This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Five Spiritual Faculties - Mindfulness (3 of 5)

Guided Meditation

Okay, welcome folks. Nice to say the names. Let's settle in.

Let's just imagine it was you, not me, guiding this meditation. Let's imagine that you were deeply at ease, with no social pressure, but you had to decide how to guide. You know many techniques, but in deciding how to guide us all, you're having to really contact the field of your own experience to find where the inspiration is, where the aliveness is in you.

Is guiding a meditation a little like narrating one's experience in a way that is hopefully useful for another? And so, as we begin, just gently scan your experience to see where the inspiration is, where the aliveness is. Which phenomena are useful for you to pay attention to right now?

Maybe it's the breath, or the body. A feeling tone, or objects of the mind. But maybe it's something no one's ever heard of before. Letting your own wisdom shape your attention in this moment. Receiving your own wisdom.

When you have your sincerity, the rest is really details. When you want to know experience, the rest is details. When you're willing to be softened rather than hardened by experience, the rest is details.

Letting the world blow through awareness. Wide open, receptive. Nothing for phenomena to clank into. Phenomena clank into the solidification of self. They clank into the solidification of clinging. And we relax. Open.

We don't have to catch and cage some thought, feeling, or sound. Like a safe way to open to hold anything, including what you call your life.

And then, of course, something clanks into self, clanks into clinging. We hear the sound of suffering. But there's no shame in that. There's no shame in that. We were designed to suffer, and we were designed to be free. Just letting life run through you.

The Hallmarks of Mindfulness

Okay, let's get this here with you. I hope you did a good job imaginarily guiding that meditation in my stead.

So: faith, energetic vigor, mindfulness. Mindfulness—oh my goodness, that word. Friedrich Nietzsche^[1] said words are like pockets into which many things have been placed, and mindfulness is most definitely a pocket into which many things have been placed.

Sometimes it is used as a kind of placeholder for all of the Dharma^[2]—all these different concepts smuggled under the umbrella of that word. Other times, attempts to monetize mindfulness change its meanings, so it's been made more compatible with greed, hatred, and delusion in some depictions of it.

Sometimes I've thought that understanding mindfulness is not the starting point of practice, but the fruit of practice. Of course, we have to begin with a definition of mindfulness, but to know what that is is not actually where we start, but where we wind up.

Classically, from the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[3], what is right mindfulness? "Here a monastic dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure with regard to the world."

There is a lot to say about that, but one of the things I want to note is that there are multiple dimensions to the construct. It's not just narrowly one feature. Contemplating the body, or feeling, ardent, clearly comprehending, having removed covetousness and displeasure—there are a lot of facets to mindfulness. With fifteen minutes to talk about it, there is a lot that one might say, but I thought to highlight this dimension: to my mind, mindfulness describes a state nearly diametrically opposed to the hallmarks of distress.

What mindfulness depicts is almost the opposite of the shared characteristics of many different states of distress, or we may say, suffering. Obviously, suffering and distress come in a million flavors, but there are shared characteristics across a range of states of distress.

When I was reflecting on this, I was able to name a few features. In states of distress, generally—not always, but generally—thoughts become absorbing and imposing. Thoughts feel really real. They feel like the realest thing in the world. We know rumination, that embeddedness in thought bubbles, is known as a trans-diagnostic risk factor. For a range of different states of distress and psychiatric compromise, rumination is a risk factor.

In states of distress, the space of experience narrows into a kind of claustrophobia. Our attention becomes fragmented. It's pinging from memory, to present-moment emotion, to physical sensation, to prognostications about the future. It's very unstable in the field of experience.

In distress, there tend to be alterations in physiological arousal. We tend to be really flat, or hyper-aroused, or a blend of frozen and then super impulsive. There tends to be a lot of experiential avoidance, meaning a kind of unwillingness to make full contact with one's inner life—bracing and guarding, patrolling the inner landscape to see what's safe and what isn't.

There are often compromises in distress tolerance, so the unpleasant features of any human life become especially distressing, especially sticky. The pain is a pain. These difficulties tend to be deeply personalized. When we're really distressed, that distress becomes a commentary on one's life, one's worthiness, one's being.

In states of distress, there tends to be rigidity in our predictive models—the ways that we are using this moment to make predictions about the trajectory, the vector of our life. There's a kind of failure to learn and revise the models. Our models of self and world become impervious to new information. In states of distress, we're not learning what's important to learn. We're suffering, but we're not learning about suffering.

So that's a brief sketch of some of the shared features across a wide range of distressed states. What are the hallmarks of mindfulness?

First, a reduction in experiential fusion. Through metacognitive awareness, we are no longer living within the bubble defined by a thought. This is another way of saying there's a kind of de-reification. Thoughts and feelings feel less real; they are no longer taken as pure, true descriptions of the state of the world or the state of the self. They become infused with space. Phenomena become less intimidating.

That phrase from the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, "putting down covetousness and displeasure," is really related to equanimity—a conjoined factor with mindfulness (sati^[4]). There is a non-interference with the arising and passing of phenomena. Mindfulness is a state of distress tolerance. It's a state where we're not so intimidated by those pockets of our inner life that are charged with affect. We can approach what was once avoided.

In mindfulness, there is attentional stability. That's different from samādhi^[5], which I'll talk about tomorrow, but there is at least a modicum of attentional stability. We're not pinging around everywhere. And there are many regulatory benefits to this stabilized, malleable, unified attention.

In mindfulness, we are draining the moralism from our inner life. What we took to be a sign about who we are, or our worthiness, no longer points to anything or anyone. It's just phenomena blowing through. There's less and less room for moralizing about what we think or feel about what arises in the field of experience.

There is in mindfulness a hypo-egoic state. The energy and tension of self is relaxed. In this receptivity, the self is not really home base; it's just wide open. And in that openness, we're not really making a home anywhere. We're awake.

So, there are many ways to suffer. These shared features of distress, and the facets of mindfulness, represent a kind of diametric opposite. I offer this for your consideration.

May we learn about the causes of suffering and the causes of ease today. Good to be with you, and see you tomorrow.