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Introduction

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started now. Good to see everyone. I think you all know that Gil is on retreat this week, so I'll be here for the five days of this week. I'll be continuing with our theme. For a while now, the theme has been the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[1], and so that's about mindfulness.

We'll take a little interlude this week to look at mindfulness as a protection. In particular, we're going to look at some images from the suttas^[2]. The suttas are totally rich with images for mindfulness; there are so many similes, so many metaphors, and I thought we would just look at some of them this week with this theme of mindfulness as protection. Protection of ourselves, protection of others. We'll look at different aspects of it throughout the five days of the week.

There's so much protection that comes from seeing clearly, which is the function of mindfulness. For example, we don't get swept up by strong feelings or high views in our daily life. We probably experience that ourselves. Also, when we have some clarity and clear seeing, we have a choice about how we respond to what's going on in the moment. We can see and feel quite clearly the harm that comes from unwholesome states, and so then it's natural to choose the wholesome. It becomes much easier; ethics become clearer when we have mindfulness. And also, we have some wisdom that comes with it. We can allow things to just arise and change and pass, thus essentially freeing ourselves from them through mindfulness. Then we can also help others by being stable and calm and present. That automatically brings some benefit to others around us, even if they aren't practicing themselves.

Getting to the greater matters of life, mindfulness allows us to meet aging, illness, and death with some presence and clarity, these things that we know are inevitable for us as humans. So that's a wide range of wonderful benefits that come from protections, really, that come from having some presence of mind. That's what we'll be exploring this week, different aspects of that day to day. So why don't we go ahead and sit.

Guided Meditation: Protection for Oneself

Finding your meditation posture, allowing yourself to settle in. Perhaps closing the eyes if that's okay for you. Maybe taking a long, slow, deep breath and allowing the body to soften and relax on the out-breath.

Just feeling into the stability of where you're sitting. Your seat against the chair or the cushion. Your legs or your feet against the floor.

Just taking a moment at the beginning of the sit to sense the alignment of the body. You can even rock back and forth a little bit, or forward and back just slightly, to really find that middle point. Sometimes in front of the computer screen, we tend to lean forward a little bit, so you might particularly pay attention if you need to settle back at all. And then just allow yourself to be supported by what you're sitting on.

Gently softening the muscles of the face, the expression on the face. Softening the eyes and the eye sockets. Down through the neck and the shoulders, letting the shoulders release. Imagining the shoulder blades sliding down the back. And softening down through the chest area, the heart, the lungs, the rib cage, the belly. Down to the hip joints, and the arms and legs, letting go of any bracing or tightness. So just inviting some ease in the body.

Then turning the attention toward the sensations of breathing. Just however the breath is coming in, going out. For many people, breathing is something that feels safe, and so we can consider the breath to be a kind of home base for the mind. If, for some reason, that is not the case for you, you can also consider the body posture, just the sitting posture and the feeling of that as the home base. Just having this sense of resting. Sometimes the resting of the body can encourage the mind also to find some degree of rest.

And when the mind inevitably gets lost in thought, there's no need to criticize, but we can just bring back awareness of the breath with a sense of returning to safety. A sense of, "Now I'm home again." The mindfulness is mostly staying with the breath or the body, just a simple breath meditation. But we can notice that the mindfulness is protective in the sense that it will notice when the mind is moving off the breath. The mind is moving out toward getting in trouble, often, and so it's actually the awareness that is doing the protection. But we just use the breath as the home base to help us have that protection.

As we settle in a bit farther and there's a bit more mindfulness, even just a bit more, we may begin to enjoy this sense of protection. We maybe begin to feel that the mind has a little bit of strength or resilience to it, and that has a pleasant feeling, and it's fine to enjoy that sense of mindfulness. Even if what we're mindful of is some pain or even a busy mind, we know that as long as the awareness is there, we have some protection, some benefit even.

Often when the mind wanders, it's going off into the territory of wanting, or ill will, or confusion. And even just knowing that is already protection. But we may find that bringing mindfulness to wandering thoughts, they naturally just fade. There's something about noticing them that... [unintelligible].

