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Guided Meditation: Deconstructing Sensory Experience

Welcome, folks. Good morning to most of you again, afternoon to some—maybe Thailand in there too. So, welcome to you wherever you are.

There's always a little bit of a dilemma for me about how precise or impressionistic to be in giving instructions. I feel like I almost always err on the side of the impressionistic kind of element, of just dropping Dharma thoughts into the mind that catalyze a certain kind of view. But there is a place for precision and attentional direction, and we can do that, I feel, without incarnating a meditator self that is cramped. It's tricky, but we can do it.

So anyway, I thought today it would be a little more technique-y and share something that's been meaningful for me from my teacher, Shinzen Young^[1]. His technique is always evolving, and so I don't even know if I'm representing it appropriately as he kind of tweaks and develops it, but the core of it is discriminating between three core sensory events: namely, visual thinking, auditory thinking, and affect in the body.

With visual thinking, my eyes are closed, but I've got the computer screen, the room, the outline of my body. No simpler, no more complex than that.

Then there are words in our own mind: auditory thinking. We can actually sense a kind of spatial location to thinking. If I told you to say your name silently in your own head, you would actually hear it somewhere. It wouldn't actually be happening there, but there would be almost this sense of it happening in a place. I don't know if it's echolocation or something, but it almost holographically arises in a place, usually in the head between the ears, somewhere like that.

And then there is affect in the body: emotionally charged sensations. This is different from the physicality of, okay, I'm tapping on my chest. That sensation is quite different from the sensation I would feel at the same place if I suddenly heard a loud noise and was startled. I'd feel a jolt of sensation, but it would be emotional in nature, responsive in nature. It's a kind of essentially wordless surveying of threat and opportunity, moment by moment, very foundational to the animal body.

So there's seeing, there's hearing, there's feeling. And we begin to discriminate between those three sensory events, paying attention to their arising and passing. There's really no distress if we have a mindful relationship with those three sensory gates. There's not really much place for distress to arise outside of them. So the panic, the dissatisfaction, the longing, the suffering has to have its fingerprint here, and we bring our open heart to it.

This is Zia's phone, so let's sit together.

Guided Meditation

Relaxing everything that can be relaxed.

The spine extending to the heavens, the rest of the body just hanging loosely from that central column.

And we practice surrendering. Surrendering to imperfection. Surrendering our willfulness. Surrendering the subtle violence of self-improvement. Vinnie Ferraro^[2] says, "There's not much time left. Time to let go."

And so for a minute, just sensitizing to the visual aspect of thinking behind the closed eyes, against the kind of blank mental screen. Images, memory. Maybe an image of my face, even if your eyes are closed. An image of the outline of your body or the room. Sometimes the images are photographic, but often melting and morphing.

And when we direct attention, for example, to our breathing or our body generally, it's often aided by a subtle visual thinking. It's bound up with proprioception. Imaging our body-world, moment by moment.

The mental note is very simple: seeing. And if, upon noticing or noting visual thinking, it melts away, we notice the blankness or the tranquility that replaces it.

Now putting that down and bringing attention to auditory thinking. Normally we just call that thinking: the words, the sentences, the phrases, the voice-over, the narrator. This constellates in this auditory thinking world. And our default is to endow our auditory thinking with incredible trust. Every thought pinging or being—every thought subtly or dramatically adjusting the parameters of our body-mind.

But now, rather than obeying the voice in our head as if it were God, we just listen to it as the voice in our head. And so we very vividly examine the drama and melodrama of identification. The ways we incarnate in a thought and become identified, take birth as a protagonist. From within a thought, we lose all sense of attentional autonomy. Then we wake up, the sentence ends, the paragraph ends, and we're reborn as a meditator.

The mental note is simple: hearing. And if, in making the note or a sentence coming to an end, there's just silence, we listen to the silence.

And then lastly, feeling. Just attuning to emotional circuits in your body, the building blocks of motivation, urgency, affirming, and objecting. Sometimes we know what's arising, or it's easy to give a name to the feeling, to the affect arising. Sometimes it's just a vague something, a state of arousal, a state of pleasant or unpleasant. Sometimes it's happening in one part of our body, sometimes more broadly. Sometimes intense, but sometimes subtle. And subtle is significant. Shinzen would always say the note is feeling.

And so now we can practice opening to all three sensory experiences. Not necessarily at the same time, but the attention may be drawn to visual thinking, to auditory thinking, to feeling in the body—body sensations charged with emotion. And of course, more than one may be arising at the same time, but we just choose one to focus on. It doesn't matter which. Maybe we stay with that arising for a few seconds. Maybe it vanishes before that; we just notice it's gone.

