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Guided Meditation: Recognize, Feel, Relax

Good morning everyone. Good day, hello, greetings from Insight Meditation Center. I'm very glad to be back here. It's been how long? It's been maybe six weeks that I've been away, or so, five weeks, from traveling and teaching and different things. Now I am coming back from Insight Retreat Center, where I just finished teaching a week-long retreat.

So, a little bit I feel like a beginner sitting here, being away, and I will use that as a theme for today. Also, maybe it's appropriate to feel like a beginner, and that I mark today as approximately the beginning of—maybe it's next week, the beginning of, or finishing this week is finishing three years of these 7 A.M. YouTube teachings. And next week, I guess we begin the fourth year. So thank you all for being here.

And in the theme of being a beginner, I think it's useful to consider, maybe realize, that when we meditate, we mostly meditate as a beginner. It mostly was like we're starting over. Then sometimes, as we get settled and mature in the practice, there are times when we course along with some kind of more experienced, deeper meditation. But often, in the vagaries^[1] of life, we sit down to meditate, and it's kind of like starting over. So we're all beginners.

But the difference between someone who's a beginner, really beginning, and someone who's an experienced beginner—who has done a lot of beginning—is the attitude with which they meditate. How they meditate, how they're aware, how they concentrate. As people become more experienced, they're more relaxed about how, and also more dedicated. It's this combination of being calmly dedicated without striving, without judging, without bringing all the baggage of "me, myself, and mine" along when I meditate: "My experience, what's happening, I'm doing it wrong, I'm doing it right, what should it be?" As people become more experienced, they just settle in and are more at ease with being a beginner, and just going through the basic instructions. So I'll offer you some of those today.

So, to assume a meditation posture. What's nice in being caring and careful about the posture you take is that it's a posture that feels unobstructed. Somehow, we're sitting in such a way that there are no obstructions. That's part of the advantage of the classic posture of the Buddha, sitting upright and cross-legged: there are no obstructions in this body, no places that are contracted, limited, or collapsed.

Sometimes, if we sit too comfortably in a couch, it might be comfortable, but maybe there's a way in which the shoulders and the upper body are kind of curled and curved in such a way that it obstructs, compresses a little bit the chest. An unobstructed posture.

And then to gently close your eyes.

And without much more ado, to take a few moments to recognize, to know how you are in your body. How you are in your mind and heart. And how you know is important. To know it simply, matter-of-factly. To know it without being for or against.

And in recognizing how you are now, going into your body, feel what that feels like. The somatic experience of how you are in your body, and your mind, and your heart.

And again, how you feel is important. To feel it with a radical simplicity. Not having an agenda or a need imposed on what it feels like. Not trying to change anything. Offering a respectful attention in feeling, sensing how you are somatically.

And then to relax the body. Relax the body on the exhale.

And how you relax is important. To relax without trying too hard, trying hard at all. Just relaxing simply, matter-of-factly. Content in doing so, in whatever way is easy.

And now, maybe taking a few longer, deeper inhales. Gently on the exhale, relaxing deeper. Relaxation that follows it. Longer exhale, longer exhale, all the way to the end of the exhale.

And now, letting the breathing return to normal. Recognizing, knowing what it's like for your body to be breathing now. And how you know is important. Being content to know it in whatever way is most obvious. No need to analyze or bore down. Just the simplest way, knowing what it's like for your body to be breathing.

And then to feel what it's like for the body to be breathing. Feeling the somatic experience of breathing.

And then, without any ambition of how well you can do this, gently soften and relax the breathing. Soften the muscles that engage around breathing. Maybe softening the muscles of the belly.

And then to be with your breathing in a simple way, resting in breathing. And whichever is easiest to help you stay with your breath, helping you quiet your mind: stay with the knowing, recognizing inhales and exhales, or stay resting in the feeling, the somatic sensations of breath. Riding those sensations. And with every exhale, quieting the thinking mind.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps we're always a beginner. In our relationships to other people, they are always changing. We're changing, contexts change. And to be a beginner is to be willing to not bring with us the old beliefs, associations, and ideas of who people are, but to see them freshly.

