The Anatomy Of Awareness

What is "awareness"? It's a quality of mind made up of 5 specific qualities in balance known as the Indriya, or spiritual faculties. This is a lovely and extremely practical way to approach meditation practice, just by simply sensing these qualities and how balanced they are. From the Nature of Awakening residential retreat, New Hampshire, October 4-10, 2025.

Transcript

Okay.

Good evening.

Should I have a deeper voice?

Good evening Sangha.

How was the day?

How's the day been so far?

Only thumbs up showing.

Okay.

Perfect.

Thumbs downers or thumbs mediumers,

You're keeping it to yourself,

That's fine too.

It's nice to have the door open.

I,

Yeah,

I felt like it was maybe,

Maybe we had the energy tonight to have a little,

Just a little more structure brought in,

Like a little more,

Yeah,

Just a little more structure brought into practice and into the Dhamma offering.

And so classically,

I got to nerd out all afternoon as I was considering what to talk about tonight.

And yeah,

I'd like to,

I'd like to offer this as I think that it will be helpful.

And this is,

In my mind,

I'm framing this as the anatomy of awareness.

It does not include the pelvis,

But I just,

Yeah,

It's,

It's like the structure around it.

And I think that it's very helpful.

It's been extremely helpful for me to look at practice through this lens.

And of course,

You know,

Take what resonates for you and let the rest slide through.

It's like,

Over however many years of practice I've been hearing,

Like there are a lot of teachings,

But there also weren't that many.

And so you hear the same things over and over again,

And every time they hit a little bit different.

So just know that whatever is,

Whatever's resonant for you is,

Is relevant for this time.

And whatever isn't,

Doesn't matter right now.

It's not going anywhere.

It's been around for 2,

600 years,

Still going.

So no need to stress about that.

So I said in the beginning of retreat,

Right,

That I've been,

I use generally awareness and mindfulness interchangeably,

Those two words.

But I'd like to parse that apart and offer just a little more,

A little more nuanced tonight,

Which is also going to be a nice broad stroke for all of you.

I think it will,

I think it will clarify some things.

So awareness is really the culmination,

It's the coming together of five factors or five qualities of mind.

And over the course of a few days,

You know,

Maybe,

Maybe we're starting to see this a little bit more now,

How like,

Even just with a little bit of intention,

A little bit of aspiration,

A little bit of willingness,

And like,

A tiny amount of effort.

Maybe sometimes it feels like it's a lot of effort.

But some amount of effort,

Right,

We start to feel that a little bit of a shift happens.

Everybody felt a little shift?

Is anybody,

Is anybody feeling a shift?

Yeah?

Just a little shift in how the mind is perceiving things,

Maybe in how the mind feels,

Maybe just in our own energetic level,

Like energy may have kind of evened out a little bit,

Maybe we feel a little less like overwhelmingly exhausted or overwhelmingly agitated.

And you just start to feel that starting to level a bit.

So if you take that,

And like,

We've been here for how long we've been here now?

A few days,

That's forever.

We live here now.

You know,

Take that from a few days and extrapolate it over months or over years or over decades.

And just imagine,

Right,

Just imagine where this could be for you.

And as the Buddha said,

The amount of collectedness of mind,

The amount of awareness that the mind can have at any given moment is boundless.

It's totally open.

Right?

It's only dependent on how much we cultivate these qualities.

These qualities,

We've already touched on a few of them.

And inadvertently,

We've touched on all of them.

The quality of sada,

Or trust,

Faith,

Faith in our own experience,

Virya,

Or effort,

Sati,

Mindfulness,

Samadhi,

Or collectedness of mind.

It's often translated as concentration.

I really,

I think it's such a such a mistranslation.

It's a missed opportunity.

But collectedness of mind.

And panya,

Or wisdom.

And so those five qualities of mind coming together.

And what's interesting about it is like,

These qualities are all balanced by mindfulness.

They are balanced by mindfulness,

Because when we're mindful,

These other things we can see more clearly.

But they also work in like a what's known as proximate cause.

So one leads to the next.

So gradually,

Right,

Incrementally,

We start to grow in faith or in our own inner confidence,

Our own inner knowing.

And that leads us to have more energy.

It's like motivating for us.

It's,

We start to see the fruit of practice.

And so it's motivating for us to continue to go.

