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Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation with Tanya Wiser and Kodo Conlin: Class 2 Body - Tanya Wiser, Kodo Conlin

Introduction and Q&A

Kodo Conlin: Burmese style. And if I could make a suggestion from here, I would suggest maybe two things.

Student: Oh yeah, go right ahead.

Kodo Conlin: One is you may end up needing that support cushion to support your right knee, but actually the first thing I would suggest you try is to bring your body forward on the cushion so that you're sitting on the front half, the front third of the zafu^[1]. If your right leg's falling asleep, it may mean that some circulation is getting cut off here.

Student: Yeah, because if I lean back far enough, I can feel the blood just... yeah.

Kodo Conlin: Then I think what you need to do is experiment with a way to sit that's going to free that vein, that artery, so it can flow. It may take tiny adjustments, and that will be enough. If that didn't work, or if your knee is floating—which now that you've moved forward it seems to be down—the wedge would be to put underneath the knee. You don't need it though.

Student: Yeah, it doesn't. And then what I have noticed helps, and I know you mentioned this last week that it's probably not so good, but if I just go like that... sure.

Kodo Conlin: What is that? What effect does that have for you? Oh yeah, what you're sitting in now I know is quarter lotus^[2], and that's a great posture if it works for you. It can be a little hard for folks who are sitting sort of early in their practice. It's hard for me to do now because it puts a little extra torque on the knee and on the ankle.

One other thing I might suggest that's not a change that you have right here: do you alternate which leg is forward between sittings?

Student: Yeah.

Kodo Conlin: Yeah, that would be one thing.

Student: Thank you so much.

Kodo Conlin: You're welcome. Yeah, so this is a time for questions and comments about the practice. As we were talking about it last week, maybe something you noticed in your meditation on the breathing, maybe something you noticed in the homework of your mindfulness during daily life, or your attention to posture throughout the day.

Student: Hello, good evening Kodo and Tanya. I really liked what you said about setting an intention first, or sometimes prior to the 20-minute sit. At least for me, it was two 10-minute sessions from the Calm app that I wanted to follow. So I was just like, "Okay, let me at least focus on the breath." I focused on the breath, and then after the session, I reflected on how it went, and it was pretty good. I think doing the 20-minute meditations, mostly guided, has been very helpful for me. I did try to do a 10-minute meditation without anything, and it was kind of difficult just for focus and stuff. Thank you.

Tanya Wiser: That's great. I usually tell people, 20 minutes is the goal. If you can't do 20, do 15. If you can't do 15, do 10. If you can't do 10, do five. If you can't do five, do two. Breaking it up if you need to break it up works. So good for you. And maybe if 10 minutes was too long to do without guidance, try five unguided. And if that's too long, you know, back it up, but find how long you can do an unguided for, and practice every time. Maybe experimenting before you do your guided sits, or after. Try practicing with wherever you're at, whatever makes sense to work on the breath or the body this week to build up your capacity bit by bit.

Kodo Conlin: Great, so when we're talking into the microphone, we want everyone on YouTube to hear you, and everybody on the recordings who listen for posterity's sake. So speaking into the mic is great. Thank you. Anyone else have any reflections from their practice or questions? Or if someone from YouTube has any comment or question, we can address that too.

Student: Hi. I wanted to talk about laying down. I know you mentioned last week that there was a little bit of time where you practiced laying down. Sometimes I feel like my body just really, really wants to, so what are the pros and cons and benefits?

Kodo Conlin: Yeah, sure. Have you had a chance to try it out yet? Laying down?

Student: No, but last week during class, I was really uncomfortable but didn't want to lay down, you know.

Kodo Conlin: Yeah, maybe talk about the pros and cons, and then we can move in a little bit. The practice of mindfulness, as Tanya was just pointing to, meets us where we are, and that includes all bodies. Sometimes, say, an injured body, for example, is better served lying down than it is sitting up. The downside to lying down meditation is probably exactly what you would imagine: it's easy to fall asleep. Very easy to fall asleep.

So a trick or a tool that I learned from Andrea Fella, one of the teachers here, when she does lying down meditation—so imagine me flat on the back—she does it with an arm straight up like this. That way when she falls asleep, she knows it, and it wakes her up. Holding the two hands straight up like this, elbows resting on the ground, takes just enough energy to keep you up until it doesn't, and then you wake up.

So there's always a measure of discernment. If it's sort of everyday variety discomfort that's motivating me to lie down, then I try for a little bit longer to stay up. If it's actually an injury that I'm trying to meet and serve, then I'm more motivated to lie down more quickly.

