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Guided Meditation: The Broad Overview

Hello everyone, and welcome. The topic for this week is changing perspectives for awareness. So often we are aware—we might be mindful, we're aware with intention or without intention—but we never question the perspective with which we're aware, the orientation. Some people are very much aware in their head or their thinking. Some people are very somatic and aware with or through their feelings.

Without questioning, we think, "This is the way it is." When we do mindfulness practice, we can begin questioning the way that we're aware. Not so much to feel that one way is necessarily better than another all the time, but to have a range of perspectives—a range of ways of being aware—so we can know how to shift it according to what the need is. For today, I'll offer you a little guided imagery to begin this meditation, to maybe give you a sense of a perspective that's sometimes useful.

Assume a meditation posture, gently closing your eyes. Take a few deep breaths to settle in, to relax into here. Then, let your breathing be normal. Take a few moments here for a broad awareness of your posture, whatever posture you're in. Be aware of whatever is happening for you, the experience that's within the posture: emotions, thoughts, feelings, sensations. Check in with yourself the way you would if someone asked you, "How are you?"

Now, imagine the room that you're sitting in. If you're sitting indoors, or if you're outdoors, imagine the location you're in. With your eyes closed, see if you can reconstruct a bit of the location in which you're sitting: the windows, the walls, objects in the room, where the door is. In your mind's eye, either visualizing it or just recalling with your thoughts, see the different parts of this room that you're in. Imagine it as if you have a bird's-eye view of the room. Now imagine yourself sitting in the room, just the way you are, from a distance. See the room from a distance with this person in it who is meditating.

Maybe imagine you are a fly on the ceiling. What would it look like to look down upon the room and see this person there? Maybe in the room around you there is stillness. There is no movement in the room except for maybe you breathing. There is a lot of space around you. Visualize or sense the space, the distance between objects in the room and you. From this imaginary distance of looking down upon the room and you meditating, recall how you were feeling at the beginning of the meditation. What is it like to be aware of yourself from the distance of a fly on the ceiling in the context of this room, to be aware of yourself from a distance?

Are some things easier to be aware of? Are some things more difficult? Might there be, from the distance of the ceiling, less identification, less activation, or less entanglement? Just seeing everything, feeling everything, as if seeing it from a distance with lots of space around it.

Or you can imagine that you're a bird high in the sky, looking down on the building you're in. From that distance, what is it like to be aware of yourself? To be aware of the dramas of your life, the concerns and fears of your life, the stories, the events. To be aware of it all from a distance, maybe high in the sky. One person among many people on a great planet, sitting quietly, meditating.

And now, imagine that you zoom back into your room. Maybe a fly on the ceiling, heading closer in, aware of this person—that's you—sitting in the room. And now, zoom even closer in and settle into your usual way of meditating with yourself. But this time, maybe with a little bit more openness, equanimity, spaciousness, and non-involvement. Just allowing things to be quiet and simple, whatever it might be. A sense of non-entanglement, without being bothered by anything. Whatever you're feeling or thinking is just something else to be aware of, with a kind of ease or distance, as if you're aware from far away.

[Silence for meditation]

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, engage your imagination a little. Just enough to imagine that now you turn your gaze out to the world. Maybe with a bird's-eye view, gazing kindly at all the people in your life, in your neighborhood, in your town, in your province, wherever you are. See if you can gaze upon them with a gaze that's like gentle rain, bringing kindness, care, and respect. Seeing everyone as important and valuable, granting everyone their dignity.

A broad, wide gaze of kindness, care, and compassion. The broad view, the bird's-eye view, through which the heart's love can flow outwards, wishing everyone well, having goodwill for all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we have the gaze of kindness, to be kind in this world.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Locations of Awareness (2 of 5) The Broad Overview

Hello, and welcome to the second talk. This week, the topic is changing our perspectives, or locations, for how we're aware.

I'll give you a well-known Chinese story of a very skilled painter. He had a very big canvas, and on that canvas, he was painting a very realistic, life-sized tiger. He was so in there with the details of the tiger, doing it all, and then when he had more or less finished the tiger, the artist stepped back ten feet to look at this big picture and what he had done. It was so realistic he got afraid and ran away. When he was close up, the details didn't bother him, but stepping away, the full picture seemed too realistic for him. The opposite can also happen. We can be frightened by being really close up to something, and when we step back, we are no longer frightened.

I once took my son to the San Francisco Zoo, and there was this big room you would go into. In the room was a big cage with very thick, solid bars, behind which was a lion. My son was very young, so I was carrying him in there. The way it worked, you could actually get very close to the lion—I think maybe we were three feet away—looking at it. And the lion roared. These solid bars were between us and the lion, but boy, I don't know if I got afraid, but I certainly got a lot of respect for that lion! So much so that I turned around and left. From outside the big door going in, I could look back on the lion and, you know, it's just a lion in a cage, and I felt a little bit sorry for it being there. How close we are or how far away we are makes a big difference.

Learning to shift our perspectives—sometimes with the help of the imagination to get a different perspective, either being really close or far away—is important. Today, I want to emphasize being far away. Sometimes, if we're sitting with a lot of difficult emotions, like a lot of fear, we are caught in it, concerned with it, and reacting to it. It just seems like too much; it seems like we're overwhelmed by it. Sometimes that's because of the perspective from which we're being aware. It's difficult enough what's happening, but the awareness is kind of in the fear, caught in it, entangled with it, or wedded to it, right up against it. It's almost like the fear takes over the whole room because the room of awareness is so small.

