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Guided Meditation: Sensory Awareness of Breathing

Hello everyone, and warm greetings. Welcome.

Some of you have been commenting in the chat, and I see that it's cold where you are. Sometimes when the weather is warm or cold, there's a way of using the temperature of the place where you're meditating as a reminder to be involved in the sensory body, to be connected to the body in some deeper way where we're sensing and feeling it. Sometimes when the weather is uncomfortable, it's easy to be in the control tower, a little bit upset with what's happening or not liking it. An alternative is to enter into the sensations of cold or warm, and rest in them, feel them, and receive them. There is occasionally a very different way in which the body receives warmth and cold if the mind is not resisting or reacting to it, but the mind is helping us to feel it and sense it in the body.

That is the theme for this morning's meditation: a sensory awareness exercise that the Buddha is pointing towards, and that is to have a sensory experience of the breathing. It means to step out of the control tower of a lot of thinking, analyzing, and judging, and trusting that we don't have to do that. Trusting that instead we can rest ourselves, rest attention in the body as it's being experienced, as it's felt—the sensory body.

Being grounded in the sensory body is a protection from wandering off in wayward thoughts, and it's also a little protection from being excessively self-concerned. Self-concern is natural enough, and certainly appropriate at times, but it can be overdone. It's nice to take a vacation from self-preoccupation.

Dropping into the body and feeling the body's experience provides some people with that vacation from self-concern, at least for these minutes of the meditation. Finally, there's something very special about the sensations that we experience. Sensations are the meeting place, the synthesis, or the dynamic experience that arises when the mind is connected to the body.

The body has sense nerves all over it that can be triggered or stimulated to give a sense experience. The mind is what knows that. Awareness is what knows that. The meeting of the body and awareness—the meeting place of the body and mind—is in the sensations themselves. The sensations occur where the sense nerves reside. Sensing, our capacity to sense, and sensations are like two sides of a hand; they can't really be distinguished in experience.

That is the meeting place of the mind and body. In this meditation practice, we are trying to have the mind and body be together, working together. If the mind wanders off into thought, or into commentary and discursive thought, then the mind is somewhere else besides the body. But when the mind is there, connected, meeting with sensations, with sensing, then they're working together.

One way today that we'll talk about dropping into that is by relaxing into it.

So, assume an upright meditation posture.

Sometimes by being careful with your meditation posture, the body begins to support you in being aware through the body. An intentional posture has an attention in it.

Gently close your eyes.

As you inhale, sense and feel what happens in your body with a deeper inhale.

And on the exhale, a longer, gentle exhale, relaxing the body.

Breathing in, and breathing out.

It's a little bit of a ritual to take some deeper breaths at the beginning—a ritual of being reminded, "Here, this is the body. This is the place to be during these minutes of meditation."

Letting your breathing return to normal.

As you exhale, relax different parts of your body. As you relax them, see if it can be like relaxing into the sensations of that part of your body. Almost like you're resting in that part of your body. Maybe begin with your belly.

On the exhale, softening the belly, and resting.

Softening the belly, and then softening, settling into feeling more of the belly.

On the exhale, relaxing your legs, settling into your legs, feeling them more as you relax.

Breathing in, and exhale, softening the shoulders, and feeling the shoulders more as you relax.

On the exhale, relaxing the muscles of your face, feeling those muscles, feeling your face as you relax.

If there's any tension or pressure associated with thinking, the thinking mind, the thinking muscle—as you exhale, relax the mind and feel whatever sensations are associated with that tension and pressure, or what replaces it.

Then, open your awareness to that place in your body where you most easily experience the body breathing.

As you inhale, receive the sensations of inhale.

As you exhale, relax into the sensations of exhaling.

As you exhale, relax whatever keeps you separate from the sensations of breathing.

Relax into the sensations of the body breathing, perhaps floating on the changing nature of those sensations.

If you're intimate with the inhales, you'll probably feel more than one sensation as you're breathing in.

More than one sensation of inhale.

And probably more than one sensation as you exhale. It can be two or three, or a kaleidoscope of sensations that come and go, fleeting, as the body goes through the motion of breathing in and breathing out.

As you exhale and feel the sensations of exhaling, see if you can relax into them, relax with them.

Settle further into your body breathing.

Relax the thinking mind.

Relax into the sensations of breathing.

Have the sensations be where the mind and body meet, trusting that staying close to that meeting point is valuable.

For a couple of more minutes, see if you can be continuous in your awareness of the whole length of breathing in—beginning, middle, and end. The whole length of breathing out—beginning, middle, and end.