Maybe time for one more, and then we'll go to the next thing.

Tanya Wiser: I'm just curious if you could just raise your hand if you practiced this week? Fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you. Nice work. Nice work.

Kodo Conlin: Yeah, wonderful to be on the path together. I think that was probably a good time moving to a little bit more formally at the beginning of our session here tonight.

Dharma Talk

Kodo Conlin: So there's a teaching by Bhikkhu Bodhi^[3], who's a translator, scholar, and practitioner. Really good news for all of us for this path, just two things you need: you need to start, and you need to continue. Last week we started, and today we have continued, so we have everything we need. Everything we need.

We started this sequential unfolding of the practices of mindfulness meditation, presenting them in a sequence as we do here. Beginning first with the breath, mindfulness of the breathing, centering ourselves in mindfulness of the breathing. And then we'll continue today. We'll talk about the body, mindfulness of the body, expanding our awareness to include the body more deliberately in our experience and our attention.

Next week we will continue further: mindfulness with emotions, a really important part of human life. Often a sort of challenging or vexing, curious-making part of the practice. How do I practice with emotions? We'll get into that next week. After mindfulness of emotions, we'll continue into thinking, and then in the fifth week, we will tie it all together.

Just to review a couple of the key points from last week, this practice of mindfulness has everything to do with the skillful use of attention. Nothing more mysterious than developing our capacity to pay attention in the present moment. There's a way that what we're doing here unifies the mind and the body in the here and now, this present moment experience.

If we are daydreaming about, say, dinner tonight or something in our work tomorrow, our body is here. Our body hasn't gone anywhere; it's right here in the present. But our mind has left the premises. Our attention has left the premises for now. So in the practice, we're just practicing again and again, bringing attention back so that the mind and the body can both be here together.

Last time, in addition to talking some about attention, we covered some of the key points of posture. Of course, one of the most important points is the alert, upright spine that's well supported. If you're seated either in a chair or on the ground, well supported either by the balance from your seat to your knees or your seat and, if you're in a chair, down the legs into your flat feet, if it's okay for your body. Sitting with the back free and independent, a long, balanced spine, so that the body can relax and loosen around the spine.

So along with attention and along with posture, it was mindfulness of breathing. So important. I love this metaphor of the human being as concentric circles, and the center of the circle we can think of as the breathing. Center ourselves on the breathing, and the other aspects of our life, they're included in the circles, but they're all connected here in the center, grounded here in the center of the breathing. So we think, of course we think, but have the thinking connected to the breathing.

An important distinction we brought up last week was direct experience—this here and now, the felt sense of breathing, for example—as compared to our concept of the breathing, our idea about the breathing, or our idea of the breath. Another way to frame it: direct experience compared to our interpretations of what's happening, the comments or the layers we add on to the direct experience. And we introduced this traditional tool, this traditional helper: a very soft note^[4], a very soft label, if that's helpful for you. Maybe "in" on the in-breath, "out" on the out-breath. Very soft, just to help keep you here with the body now.

I think maybe just to highlight one more of the important principles we covered: the experience may be pleasant, it may be unpleasant. While our attention is directed to the breathing, we may experience this as pleasant or unpleasant. That is not the indication that it's going well or it's not going well. If there's attention enough, if we're attentive enough to notice just what's going on as it's going on, we're doing the practice. We're doing the practice.

So for example, if we're breathing and some sensation in our body becomes predominant, it's okay to let go of the breathing and be with that. If we're attentive, we're doing the practice.

Maybe the last thing I'll say in this journey we started last week and that we're continuing over these next several weeks: the trajectory or the arc of this whole thing is that we include more and more of our experience, such that we are learning to be more and more skillful, including everything. Every bit of us gets to show up for mindfulness practice. So I think with that, I'll hand it over to you.

Tanya Wiser: Does anybody have any concerns about my taking my mask off? No? Okay.

I think it's worth just taking... I'm kind of going to repeat some of the things Kodo said, maybe, and some new things. But one of them is I just want to kind of build back on this idea of last week. We started with attending to the breath, and we used the word "anchor." So this idea of a reference point or something that kind of holds us close to the moment, like an anchor would a boat in the water, to keep it from drifting too far away.

Last week I mentioned something about how the mind is sort of a weaver, and it weaves all of our experience, all the data that's coming in together, and incorporates past information, probably even anticipatory information. So this weaving brings all of these parts of our experience and creates sort of a more, what feels like a solidified whole or how we are seeing things. And so what we're helping ourselves do with this practice is to sort of try and pull this apart a little bit, to make ourselves a little bit more connected with the different threads of our experience. Does that make sense?

