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Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation Class 5_Open Awareness and Daily life practice - Dawn Neal, Tanya Wiser

Introduction and Review

Tanya Wiser: We still have a couple of people coming in here, but Richard's been reading us the chat, so it's nice to hear from you out there in YouTube land, and glad you're joining us. Nice to hear that at least for one of you, you've been enjoying the course with Dawn and I. Well, thank you. And as Richard said in the chat, if you have a question specific to what we're teaching, go ahead and put it in the chat, and if we have the capacity to respond, we will. All right, Dawn, ready?

Dawn Neal: So a warm, warm welcome, everyone. Welcome back to those of you who have been with us for some or all of the preceding weeks, and a warm welcome if this is your first time also.

Tonight, my friend and co-teacher Tanya Wiser and myself are doing the fifth of a five-week introduction to meditation course. Over these last four weeks, we've been gradually learning more and more about how to be with the intimacy of the direct experience of living, watching with awareness and mindfulness. Mindfulness being a way of noticing experience while it's happening in the moment, much like a bird watcher or a naturalist might notice what's arising in the birds and the forest around them. This kind of learning how to pay attention on purpose is a process of beginning to cultivate a capacity for choice. For choice rather than reaction to what's happening in our minds and what's happening in our lives.

So I'm going to give a very quick overview of the last four weeks. We covered mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of the body, of emotions, and of thinking. The way Tanya put it a couple of weeks ago, these are like concentric rings or ripples, with the breath in the center and going outwards from there. The reason that we often start with the breath is that it's always here as long as we're alive, it's changing and dynamic, and it can help to build focus. If the breath doesn't work for you, and you know it doesn't, the sensations of the body or attending to sound are two really good alternatives.

Which brings us to the body. That was the focus for the second week. We talked about how the body has its own form of intelligence, and that listening to our bodies is a skill. It's a skill we can develop through mindfulness practice. Sensations are the language the body speaks. This skill of listening, feeling into the sensations of breath and body, has the advantage of anchoring us here and now. You may have noticed your body is always here and now. The breath is always here and now, no matter where our minds go or what they're up to.

The next week was mindfulness of emotions, which can range from the uplifting to the downright awful. Emotions are a form of communication, often kind of a gestalt form of understanding what's happening, or at least how we're interpreting what's happening. And that word interpretation is key, because emotions can be based on what's actually happening in the present, or they can also be triggered now by something that has happened in the past. I think Tanya used the example of seeing a glass of water on the counter, and that triggers something in the past, causing an emotional reaction. Or seeing a person's shoes in the pathway might have the same effect. It has nothing to do with the shoes or the water. It has everything to do with that combination of past experience being triggered by present moment emotions.

Biochemically, emotions are only a 60 to 90-second process in our bodies and our brains. If we don't interfere with them, they flow through and they can move through. So a large part of mindfulness practice is learning how to be with them and let them just flow through without buying into them, without interfering with them, repressing them, pushing them away, or getting on a soapbox about them.

And that brings us to thinking. Thinking and emotion have a symbiotic relationship. Unseen emotions fuel a lot of our thinking, and thinking feeds a lot of our emotions. Both are true. So how our minds relate to thinking has a lot to do with how we relate to reality itself. We have talked about this a lot over the course of the weeks. How we relate to things is critical, so important to learning mindfulness meditation and to living a life in harmony with what is actually happening.

In beginning to understand thinking as something beyond reality itself, as just flits of our minds, it's helpful to understand there are different modes: visual, maybe word or concept, sound, or it could be like a movie. Tanya talked about this last week. It's also helpful to understand there are different types of thinking: imagining, remembering, planning, fantasizing. All of this is important because the experience of physical and mental pain increases or decreases depending on how we think about it, how we relate to it.

Which brings me to the last review point. Just like we suggest you take an outer posture in your body that's a combination of grounded, relaxed, and alert, there's also an inner posture. The mood or attitude, the relationship to experience, that's so core. And that attitude—it's helpful to have interest or curiosity, kindness, and the willingness to start again over and over.

This all brings us to this week's topic, which is bringing it all together. We're going to teach a form of meditation called open awareness or choiceless attention. But first, we would love to hear from you. Those of you who have been here, how your practice is going, if you have questions from the past weeks, anything you want to ask about the practice right now. The floor is open, and both of us will respond.

Please help each other with the microphones. Elena, can I put you on the spot to model the ice cream method of the microphone? You can see beautifully done, right? Very close. The sound goes in through the top. Was anybody willing to share? Yeah, behind you, Elena. Thank you, and please say your name.

