, and mind as domains of practice that the Buddha articulated. Of course, the mind is central – we are engaged in “mind training.” The body is only going in one direction – toward decay and death. But the mind/heart can continue to develop to the very end of life.
 
The first two stanzas of the Dhammapada say a lot (Fronsdal translation):
 
All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind, and suffering follows, as the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.
 
All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with a pure mind, and happiness follows, like a never-departing shadow.

 
A natural question is thus: How to work with the mind? The rest of this post is a summary of realms we may work with in the territory of “mind.” It’s a big topic, and it differs by Buddhist tradition. But even this much is the work of a lifetime.
 
As we’ve noted in the case of the body and speech, there are two broad realms of training: through intentional practices, and through observation. These apply in the mind too. I go into more detail in this talk.
 
Creation of Beneficial Mindstates

  • Examining our intention and motivation to practice: This includes remembering the dangers of death, impermanence, illness, and chasing after delusions. It also includes remembering the preciousness of human birth and our beautiful aspirations to realize deep peace, compassion, love, or liberation.
  • The Brahma-Viharas. Deliberate practices of the heart: goodwill, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
  • Concentration: Learning to gather the mind into a nondistracted state. These states are very pleasant and free up an enormous amount of energy. Discovering this potential in the mind is valuable and it must be well-directed toward the aim of liberation.
  • Investigation/Inquiry: Generating the interest to examine the mind. It can be done using specific questions, or in a more wordless way. It provides a segueway into the practice of observing the mind.
 
Observation of the Mind

  • The Satipatthana Sutta (MN 10) offers realms and modes of observation in the mind: Feeling tone; the presence and absence of various beneficial and unbeneficial qualities; the arising and passing away of various mindstates.
  • We are especially directed toward observing the conditionality of experience.
  • This leads to seeing particular qualities of experience more precisely: Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and emptiness (of inherent existence)
  • In my experience, this tends toward a broad awareness in which everything can arise and pass
 
At some point, we start to get a feel for what mental activity itself feels like. Then the mind can move toward relaxing this. Even these “observations” still employ the mental activity of Investigation (which is good – it’s a factor of Awakening – but at some point starts to feel too “active”). And this leads to letting go. In the end, the mind is let go; development is necessary, but is not the final goal.
 
Development of the Mind
 
We tend to go through cycles of intentional development and observation. This can occur in a single sit, when we spend some time getting concentrated or gladdening the mind, and then change to a more open awareness. It also occurs over the months and years of practice. You may feel drawn to developmental practice for a while: concentration, metta, compassion practice, challenging your internal assumptions, strengthening intention, etc. And then at some point, this may seem too active and even agitating, and you begin to settle back and just watch the flow. This may lead to insight – the result of which might very well be the understanding that more needs to be developed.
 
It’s good to trust what you are drawn to in practice. The path of development and the path of letting go are two sides of the same coin. They both lead toward the deep insights of the path that free the heart from the vicissitudes of the outer and inner worlds. Fully freeing the heart will probably take both a lot of development and a lot of observation and letting go.
 
All of this is not to diminish the role of the body and speech in practice. Those who try to ignore these two realms (or simply "transcend" them) are in for a rough ride: We must ultimately have an integrated development of all aspects of our being. Getting into alignment is much of the path. May your practice be multidimensional.

Domains of Practice: Speech

11/6/2015

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The three domains of practice offered by the Buddha are body, speech, and mind. Although not fully separate, they are worth examining distinctly.

There is a possibly apocryphal story from IMS (a retreat center in Barre MA) about a yogi on an extended retreat. Early one morning, when the breakfast cook arrived to start the oatmeal, she found a yogi with his hand in one of the food bins in the kitchen. Surprised to see the cook, the yogi said, "I was looking for a spoon."

We can laugh, but how often do we notice that our own speech is not perfectly aligned with our actions (or thoughts) in the moment? We may not be so skilled at speaking straightforwardly, finding instead that we hedge the truth, omit details that would make us look bad, or otherwise shade the language in our favor.

Looking at the suttas, we find this interesting reference from Iti 4.112 ("The World"): “As the Tathagata says, so he does; as the Tathagata does, so he says: therefore he is called the Tathagata." (Tathagata is a word for the Buddha). This quote says that perfect alignment between speech and action is a quality that characterizes Buddhas. Thus, we can realize that we may have a ways to go, and we may need some guidance on how to get our speech aligned.

For more detail on this topic, here is a talk I gave about it at Insight Meditation Center. 

Two practices that provide excellent background and preparation for working with speech are mindfulness of the body and listening practice. It is amazing how much information is contained in the body, and how grounding it can be to rest the attention in the feet or belly while speaking. It is also worthwhile to attune to tensions in the body with the aim of relaxing them if possible. If you are not able to sense your body while speaking, begin by consciously practicing feeling your feet on the ground. As for listening practice, there are many resources out there for learning mindful or heartful listening; these are worth pursuing if it's of interest.

Moving on to speech practice, Right or Wise Speech is said to have four key qualities: It is true, beneficial, timely, and spoken with a heart of kindness. Note that "true" means both factually true and "true to the moment": It should express something appropriate to the situation, which often means it must be spontaneous. Although there are times when planned speech is necessary, often things that we have thought of ahead of time become conceptual and not quite "true" to the situation.

The Buddha was once asked (MN 58§9): “…when [people] go to the Blessed One and pose a question, has there already been in the Blessed One’s mind the thought, ‘If they come to me and ask me thus, I shall answer thus’? Or does that answer occur to the Tathagata on the spot?”

The Buddha replied, “It occurs to me on the spot.”

As with the domain of the body, there are two ways of practicing: Taking deliberate action to create wholesome or mindful speech, and observing our "natural" speech to feel how well it aligns with our intentions, the truth of the moment, etc. Both are useful modes of practice. In the second case, as with the body, it may take some practice to be able to speak and observe the speech carefully at the same time. It is well worth learning this skill. In the end, we want to speak spontaneously, like the Buddha, not relying on a mental filter that checks for the qualities of "right speech."

Sometimes people think that spiritually correct speech must always be pleasing to the listener -- in other words, it should be "nice." There are actually some suttas that say this. But other suttas place "pleasant speech" in the realm of timeliness. From MN 58§8: “In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unendearing & disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.”

Teachers may say "unendearing" things in order to shock a student out of a complacent or deluded way of thinking. One teacher talks of a time when he was a beginning Dharma student, on his first retreat. He told his teacher in an interview that he thought he was the only person on the retreat who was not being mindful. She looked at him coolly and said, "What makes you so special?"

In the end, we are asked to speak with wisdom and compassion. That is all that "right speech" really points toward. 

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    Kim Allen

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