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Guided Meditation: Sitting with Confidence

Hello folks, very happy to be here and welcome to this meditation session. This will be the last morning for a while, perhaps, to be here at IRC^[1], the Insight Retreat Center. It's been nice to be here in this wonderful meditation hall. Some of you have been here, and maybe some of you will be here one day, and I look forward to the chance to welcome you here in this wonderful place.

Yesterday I discussed that one can use posture as a reference point for the state of mind. The attitudes that we have get expressed in our posture, so attending to posture and having a reference point of an upright posture can indicate when we lose that, and then we can look at why and what's happening inside. The other direction works as well, in the sense that we can assume certain postures and that can be a reference point for the attitude, for the mind. Our minds can change to a certain degree by the postures we take. The image of the Buddha meditating, like we have here on the altar, is a wonderful example of a balanced posture that balances an attitude of confidence—calm confidence and trust, perhaps.

You might find it interesting when you meditate to assume a posture of confidence, maybe a posture that expresses or manifests a certain degree of strength, which is not going to be energetic in a way that's tense, and which will also allow you to be calm. I think that confidence sometimes is an underappreciated quality, and that more confidence can be available to us than we maybe can access through the mind. One way is to do it physically: a physical posture of uprightness. I suspect in every posture it's possible to find a way of being that somehow feels like, "Now this holds my confidence or expresses confidence."

If I don't feel confident sometimes, the mind is influenced by the body. And so if the body takes a confident posture, maybe something begins shifting inside. Assuming, taking, entering into a posture for meditation, perhaps for today you can see if you can take a posture that expresses some physical strength or confidence. Maybe by opening up the chest a bit more, ever so slightly bringing in the spine between the shoulder blades; that also expands the chest a little bit. Maybe your head can be a little bit more confident, maybe regal, straightening out the neck, maybe lifting the head up. When I first started doing meditation, the instructions were to imagine a string from the back top of the head lifting the head up towards the ceiling.

And then gently, maybe confidently, close your eyes. As if you are filling your body with strength or confidence on the inhale, and relaxing on the exhale, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Taking in some deeper breaths than usual, almost as if you're claiming your right to be here and now. Maybe a kind of regal right or place. And then letting your breathing return to normal.

If you have brought in some confidence to your posture, does that have any influence on how you're aware of breathing, and how you're aware of the experience of the body breathing? With a normal breath, breathing normally, on the inhale gently filling yourself with some degree of confidence and strength—confidence in the value of being present here and now. And then on the exhale, relax, soften holding tension in your body. As you exhale, perhaps letting anxiety melt away. And then simplifying yourself to settling into the rhythm of the body breathing. Breathing that comes with the support of a confident body.

One of the words for confidence in the Pali language is pasāda^[2], which also means bright, kind of like luminously bright. It also means peaceful, serene, calm. And what kind of confidence—strong confidence, even unshakable confidence—might you have that also has qualities of peacefulness and clarity as part of it?

A peaceful confidence. If you imagine yourself having some form of peaceful confidence, and that peaceful confidence was the channel for your love, for your karuṇā^[3], for your goodwill for the world, what would your love be like radiating from such a confidence?

May whatever confidence and strength we've developed through this practice be supportive. May it be channeled and used for the welfare and happiness of others. May we live benefiting this world. May all beings be happy. May all beings inhabit their natural strength. May all beings be safe, partly as an outgrowth of their confidence. May all beings be peaceful because they walk through the world confidently. May all beings be free, confident in the value of non-clinging. May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (19) Awareness in Activity

Today we're going to begin discussion of the third exercise in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[4], the discourse on the four foundations for mindfulness, for awareness. One way of reading this text is that these first three exercises are kind of progressive, that one can lead to the other. The first one is meditation practice centered on breathing. As we get focused, concentrated, settled here in our breathing—calm, settled, very present—we bring that calm presence with us into our activities. The simplest way is to then also know our postures: we stand, we know we're standing; as we walk, we know we're walking, and so forth.

If we can stay mindful and present, kind of inhabiting awareness as we go through and begin our activities after meditation, there's a delightful kind of calm presence for the activity. When we do things with only half attention or quarter attention to the activity that we do, we miss this. But with full presence, maybe in such a degree that it's actually enjoyable to just be there and feel and experience the simplicity of what we're doing, it's actually more enlivening, more rich, more beneficial than the alternative—wandering off in thought and concerns with the activities of the day. And then we do our things better when we have that kind of presence and attention.