This mindfulness that we cultivate on the cushion carries out into our daily life. Likely we've seen that as we see it as a protector, it will continue to serve that function throughout the day. So it can be helpful still to have some kind of an anchor or a home base as we move about the day. I often use the body, so the general feeling of my body. Wherever I am, that's certain to be in the present moment, so that can be the place to help orient the mind to. And then having that awareness is what is the protection.

When we're there in the present moment and aware of how the body is, we're less likely to get caught up in what someone is saying to us, or in extraneous concerns, letting the mind wander off into anxiety or excessive rumination. And then we can enjoy that sense of knowing that we're in the present moment, where it is really the only place we can be safe. Even if what's happening is not to our liking, we know it's safer to be there than somewhere that isn't so real.

We still have a choice about where to put the mind within the present moment. But you might consider that as you go about the day: how is mindfulness protecting you, serving you like a good friend? This will automatically help others. We'll talk more about that as the week goes on, but maybe for today, just staying with the sense of it as protecting yourself.

Mindfulness As Protection (1 of 5) Guarding the Sense Doors

This week we will continue to talk about this wonderful quality of mindfulness, but the theme will be different aspects of mindfulness as protection. In fact, I wanted to show you, you can see on this wrist I have this red cord, on this one I have a little white cord. These are called protection cords, and you may have received them at some retreats or other Buddhist events. I'm remembering that one time the teacher—I think it was John Travis^[3]—asked when he was receiving one, "So what is this protection from?" And the monk who was giving it to him said, "It's protection from yourself." I've found that to be a useful idea. In some sense, they're just pieces of string, but we can conceive of them as protections from our self, and I think as we practice we come to understand that that is useful. That's a useful image.

Speaking of images, this week we'll be looking at images or similes from the suttas that relate to mindfulness, and there are a lot. As I was sort of looking through and collecting up the various images, it was clear that protection is really a theme, and different aspects of it. So maybe I'll just talk for a moment about the value of these images and similes that there are in the suttas. I don't know how many there are, but there are certainly well over a hundred different images used for various qualities and experiences in the teachings. It's clear that the Buddha was a teacher who liked to evoke that aspect of us—the images, the feelings, our connection to them. Often the images relate to things that are quite accessible in life, images of simple feelings that we have, or, well, of course, many of them are agricultural from his time, but we can imagine that fairly well still. They're meant to be, I think, quite experiential. We're meant to have a visceral sense of what that image is pointing to, and that may speak to a different part of our heart than just hearing words or having ideas. So that's one of the reasons to look at them carefully. They speak to the non-rational aspect of us, which is not the irrational aspect of us, but the non-rational. Hopefully, you can see the difference.

I have found that with these images, maybe I read them at the time and I think, "Oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. I can kind of feel that." But sometimes they can really bubble up during a sit. We read something about fear, and it's nice in the moment, and then during a sit, maybe when fear comes up, that same image will suddenly have meaning. I've found it's like, "Oh, that is what that was referring to. That's exactly what it feels like, wow." And so I hope maybe you'll take in some of these images and consider, just store them somehow in your mind or your heart, and see if they come up for you sometime.

Each day has a theme which is some aspect of protection, and we'll be looking at these images, sometimes one, sometimes more than one each day, that relate to a certain theme. Today's protection-related theme is called guarding the sense doors, and so it's about mindfulness as a basic protection for our self. Guarding the sense doors means taking care with the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind such that inputs to those senses don't overwhelm the mind. In Buddhist teachings, there are six sense doors, those ones that I named.

One basic image that's used is the image of six animals that are bound together by a rope. The animals are a snake, a crocodile, a bird, a dog, a jackal, and a monkey—pretty different kinds of animals. You can imagine what happens is each one wants to go in its own direction; each one tries to go toward its natural place. The monkey wants to go up to the trees, and the bird wants to fly, and I think it says the snake wants to go to the anthill. But anyway, they're all going in a different direction. If you just tie them together with a rope and let the rope go, the strongest animal is going to win, and they'll all have to go that way. This is the metaphor: the six animals are the six sense bases that each want to do something different. Our eyes are going somewhere, our ears, our mind. If we just willy-nilly let that happen, whatever is the strongest is what we'll end up doing. That's really not so helpful, but that might be kind of how we go through our day when we're not mindful.

