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Guided Meditation - Simple Mindfulness with a Light Touch

Mindfulness meditation is actually quite simple. We open to experience that's happening in the present moment, with some curiosity about what it is, what is happening in the present moment. That sounds like nothing. But this perspective of curiosity about experience as experience—what is it like to be a human being that's breathing? What is this experience of breathing? What is this experience of sitting? This is not our usual perspective on experience. We're often more concerned about what is happening in the world and what it has to say about me.

And so the teachings that the Buddha offered on mindfulness practice in the Satipatthana Sutta^[1] are actually quite simple. The first instruction in that teaching encourages a gentle, receptive connection to the experience of breathing. The instruction says, "When breathing in, know that you're breathing in. When breathing out, know that you're breathing out." It doesn't have to be a detailed looking at all of the sensations that are happening, but just a simple knowing. Breathing in, knowing that you're breathing in. Breathing out, knowing that you're breathing out.

This perspective of curiosity of experience as experience—it's transformative. It slowly, over time, begins to show us how we're relating to experience, what our ideas and perspectives are about experience, how we complicate experience. And then the encouragement is to recognize those things as other experiences just happening. Thinking is happening. Hearing or other body sensations are happening. Emotions, mind states are happening. And again, this is not our usual perspective on experience. We're usually more concerned about trying to organize, navigate, fix, change, hold on to what's happening, rather than, "Oh, this is what's happening. This is the experience."

And so in the sitting this morning, just a simple receiving of what's happening. The Satipatthana Sutta points to this simplicity for all experience. It says, "When breathing in, know that one's breathing in. When breathing out, know that you're breathing out. When sitting, know that you're sitting. If a pleasant feeling arises, we know a pleasant feeling is arising. If wanting or not wanting is happening, we know those are happening." And so there's an encouragement to receive and be curious.

For many of us, where we begin is with the breath or the body. Just receiving, aware, connecting with the breath as a breath. The body as a body. Feelings as feelings. Whatever is easy for you, whatever your attention is kind of naturally gravitating towards, might be the breath or the body. Seeing if there can be a light curiosity. What is this experience of breathing? What is this experience of body? What's available easily to be known?

The challenge with meditation isn't often just this simple connection with a breath. Just right now, if I point to just what is it? What is it like? Can you know you're breathing in? Can you know you're breathing out? Probably there's a natural, easeful connection. Or can you know the body? Can you know the sensations of sitting, contact points of hands or hips? It's not too challenging to know that, to recognize that. What tends to be more challenging is the continuity, the keeping that light touch of receiving and recognition going. That's often where we get tight in meditation.

And so I'd like to offer an analogy around how we might make effort. It's really such a light touch. Just enough to be with this, with just this breath. Just this half a breath. And then we connect, and the light touch to be with the next half of a breath, or the next moment of body sensation.

If you're riding a scooter—a kick scooter, not one of the motorized ones, ones that you have to put your foot down and tap to get the momentum going—you might want to get momentum going fast and put your foot down and push really hard at the beginning. But that creates a kind of a wobbly ride. And so we know that a light tap, tap, tap, tap will get the momentum going and the balance can be found. And then you can ride for a while until you feel the scooter starting to get wobbly again. And then you know to put down your foot and tap again. Tap, tap, tap.

The effort in our practice is kind of like that. Just enough for this moment. Just this half a breath. And then again, like that light tap, tap, just a light touch in each moment. And at some point, there might be a sense of coasting. Maybe it's a breath or two that's easy to connect with. A sense of riding the wave, riding the momentum for some moments. And then perhaps you feel the attention begin to drift, like the scooter getting wobbly. The attention gets pulled to a sound and we start thinking about a sound. Maybe just again that gentle connection. A light touch. Light touch. Just this moment receiving.

And of course, at some point during this sitting, the mind will likely get caught in something, lose track of this light touch of receiving experience in the present moment. We often say the mind has wandered. What's happened there is simply that mindfulness has fallen away. And equally, what will happen at some point during this sitting after the mind has wandered is that mindfulness will return. Mindfulness will rearise.