Really staying connected, like the mind is holding hands with the body breathing.

As we come to the end of the sitting:

Learning to stay true with the breathing—meaning learning how to stay attentive to the breathing—is a life skill where we also learn to then develop attention to all kinds of things in our lives.

Including an attentiveness, a presence that we can offer to others. We can listen better without quickly inserting our ideas and thoughts. We can hear people deeply.

We can take time to see and feel and sense the situation we're in before we assert ourselves into it.

This ability to sense and feel and see and attend is the basis for wisdom, for living wisely. It's also the basis for living kindly.

Because to be wise in Buddhism goes hand in hand with being friendly and caring.

So may it be that whatever ability we develop to be mindful, to be present, to attend with attention, may it serve us to contribute to this world.

So that we contribute our care, our love, our kindness, our compassion, and our friendliness for the welfare and happiness of all.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be safe. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (5) Sensing the Whole Breath

This practice of mindfulness, sati^[1], developing awareness, establishing awareness, begins with breathing.

Now, we know that breathing as a meditation object doesn't work for everyone, so there are other ways of practicing mindfulness. Some people will establish awareness not so much with breathing, but with the body more generally, maybe ignoring the places in the body where breathing occurs because it's somehow compromised or a difficult place for some people. But it's also a classic and primary focus of meditation in Buddhism.

A teacher in Japan told me that everything you need to learn about Buddhism can be discovered through mindfulness of breathing. I prefer to reword it and say everything you need to know about Buddhism will be revealed through practicing mindfulness of breathing. But it's actually true that for any engaged mindfulness practice, whatever the object is, whatever the way of practicing is, mindfulness has this capacity to reveal everything we need to know for the purposes of freedom.

But right now, we're doing mindfulness of breathing.

The big word in Pali is paṭisaṃvedī^[2]. It means to experience, to feel, in a reflexive way, in a subjective way—your own deep subjective feeling of what's going on. But not feeling in the English meaning it sometimes has, where "how I feel" is really what I want, or what I'm thinking about it, or my attitude about something. Here we're talking about something simpler. Feeling is the sensory experience we're having independent of our preferences.

We're learning to be close to that, simple with that.

We are using this sensory experience as a way of cultivating some degree of concentration and stability, which also serves the purpose of protecting us from wandering off too easily into distracted thoughts. So, to have a place where the attention gets established and rooted, this is where we're going to be.

Of course, the mind wanders away. Rather than being upset with that, take it for granted that the mind will wander away. What we're practicing here is a rhythm. Just like there's a rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, there's a rhythm of coming into the present moment with breathing, and then wandering away, and then coming back. Wandering away, and coming back.

You're not really in charge of the wandering away, but your role is the coming back. If you think of it as a rhythm, as a flow, then maybe you do it more harmoniously, rather than jerking the mind back or taking time out to be upset with the fact that you were distracted. Just, there it is. You get into the sense of the rhythm. You're not going to participate with the mind being distracted if you have a choice. What you're doing is bringing it back to the breathing, and then staying close to the sensations of breathing, which are the meeting place of the mind and the body.

We want to have the mind and body working in harmony and working together. That's part of the unification practice of meditation. That unification, that gathering together, so all of who we are begins operating in harmony rather than working at cross-purposes.

If the idea is to be in the present moment in our direct experience, and the mind keeps wanting to think about something else, then we're at cross-purposes with ourselves. In this exercise we're doing now around breathing, the task is to come back to breathing.

It is a very common practice down through the centuries to offer a dedication, a commitment to staying with the simplicity of breathing, so there's some strength there that, with time, overrides the tendency to wander off in thought. The rhythm begins to slow down. You're less often going to wander off, you're more going to stay with the breathing, and you're going to come back more quickly to the breathing. Slowly this changes. Offering some strength, some commitment—"Okay, this is what I'm doing"—is a way of not offering a lot of energy fuel to our thinking mind.

It's a slow process. Slowly, we begin to switch the orientation, switch the commitment of the mind from being committed to our issues in our life, to being committed to just being here in the simplicity of breathing, in terms of meditation practice.

It can be hard sometimes for the mind to appreciate that this is valuable, that we're safe, that we're going to make our life better just by staying simply with the breathing, when we have important things to think about. But in fact, this is one of the great ways of making ourselves safe, because we're learning how to drop into a quieter, deeper place within that's a source of wisdom, a source of better understanding, and a source of a shift of identity. A shift of how we understand ourselves that is sometimes a much better, wiser place than the identity that's supporting distracted thinking.