So tonight, we're adding the body. We don't need to stop being aware of the breath. The invitation is, use your anchor, if breath is your anchor. Now, if your breath is not your anchor because it doesn't work for you—because it's triggering or there's something else like sound or the body, which can be good anchors—start with your anchor. When you come into meditation, use that anchor. Put it down, drop it in, get it hooked in there. And then the invitation is to open up to noticing the body.

Now, guess what? Do you think that means that the mind is not going to offer thoughts? No. And that emotions aren't going to come up? No. So there's no expectation that your mind has to stop thinking or your heart has to stop feeling. I just want to give you permission to have your experience, but to highlight... maybe use that noting practice that we talked about with "in", "out", like, "Oh, feeling", "emotion", or "thought", just real simple. We're doing this sort of trying to loosen the pieces. So we don't need to get in there and get tangled up in the thinking or the emotions. Try to think about that when you're working with strands of a yarn, sort of how you let the pieces relax. They can all be there, and they don't have to kind of get caught up together. And if they do, just sort of gently try and give them their own room.

So we'll start with the breath, with our anchor, if it's not the breath, and then the invitation is to invite the mind to be interested in what's happening in this body. And one simple way is the whole body's breathing, really. We can just start to expand the awareness of the breath, start to notice it in many ways that maybe we don't usually notice it. We usually notice it more in the center area. Just sort of trying to create a sense of non-conflict for yourselves with what comes up, and just kind of like, "Okay." And we're going to try and be a little bit more curious tonight about the body and what's happening in the body.

As Kodo said, the body is not thinking and ruminating—he didn't use those words, but essentially, the body's in the present moment, right? It's here. It's always here. It's always in the present moment. It's our thoughts about the body that aren't. It's our memories, or our wishes, or our fears. But the body itself is such a present moment anchor, such a present moment gift.

So it's a very supportive, very foundational part of our practice. Mindfulness of the body can be quite delightful to get really centered and connected with our experiences in the body. It can also be difficult if we have pain or other things come up. So I don't mean to say it's going to be all rosy, but even connecting with what's difficult, there can be a beautiful connection to the present moment. If we have pain, sometimes it still can help us stay here in a way that feels very wholesome, nourishing, even like a break from the mental activity.

If you think about what we're doing, maybe one metaphor would be that by tuning in and feeling the sensations in the body, the body has a language, and the language is sensations. And by tuning in and feeling, we're listening. The way of listening to the body is to feel the sensations. So the body doesn't have a narrative, it doesn't ruminate and think. And so maybe a simile or a way to think about this: we're trying to bring a mind that's more simple to the experience of these sensations that are happening in the body.

A simile might be going to a sports bar. People are watching huge monitors with announcers who are play-by-play talking about what's happening on the screen. People are chatting and commenting, and there's a lot of activity around this TV screen or the sports that we're watching. Imagine no sound in that environment. No more commentators. The room gets quiet. And just watching the game unfold without all the commentaries, without the stories about the players or comments about how great this was, or how unfortunate that was. Just seeing the motion. In a way, this is what we're working to try and experience, is to be with our body and what's happening in our body without all the mental comments, all the interpretations, all the judgments, all the liking, all the not liking.

Is that a picture you can imagine? Yeah. My voice is a little soft, I think I start to put people in a little bit of a meditative space when I'm just talking. Yeah, so it's great, I'll try and just keep going with it. We'll move into the guided meditation shortly.

So maybe back to this scene or the simile of the quietness, and just sensing into... maybe seeing yourself in nature, in the sense of intimacy that one can have with your own experience when we're in a quieter, simpler space. Kind of connecting in this deep listening, which is the receptivity to the feelings and the sensations, the life. Really, it's our life energy, our life being expressed through movement, through breath.

So we're growing our capacity to be intimate and connected with our present moment experience. It has certainly felt to me like a coming home. It can feel like a coming home. Finding this familiar, comfortable, centered space. And sometimes it's a coming home to a raucous place too, like going home to a lot of things happening, but it still has that quality of coming home. That sense of really feeling embodied.

So now another simile is thinking about the body as a gateway. A gateway to the present moment, to connecting with the present moment. Sometimes it's hard when we're busy in life and our minds are racing, it's hard to find the present moment, hard to feel connected to it. And so the body is a gateway to help us find it. It might be as simple as noticing, "My heart is pounding." Yeah. And that starts to help us connect more fully, more richly.

