Welcome,
My name is Doug and this is the Simple Pleasures Meditation.
It includes a reading of part of Simply Living,
A poem by Catherine Pulsifer,
And several readings from the Radiant Sutras,
Translated by my teacher Lauren Roche.
Give yourself a few moments now simply to find some comfort,
A pillow,
A blanket,
Whatever you need.
Give yourself some comfort and we'll begin in 30 seconds.
This is from Simply Living.
Busy,
Rushed,
Hurried,
Buying,
Having,
Doing,
Words for the life of the living.
Stop and living simply see the beauty of the sunset,
The sound of the wind,
The feeling of the sunshine.
Great,
Sounds nice,
But perhaps for you that part about stop and living simply see the beauty of the sunset is a little hard,
Especially the stop part.
Maybe that whole stopping thing just doesn't work for you right now.
A job,
A family,
A career,
A life in the world,
Busy,
Buying,
Having,
Doing are the words for the life of the living.
Maybe you're not ready to go to the woods and live deliberately with Thoreau.
Maybe it all sounds like something written on one of those motivational posters you find in the kitchens of offices.
This notion of living simply is all around us,
From every soothsayer and every prophet on every street corner,
And certainly from every meditation teacher you'll ever meet.
Of course,
We all know that there is truth here,
Essential truth.
We know what we lose when we lose the time for relaxation,
For playing,
For appreciation of the world around us and its wonders.
We know the value of simple things,
Hearing a song we love at just the right time,
A taste,
The touch of a loved one.
We know what we lose when we lose love and appreciation for the simple things,
Or what we lose when we still love and appreciate them,
But never seem to find the time to enjoy them.
We are overly stimulated.
Some of us are overly busy,
Sometimes because it's what we need to do to get by,
Sometimes because we might fear a life without a constant level of busyness.
We might use busyness as a way to distance ourselves from ourselves.
We might lose awareness of simple pleasure,
Of those pleasures we can always rely on instead of relying on wishes that won't come true,
Instead of relying on complication and rushing.
Becoming aware of what we don't usually see,
Becoming aware of simple things we might take pleasure in,
Is a skill,
A way of looking at the world,
A skill easily lost or neglected.
Awareness is the practice we seek.
It is the practice we need in our lives to balance out the buzzing confusion that meets us at every corner.
I offer you today a meditation on simplicity,
On seeing and taking advantage of simple pleasures.
If you look back over your day,
Can you allow yourself to be aware of what might have been missed,
Of what you didn't hear,
Of opportunities for connection,
Of chances to sit quietly for just a moment and take a deep breath?
What simple things that might have helped you were you not aware of?
Did someone offer help to you that you didn't even recognize as an offer?
It's okay.
We all get busy.
Our awareness fails.
We do what we need to do to get through the day.
Maybe right now a memory of some lost opportunity will come to you,
Not coming through to torture you or make you feel badly about what you missed,
But to let you know that such opportunities abound,
That there is an abundance.
The way light played on a table,
Crisp air being drawn into your lungs,
Finding a parking space being warm,
What someone was wearing on the bus,
An abundance of simple pleasures awaits.
This is Sutra 44 from the Radiance Sutras.
Rivers of power flowing everywhere,
Fields of magnetism relating everything.
This is your origin.
This is your lineage.
The current of creation is right here,
Coursing through subtle channels,
Animating this very four.
Follow the gentle touch of life,
Soft as the footprint of an ant,
As tiny sensations open to vastness.
Power sings as it flows,
Electrifies the organs of sensing,
Becomes liquid light,
Nourishes your entire being.
Celebrate the boundary where streams join the sea,
Where body meets infinity.
The power of life flows through you in every minute of your day.
Rivers of power flowing throughout your body and in through your senses.
When you can understand that life is singing to you in every moment,
You might find yourself filled with happiness.
When you can accept the simplest of pleasures on offer,
You might burst with joy.
Rivers of power can be loud and rushing or subtle trickles.
Our focus here is on a Lilliputian perception,
On our ability to be alert to the tiniest sensations,
The most subtle magnetism,
Gently touching you like a tiny ant walking on your skin.
The simple pleasures we find day-to-day,
Minute-by-minute,
Don't have to be big or even particularly significant.
It's not necessarily what we take pleasure in,
But the pleasure we take that is the wonder.
Fill yourself with pleasure from the abundance of wonders around you.
Fill yourself with wonder.
This is from Sutra 82.
Trees have desires,
Rocks have knowledge,
Jugs are full of happiness and joy.
Shed in celerity,
Be all pervasive,
Delighting in kinship everywhere.
Objects may talk to you,
And you may speak back to them.
Do you talk to your car,
To trees,
To your chair or table?
You might imbue simple and ordinary objects with knowledge or desire.
Maybe your water pitcher remembers the earth it was made from.
Maybe it remembers the clay it left behind.
Maybe the rocks in your garden love to shine after a rain.
Even the simplest of objects might teach you something about transformation.
Even the simplest of objects can bring you,
However brief,
A moment of pleasure.
Brief moments of pleasure over the course of your day will build until you are filled with gratification.
A room we loved as children,
The sight of a house,
A path we took,
A moment of clarity,
The voice of a waterfall.
All might be experiences perhaps now lost from memory,
But are all things we might look for again or seek to re-experience.
Things barely remembered,
Things half heard in the stillness between any two breaths.
Somewhere there in that fecund stillness between any two breaths,
In that generative plane that holds everything.
We are all beginners,
We are all novices,
And perhaps the most difficult lesson we have to learn is that we will always be beginners.
We seek to build,
To improve,
To pile achievement onto achievement in building a meditation practice or a life.
Find your beginner's mind,
Unearth that time when you didn't understand anything,
And find your way back there.
Find your simple practice,
Find simplicity in your life.
Come back to the place you started and know it for the first time.
We need all sorts of nourishment,
The food we eat,
The water we drink,
The air we breathe,
But we also need food for thought,
Food for our spirit,
For our ears,
For our hungry hearts.
We need the nourishment of simple sensuality,
A touch,
A caress,
Walking in nature with the sun shining on your skin,
And the wind tickling the hairs on your arms,
The sound of a bird calling to another.
Our task in meditation is to receive all of these sensuous perceptions and see them as gifts.
Accept everything coming in through all your channels of perception as emanations from infinity.
All of the ways in which you sense the world are pathways to allowing the life of nature and the nature of life to talk to you,
To sing to you,
To touch you,
To delight you,
To entertain you,
To feed you.
This practice of acceptance is a practice you will never complete.
There will always be new ways to discover things we do not know because we have not looked for them,
Because we have not recognized them for what they are,
Gifts.
As our meditation comes to its end,
Might there be one small simple thing you can bring back with you to take pleasure in,
Your shelter,
Soft clothes,
An animal's touch?
Maybe simply the knowledge that you can do something for yourself.
Welcome back.