But more importantly, as we become experienced in meditation, we learn that how we're aware is important. We learn to be aware without our judgments, preferences, agendas, and needs. We learn to see others simply and openly. With our feelings about them—still feeling the way we do, but to see them, to know them without the filter of the feelings. Feelings are one thing, and seeing is another.

And to see freshly. Without philosophy, without cynicism and skepticism. Just see. And perhaps to see, then, with kindness. With goodwill, with friendliness, with care. To gaze upon this world kindly, as a beginner.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings know deep contentment. May all beings know that they are respected. May all beings be free. And may we contribute to that possibility.

Dharmette: Mindfulness of the Body (1 of 4) Breathing with Challenges

So, hello everyone. I'm happy to be back after I've been gone for a while. I trust that you were well cared for by our guest teachers. They're all wonderful teachers, and I'm very happy that they're able to come and teach, and that you were able to hear their teachings and experience their presence and how they are.

I think that this coming year—starting next week is the fourth year that we'll start doing these 7 A.M. teachings—that I'll be gone more than I have been. So we'll have more guest teachers coming through. Some of the same will return, and probably all of them will return at some point, and others as well will come along, and you can experience a range.

At the beginning of the year, I started teaching about challenges, how to practice with challenges. The plan is to continue doing that. Thinking about it today, I thought, well, that's what all of Buddhism is! Buddhism is how to practice with challenges and overcome challenges. Buddhism doesn't use that word at the center of it all, but I think that in focusing on it here, now, and this year, I'm highlighting how practice is certainly useful in everyday life, but how it's especially useful when there's stress, when there's anxiety, when there's confusion and difficulty. That heightens the sense of: "There's a challenge, there's a difficulty here."

And that can be a range. It can be the simplest little thing, but it could also be some of the major life challenges that people have: sickness, old age, and death. People go through tremendous, horrific experiences in their life, and how to deal with those—calling them "challenges" maybe is to make them too small. But in these teachings on how to work with challenges and difficulties, it is knowing what to do when life gets concentrated so that there's a lot of intensity all at once.

What I'd like to do this week is go back to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[2]. At the beginning of this series, we did a week on each foundation of mindfulness. This week I'd like to focus on mindfulness of the body. In Buddhism, mindfulness of the body has been emphasized tremendously since the time of the Buddha. It's such an important part of practice. The Buddha even said emphatically in a variety of different ways that there is no maturation in this Dharma practice without mindfulness of the body.

And in recent decades, there has been a tremendous appreciation of the value of the body for healing, for psychological healing. Maybe starting in the 1950s and then onwards, there were psychologists who were discovering how important it is to really drop into the body, feel the body, and feel the psychology as it's manifested in the body. More recently, there is recognition of how important somatic work is for trauma.

So in Buddhism, we have this emphasis on mindfulness of the body. Using the body and connecting to the body in times of challenges is invaluable. In the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, there are six exercises on mindfulness of the body. We'll go through five of them this week, and the first one is breathing.

And in times of challenge, remember to breathe. Remember to breathe mindfully and awarely^[3], because when we get challenged, the breathing tends to get tight or constricted, which tends to reinforce tension, agitation, or shutting down even. It might be valuable for the breathing to stop or slow down, to be constricted, if in fact we have to get into a fight or run or do something. But in many challenges, that's not what needs to happen. What needs to happen many times is to calm down and take a deep look at what's going on, so that wisdom can operate, so clarity can operate.

And then, especially if we feel challenged when there's not an immediate threat present—the challenge is someplace else in the future, or has been in the past, or we're dealing with the repercussions of it—then maybe we can take that time to catch our breath, as we say, come back and breathe.

Take deep breaths, exhale. It's invaluable simply to do the "three-breath journey." That is, just maybe close your eyes and for three breaths, follow and be with those three breaths. In everyday life, if you go around and if you stop to take those three-breath journeys, that's enough sometimes to shift and change a significant amount of how we are, how we feel, and how we see the situation. If you do a three-breath journey once every hour, I bet that your whole day will start having a very different flavor.

