Hey everyone,
It's Judy Cohen.
Welcome to the 400th Wake Up Call.
I can't believe it's been 400 weeks.
I know that some of you have been here for most of those weeks and some of you have just joined.
So thank you for being here.
I've had a great time so far.
Hope that you have and I don't have any plans to slow down.
And also thank you to those of you who sponsor the Wake Up Call.
I really appreciate you.
Without your support,
The Wake Up Call probably would have faded away a long time ago.
There are a lot of hours of research and sitting and writing that go into each call.
It's time that I treasure and I feel really fortunate to be able to devote that time and your support really matters.
So more about that next time.
Today I want to talk about the three baskets of mindfulness.
And remember the eightfold path.
We have wise view,
Wise intention,
Wise communication,
Wise action,
Wise livelihood,
Wise effort,
Wise mindfulness,
And wise concentration.
Typically the path is also grouped into three baskets with two or three elements per basket.
The Pali word for the three baskets,
The three words are sila,
Samadhi,
And panya.
And they translate more or less as ethics,
Training,
And wisdom.
Wise view and wise intention go into the panya basket and they're considered the wisdom elements of the path.
Wise communication,
Action,
And livelihood go into the sila basket because they're considered the ethical elements of the path.
And these elements are the ones we've been looking at over the past many weeks in connection with kiri and otapha or moral shame and moral dread.
That way that we can tend to the body at this very quiet,
Mindful level.
And as we do that,
Sense into when we're aligned with wise communication and action and livelihood.
Or another way of saying that is sense into when we're ethically aligned and when we're not.
So wise effort,
Wise mindfulness,
And wise concentration,
The last three point us toward training our minds to be steady and calm and focused and loving and compassionate.
And so those three belong in the training or samadhi basket.
There's not an order to the eight steps on the path.
For example,
It's not as if we're supposed to train our minds first,
Then learn ethics,
Then develop wisdom or gain wisdom,
Then train our minds and develop our ethical framework.
A logical mind like this mind here,
This lawyer's mind,
Could be forgiven for assuming that there is a certain way,
A certain order,
Though,
Because that's logical and we are trained to be logical.
And even just a Western mind that's not even a lawyer's mind could also be forgiven for making an assumption like that,
Because,
You know,
At least as far as my understanding goes,
For whatever reason,
When mindfulness came from the East,
From Asia to the West,
It came first in the form of the samadhi basket,
The mind training basket,
Meditation.
And then the other pieces followed later.
So we could be forgiven for thinking that samadhi is how you begin.
Interestingly,
Though,
In Asia,
Very few lay people meditate or very few lay people did meditate before the last 20 or 30 years.
And yet,
Sthila and panya,
The ethics and the wisdom elements are kind of woven into the DNA.
Samadhi is less of a free for all,
Or again,
Was less of a free for all,
Much less ruggedly individualistic,
Much more oriented toward interconnection,
Taking care of one another,
Understanding that we belong to one another.
Of course,
You know,
We're still talking about the human species,
Which is certainly having a moment of not looking very loving and compassionate towards its own species.
If anyone's out there watching us,
They're probably shaking their heads right now.
But in Asia,
There isn't so much samadhi going on in the general population,
Or there wasn't.
And I wonder if that's because sthila and panya are already so woven into the fabric of life.
Whatever the reason for Eastern and Western orientations,
Mindfulness came to the West as meditation first,
The samadhi basket,
Really making that effort,
Dedicating ourselves to cultivating mindfulness and concentration.
And now,
Now that there's somewhat of a toehold of mindfulness in the West,
We're talking more about ethics and wisdom,
Sthila and panya.
And I just,
About that toehold,
I just have to say,
I was in Memphis,
Tennessee last weekend,
Which was why there was no wake up call last Thursday,
Because I was traveling to Memphis.
And I was there for the Mindfulness in Law Society's first in-person conference retreat since before the pandemic,
Well before the pandemic.
And I could say many wonderful things.
It was so great to be in a community,
In a room full of mindful legal professionals,
You know,
Friends on the path,
Getting to know one another,
Watching connections happen.
