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Guided Meditation: Tuning in to the Breath and the Moment

So I'll just mention a word or two about our theme for today, or a theme for this week actually, which is factors that build a wise stability in unity or unification, especially in meditation, and also in daily life. I'll be spending most of the time talking about the meditative aspects, and a little bit on how to apply it in the rest of our lives, which is where this practice really matures.

So good morning, good to see all of you. The invitation is, after you've greeted your friends, to settle back, relax, and take a good posture for a balance of relaxation and alertness.

Allowing yourself to go inward. Starting with a few slightly deeper, slower belly breaths, allowing your belly to relax, soften. And allowing your breathing to return to normal.

Taking a moment to acknowledge, take stock of whatever is happening in your body, your heart, your mind in this moment, acknowledging with kindness whatever's here.

Sweeping through the body, allowing the eyes to relax and soften. The tongue and lips and jaw soften. Inviting the occipital muscles at the base of the skull, between the skull and the back of the neck, to relax just a little.

Sweeping mindful awareness through your neck, throat, shoulders, and inviting relaxation. Perhaps noticing the breathing at the nostrils, the back of the throat, windpipe, the chest, and the belly. And tuning in, tuning in to the act of breathing, motion, warmth. Appreciating your life's breath.

And inviting a softening through this attunement to the breath and the torso, arms and hands, buttocks, hips, legs, ankles, feet. Allowing your awareness to fill your whole body, noticing the vibrancy of aliveness, pulsing or tingling, warmth or cool.

And then tuning in, tuning to breathing, or sound if that's a better object of attention for you, or the whole field of sensations in your body. I'll be giving instructions mostly for the breath; please adapt as it works for you.

Tuning in, settling on the sensations of breathing. Acknowledging everything else, nothing left out. Allowing everything else to fade to the background of the periphery. Sinking into, relaxing into the sensations of in and out. Rising belly, falling...

Reconnecting the attention with breathing. What's this breath right now? The invitation is to sustain that connection, staying in close contact with feeling. Feeling into all the sensations and motions of life's breath. Noticing expansion, relaxation, natural lowering of the belly, inward movement to the ribs, more motion of air on the out-breath. Really sustaining that connection through every little motion: the first inkling of breath coming in, all the way through to the top of the in-breath, the fullness of lungs resting there before releasing the out-breath.

Noticing any pleasure or comfort in the letting go of the out-breath. Perhaps resting for a moment at this stillness, still point, at the end of the out-breath.

From time to time, rededicating the attention. Noticing, enjoying any feelings of ease. And allowing, kindly, compassionately, everything else. Inviting the attention and the mind to be immersed in the moment and the sensations gently. Allowing each breath to nourish, replenish as best I can.

Noticing the returning of awareness, reconnecting with the moment, and staying in contact with, sustaining attuning with breathing sensations. Unifying the attention with the moment.

Allowing the attention to reconnect, stay with, sustain. Noticing, appreciating any pleasure, ease, contentment, happiness, or joy. Allowing the rest with kindness. Unifying the attention in the moment.

As this formal meditation draws to a close, the invitation is to tune into your heart, your heart center, and gather up any goodness, little corner of kindness, of comfort or peace that emerged in this time together. And cast your internal eye outwards to the others in your life, the people, animals, even plants, and to make the determination to share some of this goodness with the others that you encounter. Offering a sense of kindness, wish for freedom: May all beings everywhere be free of suffering.

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

Dharmette: Wise Unification (1 of 5) - Mindfulness & Practice Intelligence

A special welcome to those of you who tiptoed into the YouTube session a little bit late, and a warm welcome to those of you who have been here for the whole meditation.

The theme for this week is factors of wise stability and unification, which are otherwise known as five qualities of mind that are called the jhānic^[1] factors, because when balanced and in play, they are supports for deep meditative states known as jhānas. My focus is not going to be on those deep states; instead, we'll cover how recognizing and navigating these five factors of mind, with the support of mindfulness and intelligence, supports the deepening of our meditation practice, and it supports wisdom more broadly. I will also touch on how recognizing and cultivating these capacities of our minds is beneficial not just to meditation, but a little bit to our relational life as well.

So that's the overview. Today I'll talk about how mindfulness and practice intelligence are a helpful foundation to cultivate meditative stability and these factors. And then over the course of the week, we'll cover the mental factors of connecting and sustaining, otherwise known as vitakka and vicāra^[2]; joy and happiness in Pali; unity and unification, which is ekaggatā^[3] in Pali. So that will take us through Thursday, and then Friday to wrap up, I'll talk about how these factors, when in balance, contribute to a refinement of meditative practice, stability, and wisdom. So that's the overview, hope you stay for it!

