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Announcements

Before we move into the talk, I would like to make a few announcements. First is that on Friday I said we would post some of the things that I read last week: the simile for the jhānas^[1] (the states of absorption or samādhi^[2]), and also the little passage from the Buddha's teachings with the sixteen steps of ānāpānasati^[3]. The easy place to find that is on IMC's homepage. In the bottom right corner, in the "What's New" section, there's a little line for "Reflections from Gil." That's where you'll find those passages.

And the other is that next week, starting from next Monday, the plan is to have for one week these early morning sittings—the meditation—be 45 minutes rather than 30 minutes. We'll start 15 minutes early, so whatever time your time zone is, 15 minutes before the hour. In California, at 6:45. You're welcome to join at 7:00 if that early time doesn't work for you. Just know that you should probably tiptoe into the meditation room when you join us.

The reason for this longer sitting is I think that after all this time of sitting—some of you have been sitting for months this way with me in the morning—I feel like we're kind of deepening and going further. To be able to sit longer is one of the ways to experience more the benefits of this path, to kind of let it unfold more deeply in the course of the sitting. So we'll try it next week, and maybe in a few weeks we'll do it again next time I do a retreat.

Mindfulness of Breathing (27) Step 7: Experiencing Mental Formations

The ānāpānasati practice involves sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing in and mindfulness of breathing out. Between the eighth and ninth step, there is a transition. We stay very intimately involved with our embodied experience in the first eight steps, which is always a foundation for the second eight steps. But we also open up to a realm of experience that is not so directly related to the body; it's related to the mind. Yet we are still in this body section of the first half.

In the first tetrad, it's about learning to develop a continuity with the breathing and beginning to experience and sense the body. Especially how the body is activated by the mind—the tensions of the body—and to learn to relax that. As that relaxes, it frees up a good kind of energy in the body. And as the concentration deepens, it also awakens a meditative joy, happiness, and well-being that comes with calmness, subtleness, and contentment from just sitting and being here. With that certain kind of meditative well-being as a foundation, it's only then that the instructions open up to becoming aware of aspects of the mind.

In step seven, the instructions are: "Breathing in, one experiences the mental formation. Breathing out, one experiences the mental formation."

A few things about this: the Pali word for "experience" has a lot to do with the direct physical experience of a sensation. It's almost like this word could be translated as "one senses for oneself the sensations of the mind, of the mental formation." Here it is singular—"the mental formation." So it's not necessarily going and looking at the detailed little aspects of the mental formation, but the whole thing, somehow how it's experienced.

The mental formations are those experiences associated with mental activity that we can sense and feel. It's the mental activity that has some impact on the sensing body. I think of sensation as being very much a part of the body, and so the sensations of the mind are too. For example, if we're afraid, our shoulders might be tense, up, and tight; that's a physical formation. But if we're afraid and our mind feels contracted, small, or tight, that's the mental formation—the mental expression of the fear, of that activated state. It's feeling the mental activity.

Particularly associated with thinking, if we're thinking very intensely, we might feel it physically. Maybe the forehead is all bunched and scrunched together, and that would be the bodily formation. But if you look more deeply into the area around where we're thinking—if we think in the area of the brain, for example—you might feel that behind the forehead, in an area not particularly associated with tightened muscles, there are still sensations. There might be a feeling of contraction, a headache, agitation, or a sense of pressure or pushing. Sometimes I feel like there's a magnetic or gravitational pull for me towards thinking, or thinking pulling towards me. There's a pull or a tug going on in relationship to the thoughts. There's a leaning in in the mind; sometimes the center of gravity of my thinking is a little bit ahead of my body, like I'm leaning forward into the future a little bit. It's possible to start feeling something that resembles, or is sensation-like, associated with the mental activity we do. Those are called the mental formations—the mental activities that we can feel.

What's interesting here is that we certainly have a lot of mental activity. Let's look at thinking, for example. Thinking is a mental activity, and the instructions here are to feel the physical experience of thinking. It's only feeling it. It's not thinking better, or understanding what we're thinking, or analyzing what we're thinking. It's not about recognizing even what we're thinking. It's simply recognizing the physicality, or the sensation level, of the thinking itself. In shorthand, I like to think of this as feeling the "thinking muscle."

The ways in which we feel thinking: it can feel energetic, tight, or constricted; there's pressure, a hurry, or low energy. Sometimes it feels swampy in the mind, a lack of clarity. There is a whole realm of things that are about how it feels for us, as opposed to what it's about. This is a wonderful support and aid to not get caught up, giving us permission during meditation to not have to fix our thoughts, fix the world, understand what's going on, or analyze what's going on. We're only asked to feel it, and feel an aspect of what the mind is doing. The mind is very important, but here we focus on a particular aspect: its sensation level. We're connected to it, but we're not being pulled into the storyline in a sense.

We're trying to do this based on the foundation of steps five and six, which is feeling a sense of well-being. Until we have some feeling of well-being, we don't really start actively taking in what is going on in the mind, or what the mental activity is about. This ensures there's a container, a context of well-being, for looking at an area of our life which is often quite difficult. We're not trying to do a spiritual bypass. We're not trying to avoid our inner suffering or the challenges that we have. But maybe we're touching it with breath, with an awareness, with emotions that are supportive—that have a goodness to them, a calmness, kindness, or generosity. Building on the foundation of what's been done earlier in these steps of mindfulness of breathing, the context for becoming aware of the mental activity is one of kindness, goodwill, or even joy.

It's one of the wonderful paradoxes I discovered early on: that one can experience suffering in oneself and in the world, and at the same time have a lot of joy. In fact, my ability to go deeply into the practice of vipassanā^[4], where there are times we experience a lot of our personal suffering, was supported by having cultivated meditative joy that could hold that suffering. It isn't one or the other; it can be both. All this involves a disidentification from being locked in or overly preoccupied with what we're thinking and emoting, so that we can just hold it and be present for it in a different way than we usually are.

That's one of the opportunities here with ānāpānasati. "Breathing in, one experiences the mental formation." One isn't even trying to parse out the details of it, just the whole gestalt, the global feeling, the sensations of what is going on in the mind. "Breathing out, one experiences the mental formation." Because we're breathing in and breathing out, this is again a support for not getting wrapped up. As long as the breathing stays relaxed and smooth, we tend to have a more open, freer relationship to what we're including in that awareness, to what we're accompanying with the breathing.

I hope that makes sense. We'll do more of this over the next few days. If it didn't make full sense, don't worry about it too much, and maybe there's just enough that when I go on over the next few days it will become clearer. For now, maybe you can spend the day, these next twenty-four hours, reflecting and practicing this idea of accompaniment. We're accompanying things. We're accompanying ourselves. We're accompanying our hearts, our minds, and we're accompanying other people. What does it mean to be a companion in that way?

Thank you, and I look forward to tomorrow.