And when we have that motivation,

When we have that energy,

Then we know where to put it.

And we develop more mindfulness,

Right?

Mindfulness is able to arise because we're applying ourselves to it.

And then as I've alluded to,

And also talked about,

Overtly,

Right,

The more moments of mindfulness that we have,

The steadier the mind becomes.

So this is that quality of samadhi,

Right?

Yoga is the stilling of the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind,

The stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

That's that quality of samadhi.

And from that collectedness of mind,

Wisdom arises.

And with more wisdom,

Then of course,

That builds our confidence,

Which leads us to have more energy,

And around and around and around we go.

I don't know why I like this so much.

It's just become a real guidepost for me in practice.

And particularly like in earlier years,

I think it was just enough guidance that it allowed me to have something to orient to,

But not so heavy handed that I felt like I had to to try for something.

You don't have to try too hard at any of these things.

It's like,

Okay,

Well,

I know.

If I have a little confidence,

Then my energy will rise.

It's like,

Just start there.

Just give yourself a snack and you'll have the energy to go for the walk.

So I'm just going to parse through these a little bit for us,

And that way it will probably be the most listy oriented talk that I give.

But again,

I think it might be helpful.

So sada or trust is faith,

But in action.

It's the activity of trusting that doing something is worth your time,

That doing this thing is worth your time.

It's worth your interest.

And it's a living quality.

So it's not something that you have or don't have,

Which I think differentiates maybe from other definitions of faith that you may have been exposed to at different points in life.

And this is often why I refer to it as trust or confidence or conviction even.

Somebody gave a note about the difference of English and Pali or Sanskrit,

Whereas in English,

Language is much more fixed in its translations versus these Sanskrit and Pali words that you hear have so many more implied meanings.

And those implied meanings are also woven into the fabric of the culture.

It's almost like colloquialisms in English,

But the whole language is that.

So we might translate it as faith,

But it also implies trust,

Conviction,

Confidence,

And words similar to that.

And as you've probably seen with this quality for yourself,

It fluctuates.

So it fluctuates throughout the day.

Sometimes we can be like so high on our confidence about what we're doing,

And then we know what we're doing.

We're like straight as an arrow.

We are aimed.

And then all of a sudden,

Something shakes us,

And it's like that drops away.

And all of a sudden,

We're in a doubt storm,

Which is like a sandstorm,

And you can't see your way out of it.

You know,

For me coming into this practice,

I had had many years of practice.

I started practicing very,

Very young,

Relatively,

And just with like very simple body scanning type stuff.

This mind has always been kind of inclined towards psychology and towards like more existentialist type thought,

But I didn't really have anywhere to place it.

And then when I encountered the Dhamma as an experienced thing,

As like a lived thing that I could really apply to what was happening in my life,

It was like there was no going back from that point for me.

The first silent retreat that I went to was recommended to me by my mother-in-law at the time.

And she had gone,

I think she'd gone through a divorce,

And had gone on this 10-day silent retreat with teachers Steve Armstrong and Kamala Masters.

And she was like,

Man,

It was amazing.

Like by the end of it,

I was just walking like so slowly through the woods and these bunnies.

It was like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty,

Whatever.

It's like these bunnies and these birds,

Like everything was just coming to me.

It was incredible.

I'm like,

That sounds amazing.

That sounds incredible.

Oh my god,

I would love to experience that.

So I'm like fresh off the plane from New York at the time.

And like,

You know,

Oh my gosh,

That city just kicked me around so much.

It's a hard place to live if you have not lived there,

But it's a hard place to live.

And yeah,

I was just like,

Oof,

I really,

Yeah,

This will be great.

So I go on the silent retreat,

And it was absolute agony.

Agony for nine days.

Like I had no idea what I was getting into.

I was sold on bunnies and birds and inner peace.

And I was freaking out,

Like just sobbing all the time,

Like crippled with anxiety.

I remember sitting in the,

There was like a carport where the like teacher's car that they could use was like parked.

I'm sitting in between the bumper of the car and the edge of the carport because it was the only private place that I could find,

Despite being in the middle of a forest.

And like just sobbing,

Because I felt like there was no escape anywhere.

No escape from my mind,

No escape from the agitation,

No escape from that rumination that was just driving me up the wall.

And so that went on for days,

Like that was like days.

And then I went into the Dharma Hall.

