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Guided Meditation: Seeing Without Reacting

Introduction

Warm greetings, and welcome to this meditation session. As an introduction to the meditation, and partly as an introduction to the talk I'll be giving, imagine that you're standing in front of a store window. There's some object in the store on display that you would like. Not only would you like it, but you're very excited about having it.

Your mind begins racing about how you can get it. Your body is excited, and you're leaning into the window, studying the object carefully. Maybe the store is closed and is going to open soon. Your excitement is there, and you start pacing back and forth, looking with all the excitement of getting this wonderful thing.

The excitement that you have is not found in the glass of the window, which you require to see through into the store. It is free of that excitement. It's just there peacefully, calmly, in its own way, like a serene lake in the early morning—just completely quiet, peaceful, and undisturbed. So the glass just stays there.

As the light of the object in the store comes into the eyes, the lens of the eyes is just there in a relatively peaceful way. It doesn't share the excitement; it's just its own kind of glass through which the light passes. The retina on the back of the eye certainly gets a little excited by the light that comes in, but it doesn't get excited by your thoughts and your desires, which are just operating peacefully in their own way. The neurons sending signals from the retina into your brain have a certain kind of excitement, but they don't share the excitement of your desire.

As you go back into the mind, you come to the place where the excitement is. The excitement is in the desire, the thoughts around it, the thoughts of the pleasure, the enjoyment, the benefit you get from this object. Then this desire becomes quite strong, quite intense, and so the excitement in the mind gets stronger and more intense. That excitement, desire, and the thoughts around it then send signals back to the eyes, and the muscles around the eyes begin to tighten. You're staring at the object, or your eyes are jumping around quickly, studying all the different parts of the object, really getting to study it in excitement. Maybe your body is getting the signal to lean forward and maybe even press your nose against the glass to really see this object carefully. So the excitement gets transferred into the eyes, into the body in various ways, like the pacing back and forth.

What we might call excitement, the ancient tradition calls fire^[1]. There's this fire that gets lit up in the mind, and that fire then can transfer to the body, to speech, and all kinds of places. The idea of Buddhist practice is to begin taking away, in a sense, the fuel which perpetuates the unnecessary fires that we carry within us. The fire is only there because there's fuel—there's wood being added to it.

With mindfulness practice, it is a little bit more like the glass in the window. It's just seeing clearly without being excited about what it's looking at. If what we're mindful of is mental excitement, the mindfulness is not excited; it just sees it. In the modern world, we talk about seeing non-judgmentally or non-reactively—it just sees it.

Why this is so powerful is that it begins to offer a kind of presence to our experience which is not fueling the fires, not adding more desires or thoughts to the excitement, which otherwise excites itself. We're slowly learning how to see very clearly and be present without adding anything to the fire. Then the fire can abate. This excitement can abate, and then we have an experience of the body, the eyes, and everything beginning to calm down and settle. You begin to experience the possibility of a peace that you might pick up, feel, or project from a very quiet, pure, clean mountain lake that's just very still, very quiet, very clear, and free of the fires.

The difference between the English word "excitement" and "fire" in the ancient world is that fire burns. It really hurts; it can harm. We don't necessarily get that feeling from the English word "excitement"—sometimes it's a good thing to be excited.

Guided Meditation

Take a meditation posture. Take some care in the posture to have a posture that allows the fires, the excitements of the mind and heart, to begin to calm down, to quiet.

Closing your eyes and taking a few moments to feel if there is any excitement in the body, in the mind, in the heart. Any kind of extra charge, or strong vibration, or strong energetic fields. With awareness, make lots of room for whatever excitement is here, for whatever is energized a little bit more than you would be if you were settled. It's okay.

And then gently, having your breathing go through the excitement that you have. Whatever energy—anything that's a little bit more energized than feels settled—take some deep breaths. Breathe through that excitement, and as you exhale, let it quiet. Let it become stiller, in the way that if a fire becomes calmer, the fuel for the fire is removed or abates.

Letting your breathing return to normal.

Some of the extra excitement or fires of the mind are manifested in the tensions in the body. So you might scan through your body and relax whatever is easy to relax. Maybe the muscles around the eyes can soften. Maybe the muscles of the face. Maybe the shoulders, and the belly.

And then gently, but dedicatedly, bringing your awareness to your breathing. Being present for the breathing with the simplicity of an unexcited pane of glass. That allows you to be there, to be seeing of what is, but in the seeing itself, there doesn't have to be any reactivity. It's just seeing. Just seeing the breath, the inhales and exhales coming and going.

As you sit here, if something gets excited within you—thoughts or feelings that take your attention away from your breathing or get you to lose your present moment awareness—see if you can bring this non-reactive mindfulness to whatever it is that's excited you, grabbed you, distracted you. No need to get rid of what you're mindful of, but see if there can be mindfulness that doesn't add any fuel to the fire. Just aware, just mindful.

If you're caught up in thoughts, that's understood to be an excitement or a fire in the mind. Let the mindfulness that knows that be a cooling effect on that excitement. Not dismissive or aversive, by just allowing the fires to burn out.

Reflections

As we come to the end of the sitting, you might reflect on how the absence of distraction^[2] in the mind, the absence of preoccupations, can allow you to be more present for the people in your life. Listening better, being more attuned to them, understanding them better. And in that greater mindfulness and less distraction, to have fewer projections, fewer biases, and fewer desires and aversions influencing how you see the other.

When the fires of the mind have become cool, then the warmth of the heart has a chance to connect us to others, to care for others, to love others. May it be that the calming of our excitement translates or results in the warming of the heart. So we can go out into the world warm-hearted, kind-hearted.

And may it be that this practice that we do is for the welfare and happiness of the world. Maybe one conversation at a time, one smile at a time, one little gesture of generosity at a time. May it be that our meditation together as a community, may the goodness of it, the benefit of it, spread outwards in all directions.

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be free.

May we contribute to that possibility.