It was beautiful.
It's like being here.
Except we were live together.
But the biggest thing I want to say is that this toehold is real.
And the way that I know that that's true is that those of us who offered our thoughts and teachings,
We didn't have to define our terms,
Really.
This wasn't Mindfulness 101.
We arrived and there was already a common language.
And to me,
This is huge.
The mindfulness in law movement is no longer a baby movement.
You know,
At least a toddler,
Maybe it's a kid,
Maybe it's even an adolescent,
Which was really something to witness last weekend.
Okay,
So these three baskets,
They're not sequential.
There's no prescribed starting or ending point on the path.
Despite the fact or my experience that mindfulness came to the West first as meditation,
Samadhi,
Practice,
There's no one basket we're supposed to begin with.
We can begin anywhere.
And not only is there no sequence,
But there's no ending.
Always the good news,
Bad news about mindfulness,
Right?
We're not checking off boxes.
We're circulating around the path for our whole lives.
We explore meditation.
We notice a little more compassion in our minds and our hearts.
We bring a little more effort into our practice.
We make better choices about the words we use,
The actions we take.
Our concentration develops.
We begin to see that we belong to one another,
You know,
Or some completely different order of things happens.
My story is that when I started meditating,
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it.
Only that I needed to save my own life.
And then slowly,
Very slowly,
Mindfulness on the cushion began to translate.
It began to translate into mindfulness in my life,
In daily life.
I was more focused,
More patient.
I tripped over fewer details.
I tripped over fewer cracks in the sidewalk.
I began to see that the kindness with which I engaged in training my mind when that was the prevailing quality,
Which was not all the time,
Translated into more kindness towards others,
Which ipso facto,
I can't believe it,
Ipso facto meant to me not wanting to harm others,
Meaning a stronger ethical commitment.
And then that began to translate into a kind of wisdom.
I mean,
I was in my 30s.
What was wisdom?
But a kind of wisdom,
I don't know,
That helped me begin very slowly to get it that everybody around me,
Everybody everywhere really,
Was dealing with the vicissitudes of life,
The loss,
The sorrow,
The frustration,
The anger,
The jealousy,
The impatience,
And also the love and the joy and the connection and the success and the amazement.
And now I maybe I've made the three baskets sound sequential,
But that's just my story.
Yours will have begun somewhere else on the path and wended its way down the path in a different way.
So over the next weeks,
Let's explore these three baskets and let's explore the path together.
Okay,
So let's sit.
Finding your posture,
Your spot in the world,
On the earth,
Right in this moment where you feel most comfortable,
Most settled,
Most alive.
Taking a few intentional breaths.
Closing the eyes or lowering them.
I learned this last weekend from my dear friend Maria Breese,
Lowering the gaze to the heart.
Isn't that beautiful?
Closing the eyes or lowering the gaze to the heart.
And feeling your connection to the earth.
Whether you're fortunate enough to be standing or sitting right on the earth,
Lying down on the earth right now,
Or whether it's many stories down.
Connecting to the earth.
Connecting to yourself,
Sensing into your own body.
The weightedness of the body,
Settledness of the body.
The posture that you're in.
Your state of mind.
State of heart.
And then connecting with one another.
Just that sense of being together here on the wake-up call,
But also being together in the mindfulness and law community.
The language we share,
The understandings we share.
The commitment we share.
Then bringing the attention to the goodness of those three connections,
Our connections to the earth and to ourselves and to one another,
And the goodness of our practice.
How this is not a small thing.
How this is a very good thing that we practice.
That we bring our wisdom and our compassion out into the world.
A world that really needs our wisdom,
Our compassion,
Our good hearts,
Our good work.
Resting for the next few minutes and just knowing that we're doing that.
We're doing that work.
Each of us,
Each one of you,
All of us.
And that this is no small thing.
Thank you everyone for being on the wake-up call.
Thank all that goodness that you brought into our practice together today,
Out into the world,
Into your own lives and the lives of everyone that you meet.
And have a good and safe Thursday and a week.
And I will see you next Thursday.