I couldn't,

I can't tell you like what the first few days of Dharma talks were like,

Because I was just like panicking the whole time.

And just trying to get through it,

You know,

Like writing.

I think I did write a novel.

It was like the novel of my life of how I died on a retreat.

And so I was just in it.

And I walked in,

And it was this talk about the Four Noble Truths.

And Steve was giving the talk,

And he shared like that first noble truth about Dukkha,

And how of course we struggle,

And of course we feel dis-ease,

And of course we feel stress,

And anxiety,

And worry,

And like all of these different states.

And I felt like,

Oh my god,

That's so normalizing.

Like here I've been living in the world,

Living in a family,

Even at that point having gone through like a yoga teacher training.

So like I had been exposed to some of these concepts,

But I hadn't actually felt them.

I hadn't actually felt what Dukkha was.

Like I knew that I struggled.

I knew that my mental health was all over the place.

But I didn't know that this was an experience that people experience.

That this was normal.

This is human for us to have this experience.

And that there is a map,

Not even just like a hope,

But there's like a map of how we can walk out of this.

And I walked out of the Dharma Hall that night,

And I just started crying again.

But I started crying out of relief,

Because I felt like,

Oh my gosh,

Like okay,

There is hope.

Like there is something here.

And that kind of faith is known as bright faith.

So it's like when somebody inspires something in you,

And you're like,

Oh,

That is a handhold that I can hold on to.

That is something that I can grip until I can pull myself out,

You know.

So this retreat went on,

Still really rocky,

Having all these group meetings.

I'm crying through all of those.

Like I don't think I said a single word.

Steve was so intimidating.

He's like extremely nice.

Very,

Just extremely kind person.

Has a lot of energy.

But I just,

I couldn't,

I couldn't tell him anything.

And so he would just like look at me and go,

Oh.

And then hand me the tissues.

It's like,

How much worse is that?

But at some point,

I was like sitting out on the back deck,

And it was after lunch,

And it was like so rainy.

It had been rain,

It was in western Washington,

Just rainy all the time,

Drizzly,

Misty,

Classic western Washington weather.

And like sitting on that deck,

And all of a sudden,

The weather changed.

Like the clouds parted,

And it was sunny.

And I remembered,

Like I remember the teaching about impermanence.

Oh,

It changes.

Oh,

Oh my gosh,

It changes.

How incredible.

And I felt the relief of that change.

Like,

Oh,

Just to interrupt that loop,

Like this anxiety is not forever.

And it can change.

And it just did change.

How incredible.

And that moment was like,

That is verified faith.

Like that is you seeing something.

That was me seeing something for myself that I had already like heard about.

I had,

People had shown me,

Like there were so many cool practitioners on this retreat who were in their 60s,

70s,

80s,

Been doing it for decades.

And I find,

I just saw it for myself.

And it was like,

Oh,

I can do this.

I can do this.

And I have never once looked back,

Ever,

Since that moment.

It was like,

This is it.

So we have those moments.

And the objective of faith,

Like its function for us is to clarify our own path,

Right?

It's to clarify the path that the soul aspires to be a part of.

That whatever that part of us that brought us here,

Whatever it is,

It aligns us with that.

It really gives aspiration,

Right?

It almost gives purpose in this life where you can do and be and spend your time however you want to,

But gives that purpose.

It's like just that clarity of where you want to go.

And so you have to trust in those moments that happen for you,

Right?

And just trust that as they happen over and over again,

It's deepening,

It's realigning you,

Right?

And everybody is going to be a little bit different,

But it's realigning you with where you are going,

Where you want to go.

And the interesting thing,

So we talked about the klesas earlier today,

These torments of mind.

So what is the deepest torment that we encounter?

The first that we encounter,

The first obstacle,

And the last that we encounter,

It's with us the whole time,

Is doubt.

So confidence in ourselves,

Trust in ourselves,

Trust in our own experience dissolves doubt,

Slowly for sure,

But it dissolves that doubt.

Doubt in your own capacity,

Doubt in the practice,

Doubt in the veracity of the teachings,

It starts to dissolve those things.

And as those,

As that doubt dissolves,

That heaviness,

Right?

Doubt is heavy.

You've been in a doubt storm yet this week?

Oh,

Doubt's heavy,

Feels bad,

And so much can come along with it.

