So,
We are looking at the three characteristics that are said to characterize all experiences.
And these are all the things that we encounter in our life.
And on Tuesday,
We looked at how everything that we encounter,
Everything that we meet inside ourselves,
Outside ourselves,
Is characterized by the Pali word dukkha,
Which has a variety of meanings.
But for our purposes,
We can understand dukkha on the one side as unreliable.
That's one side of the spectrum.
And then on the other side is like full on pain and suffering.
So dukkha has a range,
Right,
But we experience that range in our life on a daily basis.
And today we'll look at how everything that you encounter also has the characteristic of being inconstant,
Being impermanent,
Being changeable,
Changing.
And next week,
We'll explore the third characteristic,
Which is that everything that you encounter that you personalize as yourself in some particular way,
Doesn't qualify as being the essence of you.
So as we continue on this exploration,
I think it's important to understand that these three characteristics,
They characterize our experience.
And they're just something that we learn to see in our practice and sort of learn to tune into.
It's not like it's something that we have to believe.
You don't have to believe any of this.
But what happens is in practice,
We start to tune into these things,
We start to see this is dukkha,
This is dissatisfying in some way,
Or,
Oh,
There is pain in this experience for me.
We start to notice them as they occur.
It's useful to notice our experience,
To notice that things are changing,
And that things are unreliable.
To notice that,
You know,
This isn't me.
It's not self.
Our lives can be a lot easier to live if we have these three characteristics in mind,
If we notice them occurring.
So today I'd like to talk about anicca.
And it's usually translated into English as impermanence.
And just to say that it's not unique to Buddhism,
Emphasizing impermanence,
You know,
Some of us remember the old Greek philosopher Heraclitus,
Who said that you can't step into the same river twice,
Which is a teaching about how this life that we live is a stream of change,
Always changing.
So it's not just this tradition.
So one of the things that I think is often true about the changing nature of our lives is that change can bring with it a sense of loss,
The experience of loss.
That's often what comes up first when we think of impermanence,
That we lose what we cherish,
The people that we love,
The things that we build up and create for ourselves,
That sooner or later,
Many,
Many things are lost and change.
And some things are unpredictable,
Like when we're going to lose them.
And then there are times that we celebrate change,
You know,
The seasons,
We're entering fall here in the mountains,
And you can start to see that subtle change of the leaves.
Or when the flowers of spring come forth,
Or when a child is born or an animal.
And even though we we know change,
Often we're not recognizing it.
We don't recognize that with birth comes death.
It's just they're a pair.
Anything that's born will die and it's not a crime.
It's not unnatural for that to happen.
Flowers come and go,
Seasons.
There's so much change and sometimes we celebrate it.
And sometimes we grieve it.
Those two kind of travel together.
So impermanence,
Sometimes I think that we do a disservice and overemphasizing impermanence because a lot of people have very little stability in their life.
And so impermanence doesn't give them any hope.
So part of our practice,
And this understanding of impermanence is to cultivate stability.
We don't cultivate the experience of impermanence,
Like that's just happening.
But what we can do with impermanence,
Always happening,
Is to practice stability,
Grounding.
As I said on Tuesday,
Part of the teaching on these three characteristics is to cultivate their opposites.
So we cultivate stability as the opposite of impermanence.
And we cultivate well-being as the opposite of dukkha,
Right?
We talked about that on Tuesday.
The opposite of difficulty is well-being.
And the cultivation of any of these opposites is really,
It begins with clearly seeing,
Oh,
This is impermanence,
This is change.
Can I ground in this change?
Can I find stability in it?
Or this is seeing clearly,
Oh,
This is the pain of life.
Can I take in the good of my life,
The sunshine on my face,
The bird song?
So stability works together as a partner with the insight of impermanence.
When I think of stability,
The image that really comes to mind for me is the redwoods.
I recently was on retreat in the redwoods,
And I had the opportunity to stand under this wise being that was 1,
800 years old.
That's amazing.
It was amazing.
This being,
This species was wider than my house.
It was so big,
So strong and stable.
And I could feel the wisdom of that species surrounding me were all of these ancient trees and this old growth forest.
And the image that's often described as we practice is to make the body like a mountain.
Some of us here in the Roaring Fork Valley live amongst the mountains,
And there's a stability.
Sure,
The weather is moving through the mountains,
And you can see the weather,
But there's a stability.
You don't see the crumbling of the mountain.
It's unmoving,
Stable.
So if the mind is agitated and spinning around,
It's really hard to have a deep understanding of what's going on.
We just get spun around with it.
We need to cultivate this stable mind that has some sort of provisional permanence,
The stability,
So that we can actually see that everything is changing.
And this is best accomplished in a very still body.
So oftentimes it's helpful that if you are really spinning in your life,
Just daily life,
And you've got lots of things going on,
And there's a lot of doing.
My teacher advises me to stop.
If there's a lot happening,
He's like,
Meditate more.
And you know what?
Even though it feels like I don't have enough time,
It actually creates more time.
That's the paradox of more practice.
Meditation helps create more stability.
It calms the nervous system and steadies the mind.
It's been very helpful to sit more,
Given I have a very full life,
And I'm sure many of you do as well.
To sit more allows me to meet it.
There's a lot of stability in the practice.
And there's a lot of stability in the consistency,
The constancy of the regularity of practice.
Regularity is really important.
You know,
A regular practice,
It's so key.
Even if it's just a short practice for you.
When I started Roaring Fork Insight in 2016,
It was with this idea that constancy was very important for a group of people,
For a community to support their ongoing practice.
So I made a commitment to keep showing up.
And when I don't show up,
I bring our community together to open up the Zoom room,
To have constancy in the group,
Consistency.
It's very helpful to sit together in this way.
And you know,
Many of us,
We attempt to create the conditions of our life for stability.
You know,
Having an orderly life,
Or the regularity of our habit patterns,
You know,
Making our bed,
Like even that creates stability.
Brushing your teeth every morning creates stability,
A clean house.
So stability also has to do with this relaxing,
Learning to relax.
Because once we kind of have things in order,
You may notice once you have things in order,
All the dishes are done.
There's sort of a really subtle relaxation with it,
A softening.
We settle and let go,
Oh,
That's done now.
The whole system works better when there's no stress.
And our body,
It works better when there's no stress.
So to create this physical stability in our body when we're sitting,
To sit upright or to lie down in a way that the spine is fully extended,
And then everything else relaxes around this strength,
This strong spine.
So it's that combination.
We talked about this a little yesterday,
Sort of the middle path,
A combination of strength and relaxation.
If the mind in the sitting practice or in your daily life is not steady,
It's agitated,
The way to work with that is to not react to it or judge it too much,
But to sort of hold it in awareness and give it lots of room,
Knowing that it's there and that it will change.
When there's this clear knowing of experience,
Ah,
Anicca,
Right now there's this stirring,
This agitation,
And we give it room,
We're not stirring it anymore.
There's something about just sort of holding whatever,
The busy mind,
The tension of our life in awareness and not reacting to it.
Just in the singing,
In the holding of it,
It can settle down.
And when we truly are experiencing kind of the truth of change,
What can happen for us when we're with it is the mind relaxes a lot.
We let go of the struggle,
And maybe at first it feels like a struggle,
But if we just keep seeing change,
Being with change,
These changes are inevitable.
They're not a mistake.
They're part of our experience as life on this planet.
Let's take some time to talk about Anicca and permanence,
To consider it,
To see it,
And thank you for your kind attention this morning.