So in the practice, we want to invite ourselves to be at ease as much as we can, and to be curious. Curious about what arises, paying particular interest to the breath and the body sensations, and maybe curious but in a, "Hey, I see you, sweet little thought, is it right here?" kind of way. So it's not pushing it away. It's not arguing with it, not saying you can't be here, but just like, "Okay, yeah, there's room here to come over here and play." We're applying a gentle but persistent energy to stay present. It's so easy to get carried out to sea by our thinking. So easy. And you will, and that's going to happen. It's not a problem. The moment you recognize it, you're already back, so there's nothing to do but notice that you're back. That's it. "Oh, I'm right here again. I'm right here, right here."

Sometimes in instructions you'll hear somebody say, "And bring your awareness back to your breathing." I don't think it's necessary to quite go that way because what we're doing is cultivating knowing, awareness. You're aware. As soon as you recognize you were thinking, you're aware, and the awareness is what we want. That's what we're building, that's what we're growing. So we can just, "Okay," like just hold and sit with the awareness, and then the breath might start to come back into a present awareness or sensation. Just sort of allowing the awareness to start to connect in that way.

And just a gentle reminder to respect your body, respect your edges. Not push too hard. If you're ending up in pain or you think you might be hurting yourself or you know you're trying too hard, try and soften up or change your posture. Respect your edges.

Guided Meditation on the Body

Tanya Wiser: All right, so let's go ahead and slide more fully into a practice. Taking a moment to find a good posture, one that supports the spine, its natural lift. Maybe moving forward on the chair, trying that out instead of leaning back. Experimenting. You can always move. It's okay to get up and get cushions or things to put... you know, I find it very helpful as well to have something right down near my lower back, just a little bit of support helps me.

And so then just sort of see... actually I have a personal preference: my personal preference is to lift my shoulders up toward the ears, kind of squeezing the ears, and then rolling the shoulder blades back toward each other and squeezing together the elbows. It opens the front chest. And then driving the shoulders and elbows down the side so we've kind of really stretched and opened the front body. And then you can just sort of rest your hands on your legs, one hand on top of the other, thumbs touching, or just palms down on your thighs or palms up. It's all good.

For me, once I do this, I notice the body wants to take a natural big breath. All of a sudden I've created a little more room in this chest for breath. So just inviting the body to take a few longer, slower, deeper breaths.

And another image for me is, you know, as I'm doing this, as I'm taking these deeper breaths, my eyes tend to naturally want to close, and they don't have to be closed, we can gently gaze a few feet in front of ourselves. But as we settle, it's almost like putting a snow globe down, and all the glitter comes to the floor of the snow globe. And the energy in the body can feel the same way as things come in, come down, come settle, come home. And then there can be more room for the breath, this anchor, or whatever your anchor is.

I'm going to just say one thing here, which is everything I'm offering is an invitation. You are welcome to change the language I offer so that it feels more comfortable for you in any way. You are welcome to disregard something I say. This is part of also respecting your edges and knowing and tuning into what's happening inside of yourself. There is no reason to deny your own truth, deny your needs. I offer guidance, and you follow in a way that works for you.

So feeling into this experience here. Breathing here.

And for purposes of kind of orienting toward the body and paying attention to the language of the body, I'll invite you to pay particular attention to your feet. Maybe getting a sense of the whole foot. Not creating a picture of the foot in your mind, or looking down or touching your foot, but feeling and sensing the feet from inside the body. So we're not the commentators in the sports game evaluating the feet, but just in that simple way, feeling feet. These feet in this moment.

And so what is the language of these feet? Sensations that might be like tingling or vibrating, buzzing, pressure, temperature. You may notice that there's parts of your feet that are cool and other parts that are warm. You may notice there's parts of your feet that feel hard and others that feel soft.

Just holding awareness of the feet in a kind and gentle way. Whatever you're feeling and sensing is okay, even if it's uncomfortable, maybe just saying, "It's okay." Just being present for whatever is being experienced.

By being with our feet in this way, we can see how it's possible to explore other areas of our body. How we might be able to feel into the body with curiosity and sensitivity to whatever is present.

So from here you can let go of attending to your feet and just allow your awareness to go back to whatever is prominent for you. The breath or the sensations. Maybe noting thinking or emotion, just kind of getting clear. And seeing if you can't find your anchor, feel into your anchor in the middle of it. Bringing the same curiosity to whatever you're sensing now.

Breathing in, and breathing out.

Maybe noticing a cool breeze on the skin or other sensation that calls your awareness to it. Providing a sense of ease, of intimacy and connection. Just this, just here. The body is a gateway to the present moment. Feeling the sensations as a way of listening deeply to our experience.

And just for fun as we come to the end, when I play the bell, see if you can feel the sound in your body.

