So we have been exploring in these past couple of weeks the three characteristics of our human life.
That everything is always changing.
That there's so much dissatisfaction and suffering all around us.
And we have this idea of who we are in all of this.
Our self-concept.
You know,
I'm a Democrat or an environmentalist or I am,
You know,
Fill in the blank.
All the I am statements that we use with others and with ourselves.
So I suggested a way of working with these three characteristics.
Last week we talked a little bit about practicing with an everyday mind.
An ordinary mind.
It's really the practice of presence.
Because everything is so uncertain and changing so rapidly,
A support for this is to cultivate stability.
Some people have so little stability in their lives and that can create a sense of hopelessness.
I saw an extraordinary display of stability in a friend and colleague of mine.
Her name is Eden Tull and I brought her to our valley to teach in 2017.
Maybe some of you attended her teaching.
It was in Carbondale.
And she lives in Black Mountain,
North Carolina.
And she and her husband had a home next to a creek.
And in the hurricane that just happened,
The creek turned into a river of mud.
And at first,
When this river was starting to develop,
They were aware that things were looking a little unsafe.
And as they were getting things out of the house,
A tree fell on the house.
And then the house started falling apart and being swept into this river of mud.
And her husband,
Mark,
Got out.
But Eden was in a different room on the other side of the house,
The side that slid into the creek.
And it started to fill with mud.
And Eden somehow found her way out of the home and emerged from the mud as her house continued to sink.
And they lost nearly everything.
And she took a video last week and posted it on Instagram as part of her GoFundMe because they lost everything.
And she shared what happened.
And she shared what happened in a way that was very simple,
Almost in the same way that I'm sharing it with you now.
Her message was delivered with such stability in practice,
Such presence with what is.
And at the end of her message,
She invited us to all deepen our practice,
To strengthen our community,
Because no one is exempt from this.
Climate change,
Instability,
Uncertainty,
No one is exempt.
So generally,
We go about creating stability in all kinds of ways.
We create a stable life through finding a job that allows us to have some financial freedom.
We create stability in relationship,
Being in healthy relationships with people.
Sometimes it's created by having an orderly life,
You know,
Avoiding chaos to the extent that one can.
Having a clean house or a made bed.
These are ways that people create a little stability.
And stability has something to do with relaxing.
You know,
We're learning to relax in this practice.
When we're in formal practice,
I mean,
I regularly offer the instruction of knowing what's happening in the body and the mind and the level of the senses and the feeling tones to feel what's happening.
And then to soften,
To relax and to settle,
To let go of the stress to the extent that you're able.
Our whole system works so much better when there's no stress.
Every day that we practice,
We are creating physical stability.
The teachings of Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind are all about creating stability in your posture.
You know,
When you sit,
You're sitting upright and relaxed.
And you're focusing on the breath and the body.
And by doing so,
This influences all areas of your life.
It's so ordinary just to sit upright or to lie down in a way that the spine is fully extended.
And then to learn to relax.
So that there's this combination happening in the body where you're upright,
Stable.
There's strength in that.
And there's this deep relaxation.
Roshi says,
If you practice,
If your practice is to attain enlightenment,
There is actually no way to attain it.
We lose the meaning of the way to the goal.
But when we believe in our way firmly,
We have already attained enlightenment.
When you believe in the way,
Enlightenment is there.
Right in the moment.
Stable in the body,
Stable in the breath,
Right in the moment.
And then there's mental stability.
That's one of the benefits of concentration practice,
To help still the mind and make it stable so that it's not jumping around and racing around so much.
It's harder to cultivate a concentration practice in daily life.
It's possible.
Sometimes we can get really concentrated in our 30 minute sits.
You know,
Just by learning to let go of our thoughts and stay with our breath,
We're learning and experiencing how the breath can steady us.
One of the ways to steady an agitated mind is not to react to it,
Not to judge it,
But rather hold it in your awareness.
And by that I mean to allow it.
Allowing is giving what's arising a lot of room.
By allowing,
We stop responding to life in ways that add to our unhappiness and our dissatisfaction.
Allowing means to not interfere.
Something arises,
Some judgment,
Some not liking.
And it's all just there to be seen.
And it's also,
You know,
It's helpful sometimes even to say to yourself,
Like,
Allow this,
Allow this to.
What I encourage you to notice in your experience is that everything is allowed.
Even resistance is allowed.
And maybe you hear this as a directive,
Like what you're supposed to allow is everything.
But that wouldn't be very constructive.
It's more constructive to notice that everything is already allowed,
Because it's appearing in your mind's eye,
It's appearing in consciousness and awareness.
And just like it's appearing,
It disappears.
All of our thoughts and views arising and passing.
They're just thoughts,
But even thoughts are allowed.
The teacher Adyashanti calls meditation,
The art of non-interference.
That's really the art of this practice.
The art of non-interference.
I encourage you to practice in this way.
Just here just here with this,
Whatever this is.
There is something to,
You know,
We hold on to our busy,
Anxious minds.
It's just a habit.
The tension we have has become habituated to loop.
We're like the little,
You know,
The little gerbil or the little animal that's on a treadmill just running on this loop.
So to hold our,
Our busyness,
Our anxiousness in awareness and not react to it.
It's like,
Oh,
Allowing this,
Allowing this to,
It can help settle things down.
Cultivating stability is a support to the truth of impermanence.
And we're entering a lot of uncertainty.
You know,
There's war now.
There is a polarizing election happening.
We don't know what's going to happen.
So as we meet difficulty and uncertainty,
Change,
Warring,
Weather events that are destroying communities,
Maybe not ours,
Not yet.
I want to repeat Eden's message.
Deepen your practice.
True stability is to meet life's difficulties without all the reactivity and fear and resistance.
I'll close with an excerpt from the poem called sustain by Alison Litterman.
I don't know this woman with the clean kitchen,
The watered garden,
Curly leafed kale and immortal chard growing around her house.
I don't know how she keeps it going,
Sustains this note we've put our weight on or how the trees keep on standing there with all the trouble they've seen,
Breathing in poison,
Giving out oxygen.
I want to be like them,
Though I am only a flesh apple of hope and doubt.
Thank you for your kind attention.