Divya: Hi everyone, good evening. I'm Divya. I've been coming to the sessions regularly. I've been practicing meditation a little less regularly, which I'm trying to give myself grace for. Sometimes it's a five-minute mindful stretching instead of a 20-minute sitting practice. I don't know if it's placebo or what it is, but I do feel like it's made a big difference in the past two months that I've been practicing. I've incorporated some other stuff in my life too, like yoga, but right now I'm going through a kind of difficult situation that I feel like a year ago would have put me in a really bad place. And right now it's hard, but I'm okay. I feel like that's something it's really helped me with, is to put things in perspective and try to give myself a break from spiraling all the time.

Tanya Wiser: Wonderful. It's really beautiful to hear how even just a little bit of practice and learning over the past weeks has contributed to this greater equanimity and this greater sense of being able to show up for whatever's difficult in your life. Exactly, that's great. I love too that you're mindful of movement. In the second half tonight I'll be talking about mindfulness in daily life, and it is mindfulness practice to be mindful of movement. So yes.

Dawn Neal: Oh great, this is a question from YouTube which Tanya helpfully handed to me. I'll read it aloud: "Can you explain the difference between mindful meditation and insight meditation?"

It's a great question. This is the Insight Meditation Center, and here we're teaching mindfulness meditation. To start with, mindfulness meditation is one branch, one kind of process, within a much larger range of forms of Buddhist meditation. Mindfulness meditation can become insight meditation, absolutely. But it doesn't necessarily have to be Buddhist. It doesn't have to have any religious connotations to it. It's a term that has been taken outside of Buddhism and used much more broadly to talk about the kinds of skills that we've been teaching for the past four weeks: being aware of our own capacity to be aware of the breath, the body, emotions, thinking, open awareness.

So mindfulness is focused on that capacity. Insight meditation refers to the Pali word vipassanā^[1], which is to discern, break apart, to see clearly. Mindfulness is one key, very important component of that, but it's not necessarily the whole thing. Other skills and other dimensions of meditation also come to the fore. Concentration being one of them. So when we talk about insight meditation, we're talking about it from a Buddhist framework, and we're talking about it as a larger part of a Buddhist path that incorporates some of these other factors as well, which do come into play in mindfulness, but not necessarily to the same degree. Do you want to add anything to that, Tanya?

Tanya Wiser: That was great. Can we ask you to move over just a tiny bit to the right? Thank you, perfect. I was just a little concerned about the camera behind her head. Come on in, please, welcome. Hi.

The Leaf Experiment: Concept vs. Direct Experience

Dawn Neal: Welcome again. Please settle in, and we're going to move into the first set of instructions. Tonight, I'll be talking at you for about another 10 minutes, and then we'll go into a 15-minute guided meditation.

I'd like you to do an experiment with me. It's kind of an exercise. Please close your eyes, and I want you to very intentionally think of a leaf, like a leaf on a plant or a tree. If you're a visualizer, you can picture it, but just think of it and hold it in your mind.

And now open your eyes, and what do you see here? Perfect, a leaf. Not the leaf I was thinking of. Was it the leaf any of you were thinking of? Right. The reason I'm bringing this very simple example is that the thought of a leaf is not a leaf. The concept of the leaf is not the physical leaf, right? All of us were probably picturing slightly different, or even very different, leaves from each other. If I had been told to think of a leaf, this would not be the leaf I would have thought of either.

That's an important distinction we're going to play with tonight: the difference between concept and what actually arises in experience. In this case, in your visual experience of seeing this leaf. Now, just notice this leaf. Would you say it's big, small, or medium? Medium, yeah, I think that's fair to say. I saw some really small ones. I had a good time on a hike today finding this.

So now, how big is it? This is a really important kind of concept. It's conceptual differentiation of comparison, right? Small, large, or medium. So this is the large leaf, right? We're all agreed. Okay, is it still the right leaf?^[2] So again, it's the distinction by comparison.

Now here's a really important question: Is one of these leaves better or worse than the other leaf? No, silly question, right? Is one of them bad or wrong for being larger or smaller? Not really. The reason I'm being a little bit silly about this is our minds do this all the time. We draw comparisons between our experiences, and usually we have value judgments associated with those comparisons. "This experience is much better than this experience," right? Or, "Actually, I wanted this experience, but I've got this one."

Letting go of the value judgment associated with distinguishing between big, little, medium, large, small, wanted, or not wanted is a really powerful capacity to begin to develop. To just experience the leaf as a leaf. Not the concept in your head. Not the, "Oh, this is a bad leaf, it's all twisted, it's too curly," whatever. I'm not able to experience it as itself if I'm doing that. And just like that, we're not able to experience our experiences if we're constantly harshing on them, judging them, comparing them to last week's experience, or the person next to me's experience.

There is no right or wrong leaf. No right or wrong thought or experiment or experience for the purpose of mindfulness meditation. They're just arising and falling, happening and going away, all in real time, right?

