So the Dharma.
These Buddhist teachings.
This Buddhist path.
It's characterized by providing a kind of freedom of choice.
Of freedom of choice.
Suffering.
Often feels like a kind of forgetting.
We forget something deep and mindfulness.
Is a way of remembering.
Remembering what?
Well.
Remembering.
The Dharma,
Remembering to exercise wise intention.
But there is another sense that happiness.
Is brought on as a collection of good habits.
We're not relying on remembering.
And choosing so much as relying on the momentum of our mind.
The direction we've been pointing to.
The inclination of this heart mind.
I like to think of the mind in this way,
This heart mind.
It's from the Tibetan tradition,
But it resonates as true.
So what happens in those momentary states when we come back to our breath and body in meditation,
What happens in those momentary states of mindfulness kindness and joy.
What's beginning to be wired in the mind is a kind of higher habit of mindfulness.
You could say it's how.
.
.
How mindful we are when we're not trying to be mindful.
How mindful we are when we're not trying to be mindful.
And that feels more important.
Uh,
For me.
And what happens.
.
.
Over time is the default state of the mind,
The default is friendliness and compassion.
And equanimity.
Enjoy.
And they're known in the practice as kind of these divine traits.
In the original text,
They are known as the Brahma Viharas.
Brahma being godly,
So these godly places where we live.
And over time,
And many of you may notice this.
That the mind defaults in a way that is less about worrying and clinging and more in the direction of these wholesome mind states.
And this really illustrates.
The nature of this path,
The nature that this path is gradual.
And sure,
We'll have moments of insight and moments of radical freedom.
But.
We're also just slowly accruing momentum.
Wholesome karma,
Wholesome action.
And when I considered what Dee talked about on Tuesday,
This Pali word mudita.
Which I loosely translate as when the heart-mind sees well-being in another.
When the heart is fully able to delight.
Without any protection.
In the well-being of another.
Back in the days at Spirit Rock.
Where I first started practicing the insight tradition.
Jack Kornfield used to share this story.
It's from.
.
.
The author Marie Sendak.
He wrote the children's story,
The Wild Things.
And so Sandak wrote in a interview.
Once a little boy sent me a charming card.
With a little drawing on it.
I loved it.
I answer all my children's letters,
Sometimes very hastily,
But this one I lingered over.
I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it and I wrote,
Dear Jim,
I loved your card.
Then I got a letter back from his mother.
And she said,
Jim loves your card so much.
He ate it.
That,
To me,
Was one of the highest compliments I've ever received.
He didn't care that it was an original Marie Sendak.
Or anything like that.
He saw it?
He loved it.
He ate it.
I was really,
Really touched by something a friend who is also a teacher once said when talking about mudita,
This joy for others.
He said that Mudita was one of the main reasons to teach meditation.
Seeing people practice,
Seeing people grow.
The reward is this great joy.
And I really relate to this.
Seeing all of you.
Committing to practice together,
Whatever the hour.
Like there is a lot of joy in my heart on these mornings together.
And I'd like to touch on.
The joy of walking this path together in spiritual friendship.
Most of my dearest friends on the planet.
Are people with whom I practice the Dharma.
These are people who are willing to look at their own greed.
Aversion,
And almost continuous delusion that we all live in.
That we live with.
People who are interested in understanding their own minds,
Their habits,
And their reactivity,
And the ways that they sometimes cause suffering for themselves and others.
There is something.
Extraordinarily intimate about sharing that with another person.
We aren't just sharing interests or having a good time together.
Although,
You know,
We certainly do that.
I just spent three days with Dee primarily laughing.
You know,
We all share a way of.
Seeing life.
We have a common language of understanding.
What it means to be a human being.
So we can talk about the mind getting caught in wanting the difficulty of letting go,
The way that we defend ourselves.
And what a relief it is to see through something that we once believed so strongly.
And we can laugh at ourselves.
We can remind one another what matters and be honest about the places where we still get caught.
And perhaps.
Most importantly for me is we don't have to pretend to be more awake than we are.
There's a kind of freedom.
And being with people who understand that we are all works in progress.
That we are all capable of kindness and generosity.
And that we also are all capable of being selfish and defensive and judgmental and confused.
And we can recognize these things in one another without making them the whole story of who we are.
I remember hearing a funny story about the Zen teacher,
Ed Brown.
Ed wrote a book that some of you may have on your bookshelf called the Tassajara Bread Book.
And he ran the kitchen at Tassajara Mountain Zen Center and also at Green Gulch Farm.
And he married Seth and I.
He was the Zen priest that married my husband and I.
And Ed is a very sweet man.
And he also has a somewhat volatile side.
And as some of you know,
Kitchens in retreat centers.
They can be kind of like pressure cookers.
And so in the early days of Tassajara,
My teacher,
Gil Fronsdale,
Was also working in the kitchen with Ed.
And one,
One morning.
Ed got so angry at somebody that he actually threw a knife at this monastic.
Like,
Unfortunately,
It didn't hit him,
But it certainly brought out some necessary conversation.
And so I share this because sometimes we have idealized pictures of what a spiritual community should look like.
We imagine that because we're practicing together,
That we should all be kind and patient and understanding and harmonious.
But that's not necessarily how it works.
We bring our whole self into community.
They bring our old conditioning.
Our sensitivities,
Our defensiveness,
And our blind spots.
And sometimes those things collide.
And the practice isn't about pretending these parts of ourselves don't exist.
It's about being willing to recognize them and to talk about them and to take responsibility.
And to find a way back to one another.
To find a way back to one another,
That's relationship.
When Seth and I moved to Colorado,
One of the first things that I missed was having a community of practitioners around me.
Before moving,
We lived five minutes from Spirit Rock Meditation Center,
So I had teachers and peers and friends.
Who I'd been practicing with together.
People who encouraged me and challenged me and reminded me to keep going.
And that's why I started Roaring Fork Insight.
Not because I thought I had something to offer that other people couldn't find elsewhere.
But because I knew how much we need one another.
And over time,
Something has happened.
That I find such joy in.
We've become more than just a group of people who sit together.
We've become people who share this path.
Who care about one another.
And who have the opportunity to grow alongside one another.
This group.
Is a manifestation of genuine rejoicing in the happiness,
The goodness,
And the well-being of others.
This group is Mudita.
We've become part of one another's awakening and we help each other see.
What we can't see alone.
We remind one another of this path when we start to lose our way and we celebrate one another's freedom.
And offer companionship.
Through This.
Inevitability.
Of difficulty that is part of our human condition.
I sometimes think that one of the greatest gifts,
One of the greatest joys of this life is finding people with who we can share this particular way of seeing.
People who are willing to look honestly at themselves and who don't take themselves so seriously.
Who can laugh at this human condition and who want to live with a little more wisdom and a little more kindness.
What a gift to have friends like this.
To have friends like you.
Thank you.