The contrast is to have the same six animals bound with a rope, but they're tied up to a stake, and the stake is put in the ground. Then what happens is the animals can't actually go, and eventually, they get tired and they lie down, so the image says. The same thing is true if we have mindfulness of our senses, our sense doors. We don't get drawn off, and they're not running off in different directions. We can just hear things, but we don't start thinking about that and worrying about that or being angry about the thought about the sound. Eventually, things will settle down, quiet down. We can maybe see this sometimes in meditation. It's also applicable in daily life when we have all six senses operating.

That's maybe one way we can think about how mindfulness guards our sense doors and prevents them from running off. But I want to also talk about another nice image that's more specifically for the sixth sense door of the mind, which is the one where we often get in trouble, I think we can see. This is one from MN 19^[4], a sutta about different kinds of thoughts. When we have many different thoughts in our mind that are related to the hindrances^[5]—actually, the sutta says they're related to sensual desire, ill will, or cruelty, but we could probably include all hindrance-related thoughts, since I know you just talked last week with Gil about the hindrances. When we have a lot of thoughts like that, it's a kind of a drain on the mind. If we keep track of what we're thinking with mindfulness, then we can kind of redirect those unhelpful thoughts.

The image given is that of a cowherd who is trying to handle a herd of cows. Does it ever feel like your thoughts are like a herd of cows going in different directions? You've got to try to kind of keep it together. So the image is like this: it says just as in the last month of the rainy season, in the autumn, when the crops thicken, a cowherd would guard his cows by constantly tapping and poking them on this side and that in order to check them. The idea here is that it won't be good if the cows get into the crops and eat them. And so the cowherd stays close to the cows, kind of poking them this way and that. When the mind has a lot of these thoughts, in the same way, we have to guard our mind carefully by doing a lot of noting practice, for example, or really paying attention to those thoughts each time they come.

One thing to note also is that the cowherd is not angrily beating the cows to get them back in line. He's just tapping them gently but firmly. If we do that in our mind, and we gently but firmly note, "Okay, nope, not going to go off into anxiety. No, not going to ruminate about my housemate, etc.," as we do this, the mind will tend to settle down. The same way that the six animals get tired when they're bound to the stake and eventually settle down.

Then the nice thing is that we don't need to be checking so actively with the mindfulness. The mindfulness also can change. There's another image given in that same sutta, again about the cowherd, and it says: just as in the last month of the hot season, when all the crops have been brought inside the villages, a cowherd would guard his cows while staying at the root of a tree or out in the open, since he only needs to be mindful that the cows are there.

So it's a whole different image, right? The cows can just be out in the field because there are no crops left that they're going to eat, and so the cowherd gets to just rest under a tree and just kind of watch that they're there. In the same way, if the mind is in a more skillful place, having thoughts of non-ill will, non-cruelty, thoughts of generosity, it's fine just to know that those thoughts are there. Or maybe it even settles down enough not to have very many thoughts, and then we can just be calmly present.

So this protection that's called guarding the sense doors could be quite active, or it could be quite relaxed. It depends on the state of the mind, what sort of external inputs and internal thoughts we're experiencing at a given time, and how we need to be mindful of them in order to guard our senses. Over time, we'll find that we can be with more and more challenging situations mindfully, so the mind gets less reactive overall. We'll find that the nature of guarding changes throughout the course of the long arc of our practice, as well as the short-term arc of just how the mind is right now.

The hope then is that during this week we'll build a picture out of different images of the many ways that mindfulness serves as a protector. Today we looked at this idea of guarding the sense doors, of not letting the mind run out, in the same way that animals kind of wander off if we don't keep track of them. So I hope that's a helpful image for you to get started on today, or maybe it's later in the day for you. But consider today what it would be like to guard the sense doors with mindfulness, and to see mindfulness as our simple protector.

Thank you.