Okay, so indulge me here, we're going to do one last little thing. Why don't you check out the space between the leaves? Take a look at it. Notice how your eyes might shift focus just a tiny bit, looking at the space between the leaves. And maybe notice the space between you and all of the leaves. Between where you're sitting and the space in the room.

This is a little bit like sometimes in meditation we can notice the space between sensation, thoughts, sounds, breath, emotions. And that can be a really helpful shift. It's not that it's bad to notice the leaves, the objects, the experiences. That's totally fine. And if we're starting to get snarled up in them, sometimes it's really helpful to look for the space in between. Sometimes open awareness meditation can get spacious that way, where the mind starts getting more interested in the space in between than the actual objects of our attention—leaf, breath, sound, sensation, whatever. And that can be beautiful, but isn't necessarily any better or worse than noticing leaf, sound, object, thought. It's helpful to notice the difference.

The really important capacity we're developing—and it's like a workout in the gym, it takes time, usually can't lift everything right away—we're developing the capacity to be aware on purpose. So that's the last little part of this silly experiment: notice that you're knowing these leaves. This instruction, this moment, notice that you're aware that you're here, that you're present.

Was that hard to do, anybody? No, not hard. That simple noticing, that's mindfulness. That's mindful awareness. There's another word for the ancient Buddhist term for mindful awareness, another translation, which is "to remember." What's harder for most of us is to remember to do it over and over. Part of what we're training is like anything else we want to remember. We do it over and over and over again, and it gets easier until it's practically natural. It becomes a trait.

So for the purpose of the meditation that we're going to do tonight, each leaf, each experience, is simply itself. Not the concept, it's not the comparison, right? And it's also really helpful...

[Audio cuts out briefly]

You know, I think my battery just went out. I'm now tethered. Can you hear me okay? How's this? A little bit better. I'm actually going to hold it a little close because I don't want to change the configuration.

So tonight, the kind of meditation we'll be doing, as I mentioned, is called open awareness or choiceless attention. It can be really helpful to give our minds something to do to stay in contact with whatever is coming up in the present moment. In the earlier weeks, we were focused mostly on paying attention to, say, breath, and letting everything else be in the background, or emotion, and letting everything else be in the background.

This week, we're going to ask you to settle into meditation using whatever anchor of attention feels most comfortable to you, given the other weeks you've been doing this. Then the invitation is going to be to open up to whatever arises, whatever is most dominant in the present moment at that point. When it becomes less obvious, return to the anchor. And then eventually just kind of float in experience for a few minutes and let things move through. Sound, sensation, thought, mood, whatever.

It can be really helpful to use the technique that we introduced a few weeks ago, where you very softly inside the mind silently say a single word or a label, like thinking, imagining, feeling, breathing. Whatever it is, just to name it. That helps the awareness sharpen just a little.

So let's give it a try. I'm going to switch mics before I give it a try.

Guided Meditation: Open Awareness

Dawn Neal: Okay, can you all hear me? Okay, great.

So settling into a comfortable posture. Feet flat on the ground. Seat grounded in the chair.

Softening your eyes, softening your tongue. And if you're comfortable closing your eyes, closing them.

Perhaps taking two or three intentional breaths.

Really tuning in to the sensations of your body breathing. Maybe feeling the belly rising and falling. Feeling the chest expanding or contracting a bit. Or perhaps feeling the breath coming in at the nose or mouth. Gentle sensations.

And allowing your attention to settle in your body. Your life's breath. Resting on the flow of in and out. Steadying the attention. Perhaps in part by making a gentle, soft mental label. Breathing in. Breathing out. Or rising, falling.

Inviting the body to soften and relax. The head and the face. The neck and the shoulders. The arms and the hands.

Allowing the breath to massage the chest and the belly from the inside. Softening and warming the torso. Feeling the grounding, the weight of your hips and buttocks on the chair or cushion. And allowing the tension to drain out of the thighs and calves, shins and ankles, down through your feet and outwards.

And opening the awareness to the whole body. And to the experiences arising in the moment. Hearing. Thinking. Feeling. And as it feels right, using a soft note. Whatever's arising. Sound, tension, warmth, relaxation.

Noticing what arises in experience. Letting it flow through.

From time to time, maybe noticing the space between the sound and another sound. Or a breath and another breath. Or any experience at all as it flows through this moment.

Noticing, are you aware? What's obvious? Receiving experience.

As if you're sitting in a simple room, a one-room house. The windows and doors all open. And you're in a comfortable chair, the only piece of furniture in the house. Letting all experience move across the windows, maybe even come in the door and stay a while, and leave. But nothing stays because you are in the one seat. Allowing experience to flow through the heart, the body, the mind, just like that.

[Silence for meditation]

Thank you for your practice. Thank you for the meditation.

Q&A and Reflections on the Meditation

Dawn Neal: So we have another time for comments, sharing, and questions. Yeah, great, you want to grab the mic?

