People come to meditation for many different reasons, but the destination is often left unclear. What does this practice actually lead to?
In this talk, Travis Hicks traces the arc of a deepening practice — from the small early benefits of slowing down and feeling a little more at ease, through the gradual clearing of the mind’s clutter, to the flashes of insight that begin to change how we see reality.
Using a few simple images — a dim light slowly brightening in a dark room, lightning flashes revealing a mountain on a dark trail — Travis describes how practice unfolds not in one great leap but drop by drop, with moments of tranquility, joy, and heart-opening becoming more frequent over time. He draws on the opening verses of the Dhammapada and a quote from Bhikkhu Analayo to close with the same point the practice keeps returning to: the measure of progress isn’t peak experiences, but the gradual, quiet opening of the heart.
00:00:01 – 00:00:26
So tonight’s theme is about the direction of the practice and the fruits of the path of practice. These fruits that unfold, some of it’s a little bit of what we have to look forward to sometimes. And that people come to this practice for a variety of different reasons, but the goal’s often left somewhat vague.
00:00:30 – 00:01:03
And the Buddha has a great phrase that he repeats, that this path is beautiful in the beginning, beautiful in the middle, and beautiful in the end. So in the beginning, it’s very common for us to have small but meaningful benefits to our lives from this practice. To quote Dan Siegel’s phrase, early practice often feels like being maybe 10% happier.
00:01:05 – 00:01:23
You get this little bump. You know, we get these simple benefits of slowing down, having periods of just slowing down, resting the body, resting the mind. Waking up to an embodied experience.
00:01:23 – 00:01:42
Some of what we do, we move in Qigong, we sit here and really pay attention to the body, is get back into this body and get out of our heads a little bit. And that can be a real relief if that’s not something that we’re used to. And these can, you know, bring small increases in happiness and ease.
00:01:45 – 00:02:04
Give us little breaks from the way that we often are living our lives. And there can also come what I refer to as— it’s a light bulb simile. This is not from the suttas, this is just from stories I’ve heard after that.
00:02:05 – 00:02:35
But that mindfulness can be like turning on a dim light in a dark room. This dark room of our mind. And before you start doing this, oftentimes our mind can be not well examined, not a whole lot of awareness of what can be going on, the moods and shifts and thoughts and dreams and fantasies and things that drift around in there.
00:02:37 – 00:03:10
And that when we sit here for 30 minutes and try to watch the breath and watch all the intrusive thoughts begin to arise over and over and over and over and over again, it’s kind of like going into a dark room and you’ve screwed in a light bulb to finally replace the old one, or you screw in the bulb that’s in there because it’s a little loose. There’s a little faint light and you start to look around and realize you’re surrounded by junk. And there may be some roaches skittering around over here and over there and things moving.
00:03:12 – 00:03:54
And now we can see it, and that can sometimes be a little disconcerting. I don’t know if other folks have had this, uh, experience of kind of sitting there and being like, my mind can do what? What did my mind just go off and do right now? And sometimes it can be discouraging because, you know, oh, I’m sitting here to refine the mind, I’m sitting here to make it— and like, look at the stuff that comes up. And, you know, in our Western viewpoint of looking, they can be very disheartening that we have 10% light and 90% clutter.
00:03:54 – 00:04:19
But Just like cleaning, it happens one object at a time. And this path is a gradual path of practice. There’s one of the similar quotes from the Dhammapada where they, you know, compare wisdom to these jars of water, and they’re filling up drop by drop by drop by drop.
00:04:21 – 00:04:35
One drop at a time, the bucket fills slowly until it’s brimful of wisdom. And so the room slowly gets cleared out. The light gets brighter and brighter.
00:04:35 – 00:04:44
We notice more space. We’re able to operate with more space in the mind. A little less clutter, a little less clutter, a little less clutter.
00:04:50 – 00:05:00
And to jump to a different simile that I’ve run across in different books like this. There are these flashes of insight. This is insight meditation.
00:05:00 – 00:05:33
We have these flashes of insight that’s like hiking on a dark night with a storm and a flash of lightning comes and all of a sudden you see that you’re walking towards a giant mountain that you didn’t realize was there. But now you’ve seen the mountain and you can’t— now it’s dark again, but you can’t unsee that you saw the mountain. And you keep walking down the path and you keep walking down the path, wandering around.
00:05:35 – 00:05:51
And the next flash of lightning happens and you’re closer to the mountain. The next one flashes a while later and You may be higher up on the mountain. And sometimes the flashes happen more frequently, sometimes they don’t.
