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Guided Meditation: Without the Weight of Thoughts

So good day to everyone. Hello and welcome to our Sunday morning meditation and talk. Thank you to those of you who are sending greetings in the chat. It's very nice for me, and I start feeling a real connection to those of you who are listening. I appreciate the warmth that's being expressed.

As an introduction to this meditation today, there's an interesting difference between the body and the mind. The body, in a sense, has weight. It's substantial and has a certain weight. We can ask, "How much do you weigh?" and we're referring to the weight of the body. The mind is wide-ranging, filled with all kinds of ideas, motivations, and memories. The mind, being different from the brain, has no weight. But more specifically, the thoughts in the mind have no weight; they're weightless.

If you feel your hands, maybe you can feel the weight of your hands. Maybe your hands are pushing or pressing. The weight of gravity is there; their weight is being pulled by gravity into maybe your legs, or into the other hand, or some part of your body. You can feel the weight in the sense of the hand. But your thoughts have no weight. Your judgments in and of themselves have no weight. Your memories, your predictions about the future have no weight.

But they can be quite weighty. We can say, "I'm weighed down by my concerns," and "weighed down by my thoughts." It's not the thoughts themselves, but rather it's the contracting, the tensing, the pushing, the striving, the energy that we apply to our thoughts, ideas, judgments, memories, and fantasies. That's where, in a sense, the substantial nature of them comes alive, or that's where the weightiness of them comes in. In the way that we relate to them, we contribute the weight. But in and of themselves, our thoughts have no weight.

To realize that, to make that real in ourselves, to really feel and sense the weightless quality of these, then we can get a feeling for freedom. We can get a sense of how these float, that there are no boundaries to them, no substance to them. They just kind of come and go, they can dissolve and appear, they float through, in a sense. Everything else is our contribution: our intense interest in them, or alarm, or horror, or fear in relationship to them, or our wanting and not wanting, contracting and pushing away. This goes on and on, the ways in which we relate.

For this meditation, maybe you can become aware a little bit of that distinction between the weightiness that you contribute and the weightlessness of your thinking, of your ideas and thoughts.

The substantiality of our tension and holding on, our reactivity, and the non-substantial nature of these thoughts themselves. One of the things to discover, then, is that our thoughts are not bothering us, but in a sense, we are bothering them, or we are being bothered by them. To discover how not to be bothered by thoughts and ideas is to begin discovering how to be free from them.

So, assuming a meditation posture that supports you to be alert and relaxed. Taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. Breathing in, breathing out. And as you exhale, to relax and soften. Relaxing and softening the muscles of the body contributes to a feeling of fluidity, softness, or lightness in the body that's not there if we are tense and tight.

Letting your breathing return to normal. Taking a few moments to feel your embodied body. Feeling the sense of embodiment in this body, the weight of the body, the substance of the body. And then, as you exhale, gently exhale, softening the muscles of your face, letting those muscles of the face fall away from the bone in the skull. Softening your eyes. As you exhale, softening the shoulders. Releasing the shoulders to the pull of gravity. Exhaling and softening in the belly. And maybe when you inhale, can you keep the belly soft and expansive?

And then also, as you exhale, see if you can relax any tension or pressure that's around the mind. In the area that you most identify with the mind, maybe it's the same as the brain, the area of the head. If there's any tension, contraction, relax, soften, let go. The tensions, the pressure, energy, agitation of the mind is not really of the mind, that's of the body participating, reacting, engaging.

The mind has no weight. It has no boundaries, no center. And the thoughts of the mind, the judgments, the ideas of the mind have no weight, no substance. Their weight and substance are contributed by our reactions to them, our relationship to them.

In and of itself, allow the simplicity of thoughts, the weightless, insubstantial nature, allowing them to be without being bothered by them, without bothering them.

One way to do this is to let your attention flow into your body, into the breathing body. Resting awareness on the inhales and the exhales of the body, so that the energy of awareness doesn't contribute to the heaviness or substantiality of thoughts. And thoughts, maybe at some point, will begin to just float, and feel very thin and very light. Nothing we have to be involved in. Instead, let yourself be centered in the body breathing.