Participant 1: [Inaudible]

Dawn Neal: Okay, I'm sorry to hear that. It's helpful, speaking of hearing, to use a microphone. Were other people having a hard time hearing? Yeah, the hearing aids, yeah. This room also has weird little dead spots sound-wise in it, I've discovered in the past. So if you happen to have bad luck, you might end up in one of those.

Was anyone able to kind of have that experience of a feeling that you were grounded in a chair or sitting somewhere and letting things kind of come and go? Were you able to have some degree of that experience in your meditation? It's not always so easy. Just wondering if that connected for you, not for you. You want to go ahead?

Participant 2: I'm just gonna say that I think the labeling that you mentioned, like labeling different thoughts, was really helpful for me. Because sometimes like one thing just kind of waterfalls into a bunch of other things, and before I know it, I'm like, "Why am I thinking about this again?" So it was kind of nice to be like, "Oh, okay, I'm imagining this, and I'm wondering about this, and I'm planning for this." You know what I mean? And that really helped me at least realize what I was doing in that time.

Dawn Neal: Yeah, great. So identifying the different kinds of thought or the different processes, it sounds like, was really helpful to kind of get a handle on that they were happening. Great. Any other comments? I think you had one. Yeah, please.

Participant 3: I don't know if I just did this—this is not a very deep comment—but just to say that when you talked about the muscle, I haven't sat for quite a while, and I was definitely sort of drifting off. And it's just interesting to observe that my muscle is a little bit out of practice. And so yeah, I'm feeling quite inspired to get back into it.

Dawn Neal: Yeah, it's a great observation. You're noticing that the conditions are different. If we don't practice for a while, the conditions are different, the muscles get a little deconditioned, and it's easier to wander. There's a difference between valuing something and actually embodying those teachings. Well said. That's right. Tanya, did you have one from YouTube?

Tanya Wiser: Yeah, I do have a question from YouTube, but I'm gonna answer it later because it works well with something I'm gonna address later.

Dawn Neal: Oh, yes, please. Corey, yeah, help each other with the mics guys if you can.

Corey: I thought it was intriguing to focus on the spaces between sounds. Because usually when I do practice mindfulness on sounds, I'm focusing on the things that pop in. Generally, I notice sounds pop me into the present moment, but then also evoke imagery as to what's causing the sound at the same time. And that gets me spinning too. But focusing on the space between sounds, I noticed some sounds, like train sounds, were long distances between sound, and other sounds were very small apart. So I thought it was good. I'm gonna try that more, it's very nice.

Dawn Neal: So did you find that focusing on the spaces helped you stay a little bit less in the discursive like, "Oh, that's a train"?

Corey: Yeah, I think that's what kind of appealed to me a little bit, is that I don't get caught up in the what's causing it. It's more just the raw sound, not focused on who's walking, who's driving, or what's you know...

Dawn Neal: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Great observations. Did anybody find it challenging? Hear about that too.

Brian: Yeah, can you hear me? Hi everyone, Brian. Yeah, this is challenging for me. I think for me, it's the breath. Like, focusing on the breath, and if I'm not focused on the breath, then my mind just goes everywhere. And then before I know it, I've spent five, six different thoughts, and then I'm like, "Oh, that was a thought, but it's been too long," right? So then I just get lost. When I recognize it and come back to the breath, then it's fine. But then I was like, "Oh, the whole point of this was to watch the spaces," and then I lose it again. So I have like three separate cycles of that. Or I just couldn't be grounded. It's like grounded for a few seconds and then gone again.

Tanya Wiser: Um, yeah, I can respond. I think what I want to point to, Brian, is you know what helps you anchor your awareness, which is the breath. And that's a power right there. That's a strength, it's a skill. It's really lovely that you know that you can do that. And you know, sometimes it is like that, no matter how much you're practicing, the mind is just a bit of a choo-choo train.

What I'll be talking about is mindfulness in daily life, and there's this idea of going to the gym and building the muscle, right? It really is a matter of not just the lovely idea of what meditation is, which helps us even if we're not doing it, it can help us remember. But actually, when we start to practice regularly, just like we start going to the gym regularly, we actually do build up some capacity, a muscle. The capacity to be aware and mindfulness.

And then what we can do as well is we don't just have to meditate on the cushion. It's not like we can only grow that capacity on the cushion, but we actually can start to practice it in daily life. You know, we don't need weights, we can just watch our thoughts. We can notice our emotions. We can feel our body as we're walking and moving.

I did a practice for a long time where every time I got up at my office and walked anywhere, I used it as a mindfulness practice. It really grew my connection to my whole chest, my sense of breath, and my body. It became something that went with me everywhere. So I think the encouragement is you've already got some capacity, which is to be able to tune into the breath, and keep experimenting and practicing. More practice, in more ways, more times. Is that helpful?