Today, mindfulness and practice intelligence. This broad base of overall mindful awareness of the entire process of what's happening within us, as best we can see, lends itself to developing a kind of understanding of practice intelligence that is a super helpful context when wanting to deepen meditation. That's already a sign of a certain kind of depth and breadth. And the five jhānic factors exist within this ecology of our minds just like everything else that exists in there—distraction, or love, or joy, or whatever. Like many other mental factors or qualities of our heart and mind, they can be beneficial to our lives in some ways, and if misdirected, they can be unbeneficial. So that's why it's so important to cultivate mindful awareness as a foundation.

There's a modern simile that I'm going to use: let's say you're a bicycle rider. The handlebars are the intelligence, the bicycle rider themselves is mindfulness and equanimity, steadiness is the balance of the bicycle as it moves along, and then the bike path or the road is the Noble Eightfold Path^[4]. So it gives you an idea that mindfulness and practice intelligence are kind of in charge of where we go on the path.

As many of you know from having been here for quite some time, mindful awareness (sati^[5]) is the capacity to know what's going on while it's happening within and around us. And this is especially true when starting to deepen our practice of being aware of the qualities or attitude of our own heart and mind.

One of my Burmese teachers talks about the way that mindful awareness gathers data, gathers information like a scientist or a researcher might. And this gathering process is helped by being able to settle back, soften, and open, be aware without an agenda in the moment. Aspiration is great—aspiration for freedom, more healing, more love, whatever it is—but a lack of agenda helps us to see it all. See all of it: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. All of it.

It's also really helpful to engage intelligence, practice intelligence. By that, I mean it's okay to bring your whole mind to bear on meditation, get curious, get interested in the information that mindfulness is gathering in the moment. Practice intelligence begins to connect the dots. And this emerges—it's not a discursive kind of analysis, but an emergent kind of understanding that naturally develops in each of us over time regardless of age, IQ, or formal education. This is a different kind of intelligence. It's our natural birthright. This kind of intelligence or wisdom begins to seek cause and effect, discerning what's beneficial or unbeneficial. That's especially true in terms of these factors of mind. Sometimes these words translate to kusala or akusala^[6], which is skillful or unskillful, wholesome or unwholesome, and that's a very simple, incisive discernment. Is this good right now, or is it not helpful?

There's a simile in the ancient teachings—I believe this is from the Numerical Discourses—where the Buddha talks about mindfulness as a gatekeeper. He uses the gatekeeper as a simile quite often. This particular one is a gatekeeper who is in front of a walled city, as they had in those days, and he or she has the discernment to really let in and direct people who are good for contributing to the city, or who have messages for the leader, directing them to the right place to go in the center of the city. Then for others, he directs them to what they need. And for the people who aren't so helpful for the city—criminals, for example—you might not let them in at all.

So this is a factor of intelligent mindfulness. It's accepting whatever is arising if it's already in the city—the city being our body—accepting that it's there while discerning whether or not it's helpful to continue to feed it, or to let it go and usher it away. We begin to see, with mindfulness and practice intelligence, when conditions are in place for meditation to take a certain direction, including developing meditative stability and unification.

So mindfulness and practice intelligence reveal whether or how any particular mental factor is useful or not for the purpose of cultivating meditation or for cultivating other activities, and I'll get into that more as the week goes along. So again, vitakka and vicāra, connecting and sustaining; pīti and sukha^[7], joy, contentment, happiness; and ekaggatā, one-pointed focus, immersion, absorption. And the intelligence at play and the mindfulness at play help to steer this whole process. Is this the time to unify and gather? Is this particular factor of joy, for example, helpful or distracting right now? Or is something else called for? Sometimes a broader knowledge, a broader understanding of what is operating in our hearts and minds is actually more helpful and integrating, stabilizing prior to cultivating more of these factors.

There's an example from my own life: I was a practicing artist for many years, and I attended this group of figure drawing people for years. It was a lot of fun, but we got to see each other work as well as draw. Inevitably it would happen, especially for those of us who were newer, that someone would be focused in on this detailed, gorgeous rendering of, say, a hand, an ear, or a face. However, they were so focused on the details that they didn't step back to notice that the hand was five times too big, or the head was half the size it should be in proportion to the rest of the drawing. It's kind of like this: mindful awareness and practice intelligence help us understand when it's helpful to dive into the details and absorb and be focused, and when maybe it's helpful to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

We never have complete knowledge, but a sense of how the proportions of what's happening in our minds and hearts and lives are working can be really helpful before absorbing into details. So mindfulness and practice intelligence are the foundation for the cultivation of these five jhānic factors, five factors of wise stability and unification. They operate in our minds and hearts in deep practice, and they provide a resource and sometimes a frame for understanding our relational lives.

Tomorrow I'll shift to the five factors proper, with the first two: connecting and sustaining. Meanwhile, perhaps just notice the range of mindful awareness in your heart, mind, and life, and if it makes sense, maybe talk about what kind of intelligence emerges for you with a Dharma friend between now and then.

So it's a delight to be with you, Sangha. We look forward to being with you tomorrow. Thank you.