That moment also can be quite simple. In that moment, we're often judging ourselves for having lost mindfulness. But in that moment, mindfulness is back already. So we're judging ourselves for something that's not even happening anymore. So appreciating, noticing that—what is it like for mindfulness to come back? And mindfulness in that moment is connecting to some experience, maybe thinking in that moment. And so the encouragement is again, to mindfulness having rearisen, connect with what's here with that light touch, and connecting again with whatever is a simple, easy experience to recognize right now. The breath, the body are always happening, always generating experience. So those are easy often to receive.

And that moment too, when mindfulness returns, is often a moment when we bring our habit of wanting to hold on tightly, to trying to stay present, to pushing really hard on that scooter. Remembering the light touch. Just this, just this half a breath. Just this body sensation. Just this experience, a light touch, a simple receiving. Breathing in, know that you're breathing in. Breathing out, know that you're breathing out.

Announcements

Good morning everyone and welcome to IMC. I know there are a couple of announcements.

Hello everyone. I'm announcing the reminder of the picnic time, which is next Sunday, June 21st, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Red Morton Park in picnic area 3. Everyone is welcome, and there's a Magical Bridge playground for kids of all abilities. Please bring a vegetarian dish to share with four to six people or just bring yourself. You could drive or walk to the park after the dharma talk next Sunday. It's fairly close, and there's directions on the flyer which I will leave out in the outer hall, and I think it's online too. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Kristen Benson. I'm a Buddhist eco-chaplain through Sati Center. I will be leading a solstice walk on the 20th, Saturday, as opposed to Sunday, which is the solstice. At 10:00 a.m. at Edgewood Park in the main parking lot up by the visitors' education center, we'll meet. It's about 3-plus miles. I do it over a period of time, trying to drop us into our senses, doing a period of silence, having a ritual, trying to say hello, and we remember our connection to the earth. There is a flyer up over here on the board also, and it is also on the calendar.

I just wanted to invite some of the people sitting out here into some of the chairs inside. There's about eight open chairs.

Thank you for the announcements. Is there an announcement about the tea?

Today is the second Sunday of the month, so it's our tea. So you're all invited to please stay following the Dharma talk and enjoy some tea, or some cool water perhaps today, and various little treats that we have out for sharing. So, everyone's welcome. Thank you.

And our teacher today is Andrea Fella. Good morning, Andrea. Thank you for the guided meditation.

Thank you, Martha. So, I also have an announcement that two of my colleagues asked me to make, and it's that there's a three-day non-residential retreat happening here at IMC at the end of the month. There's also a flyer out on the counter for it. It starts on July 31st in the afternoon or evening of Friday and goes from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m. On Saturday, it goes from 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and on Sunday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. It's led by Tanya Wiser and Shelley Gault. It's an opportunity to get the taste of a residential retreat without having to sleep in somebody else's bed. [Laughter] You get the taste of a full day of practice and then go home to your own home for the evening. Registration is required and there's a QR code on the flyer. And I imagine there's also a link on the website for this too. So, if you're interested in seeing what a residential retreat might feel like or just interested in integrating a little bit more the practice into our daily lives—because of the shifting between the retreat practice and the daily life going home, it can provide an opportunity to allow the mindfulness to infiltrate our daily lives in a new way. So I just encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity.

Simplicity of Mindfulness

One of the things I kind of emphasized in the guided meditation was the simplicity of the practice itself, the simplicity of our mindfulness practice. And the instructions that the Buddha offers are quite simple, but there's a lot of, in what the Buddha taught, and sometimes it can seem like with so many lists and so many different instructions that it may not seem so simple what is offered in the Buddhist teachings. And one thing I'll point to is that in the teachings themselves, there's maybe kind of two flavors of what the Buddha is pointing to.

One is the flavor of how to meet your own experience, how to practice, what the instructions for meditation are, what the instructions for mindfulness are. And then the other piece of what's pointed to in the suttas is a description of how our minds work, the nature of our minds to be conditioned. There's many teachings describing in great detail how our minds get caught in habitual ways. And these teachings are pretty complex because our minds are pretty complex. So these descriptions of how our minds work—it's kind of amazing to me that 2,600 years ago the Buddha could describe in such detail the workings of our mind. And these same processes are at work now. I mean, we have a lot of different things in our environment that the Buddha didn't have—cell phones and AI—and yet all of the processes at work in our minds are the same. We want to hold on to things that we like. We want to push away things we don't like. And the ways our minds get caught are still the same as they were 2,600 years ago.

