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Guided Meditation: Aware of Internal Weather

Good morning Sangha, good morning online Sangha.

Greetings from rainy Redwood City. And I'm loving seeing the weather reports: local rain, snow, cloudy. Please feel free to share your weather wherever you are. We're celebrating rain in our very dry Northern California. I'm confident that's not everywhere.

We've got chilly Seattle... it was cloudy a few minutes ago. And cold in Stafford, Virginia. Bitingly cold in the heartland, I believe. It's chilly and damp. Lovely to see all the warm greetings in the midst of the cold, damp, or wet. Bright and crisp in Glenside, Pennsylvania. Sunny and cold... lake effect... clear and cold... cool and clear.

So, very happy to be here with all of you this morning. I love the little greetings, the anecdotes, the warmth of this Sangha. It's really something.

So, we are at the top of the hour. I just want to invite you, when you're ready, to turn your attention from the weather report rolling in from all over the place to the internal weather: the internal weather of your body, heart, and mind. You can do that by settling back and closing your eyes. Maybe you aren't quite done with the chat, but you just want to tune in. You can share it if you like, before you settle in.

Then settling into a posture that will support you for the next half hour.

Opening your awareness to the quality of the larger atmospherics around you, whether it's rain or sun, or wind or damp. And feeling yourself embodied, embodied within that larger system, atmosphere.

And feeling into the sensations of this body, this moment, internally. The overall sense of warmth or cool, relaxation, aliveness. Maybe weight or lightness. Breathing out any excess energy or tension.

And paying special attention just for a moment to your head, to your face. Allowing the eyes to soften in their sockets. Perhaps to gently roll down and back just a little bit. This invokes a global relaxation response. And also allowing the tongue to relax, to soften. Rest in your mouth however works for you. For me, and for many people, it's helpful to have the tip of the tongue gently resting on the front of the palate—that area of the roof of the mouth right behind your top teeth. And that can allow the rest of the tongue just to relax. Another signal to soften the overall system.

Feeling your feet, your seat, your body. Rooted, held. Held by the gravity of the Earth, supported by the Earth.

Checking in now with the overall atmospherics of mood, just in a general, broad-brush, overall way. How's the heart? How's the mind today? It can be an act of love to check in with that. Acknowledging whatever's there.

And settling, settling into really allowing awareness, mindfulness, to be at the forefront of attention. 360 degrees, all around you, within you.

Perhaps resting the attention, awareness, on the breath. If there are sounds—effect of external weather, ambient sounds of any kind—allowing that to be an anchor in attention. Gentle movements of rain or shifting sound of wind. Distant sounds from outside.

Spaciousness. Allowing.

Resting, resting on the gentle waves of arising and passing away of sensation of breathing. Experience of sound or sensation.

Allowing the attention, the awareness, to rest in this moment.

If you find the attention called to any specific, stronger arising—maybe a sound, sensation, internal mental or emotional process—turning all of the attention to the fact of that arising. Acknowledging it kindly. And with the acknowledgment, either staying with it as an event in this moment, or, as it fades or the mind loses interest, returning the attention to the global awareness, overall awareness. Perhaps including breathing, overall sensation, sound.

Allowing sensations, internal processes to come and go. No need to get involved. No need to be for or against. No need for judgment, just noticing. Allowing. Being with.

In these last few minutes of this meditation together, tuning in to any calm or spaciousness, any peace, relaxation. Even just a tiny corner, tiny drop that may have appeared, emerged in this meditation.

And tuning into the good qualities cultivated in this practice: perhaps patience, persistence, engagement, stillness or collectedness, compassion, self-compassion, kindness. Whatever good qualities have been cultivated or experienced.

Imagining others in your life, near and far, with whom they might be shared. Just in a way of being or a simple intention, sharing increases these good qualities for everyone. And if it feels right, allowing these beneficial good intentions to flow outwards towards those your life touches.

May the goodness cultivated in our practice together here be shared with the others in our lives and, by this sharing, continue to radiate outwards, and further outward still.

May all beings be safe. May all beings be happy. May all beings be healing. May they be peaceful, and may all beings be free.

Thank you for the dedication, the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Spiritual Power (4 of 5) Quality of Mind

The topic for this morning is again one of five bases for cultivating spiritual power. This basis is a combination of, again, engagement or padhāna—wholehearted engagement—and in this case, citta^[1], the quality or subjective experience of the mind and heart. And again, those two help to form collectedness, immersion, stability, concentration, samādhi^[2]—all of those are synonyms or different translations of the words.

So I have three main points to cover this morning. The first, overarching point really—if you take nothing else from these fifteen minutes—is that the quality of our minds and hearts, the quality of thought that emerges from it, can define our practice and it can define our lives. This is most easily seen in meditation practice for me, and sometimes moments of it will pop in in daily life, too, of course. So it's helpful to learn to notice. That's point one.

Points two and three are sort of subsets; they are ways of noticing. The first kind of thing that some of us can tune into—you might find that you tune into—is the overall state of the mind in any given moment. This is kind of like the atmospherics, that overall ecology or soundscape happening in your system. The second way is to tune into the kind of thoughts that are emerging. I don't so much mean the story of the thoughts, though that can be very important, but the underlying quality. I'll talk about that more in a minute.

