So good morning.
Thank you for your practice this morning.
So we'll continue today with the subject of faith.
So in Pali the word is Sadha which literally means to place the heart upon.
So what do you place your heart upon?
One translation I like for that Pali word is Trust.
What do you trust?
And in part it's the concept of trusting ourselves.
In some ways I personally feel more connected to trust than I do with the word faith.
So to trust,
To be able to live and trust.
I associate that with living without fear.
This thing that I trust in I don't have to be afraid of.
And this is kind of a capacity that we develop in practice.
We can develop the capacity to be without fear.
The capacity to feel safe.
And that's an important thing to appreciate.
So in my own experience I feel like I have to offer up a disclaimer.
Although I've been a practitioner on this path for almost half my life.
The first half of my life didn't provide a lot of opportunities to trust.
I didn't trust my parents.
Their message was don't trust anybody.
If you're vulnerable you're prey to those people who will take advantage of you.
This was the early message.
And after working with that for decades I met Seth,
My husband,
For now the past 18 years.
And we first met at a rock climbing gym in the Bay Area where we're from.
We became friends and then we became climbing partners.
So I had to trust him not to drop me when I was climbing.
And if he didn't drop me maybe he was trustworthy.
So here we are.
You know 18 years later,
20 years later really.
And not climbing as much but we're still here.
So trust has come but it's been slow.
So I'd like to talk a little about this ability,
This cultivation of trusting ourselves.
Having a sense of faith in ourselves.
What is it that you trust?
What do you have faith in in your life?
This is a good question.
For many people they have faith in their money or they have faith in their intellect,
Their survival skills,
Their relationships,
Their homes.
And what's interesting about this path that we're on is it's not a matter of having faith in something but rather having faith with something.
So faith is sort of an,
It accompanies us.
It supports us on our journey.
We're learning that it's not in the content of changing thoughts and feelings that we can take our refuge,
That we can have our faith in.
Those are ephemeral and permanent.
We find a kind of trust when we actually can cut through those obstacles.
We can talk about having trust in ourselves.
We're not these fleeting thoughts.
We can have trust in the very nature of our awareness,
The capacity that we have to care,
Our capacity to meet uncertainty with openness,
Maybe love and even compassion.
One of my strongest areas of trust is really the depth and power of my own effort,
The effort to show up in my life,
The effort to sit and practice every day.
I trust that.
And having trust in our own awareness really speaks to how we relate to what's happening.
What arises in our minds is totally out of our control.
But how we relate to it is the turning point,
Like right in the moment.
It's a choice of bondage or it's a choice of freedom.
And sometimes we choose bondage.
It's almost like we need to in order to get to freedom.
So the most important thing is our view,
You know,
Our view.
And we talked about that yesterday in practice at the Aspen Chapel.
We don't have to give in to our overwhelming anxiety.
We don't have to give in to the defeatist attitude when we're having difficulty and challenges.
Everything depends on how we're relating to what's arising in our experience,
What our view is.
The whole idea of progress or movement or growth rests completely on how we're relating to what's going on.
The fact is if what we're experiencing is painful,
It doesn't mean that it's bad.
It doesn't mean that it's wrong.
We can trust our own experience.
And the most important aspect of trusting our own experience is the quality of awareness that we can bring to it.
Like,
Oh,
Look at where the mind goes.
I think there's a common misconception that the purpose of meditating is to live a more relaxed and mindful life.
That's the way that mindfulness is taught in much of our secular society.
It's kind of a departure actually from the core purpose of mindfulness.
It's not so much about living a relaxed and mindful life or getting better sleep or being less reactive.
I mean,
Those are benefits for sure.
But in the classical teaching of the Buddha,
Mindfulness is to sit upright and still and quiet and alert and see what's really going on in a deep way.
To really get to the bottom of our attachments,
Of our fears,
Of our distresses,
Of our hatred.
To sit there and just to see it over and over again.
To see what's driving us and what we're holding on to.
To see what we're gripping to.
Where am I clinging and how am I contributing to my clinging?
There's a Zen story about a man riding a horse,
Which is kind of galloping very quickly.
And another man is standing along the road yelling at him,
Like,
Where are you going?
And the man on the horse yells back,
I don't know.
Ask the horse.
I think that's kind of our situation.
We're riding a horse that we can't control.
And the Buddhist practice,
The most important practice is to know what's going on.
To just live in awareness.
We're on a horse that we can't control.
So seeing clearly and repeatedly the changing nature of our experience.
It's just changing.
It de-conditions the habit that we have of holding on and grasping and clinging.
And the more that we see it,
The more that we're just right there with the experience.
The mind begins to let go.
It's a gradual path,
But the mind begins to let go.
It begins to trust that letting go is possible and that it actually feels really good and easy and beneficial.
We can really have faith in our efforts,
Our efforts of letting go,
Our motivations.
The practice that we do,
This coming together,
You know,
With an interest to develop and honor,
Honor our precious human life.
So many causes and conditions brought us here.
So many facets that allow us to kind of go against the current of our world.
Not to remain satisfied with the superficiality of this world.
The heartlessness of it.
The mechanical nature of it.
Each time we sit,
We're turning away from that stream of consumption and desire and wanting and not wanting.
And turning away is the hardest part.
Everything that follows from there is the product of this steadiness of effort.
The hardest thing is that turning.
And maybe some of you can trust that.
Trust that turn.
You've experienced something that's more uplifting.
That release.
So those are my reflections on this practice of trust.
Of faith.
Thank you.
Thank you for your kind attention this morning.