Dawn Neal: I'll just briefly add that the experience you described indicated to me that you were actually quite mindful of going off and coming back. And just give yourself credit for that, because that is building that muscle in a really powerful way. Because life isn't as simple as watching your breath, right? That's why we call it practice. In some ways, it's all simpler when we're just sitting.

So this is a question from YouTube: "When you say, 'notice that you know,' it almost seems like you're asking me to be aware of awareness, and that seems impossible. So could you please clarify?"

I'm happy to clarify what I can there. As Tanya was just talking about, this is a process. We don't start off immediately being able to notice that we're knowing, or be aware of awareness itself. And it is the direction the practice goes as it matures. The invitation in the little instructions I gave, and then just for a moment in the meditation, was just to respond to the question: If I ask you right now, are you aware? What's the answer? Is anyone not aware? It's kind of impossible not to be once the question is asked, right? So the capacity to develop that reflexive awareness, the ability to know that we're knowing, builds over time, in part by cultivating mindfulness of the breath, mindfulness of the body, awareness of the spaces in between.

But it's not something we can make happen. I have found in my own practice, asking the question every now and then, especially if I hook it to a daily life activity like Tanya talks about. Like I've gotten in the habit that every time I walk out my front door, I ask the question. Every time I'm walking back into my apartment, I ask the question. Every time I open my car door and get in or get out, asking the question. And over months that built, to now the question doesn't happen anymore, the awareness just comes. Because like conditioning a muscle, we can condition that capacity. It can't happen on demand for most people right away, but it can be developed. So play with it, experiment with it. Some people even put little reminders in their phone that pop up like, "Are you mindful right now?" It's a way of kind of hacking the phone to be more about bringing you into the present moment than what it usually does.

So that's what I have for that. I hope it was helpful.

Mindfulness in Daily Life

Tanya Wiser: Great, thank you, Dawn. Let's go ahead and shift. I want to talk more about mindfulness in daily life.

In the very first class, one of the things that I talked about was part of the gift of the practice is growing our capacity to choose, reducing our reactivity in life, increasing our ability to respond in life. This is one of the huge gifts of this practice, and I kind of think that choice is a superpower, you know? And we grow that as we grow our mindfulness.

We can talk about sitting and practicing every day, five minutes, ten minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. But when you finish a formal meditation, you don't have to stop your commitment to being aware. You can keep it with you. You can have a sense of, "It's kind of good to be aware. I like to have a choice. I like to not feel like I'm just reacting to life, reacting to my thoughts, being driven by my feelings."

So one of the ways we can bring our practice into our daily life can be, like Dawn and I are both saying, choosing an activity or moments in our life. I'm going to invite you, if you're willing, to do a little bit of play acting with me. And I'm going to ask you to do this three times, three different ways.

First, can you bring to mind something that you do every day? For me, I'm going to focus on making my coffee in the morning. Something that is a routine, fairly simple, but something that you really reliably know you do. So everybody got something in mind? Okay. We're going to be mimes together, if you're willing.

The first pass, we're going to do the same activity each time. I'd like you to imagine—you can join me at any moment, I'm pulling out my coffee machine, so we're not narrating—I'm just going to show you essentially what I'm doing, right? We're not really going to be looking at each other, just know that, because we're all going to be focusing on acting out our little routines. Join me anytime that you feel ready.

[Participants mime their routines]

Okay, finishing it up. Okay. So you did what you did. Now this time, as you do it, try and be really, really aware of intentionally, "I'm moving my hand and pouring." Just be very intentional in your own mind about, "Okay, I'm doing this," and feel it, notice it. Just kind of upping the mindfulness and upping a sense of experiencing your routine. Okay, all right. Here we go.

[Participants mime their routines mindfully]

Okay, finish up. Yeah, okay. What did you notice? Was there a difference? Anybody with the mic, do you mind saying, Elena, what the difference was?

Elena: It slowed down the process. And when it slowed down, I was more mindful, more aware, like each step compared to doing it automatically.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah, kind of like, mindful. Beautiful, I like it. Not as automatically, that's a great way to describe it. Anybody have another word or anything that they would say about the difference? Yes?

Participant 4: Yes, I was making tea. And on the second time, I noticed that I was feeling how it felt to like open the door handle. Oh, it's like a metal handle. And then when I put the mug down, it's a granite countertop, and that kind of makes a sound that I didn't notice the first time.

Tanya Wiser: And how often is it we don't even notice what we're touching or hearing, right? Because we're in automatic or we're thinking.

All right, so the third pass. The third time, we've got the routine, we've got increased mindfulness, and now, you know, this is about our relationship to our experience as well. We've talked about this idea of our inner posture, right? I like also to think about it just as we're relating to our experience in a particular way. There's an emotional or relational quality. It could be curiosity, it could be hatred, it could be idealizing. We can bring these attitudes into even mindfulness, right?

