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Guided Meditation: Relaxing

Hello on this Monday morning, welcome. This week we'll continue this series that is more based on the introduction to mindfulness course that I teach. I will add something which on occasion I've added to the intro to meditation course as one of the foundations of mindfulness, one of the basic areas. It can be called mindfulness of mind, or mindfulness of attitude. I'll talk more about that during the dharma talk at the end of the sitting.

But I would like to again use an analogy for the practice this morning. If your technology, your computer or something, is not working properly, and you need to have it work or it's important for you that it works, it's possible to get tense trying to figure everything out and trying to make it work. The less it works, the more you can't succeed, the more tense it is perhaps. Then you start feeling kind of lousy, feeling tense, kind of miserable and headachy. One strategy at that point is to blame the technology for how you're feeling and maybe then storm off to a repair shop, or put the technology in the wastebasket and go buy a new one. But you blame the technology for how lousy you feel.

Another strategy is to appreciate that the tension that's building up in the shoulders, the back, the eyes, the neck, is not inherent in the technology, but in the relationship we have to it. Whereas maybe we can't solve the technology problem, we have a lot of capacity to solve the tension problem. So if we're blinded by the technology and trying to solve it or fix it, or focusing on how bad it is, we might not notice the tension. We might even blame the technology for how we're feeling. But the pathway of suffering goes through our reactivity, our relationship, how we respond to something.

That's where meditation sits. It sits there where we are relating, responding, reacting to what's happening. If we notice, "Oh, the tension. There's physical tension here," the tension is not in the technology. It's not somewhere else. It's just here in my shoulders, my jaws, and my eyes. Then we can take a moment maybe to close our eyes, take a deep breath, and relax and soften. We can take responsibility for how we're feeling the tension. The technology, the computer, is not going to take responsibility for that. The only person who can do that is yourself.

So part of meditation is to place ourselves, or stay close to that place, that location where we can take responsibility for our reaction, our response. And not have the reaction, the response, the tension, somehow color what we're thinking about, what we're focusing on. Even if that is the meditation itself—it's possible to get tense over how meditation is going.

So this morning is about relaxing. It's a very profound topic. It can seem superficial. So, assuming a meditation posture, gently closing your eyes, maybe rocking back and forth a little bit, forward and backwards, side to side. It is partly a ritual of embodiment. With the rocking, you feel your body a little bit more in certain places. Perhaps a little beginning of relaxing, and also helping you find center, where your sitting bones are centered, where you're lined up, your weight is balanced.

Continuing the process of embodiment, take a few long, slow, deep breaths, and use that time to feel the body. The wide, global awareness of body as you breathe in and as you breathe out.

And letting your breathing return to normal. As you inhale, feel some part of your body where there's likely to be tension. If there is, then on the exhale, relax that part of your body. Relax in a relaxed way.

Breathing in, breathing out. Relaxing, softening, releasing.

And then settling into your breathing. Just feeling the inhales, the exhales. With a feather touch, very lightly, very gently, without any ambition. As you breathe, gently relax the exhales. Gently relax around the inhales. Almost like you're softening, relaxing around the edges of where your body feels itself breathing.

And if anything takes you away from your breathing—thoughts, feelings, body sensations—see what you can relax. What will soften? And what might relax also is your attitude towards it. At every opportunity, for whatever you're aware of, gently feel your way into what can be softened and relaxed. Feel your way to where the tension is, and relax in a relaxed way. Relaxed about not being able to, just holding the tension.

And if there's no tension, no pressure or tightness, return to the breathing. Breathing gently, softly.

What can be relaxed as you're sitting here? In the face, chest, belly? In the mind? The hands, the thighs? What can be relaxed and softened?

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, see if you can relax some more. What can soften in you? What can be released? What are you tightening around? What are you holding on to that, for a few moments here, you can put down, let go of?

And then, to stay as relaxed as you can, turn your attention now to the world of people around you that you might encounter today. Notice if any tension returns. And if it does, can you relax again? In particular, relaxing the heart. From your heart, wish others well. Wish their day well, their life. A few moments of well-wishing continues the practice of relaxing, opening, removing barriers to our care and our attention to others.

As we go through the day, may we keep these wishes close by:

May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free.

And may I avoid getting tense. And if I do, let me relax.

With those wishes close by for this day, may your day go well.

Dharmette: Mindfulness of Mind (1 of 5) Responsible for Tension

Thank you. So then I'll start over again.

Today we start the week on mindfulness of the mind. It's a continuation of these last four weeks where we explored the basic instructions for mindfulness meditation that we teach here at IMC^[1]. Kind of exploring the territory. The first week was mindfulness of breathing, then mindfulness of body, then emotions, and thoughts.

With each of those areas, it's easy to get focused on those things. We're breathing and we're focusing on the breathing, and the breathing seems like what's most important. Or if there's pain, especially, we're focused on the pain in the body, and that seems the most important. Or for emotions, the emotion seems really central, key, juicy. So the attention is focusing on the emotion or on thinking, whatever it might be. That's part of what mindfulness is. But in doing so, what's also important is the focus itself, the attention that's brought. How are we with the attention? What attitude comes with the attention?

