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Guided Meditation: Awareness Established and Receptive

Hello everyone, and nice to be back here with you. I want to begin with an analogy that I've taught before, but I think it makes the point well.

When my son was in preschool (he was three and four years old), sometimes I'd visit the school. It was a wonderful school with wonderful teachers. It was fun to watch the kids running around chaotically in the various rooms of the preschool. It certainly was chaos, and a lot of joy watching them, but also seeing the joy in them.

At some point, it was time to change the schedule, to change what the kids were doing, to get them ready for something else. One of the teachers would stand in the middle of the classroom, and he would just stand there very still, upright. The kids were running around him and through his feet, doing all kinds of things, but he was just standing there. And then he would begin to whisper, talk very quietly.

It was remarkable to watch then all these little kids begin to slow down, sit down, and gather around him. After a minute or two, all the kids were sitting quietly and had gathered together around the teacher, and then he would tell a story. They probably knew that this was the deal; they recognized it.

But this way of getting their attention was not a command. He wasn't commanding them, "Just shut up and come here." There was nothing like that. He was just standing attentive in the middle of it all and being quiet, and all the kids gathered around and got quiet themselves.

So, this is a nice analogy for meditation practice. We are, in a sense, establishing ourselves with awareness at the middle. We're establishing the awareness we have; the attention we're going to use to be here becomes established at the center of our being, the center of here, where we're sitting.

All the ways that our thinking and our feelings get us scattered and spin us outwards—the outflow, the scatteredness, thinking about the past, the future, fantasy, the way that feelings keep us activated and engaged in thinking and story-making—because we have an awareness centered and established in the middle, it works as a gathering point. Things start getting collected. It's like there's a little bit of a gravitational force that, without any more insistence than gravity, begins pulling things in, getting settled and gathered.

It's a special thing. What we have to do is stay aware, stay present in the present moment. Then this gathering begins happening. It's a collecting of ourselves, and all the disparate parts, the scattered parts, collect together. So we don't have to do so much work bringing the mind back. We don't have to do so much work jerking the mind back or being disappointed in ourselves. All we have to do is come back to being aware. Be here.

I like the phrase just here for that. Just here, but here open and aware of what's here, present for what's here. And then you'll probably see that things will slowly begin to come closer and closer, and there's less of a tendency to wander off or get involved in the scatteredness. That will still happen, but just come back to here. And perhaps do that with a quietness within. Not a forcefulness, not an insistence, not an expectation. Just like the way that a loving kindergarten teacher would stand there, loving the kids, being quiet and being present, and beginning to tell a story that gathers them together.

Assuming a posture that allows you to establish mindfulness, establish awareness.

Lowering your gaze, relaxing your eyes, not looking at anything in particular, loose focus. And then gently closing your eyes, if that's comfortable for you.

Taking a few long, slow, gentle breaths, imagining that as you breathe in, it's like you're spreading your arms wide to gather yourself, to gather all the scattered pieces. And as you exhale, you bring it all in close, let it settle, as you relax on the exhale.

Breathing in deeply, a full embrace of all that you are. And the exhale, letting it all relax here, back to the center.

Then letting your breathing return to normal. On the exhale, relaxing different parts of your body, with the idea that in relaxing, something is gathering, settling back into the place of awareness.

Relaxing the face.

On the exhale, softening the shoulders, and as you soften your shoulders, settling back into a place of awareness.

Being here.

Relaxing your belly. Almost as if you relax your belly and it settles, and there's a groundedness in here, a rootedness here.

Then centering yourself in your breathing.

Being here. Not so much reaching out to the breath or directing yourself to the breathing, but more being aware, being present, being available for what's happening here and now.

More like allowing the breathing to find you. As if the sensations of breathing in your body are arriving in the awareness that knows your breathing.

And when thoughts override your attention to breathing, re-establish the awareness, the knowing that receives the inhales and the exhales. As if breathing is part of the gathering together.

Over time, you'll notice that even the mind that begins to think will feel like it, too, is known. As if it arrives in awareness, and there's no need to wander off with the thoughts. Everything is arriving in awareness, supporting present moment awareness.

