Why Meditate?

In this talk offered for the Sit Feel Heal Center in Santa Cruz, California, Matthew explores the reasons that people begin mindfulness meditation, why they continue meditating, and what the practice offers in both secular and Buddhist terms.

Transcript

It's good to see you.

You know,

As I was preparing the talk,

I was reflecting on this time I did a,

It was like a day-long workshop at Inside Santa Cruz,

Which I think is pretty close to here.

I don't live here,

But I think it's over there,

Right?

And it was like 10 or 12 years ago.

And it was one of those day-longs that it was very traditional.

It was like walk,

Sit,

Walk,

Sit,

Walk,

Sit.

And we were doing walking meditation.

And for those of you who aren't familiar with kind of the more traditional form of doing walking meditation,

It's very slow.

You know,

It's kind of lift,

Lift,

Move,

Move,

Place,

Place.

You know,

So all of us are outdoor.

It's a beautiful day,

Right?

It's a beautiful Santa Cruz spring day.

Sun was out.

And some people are in the parking lot.

Some people are walking along,

Like,

The sidewalk.

That's where I was.

And,

Of course,

There's cars driving by.

There's people going by on bicycles and people walking by.

And it struck me that everybody who's seen us probably thinks we look kind of weird,

Kind of like non-threatening zombies or something.

You know,

Like they're not the wild zombies,

You know,

That are,

Like,

Running really fast or have their arms out,

Just like,

What are these people doing?

And,

In a way,

What we do when we meditate is kind of weird in terms of what we're socialized to do.

It's a little bit weird.

It just so happens when you're doing the walking meditation out in a public parking lot,

You know,

The juxtaposition is more noticeable.

But even what we're doing here when we come in and we seclude ourselves from the outside world and we come in here and we sit down and we maybe close our eyes.

Maybe we don't move.

Maybe we're stillish.

And we certainly aren't talking too much when we're meditating.

That's a little weird,

Too.

It's just that people aren't seeing us do it.

But most of the time when you put people in a room,

We talk,

We get chatty,

We distract ourselves,

We do all sorts of other things.

And instead,

On a Friday night when we could be Netflixing or whatever it is you could be doing on a Friday night,

We're still going to get ice cream tonight,

But whatever you could be doing on a Friday night,

You've come here and decided to,

Like,

Sit down,

Shut up,

Close your eyes.

Like,

It's a little bit weird,

Right?

And the Buddha did talk about the fact that this path goes against the current,

Right?

And it goes against the current in terms of what our mind might want us to do,

But it goes against the current in terms of what society might tell us is the normal thing to do on a Friday night or the normal thing to do on any given moment.

So congratulations.

You've decided to sit and be quiet on a Friday night.

So what is this we're doing here?

What is this weird thing?

And what is mindfulness?

I think a lot of people encountered meditation for the first time probably outside of a Buddhist tradition.

Not all of us,

But I think a lot of people probably encountered it that way.

Maybe it was like an MBSR class.

Maybe it was with your therapist.

Maybe it was in a recovery program.

Maybe it was,

I don't know,

The secular 24-hour fitness yoga class where they had a five-minute meditation at the end.

Something like that.

You know,

There's all sorts of contexts when we could encounter meditation that aren't necessarily Buddhist.

But even the secular kind of versions of mindfulness that we're familiar with,

Mindfulness-based stress reduction as an example,

They're rooted in a Buddhist tradition.

They're rooted in some very specific teachings that come to us.

And some of you will be familiar with this,

But for those of you who aren't,

A lot of this mindfulness movement,

A lot of the meditation we're exposed to in these non-Buddhist,

Non-dharma settings comes from a teaching called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness,

From a teaching or a scripture or a sutta called the Satipatthana Sutta.

Satipatthana meaning foundation of mindfulness.

And so I'm going to read a little bit from that sutta,

The very beginning of it,

Just so you get an idea of maybe where we're headed here.

