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Guided Meditation: Appreciating Awareness of this Moment

Welcome, welcome everyone, and welcome anyone online watching. Very happy to be here today. My name is Dawn Neal, and I'm a long-time practitioner. I've been teaching for about ten years, and we're just going to sit together.

The invitation is to settle back into a comfortable, yet alert, posture. It can be helpful to start with two or three intentional breaths, perhaps a bit deeper than normal, allowing any excess tension to flow outwards on the out-breath. Letting go on the out-breath.

Allow the breathing to return to normal, whatever that is for you today. Take a moment to establish awareness, establish mindfulness in this body, noticing the details of your posture. Noticing sensations: warmth or cool, tension or relaxation. Perhaps allowing acknowledgments of sound, and acknowledging any energy left over from what it took to get to your meditation spot.

Allow the heart and the mind to rest, to settle into whatever meditation anchor or primary object feels most hospitable. Perhaps the sensations of the body, especially the sensations of breathing. Allowing thoughts of then or there to fade to the periphery, and settling into here, into this. This moment.

Allowing your awareness to become intimate with the felt sense at this moment. Allowing sounds to come and go. Sensations to come and go. Greeting each arising^[1]. What's this breath like this moment?

Inviting awareness to suffuse through the entire body. Inviting the body to soften, relax.

If a sensation, a sound, or a thought pulls the attention away, the suggestion is to gently, kindly acknowledge it and allow the attention to settle back. Riding waves of breath or sensation, or the general felt sense of being here, now.

From time to time, refreshing the awareness. Noticing mindfulness, perhaps re-emerging or perhaps continuous and steady. Either way, appreciating the awareness of this moment.

For the last five minutes or so of this meditation, the invitation—if the mindfulness and awareness feel steady—is to take an internal step back. Allowing everything to come and go in a broad, sky-like awareness opening up. Noticing whatever appears and goes away again.

And in the last moment or two of this meditation, noticing any calm, softness, perhaps a touch more attention, clarity, or mindfulness. Appreciating any benefits of this meditation. Noticing, taking it in.

With that in your heart and mind, calling to mind the other people and other beings in your life. Here in this room, near your home, your neighborhood, anyone you are in contact with. And see, perhaps, if it's possible to generate the intention, the resolve, to meet them with kind, receptive, appreciative awareness. To share the goodness of this practice as you move through your life.

[Music]

Broadening Recognition of Awareness Increases Presence and Wisdom

Welcome everyone, good morning. I'm going to start this talk with a story. This is from the fables, the myths of early Buddhism, called the Jataka tales. It is sort of a story within a story.

There's the Buddha, who is on a retreat with several very senior monks, and during the retreat, four or five of them experience full awakening. Before he comes to speak with them after they break the silence, they're talking. Each of them was doing a different practice; some were meditating on the four elements that some of you have heard about, others were practicing with breathing or different aspects of their experience like their senses (eyes, ears, nose, taste). Their experiences of awakening are different, and they're confused by this. So they ask him when he comes, and he tells them this story.

In the distant past, the King of Varanasi had four princes. In conversation with these princes, a certain, very unusual tree came up. It was a kimśuka^[2] tree in Pali, which would roughly translate as a "what do you call it" tree, right? So it's kind of goofy, whatever it is. He describes it a little bit to them, and they're all fascinated by the idea of seeing this tree. But princes are busy, and even though they didn't have iPhones, they had full schedules. So one at a time, at different times, the charioteer took them to this distant forest to see this tree.

Eventually, maybe six months or a year later, they're in conversation again, and this tree comes up. Each of them describes how they saw the tree. One says, "Well, it was kind of like a charred stump with just these little green specks on it, little buds." And the other goes, "No, no, no, we saw something different. We saw a tree with flame-like leaves all over it." And yet another one said, "Well, no, I saw a brown tree with big, lumpy fruit." And then the last one was like, "No, this was like a shrub with these gorgeous flowers all over it."

The king just sort of looks at the princes and says, "Why didn't any of you ask the charioteer about what kind of conditions were at play around this tree? That's the same tree! It's in different seasons with different amounts of water."

I like this story because what the Buddha is pointing to by telling it to his monks is that there are all these different kinds of ways that awakening can show up, and that practice shows up. The experience can look different depending on how we're practicing—of the big awakening, but also the little awakenings of awareness, too.