As part of welcoming the breathing into awareness, you can say the word in^[1] as you breathe in, maybe with the idea of welcoming it as it arrives. You can say out as you breathe out, welcoming the sensations that come with the exhale.

You might think of awareness as a place of rest, where all things gather together to rest in the embrace of awareness. Allow things to arrive in this restful place of attention, knowing.

For the next three or four breaths, see if you can relax more deeply on the exhale. Maybe relaxing something deep in your core, deep inside, that's agitated or tense, activated. Deep relaxation.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, there is a wonderful reversal that can happen with awareness. If you do not direct your attention outward—if you don't actively direct your concerns outward into the world—but you allow yourself to be receptive, so the world arrives in awareness, it's kind of like you're settling back and just available for things to be known.

When you do that with others, and you're not distracted or preoccupied with doing and directing and making and fixing and protecting, but deeply relaxed, receptive, available to receive the experience of others—that makes room. That allows for a deeper experience of love, of care, friendliness, goodwill.

The more we are receptive to the world, the more room it allows for these positive feelings for the world. So, at the end of this sitting, allow the world to come back to you: your community, your friends, your family, colleagues, neighbors, people in your neighborhood, and out across the lands where you live. Receive them, know them, be reminded of them, with no obligation, nothing you have to do except to allow your heart to receive their presence.

Perhaps, with a relaxed heart, the heart then responds with warmth, tenderness, care, and an orientation of being friendly. To give voice to this warm feeling of care and friendliness, you can allow your heart to, in a sense, say these words:

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be safe.

May all beings be peaceful.

May all beings be free.

And from your heart, from your inner life, may there flow naturally, easily, an inspiration to contribute to the welfare and happiness of all beings. May this generosity spread out from us, out into the world. May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: Breathing (1 of 5) Intro to Mindfulness Instruction Series

Hello everyone. Here we are on Monday, and for this week's theme, and for the next maybe four or five weeks, I would like to go progressively through the basic instructions that we give here at IMC^[2] for a mindfulness meditation course. Normally, we'll do a five-week Introduction to Meditation course. Some of you have probably done it with us, and the course is available on AudioDharma.

It follows a sequence of five weeks, one evening a week. The first week we talk about an introduction to mindfulness, and then mindfulness of breathing. The next week we talk about mindfulness of the body. As people settle into meditation, the body often becomes very loud or clear, often because it gets uncomfortable if you're not used to meditating.

Then the next week we talk about mindfulness of emotions, and then mindfulness of thinking. The fifth week, there's a range of things that are talked about. That sequence is meant to slowly, steadily lay the groundwork for a time when all those ways of practicing, all those areas, are integrated together into a whole. Then we're practicing mindfulness where, depending on what is compelling, what is predominantly happening the most, we might be aware of breathing, the body, emotions, thoughts, and other experiences of our life.

This ability to develop an awareness that's available—mindfulness is available to the full range of our human experience—is the goal of mindfulness practice.

That's valuable for many reasons. One reason it's valuable is that we then have a heightened attention to so many areas of our life. Things don't remain unconscious, things don't remain unknown or sidelined. Everything sooner or later comes through the view, the knowing of awareness, and is seen clearly.

Also, as we do this practice over time, we start appreciating more and more what it is to be aware, what it is to be mindful. In particular, we start noticing all the extra baggage we bring along that we put on top of the simplicity of awareness: the expectations we have, the idea that we have to do a lot of things, the idea of being an agent ("I have to prove myself" or "I shouldn't fail"), and that it's all up to me, myself, and mine to do it.

We might come with fears around being aware of what's coming along. We might have really big goals or ambitions around meditation that we bring along. As we become more and more aware of all this extra stuff we bring along, we can start shedding it and discovering the simplicity of awareness itself.

Part of that simplicity, eventually, is that awareness can be present without us doing it. Awareness becomes autonomous from our doing it; our role is to allow for it, to stay close to it. It's a magical time, a special time, to feel that awareness is just the nature of who we are, and we don't have to insert the self, agency, and doing into it.

There's a shift in mindfulness. For someone who's a raw beginner, the practice does involve doing. We're engaging in changing the direction, changing the course of how our life is going, from just letting ourselves wander off in thought, desires, and aversions, and just being caught up in things, to waking up.