Now,

All these scriptures,

All of these teachings,

They begin with,

Thus have I heard.

And it's typically because somebody heard the Buddha say this.

Traditionally,

There's one of his attendants who memorized,

Supposedly memorized all of the teachings.

And so thus have I heard,

This is Ananda speaking.

On one occasion,

The Blessed One,

That's the reference to the Buddha,

Was living in the Kuru country at a town of the Kurus named Kamasadama.

There he addressed the monks thus,

Monks,

Venerable sir,

They replied.

The Buddha said this,

Monks,

This is the direct path for the purification of beings,

For the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation,

For the disappearance of dukkha and discontent,

For acquiring the true method for the realization of nirvana,

Namely the four foundations of mindfulness.

One word in there,

Not English,

Dukkha.

Are people familiar with this word,

Dukkha?

Not everybody nodded their heads,

So we'll go over that for a second.

This is the word that's usually translated as suffering.

When we talk about the first noble truth in Buddhism,

The truth of suffering,

The word that we're talking about here is dukkha.

And it's in the original language,

It's Pali.

That's the original language of some of the earliest teachings we have.

And dukkha refers to,

Sounds funny when I first say it,

But it basically means bad hole.

And it refers to the hole of a wheel.

And if you have a wheel where the hole is not perfectly centered and you attach an axle to it,

You'd have a misaligned wheel,

Right?

And so when we're talking about dukkha,

We're talking about a bumpy ride.

If you were to get a bike,

If you were to get a car or a train or any other wheeled vehicle,

And your axle isn't perfectly in the center of that wheel,

You're going to have a bumpy ride.

So when we talk about dukkha here,

We're not just talking about kind of the dramatic forms of suffering,

Right?

Terrible grief,

Terrible loss,

Things like that.

We're also talking about everything that makes life a little bit bumpy.

We're talking about traffic.

We're talking about work,

Waiting for the clock.

We're talking about all the subtle forms of dissatisfaction,

The whole spectrum from discomfort all the way to more extreme forms of suffering.

So when the Buddha says,

For the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation,

For the disappearance of dukkha and discontent,

Understand that he's pointing towards this path of mindfulness as being in some way a treatment,

As a way of working with and eventually disappearing even the subtle dissatisfactions of life.

It sounds like a tall order.

I mean,

It is a tall order.

But I don't know about you,

When I first picked up meditation,

When I first decided to try mindfulness,

It certainly wasn't offered to me as the surmounting of sorrow,

Lamentation,

The disappearance of discontent.

For me,

Personally,

It was a form of escape.

I saw meditation and mindfulness as a way of checking out.

I also didn't completely understand meditation or mindfulness at the time.

As some of you know,

Well,

There's actually a two-part story.

I was first exposed to the Dharma.

I was first exposed to Buddhism in a college class in my early 20s.

And I heard about the first noble truth,

The truth of suffering,

The second noble truth,

The cause of suffering,

The third noble truth,

The end of suffering,

The fourth noble truth,

Here's how.

And I heard about this recommendation to meditate as a way of doing that.

And it all made perfect sense to me.

It just was really,

Really logical.

It didn't demand me to have particularly supernatural beliefs.

I was a very angry atheist back then in my early 20s.

You know,

Like the remnants of my punkier years.

But I didn't pick up the practice then.

I suffered from something the ancient Greeks might have called akrasia,

Which is the tendency to know what's best for me but not do it.

And so I knew what was best for me.

And I knew that meditation was probably something that I should pick up,

But I didn't.

I think we all understand this tendency to not necessarily do what's best for us a lot of the time.

And so I kind of set it aside,

And I put it behind,

You know,

The glass in the hallway that said,

In case of emergency,

Break glass.

So that's the first part of the story.

The second part is when I needed to break the glass.

And as some of you know,

This is a few years after that college class,

I found myself in the county jail.

My best friend had killed himself.

