Buddha's Teachings Of Freedom: Four Noble Truths Meditation

This guided meditation explores our moment-to-moment experience through the lens of the Buddha's central teaching--the four noble truths. We investigate our suffering, identify our own role in perpetuating our suffering, and the path of letting go that helps us find a way out of suffering. This is a live meditation given for the Insight Meditation Community of Washington on April 2, 2023.

Transcript

Or take some moments to arrive and sit together.

So begin by finding a comfortable,

Relaxed posture,

Sitting with your your back straight,

Maybe inviting the shoulders to relax,

And letting your awareness come into the body.

You might consciously kind of drop the attention down out of the head,

Out of the thinking mode,

Down into the body.

So feeling the contact of your body with the surface beneath you,

With the chair or with the cushion or whatever you're sitting on.

If you're sitting and if you're walking or if you're lying down,

Just adjusting accordingly,

Just relaxing into being here,

Closing your eyes if that's comfortable for you.

And it can be helpful to take a few minutes at the beginning of a meditation just to to help yourself arrive as fully as you can and settle into being here.

One helpful practice is just to take a few longer,

Deeper breaths.

So in your own time,

Nice deep in-breath and a long slow out-breath,

Helping the body and the mind to settle into being here,

To shift out of the the kind of the busy mode,

The doing mode.

Often it can be a fight or flight mode,

Where kind of getting you know in a defended mode.

And just coming into that,

What's often called relaxed rest and digest,

Rest and digest mode,

Parasympathetic nervous system.

Breathing in,

Calming the body,

Breathing out,

Calming the mind.

Just letting yourself settle into being here and open to what's present for you right now.

You know if you had an image of your body as a whole,

And including the physical body and you know all the energy in the physical body,

But also the mind,

The consciousness.

Just be aware right now of what's noticeable,

What's predominant in your experience.

Just make space for what's here.

Just allow whatever is here to be to be here.

So whatever bodily feelings may be noticeable,

Maybe you're breathing or an uncomfortable feeling somewhere in the body or a pleasant feeling somewhere in the body.

So if you can just allow what's here to be here,

To let it come and go.

The practice begins by turning toward our experience.

You know often our focus is on what's outside of us and what we need to change to to feel okay or to feel comfortable.

We choose to turn inward and just open to to what's present.

And we meet what's present or we have the intention of meeting what is present with kindness and with acceptance and without judgment.

So whatever is here right now,

Can it be okay?

The lines from Dorothy Hunt's poem,

Peace is this moment without judgment,

This moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome.

So many different ways and metaphors that we can express this attitude that we bring or we endeavor to bring to our experience.

Welcoming the guests in Rumi's phrase metaphor,

Saying yes to what is,

Saying yes to what's here.

Radical acceptance,

Deep-rooted acceptance of this moment,

This experience just as it is.

At the heart of our practice is the art or the practice of paying attention and the attitude with which we pay attention to our experience.

The attitude with which we meet what's here now.

So inviting an attitude of friendliness,

Of kindness,

Of acceptance to what is here for you right now.

Nothing left out,

Nothing rejected.

Oh,

I shouldn't be feeling this.

And if the thought comes up or the movement comes up to push something away,

See if you can make space for that too.

Make space for the resistance,

For the not liking of something.

And if it's helpful,

You can just let the attention,

Let your attention rest on your breathing as an anchor that can help you be here or home base where you rest your attention.

And then when the mind goes off,

Gets pulled off some way,

Just gently come back again,

Kindly come back again.

Notice if there's any feeling of not liking your experience or wanting something to be different.

That this moment in some way isn't okay.

I don't like this feeling.

I'm too hot,

Too cold,

Too achy,

Too tired,

Too this.

Or I wish I had that.

Wish this wasn't happening.

At the heart of our practice is to investigate our suffering,

Really be curious about,

In a non-judging and a kind way,

To be really curious about when we do get into feeling stuck or feeling hooked or tangled or craving or caught in aversion.

We can't find a way out of suffering,

Out of being hooked or tangled hooked or tangled without first acknowledging that we are tangled,

That we are hooked,

That we are caught up in something.

Not that it's wrong,

But just that if this is what's here,

This is what's here.

So just recognizing it when it's present,

That feeling of not liking,

Not wanting.

In the Pali language,

The word is dukkha,

D-U-K-K-H-A.

And the best,

One of the best,

Though not such an elegant translation is unsatisfactoriness.

Some sense of things not being satisfactory or the way we want them to be.

And when we experience that,

Just to acknowledge it,

Recognize it,

Whether it's here right now,

Something you're experiencing right now or more in everyday life.

It's really essential to do this investigation,

Just recognizing when this broadly called suffering is present.

And then the next turn,

If you like,

Is to see what is my role in this suffering,

In this unsatisfactoriness.

You know,

In the Buddha's teachings,

Buddha taught that the cause of suffering is craving.

Than-ha is the Pali word,

Meaning thirst.

It captures probably better the kind of pulling stuff towards us,

But it includes the pushing away as well,

The aversion,

And the kind of being lost,

Being distracted,

Being avoiding.