Well, let's invite in that relationship that communicates compassion or caring. Like, "This matters. I care. I care and maybe even, hey, I'm taking care of myself right now. I really want to make my tea, that is such a sweet gift to myself. I'm gonna make this tea to help me start my day."

So, you ready? All right, go for it.

[Participants mime routines with compassion]

And finishing up gently, compassionately taking your time.

Did you notice this time, did anything change for you? I noticed myself tasting, kind of savoring, maybe in a way that I hadn't been. Like this idea of, "Oh yeah, I really want to open my senses up to receive and feel the sense of what I'm doing and taking it in." What did others notice?

Participant 5: I notice a sense of gratefulness. Like, thanks for taking care of myself. It's a mundane routine thing I do, but I didn't see it as taking care of myself. So I was like, "Oh, I'm thankful for that."

Tanya Wiser: Beautiful. Do you mind bringing the mic back to Shelan? Thanks.

Shelan: Okay, so I was brushing my teeth. It's the one thing I can't stand not to do, I like to get in bed with brushed teeth. But when we did the third part of the exercise, and I was doing it as a treat to myself, rather than something that I had to do, I could really get into, "Okay, I love the feeling of really clean teeth, and this I'm doing for myself. You know, I can just enjoy it." And so it made the whole process very different.

Tanya Wiser: Beautiful. So this is a great illustration experientially of the different kinds of relationships we can have with our inner experience. We did the same thing, same task, but the way we related to the task and being aware of the task changed the way it impacted us. So this is what we've been trying to point to, right? Is that inner relationship to how we are being mindful.

Participant 6: Just along that line, when you invited us to imagine that activity as an act of self-care, I noticed that I also slowed down. And I also felt more emotion. Like it felt like it allowed room for other emotions that I have to be felt. Like my father passed away about a month ago, and I unexpectedly felt sadness. You know, like I was allowing myself the space in that act of self-care to just be present with myself. Rather than a fast road kind of thing.

Tanya Wiser: So automatic pilot. You know, shifting out of automatic pilot into mindfulness, right? Then we do become aware or available to receive our actual experience. And when we're on automatic pilot, we don't really receive it. It can't really be processed, it can't really be felt. And it is in the receiving of it and the feeling of it that allows it to transform, even. It allows it to kind of move through us in a different kind of way. We end up carrying things around a lot because we don't actually let them be felt, you know, or we ruminate on them in a particular way that kind of keeps them locked in, right?

Where to Go From Here: Continuing Your Practice

Tanya Wiser: So now the question is, where do you go from here? This is the end of the five-week series. And I want to just invite you to reflect for a moment: however many times you've been here for this series, what are you more aware of right now?

Another question for you is: what do you want your practice to be like? What do you want it to look like? Like when you get in a relationship with somebody, at some point you talk about what kind of relationship you would like to have, how much time you would like to spend together, and what kinds of things you'd like to talk about. You know, like to start your day together, end your day together, right? So what do you want your relationship to be like with this practice? Is it something that for you, it's good enough to do it on the cushion one time a day, and that feels like enough of a gym for you? Or is it like, "Oh, I actually think I'd like to intersperse it throughout my day"? What kind of relationship, what do you want it to look like?

And as you kind of imagine that, what would help you create that relationship? What would support making that happen? So if you're willing, it would be nice to hear and to respond to you about what you would like it to look like or what you think would be supportive or helpful. And then I can tailor some of what I talk about in terms of other things available, other practices. But if anybody has anything in particular they would like to share, please find a mic. Yeah, great.

Participant 7: Well, I was just up visiting my grandchildren. And I wanted very much to be able to be coming from my center and being with them in a really calm way, and they are not calm. And so what I did, the few times where I was just kind of like, "Now what am I going to do?" What I did was I said, "What am I grateful for right now?" And I could just say, "I'm just so grateful to be with them." And that was kind of letting go of this other fantasy I had of how we were going to hold it together, it wasn't quite there. But it helped get me centered because I get out of myself, and I'm out there instead of here. So yeah.

Tanya Wiser: Beautiful. And do you have a sense of what would help you, what would support you in continuing to grow that capacity to not be out there, but to be in here?

Participant 7: I think that in addition to what I do, which is to sit in the morning, it would be to give myself maybe a couple of times during the day where I just took myself back and didn't get so caught up out there, and just kind of settled back in.

Tanya Wiser: Great. So you're thinking that it would be helpful to stop a couple times during the day to actually literally invite yourself to come back home.

Participant 7: Yes, because I start off the day and then I'm gone. At least when my grandchildren are around, and they're seven and five, so.

Tanya Wiser: What a precious thing, yeah. Thank you for sharing. Anybody else?

