The Mystery

This is a longer range view of our practice and what we’re doing here together, and throughout our lives. When we’re together we’re doing the meditation part but there are also other parts of the practice, that part in which we’re practicing in the world.

As we do this practice, we learn a more balanced awareness by seeing where we are out of balance. We see where the mind and heart can unfold; and where it fold in upon itself.

Transcript

So the topic of today's dharma is about this,

This mystery that we're all involved with.

That we're all involved with.

I want to start by reading from the Majjhima Nikaya.

It's the early text that I pull a lot of my teachings from.

The purpose of the holy life does not consist in acquiring merit,

Honor or fame,

Or gaining morality,

Concentration or the eye of knowledge.

The purpose is that unshakable deliverance,

The sure heart's release.

That indeed is the object of this holy life.

That is its essence,

That is its goal.

The sure heart's release.

So today I'd like to offer a long range view of our practice.

Like what we're doing here in this mystery.

What we're doing throughout our lives.

And I'd like to speak about the foundational practices because we often forget about them.

We talked about foundational practices last week.

Now what we're doing here together,

We're doing the meditation part together,

Right?

But there are all the other parts of our practice.

Our daily life practice,

Our practice in the world,

Our practice with our children,

Our practice with our aging parents,

The practice with our aging bodies.

So as we do this formal practice together,

We learn more and more about a balanced awareness.

And we learn more and more about where we really are way out of balance,

Right?

We can see where the mind and the heart can unfold.

And we can also see where it's been folded in upon itself.

And all of us have experienced where we feel tight around something,

Some situation.

And then when we give a little space to it,

It starts to unfold through our attention.

Like it starts to unfold that tightness.

When we give it a little space,

It loosens a little bit.

When we start to really see it like,

Ah,

This is where I'm holding.

This is where I'm clinging.

And as we practice,

We begin to bring more and more of a,

Like a real sobering honesty to what's unfolding in our life,

To what we hold on to,

To our responsibility in the clinging.

So even when it's hard to bear,

When life presents something that's hard to bear,

We're still able to do our practice,

Our practice of awareness.

And that brings forth wisdom.

And then we start to use that wisdom.

Maybe not at first,

Maybe we just see the wisdom and then go back to our habit pattern.

But eventually.

.

.

Because we become more aware of what helps a situation and what hurts us.

So with some continuity of practice,

Day by day or year by year or minute by minute sometimes,

The heart and the mind start to align.

They start to come together with what is true in reality.

We're able to face the truth.

And the biggest truth we're able to face is that everything changes.

Everything changes.

And this happens,

This unfolding,

It happens gradually.

It's a gradual awakening,

What we're doing here.

It doesn't happen overnight.

For most of us,

It takes a long time,

Maybe a lifetime.

So we bring forth,

As this gradual awakening is blossoming within us,

We bring a lot of compassion to its development.

A lot of patience and faith in ourselves as this develops and unfolds.

And faith in others too.

Because sometimes people in our life don't behave in ways that are loving.

But we can still have an open heart to them.

We can.

And what's so astonishing about this practice is as we cultivate these qualities within us,

These attitudes that we're developing,

You know what ripples in the pond,

So to speak.

Sometimes there's a bunch of rocks thrown into the pond in our clear,

Open,

Vast mind.

So when ripples come and currents come,

We can still have that ability to actually return to stillness.

We can return to clarity.

Because we've been practicing together.

And what becomes our practice really is seeing the ripples,

Seeing the currents,

Seeing the rocks disturbing our clear,

Open mind.

Seeing the stillness that comes.

And this is over and over again,

Time and time again.

Just seeing the waves.

I think it was a Taoist saying,

And learning how to surf.

Learning how to surf those waves.

And we can rely on this practice in that way.

The practice of clear seeing.

What we're doing is really getting to know ourselves.

Know our strengths and know our weaknesses.

And for some of you as we practice together,

You know we understand that at first we're practicing to alleviate our suffering.

There's some dissatisfaction in our body,

In our mind.

When I first started practicing,

I was suffering.

And my intent was to find some relief from it that wasn't in a bottle,

That wasn't in a drug,

That wasn't in a relationship,

That wasn't an experience or something that I could buy.

I wanted something lasting to relieve my suffering.

That's how I came to this practice.

And when I started to retreat and deepen the practice and just give space and awareness to what was arising in this body,

In this mind,

This crazy mind.

At times I experienced such incredible ease,

Like the big mind meditation,

But without any sound.

And I wanted to find out where is this going to lead me.

I wanted to understand it.

Like where am I going with this?

What am I getting into?

And so I read these,

I started getting involved in these ancient texts.

And I read the Middle-Length Discourses.

And I came across that passage that I read earlier.

The purpose of this holy life does not consist of acquiring merit,

Honor or fame,

Nor in gaining morality,

Concentration or the eye of knowledge.

The purpose is that unshakable deliverance,

The sure heart's release.

That indeed is the object of this holy life.

That is the essence.

That is the goal.

So that passage,

This is the aspiration for us all.

The sure heart's release.

That's what the Buddha experienced as a human being.

Not as some god,

Not as some super human being.

So this is not beyond us to experience in this lifetime this freedom of heart,

This ability to love without boundaries.

In the early Buddhist text,

It starts out in the beginning of the readings.

O nobly born,

You who are the sons and the daughters of the awakened ones,

The Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas,

Do not forget who you really are.

Do not forget your true nature.

Over the years I've read this a lot to this Sangha.

I need to hear it myself.

O nobly born.

This is our inner nobility,

Our Buddha nature,

Our ability to be generous and kind and loving to ourselves,

To each other.