This morning I'm going to talk about one of these methods, which is recognizing the many different forms that mindfulness, mindful awareness, or awareness can take (I'm using those terms synonymously). This is what the Buddha calls the third foundation of mindfulness, kind of shading into the fourth. If that's not familiar to you, you don't have to track it, but it's the quality of our minds and the quality of how we relate to what's in them, basically.

Just like the "whatchamacallit" tree, awareness can show up very differently depending on the different conditions and depending on what's being observed, whether it's breath or sound or emotion. It can feel different. Old landscape painters understood this very well. You don't notice the quality of light happening in a day as much if it's just a cloudless sky, right? But if there are clouds, trees, rocks, houses, and fields, the quality of light becomes apparent through what it strikes. The same is true of awareness and what we're aware of.

Part of broadening and maturing awareness practice, mindfulness practice, is recognizing all of these different forms that awareness can take. I'm going to describe them as different experiences, but in reality, they all shade into each other. They all overlap, they're like a continuum even, and they're all good. I'm going to go through them progressively, but there's no need to rank them, because any complete moment of mindfulness is an opening and a possibility into waking up.

Broadly, in the next few minutes, I'm going to describe mindful awareness as the tree with the buds, with the leaves, with the flowers, and with the fruit. And then I'm going to talk for a few minutes about the forest.

Moment-to-moment mindfulness is like those little buds on that tree. One breath at a time, one sensation at a time. Noticing each one in its particularity as it comes up and as it goes away. Most of us begin to notice this process when we first start sitting meditation, and it can feel a little bit like labor to bring the mind back to it. We can also notice this with sensations, which broadly might be back pain for example, like a spot in my back. But when I really look closely, it's all these scintillating, little star-like sensations coming and going, and there's not actually a border around it. It's just moving in and out, coming and going.

Sometimes with moment-to-moment mindfulness, little bursts of many moments in a row will happen. This sometimes happens when sitting, right? It feels like it's going easily, flowing. That's a certain kind of momentum. There's another kind of momentum too, which you may have noticed, which is throughout your day or maybe in a sit, a little bit of awareness will just pop in without you doing anything at all. It just arises.

Another form of this simple level of mindfulness is something I call wholehearted presence or open-hearted presence. This is where everything is more of a wash. It's the completeness, it's just the sense of being present here and now. There's not any particular object of attention, rather there is just a sense of being here.

In daily life, this can manifest as tuning mindfulness when there's more going on. For example, I'm not going to try to track my breathing when I'm driving, right? I'm focused on driving. It can also mean noticing, like when I am walking with a friend, just, "Oh, here I am walking with my friend." It's being present at the very simplest level. It's also the capacity to simply be with whatever is going on. If intense emotion is arising for me, being with that. Just being with it.

There's a way of lensing in and out between these two different forms of moment-to-moment awareness. I remember I sat two long retreats, one at IMS^[3] in Massachusetts and the second one in Burma. When I got back, my awareness was attuned to all the little changes in each moment—very subtle. Well, shortly after that, I started volunteering as a hospital chaplain. I felt like I was a violin that had been thrown into a frenzied dance floor. It was just like, ahh! And it's because I hadn't yet learned to pull back, open the lens of awareness, and just take in the whole wash of what was happening. As soon as that happened, it felt quite easy. So there's this focusing in and pulling outwards.

Sometimes this simple meeting of mindfulness as it is can just be like a brightening, or perhaps like a gong striking. Just richer flavors in food, right? And moments of clarity can arise inside of this, kind of like shooting stars when we get those meteor showers. I went up to a local vihara^[4] a few years ago (this was pre-COVID) and was hanging out with some of my friends there. We were lying in this field at night looking up at the stars, and every once in a while a meteor would go by. But then, just like when mindfulness momentum builds, we started getting more and more of these, one after another, showering through. When continuity of mindfulness builds, these shooting stars can happen more and more often. And every now and then, no matter how often they happen, a bigger star might come through, a bigger meteor. Insight can happen at any minute.

So, the second level of attention. If you want to imagine the tree again, perhaps the tree is leafing out. This is the step back in awareness. There's this massive difference when there's even the slightest distinction between an experience and the knowing of it. I was walking with a dear friend recently, and she had started a mindfulness practice kind of recently, and I asked her, "What have you noticed? What's different?" And she said, "It's so huge, when I'm stressed, I can just notice that I'm stressed." Right? That distance. No longer being hooked into the story that the stress is making, but just like, "Oh, stress, okay," or "Oh, relaxation, great."