So these teachings about how the mind works, how the mind gets caught, how it struggles, and the teachings also of how the mind can turn and move in the direction of more ease, more peace, more freedom—those teachings are a bit more complicated, are a bit more complex. They're harder to understand. I mean the lists of the five aggregates and the twelve steps of dependent origination. There's a lot of teachings that we might think, "Well, it is hopeless. I'm not going to be able to learn all of these things."

But I want to emphasize again, the practice that the Buddha pointed to is really simple. And it's the simplicity of that practice that begins to reveal the complexity of the workings of our minds. We don't actually have to understand all of those teachings in advance in order for the practice to bear great fruit.

So when I first met the practice and really started practicing, I was suffering a lot at that point. This is a story I often tell, so some of you may have heard this. I was suffering quite a lot. There was a lot of anger happening. And I would find myself just frozen in front of my computer, just frozen, not able to function. So, the anger was really taking over my life. I was really, really angry at this one particular person for something they had done.

And so, I reached out to friends and told people, "I'm really struggling." And one of my friends sent me a book about mindfulness practice, mindfulness meditation. And I did not understand a lot of what was in that book. What I did kind of get out of that book was a little tiny bit of wisdom, which was something along the lines of: try recognizing your difficult reactive states of mind instead of acting on them. Just know that they're happening. And I saw that and was like, "What good is that going to do? Isn't that just going to make me more angry to notice that I'm angry?"

But fortunately, in some fashion, I had kind of hit bottom and so I was willing to try anything. And so I just told myself, "Okay, well, I will see if I can know that I'm angry when I'm angry." Now, that instruction is a similar instruction to what I pointed to in the guided meditation. "When breathing in, know that you're breathing in. When breathing out, know that you're breathing out." "When you're angry, know that you're angry." And this ended up being pretty transformative for me.

The first time I noticed that I was angry, with this kind of recognition: "Oh, right. I said I was going to know that I was angry when I was angry." I was frozen in front of my computer and that recognition arose. It's like, "Oh, I know that I'm angry." Now, I'll tell you, it did not feel pleasant. It was really painful. In fact, that's the first thing I noticed is like, "Wow, this is really painful." And the next thing was like, "Well, I don't know what I do with this. I guess I go back to work." So that's what happened for me that very first time. And in retrospect, years later, looking back on this entire sequence of events that I'll describe, that moment was actually a pretty powerful moment because in the moment before I had been frozen, not able to function, not able to work. And that recognition of, "Oh, I'm angry. Let me put the anger aside and get back to work," was huge actually.

And so I just kept having that curiosity. My friend told me this was all useful. So I was kind of borrowing trust from her. And over the course of some weeks, I began seeing that I would recognize that I was angry before I got frozen. I would recognize that I was angry and it was more of a normal anger. And then it was more of just an irritation or a kind of a thinking about that person and being grinchy. And that's when the mindfulness would wake up and be like, "Oh, there's the beginning of anger." And over the course of that time, I learned a lot about anger. The biggest thing I learned was that anger hurts and that I had some beliefs about it. Like I thought that anger was going to make the other person miserable, but it was making me miserable. And this was highlighted because I was in the Peace Corps at the time and the person I was angry with was 7,000 miles away. You know, they did not know I was angry. [Laughter]

But the recognition of "Oh, this hurts here"—that's also one thing the teachings point to, is the suffering of our reactive states of mind. And so again, in retrospect looking back on this whole sequence of events, seeing how I began to see the anger more quickly, the mindfulness was connecting with that more quickly, and then seeing things about the anger being suffering. These are teachings that the Buddha points to, that our reactive states create suffering here and that is actually something that should be understood. That's what the First Noble Truth says: there is suffering and suffering should be understood. So that teaching around understanding suffering, that's another way to frame that teaching of "When you recognize that you're angry, know that you're angry." Because that understanding of suffering is not about figuring it out. It's not about teasing it apart and understanding the whole history of why that person did what they did and why I reacted the way I did. It's about understanding the present moment experience. What is the experience right now of this suffering?