I went off the deep end.

I relapsed on drugs pretty significantly.

And then I found myself facing the rest of my life in prison.

In fact,

Multiple lifetimes.

They were trying to give me 400 years to life.

So generally speaking,

Life sucked.

I didn't have that friend.

My wife was then leaving me.

I was facing all of this time.

I didn't have drugs to escape anymore.

So I made a decision back then.

I was going to try two things out.

One of them was recovery.

I decided that drugs had finally got me to a place where maybe I should do something about it.

And two,

I was going to try meditating.

So I approached it through this dharmic path.

I approached it through this Buddhist path,

But I also approached it still with kind of like that atheist,

Almost secular Buddhist approach.

This idea that Buddhism is just a philosophy of life.

The Buddha is giving me these practical instructions for meditation,

And that's how I approached Buddhism.

This is about 20 years ago now.

So we all come to meditation for,

I'm sure,

Different reasons.

There's a WhatsApp group with my local sangha.

Some of you in that group are in here.

And so you know that like last week,

I was asking the WhatsApp group,

Why did you start meditating?

And there's some interesting answers.

And then I went down the rabbit hole a little bit.

I jumped onto Reddit.

I found a Reddit thread that was,

Why did you start meditating?

And it was just all these hundreds and hundreds of answers.

And so I'm going to read some of them to you.

Maybe they're familiar.

Maybe they're not.

I hid out in a Zen monastery because I owed people money.

Powering control over my mind.

Did I see a nod over here?

There we go.

Less stress.

More mental fortitude.

Curiosity for altered states of consciousness.

I see some nods there.

Thought it might help with my depression.

You're going to recognize this one.

Not that it's you,

But you're going to recognize this one.

The shittiness and endless pain of being alive.

Grieving the death of my mother.

My mind was complete chaos.

I wanted to leave the world behind without resorting to drugs.

I can identify with that one.

Trying to lower my blood pressure naturally.

Sidebar.

I used to like.

.

.

Remember the TB tests they used to give people?

If you've been to jail,

You've gotten lots of TB tests.

They give you one every time you have.

.

.

All the time I was getting TB tests.

But because I was born in Europe,

I had like.

.

.

I don't know if it's a TB vaccine or something that would make me always test positive.

And I knew that it meant you would get quarantined in the county jails.

So when I first started meditating,

I'd only been there a few months.

I was trying to meditate the lump on my arm away.

It worked.

To lessen the anger I had towards my health issue.

To heal trauma.

I saw that people who meditated were more peaceful.

Someone I trusted suggested it to me.

I wanted to relax.

So perhaps you heard you in there.

Perhaps you didn't and you have your own unique reason for having found this path and picked it up and decided it was something to try,

But you're here.

And all these myriad reasons that we have for picking up practice and some strange confluence of events have all led to us sitting here doing the weird thing on a Friday night in the same room together and that's pretty cool.

So we have a pop understanding of meditation.

This secular context that I referred to.

And so according to the American Psychological Association,

Mindfulness-based interventions like MBSR,

Which is mindfulness-based stress reduction or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy,

They're effective at reducing stress and anxiety helping with pain management,

Conducive to addiction recovery,

And help prevent major depressive episodes.

Now there's lots of studies that talk about lots of other benefits of meditation and mindfulness,

But those are kind of like the foundational ones that most of them agree upon at least.

There's disagreement in other places.

And so if you look generally speaking at all those reasons I listed and maybe our own reasons,

And even the reasons for practicing according to the APA,

It seems that mindfulness is a treatment or mindfulness works when it comes to dealing with stuff that sucks.

That's basically what we're talking about here.

Mindfulness works in dealing with stuff that sucks or another way of putting it,

In dealing with dukkha.

And so the kind of the purpose that the Buddha offers us for practicing mindfulness aligns with the purposes of mindfulness as expressed by even our clinicians,

Right?