Participant 8: I didn't realize this was the last of the series. Is that right, tonight? Is there another series coming up? Because I also wanted to get tips on... during the pandemic, I got completely out of meditation. And I really have been for the last few weeks making it so I have to get back into it. So I just came, I thought, "Well, this will get me going because it's open now and there's people here and I can't do Zoom and listening to things and sitting at home." So I want some more ideas.

Participant 9: So I appreciate the question of what do you want it to look like, because that invites a decision. And for me, I'm just very aware that there's a choice, and there's a difference between how I experience my inner life when I am meditating more regularly and when I'm not. And so something that would be really helpful for me would be to have a regular circle that I can come and sit with, and a regular talk that I can come to at least once a week. And I'm just arriving in Palo Alto, so new to the area and hoping to find that.

Tanya Wiser: Great. Okay, so I think I'll... I'm running over my time a little bit, but I need to say a few more things and I think it's important.

So at IMC, we have a number of different options. I'll start with just Thursday night, because you're all here right, and you're available on Thursday nights. So next week, for the next three weeks, just in person, I won't be streaming on YouTube, but I'll be talking about establishing a practice. And I'll be here, I'm kind of really wanting to respond to whatever questions. I have lots of material to share, but I also will make myself very available to what's going on, how it's going, questions about the center or things like that. And Dawn and I will both be here next Thursday. So that's one place to continue this conversation, right, sort of to learn more.

There's also Monday nights, there's in-person with a Dharma talk and a 45-minute meditation. And then there's Sunday mornings here, which is a 35, 40-minute meditation and a Dharma talk afterwards. And sometimes on Sundays there's social tea, and sometimes there's potlucks, sometimes there's occasionally a community meeting. So that's another opportunity.

Let's see, there's also Happy Hour, which is every night during the week at 6:00 PM. It's a loving-kindness practice on Zoom from 6:00 to 7:00, which is lovely. It's one of my favorite things. It's a combination of a guided loving-kindness practice and then small group breakouts, so you get to talk to people from all over the world who have been coming really for a long time to this little Sangha^[3] of mettā^[4], loving-kindness. And that's a lovely support that's there.

And then every morning, Gil^[5] on YouTube, or whoever's covering for him, does morning meditation with a half-hour guided meditation and then a 15-minute Dharma talk. So just a short little nugget for you for the day.

And Wednesday is a half-day. You come and you have a sit, and then walking meditation, and then another sit and a Dharma talk. So it's a wonderful practice. And then we do Sangha cleaning together, then we meet in a circle out in the Community Hall, and then you're invited to bring your lunch and sit down and connect with each other afterwards. It starts at 9:30, and I think officially the outside circle is at 12:15, so, but then there's lunch afterwards.

So those are some of the things that IMC offers. And there's more. There's day-longs, and in fact this Saturday there's an Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation day-long taught by Bruni Dávila^[6]. It's 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM. So it's nice, and she'll be giving instructions on breath, mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of body, mindfulness of emotions, mindfulness of thinking, and open awareness practice throughout the day. And bring your lunch.

And then I'll be co-teaching a class with Diana Clark^[7] in March on the Five Hindrances^[8]. The Five Hindrances are the five things that tend to interfere with our meditation practice. And we'll be using the Wizard of Oz as a reference point, and so it will be very fun. I'm very excited. And then in April, I'll be doing this class again. So that's some things that are going to be coming your way.

Dawn Neal: Can I interject here? Especially for those of you who are constrained to YouTube, I'll also be offering an introductory series on loving-kindness meditation starting March 11th. It's a five-week series, it's much like this except that the focus is on mettā, kindness and compassion cultivation.

Tanya Wiser: And that'll be on Zoom or YouTube?

Dawn Neal: Actually I know for a fact it'll be on Zoom, I think it'll only be on YouTube after the fact. So if you want the interaction with people, you can register by looking at the IMC calendar. It's on Saturdays starting March 11th, from 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM, five Saturdays. And then the following Saturday I'm doing a half-day. So there's a lot of stuff happening.

Tanya Wiser: There was a question on YouTube, which is, "How do we decide which meditation technique to use?" And I think the simplest, the funnest way to answer that is to share a story about another teacher in our tradition named Natalie Goldberg^[9]. And she also is a Zen practitioner. And she was sitting with Thich Nhat Hanh^[10], many of you know Thich Nhat Hanh, and she asked him how he kept his practice alive you know, for all those years. And he smiled a wry, sweet smile she says, and he said to her, "So you want to know my secret?" She nodded eagerly. "I do whatever works, and change when it no longer works."