It's a little bit like driving a car where the windshield has been cleaned. Maybe you go on a long road trip on the freeway, and ever so slowly the windshield gets dirty. It happens very slowly, and you don't see it building up. After a while, you don't really realize that you're straining to look out the windshield and it's a little hard. Then maybe you stop to get gas, and you clean your windshield. Lo and behold, wow, is it clear again! You realize that some of the tension that was building up was the difficulty of seeing, but you hadn't realized it was difficult. It happens to me sometimes with my glasses when I wear them, that they get dirty without me knowing it. I don't really notice sometimes that things aren't quite right with trying to see because the focus is so much on driving, and being safe with other cars. We don't notice the seeing itself and how that's changed.

So the art of this is to be able to step back, or turn the attention around 180 degrees, and notice the quality of the attention we're bringing, the quality of how we practice. There are always two things—I like to say there's only two things: there's what's happening, and our relationship to what's happening. So here we're going into the domain of how we're relating to whatever is happening, whether it's within us or around us. And starting to notice—because today is the day we focus on relaxation—are we tense? Are we contracted? Are we tight? Are we pushing? Are we forceful? Are we resisting in a tense way?

It's easy to justify that tension and tightness because there are challenges the world brings. It's easy to see the problems out there, the problems with that thing that I'm focusing on, and we have to fix that or do something with it, or get away from it. Not noticing that there is this tension that's building up, and not wanting maybe even to take responsibility for that tension.

When we do mindfulness practice, when we're focusing on the dharma^[2], the way that we relate to what's happening is crucial, essential. The attitude we have, the reaction we have to it, the way in which we bring attention to bear on whatever we're doing—that is really part of the pathway of suffering. And it's a part of the pathway where we can take the most regular and ongoing responsibility, or make the biggest difference.

Maybe it would be a little bit like—I'll say it this way: if someone's angry with you, on a scale of one to ten it's not a ten, maybe it's a five or four, but still what they're angry about seems to you not right. So you get upset. And part of being upset is being tense.

Now, the person who is angry, you could perhaps ask them politely to stop being angry. You could perhaps insist that they have to stop. Or you walk away. Or you could ask them, "Let's talk about it." Or you could shake them upside down and try to shake the anger out of them. All kinds of options you have. Sometimes most of those might work. But sometimes they don't. And so then the irritation, the frustration can build, and the tension builds as well. We might say, "That person is making me tense." In some kind of way, there's a relationship between that person's anger and the tension you have. But the tension is your contribution to the situation.

That anger goes into your mind. Maybe you have associations to what anger is: a frightening thing. Or maybe before, there's been an injustice to you, and here the person's getting angry and it reminds you of all the injustices you've had to suffer. Or maybe there's fear, and the person's anger happens to remind you of an angry bully when you were young. So all these reasons why the tension and the reactivity might arise, but that belongs to our inner world, our inner life. Our preferences, our experience, our memories, our judgments, our desire to protect ourselves—all these things come into play.

There are pathways. A loud, angry voice comes to us. We receive it, we hear it. We process it, and we feel afraid. We tense a certain way. We process it and feel angry in return, and it tenses up in a different way. That's the pathway, and then we react and maybe we get angry back or we say something. But if we can sit in that place where there's a choice whether to be relaxed or tense, whether to go with the tension or allow it, or to relax, then we're getting close to where the dharma is. We're focusing on our contribution to our suffering.

That is one of the key things that mindfulness practice can do, or the dharma does. We're very keen to take responsibility for our own contribution to whatever is difficult. It doesn't deny that things need to be changed or fixed in the world. But at least we can always look at what our contribution is to our suffering. The place that I'd like to recommend today is how you've become tense, how you've gotten contracted, tight, pulled in. The ways in which you feel that compulsion to push and to do, and we're kind of restless.

Maybe that can be relaxed and softened. The real world issues are not denied^[3] if there are real world issues, but relax so that we can come to them with the most wisdom and the most care, from the best place that we know. The more tense we become, most people don't respond with a lot of wisdom, don't respond with a lot of care, and sometimes respond in ways that are actually detrimental.

There's a lot of unconscious justification for being tense. There's a lot of justification or feeling that the blame is in the other person or the situation. That keeps the focus out there. In mindfulness of the mind, we're turning the attention back to see what is happening in our attitude, our relationship with ourselves. We train ourselves to do that. Keep looking there and see where the tension is, and then relax.

To be given the instructions to relax might seem superficial, not very profound, not very spiritually ultimate or valuable. But relax is a simplistic way of referring to the deep letting go, the deep opening up that Buddhist spirituality moves towards. Relaxing is part and parcel of this movement towards deep freedom. To take seriously the way we become tense brings us into the territory where we contribute to our suffering, and where we can contribute to our freedom from our suffering.

So don't overlook your tension. Don't justify being tense. Maybe occasionally it's okay. But the opportunity in this practice is to turn around, take an honest look at it, and see what can relax. Then once you're kind of relaxed, then you can turn your attention around again to what needs to be addressed.

May the bliss of relaxation, the blessings of relaxation, be something that you study and work with today as you go through the day. It's not a simplistic thing. It has deep roots in so many profound areas of our life. Hopefully you'll enjoy it. May your shoulders, your belly, your face, your eyes, your hands, your heart, and your mind find more relaxation today. Thank you.