Science seems to confirm some part of that.

And so that's this first noble truth,

This truth of suffering.

And it's not meant to be like,

It's not meant to be negative,

Right?

I think some people think that Buddhists,

Because our first truth is negative,

That we just must be a bunch of like morose,

You know,

Negative people.

But to me,

It's liberating.

This idea that dissatisfaction in some way is,

It's not a problem.

It's not something that we did wrong.

It's not something that's personal.

It's a feature of existence.

It's not something wrong with existence.

It's a feature of the matrix,

If you will,

Not a glitch.

It doesn't mean it can't be worked with.

Otherwise we wouldn't be doing this,

But it does mean that we don't have to take it personally.

And so we talk about this suffering.

We talk about this dukkha.

But what is the flip side of it?

Because a lot of the times folks will talk about meditation,

Not so much in terms of dealing with suffering,

But in what it does for us when we practice it.

And I feel like there's general agreement over this idea that meditation provides calm.

That might be what we think of as like one of the flip sides of suffering is calm.

You might have people that meditate to relax.

You might have people that meditate to get to sleep.

Anxiety,

Generally speaking,

Is not calm.

And there's people who meditate to have less anxiety.

Anger is not necessarily calming.

And so people meditate to have less anger.

The compulsion of addiction,

Meditate to have less anger.

Less compulsion or calm.

And calm is one of the aims of meditation practice in a Buddhist context.

But I think a lot of folks practice for calm and calm alone.

And calm sometimes is a side effect of meditation.

Some sense of tranquility,

Some sense of contentment,

A sense of equanimity and peace.

This can be a side effect of meditation.

And of course,

With persistence,

The sometimes can become more oftentimes.

Not all the time.

But in the Buddhist context,

In this path of the Dharma,

This calm,

In a way,

Greases the wheels for what is to come next.

I don't remember where it comes from,

But there's a story about a.

.

.

I don't know,

It's like a Buddhist master that has a glass of muddy water.

And the student keeps stirring it up for trying to clean the water.

And the master says to the student,

If you just let the glass sit there,

The mud will eventually settle to the bottom.

And then we can see clearly.

And ultimately,

That's what this path is about.

This calm that we try to establish,

This calm that we begin to establish with mindfulness practice,

It's geared towards being able to see clearly.

And so ultimately,

While we might get calm and some relief from suffering while practicing meditation,

And it can tend towards creating greater calm in our life off of the cushion or with informal practice,

Ultimately starting to see clearly is where the alleviation of suffering really begins to happen.

Seeing clearly.

So to take it back to the Satipatthana Sutta,

It is for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation,

For the disappearance of suffering and discontent.

What are we doing then when we're practicing mindfulness?

What are we doing when we're meditating?

I know we're not supposed to have goals.

Who's heard that before when getting meditation instructions?

You're not supposed to have goals.

Like Joseph Goldstein says something along the lines of,

You can get better,

But the desire to get better will get in the way of getting better.

And a lot of our practice is kind of paradoxical like that.

And the Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi said,

You're perfect just as you are.

And you can use a little improvement.

It's another paradox,

Right?

Now,

Some of you have probably heard this story because you're in one of my sanghas,

But just describe a personal experience with working with a certain type of suffering with a meditation practice that I think exemplifies really well what it is we're doing when we're trying to see clearly.

When I came home from prison,

I won't say I suffered from anxiety,

But I had moments in which I had terror.

And they always happened in moments when I was doing what I was doing right now.

Go to 12-step meetings,

Someone would call on me to go to the front of the room,

And I would want to run.

I had a paralyzing fear that someone in the room was going to hurt me.

And speak as a survival strategy,

I had picked up when I was in prison was to be invisible because if people knew me,

Then they might hurt me.

So visibility was a significant problem for me.

And I was fortunate enough to find a therapist who was a somatic experiencing practitioner and a regular therapist,

LMFT,

And she was a dharma teacher.