To not being lost in the world, but being present in the middle of our experience, really present, really centered here. There's a doing: coming back, applying ourselves to the breathing, applying ourselves to the body, to these different areas that we pay attention to. There's a sense of applying oneself and doing it. Partly, that's because it's an alternative to being lost.

As that builds over time, this sense of autonomous awareness, independent awareness, becomes stronger and stronger. Then awareness more receives experience; things arrive in awareness. Awareness is not something we have to do; it's more something we allow, and there can be a sense that things just arrive or arise within awareness.

Awareness becomes freer and freer of even the sense of me being a doer, the agent. In a sense, awareness becomes independent of the usual ways in which we identify who we are—me, myself, and mine.

So the mindfulness instructions that we give have two sides. They can have the side of something we do, so it's prescriptive: this is what we do. That's often the case certainly for beginners. But at different phases of life, different levels of what's happening in our life, it's always coming and going, these different ways of practicing, depending on what's needed at the time.

If we're very experienced practitioners, but really frazzled and agitated, we might be better off applying ourselves in the meditation.

But alongside that prescriptive side, the other way that the mindfulness instructions work is that they're not instructions on what to do, but instructions on what to notice. So it's descriptive of what arrives in awareness.

When awareness is established, it gathers together or allows to arrive the experience of breathing, the experience of the body, the experience of emotions, the experience of thoughts. There's a radical shift from being a doer to being an allower.

That allowing creates a different way of participating in the world that's still very effective, but very different than it being all up to me, myself, and mine to do and be.

So in these next days, I'm going to talk more about breathing. What I want to do for each of these five days of each week of this series is repeat the same kind of theme around each of them. So that these become a little bit more familiar, regularly available to you at different times, to really understand different facets of this practice.

On Mondays—and I'm not going to spend much time on it now—the theme is going to be relaxation. Tuesdays, the theme will be recognition. Wednesday's theme will be respect. Thursday, the theme will be restoring. And Friday will be release. We'll look at each of these things and look at these different aspects of the practice in relationship to breath, body, emotions, and thoughts over the following weeks.

So, relaxation with the breathing. We did that a little bit in the guided meditation. Part of the function of coming back to the breath over and over and over again when the mind wanders off is that the breathing then is the anchor for having awareness established, and we relax.

It isn't so much that we force ourselves back to the breath, but it's more like we welcome ourselves back to the breath over and over again.

The regularity of breathing takes the energy away from the ways we are tense around our thoughts, tense around our emotions, caught up in things. The more preoccupied we are in thinking, the more tension there is in the system, the more force and pressure there is.

This gentle returning to the breathing, returning to be aware of the breathing, begins to take away some of that energy that goes into keeping the mind, the heart, and the body tense from our concerns.

In addition, the regularity of the rhythm of breathing helps us to relax. You can even help that by allowing yourself to relax on the exhale. Relax gently, openly.

For some people, this focus on breathing is difficult sometimes. That's normal enough. It's just a process to work through, to be gentle and patient, and not make a problem out of how difficult it might be—the tension, the holding patterns, controlling the breath, or something.

It's well worth spending time to see if you can work through it. For some people, breathing is not really the appropriate object for attention. I've known people, for example, who had a near-death experience of drowning or something else that was very difficult for them, where breath was really a challenge. The memory or impact of that is such that breathing never really becomes a good place to meditate.

For them, sometimes just being rooted in the body, being grounded here in the body in some open way, is much better. There are other options as well. But it's really nice to work through some of the difficulty, if possible, around breathing. Relaxing is a big part of it, learning to relax with the breath.

So that's the plan for this next period of time. I'm hoping that these instructions and teachings I give will work both for people who are beginners or new, but also be a support for the people who are quite experienced in practice as well.

The beginning practice is the practice. So in some sense, the difference between a beginner and a mature person is that a mature person is a better beginner, a more thorough beginner.

Finally, I said some of this, but also a little bit more, yesterday morning for the Sunday morning talk at IMC. That talk was done as an introduction to this series that we're doing here now. So if you haven't heard that, you might go and listen to that half an hour, and it also sets the stage a little bit for what we're doing.

So, thank you for today. I'm looking forward to sharing something that I love quite a bit. Thank you.