Whenever there's suffering in this,

In this Dharma sense,

There's always some way in which we're in some kind of unskillful relationship with our experience,

Wanting things to be different,

Wanting what we like to continue,

Wanting what we don't like to go away.

Can you see that,

You know,

Either in practice,

Or at least in understanding,

Can you see that relationship,

That nexus of the holding,

Kind of getting hooked,

And the suffering,

You know,

As two sides of the same coin,

We can bring this curiosity,

This investigation to suffering and the cause of suffering in our own direct experience.

What am I doing that is in some way,

Kind of keeping me kind of keeping me on the hook,

Keeping me tangled.

These,

As many will have noted,

Are the first of the two noble truths,

The first two of the four noble truths of suffering and the cause of suffering.

And then,

As we become familiar with our own relationship to our suffering,

There's a possibility that we can make some space around that holding or clinging or craving,

Being hooked and let go,

Maybe seeing that it isn't helpful for us,

That it is causing us suffering.

And to be able to,

It's like holding on to something really tightly in our fist and just recognizing we can open the fist,

We can kind of drop the thing we're holding.

Sometimes it would be like dropping a burning coal,

You know,

An immediate thing,

Sometimes,

Maybe a little more gradual.

This is the third noble truth,

The freedom that comes with letting go,

With untangling ourselves from suffering,

From clinging.

And the fourth of the noble truths is really the path,

The path of practice that leads us to the end of suffering.

All of the skillful qualities that we cultivate,

You know,

Compassion and generosity and gratitude and loving kindness,

Equanimity,

A whole range of qualities,

Patience,

Non-judgment,

That support us and all the practices of letting go,

Letting go a little,

Letting go maybe a little more,

All of these help move us towards letting go.

We can do this exploration in our own,

In our own lives,

And in our own meditation practice,

Just this investigation.

This is just a very short,

You know,

Attempt to encapsulate this kind of absolutely central teaching of the Buddha on the four noble truths,

Around which all of the other teachings revolve and come back to.

So I'm going to be quiet now for a few minutes and just kind of sit with what's coming up for you and,

You know,

These practices if they're helpful.

In any moment,

Being able to come back,

The mind will go off,

It will get distracted,

Get pulled into something.

This present moment is always available,

Just have to remember to come back.

And our practice is really a practice of remembering,

Strengthening this capacity to remember,

To remember what matters,

To come back,

To be here now.

Finish with this poem by Mary Oliver,

Kind of maybe speaks to the journey that we're on,

The spiritual journey of inner transformation,

Transforming our hearts.

A poem that the journey says,

One day you finally knew what you had to do and began,

Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,

Though the whole house began to tremble,

And you felt the old tug at your ankles.

Mend my life,

Each voice cried,

But you didn't stop,

Though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations,

Though their melancholy was terrible.

It was already late enough on a wild night,

And the road full of fallen branches and stones,

But little by little,

As you left their voices behind,

The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,

And there was a new voice that you slowly recognized as your own,

That kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world,

Determined to do the only thing you could do,

Determined to save the only life that you could save.

Reviews

A very open and relaxing meditation on the foundation of Buddha’s teachings, helping is to release our craving and accept impermanece. It’s a relaxing inviation to put more of the teachings into practice, creating a better world for ourselves and for others. 🤓🙏🏻

Thanks very much, Hugh! 🙏🏾

Thank you

This was so helpful to listen to on this first day of the new year. Something I will come back to again and again. The poetry is a beautiful touch, thank you 🙏 ☮️

Thank you Hugh for for your thoughtful teachings and words of wisdom 🙏💝❤️

Thank you.

Thank you ☀️

Such a lovely introduction to peace. Thank you 🙏

🙏

So beautiful and grounding. With such gratitude to you. Nameste .

Tracy

Hugh’s kind and gentle guidance always has the feeling of a wise friend speaking to me. He teaches with knowledge and experience and I’m very grateful that I can listen and learn from him here.

This is such a healing meditation for me. The gentle reminder that if we are able to set down the second arrow—the craving of suffering—we can and will be free. I am not always ready to set that arrow down, but this meditation helps me make some space so I can sit with it a while and watch it shift. Thank you, Hugh, for ever being such a kind guide into the process of accepting, untangling, and letting go of the knots of suffering. What a treasure you are to this community. ❤️

Thank you for your kind teachings. A lovely way of highlighting the Four Noble Truths 🙏

So grateful. This is lovely. Sacred silence fills the empty space I’m feeling in my heart today

Thank you.

Just what I needed today. Thank you dear Hugh ❤️🙏

A great meditation to start with Hugh’s way of teaching

Excellent. So helpful. I am very grateful for your meditations here 🙏

I do often find myself clinging to something, and suffering. The process of letting go through cultivating patience, acceptance, non judgement, gratefulness, compassion, being here now is the practice of my journey. This meditation guidance simply and clearly led me back to my current insatisfaction in life, the one I needed to make space for despite the constant chatter of my thoughts. It helped me understand I need detachment, to let go. Thank you Hugh for your kindness through your teaching. 🙏

Such a clear explanation of the concepts, wrapped in a supportive meditation. Thank you