Stephen Covey has been known to describe Viktor Frankl's understanding as in this quote that he found in a library stack somewhere. Roughly it states: "Between stimulus and response is a space, and within that space there's a choice, and therein lies freedom."

One of the things that can really help make space is a sense of humor and playfulness in the practice. I used to think I was kind of cheating by doing this. On long retreats, I would sort of invent these things. So I'll tell you one. There was this one retreat where I was just really caught up in resentment about something—for the life of me I have no idea what it was anymore—but that grudge was just kind of weighing on the mind and pulling it in. Eventually, the mind made it into this little troll. Like this little squat troll with ears and hair coming out the ears, and just really hammed it up and made it silly. I imagined the troll stomping back and forth as being the grudge, and that created enough distance from the experience to be able to hold it lightly, and eventually it just went away.

Like I said, I kind of thought I was cheating about this until I heard Joseph Goldstein talk about playing Atari with his thoughts, like shooting them and letting them kind of explode and disappear. So there are all these different ways of being playful that can help create this second level of attention: the knowing we're aware, the knowing that we're in an emotional state, holding it lightly.

Then we get to the flowering of awareness. What in the Satipatthana Sutta^[5]—the four foundations for awareness, the four establishments of mindfulness—is called full awareness. It talks about how a practitioner or a monk knows when they're moving, when they're reaching, when they're eating, when they're using the bathroom, all these different daily activities. For us, maybe walking, "I know I'm walking." Reaching for the refrigerator door, "I know I'm reaching." That's at the body level. But this full awareness, this mindfulness of context, applies also to other things, like what kind of practice is helpful in this moment, for example. What's helpful now?

Then there's the awareness of conditions. This also fits into this full awareness I'm describing; in Pali, it is sampajañña^[6], of satisfying the bigger picture. So, what kind of practice is helpful when I'm driving? Maybe it's just driving, maybe it's seeing. Or having a tough day, maybe it's loving-kindness. Mindfulness of conditions is part of this as well. That could be knowing the effects of what my mind or heart is doing on my body—softening in the chest, relaxation, or a quenching in the neck, tension. But noticing the relationship between these things. Noticing our internal ecosystem, the internal system of interactions that's happening.

Then we get to sort of the tree bearing fruit, which is another level of mindfulness and full awareness. Lucid awareness as it starts to shade towards wisdom or discernment. One level of this discernment is the quality of the heart and mind at the moment, right? It can be the quality of awareness—how spacious is it, or how contracted is it? Is there distraction or concentration? Is there greed or contentment? Just as simple as that.

Sometimes, too, there's almost a spatial component to it. For some people I know, the awareness can feel close in and intimate, or it can feel like surfing the sensations of the changes in the body, and the mind can be kind of floating, or very grounded. Vast like the sky, or as tiny as a little pinhole. Sometimes it even feels like being immersed in reality, like that fish swimming through water suddenly realizing there's water there. It can even feel like being steeped, like there's no separation between inward awareness and outward.

There's another kind of discernment too, which is perhaps more helpful even, which is discernment of what's helpful and unhelpful in our minds and hearts. What's helpful is that which leads to greater benefit for ourselves and others. What's unhelpful leads to greater affliction. There are a few teachings in the ancient texts, the Pali Canon, where the Buddha talks about this. He teaches his son in one of them, and he just talks about a wise person and an unwise person. A wise person is one who acts for benefit for themselves, for others, for themselves and others, and all concerned. An unwise person builds affliction in themselves, affliction in others, affliction in both, and for all concerned.

The Buddha suggests dividing thought and meditation kind of along these lines: on one side are the afflictive thoughts, and on the other side are the beneficial thoughts. He suggests keeping very close watch when there are afflictive thoughts happening because there can be a cascade effect, right? He talks about it being like a cowherd who keeps the cows away from the neighbor's crops very carefully. There's also, when things are good, noticing that too, appreciating it, allowing it to grow, to extend.

Mindfulness in these contexts is sometimes described as a gatekeeper who is guarding a walled city. The Buddha was alive in the Bronze Age^[7], so there were more individual towns or cities with protection around them. The gatekeeper knows the way for the important messengers to go straight to the king. He also has discernment in recognizing who's coming in that the king's guards might want to keep a closer eye on, or in extreme circumstances, who's trying to enter that he shouldn't let enter at all. Our minds can be like that too. The mindfulness, the discerning quality of our minds, can just be as simple as, "Not now," or "I'm just not going to go there," right? Helpful qualities of the mind are also balanced by awareness, kind of like a charioteer keeps horses in sync. That's how it's described in the ancient teachings.