There is no need to give weight and substance to whatever you're thinking about. Leave the thoughts alone. If you don't pick up a boulder, you won't feel its weight. If you don't pick up a thought, it has no weight.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to consider: when thoughts have no weight, no substance, we're not contributing pressure, resistance, or contraction around them. Then the heart is not eclipsed. When the thoughts have weight, they eclipse the warmth of the heart, the radiance of the heart.

Perhaps softening, relaxing the mind in these last moments of the sitting. To feel and sense whatever capacity for warm-heartedness, heartfelt goodwill that you're capable of. And without adding weight to your thoughts, lightly, openly, let that heartfelt warmth open up widely into the world around us, to the world around you. The people who are closest to you physically and emotionally, circles of community outwards across the land.

Without any weight of reactions, judgments, or planning, with the simplicity of an open heart, wishing that this meditation that you've just done in some way or other may be in service of the welfare and happiness of others. May it be that the benefits that have come from sitting quietly, may you share those benefits with others. May they spread from you. So that we contribute, maybe in small, infinitesimal ways, but we contribute to a global possibility that all beings may be happy, that all beings may be safe, that all beings may be peaceful, that all beings everywhere can be free.

And may it be for our own happiness, safety, peace, and freedom, that we offer weightless care and love for this world that we share. May all beings be happy.

Not Churning Thoughts

So, hello everyone again. Here we are on August 1st of 2021, and today was a day that we had plans here at IMC to open up our doors so people can come together. This Sunday morning talk was meant to be the first public talk at our center since mid-March 2020. Over the last few weeks, it seemed that the course of the pandemic was taking such a direction that it wasn't wise to open up, or it didn't contribute to our community in important ways. We want to try to be careful not to be transmitters, or enable the transmission of this coronavirus. Somehow, being sheltered, protected, and closed this way, hopefully, is seen as an act of love, care, and compassion for this world, for ourselves, and for others.

It is a poignant moment to have planned to open and then now not opening. It makes me reflect on the impact that this pandemic has had over all these months. I think it's important to be deeply respectful of the impact and to appreciate and understand the impact it has on each of us as individuals, as a community, and as a global community. It's not uncommon for people to feel that the ongoingness of this pandemic has worn them down to some degree. There's a kind of tiredness, a weariness from the lack of contact with a lot of people, the isolation some people feel, the feeling of compassion, and the feeling of distress around what's happening in our society and our world as a whole.

I think of these months that we've been in the pandemic as a time when some of us have experienced and become aware of a greater range of suffering and challenge, locally and internationally, than many people experience over a lifetime. Maybe not since World War II has there been something like this. Some people have evoked the AIDS pandemic as another time with a global impact. But one of the remarkable things about this pandemic is how much it's shared by everyone on the globe. I think there are very few people who are not somehow impacted by it. Maybe there are a few—I had a little bit of indirect contact with a South Pacific island where it doesn't seem to have reached the shores, so they're free of it, but they've closed themselves off to the wider world, and so that has an impact as well.

I can imagine that for a lot of people it felt like, "Finally it's over," but then it's not over. One of the important things is to care for ourselves, not to allow the weight of these current events to weigh us down, to stress us, or for the weariness of it all to begin wearing us down. So how do we do that? How do we not allow the experience of this ongoing pandemic to accumulate its impact on us? That is very much the topic of today.

For me, the reference point for this is meditation and the way that meditation can help. Some people have other means that are similar to meditation to do the same thing. That is, a means by which we can start fresh every day, a means by which the accumulation of stress, weariness, resistance, sadness, or distress doesn't accumulate and build. Rather, the opposite: we're able to put it down for some period of time. To really put it down and live free of it, even if it's just for a few minutes, so that we can start fresh and be refreshed and renewed. Then we have interrupted the building, the accumulation of the tremendous weight and the ongoingness of the experience.

It's very easy for many of us to be caught up in the agitation or the churning of the mind and thoughts, and live in them as if that's completely natural and normal, and what else is there to do? It's kind of like a labyrinth we can't get out of because the thoughts are just thinking themselves. Maybe sometimes the thoughts are thinking about how to be free of the very thing we're thinking about, and we're just stuck.

But to really be able to get still, focused, and concentrated in meditation, to have mindfulness be a stepping away from preoccupation and involvement with thoughts, is to get a little distance from them and freedom from them. It allows the thinking to quiet and still. Or it shifts the center of where we live in our being from being centered on thoughts to being centered in the breathing or in the body. We feel that shift so that we're not feeding our thoughts, we're not living in the thoughts, we're not swirling around in those thoughts.