And that's exactly what that instruction pointed to. And so that instruction was what I worked with for a number of months. "When you're angry, know that you're angry." And I think of this as a seminal core teaching of the Buddha: the simplicity of when an experience arises, know it as an experience. And it's so simple. The instructions for our practice are so dense in a way, what can be revealed with just a simple instruction like that. It's like a really, really piece of dark chocolate that just explodes in your mouth when you put in this tiny little bit of chocolate. The wisdom of the Buddha is so dense. You don't need a lot of it to experience the benefits with the simplicity of the practice.

So there are some analogies that are offered in the suttas, and I'm a particular fan of some of the analogies that the Buddha offered. They're so evocative and they really provide a felt or visceral sense into some of the teachings in a way that can go in without having to memorize lists or anything; you kind of get this image and the image can speak to us. So, one of the images around practice is that of a hen tending her eggs. And the story goes that if a hen sits on her eggs, keeps them warm, takes care of them properly, only leaves for short moments to get food and comes back, if the hen is tending to the eggs properly, then the chicks will hatch. And the story goes, even if the hen does not wish, "May my chicks hatch out safely," they will hatch out safely because she's tending to the eggs skillfully. But if she's wandering around the yard and not sitting on her eggs, the eggs will not hatch properly. Even if she wishes them to hatch properly, they're not going to hatch properly because the conditions are not in place for them to hatch.

So this image brings a lot up to me. The pieces of this image: one is the simplicity of what the hen has to do for the eggs to hatch. She sits there, and there's a warmth in the image because it's the warmth that allows the eggs to hatch. She doesn't have to know a thing about how embryos develop into chickens. They just hatch. So there's the simplicity of what she's doing. It's just simple conditions for the eggs to hatch, and there's this sense of staying with the eggs, this continuity of warming the eggs. So this points to the warmth and simplicity of our practice.

We talk about the simple nature of the teaching, but in my experience, the feeling—probably not immediately when I first noticed the anger—over time is that as I notice what's happening in the present moment with just this simple receptivity and recognition, allowing what's here to be here, there's an allowing perspective to our mindfulness practice. And the experience of that allowing is one of love. The feeling of when I recognize, "Oh right, what's happening is this pain in the body." There's this feeling of care, of connection, of love. And so the experience of this simple practice of knowing experience as experience has a flavor of warmth, of kindness, like the warmth of the hen sitting on her eggs. And then there is the continuity piece, of needing to come back, needing to be with the next moment, the next moment, the next moment. Just the simplicity of that.

The next simile—these are three similes that are offered in the same teaching, and I kind of like the way they build on each other in a way. The next simile is of a carpenter who uses a tool to shape wood. I think it's called an adze, and its function is to shape wood. And the simile isn't so much about what the carpenter is doing with the adze, but it's about the fact that the carpenter uses that tool each day. Again, that continuity of using the same tool over and over again, and the handle of that tool gets worn. Now that's an image of imperceptible change. And the teaching says that even though that carpenter doesn't know every day this much of the adze handle has worn away, there's a sense that when the carpenter picks up the tool that it's a smoother fit to the hand. So there's an understanding that the handle is getting worn just through the use of the tool.

Again, the imperceptible change. This is a piece that is a useful image or understanding in our practice, that it takes the continual coming back over and over again. In this case, we could think of the mindfulness practice being the tool and the wearing away of the handle as being like the releasing of some of our reactive habits and patterns. And it doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in a split second. It's a slow process.

So over the first few months of my practice, that coming back to see the anger, I did have a big understanding in those first few months which I'll describe a bit later. But the anger at that person lasted for a couple of years. And it was just this wearing away of that anger. At a certain point in time, I began noticing that the anger would arise and I would just notice it and be with it and kind of get on with my day. I had been partners with this person who had done this thing and there were many memories, so pretty much a lot of things that I would do would bring up a memory of the person and the anger would come up. And so it would arise a lot, but I would just recognize it's like, "Okay, yep, I see you." And it often seemed to happen while I was taking a walk. And so I just told myself, "Okay, yep, I see you. You can take a walk with me, but I'm going to put my attention on my feet." So it was kind of a gentle setting aside, but it wasn't a repression of the anger. I even invited it to take a walk with me. So I was just noticing that.