[Bell rings]

Q&A and Reflections

Tanya Wiser: Just noticing what you're aware of now. Staying close to your experience. And we'll open this up for some comments, reflections, and questions, including from YouTube if anyone has anything. Richard will check the chat in a minute. And a reminder to use the microphone. So is anyone willing to share anything about your experience?

Student: I was able to feel my feet being warm. I'd never been able to actually get in touch with a particular body part, but somehow the way you explained it, I was able to feel it from the inside. And I always have cold feet, so it was very interesting to have warm feet.

Tanya Wiser: Maybe your feet liked being felt. [Laughter]

Student: So I felt... well, my mind was wandering quite a bit and I had to call it back a few times. So there's that.

Tanya Wiser: Thank you. How was that for you, if I may ask?

Student: Yeah, in the process you described, right? I tried to just use one word like "wandering" or "daydreaming" and then bring focus back to my breath or to feel different parts of my body, just kind of going through the whole system. So a little distracting, but overall good. Trying.

Tanya Wiser: We're doing the practice.

Student: Yes. Now that you mention the thought process that you noticed, I also remember how I always have a running narrative of what I'm thinking about. It's like, right now I'm thinking about my feet, now I'm thinking about something on my hand. So...

Tanya Wiser: Would you like to make a comment or should I go ahead?

Kodo Conlin: Sure. "Now I'm thinking about my feet, now I'm thinking about my hands." It sounds like the thinking was helping you to stay present. That's one of the bits of logic behind using a note, is that we're noting what the attention comes into contact with. It's using a thought to keep us here. Skillful use of a mind that can stay active. And then it is possible over time the body will settle down, breathing will settle down, and the thinking will, for a time, maybe slow its tempo. But we'll see. Thanks.

Student: I had what I thought was a very cool experience in that you had mentioned trying to move away from your mind's map of what you think your body looks like. And I sort of felt into some neck and shoulder pain that I have and I was just like, "I wonder what this feels like from the inside." And it was so different than the shape of anything. It was sort of weird and felt almost like symbolic, if that makes sense. But I just thought that was cool.

Kodo Conlin: Thank you. We're going to touch more on that shortly when we talk about pain, but isn't it fascinating how the sensations we're presenting, maybe in a shape or a form or a texture or something, it was different than your idea of the neck and shoulders? Yeah. Thank you for that observation.

Student: Okay, so I have a question that's kind of difficult and I hesitate to ask it, but... so I have a rare pain disorder where if I focus on it, it becomes a feedback loop and gets magnified. So if maybe in our pain discussion you have any ideas about how to break a feedback loop of pain perception, I don't know, it's a difficult one. So that's a big question.

Kodo Conlin: So it is. I think we would be really well served, why don't we spend a few minutes together at the end of the session? Something I can say now is... and I'm actually going to say exactly this: the experience of pain, as you all know, is composed both of nerve information and the recognition up here where the recognition happens, "Oh, this is danger." And there's a way it sort of gets stuck. It can get stuck in itself. When I was working with this injury, there came a time where I ended up actually talking with my pain and saying something like, "Oh, thank you for the information. I'm safe, you've done your work, and we're safe here now." And actually having that conversation sort of let the pain know it had done its job and somehow for me helped undermine the loop. But we can connect more.

Student: Yeah, thank you for reminding me that because that's exactly what my pain psychologist says for two different points, so I don't know why it didn't occur to me. So yeah.

Kodo Conlin: Maybe one last thing about that, I realized I went straight to process and the first thing is like, that's really difficult. I'm recognizing it. It can be really challenging to work with consistent pain. So thank you. Thank you for the practice you're doing.

Student: So I have a chronic illness and fatigue is a significant part of that. So I actually dozed off during that meditation and I noticed that I did that earlier in the week as well when it was later in the day. And so I'm not sure sort of how to work with that knowing that that's probably going to be a challenge for me. So any comments or thoughts you have about that would be great.

Tanya Wiser: Maybe I'll just say something and then you can pick up and take off on the next part. Maybe you're just learning the rhythms of your body, right? So something to learn to know about yourself, and maybe it's perfect to fall asleep a little bit in the evening because you're tired. So just to not make it a problem, to have it be information. Maybe have it help inform you about when you practice. And yeah, it's great, you know, you fell asleep and hopefully you got a little rest.

Student: I did.

Tanya Wiser: Good. Yeah.