You know as we approach the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere,

We're losing daylight.

It's getting darker earlier.

And so we're seeing people put up their lights,

Lighting candles.

And at this time of year,

People light up all kinds of things.

There's an opportunity to shed some light in on ourselves.

To kind of get more settled and maybe get a little bit quieter,

Stay closer to ourselves and remember,

Remember our own inner light.

To come home to ourselves and be a refuge to ourselves.

To be a light unto yourself is understanding that it's not dependent on circumstances,

On people,

On someone else.

It's not like somebody else is going to do it for you.

Like here,

Let me shine the flashlight on you.

We actually have to do it ourselves.

So our work in the world at this time is to find something that brings you home to yourself.

You know we're getting busier now with the holidays approaching.

So find something that brings you home to yourself.

So you're more connected to yourself.

And in a way that's why I wanted Megan to come and play the Singing,

The Healing bowls today.

So that you could come into yourself.

The Native American tribe,

The Ojibwe have a saying,

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.

Sometimes I go about in pity of myself and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.

It's a mystery what we're involved with here.

We're all made of starlight.

The earth and all that came with it came as an explosion out of the stars and galaxies.

And if you don't think that's a mystery,

Look at every tree,

Every leaf and blade of grass on the surface of this planet.

All those green beings can turn light into sugar.

That's extraordinary.

That's extraordinary.

What a mystery,

Right?

What a mystery.

What a mystery.

So the point is,

I guess the point of liberation,

It's not to transcend our world,

You know,

To find some peaceful bliss or to run away to some cave or some tropical island.

The point of liberation is to actually see the mystery,

Sense the sacred in the everyday.

Sense the sacred in the everyday.

And like the Buddha who wandered through the dusty streets of India,

Find that sacred exactly where we are.

And that place is Nirvana,

Nibbana,

Right here and now,

When we can find the sacred in just here.

I remember the hours that followed,

Finding out that my mom took her life.

I recall walking from room to room in my house,

Packing clothes and getting ready to fly to California.

And I was really walking in circles,

Stricken,

Stricken with grief.

And as I sat on the plane that evening,

I wrote in my journal,

Here's what I wrote.

Descending into California,

Filled with uncertainty,

Loss,

Fear of what is ahead.

Grief,

Bone chilling grief.

And somewhere,

Someone else is experiencing what I am experiencing.

I am traveling solo in this body,

But my grief is not solitary.

So when I arrived in California to deal with the business of death,

At the end of every day,

I would take these huge walks,

Sometimes well past dark.

And I'd usually end up sitting on a hill or by the bay.

And I would see the sunsets or the first stars and the unbounding vastness.

And in my grief and in my aloneness,

Looking at the night sky,

I felt less alone.

I could sense how everything has its rhythms,

You know,

Arriving and departing,

Flourishing and struggling,

Coming into being and dying away.

And I kept coming back to and wondering how many other people were in the same predicament that my brother and I were in.

I kept coming back to,

I'm not the only one who has had to meet suicide in families.

I'm not the only one that has been stricken by tragedy and loss and heartbreak.

I'm not the only one.

This is all of us.

This is the human journey,

Our human journey.

And I could,

When I reflected on this,

I could feel the space within me relaxing.

And I could hold it with tenderness and care.

And I could trust this mystery,

This mystery.

I am not alone.

Neither are you.

So this practice that we do,

The vastness of mindful awareness practice,

Allows us to stay steady and quiet so that we can cultivate this tender and wise perspective.

To really be able to witness just this dance that we're in,

This dance of life.

So dear ones,

Dear friends,

Our practice together is an invitation really to live from our wisdom.

Who you are is nobly born.

Consciousness itself,

Consciousness itself,

Starlight.

This is from the writer,

Glendon Doyle.

She says,

You will never change the fact that being a human is hard.

So you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.

So to be wise and peaceful and free,

It's the great power that we're cultivating.

And the great power is not to be afraid of suffering.

Suffering is the first of the four noble truths.

There is dissatisfaction.

When you sit down,

And if you certainly if you don't sit down regularly,

You'll find suffering almost immediately.

And your dissatisfaction.

That's the only part of the story though.

The liberation,

The liberation that comes from suffering,

That's the other part.

That happens too.

So our hearts,

You know,

We can bear witness and carry what Jack used to say,

Life's 10,

000 joys and 10,

000 sorrows.

It's like that for each one of us.

And when you get quiet and you're sitting,

You feel your grief and your loss.

You feel those connections that you cherish,

Maybe your economic worries,

Your children growing up,

Your body growing old,

Friends that are dying,

Knowing that you too will die.

And you can feel that in your heart,

The heart that can carry it all.

Your longing and your hope and your love.

This is the reality that we live in,

Those 10,

000 joys and 10,

000 sorrows.

So what really starts to bring the spiritual path alive in our daily life is when we start to bring into consciousness the millions of little moments that we have with each other.

That we can love one another.

Kindness is the way.

So offer kindness to your own being.

Start there.

So we thank our tender hearts for showing up for ourselves.

And we hold it all with compassion.

This is from W.

S.

Merwin.

Little breath,

Breathe me gently.

Row me,

For I am the river I am learning to cross.

Breathe me gently,

Row me,

For I am the river I am learning to cross.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Thank you.

Reviews

🙏🕊️

Dear Lisa, thank you for your inspiring, gentle compassionate talk. I am grateful. Sending good wishes. 🌻

Suffering is life. But there’s joy when I change my perspective

✨️🙏✨️

A talk for all who seek truth and calm. There is no answer to the mystery - only our own journey through it.

Superb. Thank You. 🙏

Lovely 🙏