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Guided Meditation: Mindful of Selfing

Hello everyone, and welcome.

This week for these meditation sessions, I'm offering you a little exercise that you can include as part of your meditation that corresponds to the later teaching, the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness^[1]. There are five exercises there, so I'm giving a little taste of it perhaps for each day.

Yesterday, the idea was to notice desires operating whenever you were distracted by thoughts. Today, whenever you get distracted and whenever you get concerned with something, even if it's happening in the present moment, that you somehow interrupt the flow of your ongoing contact with the present moment as it unfolds, as it develops. If you start thinking about or having commentary about what's happening in all these regards—distracted thoughts, commentary, being stuck on certain emotions perhaps—the basic mindfulness practice is to have clear recognition of that, clear mindfulness. Hold that in awareness without making it a problem, without being critical of it. If anything, be kind and just be clearly aware that it's there. And then once you've recognized it well enough, if it's no longer compelling or strong, you can come back and continue with your breathing.

Today's exercise has to do with the idea that one of the primary catalysts for losing our connection to the present moment is concern with me, myself, and mine—what we sometimes call selfing. We take things and define ourselves by them or define them as my thing. Even something as simple as saying my pain is different than saying the pain. There's a little act of selfing, a little bit of identification with the pain, adding the seemingly innocent word my to it.

The thoughts you have, chances are that you're one of the characters in it or it somehow concerns you. So, recognize the self-concern that's there. The word you could use if you'd like is selfing. "There's selfing." And please do that without any condemnation, criticism, or disappointment. It's an all-too-human phenomenon that human minds will identify, construct selves, appropriate things for themselves, and assume that things are mine. All these kinds of things that we do. Sometimes it's kind of innocent, but it also is the foundation for all kinds of ways in which we end up suffering, end up challenged in this life.

So it's a helpful thing to see, to recognize it when it happens. When you use the word selfing, or I, or my, or me, or something similar, it's a little note to recognize that it's happening. Do so kindly, do so caringly, like you care for yourself. An alternative to that is to be slightly amused: "There it is again, wow." And it might be very interesting for you to kind of recognize all the ways, the many ways, and the frequency in which the things that distract you from the breath, from the present moment, are somehow related to self—me, myself, and mine. And if this doesn't make so much sense for you, you're welcome to just ignore it, but it might be an interesting exercise.

So, assuming a meditation posture. Lowering your gaze to have relaxed eyes, not really focusing on anything in particular, soft eyes, and gently closing your eyes.

Then taking a few long, slow, deep breaths, as if you have all the time in the world to leisurely breathe deeply and appreciate each breath, each inhale, each exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal, and noticing the rhythm of the body's breathing in and breathing out. Wherever in your body you most clearly experience that rhythm, familiarize yourself with those sensations, that experience.

And then, as you exhale, relax. Maybe relax the muscles of the face. Relax the shoulders. Relax the belly. Relax your butt and your legs, so they settle into your sitting place.

And then settling into the body's experience of breathing, again with the simple rhythm of breathing. The idea is to be as simple as possible, not using the experience of breathing to reinforce ideas of self. Just a simple experience of the rhythm of breathing in and out. A rhythm you share with all breathing creatures that's been going on for millions of years, breathing in and breathing out, and will continue long after you're gone. And now you're participating in this shared common experience of breathing in and breathing out.

Center yourself on your breathing. And if you get distracted or caught up in something, notice how that might be related to self-concern, self-referencing. Then kindly, gently recognize it as selfing, and begin again with your breathing.

If you recognize selfing, see if you can recognize it with a light touch, not making it a big deal. And in doing so, perhaps experience a teeny bit of freedom from the ongoing selfing, just through recognizing it and stepping back, holding it lightly, and then beginning again with your breathing.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps recognize that the all-too-human concern with self, with oneself, is quite common, normal in many ways. But also, it's the seat, it's the source for a tremendous amount of confusion, desires, aversions, pain, hurt, and suffering for many people. The self is a complicated, difficult topic. Sometimes with self-criticism, sometimes with kind of selfish self-assertion which leads to frustration and difficulties. Recognize the tremendous amount of suffering that exists in this world because of how people are caught up in conceit and identification.