So I had this awesome fusion of like,

I don't know,

To me the perfect therapist,

Like all rolled into one,

Right?

And sometimes I was fortunate enough to be able to go into her office when I was mildly activated.

And there were things that she could do for me to activate,

Which would actually be something along the lines of what I'm doing now,

But in an office,

She'd have me stand up,

Sit down,

Stand up,

Sit down to activate my body and kind of like initiate like this,

I'll call it anxiety,

But there's a lot wrapped into this word.

Excuse me.

And she would have me sit on a cushion or in the chair and describe what it felt like,

What this fear felt like,

What this anxiety felt like.

I would have like sweaty palms.

I'd have like an elevated heart rate.

My breath would start to get restricted to the top of my chest.

There's tension in my lower back,

Tension in my forehead,

And I felt hot.

And it was this suite of symptoms,

Right?

Like all of these things occurring together,

Kind of like the constellations of a star.

When you look up and you see,

You can look at an individual star and like,

That's one star,

But you put them in a particular order in a particular arrangement and it becomes the Big Dipper.

So I had these constellations of sensations in my body that as a suite of sensations became this paralyzing fear,

Right?

I named them this paralyzing anxiety,

This paralyzing fear.

And so she would ask me to drop into the body and name those things.

And then she would ask me to go to those sensations and describe them as pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Or neutral.

And what I found,

And it was a really curious and interesting exercise,

What I found is that my sweaty palms,

It wasn't unpleasant,

It wasn't pleasant.

It was just neither.

My elevated heart rate,

Neutral.

Almost every sensation that I was experiencing in the body as part of this suite of symptoms that I was calling anxiety and fear,

All of the individual sensations themselves were neutral.

And then I would tack to the mental concept,

The mental state of fear and anxiety,

And that was very unpleasant.

And what she had me do is go back and forth,

Back and forth,

Become familiar with the body,

Become familiar with the feelings,

Become familiar with the mind state until there was like a little bit of an uncoupling.

There is the realization that the mind was actually the one that was manufacturing the bulk of the unpleasant sensation I was experiencing.

And so I worked with it,

You know,

Like when I would get called to the front of a room,

When I was still going to 12 step,

Though I don't do 12 step anymore,

I do mindfulness-based,

Buddhist-based recovery now,

And I don't have to stand up at podiums anymore.

So that was really useful because there's something about actually standing up that's more terrifying than sitting down in a circle.

But if you were at meetings or groups with me back then,

And I was asked to say,

Chair a meeting,

Something like that where I had some degree of elevation,

You would have heard me actually begin my talk by telling folks what it felt like in my body because there was this,

I had to drop in to continue.

And so what was I doing?

What was happening when I was practicing this way?

I was seeing clearly the way that my mind was constructing certain parts of my experience,

Right?

I saw clearly the way that my mind was taking context,

Combining it with particular constellations of sensations in the body,

And making it very unpleasant for me.

Because of a narrative,

And by the way,

A survival strategy that totally worked for me,

I managed to not get stabbed or anything crazy my whole time in prison.

So the survival strategy did work,

But it was no longer a viable strategy,

Right?

It was no longer useful to me,

And it created suffering.

And so it was worth looking more closely at and more clearly.

I mean,

I can have an elevated heart rate when I'm running,

And that's just fine,

Right?

My palms are probably sweaty when I'm working,

And that's just fine too,

Right?

And so what is the mind doing with my experience?

There's a Buddhist text called the Dhammapada.

And it's basically one of the simplest texts that's out there from the Pali Canon,

One of the earlier sets of teachings from the Buddha,

Because it's just like lists of sayings and teachings.

It doesn't include a lot of the fluff that you might find in the other scriptures.

And the very first one in the Dhammapada,

And I don't think it is unimportant that it's the first one,

Goes like this.

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 an ox.

All experience is preceded by mind,

Led by mind,

Made by mind.