00:05:56 – 00:06:38
And so we get these flashes, and I hope you all do as well as you practice. And for many people this does come and becomes more frequent with more dedicated, intense practice. That we get these flashes of insight, we get these flashes of realization about reality, noticing how things are, noticing bits about how we respond to things, noticing bits about how this mind works, noticing the impermanence of sensations and reactions, noticing the suffering that comes from making an identification and an I, me, and mine about what’s going on.
00:06:40 – 00:07:18
And noticing that some things just hurt, some things are just hard, and being aware of that. And amongst that, we also get these moments of tranquility, moments of extreme compassion, noticing an opening of the heart that may not have happened before that changes how we relate to either a person or or to people generally. And flashes of joy, of extreme happiness that kind of changes our relationship to this path.
00:07:18 – 00:07:29
It doesn’t seem as much like a hopeless dark room and seems a little bit more like, man, we could actually clean this place up. Imagine what it could look like. Wow.
00:07:41 – 00:08:24
And it become— as we move along the path more, we start to think a little bit more about this ideal of enlightenment, this freedom from suffering, a life of ease. And for me, this is something that comes up quite a bit when we get onto retreat. For people who have been on long retreats, even just being away from the world for a couple days, a week, there are flashes where you can begin to see, hmm, I could actually just exist in a continuous awareness for some say hours.
00:08:25 – 00:08:35
That could actually be possible. Maybe that could be days. Could it be weeks? I don’t know.
00:08:36 – 00:08:55
But these things begin to show up, things that we can start to see. States that are cultivated in meditation start becoming part of how we can live. Part of how we interact with people, they stop going from something we’re training to becoming habits of our action.
00:09:00 – 00:09:24
And even the Buddha continued formal practice after awakening. Practice continues and continues and continues in some ways because it can be quite enjoyable. And so part of the fruits are also beginning to embody some of these qualities of enlightenment.
00:09:27 – 00:10:09
And they’re embodying, you know, awareness of the impact of our speech and our actions, our thoughts, noticing those with investigation and curiosity, taking that spirit of interest, of Sitting here on the cushion, we pay attention and are interested. You know, I watch my little son like just like, ooh, this is fun, just poking at this thing with intense curiosity like he’s never seen it before, and it’s like that is a spirit that can really change how we view things. This is this quality of investigation, of curiosity, really paying attention to how the world is.
00:10:11 – 00:10:36
With a bit of beginner’s mind, childlike mind. There’s energy, the energy to help ourselves, the energy to help others, joy, tranquility, the enjoyment of silence. Quite beautiful states of concentration and equanimity.
00:10:38 – 00:10:57
And really bringing some of these brahmaviharas, these divine abodes, into how we live every day. You know, these divine abodes are called that because it’s where the gods live. It’s these living in loving-kindness, living in compassion, living in sympathetic joy and equanimity.
00:10:58 – 00:11:22
What great places to live, to spend our time. Realize— realizing and recognizing the interdependence that we see amongst living beings when that becomes part of our lived reality. Awareness that we’re all brothers and sisters in old age, illness, and death.
00:11:27 – 00:11:46
And so just as this path is gradual, so is the opening of the heart. And last week I talked about this, you know, there’s this balance between wisdom and compassion, wisdom and compassion. So there’s some of these things where we, you know, we understand more about the way the world is, the heart opens more.
00:11:46 – 00:12:16
We realize more about the way reality is, the heart opens more. And these things have to be kept in balance. And so just like the bucket of wisdom fills drop by drop, so the heart opens more and more and more as we start to notice that these traps of the mind, these habits of the mind, they aren’t necessarily limited only to my mind, but all minds are often like this.
00:12:17 – 00:12:55
And just as I have self-compassion for myself when I notice myself getting trapped, I can have compassion for others when I notice them as well. I can wish for their ease, for equanimity in their mental turmoil, drop by drop by drop. And so repeat this quote as the scholar monk Bhikkhu Analayo says, it’s not through great experiences that we measure the success of our practice, but rather through measuring the openness of the heart.
00:12:56 – 00:13:20
For the face of liberation is the face of happiness and love. And to wrap up, I want to share some of the opening lines of the Dhammapada, which I’ve referenced a few times in here. The Dhammapada is a part of the Pali canon that are collections of these, like, little pithy verses.
00:13:20 – 00:13:48
It’s kind of written in verse form and You’ve likely heard some of them before, but phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart. If you speak or act with a corrupted heart, then suffering follows you as the wheel of the cart, the track of the ox that pulls it. Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart.
00:13:49 – 00:14:18
If you speak or act with a calm, bright heart, then happiness follows you like a shadow that never leaves. So it is life in the present moment, clearly awake with a calm, bright heart, and happiness like a shadow that never leaves. We get there drop by drop, drop by drop.
00:14:23 – 00:14:25
Thank you all for your kind attention this evening.
