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Guided Meditation: Simplicity of Being

Good morning, good day, everyone.

One of the directions that this practice goes in is toward a simplicity of being. Anything that is extra, anything that's really not needed to be happy and peaceful, has kind of fallen away, kind of taken a vacation. We give ourselves permission—we are given permission—where just to be alive is enough. Breathing, sensing, feeling, knowing, thinking, whatever is happening.

In a kind of simplicity of being that highlights what we're doing that's extra—how we get involved and pick up thoughts, pick up concerns, react, push away, want, fixate on certain thoughts and ideas—the simplicity of being kind of shows us that this is extra. There's something really good happening here, something really nice in this simplicity. Just being alive is enough. Nothing to prove, nothing to defend. For a few minutes, a radical vacation, a radical pause in the incessant movement of doing and wanting and thinking, and we have permission to do this. Just to be alive is enough for these minutes while meditating.

Trust the process. Keep coming back to being simple with what is happening. Simple meaning not getting involved, not fixing, not pushing away, just being, just allowing what's there. And as the mind knows what's happening, let that be simple, just to know. There's a wonderful expression: the cognitive functioning of emptiness, the knowing functioning of radical simplicity, where knowing has no weight, awareness has no weight, no shape, no color, no boundaries, no walls. Awareness, our capacity to know, is porous, transparent, it just is.

One of the things that falls away with the simplicity of being is all forms of self-preoccupation, self-concern. Not because we're not important and we don't want to care for ourselves; we do want to care for ourselves. But one of the greatest ways to care for ourselves is to trust that just being alive is enough, just allowing the simplicity of being where there is no self-concern because, in this simplicity, it's not needed.

So, assuming a meditation posture, begin a process of simplification. Simplify your eyesight, your looking. Maybe let your eyes gaze down at the floor. Relax your focus so you're not really looking at anything in particular. And as you exhale, closing your eyes.

Then feeling your body globally, so you're not landing and standing on any one place in the body, but a global, open awareness that maybe roams around the body but doesn't take a stand anywhere. It doesn't get focused on any particular thing for now. Just a global feeling of being in a body.

As you exhale, relaxing the belly, softening the lower part of the body, including the legs, the thighs, and the feet. Relaxing in the solar plexus area, the chest. Releasing. Releasing the shoulders. Always going in the direction of being simpler: less work, less activity, less tension, just being here.

Softening the muscles of the face. If the lips are pressed or the teeth are pressed together, release the pressure. If the jaws are clenched, release the holding, maybe by dropping the jaws open a little bit. Softening around the eyes and the forehead.

And on the exhale, softening in the mind. Quieting your thinking. Turning whatever thinking you have to gently and quietly think about being here in this body, at this time. Let your concerns simplify to just what's happening here in your body.

Feel your body breathing. The rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Becoming simpler with the breathing. As simple as it's easy to do. Not trying to do anything with your breathing, not trying to get concentrated or anything. Simple being, simple just breathing. Allowing for a self-forgetting as you enter into the world of the body breathing.

If it helps you be simpler, as you exhale, gently, softly, let go of everything. Or let go of anything that appears, anything that's more complicated than simply the body breathing.

And maybe at the end of the out-breath, you can even let go of yourself: self-concern, self-referencing. The end of the out-breath, before the in-breath. The simplicity of no weight, no color, no shape, no body, no feelings, no thoughts, no mind, no self. None of that needs to be a concern. You're allowed the simplicity of being. Just to be alive is enough.

So let go as you exhale. For these minutes, trust letting go. Let go of anything and everything the mind is involved in, until the last thing to let go of is letting go itself.

As we come to the end of the sitting, in whatever way you can, appreciate your simplicity of being. Just being alive is enough. Nothing to prove, nothing to defend. It's enough just sitting here breathing peacefully, because all other demands and needs and ways of being have receded for now. Just enough to be alive in that way.

It might be possible to have a particular respect, even reverence, for others. They too, you can allow to be just as they are in the simplicity of being. You can see them as someone with whom you don't need to add desires and needs and demands. Just as you see yourself that way for these few moments, you can also see them that way. Free of your needs, your judgments, your desires, your fears. Freeing them from projections and demands. It gives birth to a kind of respect, a kind of reverence for others. Seeing past whatever behavior they have, good or bad, past whatever history they have, just allowing them to be who they are for a few moments, and having a reverence for the life that's there.

Another human being is as wondrous as looking out across the ocean at the beach, or the vista from a mountaintop, or the beauty of a flower. Not to deny all the things that we should notice, but not be limited by them. Deep respect, deep reverence for every life. And with that respect, to care for their welfare and happiness.

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

And may we contribute to that by freeing others from all the projections and needs and demands that we carry, allowing each person, each being, to be itself.

Dharmette: Mindfulness of Mind (5 of 5) Awareness Releases Itself

So, mindfulness of mind, mindfulness of awareness. Awareness, in the simplicity of it, has no weight, no color, no shape. Awareness in itself has no history and no future. And to free awareness from all the ways in which we burden it with our desires and wishes and fears and projections, so that awareness becomes simple, is one of the great possibilities in this practice of mindfulness. Awareness is released, awareness is set free, even of ourselves. This is one of the more radical things about this practice: the way in which it can free ourselves from ourselves.