And I began noticing over a long time—I do not even know how long this part was—that at some point the arising of those angers was coming up less frequently. So it was getting worn away. There was more space, less of that reactivity. And then one day I was taking a walk and the thought occurred to me, "I have not experienced that anger in a long time." So the person came up in my mind with that memory and I could not find a trace of the anger anymore. It disappeared while I wasn't looking. Through this really, really simple practice, just knowing the anger when it happened and not even trying to notice how it felt in the body or what other emotions or thoughts were going on. All of the instructions that I had learned around working with emotions, it was just really simple. It's like, "Yep, there's the anger. I'm just going to keep taking a walk." It was so simple. Just noticing that light touch of anger, just like picking up the adze handle over and over again, just knowing this is what's happening. It went away. I actually didn't trust it at first, you know? It's like, "Where did it go?" [Laughter]

And it has never come back since then. So I'm convinced. I talk about it a lot, and I'm convinced that if it was still here, it probably would have arisen while I was talking about it at some point. It's not there anymore. In fact, what I experience is a wish. I wish that he'll be happy. You know, I wish that he's happy. So that kind of wearing away, the patience, not expecting—I think sometimes we think we'll see something so clearly. We want to dig in and find all the details about something and think that that's how the suffering will go away. I knew so little about what was going on there. I had seen something much earlier which I'll describe in a bit. But it was just so simple. It went away. It just wore itself out.

There's another simile that really speaks to that just wearing itself out. The simile of the carpenter is still using an image of a person doing an activity. So there's a sense of intentionality in that image. And like with the hen, there's a sense of a being caring, doing something to cultivate conditions. The cultivation of the conditions with the carpenter are less directly related to the task that he's doing, which is an interesting image. You know, with the hen, the cultivation of the conditions are directly related to the hatching of the eggs. With the simile of the adze handle, the wearing away of the handle is related to using the tool, but not particularly what he's using the tool for. So mindfulness is a very general tool that can be brought to bear on any experience. And bringing that tool to bear begins to wear away the unwholesome and simultaneously cultivate the wholesome.

The third simile is one that takes any kind of consciousness out of the picture altogether. So the simile is of a ship that has been out at sea for a long time, six months, and it's exposed to the elements when it's out at sea, and then the ship is brought in. And so there's the people who are taking the ship out and bringing the ship in, but the simile is more about what happens to the rigging on the ship. So the image is that when the ship is brought onto dry land—and I can imagine this is an image that people in the location where the Buddha was teaching were seeing the ships brought in during the dry season or the season when they were not fishing—so this was an image that people had. The ship is brought in and it sits on the shore for six months and day by day those ropes, the rigging of the ship, are exposed to the elements, the sun, the sand, the wind. And day by day, and again this is a picture of imperceptible change but happening really naturally, really just the nature of the rigging and the elements are to wear away at the rope.

And each day you walk by the ship. I imagine being there looking at this ship and each day you walk by and it doesn't look like the rigging has changed. It may sag a little bit, but the rigging still looks like rope. But then one day you walk by and the rope has fallen apart. And that's just happened because of natural conditions, of the elements wearing away at the rope. Again, the imperceptible nature of this and the natural course of events. There's so many images in the Buddhist teachings about nature and how nature does its thing. This is an image of something that people would see every day. And again, it's the conditions of the elements and the rope. Like each day, the grains of sand are wearing away at that rope. And then one day you walk by and the rope has fallen apart and you never saw it falling apart. Much like I never saw the anger going away. I looked one day and it was gone.

That again is the image, that the sun and the sand and the wind are like moments of mindfulness meeting experience. Just each moment of mindfulness wears away at our reactive habits and patterns. And we need the patience because we want to see results, right? I mean this is how we are. We like to see results, but we don't necessarily get to see results day by day. We do over the course of time get to see how things have shifted, like over those first few months noticing the shifting of anger from being something that was completely consuming me to being something that I could navigate in my day, and then eventually that it was gone, that it had disappeared.

