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Guided Meditation: Attention in the body

Welcome to you all. Happy to be with you. Nice to see who's here.

We'll sit. I'll guide something and then give a short talk at the top of the hour.

Find your posture. Just settling into your posture. Just kind of gathering up all the moments of mindfulness, love, surrender, and renunciation. Just gathering your whole dharma history. Gathering it all into this moment. Feeling that blessing.

What peace needs to be made with this moment in order to arrive? The frictions, resistances, preoccupations, and the peripheral awareness that bug at us. Make our breathing feel like the one thing we don't need to worry about.

And can we pour our attention into our body? Not just to the hot spots, but to the places we don't notice, the places we're a little numbed out. Just unifying your body with your breathing and your attention.

Our attention becomes more subtle as we stabilize. We become more awake to nuance and subtlety, wispy sensations, and the subtle energetics of our body.

There's the front of our body. It feels like life is in front of us, but life is everywhere. We tune to the back of our body.

Keep relaxing whatever can be relaxed. Any tension that remains, we allow that to remain.

With attention and breathing, like water cohering the clay^[1], when we fight with sensation, we fracture the field. We rush our attention to what we wish to change. Instead, we practice giving pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral equal seats at the table. Just bathing your body with attention.

Our attention snags on our hope and fear. It couldn't be more innocent. We forgive our mind, forgive our hope, and forgive our fear. Reestablish this tranquil, vital alertness we call mindfulness.

Of course, meditation doesn't solve our problems. But it speaks to and soothes the bodily feeling that sponsors all problems, and our attention and breathing speak deeply to our bodies.

Tranquility

Many years ago, I was co-teaching a retreat with a friend who is much wilder than I am. That's not a high bar, but he's much wilder. He's most alive surfing a wave that wants to eat him alive, and I'm most alive taking a nap. So, there are some temperamental differences.

We got to a point in the retreat where it was very still. I think it was maybe a ten-day retreat. It was very still and very tranquil. He's not dismissive of meditation; he's a long, deep practitioner with a lot of access. But we were riding down the hill in the golf cart to the teachers' rooms late at night, and he said to me, "The dharma is parasympathetically biased."

The parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system—the peripheral nervous system—is usually associated with the replenishment of resources. It's not fighting or flighting, but the replenishment of resources: soothing, resting, digesting. The dharma is parasympathetically biased.

What I took him to be saying was that there's an excessive emphasis on calming and not enough on vitality or aliveness. That line stayed with me all these years. I got where he was coming from. Sometimes the dharma can collude with some measure of flatness, pinched emotion, or pinched expression. Sometimes people get the idea that spiritual maturity is kind of like narrowing the band of emotional experience and expression, that it gets to be a thinner range of highs and lows. We can become afraid of intensity and aliveness. We can practice in such a way where we're essentially controlling intensity, and we can impose a kind of control. So, I get the sentiment.

But generally speaking—maybe it's my bias—I have a lot of trust in tranquility. The dharma makes a bold claim about truth: that knowledge and vision of things as they are depends on tranquility. We will not perceive the truth unless we establish a lot of steadiness, tranquility, and patience. The truth, in that sense, depends on our body from a Buddhist perspective.

It may be worthwhile to consider the mind states that have led you to clarity and those that have led to confusion. Consider the mind and body states that have given you access to good predictions about what's coming, what's what, and where to look for happiness. And also consider the mind and body states in which we've been prone to partial perception or poor decisions and judgments.

Our mind has to cope with feeling and arousal in our body. When our chest is on fire, or there's a thin film of yuckiness, or some intensity coating our whole body, we need to know. It's not like we have some super intense feeling—some explosion of feeling, pleasant or unpleasant—and we just say, "Oh, whatever. Nothing to see here." That means something that demands words. From a place of hyperarousal, we feel compelled to build a lot of meaning. We build our stories on the foundation of feeling; feeling necessitates story.

You can investigate how this constellates for you. The potency of our stories must match the potency of our feeling. Some of those stories are not all bad; story doesn't mean bad. Some of those stories can be deeply empowering, freeing, and liberating in some way. Insight, in a sense, is a freeing story or perception. Part of retreat practice is generating enough feeling and affect that a new story becomes necessary. That's empowering.

But many of the stories are just our desperation to know and to control. We can live our whole life in the dream of the fabrications that emerge as exhaust off the engine of feeling. Maybe we're closer to truth when there's no urge to say anything or think anything.

Tranquility, in other words, is central in many ways. Not all, but many of the afflictive states that get us in trouble involve hyperarousal on some level. Clinging is at the heart of the dharma. Clinging is a state where the feeling is a little too much. Compulsivity and the drivenness of our lives is too much. In many cases, tranquility will lead us in the direction of more freedom.

But this is a special kind of tranquility. This is not a flatness. There's still alertness, but alert brightness is different from hyperarousal. So much of the dharma is just self-soothing. What I was alluding to in the sit is that dukkha^[2] manifests as some kind of friction, tension, or viscosity. Even ignorance—the ways we ignore and try not to see—has tension in it. Greed manifests as tension. Hatred manifests as tension. The urgency of feeling manifests as a sense that something has to happen; there is tension there. The self—the arising and congealing of self—is a kind of tension. Part of the value of deep relaxation is insight into the emptiness of the self, as we see the weight and the tension of grasping and selfing.

So, we soothe ourselves, but in a deep way. We have to find many refuges and bring them close at hand. We practice in such a way that they're never far, even when we forget. The dharma is a kind of technology of soothing, but those skills develop slowly. It takes time before just one breath calls the whole of the dharma back to our heart. It takes time to cultivate refuge and love in the space of awareness. It takes time to bring meta-awareness to what is not tranquil and to disidentify. It takes time to learn how to rest deeply.

Emotion regulation of this kind takes effort, but sometimes our resources are already depleted. There's no effort left. I saw an article a few days ago from a group at Harvard that prompted these reflections. The title of the article is "Low-Effort Emotion Regulation." I saw that article and was like, "Yes, please. May I have another low-effort emotion regulation?"

Here's what they write: "We introduce the concept of low-effort emotion regulation strategies that involve low initiation costs, minimal demands on executive attention, and little to no physical exertion. Low-effort strategies may function as emotion regulation affordances, making regulation feel more immediately accessible when individuals are cognitively depleted or unmotivated."

I don't usually just rattle off weird research findings like this, but this is what they say. They marshal evidence for a lot of this. Music. (Not Nick Drake, not Elliott Smith, not The National. No, but music.) Weighted blankets. Smells. Smell is very deep associative learning. Especially around anxiety, a different smell may break some associative linkage. Nature. Physical touch from a friend, family member, partner, or healthcare professional—specifically, they highlighted touch to the head and face.

Then they had a couple of language-based strategies, like distanced self-talk. Not "Why am I upset?" but "Why is Matthew upset?" I always talk that way; I always speak in the third person, just as a dharma teacher. "Why is Matthew poorly dressed? Why? No, seriously." [Laughter] Moving it into the metacognitive realm is a mechanism used in some psychotherapeutic approaches with self-distanced ways of speaking.

They also shared affect labeling. Actually noting the feeling flavors that are arising reliably downregulates physiological markers of distress. We can see what kind of energy our heart has. Is there a lot of interest and energy? That might be one way of bringing in a measure of tranquility. Sometimes in states of depletion, I don't have much to give. What can I do? I can bring a measure of tranquility and then see: What does life feel like? What do I look like? What does the world look like from the vantage point of tranquility?

So, I offer this for your consideration. Nice to be here with you. See you next week.