To end this sitting, appreciating the challenges that this brings to people, maybe allow yourself to feel care and compassion for the challenges and difficulties that people have. To wish them well, to wish all of us success in finding a way through, beyond the suffering based on self, selfing, and conceit.

May all beings be happy, without needing to reinforce or build up the self.

May all beings be safe, without needing to defend, protect, or let get hurt the concepts and ideas they have of who they are.

May all beings be peaceful, free of self-preoccupation.

And may all beings be free, free of the stickiness, the traps that are set with self-concern, self-preoccupation.

And may we support all beings to be free from the suffering of selfing by overcoming some of our own attachment to this area. May all beings be happy and free.

Dharmette: Dhammas (2 of 5) The Five Areas of Selfing

So today I continue the discussion about the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, and there are five different areas to attend to in this foundation. Yesterday I talked about the hindrances, the five hindrances^[2]. Today will be what's called the five aggregates^[3]. Tomorrow, the six sense doors, then the seven factors of awakening, and then the Four Noble Truths.

So all these wonderful lists. There's a progression through them. The progression from yesterday is that the hindrances are what keep us distracted in the world of desires and aversions, in our relationship to pleasure and pain, and things of the world. The alternative word for sensual pleasure—the first one that appears in the suttas^[4] in another same list, but with the word instead of sensual pleasures—is avariciousness, wanting to acquire, especially things of other people, or acquire things. So it has a lot to do with our relationship to things, desires, and pleasures, kind of what the self can get, what the self cannot get, what the self wants and doesn't want.

When that kind of desire settles down and quiets, then we're more present for ourselves. We then at some point encounter the next layer of attachment, this layer of preoccupation that interferes with the deeper settling into peace. That has to do with me, myself, and mine—self-concern and identification. Where we take different parts of our psychophysical being and hold onto that, or assume or conceive of that as being, "This is mine, this is me, and this is my true self."

Something as simple and seemingly innocent as saying, "This is my hand." I appropriate it as being mine, and in some sense it is, but when I say "my hand," it's associated with me. Maybe I think my hand is the best hand in the world, or I have the worst kind of hand in the world. Here I am holding it up in front of all of you, and if I'm attached to "this is my hand," then I could be either completely proud of showing it off or completely miserable that you're seeing this thing that is mine. So the idea of "my hand" can be innocent, but it can come along with a lot of baggage. That baggage is called selfing.

Or it could be that the hand is me, and so if someone brushes against it in a hard way, they're offending me because the hand is me. We take what's innocent enough and assume that this represents me as a person, or I take my hand as being my true self. That's the essence of who I am—"handness." And I'm ready to argue with anyone or insist that this is my handness; I'll protect my hand at all costs. I don't want it to die or get old, because that's essentially who I am. Maybe that's a silly example, but I'm hoping that you can apply this to yourself. There's this action of selfing, and in extreme forms, it takes the form of conceit, very strong attachment to self.

It has lots to do with identification. Not identifying who we are in a simple way—a man, a woman, neither man nor woman, transgender, non-conforming, all kinds of other options—but there's a way of leaning into it too much. Holding onto it and clinging, holding tight in such a way that as the vagaries of life encounter us, it either challenges that deep attachment or reinforces it. So there's selfing going on.

In the Buddha's teaching, the idea is to be sensitive to the contraction, the stickiness, the resistance, the pushingness, or the neediness that seems to be related to this idea of self. It can be experienced very simply, sometimes as a contraction, a tightness, inner pressure. It can be experienced as a wanting or a not wanting. It can be experienced as ideas that we swirl around in. A lot of this selfing does in fact have to do with ideas and concepts we live in, sometimes so deeply that we don't even see we're doing them.