The analogy for this is whipping up cream or using an eggbeater to beat egg whites. If you take either one and keep stirring, churning, beating, and bringing air into the egg whites or cream, slowly over time, they become stiff. They get stiffer and stiffer until they are so stiff you can take the beater or the fork and lift it up, and you make these little peaks because it's firm enough that it stays upright.

It's the same way with our minds. If we're constantly using an eggbeater of the mind—constantly stirring and stirring—the mind starts becoming stiff. It becomes heavy, feels substantial, feels sticky, and stiffer and stiffer. There's not much flexibility and fluidity with our experience because of the stiffness of the mind. The stiffer the mind becomes, the more we're coagulated around thoughts, ideas, concerns, and our suffering. The more circumstances impact us, or the more fragile we are, in a sense. The stiffness is vulnerable to being broken or being bumped up against. That doesn't happen if the liquid is really soft and smooth. You put your finger through the cream before it's been whipped up, or the egg whites, and there's no resistance to the finger going through.

This idea of letting the mind become soft and fluid, not stiff and coagulated, addresses where the accumulation is. It's the accumulation of tension, the impact of chronic thinking. Sometimes people's suffering gets exacerbated by this whipping around of the eggbeater in the mind: our fears, plans, resistance, resentments, desires, and frustrations. Learning a way to put that down, to stop the eggbeating, to stop the churning and allow the thinking mind to get quiet, means that for a brief moment, or a short period of time, we're not riding on the wave of chronic thinking. We're not being pushed by the tides of thoughts that keep coming and coming. It's as if we're able to settle or stand on dry ground, and we're no longer caught in the momentum of thoughts, spinning or swirling in them.

This allows us to feel deeply refreshed. It allows us to feel at ease and at peace. It's a wonderful peace and refreshment that's very hard to understand if we're churning in our thoughts. Thoughts want something, and to not want can seem like a betrayal. It seems like we have to be forward-looking, reaching out or pulling back, protecting ourselves or doing something in order to be safe or to get what we want. From the logic of our thinking mind, the idea of doing nothing, just letting go fully and being peaceful, doesn't work. The unconscious logic of thinking is that you can't really afford to stop thinking. Thinking is where the solution is going to be; thinking is where it's all constructed and made. Thinking has so much weight, substance, and authority that we feel we have to stay there. The authority insists, "You have to stay here, be in your thoughts, and figure this out."

But if we can put it all down, step away from it, and discover a place where there is no weight, where there is no authority like that, and feel like that's a center, then something can relax. There can be a discovered capacity for peace, ease, and letting go. That refreshment is like starting up fresh. We're not abandoning the world, but when we return to the world after our meditation, we're there in a fresh, clear, and hopefully renewed way. Then it's easier to engage in the world around us with our family, friends, work, or whatever it is. It's easier to read the news and not be overwhelmed, or not have it be one more thing that gets folded into the churning of the mind, the eggbeating of the mind. It doesn't just become something we take in and fold into our suffering.

Taking in the suffering around us in a beneficial way impacts our heart. But if the mind is spinning and churning, taking in the suffering of the world is probably counterproductive and not useful. I think the pandemic has been an opportune time to be a deep witness, a heart witness, to the human condition on this planet. We're learning so much about injustice, suffering, death, and sickness.

It's huge what's happened to our planet with this pandemic. How do we become better people because of it? How do we not get weighed down by it? How does it awaken compassion, love, and good qualities in us so those qualities can meet the world? I think it's very hard to do that if we're stuck in this churning—stirring up the mind, beating up the mind, whipping up the mind over and over again like you would egg whites. We have to stop the churning. We have to stop the incessant spinning and agitation of the mind, or at least slow it down dramatically enough so that there's time for us to be refreshed, time to open our eyes again so they are not so clouded by all these thoughts, ideas, judgments, and fears.