So I come back and check in with my breathing regularly, constantly. With all these years of practice, it has become second nature to feel my breath, to connect to my breath, and to see where the constrictions are, where I'm tight, what's happening in the belly, what's happening in the chest, how am I breathing, and to use the breath as a relaxation.

When the Buddha began the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, he put breathing at the center of it, because it's first. So, to connect to your breathing and recognize the breath. And then, as we begin recognizing breathing, then begin feeling—he said—the whole body. I'd like to begin by just feeling the experience of breathing throughout the body, wherever breath is influenced or touched by the experience of breathing. And to take time to feel the somatic experience of breathing in the body. How is it? And then the Buddha went on to say, after you've felt the whole body, relax the tension in the body. Relax the body. This is kind of the beginner practice.

However, many of you have been practicing for some time. As I said in the guided meditation, I think most of us, most of the time, are practicing as beginners. We sit down and the mind is busy and agitated, or spinning around, concerned. Maybe we've had a busy day and there's tension in the body, and the mind is not settled and calm and doesn't immediately get concentrated. So we're kind of like a beginner. Just appreciate that, almost like an assumption that mostly we're practicing as beginners, and sometimes we are practicing really getting deep in meditation.

But as beginners, people who are experienced in practice are quite willing to begin again and again, to be beginners in meditation. What shifted is their attitude. One is there's a willingness to be there for that experience, not to be fighting it or agitating it or judging: "I think I'm not doing it right," "I'm supposed to do it right," "What's supposed to happen here?" There's more spaciousness, a graciousness with, "Oh, I'm just here practicing beginning exercises. It's okay."

There's a feeling that how we're mindful is more important than how deep we go. Rather than jumping ahead, leapfrogging ahead into what we want to have happen in some depth of practice, it's where we take a backward step into recognizing: How am I right now? How am I feeling? And how am I being aware? Am I being aware with strain? Am I being aware with need and wanting, and trying to fix something? Am I judging? Am I for or against my experience? Am I complacent? Am I here but not really interested in meditating? "I meditate every day and I'm just here, so I'll just kind of daydream or something because I'm not really into it."

How is the mindfulness? How are we practicing? That becomes important. Experienced beginners know that that's an important thing to look at and be with. And then, as we become aware of how we are in any situation: How are we with challenges? How are we paying attention to our difficulties and what's going on for us? Then, to breathe in the middle of it. You feel and allow yourself to breathe. The rhythm of breathing, the massage of breathing. Maybe taking some deep breaths and exhaling long and deep. And then with the breath at the center, start feeling the whole somatic experience of the body, as much as it's easily available, and relax the body.

So these are the three steps that the Buddha offers as a kind of beginning practice: to recognize what's happening with oneself, to feel it, to sense it, to experience it somatically, and then to relax. Those three are a wonderful little three-step process.

As practice unfolds, it might seem that first one of those is not really relevant, and then no longer necessary—you don't need to relax anymore. And then it's just recognizing and feeling. At some point, feeling the experience might be too much, or recognizing the experience might be too much, and then the practice gets simpler and simpler.

So when you have challenges, you might do a few things. You might do the three-breath journey. When you recognize, "Oh, I'm challenged now," take time. Unless the threat is immediate, if there's some time and space, then take at least the time for three breaths. Close your eyes and just be really intimate, then follow and connect to three breaths—just three—and see what happens.

The other is to practice these three steps the Buddha talked about: really recognize how you are, feel how you are somatically, and then relax. That can be done together with breathing, and this is beginner practice.

And if you are an experienced beginner, then you know that how you're practicing is as important. You can feel, you can recognize how you're practicing. You can feel it somatically, how you're practicing, if there's strain or tension. And you can relax how you're practicing, so there's no extra tension involved in the practice that you do.

So if you should have some challenges today, and unless it's an immediate threat that needs to be addressed, I'd encourage you to engage with practice. Practice in the middle of it. It's invaluable to practice in challenges. It really strengthens and inspires. Really, that's where the muscle of practice and maturation of practice really starts taking hold.

So thank you, and we will continue tomorrow.