There's a quote that Jack Kornfield, I believe, has said, quoting Anne Lamott, the writer, saying, "My mind is like a bad neighborhood, I try not to go there alone." These helpful qualities of mind are sometimes considered to be like seven friends. There is a poem based on the early teachings of the first ordained monastic women in the Buddhist order. This book of poems based on that is by Matty Weingast, called The First Free Women. In it, this awakened woman is saying:

I was forever getting lost until one day the Buddha told me
to walk this path, you will need seven friends:
mindfulness, curiosity, courage, joy, stillness, calm, and perspective.

For many years these friends and I have traveled together,
sometimes wandering in circles, sometimes taking a long way around.

Oh, my heart, you don't have to go it alone.
Train yourself to train just a little more gently.

Those seven friends are the Seven Factors of Awakening^[8]. That translation is a little bit different than the normal one. So, gentle attention helps in recognizing all these different forms of awareness.

There's another broadening of this sati sampajañña, this full awareness, which is to notice the forest around the tree. Venerable Anālayo^[9] highlights how important it is to balance internal awareness, which we talk about a lot here, with external awareness. Awareness of other people, living beings, or life forms. Awareness of our environment. He says one of the reasons it's so important to balance internal and external is that there can be an over-focus on the self, an over-self-absorption that happens. If it all becomes about my experience, that can be balanced quite beautifully if we start noticing and practicing external mindfulness of others and their experience.

So while it can be helpful to notice one thing at a time in this body—that tree that I keep mentioning—it's also helpful to have the entire surrounding ecosystem in mind. In The Hidden Life of Trees, author Peter Wohlleben^[10] talks about how trees actually communicate through their roots with each other. They send out signals; sometimes they're helped by the fungi beneath the forest floor. They send each other nutrients, warnings. They even help prop each other up quite literally when they're in this kind of symbiotic relationship.

Noticing others, being present for others is another way of building a symbiotic relationship, a mutually helpful relationship, and this kind of awareness really draws on awareness of ourselves, right? I might notice a person's posture or expression and be able to infer—with humility, with lack of certainty—a certain kind of awareness or emotional state. "Gosh, they look like they might be going through something, maybe I should check on them." Just noticing with humility, with the possibility that, "I'm seeing this, am I off here? I could be wrong." That is one way to start noticing externally.

Noticing people's body movements is a much easier way, like how they're walking, if they're walking, sitting close or far. But all of this can draw on the wisdom, the mindfulness that has been learned inside our bodies, right? And that is tracking also internal and external awareness.

Those of you who are healthcare professionals or work with people, maybe therapists, coaches, whatnot, we use this all the time: checking in with our own experience to get a sense of how to read the room. It's like a stringed instrument. When a really heavy truck drives by and the building shakes, the stringed instrument might hum in resonance, right? We're also humming in resonance with everyone around us. Our nervous systems are the instrument, our hearts are the instrument.

Noticing this provides space for something known as a non-complementary response. This means, for example, I don't have to meet anger with anger. In my day job, one of my jobs is as a hospital chaplain, and there are times where there might be a visiting family member that's very upset, really angry, or grieving. There's something so powerful about being able to be with that person and feel that resonance without getting pulled into it. It enables a sense of compassionate calm in meeting them, and it can transform things and help someone get further through their process. Or if they're upset, it can help them calm down very quickly because my instrument isn't caught in their instrument's tune. I'm aware of it, I'm responding to it, but I'm able to be with. Each of us has this capacity.

Also, times when one's impact on others maybe isn't so clear. Maybe I'm caught up in my head, or I'm busy, or I'm in a rush or something like that, and then we can notice how people are showing up in relationship to us as a mirror to our own behavior. Lily Tomlin has this famous quote^[11]: "People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel," right? We can often see it on people's faces, in their bodies, if something was a little off.

It's important to say here too that this internal and external awareness, these perceptions of other people, is also precisely where bias can come in. Our own filters. Those can distort the mirrors and they can also filter our perceptions, including what we are even able to see at all. And how we see it. Like a number of you, I sat a lot of home retreats in the last two and a half plus years of this COVID pandemic. I just remember on this one retreat, it was during an informal time between sittings, and I was walking through my apartment. The back wall of the apartment has a lot of windows on it, and one of them looks out onto a porch that my neighbor also has access to.