Speak or act with a peaceful mind,

And happiness follows,

Like a never-departing shadow.

And that's Gil Fronstel's translation.

But I've heard a different way of phrasing the first line that always strikes me,

I like it.

It is,

Mind is the forerunner of all things.

Mind is the forerunner of all things.

So a lot of the times what we're practicing,

Particularly when it comes to dropping into the body and getting grounded and getting present,

To a certain extent we're trying to,

For the moment,

Bypass a little bit of the filter that the mind is providing to our experience,

Right?

That's why a lot of practices involved with,

You know,

Regulating the nervous system,

A lot of practices that deal with actually creating calm and fostering calm often start with the body.

They don't all,

It's not a one-size-fits-all for every human and every mind on Earth,

But generally speaking,

These are useful practices for grounding and calming.

So I'll ask the question again,

What are we doing here?

Now in that setting with my therapist,

I didn't know this at the time,

Because I wasn't schooled,

I suppose,

In the framing of the Dharma practice,

Is I was working with the first three foundations of mindfulness,

From the Satipatthana Sutta,

Mindfulness of the body,

Mindfulness of feelings,

Mindfulness of mind.

That's the specific practice that this therapist was guiding me through,

To work with this paralyzing fear that I had.

But if we don't want to,

Like,

Talk about it in terms of a specific teaching,

How might we talk about what we're doing?

I think the best way to characterize the way we're beginning with practice is that we are turning towards our experience.

I think a lot of folks' suffering comes from turning away from experience.

I spent my last few years in prison as a firefighter,

And we did wildland firefighting,

And we would do these things,

These live fire trainings,

Where we'd light a field of grass on fire,

And we'd chase after it,

You know,

Digging a little fire line along the edge of the fire as we went.

And we had these instructions for it,

If things got really hairy,

You know,

What to do.

And by hairy,

What we usually mean is you're fighting a fire with the wind at your back,

And so hairy means the wind changed direction,

Which means it's going to blow the fire into your face,

Right?

And so you would get these outlet instructions.

And the simplest,

Of course,

Was always just go back down the fire line you just constructed,

Right?

Because you created a path for yourself,

So you should have a way out.

But if things get really hairy,

And the wind absolutely blows the fire directly into your face,

The only way to survive is to run into the flames.

And this only works with a grass fire,

Not a brush fire or a forest fire.

And the reason is,

Is because on the other side of the wall of flame is burned grass.

Now,

If you turned around and ran away from the fire with the wind pushing it,

You'd just get burned the whole way,

Because the fire is going to basically be going at the same speed that you are,

So you just keep getting burned.

And I feel like this is a Dharma teaching,

Like this idea of,

Like,

Turning,

Facing the fire,

Having a certain degree of willingness to get a little burned in the process.

In other words,

Some willingness to feel the suffering and not turn away from it,

With the understanding that on the other side of it,

There may be freedom and safety from it.

So we're turning toward experience in order to better understand the source of our suffering.

This takes courage.

It takes curiosity.

In the beginning,

It might take a little bit of faith.

Maybe just faith that comes from someone else who said they did it,

And it works,

Even a little bit.

Or just try it for a moment or two,

And then go back to turning away.

You can always turn away when it's time.

So the solution to our suffering,

Then,

Lies in the suffering.

The doorway to happiness eventually lies in the suffering itself.

So that's the first thing we're doing,

Is turning towards our experience,

Not turning away from it.

We're turning towards the simple things like sensations of the body,

Which we may ignore most of the time.

We're turning towards the simple recognition that sensations come with our experience.

I like it,

I don't like it,

I don't care.

We may very often ignore a lot of that.

We're turning towards the fact that most of the sensations and experiences we're having in any given day or any given moment are neutral,

And we're not paying much attention to those.

So turning towards experience.

What follows from that is,

Essentially,

We're training our attention.

We've all heard the basic instruction,

Right?

