(upbeat music) Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. Okay, so yeah, the theme of this talk is meditation and defending oneself. And anyone who was on the mailing list would have seen that what we're going to be trying to explore is both the inner and outer expressions of friendship, so friendship towards ourselves and also how we can then take friendship towards others. And we'll be exploring that throughout the day through meditation, discussion and talks. So I've been meditating for 23 years now, on and off, more on nowadays. And I've experienced it, it's had many, many benefits. One of the things that's I'm far less stressed, less anxious, my mind's less scattered, my energy's much more, less scattered. I'm not so busy, busy, busy all the time in my mind if I may be outside in the world. Generally speaking, I feel a lot happier, calmer, more focused, more content, a lot more aware of myself, aware of others, a lot more present in whatever I'm doing and therefore I think it more fulfilling when I'm doing it. So I used to do all this as a multitasking and be all over the place and now I kind of, whatever I'm doing, I tend to be much more there than it. Which has sort of helped me to engage a lot more fully in my life because I've really enjoyed like really simple things that I'm doing, none of which I expected when I started to meditate particularly. Well I thought I might get more relaxed and a bit more focused. And another thing that I didn't really expect was the impact it would have on myself as team, myself confidence, how I felt about myself and how I relate it to other people. When I started a, I did have quite a low self as team, I was very, very so critical. I got quite anxious people around other people. And one of the things that meditation has done is sort of helped me to change and it's been a long process and it's a long-going process but it is something that I really value about it. So that's one reason I was quite interested in talking around meditation and differenting on self. So meditation is basically an awareness practice. What we're trying to do is bring awareness to our experience, our present experience, whatever that may be, moment by moment. And that includes awareness of our bodies, awareness of our feelings and our emotions and our thoughts. But there's also not just awareness of our self, we then become more aware of others, our environment and maybe get a bit more insight into reality into our views and to our conditioning and things like that. And that can also be really helpful. That may sound a lot to say but that is something that sort of can happen as we're meditating. But you know, we start quite basic, quite simply by becoming more aware of ourselves. And in particular, we start with the body and I'll say a bit more about that later. So, yeah, one of the things that we find is when we stop doing what we are when we sit there, we become very much more aware of what's going on in our minds and often how busy it is, how scattered it is. And we may become more aware of our feelings and things and we may find it quite difficult to actually see exactly what we're experiencing. Sometimes when we come to meditation, we may actually feel quite disconnected or alienated from our body or from particular emotions or aspects of ourselves. And that's partly because of the kind of conditions we might have experienced in our lives up to then in family society, school, things like that. And I think particularly as lesbian as gay women, we may have had hostile reactions, we may be aware of people being prejudiced, homophobic, or even when we've gone into sort of gay community, may have felt that we have to be a certain way in order to be accepted and therefore sort of not allow us as to be all of who we are. So one thing that we do when we meditate is we kind of explore just what is there, what are we feeling, what are we experiencing, what are we thinking, what is present and what might be present that we're not aware of because quite often we get very identified as what's most present in our thoughts, you know, in a situation that's dominating our thoughts or maybe then maybe in emotion that's more intense to experience. But actually we've got a lot of things that we've experienced as a whole complexity to us, some of it present, some of it unpleasant and the more that we can sort of uncover and allow ourselves to experience of ourselves, the whole and I think more integrated we feel. Yeah, 'cause meditation, it is a journey of self-exploration and it does help us to bring together the sort of more disparate parts of ourselves, the bits that we may have disconnected from. It's very good in developing integration. I'm just going to put a quote from Sengo Ashutoshu, the teacher who founded this movement, who's saying that integration is bringing all our scatter bits together. We integrate ourselves, we overcome conflict within ourselves, disharmony within ourselves and then we get ourselves functioning as a smoothly working whole, not a jumble of bits and pieces and fragments of selves and struggling and just for supremacy. So I don't know if any of that sort of bits was your experience, it does certainly fit with what my experience has been in class. So, yes, so how we start in meditation really is, we start with a body by coming home to the body and allowing ourselves to sort of not have that separation through mind and body or mind, body feelings to see that we are, well, the body is ourselves, that we experience the world through the body as well. And to actually allow ourselves to be aware of what that's like being in this body. So, we really try and get a sense of what the sensation feelings are in our body, become aware of our body not as a fixed unchanging thing but something that's in process, the sensation feelings coming in and out of awareness, changing all the time. And the same thing about our feelings, when we become aware of our feelings and our thoughts, we can see that actually that's also changes. We