My eyes lit on a form on the porch, kind of brilliantly lit by the sunlight, and almost before I could perceive what it was, there was aversion. Because my mind was quiet, I could just watch the mind cascade through this story of, "Oh, my neighbor left that stuff on the porch," and then it filtered the view of the neighbor too, and it definitely filtered the view of the object. The really humbling thing about this is with the second look, the object wasn't what I thought it was at all. It was conditioned by these attitudes in my mind. They literally distorted what I saw.

There are also people who have described receiving an email when in an agitated state and being convinced it says something not good. Having the presence of mind not to respond to it, going back to it later, and realizing it actually said something different. The text was different than they read it to be. The emotional state filtered the information that much, it distorted it that much. So one benefit of starting to notice awareness is noticing when there might be a little distortion at play. "Oh, maybe I'm not in the best frame of mind to be taking this in right now. Maybe I'll set it aside, take it in later."

Internal and external awareness is where we exercise some of our most important choices. This includes what voices and sources we amplify in our own hearts and minds that allow our own hearts and minds to move in certain directions. It can also be in noticing what we say, or amplify, and move on to others. The choices we make can be the difference between cultivating trust, kindness, honesty, awareness, cultivating our cultural and relational commons, as opposed to putting agitation, anger, judgment, fear, even untruths we run across without checking. We have the power to emit things that are more wholesome versus things that cause more problems and agitation to the people we know or don't even know.

Another gatekeeper story and then I'll be done here. I don't remember if the story is in the Suttas, I think it may be sort of in the literature around the discourses. It's another gatekeeper, and this gatekeeper is a friendly sort, and people ask him all kinds of questions. So one day one group comes by and they're doing what they need to do to get in the city, and they ask him, "What are the people like here?" The gatekeeper looks at them and goes, "Well, how did you find people in the town you left?" "Oh, they were awful. Greedy, conniving, couldn't trust them. Always putting people down." He just nods and he says, "I think you'll find people like that here too."

Next group comes by a few groups later. He gets the same question, he gets this question a lot. "What are the people like here?" "Oh, they're kind, trustworthy, generous. I feel blessed to have had them as neighbors back where I left. I'm gonna miss them." "Oh, okay. I think you'll find people much like that here too," right?

What we put out has a large impact on what we receive.

So to recap, the takeaway is that awareness can take all of these different forms with different breadth, depth, and scope, all of which can be useful. Whether it's moment to moment, more of a general gestalt, a full awareness, an encompassing awareness, or a discernment. Like that kimśuka tree and all the fruits and blossoms and buds, eventually mindfulness awareness blossoms into that greater discernment and wisdom. Now, this is not a project, it's just something to keep in mind. You can trust the process. As long as awareness and mindfulness are practiced as part of the path, it will mature into discernment and wisdom.

So may we all awaken into a healthy relationship with the way things are, and to the capacity to show up in ways that make this life and the lives around us better in all different kinds of ways.

Thank you for your kind attention. We have just two or three minutes if anyone here has questions that you would like to offer. Thank you. Comments are also welcome.

Q&A

Martha: Dawn^[12], I just want to thank you for all your words and all the planning and thought that went into them, but also the way you managed things this morning. That's a very powerful teacher, so thank you.

Dawn Neal: Thank you, Martha.

Participant: I just want to point out how much I appreciate the difference between the stimulus and the stress. There's that space, and within that space, a lot of times we get caught up with the stimulus and ruminate, not knowing the space is there. That's why mindfulness is kicking in. Knowing the space creates the expansion; that's when we can have a different response. And so that really resonates with me, so thank you.

Dawn Neal: Thank you, thank you for putting it so well. I can tell you it really went in. You haven't missed it. Thanks. Anyone else? We have just a moment or two. Behind you.

Hillary: I loved the gatekeeper at the end that you were talking about, when people show up and what they show up with, the precise perspectives and perceptions that they take with them and project into their environment. It's really important to remember that and to be aware of that, you know, just to let go of those that are not beneficial. And so thank you for that, I love the story.

Dawn Neal: Thank you, Hillary. Thank you.

So thank you friends for your kind attention. May all beings benefit from our practice here together. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free. May all beings know the highest safety, freedom.

[Music]

Okay, thank you for your kind attention.