Kodo Conlin: Maybe I'll add this briefly and then segue into our next section. Gil^[5] will often mention at the beginning of a meditation retreat how a great many of us are perhaps sleep deprived and maybe could benefit from an early night's rest. And a secret of the first night of a meditation retreat is we always go to bed early. And then the other thing is that someone who's close to me has made it a practice of being very acutely mindful of the state of sleepiness and has discovered all sorts of interesting things like where it's living in the body and how it moves and functions. So just to say that that too can be part of it. That too can be part of the practice.

Working with Discomfort and Pain

Kodo Conlin: You know, while we were doing the guided meditation I was really taken by this image of the anchor, and because we live so close to the bay I was thinking, I actually saw in my mind's eye—I don't know how many of you had this happen—an anchor in the ocean. And I was seeing the sort of sway of the seaweed and imagining the little sea life floating along, the temperature of the currents, the different aspects. And I was thinking how all of those parts of the sea are right there with the anchor. They didn't disappear. So our whole life in the same way is right here with the anchor, whatever it is. The body is right here with the breathing, the emotions that are right here with the breathing, our states, our thoughts.

And as we're bit by bit practicing with one aspect of our experience and then widening—practicing with the breathing, widening to the body, widening to emotions, thinking—learning to include more and more. So for now, keep it simple. Our practice is with the breathing. Our practice is with the body sensations of the body. I appreciated how the attention can be both directed, as it was when we were feeling into our feet. We can direct the attention to the body to really feel into, sense into from the inside out what's going on in a part of the body.

It can also be a receptive attention that maybe takes in the whole body globally. It can also be a mix of the body and the breath. Let's say our anchor is the breathing. Say there's a sensation that arises in the body that's calling awareness, it's more compelling, it becomes predominant. Letting go of the breathing, attending to that sensation while it lasts, while it's compelling, and then when that fades going back to the anchor. The movement from object to object is not a problem. Going along with attending, in the sense of going along with the attention, we're still doing the practice, whatever the experience is.

For many of us, and especially in the beginning months and years of practice, there can be a lot of discomfort in the seated posture or whatever meditation posture you use. So you may be experiencing sensations that are predominant. Those too get to be included. And there's a way that whatever needs to be experienced will come up for you in the course of meditation. I have a faith that we can trust that. So the fact that a discomfort has come up: not a problem. Not a problem. How to engage with that in a way that's caring and gentle and clear?

So the discomfort can take any number of forms and sort of be part of a spectrum. Discomfort can be very mild, it can be very intense. It can come up in the form of agitation. It can come up in the form of pain. This pain is a very interesting part of practice, I think, for all of us that comes up sooner or later.

So I appreciate something Tanya said earlier: to respect your edges. We're going to talk about practicing with pain, and it's very important to emphasize this for me: respect your edges, stay in your choice. Choose how much you're going to practice with pain for now. There's a time and a place for sort of strong determination with pain that can be a good teacher, and there's a time and a place for being very gentle. So then you'll have to discern.

To bring in another image, I did something right before the session I haven't done in a really long time. I was sitting out here on the bench, I was enjoying the trees, the breeze in the trees, and I looked up at the sky and I watched a cloud. Just watched a cloud. Who knew, who would think? And I was watching its shape, just slowly drifting, slowly changing. Some of it kind of fading away. It was so relaxing just to be there and watch the cloud.

And it occurred to me, this is perfect. This is the perfect dharma for... this is the perfect teaching for talking about pain. Clouds, just like pain, they're composites. A pain is not one thing. The experience of pain is not made up of one condition, it's not just a lump. It's interesting though, because our perception says if we hold pain at a distance it's like, "Oh, that pain is solid, it's one thing, it's over there, it's pain." But really interesting, just like the cloud actually, it's made up of some sort of particle. It's made up of a sort of mist in the sky that's condensed around these things, the right temperature. Things have to be just so and they're always changing.

And the same with pain, it's always changing. And if we get close to it, in the same way we're practicing with our feet earlier, if we get close to it, if we get into it, we feel pain intimately, maybe say at an appropriate distance. If it's too much... there's a way that it reveals itself. There's a way that the threads that make up pain start to loosen, tease apart. It might be that what we think of as pain, what we think of as one pain, if we get close to it, it might be that it's a combination of say pressure, and heat, and maybe a little bit of tingling, or this particular pain might have a feeling of twisting involved in it. It could be any number of things.

But the very same curiosity that we bring to sensation and bring to breathing, we bring to pain, and it can reveal itself. What's very interesting about this is that as we tease it apart, you might notice this, any given sensation, pain included, when we tease it apart it has a tendency to start breaking up. It might reassert itself very quickly but then it breaks up, breaks up, breaks up or changes. One of the things that keeps pain maybe seeming unitary is the interpretations. It's the things that aren't actually physical sensation but are other parts of our being kind of like the glue. So say I feel a sensation that's unpleasant in my hip while I'm sitting. The thought, "Oh, that shouldn't be there. I think this means that I'm not going to be able to walk pretty soon." I'm like three, four steps down the line from the physical sensation in a narrative.