I'll read you the passage, the exercise. It's one of the longer ones: "A practitioner is one who acts in full awareness when going forward and returning, when looking ahead and looking away; who acts in full awareness when flexing and extending the limbs; who acts in full awareness when wearing their robes and carrying their outer robe and bowl"—this is referring to monastics, so it applies to us but not with the same specifics—"who acts in full awareness when eating, drinking, consuming food and tasting; who acts in full awareness when defecating and urinating; who acts in full awareness when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking, and keeping silent." These are all ordinary daily activities that many people do, and here it uses the term "full awareness."

The word is sampajañña^[5], and exactly what it means... I love this translation where it says "full awareness." I love the feeling of fullness of awareness as we go through our lives and what we do. The tradition understands it as being a fuller understanding of what we're doing. So as we come out of meditation and start doing the activities we're doing, we're aware of more than just the activity itself. If we're doing walking meditation, we're just settling in and doing walking, and that's all we're doing. But if we're walking to our kitchen, we know we're going to our kitchen as well. It's not just walking; there's also the knowing of going to the kitchen. If we're reaching for a cup to have tea, we know that we're reaching for the cup in order to have tea, for the purpose of having tea.

If we are reaching for the faucet to put water in the tea kettle, we have a sense that we're doing this for a purpose: to have water come out, to fill the kettle, to make tea, because we're thirsty and it's good to be hydrated. In the immediacy, there are a number of things that are clear: the purpose of why we're doing it, and the context in which we do things. We walk into some place and we're going to walk through the room, but we know there are other people in the room. It's not just walking as if that's all that's going on. We take into account the context of the people. Maybe we walk around them rather than walking through them or expecting them to move. This full awareness takes in much more.

Here we're beginning to use a little bit more of the intelligence of the mind. We're not using our intelligence to fantasize about tomorrow or get lost in fantasy and thoughts about something or other as we do it. As we are reaching for the faucet, we might know we're doing it if someone asked us about it later, but we're not really present. It's not full awareness of the activity, the context, and the purpose if we have already started thinking about, "I can't wait for lunch, and I wonder what we should have for lunch," and we haven't even had breakfast.

This exercise is a call to bring our mindfulness into our daily activities, into all our activities. I love that it ends with both talking and remaining silent, putting them both on the same level of importance. To have a full awareness is to know when we're talking, to know why we're talking, to know the context for why we're talking. And the same for silence: to know why we're silent, the purpose of silence, the context of it, the appropriateness of it.

The tradition also says that this full awareness means that one knows in what part of ourselves we stay grounded as we do the activity. It explicitly says we stay connected to the four foundations for mindfulness. Sometimes we enter into the world of the activity very much with our bodies; some of these activities are physical. Sometimes we're present for our mind states, the quality of our mind. Sometimes we're aware of the feeling tone, sometimes the mental processes involved. These are all the exercises we'll be talking about as we go through this Sutta. It's about really practicing mindfulness with all these different aspects of ourselves—mindfulness that keeps us rooted in the present moment, grounded in the present, and capable of taking in this fuller context, the purpose, the values of what we're doing, the impact of what we're doing, and the influence on us in what we're doing.

It's one thing to walk and be aware that we're walking. It's another thing to feel that we're walking in such a hurry that we're getting tense; full awareness would notice that tension. Or walking in a way that feels nourishing, that feels delightful and satisfying, and then we walk with that satisfaction and feel that.

One way of understanding this is as mindfulness in activity. It's very common among English-speaking practitioners to refer to "mindfulness in daily life," which is a great concept; however, it's very abstract. Daily life just means too much. For the Buddha, it was always more concrete, more specific, something more tangible. So here, it's mindfulness in action, infusing our activity with awareness and attention. It isn't so much that we have to think actively about the context or think about the purpose, but it's a relaxed, open awareness that takes it into account, that sees, that understands. It arises as well; it's a rich world.

The activities that I just read are generally pretty simple ones: eating, defecating, urinating, extending your arm, falling asleep, waking up. You might, over this weekend, look for simple activities that you do that you can try to practice full awareness with—full understanding of what's happening there as you do it. Not searching and analyzing for that, but is there some way of being really present for the activity you're doing, such that there's a clear knowing of the context, the purpose, and the influence it has on you? Because you're so present for it, your system is taking that in, registering that, and knowing that as part of the full picture of your present moment experience. Abiding in the present moment, calm and confident, available to take in the fuller picture of what the activity is about and how it's going.

Choose a few activities through the day—maybe washing dishes, sweeping the floor, driving, or something simple—that you can practice and experiment with. In this way, this mindfulness awareness can begin growing, expanding, and spreading into more of your life.

Thank you very much, and I'll see you back at IMC^[6] on Monday.