Begin Again: Heart Practice & True Contentment

So,

As I mentioned this morning,

The heart channel is this boundless space and the fire element reminds us of this expansive space that we can dissolve our own egoic preferences,

Our own origin stories,

The histories of tumultuousness or turbulence that can tend to define the rigidity or the armoring that the heart space,

The chest,

The clamp of the lungs,

The clothes of the ribs,

The sink of the sternum,

Right,

All of this is what we sometimes call the heart armor and the psychological lived experience of the mind-body shows up somatically,

Right,

We see the holding patterns in the fascial web with regards to our burdens,

Our dukas,

Where we suffer.

Duka is a Pali word,

It's from the tongue of the Buddha,

It predates Sanskrit even and to break that word down,

You know,

The languaging of it I find is so important,

So ka is space,

It's ether,

It's air,

You know,

Like Akashic records,

Ka is that open boundless space and the prefix of du means a lack of,

Duka is the collapse of space,

Suffering is when we forget our basic nature,

The Buddha seed of this boundless heart,

Duka is when we get smaller,

Duka is when we give our power away,

Duka is when we forget who we really are and start to grip or clench on to conditional circumstances in order to be content.

Now there's circumstantial satisfaction in life and that's the satisfaction of I just had a great massage,

I love the meal that I'm having,

Everything's right in the world,

My friends support me,

Circumstantial or situational contentment is informed by so much of what's out of our control,

How was the meal,

How did I sleep,

Am I feeling recognized and witnessed in the social fabric,

Am I getting my way?

So you could say it's immature happiness,

It's immature peace,

Not bad or wrong,

Just not evolved and we all seek conditional happiness lifelong and that's the monkey mind that's continuously grasping for,

I want to look a certain way,

I want to feel a certain way,

I want things to go a certain way and I'm going to continuously use my life force to grapple with conditions,

Some of which are entirely out of my hands,

Lifelong.

Non-conditional contentment is nirvana,

That's awakening,

That's reaching the other shore of regardless of conditions arising,

I know a space in the boundless depths of my being that can be with this all with tranquility,

Irrespective of circumstance,

I can be at peace,

It's a much more lasting,

It's an everlasting equanimity.

So,

Yes,

Even the Dalai Lama has said,

I hate when I order ice cream on a hot day and it melts,

I hate when I give a Dharma talk and I've been talking about this theme for hours and then at the end someone comes up to me and asks,

Are you going to mention this thing that I was just talking about?

So,

He's alluded to,

You know,

There's the humanity here and even a very highly evolved being,

There's a humanity of preferences and how do you respond when the world does what you don't want it to do?

And that's a when,

Not an if.

And so,

The heart of awakening the capacity for true contentment,

That's the open-hearted willingness,

The willingness to be with what is,

Is inquiry-based practice,

We need contemplations to see,

You know,

What's in our way of feeling home in this human heart,

In this Buddha belly,

What's in the way currently of allowing myself to come even closer,

To come just even a little bit closer to this radiant plumb line,

Right,

The juice of the stars is here from the belly to the heart,

This intelligence that gets so buried underneath the rigmarole of concerns that cloud our clear-seeing.

So,

Vipassana is insight practice,

Insight meditation,

Literally translates to clear-seeing.

For just a moment,

Can I part the clouds enough to see that here in the heart space,

There's a boundless sky,

What Taoists call sunyata,

Sunyata is the open sky space so that whatever weather patterns pass through,

Hardships,

Transitions,

Right,

The birth-death cycle will be continuously exposed to lifelong,

Whatever the weather patterns are,

That there's a backdrop that's vast as a holding sphere for the conditions of life to travel through.

Sunyata is a being,

A practitioner that knows there's a boundless kindness and warmth and receptivity here that's unconcerned with worldly material.

Again,

Inquiry is what drives our evolution,

So at the heart of Vipassana practice and to open the heart-mind,

Sometimes it's as simple as the inner contemplation,

Am I willing to be here?

Can I be here with myself?

Sometimes the inquiry evolves into really being met with a strong storm and there's pain in the body or there's disconnect or this sense of feeling shipwrecked,

Self-abandoned,

Distraught,

Disconnected,

Disturbed,

Right,

Any of those dis words,

Disappointed.