So first, the quality of the mind and heart, the quality of thoughts, how we relate to experience. I'm going to ask you again to kind of feel into these as I talk about them, and I'll give you another word cloud for the Pali. This comes from a number of different translators: mind, mental processes, mental development, heart or heart-mind, state of consciousness. You just feel into those so far, any associations coming up. Overall awareness, kind of like the overall atmospherics. And then my personal favorite comes from the very prolific early translator Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids^[3]. She calls citta 'the subjective experience of mind.'

A subjective experience of mind. So this overall subjective experience, it's as I mentioned kind of like the overall weather. The overall front here in the Bay Area of rain, and the kind of overall atmospherics you might experience in a soundscape. Another way I've thought of it in the past that's been helpful is, if the mind is spinning up movies for those of us that are visual, what's the tint or the color theme in the movie? Or what's the general mood of the soundtrack? Not the words, not the dialogue—the feel.

So this is such a helpful sort of part of experience to tune into that it actually has its own foundation in the Buddha's famous teaching, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[4]. One of the central teachings of this tradition of Buddhism, and perhaps of most if not all traditions. And that third foundation is—and I'm using Gil Fronsdal's^[5] translation here of this discourse—observation of mind.

And there are certain things that are helpful to notice. You don't have to dig around for them, but just notice them. I'm just going to read a few of the phrases from this section:

"One knows a mind with craving as a mind with craving, and a mind without craving as a mind without craving. One knows a mind with ill will as a mind with ill will, and a mind without ill will as without ill will. One knows a mind with delusion as a mind with delusion, and a mind without delusion as a mind without delusion."

In other words, clarity or wisdom.

"And one knows a mind that is collected as collected, and a mind that is scattered as scattered."

So that could be distraction. Collected, of course, is that stability, that stillness, focus, samādhi.

"One knows an expanded mind as an expanded mind"—or spacious mind, you could call it—"and a not expanded mind as a not expanded mind." And it goes on from there.

Just to give you a flavor, this is general, and it doesn't have to be something you even look for. But every now and then, if things are going really tough in a meditation, or if they're going really, really well, just to check in: what's the quality of the mind and heart right now? The shortcut that a teacher I've followed now for some years—his teachings—said is: is there tension in the mind or relaxation? Or for me, it's often a helpful shortcut to ask: is it helpful or not helpful? I suggest these are possibilities. You don't have to go looking for them, digging for them, but allowing them to emerge, to be seen.

So an example here: let's say you go to visit someone who's having a really hard time, to support them, to be with them. Beautiful thing to do, right? There's a big difference, during and afterwards, between tuning into the compassion and the care in your own heart, or maybe the appreciation for them, versus criticizing or blaming yourself for any little misstep or imperfection of how it went. The same thing goes for showing up for ourselves in meditation, right? Acknowledging what's happening without putting on extra layers that aren't so helpful.

So in meditation it's helpful just to notice. The shortcut for all of this is just notice the overall mood, notice the overall tone. And that tone, that mood can feel so authoritative that it's really worth remembering that the citta, this subjective quality of mind, can change faster than a finger snap. We've all experienced that. Some new event happens, a new person, a memory, a realization, and our mood goes from one thing to completely another. Just like that, faster than a finger snap.

The last area I'll cover just briefly is to notice the different types of thought arising. And this can be the kind of attitudes of thought that I talked about earlier in Gil's^[6] translation of the Third Foundation. But there can also be qualities of the mental activity itself. And there are two qualities in particular that are helpful in cultivating the iddhipāda^[7], the bases for meditative success and spiritual power. And that is the quality of directed attention at whatever your central object of attention, anchor of attention for the meditation is. So that's like the striker hitting the gong of the bell. And the other quality is a sustaining quality, like the fade of the bell. I'll just do it now. So if you just connect, it'll be a clunk like that. If you connect and sustain, it's like this.

There's this capacity to be with, be near what is being attended to, that continues. You can think of this in terms of yesterday's topic of effort, too. Every now and then a little pulse of connecting, and then this long sustaining. It's like pushing a child on a swing: you don't need to be pushing the whole time, the swing swings. So this is a very helpful quality of mind. Each of these are very helpful qualities of mind for deepening immersion, stability in the meditation. And again, nothing that needs to be made to happen or dug for, but just noticing. I encourage you to notice in your life when you connect, when your attention naturally connects with something and stays with it for a while.

Okay, so to recap: citta, your subjective experience of the heart and mind, is one of the really crucial, helpful qualities to notice in cultivating a deepening of meditation practice. The overall attitude, quality, atmospherics of heart and mind; the overall sense of weather, atmosphere, presence and absence of skillful and unskillful, healthy and unhealthy qualities; and these kinds of thoughts or types of mental activity.

So in the next twenty-four hours, if it feels right, just notice these in your life or in your practice. Maybe talk about them with a friend. And I'll look forward to seeing you, at least in the chat or in my mind's eye, tomorrow on YouTube.

Thank you for your practice.