So just the same way we were talking about the difference between the game and the commentary, there's a way of relating to pain that's similar where we can experience pain as the physical sensation, and notice also what's added. What's the commentary? What's the interpretation? And that can support this teasing apart process.

I can say that as that practice starts to develop, and pain starts to reveal itself, there's a way that actually you can be there with pain, totally with pain, and be independent of it. And actually, totally unexpected, maybe even relaxed some of the time. The big qualifier with all this: we're sort of talking about pain in a general way. Working with our own pain, it's particular. We can use some of these same strategies but we never want to exacerbate our injuries with this good dharma mindfulness advice. Please take very good care of yourselves and follow your wisdom. Follow your wisdom.

The practice we introduced of maybe offering a note can help us to tease apart what it is that's making up an experience of pain. It can actually let the mind register and recognize, "Oh, this is a comment." Pain... pain... heat... vibration... comment. Oh, fear, there's emotion. Anyway, that can help with this parsing process.

So in the practice that includes our whole life, this whole spectrum of discomfort will very likely begin to show itself and can be a rich field in which we discover more and more about freedom of attention and awareness. It's not all pain, of course, we have great pleasures in meditation that can come forward. An independence of awareness and attention.

One aspect of experience I want to note before we go into a guided meditation is, say the body is in some level of discomfort and you've discerned that, "Oh, this for now, for me for now, this is too much. This is too much." Moving is an option, a good one. Tuning into something neutral is a good option. I've also heard tuning into sounds. Tuning into sounds if the body for now is too much, opening up to mindfulness of sounds. And we'll explore mindfulness of sounds a little bit in this guided meditation.

Guided Meditation on Sound

Kodo Conlin: So why don't we find our way back to our meditation posture.

Feeling the steadiness, the sensations of an upright, balanced body. Maybe even renewing the shoulder roll that we did earlier. The spine both alert and relaxed, the chest open, belly relaxed.

You can lengthen, give... invite a little space in the top vertebrae, with the top of the spine and the neck, which you may find tucks your chin just gently.

Greeting the body, your companion for life. And connecting again with your anchor. Be that sounds, or awareness of the whole body, or the breathing.

Allowing a soft breath to be a soft breath, and a full breath to be a full breath. Just enough energy to sustain contact and curiosity.

And for the sake of an exercise, letting go for now of effort to stay with the anchor. Opening up to the sphere of sounds. In a wide, receptive way. Receiving the sounds as they come in. And letting them pass right through.

If the sound sparks a thought, sparks a comment, to parse, to discern, to tease apart: the sound is just the sound, the comment is just the comment.

Relating to sound in this way. Pleasant or unpleasant, the sound does not request a response. Pleasant sound is just pleasant sound, passing right through. Unpleasant sound is unpleasant sound, passing right through.

And again as I ring the bell, can you listen with the whole body?

[Bell rings]

And when you're ready, you can open your eyes.

Q&A and Reflections on Sound

Kodo Conlin: As we transition into a few last minutes of Q&A, given our conversation of sound and commentary and pleasant and unpleasant today, I found I came across the perfect quote from the founder of Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi^[6]. You may have heard this before, it's a teaching on sound versus noise, and I think he was at Tassajara^[7]. He says, "When we hear the bird..." actually I'm not listening to the bird, and then very cute he goes, "Peep, peep, peep." He says, "When you are reading something, you may think the blue jay is on my roof, but their voice is not so good. When you think in that way, that's noise." And then he says the most important thing: "When you're not disturbed by the blue jay, the blue jay will come right into your heart."

When you're not disturbed, the blue jay will come right into your heart. So maybe you have something you'd like to share or some question.

Student: I think for the second half of that meditation where I actually tried sitting on the floor for the first time, I tried not to be so disturbed by feeling uncomfortable, and then I felt comfortable. It was really strange, I was just like, "Oh wow, I'm not trying to move, I was just..." and I wanted to hold on to that but I'm like, "Wait, if I hold on I'm going to get attached to it." So I kind of just let it be and I'm like, "Wow, it was really cool." So I think yeah, it was nice. Thank you.

Tanya Wiser: Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for sharing, I love that you tried it out and had that experience or had an experience. That's a great example of losing the commentator, right? Like we add so much to our experience with our comments and reactions. So it's like turning that TV volume off, you know. Nice work.