In a sense, this capacity of meditation to get renewed or refreshed is also to get renewed from ourselves. We're not being disloyal to ourselves if we're not continuing to think about our suffering, our problems, and our concerns. Actually, some of our preoccupations are all about "me, myself, and mine." To be able to really put that aside—even if we are suffering, and there is a lot of suffering that many of us are experiencing, not to diminish that or deny that it's there—but if what we're doing is using the eggbeater of the mind just to spin, spin, spin the thoughts and ideas, then it's not really useful for us. We're just adding suffering upon suffering. It is okay to stop the eggbeating. It's okay to stop thinking about oneself for a while and get renewed and refreshed, and then we can come back.

Now in Buddhism, one of the eggbeaters—one of the core things that Buddhist practice is trying to free ourselves from—is this eggbeater of self. As things get stiffer in the mind, some of these stiff things become the eggbeater, and one of the stiff things in the mind that becomes the eggbeater is our ideas of self. It's pretty natural for human beings to have a sense of "I am"^[1]. There's a centeredness here in our being that's normal and natural. That centeredness, being centered here and feeling the substantial nature of our being and the vitality of life flowing in this body, is fine. But then we start having thoughts, ideas, judgments, projections, and biases that we add and build upon. That's the eggbeater of self.

We're adding to it the baggage of, "I have to be this way, I have to be that way. Being a person like this means that I have to be treated this way, or shouldn't be treated that way. I should treat myself this way, or I need to have that happen, or this has to happen." It's just more and more ideas about self. Some of these layers are fine ideas in and of themselves. It isn't the ideas that are the problem, but rather how the eggbeater of self is churning and spinning, making a more solidified sense of self and holding the self contracted.

One of the great blessings and benefits of meditation practice is stopping the eggbeating of self. It retires the constant preoccupation and spinning around "me, myself, and mine" and lets that become quiet.

It's not a disloyalty to self, but it's a recovery from the stress of this eggbeater. It's a remarkable thing to discover that there's a vitality, a clarity, and an openness that's possible for us. Engagement in life is possible without that stiffness of "me, myself, and mine," the stiffness that starts making a substantial self, a weighty self.

Whatever the self is, if you want to have a self or self-ideas or identities, they belong in and of themselves to the weightless world of the mind. As soon as we give weight to them, we've contracted, we've gotten tight and heavy. If they get heavy and substantial, the eggbeater of the mind has been stirring things up.

Whether it's meditation, going for a walk in nature, reading a nice book, or taking a nap, there are different ways that people have. But to do it in a thorough and deep way—where we completely put down the eggbeater of self and the churning that goes on—is to discover a peacefulness, a quiet, a radiance, and an openness where no reference is being made to "me, myself, and I." There's no reference to anything that has any weight. The reference, if anything, is through something that feels open, weightless, light, free, and relaxed, where we learn to recognize that the eggbeater, the incessant spinning and churning in the mind, has quieted down.

It's so important to give ourselves some time to do that because then we think more wisely, and we're ready to see more clearly. Then there's space and room for the heart, for our capacity for goodwill, kindness, care, compassion, and warm-heartedness.

If this talk is something you can relate to, you might start paying attention to when you're spinning your thoughts, spinning in the world of the mind, eggbeating and whipping up your thoughts in ways that things become mentally heavy, substantial, thick, and even stiff. Notice how it might eclipse the warm-heartedness of the heart. How it might eclipse the kindness, the generosity, the natural goodness of our being that, in and of itself, also has no weight and no substantiality unless we pick it up that way with clinging, pressure, and wanting. We pick it up with self instead of letting the goodness of our heart be un-churned by the eggbeater of self, where the goodness is just allowed to be there simply, relaxedly, and openly.

Look and start noticing the distinction between when you're churning and when the churning has stopped, when you're spinning in thought and when you step away from that world of thought and are at more peace. It's a very important distinction. The more you can see that distinction, the more access you'll have to a degree of freedom. Not only will you maybe not need to recover or renew as much, but you will actually stay renewed, relaxed, and open because you're not continually accumulating more and more of this tension that comes from whipping up the egg whites in the mind.

I hope you have a chance each day to do something that really renews or refreshes the mind. I think it's as important as brushing your teeth. I think you'll probably find that you'll live a much more effective life that way. So thank you very much, and I am looking forward to being with all of you when we do open our doors here and we can meet in person. That day will come. Until then, I offer you my warm regard and well-wishing, and hope that you take good care of yourself and good care of the world. Thank you.