The first mindfulness instruction we got.

Pick an object,

Your breath,

Your body,

A sound.

Just stay with it.

Non-judgmentally,

Stay with it.

Then when the mind wanders,

Come back,

Right?

When the mind wanders,

Come back.

Keep coming back,

Keep coming back,

Over and over again.

That's the practice,

Right?

We're training our attention.

And one of the first insights we might get when we practice this is that we don't have the mind really totally under control.

In fact,

If you saw the reason some people come to meditation in the first place,

They're like,

My mind was chaos.

I need control over my mind.

I can't get it to do what I want it to.

They've actually had an insight.

Welcome to the club,

Right?

But we can train the mind to not wander as much,

Right?

And we can train the mind to not be as compulsive.

And in this sense,

Then,

We're training our mind towards freedom.

I know the Buddhist path,

The Dharmic path,

The end of suffering is a path of freedom.

It's a path of liberation.

I know in America,

We sometimes have this funny notion of what freedom is.

I like to think of Cartman from South Park.

I do what I want.

He's got little sunglasses on.

You respect my authority,

Whatever.

You know what I'm talking about.

I do what I want.

We have this idea that freedom is to do what you want.

And I've never heard anything that sounds more compulsive in my life.

Compulsion is why I went to prison.

Compulsion is why I lost almost all of my physical freedom for nine years of my life.

That doesn't sound freeing or liberating to me whatsoever.

If we spend all of our time doing exactly what we are compelled or compelled to do by our mind,

Then how could that possibly be considered freedom?

And so in training our attention,

We're actually training the mind in the power of choice.

And so freedom really is the power to choose to do what one wants and to choose to ignore what one wants as well.

To choose to not do what one wants because you might suffer from akrasia.

That Greek term.

Remember to have the tendency to not do what's best for you.

The mind's tendencies.

.

.

If anybody's ever been in recovery or in like a behavior therapy sort of program,

They always tell you,

First thought wrong.

And it's pointing towards this sort of idea that we're training the attention in order to recognize first thought wrong.

I think it was Ajahn Sumedho who says,

It's not about following your heart,

It's about training it.

And I think that's pointing towards this same concept because to train the mind is also to train the heart.

And that leads towards what I think is the third thing that we're doing the third thing that we're practicing after turning our attention towards things.

After training our attention to remain with what we choose it to be with.

I believe we're learning to love.

I think the whole practice is a practice of intimacy.

And I know when we hear the word intimacy,

We think of it it's got like some sexual connotation,

Right?

Intimacy with ourself,

Intimacy with others.

And if it's not sexual,

There's like an Eros type thing in there.

That may just be me,

But I have a feeling that other folks recognize that connotation of it.

But,

In a way intimacy is more about like closeness,

Right?

It's about familiarity.

It's about vulnerability.

I'm a cat guy.

I mean,

I like dogs.

But,

Cats are so much easier to manage in a busy life.

And I love my cats.

And,

When my wife and I get in bed at night and we both take out our Kindle or iPads to read before we go to sleep.

A little orange tabby Oakland,

You know,

He circles the bed,

Make sure the coast is clear and we're safe.

And then he hops in and he gets into the valley between she and I.

And,

He goes straight for the iPad.

Like he knows what is getting our attention.

And he either puts his face between my face and the iPad,

Or he like rubs his head up on the edge of the iPad and it's like trying to like push it out of the way.

Because to cats,

And I think to pets,

Other than food,

Right?

Other than food,

The only thing they want from us is our attention.

And I think that's because to them,

Attention and love are the same thing.

And I think they might be onto something.

When we think about a loving home,

When we think about a loving relationship,

When we think about a loving friendship,

We think about just a loving encounter at the supermarket.

What's happening is there's presence and there's attention.

You know,

Two people sitting on their phones in the same space,

Like it's disconnected,

Right?

And so,

Turning our attention towards things and training that attention to be on what we choose it to be.