may feel that we're one way or that however we're feeling at that time is never going to change, but actually it does over time. Different feelings come into being, or we may even feel too different feelings at the same time. And especially with meditation, we become much more aware of that process happening, much more able to sort of hold more of ourselves, more of our experience. Just by trying to sit there, try and stay present, try to stay aware of whatever's happening moment by moment. And, you know, sometimes that's quite a challenge because we're not used to being present. We probably all had experience of what it's like when you're with somebody who's not present and you're talking to them in their minds off somewhere else and they're not there for you. You probably also had experience of you being there, talking to someone and you're not being fully in person and thinking about everything. And of doing class activities when you're not really there. So one of the things we're trying to do is just try and be more and more fully present in whatever we're doing. And we need to be kind with that. We need to sort of develop this kind, non-judgmental awareness that's not going to sort of say, "Oh, I shouldn't be doing this. I shouldn't be thinking about this." I mean, obviously if you're doing something that's really unethical, you might want to consider it, but I mean, you need to be aware of what you're doing really and aware of the consequences of what you're doing and the impact of what you're doing. And also through meditation, what happens? We come very aware of what our habitual ways of responding to situations are, ways that our lives have conditioned us to have certain views, certain ways of being. We've become aware of our views, opinions about ourselves, about others and sometimes how fixed they are, that I'm this kind of person or they're that kind of person. But in meditation, we can actually see the flow of our experience and then come up a bit more aware. But other people also are with low experience and changing and there are all sorts of conditions that change all the time that make us behave in certain ways that might make them behave in certain ways. So it can sort of help us as sort of, I suppose, accept become more aware of ourselves than more others, be more imperfect towards others out of our own experience of what is life for us. So it's sort of this kind of receptivity kind of openness towards ourselves as well, what we're trying to develop in meditation. So whenever we're doing meditation, whatever practice we're doing, there are some practices that are more focused on body awareness, being aware of breathing. There are some that are more focused on trying to develop kindness and other kind of things like that. But any meditation we still want to be very much in the body, very mindful, very aware, very present. And with any meditation we still want to have this attitude, this attitude of sort of kindness of being judgmental, allowing ourselves to feel whatever we're feeling, to think whatever thinking without sort of thinking we're bad. The sort of internalized judge and critic we're sort of trying to see through them, get that a bit more and we're going to just allow ourselves to see, well, who are we, who do I want to be, really? Do I always want to behave the way that I have done or know that I see that's the way I behave, don't want to have a choice to do something differently. So that's why it's so key to be developing awareness in meditation and that's why it can be really helpful in befriending ourselves. So one of the practices that we do is called the mindfulness of breathing. And that's very much about coming home into the body, getting that integration between my own body and being present to our experience in the body, moment by moment. And another key practice that we do in this tradition is called the metabarvna. Metabar is often translated as kindness or loving kindness. Metabarvna was the development or cultivation of loving kindness. There's a teacher called Vedra Dhaka, I really like the way that he defines metabar as being for the benefit, being for the welfare of other living beings. So it's all about in a way trying to create a change in attitude, a change in approach. It's not just about sitting there thinking, oh, I must generate all these readings of love 'cause actually, when you're doing the practice that may, well, that's quite likely not to happen. But it's working with our intentions, it's working with our habits, with our views, as much as anything. It's a volition that we want to be kinder, we want to be more open, we want to sort of have a better relationship with ourselves, with others. We want ourselves to be happy and fulfilled, we want others to be happy and fulfilled. And it's not about relating to people just through how they affect us in their self-referential really, 'cause quite often we relate to people in terms of if they do things that we like, if they care for us, then we like them, if they don't, then we don't, or we don't know them, so we don't really care about them one way or the other. So we're trying to develop an attitude where we actually see people, you know, as people, whoever they are, even if we find them difficult, even if we don't know them, to sort of kind of relate to their solidarity with other living beings. And from our own experience of life, and knowing how challenging and difficult that can be, having that sort of well-wishing for them in their lives, but they're also gonna be challenging as well, wanting them also to be happy, to develop their potential. So anyway, I think I'll probably stop there, but that just sort of gives us a little context for what we're trying to do a little bit in meditation, that I've said we're gonna start up very simply with the body. (upbeat music) - We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this screen. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny. And thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