If you engage in mindfulness practice, in meditation practice, and you're able to really give yourself over to just being here—just being mindful in the current of the present moment, the current of breathing, sensing, feeling, whatever's going on—at some point we get absorbed. This becomes all we're doing. In that absorption and just being present, self-concern and self-preoccupation fall away. We're still here in a full way, but for some reason I like to liken this to basketball players. If you watch someone playing basketball professionally, there's no time to wonder about, "What is that fan thinking about me?" "Is my shirt tucked in properly?" "Did I snap my fingers right at that last shot?" There are all kinds of preoccupations and thoughts, but there's no time for it. There's a kind of giving oneself over to what they're doing.

Most of us are not basketball players, but it could be cooking, or playing music, or reading a book. There are activities we do where we kind of forget ourselves; we lose ourselves in a healthy way in the activity. Some people say that time stops when we lose ourselves in the activity. We don't really lose ourselves, but there's a wonderful self-forgetting, or stepping out of the clothes of self that we wear. To have this wonderful getting out of our own way and being free from self-concern, self-preoccupation, and referencing everything to self, also begins to free awareness. It frees our presence, our ability to attend to what's here. There's a freedom, a lightness, an ease in that.

As we continue the practice, there's more and more of this shedding of anything that's extra. A sensitivity arises to what's extra. Sitting quietly, being with the breath, being with something, you might have the thought, "You know what, that breath wasn't as good as the previous breath." But rather than believing it or getting involved in that thought, it's so clear that the thought is extra. The goodness of the moment doesn't need it. So we don't get involved in that thought, we don't pick it up, and we just kind of stay with the flow, the activity of being here and here.

Then awareness gets simpler and simpler. We get simpler and simpler. Or maybe we don't get simpler anymore because we've receded from the picture, and awareness gets simpler and simpler. At some point, awareness releases itself. Just like there's a self-forgetting, there is an awareness-forgetting; awareness forgets itself. What is that like when it gets that simple, that free, that safe, that settled? Just being alive is enough, just being here. Even awareness doesn't have to do anything, doesn't have to accomplish anything. It's not directed anywhere. There's a self-forgetting in the awareness too. Awareness is so smooth and operating so simply, it just kind of forgets itself. Sometimes it's called a dropping away, sometimes it's called a ceasing, the ending of something, and then it comes back. To have that experience of awareness forgetting itself, awareness getting out of its own way, teaches something very profound about clinging and the possibility of non-clinging.

So the final step for this week about awareness is the release: not only the release in awareness, but the release of awareness itself. Both of those.

We respect our minds, our awareness. We begin by just relaxing; that was the first day. Then there's recognition; a huge part of awareness is its capacity to recognize, and we're building on that capacity so the recognition becomes simpler and simpler. Less baggage, fewer associations, just the simple knowing. Just an in-breath, just a thought, just hearing, just being.

Then there's this deep respect for this whole process of being aware, of being present. Respect for ourselves. I think this dharma practice is founded on a very deep respect that borders on a kind of reverence for all of this. Of course we want to be present and attentive and find a way to be with everything so that the being with it is simple, just there with it. We don't interfere with anything. Then there's a kind of restoration of a wonderful freedom of mind that can just know whatever's happening freely, openly, like there are no barriers, no boundaries to anything. It's just known, it's free. Everything is known simply; nothing sticks.

As we continue this process of deepening the awareness and just kind of getting the flow of awareness, just relaxing in the simplicity of being, there is a greater and greater process of simplification. That might be a nicer word for some people to hear rather than "letting go" or "releasing," because letting go can seem like we are dismissing things, abandoning things, or that we're going to be without anything. But this simplification is simplifying into the part of ourselves, the part of life, that is most reverent, most respectful, deepest, most sacred. To trust it so deeply and so well that there's a self-forgetting, and then an awareness-forgetting. Then you'll know something new, something different about this life. You probably will never believe that clinging is important again. You probably will still cling, but you will no longer believe in it and think that that's what's important.

The Buddha talked about awareness—using the word citta^[1], so maybe "mind"—but awareness liberated through non-clinging. And then you get yourself in the simplest, most beautiful, and profound way that you can be, that paradoxically, wondrously, also involves a self-forgetting. It might seem like you're not going to be there to appreciate this wonder, but maybe the part of you that is not there is just the part that's extra.

Announcements

Thank you for this opportunity to teach this material, and I appreciate our time together. As I said yesterday, next week I'm teaching a retreat, and we're very fortunate to have Matthew Brensilver teaching the 7:00 a.m. session. He'll do that together with some other things he does for the week. If you want to get a deeper immersion in the practice and the teachings with Matthew, check out what is described on the IMC website and on the calendar, which includes the daylong retreat next Saturday.

Then on next Wednesday evening, the 17th of November, a few of the senior practitioners and teacher trainees here at IMC, who both have done chaplaincy training and spiritual caregiving training and are very intimately involved with that, are going to offer a grief circle. It's something we've done sometimes at the end of the year to kind of honor, respect, commemorate, and engage with the losses of the year. There have been a lot recently because of the pandemic and COVID. It will be on Zoom, and they'll have a protocol for Zoom. You should read the description because you need to come with something for the ceremony and ritual they'll do. So that's this coming Wednesday with Ying Chen and Dawn Neal.

Thank you all, and I'll see you in a couple of weeks.