Maybe you use the mental notes. It could just be as simple as see, hear, or feel.

Sometimes I'll simply cycle through these three sensory spheres. Just checking in with seeing for a few moments. Hearing. Feeling. And then around again. And pouring mindfulness, equanimity, into each moment. The tangle of 'I am-ness' begins to untangle.

Reflections

Okay, it's good to sit with you.

So, Rumi^[3]:

If you bake bread with the wheat that grows on my grave, you'll become drunk with joy, and even the oven will recite ecstatic poems. If you come to pay your respects, even my gravestone will invite you to dance, so don't come without your drum.

I want to die that way.

If anicca^[4] doesn't soften us, it'll break our heart. When we don't meet anicca with wisdom, the default tendency will be to cling more tightly, to double down on fulfilling this craving or that craving. And it might work a tiny bit, but it doesn't really work.

So what does it mean to meet anicca with wisdom? I think it can look a lot of ways. Sometimes it's a very cooled-out state, very equanimous. There is this sense of death being huge, and it also being not a big deal. Let us not be grandiose, right? Sometimes, especially when I see animal suffering—I know we're different from ants or something—but this huge quality of death feels largely a testament to my grandiosity and my enormous ego. I do sometimes think of myself as a kind of overgrown, intelligent insect with an enormous ego, basically. Okay, I may not be grandiose. The utter naturalness of birth and death drains some of the melodrama.

And sometimes wisdom meeting anicca looks like gratitude. Amy Krouse Rosenthal^[5], a writer, after a very serious diagnosis, said:

When I'm feeling dreary, annoyed, generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful, or mundane. Oh, there's a light switch! I haven't seen a light switch in so long. I didn't realize how much I missed light switches. Oh, and look, the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked. Hello cracks, let me get a good look at you. And there's my neighbor standing there fantastically alive, still punctuating her sentences with 'you know what I'm saying?' Why did that bother me? It's so endearing.

It's easy to acclimatize to goodness, and we want to wake up to it.

Sometimes wisdom meeting anicca looks like grieving. Classically, grieving is sort of clustered with the afflictive emotions, in the same category as anger or something like this. But I elevate grieving in a way. At least certain species of it do not feel in any way afflictive. It's very hard for me to imagine ourselves as moral creatures capable of causing harm, capable of rippling love—very hard for me to conceive of how we can look at the carnival of greed, hatred, and delusion^[6] and not feel some grief. We all have our archetypes and our visions of freedom or what we aspire to, and it's not shared by all by any stretch, but for me, I do want my Buddha to grieve. That elevated response to the poignancy of the human condition.

So on this last day, considering the counsel of mortality, it's about grief and love. The real redemption of mortality is more love. More love, deeper, wider. And how is grief redeemed? In this realm of loss, how is grief redeemed? I don't know, I'm sure we all have our own answers, but to my mind, it's art and love. These are the redemptions of grief.

Norman Fischer^[7] says:

When someone you love is gone, that person can't do anything anymore. This means you have to do something, or you have to do something differently. Somehow you were connected to that person. You have to do what they can no longer do. You have to ask yourself: now that this has happened, what will I do? What will I do in place of my friend?

There is always something to be done. When we stop creating the unnecessary suffering, we can notice all the real suffering around us. The fake, unnecessary suffering is actually distracting us, protecting us in a way from the real suffering around us. The real suffering is much more intractable, it's horribly painful, but it connects us to everyone else in the world. And so in that sense, the real suffering is okay.

We become numb and isolated because we want to avoid the suffering, but it's the numbness and isolation that feel the worst. When we break through the unnecessary suffering and connect with others, it's hard, it's painful, but it's also better. When we open to the real pain of caring for others, we do feel better.

What will I do in place of my friend? That is a very worthy question.

So much of anxiety is sometimes described as the intolerance of uncertainty. So much of our anxiety is about not knowing. The agitation that arises out of not knowing, out of uncertainty. But we already actually do know how the story ends: everything changes. And so the kind of anxiety and frenzy and numbness, that can be drained out. And it's just a kind of heartfelt connection to the human condition. And for sure it's hard, it's painful—we call that grief—but it's also better. So much better. A lot of room for love.

So I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what is useful or what feels native to your own heart, and leave the rest behind. We all have to find our way.

So thank you. Thank you all, thanks for your practice. And thank you to the AudioDharma YouTube editing crew: Kevin, Julie, Dan, and Job, much appreciation. So I'll sign off here and wish you all well.