But as that dissolves,

All that it lightens,

Then we start to feel weary or energy.

And I always like to throw this out,

Because I know many of you have at least been in one yoga class before that has included like virabhadrasana,

One,

Two,

Or three,

The warrior poses.

It's the same root,

Virya.

Energy means power,

Right?

Solidity,

It's like that strength and that bravery,

And the proximate cause for this to arise,

For this strength to arise,

Is known as samvega.

This is called spiritual urgency.

So sometimes we find it when we encounter dukkha,

Yeah?

So you're sitting with your crippling mind state,

Whatever that might be,

Can't seem to like move on with your life without that being a constant for you.

And that gives you a sense of urgency to try and find a solution for it.

Sometimes it's inspired by a loss,

You know,

Sometimes it's inspired by a major life event of some sort.

But we feel that,

Like that sense of time running out.

Sooner or later,

We all start to feel the sense of time running out.

I don't know if you're there yet,

But it starts to happen.

And,

You know,

We really start to realize how little time we have on this earth,

And how little time we have to live well.

How little time we have to love well,

And figure it out,

So that we can really be in our life in a way that feels meaningful,

And purposeful,

And driven by something other than just buying more stuff,

Getting more stuff.

For the Buddha,

Right,

This is like the traditional kind of example of this.

For the Buddha,

It was when he left his palace of luxury that he had never ever been allowed to leave before,

Because apparently his parents were very controlling.

And he left the gates and like saw aging,

Sickness,

And death.

And he was like,

Oh my god,

This is what happens as we live.

Oh god,

He had been protected from all of that.

It was like,

Yeah.

And he saw it,

And he's like,

Oh my gosh,

I got to figure out a way.

I got to figure out a way to sort this out.

You know,

For me personally,

And I'm just sharing these anecdotes,

Just again,

I just think like normalizing stuff is so important,

Because it's really easy to put ourselves on pedestals.

It's easy to put other people on pedestals.

You know,

For me,

This energy was like,

First it kind of came in as really like a cleaning house type thing.

Like I had to really clean up my act a lot.

I was like,

I have no judgment about anything that anybody's doing.

Like we're all on our own path.

But I was a extremely heavy pot smoker.

Just loved,

Loved ripping that bong.

So good.

And like,

I just,

I don't know,

I just started to see like how much of a of a crutch it was for me like to just come home and I would feel some anxiety.

So I would just like,

You know,

Roast a bowl.

Or then on the weekends,

Like I'd be doing all this stuff through the week and like,

You know,

Spending my time reading spiritual books and all over the self-help section.

And then I'd be like head into the Green Lantern and just like getting faded and then whatever,

Wandering around or like getting pulled over on my bike because I'm swerving too much.

Like it's,

You know,

There's a lot.

So you see like,

And all the reactivity,

Just all of the fighting that was happening in my relationship at the time,

Like all the volatility that was there.

And not,

I just had no concept of like how,

What I was doing,

How I was spending my time was affecting my lived reality outside of that moment.

It was like the idea or even the understanding of like cause and effect had no relevance for me.

I was like,

I was just happy to be alive because honestly,

There were several moments where that was a little bit of a,

A little bit of a question of if I was going to make it through some things.

And yeah,

You know,

So really like just had to clean it up.

But I felt like,

I felt like there was enough force there.

Like that aspiration was strong enough,

That faith was strong enough,

That confidence was strong enough that I knew I could do that.

And it took time.

It really has taken time to step back from the places that I really felt like I was crutching,

And these behaviors,

And these habits,

And all this stuff that I was using as a way to avoid,

Or deflect,

Or manage,

Or whatever,

Rather than just being able to be present.

Rather than just being able to be with what was here.

So this energy manifests as a non-collapse,

Right?

And so in this way,

It is the antidote.

It's the opposite of sloth and torpor,

Or boredom.

So when we have energy,

When there's interest there,

When there's curiosity there to engage,

Then that builds on itself,

And then,

And then we don't get stuck in these holes nearly as much anyway.

So if we're not constantly monitoring this like energy and this effort,

This is a part of why,

Why wise effort is such a big part of this practice,

And why it's something that Laura and I talk about all the time.

Like how many times did Laura tell all of us to slow down today?

Because we're all,

And like work at 70% instead of 110%.