We learn to become intimate with our lives.

And intimate with everybody.

And all things.

Intimate with the sensations in my knee.

Intimate with the fact that I've got a cramp in my arch right now.

Some of you know about that cramp.

It's one thing that always plagues me.

Intimate with the things that are beautiful and wonderful and intimate with the things that hurt.

Intimate with their suffering.

There's a Buddhist text that says our only true possessions are the results of our actions.

And I agree with that.

And I think there's a second possession.

And I think it's our attention.

I think it's the attention to a certain extent is the only thing that we can offer to the world.

And it is the one thing that is almost unabashedly an expression of love.

Careful.

Mindful.

Hateful.

Attention.

A few years ago I was in the ICU.

Actually at a hospital here in Santa Cruz.

I forget which one it was.

There's a Catholic one over there.

Dominican?

Does that sound right?

I was in the ICU over there after a heart surgery.

And it was the most painful,

Most physical pain I've ever felt in my whole life.

That's.

.

.

Something happened.

And I don't have time to.

.

.

For time management purposes I don't have time to tell the whole story but it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life that time in the ICU.

I remember being by my grandmother and watching her die.

I remember my hand on her cold hand as she took her last breath.

It was beautiful.

Our attention has the capacity to transform painful experiences that may still be painful into something beautiful nonetheless.

Not all the time.

Not always.

Maybe not until we're awakened beings.

But it has the capacity to do this to our lives.

So we turn toward experience and in doing so we turn towards love.

We don't do this alone.

You know I know when we close our eyes and we get in this chair it kind of feels kind of lonely.

Right now there's just one dude talking at the front.

But raise your hand if like you find that your meditation has a different vibe when you're in a room with other people when you're sitting.

There's like something that happens when we do it together.

I was actually at the Bodh Gaya in India where the Buddha was awakened and there's a little temple right at the spot and I was meditating in that temple and it has like kind of like a mini stupa inside and people will come inside and circumambulate kind of rock in circles like kind of like prayer circles around but it's a very small little temple.

And I was sitting in there with my eyes closed but I could hear people like doing their like walking like devotional meditation.

Excuse me.

And I felt someone's hand like on my forehead.

It's like someone's hand like blessed my forehead.

And it was interesting because my mind wanted I wanted to open my eyes and catch the face of that person who had done that to me but I didn't do it.

I just had this memory of being touched by someone from this global sangha that we have.

Like this idea that some anonymous person this anonymous being in this community of people practicing with us blessed me that day.

We don't do this alone.

It's an ancient path.

I have teachers.

My teachers had teachers.

My teachers,

Teachers,

Teachers had teachers.

And then you just go back.

They go back through Korea.

They go back through Japan,

Tibet,

China,

Thailand,

All over Southeast Asia,

Burma,

And eventually land back at the Buddha and I guess you could argue he didn't do it in a sangha necessarily at least not the awakening part but he sure built one but even the Buddha said in one of the suttas that he when he stumbled upon this path towards the end of dukkha in discontent that he was stumbling upon an ancient path that had been traveled previously by other Buddhas.

And the path by its very nature is a path because people walk on it and as soon as people stop walking it the path is no more.

And so all of our reasons for coming tonight all of our reasons for starting practicing all of our reasons for continuing to practice brought us here this particular moment together and may we grow intimate with each other.

There is a tale about the Buddha's night of awakening.

If you're not familiar there's a character in Buddhism called Mara and Mara kind of is a placeholder for all kind of the evil states of mind we might have also presented as like a malevolent divine style being kind of like the devil or something in other traditions uh and on the night of the Buddha's awakening Mara said to the Buddha different versions of the story he says different things but he said something along the lines of like who do you think you are who is your witness to have discovered this path and the Buddha was quiet he said nothing and he reached down and he touched the earth you can interpret it how you wish the earth is his witness but it's because I think this is our birthright I think it is time for a break