So the idea of how do we decide what kind of practice, what to be doing—you know, we've taught you a lot. This was a smorgasbord of meditation practices. And I always like to say, start with what's easiest. Right? You encounter the least resistance, you get your momentum going. So start where it's easiest, start what calls to you, start what feels right. And there's a lot of research on change, and it shows that smaller commitments, smaller bites is much easier to sustain and feel motivated instead of getting discouraged.

So with that, we'll open up for a few more questions before we close. Yep, grab the mic.

Participant 10: I just wanted to say that I find it really helpful to tune into the morning sit and then the really short Dharma talk. It starts at 7:00 o'clock if you want to be on time, but it's on YouTube the rest of the day. And actually, if you miss a day, you can go back and catch up on that day. And so I think it's so available that it doesn't mean that you have to be up at 7:00 AM. Yeah, that's what I wanted to say. Thank you.

Tanya Wiser: Get the mic, get the mic. Oh, you were scratching your head, okay. Any other questions, requests, comments? How this has been for you, if you've been coming to the class, anything you want to share about that is also welcome. Even just today.

Participant 11: I, this is my first time doing this class, and I attended the Four Noble Truths^[11] class as well last year. And I feel like I really enjoy the interactive aspect of it a lot. Like something that I think happened a few times in the Four Noble Truths was actually like small breakout groups when there were enough people, and I feel like that was... it was just so nice to talk to people and share what we were going through.

Tanya Wiser: And so we'll be doing that the next three weeks, and the Four Hindrances class.

Participant 11: Awesome, yeah, I just really... I love Five Hindrances. [Laughter]

Tanya Wiser: Yes, I'm glad to hear that. They're really helpful to me, I really love offering that, so hopefully you'll be here.

Participant 11: Definitely.

Participant 12: I just wanted to thank both you, Dawn, and you, Tanya. This has been a really good five-week class. Although we missed last week, we are starting to invoke more mindfulness in our daily life. Just yesterday we were at the airport and a situation got a little stressful. I remembered that it was a good time to practice mindfulness, and then that was very helpful. So I can remember another time, I used to, when I was driving more, I had a practice of being at red stoplights and using that as a moment to practice mindfulness. Because normally you're in a mindset where you have to be somewhere, and this red light is preventing you, darn it. So yeah. And you asked the question of where I want to take this practice. And for me, as far as it will go. And there's so much I'm learning, and so much unknown, that I feel like I don't know where it's gonna take me right now. So I don't know what it looks like, I can't imagine it right now.

Tanya Wiser: That's great, wonderful. Yeah, living on the edge of the mystery. More comments and questions?

It's great, it's been fun to be here with you guys. It's really, really nice, and very fun to teach with Dawn.

Dawn Neal: Yes, yeah, totally fun. This is our first time teaching together.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah. And Sally's our lifesaver, and Richard our amazing recorder, who's also the great helper with sitting posture and encouraging you. Talk to him afterwards, he'll encourage you along, just keep going, he'll tell you. So we're a team here, glad you're a part of it.

Dedication of Merit

Tanya Wiser: So let's see. Just a reminder that at IMC, you know, this place exists because of volunteers. It's an all-volunteer Sangha. The building was bought by people's donations to the Sangha. There's nobody here that gets paid for anything. It's all—all the teaching, all everything. And there's no membership other than your desire to have a mind that's present and a heart that's available to this world and ourselves. So to me, that's a very inspiring thing, and you're here and you can keep coming as much as you want. And if you want to become more involved in the center, there's lots of opportunities for volunteering. So that was helpful for me when I came here. I liked having a job, right, and I felt a little bit more like I belonged.

So let's... I have one practice of dedication of merit I think we have time to share with you all. The dedication of merit, this idea is that everything we're doing, we're doing it for the benefit of ourselves, for the benefit of others, and both. So without exception, all beings. And that's a big topic, right, a big idea of all beings everywhere.

So I'd like to invite anyone who's interested to maybe name a group of people that they're thinking about right now, that they want to invoke us to think about. Some people, one person said "all the people in cages," meaning people in prison, he wanted us to think about them. So is there any group of people or any beings that you would like us to bring to mind as we dedicate our merit? Here's the mic right there.

Participant 13: The Rohingya people in Myanmar.

Tanya Wiser: Thank you.

Participant 14: Women and girls in Afghanistan.

Tanya Wiser: Beautiful. You can pass the mic, and you don't need to speak into it, just hand it around if anybody wants to say something. Great. And YouTube, you can type in there if you want to name something.

Participant 15: I guess people who—this is like a vague term—but just people who dedicate their lives to helping others in a very real way and maybe not expecting a lot in return too.

Tanya Wiser: Beautiful. Beautiful. All these beings that have been named, and everyone we didn't name, may all beings benefit from our practice. Including ourselves, right? Without exception.

[Music/Bell sounds]

Thank you. And that's it. Dawn and I will be here, as well as Sally and Richard, if you guys have any questions afterwards, and hope to see you back.