With an act of imagination, we can spread and expand our awareness. Maybe imagine that we're standing ten feet away and looking at ourselves. From ten feet away, we can feel the fear, we can see the fear, we can be with the fear. We might not be able to be with the fear close in, but we can step back ten feet. I've known people whom you ask to step back—maybe onto a hillside that's 300 yards away—and look back at themselves. "Can you be with your fear from that distance?" And they say, "Oh, from that distance it's okay." Then they have a little bit more equanimity, a little more space, and less reactivity to their fear. It's a whole different thing.

The same thing applies to physical pain. Sometimes it is easier to be aware of if we look really close in—which is a topic for tomorrow—or it can be easier to be aware of if we just open up really wide and imagine that we're seeing the whole landscape, and the pain is just one little piece of it. Then we might realize how reactive we were to the pain, living right connected to it, as if it was the most important thing, a crisis that had to be dealt with. But to step back, step back, step back—take that backward step so that we have some distance and some spaciousness around the pain. The pain is still pain, but some of the intensity goes away because some of the intensity has to do with our reactivity.

Pain is a complicated phenomenon; it's not a unitary, single thing. The same thing is true with emotions; they're not unitary, single things. There's a lot that goes into the construction of pain and the construction of emotions. Some of that has to do with how close in or how far away we are, how much space or how little space we feel like we have for what we're experiencing. So find ways to open up, to be spacious, to create lots of room. One way to do that is to imagine that your inner eye, your perception, your sense, has taken a backward step, really far away, and is looking back on you in the situation.

Now, this could also be used to become dissociated and aloof from the experience, but that's not what I'm suggesting. What I'm suggesting is getting this bird's-eye view of what's happening with you. Step back enough so that you can have some non-reactivity in the awareness, so you can be less entangled with or reactive to it. Then you can start seeing it more clearly. You might be able to see not only what's happening—the emotion, the pain, or whatever—but you might also be able to start working on understanding your relationship to it all, the reactivity itself.

One of the first times I had an "aha" moment around this kind of shifting of perspective was when I was in college. I was on the balcony looking back through the window at some friends talking in the living room of our apartment. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but they were expressing themselves quite vigorously with their hands. I think they were having a good time, but they were quite animated with their bodies. I gazed at them without being able to hear what they said, and I could feel how I was marveling at their communication, appreciating them in a different way. Maybe it was a nicer way than if I had been involved with the conversation, knowing what they said and thinking about what they said. That distance made a difference. It changed the perspective, and it wasn't that it was a better perspective, it was just different; it was nice to have that difference.

I've also been in groups of people that have been having a lot of difficulty, arguing and talking hotly. For some reason, I had to step away. When I came back, I stood from a distance, watching the group talking in their upset way, and I didn't feel like I was in the upset anymore. I could just watch it. I could watch it with kindness and compassion, take it in, and get a bigger picture of what was going on: "Oh, I see what's happening here. So-and-so is like this, so-and-so is like that, and it looks like they're missing each other." I got a much more useful perspective than if I had been in the fray itself.

In your meditation, this can be done as well. You might be in the middle of the fray. You might be preoccupied with thoughts and stories, what happened earlier today, or planning for tomorrow. The emotions might be quite strong and difficult. If you just show up for your experience with your usual attention, that might not be the right attention for you to have balance as you're with it. You might be too close; it might be too claustrophobic, too tight, with not enough space. So, learn how to step back. The backward step creates space. Rest back with awareness to make a bigger awareness for the situation, imagining that you're far away, looking down on yourself. Then, maybe, you will be able to see what's going on in a clearer, more peaceful way, less identified with it.

I think this intensive identification—where we have a sense that "I am the fear," "I am the story," "I am the experience"—tends to make our lives narrow and tight. Stepping back wide enough so that we don't feel like we are these different things can be really helpful in meditation. Of course, it's possible to do that and then become dissociated, to be aversive and so far removed from experience that you might feel a little bit calm, but in a way that is disconnected from the experience. It's not a crime to do that; it's okay, and it might have its function as well. But the idea is to find the place of being clearly aware of what's happening in the present moment, and being able to do so with some degree of equanimity, some degree of non-reactivity.

One of the tools for this is to get the bird's-eye view, to get a different perspective. How far back or how far away you need to be varies from situation to situation. Sometimes you need a lot of distance, like being up on a mountain. In doing so, you're enacting a little bit of what the meaning of equanimity is. The Pali word for equanimity is upekkhā^[1], and it means something like having a higher view, an overview, looking from above. The Buddha actually used that metaphor sometimes: standing on a hill, looking down at the hustle and bustle of the town. From the hillside, we're not in the hustle and bustle; it is peaceful. To cultivate equanimity, non-entanglement, and non-reactivity, one way is to imagine stepping away, stepping back, and getting distance.

You might try this today in your life. It could be some simple things. If you're in a room with people—and if it's not impolite or awkward to do so—you might sit further away from people than you normally would and see what it's like to have that more distant view, as opposed to being right in the middle of it. If you're one-on-one with someone, without them thinking you're pulling away, you might physically sit a little bit differently so you have a little more distance, and see if that distance creates more non-reactivity and space.

If you're really caught up in some preoccupation, maybe go out into an open field or a wide park where you get help with your awareness expanding and becoming much more broad and open. That way, it's easier to feel that there's more space and distance from the entanglement, the caught-upness with what's going on. Find ways of changing the perspective, and for today, practice the perspective of having a bird's-eye view, that large view of the situation. See how that helps you, and also see how it begins helping you understand that you have a choice in the perspective you use when being mindful. For some people, it never occurs to them that they have a choice. They're mindful, but they're just mindful in the same way every time. And maybe that same way is not the best medicine for some situations we're in.

Thank you very much, and may your capacity for awareness bring you much delight.