So we're coming in for landing with our breathing, just being with the body as it breathes. Then the instruction at this point in the text says, "Breathing in, one experiences the whole body; breathing out, one experiences the whole body."

There are two meanings of this "experiencing the whole body." One is that it is experiencing the whole breath body, the whole duration of the breathing. The other is you're actually experiencing the whole physical body beyond just the experience of breathing. For now, I'd like to emphasize the first. As we're cultivating continuity with the breathing, it's possible to have continuity within the inhale.

There was a time in my life where I did the checklist approach to mindfulness. I knew I had to be mindful of the in-breath, and so I would note it as "in," and as soon as the mind recognized that this was an in-breath, then it was vacation time. My mind would wander off because I did my job, I just checked it off: "in." And then with the out-breath: "out."

What I learned was that rather than just checking it off and being done with it, it's staying present for the whole duration. Many years ago, I took a massage class in college, and the instruction was, as you're massaging someone, always keep a hand on their body so there's always a continuity of contact.

That way they're not surprised. If you take your hands away to get more oil or something and then put them back, it's a little bit surprising, or you've lost contact. The same way with the breathing: stay in touch with the full duration of the in-breath, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

As you get more intimate with the experience, you'll feel a kaleidoscope of sensations as you breathe in. Maybe there's a beginning of a lifting of the chest, or expanding of the belly, or beginning of a tingling on your nostrils. Then what happens to those sensations? How do they morph and change just in the course of the inhale? And then the same thing with the exhale: stay in touch.

Now, sometimes we sit down to meditate and the breathing is short and quick. So you just kind of ride it, like bronco riding in the rodeo. You just ride the shortness of it coming and going, and maybe relax the best you can on the exhale. But as meditation gets calmer, the breathing tends to get slower and longer, and then that's when you start feeling and sensing, savoring, having an intimacy with all the physical sensations that come into play as you breathe.

It helps if you are not measuring everything through the perspective of your preferences—whether it's comfortable or not comfortable, whether you like it or not like it, or whether you think it's good or bad. That belongs to the control tower; it belongs to a way of separating ourselves from the experience. If you get bored with the breathing, that's also a separation from the experience. You probably won't be bored unless you're pulled away from it. The idea is to come into it and be really close and intimate with the experience, and just feel the whole inhale and the whole exhale. If you get into that, then you can bring the same kind of delicacy to experience the transition from breathing out to breathing in, and breathing in to breathing out.

What I'm describing today, I'm not suggesting that it's easy, but it's the direction that it's possible to go to settle in and let the mind become quiet, and really develop this sensory awareness. Sensory awareness is one of the forms of awareness, forms of attention, in the toolbox the Buddha is offering us in doing Satipaṭṭhāna^[3] and doing this mindfulness practice. To cultivate, develop, and hone this tool of sensory awareness is really fantastic for the purposes of mindfulness.

I would encourage you, until we meet again on Monday, to spend the next couple of days studying and being curious about the sensations involved in your breathing. Take little times out through the day, maybe even a minute or two, in times when you're waiting for traffic to move or you're waiting for something to happen standing in line in a store. Use that as a time to really just be curious: what's happening with your breath? How is your body experiencing the process of breathing? Get intimate with that, and curious, and wise. Start becoming familiar with a range of different ways in which breathing is experienced. We'll continue with this process next week, and then at some point expand it into mindfulness of the whole body as we're breathing, and go through all these different steps of the first exercise in mindfulness of breathing.

Announcements

Thank you very much. I have a couple of announcements. The first is that I'm going to do something a little different for next Monday. The broadcast of this YouTube will be at the same time and same place on YouTube; however, I'll be at our retreat center in Santa Cruz, and so I'll be teaching from the meditation hall there. You'll see a different place, and there'll be a different Buddha statue. That's just for one day; I'll be back here on Tuesday.

The other is that IMC is offering a day-long meditation retreat tomorrow on the Four Great Efforts^[4]. This is one of the important teachings of the Buddha about the kind of effort or engagement—the four wise ways of engaging—that are essential to all forms of this meditation and mindfulness practice we're doing. It's an orientation to how to engage wisely. So it's a day-long with meditation and teaching, being taught by three teachers here from IMC who are in our current teacher training. All three of them have been teaching for some time and are wonderful teachers. It should be a wonderful synergy of the three of them teaching together. You'll find out more about this—there's a link to it now that someone put in the YouTube chat, but you'll find more about it also on the IMC website under "What's New" and on the IMC calendar. So thank you, and I look forward to being together on Monday.