But we're all going to over-effort at times,

Right?

We're all going to shoot for the moon,

And we're all going to slack.

So like for you,

You have to find what's the appropriate amount,

What's the sustainable amount of energy.

And sometimes you have a little bit more energy,

And that's great,

So apply it.

And sometimes you have a little bit of less energy,

And that's okay.

So you use what you have,

No?

But this is,

It's like,

The energy that we expend doing this is maybe the only place in life,

The only energy that we spend that actually multiplies.

It gives it back,

And it gives more back than what you put in.

So I'd like to share this.

Is anybody familiar with Carlos Castaneda's work?

Yeah,

Okay,

Okay.

So this is Carlos Castaneda talking about what Don Juan,

Who's like a spiritual shaman,

Said to him.

In order to accomplish the feat of making myself miserable,

I had to work in a most intense fashion,

And that it was absurd.

I had never realized I could work just the same in making myself complete and strong.

Don Juan says,

The trick is in what one emphasizes.

We either make ourselves miserable,

Or we make ourselves strong.

The amount of work is the same.

And something that Sayadaw Uteshania says is that mistakes are the stepping stones.

So there,

Of course,

We make mistakes in life.

We do things that we regret or whatever.

But you know,

When you learn from them,

When you commit to learning from your own life,

From the way that you've moved through the world before,

Rather than just getting caught in that,

Like,

Shame cycle,

That guilt cycle,

And like the,

Like,

Oh man,

I did it so wrong.

Let me go roast a bowl now so I can forget about it.

Then it starts to become this energizing force.

Like,

These are stepping stones on the path that we have.

We really,

Really don't understand,

Until we start to see it more clearly,

How much effort goes into making ourselves miserable.

How much effort it takes to hold on to a view,

To a belief,

To a certain sense of self-righteousness about a situation.

How much energy it takes to hold on to anger.

How much energy it takes to hold on to just what,

What is out of alignment with us at any given point.

But when we let it go,

It frees that energy up,

Frees it up for us to use it in ways that are actually nurturing for us.

And of course,

I'll argue that the most nourishing,

The most nourishing way to,

To use that energy is to apply it to mindfulness.

Mindfulness to be present.

And as I said earlier,

Sometime during this retreat,

That word sati,

Mindfulness is the function of remembering.

So if you have the experience where you're like walking around,

You're just kind of like,

And then all of a sudden it's like,

Oh,

My foot is touching the ground.

And it's like,

Bing!

A little mindfulness light bulb goes off because it's like that groove is there now.

And so there's,

That was a moment that you had conditioned from before,

From the effort of being aware,

From the effort of being mindful,

That moment of mindfulness arose,

Even without much effort from yourself,

Right?

Now,

There is a little bit of effort to remember.

It's like having this,

I don't know what a good example,

A paddle boat.

Yeah,

We'll stay on the lake metaphor.

All right.

So when you're first getting into a paddle boat,

Right,

You got these little like pedals and the paddle,

Whatever behind you.

And it takes a little more effort in the beginning,

Like you have to push harder.

But then once you start pushing,

And you get into the rhythm of it,

Then actually you just kind of are coasting.

Like it's like,

Oh,

Yeah,

Okay,

I still have to apply a little bit of effort with each stroke.

I feel like a paddle board or a paddle boat is kind of a specific thing.

We could apply it to a bike too.

Okay.

You know,

You still have to like put in the effort,

But like you've already got it moving.

And like the hardest thing is to get it moving again.

So not that we're there yet.

But just to like maybe put a little note in your mind at this point,

That you have already put in a lot of work,

Even for those of you for whom this is totally new.

You've already put in a lot of effort.

You've already got that boat moving.

You already have that bike moving.

And it's going to be a lot harder if you stop.

So just keep a little bit,

Right,

A little bit of effort over and over and over again.

So what are we remembering?

What is the function of this remembering?

We're remembering our life.

We're remembering that our life is actually happening right now.

That everything that's come before is gone.

It doesn't actually exist anymore.

The body is kind of a record of it,

But it's gone.

It doesn't exist.

You are not you at five years old anymore.

I'm sorry.

You know,

Past is gone.

The future is a total fantasy.

It is.

And it's like that fantasy feels like it's real because we,

You know,

Believe it.

So we kind of like aim towards it.

And we,

In that way,

Kind of make things happen that we imagine.