Student (Holly): I paused to give people time to ask questions, and now I'll go ahead. But um, okay, so that really helped. The visualization with the pain... this is Holly again... the visualization that you mentioned, Kodo, of letting the sound pass through you and being expansive, like having an expansive perception. So it was like I gave space to my body and became like the size of the entire soundscape. And I think Gil has talked about imagining yourself as more space if you have a lot of thoughts bouncing around like ping pong balls. Nice. And it did the same... I think it did the same thing as with the pain signals or whatever pain ruminations. It gave them space and also provided a little distraction while still maintaining that anchor of mindfulness in the breath or the body. So yeah, that seems like a pretty good antidote.

Tanya Wiser: I'm happy to hear it. So it sounds like during the meditation on sounds it opened up your perception of space to be broader, and that gave more room for the pain signals to have some space around them or inside them or...

Holly: Yes. Yeah, instead of being focused in one area kind of like you mentioned earlier, it wasn't so much pulling them apart, it was just giving a ton of space to a concentrated location.

Tanya Wiser: Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you.

Student: Um, I was just wondering if there's a way to be entirely with sound in the absence of kind of associations and emotional charge that comes with it, because unfortunately I get a lot of emotional charge. So yeah, I find that I can fall into a place where I'm thinking about the feelings that come with specific sounds and it feels counterproductive.

Tanya Wiser: Sure. I actually like sound meditation, I like it a lot, and one of the key things that helps me is not to be imagining what's making the sound, because then I start to create a lot of mental fabrications and stories. And I like to see if I can feel—because I really sense the vibrations of sound, you know, like there's a car moving and you can feel, oh, it's shifting where you feel it in your body. So receiving—that's another word I like—is receive the sound. We don't need to go out and find the sound, it comes to us. So more of a receptivity.

And, you know, if you have particular associations with particular sounds that are very strong, it takes a long time, right? So it may be that there are certain kinds of sounds or things that are triggering that have a lot of impact for you. And so knowing that and then bringing compassion maybe to that. Is that helpful? Yeah. Do you want to add anything?

Kodo Conlin: I was thinking, if say the breathing is generally a more useful anchor for example, if that is true for you, and you're exploring the world of sounds, one way to do it would be to ground yourself in your anchor and then decide, "Okay, now I'm going to open up to this thing that I know is a little more stimulating for me, and let's just see what happens. Let's see what happens." And let's do that for however long, a few minutes if you want, and then come back and settle. And that sort of back and forth, so you can have your meditative resources about you. And then again if meditation on sounds encourages a response, to note that response, to be attentive to it, you're doing the practice.

Homework for the Week

Tanya Wiser: Thank you. Okay, so we're about ending. So I'm just going to... if you didn't pick up a handout there on the stage as you come in, over by Nancy. Thank you, Nancy.

And so the homework for this week is to continue to practice 20 minutes a day. You can't do 20, do 15; can't do 15, do 10; can't do 10, do 5, right? And break it up maybe so you get your full 20 if it's possible.

And there's an invitation to take two hours during the week to do a devoted mindfulness of your body practice in daily life. So you know, yoga, swimming, going for a walk, those are all easy places to kind of practice for a sustained period. For more broken up, one of the nice things, one of the practices I grew for a while was every time I got up to walk somewhere, practicing mindfulness of the body moving. So that's a nice way to build in something into daily life is every time you get up and walk somewhere, it's practice.

You know, we're talking about the body, so we've talked about sensations and then we just added sounds because the body does hear. The body also tastes and smells. So this week you're invited to have a mindful meal, to spend a whole meal, or start a whole meal as mindfully as you can. It can be very fun to do eating meditation. Like sometimes a raisin or an orange, you know, smaller bits like that, but really taking time. Smell it before you taste it, listen to it. You know, notice that you start to salivate, there's so many things you can feel your body wanting to swallow, you know. There's just so much to notice. So you might do a smaller eating experiment with a little piece of fruit or something like that, and then see if you can... how much of a meal you can pay attention to. You can try putting your fork or spoon down between bites, that can help. Then you're really aware before you pick it up again, wait till you swallow, you know. So, one meal, have fun with it, see what you can notice.

And the fourth invitation for this week is to be curious about the things that take you away, that distract you. There's a lot of information there. Particular thoughts or reactions or fantasies or you know, just be curious, what is it that kidnaps my awareness? What kidnaps me? What happens, you know, just noting it and paying particular attention, being curious about it.

So thank you so much for being here and your practice. And if you have questions afterwards we'll be here, and hopefully we'll see you next week. Thank you. Thanks so much.