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Are any of you familiar with the Insight Dialogue practice? It is an intersubjective meditation practice, founded on the principles of Buddhist vipassana. If you're interested, here's a summary of the practice, which I've compiled from information available on the Metta website.
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Traditional silent meditation has different forms of practice, each guided by different instructions. Insight Dialogue also has meditation guidelines to support meditators as they change their habitual ways of interacting with others. Each guideline can be used in daily life as a simple reminder to calm down, become aware, and notice and release old habits. In Insight Dialogue practice, the same guidelines work together to point the way toward profound spiritual awakening.
The practice involves discussion and contemplation of profound subject matter—fear, joy, desire, and the inevitability of change, for example. The content of an Insight Dialogue discussion is not the primary focus, however. Becoming aware of how the heart-mind functions is at the core of this practice.
An interpersonal practice will have different emphases than a primarily solitary practice. Some of the refined states of stillness encountered in traditional silent meditation will be less prominent. Interpersonal practices involve speaking or interacting with others, leaving behind the silence that is the most obvious feature of traditional meditation.
Morality is the foundation of all spiritual progress. An interpersonal path must be founded on morality. Without the human kindness and respect that underlie morality—and without the ease of a clear conscience—all deeper wisdom remains an idea, another delusional attachment.
The three moral components of Buddhism’s eightfold path—right speech, action, and living—address our relational lives. Speaking implies listening; the two together describe relationship. Right action refers to actions in relation to others: refraining from killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. Right living refers to making a living in an honest and decent way.
The basics of moral communication are straight forward: abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter. Speech should also be true, useful, spoken at the proper time, and spoken with lovingkindness. Along with treating others the way you yourself would like to be treated, these moral principles are essential to the smooth functioning of any human system. These are also foundational to Insight Dialogue.
Tranquility is another key element of the eightfold path. A mind at ease and a calm heart are essential to seeing things as they actually are. Tension distorts the lens through which we see the world. We view everything from the perspective of our tension: if we are hungry, for example, we have eyes only for food.
Without tranquility, the mind cannot dwell with any experience long enough to know its nature. Without knowing the nature of experience we are unlikely to abandon self-centered fabrications; we cannot be fully compassionate to others or ourselves.
Wisdom—seeing things as they actually are—is the third element of any path to enlightenment. We can see things as they actually are when the mind is calm and alert. The more calm and alert we become, the more clearly we see the nature of the mind and the nature of the world. Interpersonal practice supports this clear seeing by cultivating mindfulness and calm concentration.
Insight Dialogue also involves inquiry. Wisdom is supported by inquiring into the nature of reality and dwelling intimately with teachings that reveal that nature.
Wisdom grows in interpersonal practice by direct experience of interpersonal suffering, hungers, and freedom. Meditators experience their thoughts and emotions as impermanent, stressful, and impersonal. They experience firsthand the ease that arises when the mind ceases its habitual clinging. No intellectual understanding can replace this direct apprehension of stress and freedom. In Insight Dialogue, these insights unfold in mutual rather than solitary practice.
Much of our contact with people—-emotional, intellectual, or otherwise—-occurs through language. In Insight Dialogue, verbal communication is a primary medium of practice. Language brings into our practice the force of intellect and the associative power of words. Language also reveals limiting beliefs, desires, grasping, and fears. Because Insight Dialogue works directly with language and relationship, it can bring about profound transformation in individuals and groups.
The impact of a meditative practice should be discernable by the wise, reflected visibly in the human decency of the practitioner. Insight Dialogue is an interpersonal practice that seeks to meet these criteria.
Following are the primary guidelines of Insight Dialogue:
Pause
To pause is to stop some activity temporarily, to let it go.
The body-mind is astonishingly sensitive. Its habit is to grasp at whatever touches it: sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, and thoughts. It grasps to understand: What is this? It grasps to hold onto pleasures, to wrestle with pain, and to obsess about fears. Seeing another person, it grasps to hold her or to push her away, to know him or to be known by him, to touch, to fix, or to adjust.
When we Pause we move from grasping to non-grasping, from clinging to non-clinging. This movement is the pivot point to freedom.
Waking up from habit mind is the first step on any path. The first instruction in Insight Dialogue is Pause. Step off the train. Dwell a moment with immediate experience before speaking, or while listening. The pause is mindfulness. It is an interruption of a lifetime of habitual forward pressure. It opens the door to the present moment.
Relax
The mindful Pause often finds us in the middle of habit-driven thought or emotional reaction. Stirred by the emotional spike of a recent interchange or by the ongoing rush of thought, the body is agitated. If we do not meet these experiences skillfully, we will be flung back into unaware and identified activity. We need further support.
The second instruction is Relax. When we Pause into awareness, we also Relax the body and mind. This meditation instruction reflects tranquility, an important factor on the path to awakening. At first, it is as direct and simple as it sounds. We bring awareness to those parts of the body where we tend to accumulate tension, and allow that tension to relax.