But it's a fantasy.

Like in the future,

I could become a dragon.

It's unlikely,

But it's a fantasy.

Everything,

The only thing that you have,

The only life that is happening is right now.

It is happening in this moment.

And yes,

It feels like a continuum.

Our feeling of space,

Our experience of time makes us believe that we have this past and this future,

And we're juggling all of this in real time.

We're not.

You only have right now.

This is the only thing that is real,

Right?

And so this practice,

Mindfulness,

Is really about being alive.

It is practicing being alive in your own life.

So we spend so much time imagining,

Fantasizing about what happened in the past and the future,

Trying to rewrite history,

Trying to resolve things that will never find resolution.

And we project into the future these different ideas of who we could be,

Who the people we care about should be or could be,

Or what their potential is.

And it's like,

Oh,

We get so trapped in this murky haze of all of that past and present,

Future all colliding in once.

But we just have now.

So all of this spiritual,

What's the word,

Spiritual idealism of like,

Oh,

I experienced my past lives,

And I projected to the astral plane,

And I've done all of this.

And on this Ayahuasca trip,

I visited this realm and the fifth dimension and all that.

It's like,

Fine,

That's fine.

Maybe that's true.

But at the same time,

Is there anything more powerful than actually being here in your life?

Is there anything that is more incredible than actually being here and now?

As I was typing this out today,

In my flurry of thoughts,

I looked over on the coffee table in the upper farmhouse there,

And there was an article that was like,

I don't even,

I'm not sure what this publication is,

Some local newspaper or something.

And it talked about,

It has like big picture of this man on the front of it wearing a baseball cap.

And it says,

Every day is a blessing.

And then just within like the first page of this,

He had a heart transplant 40 years ago,

Which is a long time ago to have a heart transplant.

Those usually wear out much sooner.

And he is on the transplant list.

But he's not yet,

He's not getting one yet.

He's just on the list.

He's like,

You know,

Down there.

And his perspective on life,

Every day is a gift.

Like,

Can you imagine really,

Really living with that kind of awareness that you don't know when the heart is going to give out?

You don't.

I think that that sense of time,

That sense of spiritual urgency,

It increases as we get older,

As we see the realities of time running out,

Because the body starts to change quite a bit.

But,

You know,

The earlier that we can start to live in a way where it's like,

Wow,

Every day,

Every moment that we have is a blessing,

You don't know,

Nothing is guaranteed at all.

Incredible.

All right,

We'll move on.

Many moments of mindfulness lead to what's known as samadhi,

Or collectedness of mind.

And I always said that,

That concentration is,

Because our idea of what concentration is,

Where we have to narrow and focus.

And it's like,

I just imagine being in front of my math textbook in high school and being like,

I have to concentrate on this.

And I'm like,

Watching the numbers go like that on the page.

I'm like,

Oh,

No,

No,

I have to pull the numbers back together.

You know?

That's not the same.

That's not samadhi.

Samadhi,

Evenness of mind,

Right?

It's like this natural settling of the mind.

Yesterday,

In one of the small groups,

The idea of Teflon came up.

Teflon of the heart.

I was talking about the Brahma Viharas being Teflon of the heart.

We don't need to worry about that.

But it's almost like,

Samadhi is like Teflon of the mind,

Where it's so smooth,

So slick,

That these torments of mind might arise,

But there's nothing to hold on to.

There's no belief in them.

Because the mind is seeing clearly,

Right?

It's seeing more clearly.

It's like,

Oh,

Yeah,

This is just arising because it's already been conditioned to arise.

Oh,

Okay.

And it passes away.

And without that identification with it,

Without the story behind it,

The narrative,

The like,

Oh,

My gosh,

Well,

Due to this trauma from my mom and from this and that,

And like,

Oh,

That fight that I had last week,

It's able to move onward.

So this is the end of clinging.

That clinging word,

That velcro,

We feel that velcro kind of starting to soften quite a bit.

That word sukha,

I think I brought that in this morning.

Maybe I brought it in yesterday.

That word sukha,

Kind of the opposite of dukkha,

Ease,

Relaxation,

Is why I emphasize relaxing so much.

Relax.

Because when the conditions for being relaxed are there,

When the body can loosen,

Right,

If the body's tight,

The mind is tight,

Guaranteed.