When the feeling tone becomes strong and wants to pull you off of the center line,

Inquiry is the way back home and so the inquiry will evolve into even though I'm feeling fill in the blank,

Am I willing to be with myself right now?

Am I willing to be here with the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows of this human lifetime,

Who knows how long we have here,

So can I meet this moment with as much vivid,

Clear seeing as is possible right now?

And because the heart holds the hum of the human collective,

You know,

We're tribal species,

We're communal species,

So the interwebbing of our relational world impacts how clearly we can see,

Right,

We've got the ancestral legacies,

The legacy burdens of our family line,

Of our racial line,

Our religious line,

And then we're also influenced so deeply especially at a young age,

Porous,

The soul is so porous when we're young that the organism absorbs what the world tells us about who we are.

Mindfulness,

Vipassana specifically is a practice of seeing clearly this moment in an attempt to decondition from what we've been told,

From what the culture overridingly assumes that we should feel about ourselves.

I like to think about these heart practices as clearing the cobwebs and to really see clearly from that glowing allyship of the center of the sternum,

Right,

That like Iyengar once said,

It's where the sun shines from,

Like to really just part the clouds from that space,

We'll have to get clear on what those clouds are,

What are the burdens relationally from our history that we're bringing in.

So we'll do a little practice now to clear the cobwebs and begin anew with a clear,

Fresh heart mind.

And I'll recommend you use this inquiry practice,

Poise it from a seated meditation,

Though if you want to lie down or pick a yin pose,

Please do.

This is a practice called beginning anew.

And at the midpoint of retreat now,

There's a sense of wanting to pull out or start to go back to our habitual patterns or get more online,

Start thinking about the travel ahead,

Right?

Begin anew,

Recommit,

Recommit,

Get the most out of this time and turn freshly back to the practice field and put the rest of the world down,

Set it down,

Put it down and let's come in through this beautiful,

Humming,

Vibrant human heart.

Beginning anew,

It's a timely practice for the October effects,

The last few months before the new year.

It's a practice to get real about who we've hurt or unskillfully entangled with,

To transform ignorance,

Wrong actions and cultivate clear seeing,

Vivid seeing.

As you breathe in and around the heart space now,

The swirl of the upper lungs,

The spread of the collarbones,

You feel the rise and the fall of the shoulder blades.

It's a four-step process.

The first step is what we call flower watering,

Watering the flower of your heart.

What do you love about yourself?

What are qualities you admire in yourself?

Feeling gratitude,

Admiration,

Whisper that like you're drizzling nectar here.

Feel the flower of the heart bloom as you admire your precious form.

Think about what gives you meaning to your life,

What turns the world for you,

What do you love about how you move through the world.

Stay with any step as long as you'd like.

We'll move on to step two,

Which is to contemplate our regrets.

In this past year,

Where have you hurt others and created dukkha,

Constriction,

Separation,

Confusion in yourself or others?

If there's shame,

Regret,

Disappointment,

Rather than sweeping it under the rug of the heart space,

Turn to it freshly,

Contemplating any real regrets you have about this past year.

Step three,

Inwardly sharing where suffering has arisen for us.

So,

Has someone created dukkha for us,

Expressing hurt over this past year,

Expressing any hurt,

Any dukkha that you've navigated?

To see it freshly,

The witness presence of yes,

This too,

This is here too.

And then lastly,

We'll stir up in the very root of the heart a statement.

This will be your sankalpa,

Right,

Your mantra that indicates willingness.

Willingness to move forward,

To begin anew,

To start fresh right here,

Right now.

To spin the heart back open to willingness,

What's the secret line,

Those secret prose you'll whisper to yourself,

Let clarity,

Clear seeing come into sharper view from the heart.

And it's here you might also ask for support around any ongoing transformation or long-term difficulty or something on your horizon,

Ask the cosmos,

The angels,

Gaia,

Ask the gods for the support you need to stay in this willingness.

And we'll close the practice with one of my favorite lines from Jack Kornfield,

If there's anything that just feels too big for you to hold,

Too much for this heart to encompass right now,

Jack says,

Place that which is too hard to bear into the hands of spirit.