For example, you come to a place where there are chairs, and lots of empty chairs. Maybe you're waiting at the doctor's office. You've been sitting in one chair for a long wait, and then you have to go to the bathroom. You go to the bathroom, you come back, and lo and behold, someone's sitting in the same chair that you were sitting in. The initial reaction is, "How could they be sitting in my chair?" There's identification with the chair and me that might arouse anger that the person is sitting in it, even though there are lots of other chairs around. This can happen in all kinds of small ways throughout the day.

So, to begin being sensitive to this movement of selfing that's possible when we're no longer caught up in the coarser surface desires of wanting and not wanting and the confusion that comes from that (the hindrances). What the Buddha wants us to do is to recognize in our simplest forms of experience the five different ways, five different foundations for what is called constructing a self. Sometimes it's the body, the form. Sometimes it's based on our feelings. Sometimes it's based on our ideas of things, our concepts—it's called perceptions in English, the third aggregate. Sometimes it has to do with the stories we make up, the impulses, the intentions, the motivations, the opinions we have—the fourth aggregate. And the fifth one is consciousness, the idea that we can be aware, that we can know. Some people very strongly associate that with a feeling, almost of emphasis, "I am," and of course, that's who I am.

These are different areas that people sometimes focus on in the construction of identity, in the construction of self, in the preoccupation with self. You might do it as an exercise and spend maybe today, a period of time, on each of these five aggregates and see how much self-concern is there around your body, what you look like, and bodily pleasure and displeasure. How much preoccupation and selfing is connected to how you feel, your feelings—feeling happy or sad in all kinds of ways. How much preoccupation and selfing is about my opinions, my history, my story, my biography, my plans, my desires, and the whole inner world that we construct with our mind. And then consciousness.

These are the five aggregates. This is where the Buddha wants us to look, but he wants us to look and see this for a particular reason. Not to negotiate, not to abandon it, not to let go of it even, not to make a problem out of it, but to see it clearly. To be quiet enough to see that in each of these five areas, when we don't cling to them too much, or don't overlay our ideas or preoccupation on them too much, they can be experienced as something flowing. Something arising and passing, something that appears and disappears. Something that is very inconstant, changing, flexing, moving. It's kind of like a river of our life, that our being is a river of changing sensations, experiences, thoughts, and emotions. The idea is to relax into that river and float, or be massaged by it, or settle in. The attachment to self and selfing is like taking a bucket of that water out and freezing it and saving it for the future, but it's no longer the river.

The idea is not so much to attack or feel upset about the selfing that goes on, but rather to look more deeply and see that underneath the self-concern, can we notice how it takes us out of the flow of life, the movement of the present moment? If the present moment is a river, notice how it takes us out through retrospective thinking, through fantasy, through being caught up in conversations in our head.

The five areas are the body, feelings, basic simple concepts and ideas that we live by, the fourth is the stories we live by, the more complicated mental constructions about our lives and motivations, and the fifth is consciousness. You don't necessarily have to remember them all, but you might become sensitive to how much selfing goes on. I think for many people, a primary subject, the main character, and what fuels much of their thinking is the self as me, myself, and mine. We're either center stage or somehow important in the thoughts and concerns we have. Just watching the thought stream and recognizing how much self is in there, and selfing, and ideas of self, is a fascinating study.

To do this as a mindfulness exercise is to try to see it as selfing, but see it as a reification, a solidification of the ongoing river of life that we live in. In doing so, you start experiencing some freedom, some independence from that attachment to self.

So, thank you. I realize this week is a bit of a whirlwind tour of these five different areas for the Fourth Foundation. Hopefully, it's useful to have a general sense for those of you who don't know of this very important part of mindfulness practice, and maybe some other time we can go into more depth with each of them.

Thank you all very much.