If the mind is tight,

The body's tight,

Guaranteed.

If the body can be loose,

Soft,

Supple,

The mind will follow suit,

And vice versa.

There's a word that I think is nice to bring in.

Ujukata.

Ujukata.

So like uj.

You know that word,

That ujjai,

Uj.

Victorious.

Ujukata.

Which means that when we have developed enough samadhi,

Ujukata is the inability to deceive yourself.

Have you deceived yourself?

Even we just see it in like self-limiting beliefs,

You know,

Like I can't do that.

I can't do that.

It's not within my capacity.

It's not within my capability.

I can't do it.

Don't have the time.

Inability.

It's like all those unskillful views and opinions and beliefs and habits and patterns that we bump up against,

Whether they're externally something that we find or internally there's something that we've absorbed and that we really ride by.

Ujukata.

We develop the inability to deceive ourselves.

You become really honest with yourself.

That's cool.

Imagine a world where everybody was doing that.

Of course,

All this leads to panja or wisdom,

Right?

And this wisdom specifically points to the understanding of what leads your mind,

It's individual,

What leads your mind into more suffering and what leads your mind away from suffering.

Knowledge is what we glean from others.

It's what we hear from others.

So these could be extremely enlightened beings.

These could be people who are extremely wise in their own right,

But the only thing that any wise person can offer is their knowledge,

Right?

Ultimately,

Because it has to become yours in order to become wisdom.

It has to be from your lived experience.

It has to be seen and felt and metabolized and integrated in order for it to be wisdom.

We have a knowledge addiction in this culture.

I think worldwide.

Knowledge addiction.

We want to consume it.

It's like the newest,

Maybe not the newest,

But man,

The invention of the iPhone.

I remember my dad being like,

I just wish,

This was back in 2001,

Maybe,

Being like,

I wish I could just pull out the Encyclopedia Britannica so I could look up anything I wanted to look up at any time.

And we were all like,

Whoa,

Can you imagine the Encyclopedia Britannica?

Of course,

It's always like 15 books.

I guess it's like 30 books.

Huge collection.

All those hardbacks.

How are you going to carry those with you on a vacation?

Well,

Now you have it and you can't escape it.

And not only do you have wisdom coming at you,

You have all kinds of whatever coming at you that's also disguised as wisdom,

Disguised as actual knowledge.

It's insane.

So this is where this practice really like the rubber hits the road you could stop,

You stop deceiving yourself and you start realizing that all has to come from you walking your own path.

It is so,

So easy to believe in the future of your fulfillment.

It is super easy to believe in that.

But as I'm going to keep saying,

Your life is only right here.

So anything that you experience now,

Right,

Conditions the next moment.

So we start to feel that like,

Oh,

Peace is actually what we find now.

Peace is in the decisions that we make now.

Ease is in the decisions that we make now.

So that's all we have.

It's the only thing we have to work with.

So this is the path,

Right?

It's individual and it only reveals itself to the people who actually walk it.

What's going on,

You know,

Right here,

Right in our own heart.

So these spiritual faculties,

Again,

Sadha or trust,

Faith,

Virya,

Energy,

Sati,

Mindfulness,

Samadhi,

Collectedness of mind,

And panya or wisdom,

Really guide our unfolding.

And we just have to keep our aspiration clear,

Right?

Keep it clear.

Keep aiming towards that.

So I'll finish with this from Sayadaw with Tejnya.

There's nothing more interesting than using the dhamma in daily life,

He says.

People don't use the dhamma that much in daily life because they don't know the quality,

The value,

The inherent worth of the dhamma.

Someone who really practices in their daily life will really know the value of this practice as something they can't live without.

When your understanding of the true nature of things grows,

Your values in life will change.

When your values change,

Your priorities change as well.

Through your understanding,

You will naturally practice more and this will help you to do well in life.

So let's just sit for a few minutes and let that kind of trickle in.

Just a minute or two.

By sit,

I mean lay down or stand up or however you need to be comfortable.

Trusting that whatever is relevant,

Whatever is helpful will percolate in and will plant a seed.

When your understanding of the true nature of things grows,

Your values in life will change.

When your values change,

Your priorities change as well.

Through your understanding,

You will naturally practice more and this will help you to do well in life.

Thank you for listening to the dhamma.

Thank you for your kind attention.

You