So this simple practice, we don't have to see something in detail or see all of the conditions that are putting things together in order to experience the benefits of the practice. And again, the simplicity of the practice can reveal amazing complexity of our minds. Just this simple witnessing, and in fact the simpler the mindfulness, the more it can see. It's very much like a mirror. A mirror will reflect whatever is in front of it and it can reflect a white wall. It can reflect fog. It can reflect steam on a mirror or it can reflect the most complex Bosch painting ever in front of it. So the mirror is not changed by what it reflects. It just reflects. [Laughter] And it's a simple thing that reflects. And so the simpler the mindfulness, the more it can see. And yet it doesn't have to see in detail for freedom, for ease, for peace to come.

And yet sometimes we get those moments, those moments of some clear seeing. And those moments can feel pretty transformative. So in the first couple months of my practice—and you know at these first couple of months I was not interested in sitting meditation. So everything that I described in those first couple months, the noticing the anger as it arose, that was all happening in daily life. And this experience too that I'm describing also happened in daily life. And this was the moment that I decided, "Oh, this is useful. I'm going to keep doing this. And wow, this is amazing what can be seen." So it was a real faith-producing event. It really helped me to step fully onto the path. It was quite an experience and it wasn't anything I was doing except that I had been kind of connecting with anger. I had been connecting with anger with mindfulness over the previous two or three months and had started seeing that the mindfulness was like backing up into the beginnings of the anger. You know, I said it was more normal anger, just more irritation about this person, things like that.

Well, on this particular day I was in my kitchen and I was just doing a normal activity. I was cutting an apple. I wasn't trying to be mindful. I wasn't working at cultivating mindfulness. I was just cutting an apple. And my understanding again in retrospect is that because I had kind of been curious about noticing being mindful when anger arose, there was a recognition when I cut the apple of a memory of being with the person I was angry with and we were at a fruit stand. So I could see there was a connection between what I was doing and the memory. And then I felt this kind of urge, this impulse to jump on that thought and think more thoughts in order to get angry. But I could see in that moment that I was not angry yet. But I felt the impulse, the urge to get angry.

And what my mind said in that moment—and again, I did not do this. I could not have figured out how to do this if I tried—my mind said, "You don't have to get on that train." And the thought went away. So I saw the thought go away and I stood there in my kitchen waiting to get angry because I had not experienced yet, up until that point, this person coming into my mind and anger not coming up. And anger didn't come up and I was like, "You know, yeah, I could say that I could not get on that train for a split second, but let's just wait, let's see what happens."

And I didn't get angry. And the next thing that happened was that I was so overwhelmed with gratitude and seeing that, "Oh, this is a way. This is a way to more ease and peace in my life." In that moment, I think what the lesson was, I understood how the practice worked and trusted that it worked even in all of those moments that I had no idea how it worked. So, it was a little bit of a clear seeing of the conditioned nature of something arising and how intention leads to action, mental action, physical action. But again, it was the simplicity. I could not have tried to see that. It was the simplicity of the awareness that saw that. It was just like I was watching things unfold like dominoes falling. I was just watching it happen.

And that moment was pretty transformative and powerful. But, you know, I've experienced just a handful of those, probably maybe two handfuls of those in my 27 years of practice. Much more of my practice has been this gradual, gradual unfolding. The trust in the simplicity of just meeting what's here, having some curiosity about experience as experience. It's so simple. It's so simple. Those moments of what we think of as insight, they can be inspiring faith and inspiring us to continue, but they're not actually the goal.

You know, the aim of this practice is release. Release from greed, aversion, delusion. And that happens through the cultivation of conditions of warmth, of care, through a continuity of just meeting what's here and a patience in the imperceptible change that happens. And trusting that imperceptible nature of change. The Dalai Lama famously says, "Don't try to look at the results of your practice after a day or a week. Think back five years and notice what's changed. You will see the benefits."

And I'll end with a quote from Munindraji^[2], which Joseph Goldstein often quotes, again about the simplicity of practice. He said over and over again, Munindraji told him, "Sit and know that you're sitting and the entirety of the dharma will be revealed to you."

So, thank you for your attention, and I'm happy to hang out and check in if anybody has any questions or something they'd like to share with me. Thank you.