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Guided Meditation: Resting in Subjective Experience

Greetings from Redwood City Insight Meditation Center. I'm happy to be here. Normally on a Sunday, the room would be full of people. And it's now after maybe nine weeks or so, eight, nine weeks of doing this teaching like this, I feel the room is still full, that there's many people who are part of this and connected. And it's quite a wonderful feeling to feel that we're sharing the practice in a close way together, while we're far away at the same time.

So as we begin this meditation, I want to mention that one of the reflections I've been doing is that the word insight is often used for the kind of meditation we do: Insight Meditation. And I like the word and the idea right now I'm thinking about. It's the inner sight, the sight inward, the ability to see what's happening. And it's really the foundation, and the refuge for this practice can be our subjective experience. Subjective experience is always in the present moment, is what we're experiencing. Maybe it's almost worth saying subjective experiencing, so we don't linger with thoughts about what we experienced, but in them. It's really to have this in sight, to inspect what is here from the inside out.

And so this connection with the body, feeling the body from the inside out, feeling the feeling tones of sensations as they come into play from the inside out, feeling our emotions and moods and mind states from the inside out subjectively, means to not get caught up in the reasons why we feel the way we do, but really just have this insight, this ability to really see it clearly. And then the same thing with the mind, and how the mind functions, and its thoughts and its desires: to have insight, to see into it, to feel it as present moment subjective experience.

So take a meditation posture, and gently close your eyes. Begin this process of turning inwards, or awakening the inner sensitivity to our subjective experience. You might rock back and forth a little bit, and sway, and maybe rotate your body around and just kind of feel your body moving, and then gently slow it down. And as you come to stillness, feel the weight on your sitting bones if you're sitting, so you feel your weight balanced on your sitting bones.

Feel your torso from the inside out, maybe by feeling your spine. Let your attention move up, vertebra by vertebra by vertebra, up your spine from the base, and making ever so small adjustments so that the vertebrae sit more balanced on each other. Maybe there's even a sense of the vertebra resting one on top of the other, maybe ever so gently bringing the spine in between your shoulder blades. Perhaps as you get to the top of the spine, opening up a little space between the last vertebra and the skull by having your head tip a little bit downwards, kind of like you're bringing your chin down a little bit towards your chest, opening the space between the last vertebra and the skull.

And again, to really begin feeling more fully the subjective experiencing, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Breathing in and feeling the expansion and lifting of the ribcage, the torso as you inhale, and the release of that as you exhale. Long exhale that allows everything to settle down, to really be released into the pull of gravity as you exhale. Exhaling into a groundedness, being grounded or rooted here.

And then letting your body, your breathing return to normal. And in your subjective experience of the moment, you might feel some places physically in the body that are active, activated, energized, tense, being held tight, contracted. For a few moments, feel that. If that's the case, as if it's completely okay to be this way, not making it a problem, but something to feel as the subjective experience of the moment. The inner sight has insight into its presence.

And if it's easy enough to release some of the holding in the body, or relax or soften, you might spend a moment here doing so. The muscles of your face, around your eyes, and your cheeks, jaws, the shoulders, perhaps in the chest, perhaps the belly. And the subjective experience can be the global experience of the humming, vibrating, energetic body. Whatever way the flow of sensations appears in your body, feeling, sensing your body from the inside. In the way that if you lower yourself into a warm pool, warm bathtub, you would feel the warmth all over your skin. Lower yourself into the bathtub of your body, to feel and sense whatever way the body is right now for you.

And then within the body, as part of the body, becoming aware of the body breathing. And not necessarily so aware from the control tower, from the distance, but an intimacy that comes with the sensing of breathing, where the sensations of breathing are known in the place where they're sensed. Sensations and sensing arise together in the body, to feel the subjective sensations sensing that goes on as you breathe.

And as you exhale, perhaps you can relax some of that holding in tension or pressure associated with thinking. The sensations that come with thinking can sometimes feel like hardness or stuckness, pressure, tightness, or a swirl of agitation. As you exhale, relax all that, relax into your breathing, having insight, having attention to the subjective experience of breathing. Allowing the awareness to receive the subjective experience.

And if anything makes it difficult for you to be with your breathing, if anything happens that pulls you away or is more compelling, let your awareness, your attention go to the subjective experiencing of what is happening now. Nothing needs to be a problem. Anything that happens is just one more thing to be aware of. If you can be aware of it as a simple subjective feeling, sensations, feel it. It's almost like you feel it with your body. What is it to be thinking from the point of view of the body? Emotions, how they're experienced in the body.

Going off in our thinking is a way of leaving behind the immediacy of our lived experience. It's a departure from resting in our subjective experience of the moment. See if your awareness, your mindfulness can have a quality of resting in the flow, the unfolding of present moment subjective experience.

And then in the last few minutes of this sitting, see again if you can rest in your subjective experience, even if you're just imagining what it might be like to settle into your body, to the place where subjective experience is most physically sensitive. A physical sensitivity. Not subjective in the sense that it's what I think about what's going on or what it's like for me, but deeper than me, myself, and mine, to the immediacy of the sensations. What is the aliveness within? In the deep subjective experience of the body sensing and feeling and resting in the depth of the body's sensitivity, might also be the place where love, compassion, care, kindness arises almost on its own. Almost as if a deep subjective sensing of life, deeper than our resentments and angers and griefs, preoccupations. But deep down inside, a place of sensitivity where love arises. Kindness, care, compassion.

And a deep connection to subjective experience is needed for the full flowering of our capacity to love. And you might consider as we come to the end of the sitting, how your own capacity to connect to kindness, to feel compassion, or sense of care, the inner sense, feelings of friendliness and love—how you can bring that into your daily life now. You can live from that, expressing that in some of the specific things you'll be doing in the next 24 hours. Perhaps certain conversations, or certain things that you do, certain places you go to. Think ahead, to plan ahead, to intend ahead. Have the intention that whatever way that you've benefited from this sitting today, whatever way this has connected you to something valuable about how to be, even if it's just a hint, perhaps you can plan ahead to find a way for that to live and be expressed, so that how you live over the next 24 hours benefits others.

May it be that this meditation practice we do always is for the benefit of ourselves, the benefit of others, and the benefit for the whole world.