Whenever we recognize tension, we can choose ease. There is no other practice, really, than this letting go. We only need to choose. Choosing the ease over and over again is the practice. Our formal support for making this choice—for remembering that this choice is available to us—is one simple word: Relax. This guidance is not offered to the body only, nor to the mind only. The body and mind move together, not two but one. When the body relaxes, the mind calms down. When the mind calms down, the body relaxes.
Open
Pause and Relax establish the traditional meditative framework of mindfulness and tranquility. In Pause, we step out of habit and meet the moment afresh. We awaken out of identification with reaction. We become aware of the body, emotions, and thoughts—without clinging. In Relax, we meet our immediate experience with acceptance, receptivity, and kindness.
Now we come to the third interpersonal meditation instruction: Open. With Open, awareness extends to everything around us. Pause and Relax could be instructions for internal individual meditation, but Open invites us to extend this accepting mindfulness beyond the boundaries of our skin to encompass the external world. This extension opens the door to mutuality, and is the basis for interpersonal meditation.
When we extend awareness beyond the skin-encapsulated self, our meditation grows to include other people and our surroundings. We meet other people with the same mindfulness and calm acceptance with which we are learning to meet our internal experience. If we are meditating in dialogue with one other person, we meet this person with wakeful acceptance. If we are meditating with a room full of people, the awareness opens wide to receive the whole. With mindfulness of both the internal and external, we are aware of the ever-changing relational moment.
Trust Emergence
We have established the core of the practice:
mindfulness—Pause;
calm acceptance—Relax;
and mutuality—Open.
This is how we meet the moment: awake, loving, and spacious. But what do we do when we find this moment is changing uncontrollably? Or conversely, when the predictable, habit-driven world hardly seems to be changing at all?
The fourth meditation instruction in Insight Dialogue is Trust Emergence. With this instruction we are invited into the numinous but observable impermanence of all experience.
Trust Emergence is rooted in wisdom. That is, it supports seeing things as they are—unstable, and far more complex and fluid than the mundane glance can ever know. The dynamic quality of experience demands a robust practice; it also provides the object of that practice: change itself. Trust Emergence invites us to dive headlong into the tumbling moment by guiding us in relating to each other and to the totality of experience.
Trust refers to the faith required to leap into this seething sea of change. Emergence refers to the process by which the complex things we experience arise spontaneously from underlying contributing factors. For example, we see emergence in the way conscious thought arises from a cauldron of sensation, memory, and emotions. To Trust Emergence is to let go into the changing process we call “now,” with its uncontrolled sensations, thoughts, emotions, interactions, words, topics, energies, and insights.
Listen Deeply
Pause-Relax-Open establish the mind state for being fully present in the mutual, emergent moment. In this vibrating and aware moment, we listen and speak. In this vivid state of mind, we communicate. The Insight Dialogue meditation instructions that directly address this are Listen Deeply-Speak the Truth; we will focus first on Listen Deeply.
Listen Deeply opens the senses, heart, and mind to receive the moment fully. To Listen Deeply is to listen with mindfulness, surrendering fully to the unfolding words and presence of our co-meditators. Grounded in clear awareness and sensitive to the speaker’s offering, we are a receptive field touched by the words, emotions, and energies of our fellow human beings.
Communication is mutual gift giving. We offer each other the gift of presence, the particular wisdom of the moment, and the muscled and softly textured heart. We receive the spoken word with appreciation for this gift. We listen with the generosity of patience, unhurried by a personal agenda. We aspire to the type of generosity Thoreau suggested when he said: “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.” With the mind expanded by Open and Trust Emergence, we are touched; tranquil, we do not interrupt our listening with an internal dialogue. For the moment we are not preoccupied about how we might respond to sooth, fix, impress, or dominate. We listen with kindness, compassion, and responsiveness.
Speak the Truth
Up to this point, we have been exploring how we can dwell in meditative awareness with others. As we Pause, we can Relax and accept what we find, and Open our awareness to encompass external as well as internal experience. We Trust Emergence, resting in the flux of experience; we meet the delight and the insecurity of change without knowing what the next moment will bring. Listening Deeply to our inner voice and to the voices of others, we come to the precipice of outward action.
Attuned to the moment, we Speak the Truth. Communication inevitably arises in any moment of emergent interpersonal contact. Seeing and being seen yield an emotional interchange, with or without words. Bodily proximity generates a flow of energy between people. It is uniquely powerful, however, to meet each other through the power of language. Whenever we speak, some bit of the heart-mind is revealed; every day, through the mystery of language, we touch each other mind to mind, heart to heart. The guideline Speak the Truth grounds this mutuality in morality and mindfulness.
Speak the Truth rests in the moral and mutual elements of our practice. In Insight Dialogue we are committed to ethical speech, to truth, and to kindness. Given the human propensity for reactivity, and the power of language to spin us out of present-centered awareness and into self-centered habits, it is no surprise that most meditative practices do not include speaking. With Speak the Truth we are invited to bring our highest intentions and our refined perceptions into language.
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