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Guided Meditation: Breathing with Distractions

It's a fortunate thing for all of you to be here, and I feel very grateful and happy to have this time to share the practice a bit, and the Dharma^[1].

One of the ancient ways of meditating is to meditate with the breathing. Some of us have done the whole series now, since the beginning of the year, on mindfulness of breathing. One of the options with mindfulness of breathing is to keep a constant, like the beat of a song that's always going along, and just stay with the rhythm of breathing.

But then, not exclude other things. If something else is strong and compelling, breathe with that strong thing, that other thing that's happening, so that we don't get caught up or entangled, thinking about and involved too much with what's happening. We're able to be aware of it and present, but stay a little bit free of it without being entangled, being loose and easy with it. Keeping a focus on the breathing keeps us limber and loose, preventing us a little bit from seizing up or tightening around whatever's going on. This ability to stay loose and easy by staying with the rhythm of breathing is quite helpful.

What I'd like to suggest for today is one variation of this: whatever happens during this meditation that makes it difficult for you to stay present in the present moment—whatever ways in which your mind gets pulled off into thoughts, or you get pulled into your emotions and concerns with your emotional life, or if there are strong physical sensations in your body that trigger some reactivity inside of you, and you're more involved in the reactivity than you are in being present—whatever is making it difficult for you, breathe with that. Just breathe through it. Breathe with it.

See what happens if the massage of breathing, the rhythm of breathing, acts as a guard against getting caught in the reactivity, caught in the preoccupations, the wandering thoughts. If you're having a lot of thinking and you get pulled into your thoughts all the time, you don't necessarily have to let go of it, but breathe with it. Just breathe through it. Maybe sixty percent of your attention is on the breathing, and forty percent on the thinking. What happens to your thoughts? When you're lost in thought, one hundred percent of your attention is going into your thinking. But if sixty percent is just with the breathing, and you know you're thinking, but you're breathing with the thoughts, breathing through it, what shifts for you? What happens?

To the best of your ability, stay with your breathing. And of course, you'll lose it. Don't worry about that. Then, in a funny way, the task is to breathe with having lost it. So you're right back with the breathing again. Rather than being preoccupied or upset that you've lost touch with the breathing, just breathe with that phenomenon, and then you're right back with the breathing.

I hope that this way, you can enjoy your breathing. It helps if you enjoy it a little bit, in a very modest way, and breathe with whatever makes it difficult for you to meditate. If it's easy to meditate, then it should be easy to just stay with your breathing, get settled and focused, and enter into that beautiful world of being settled on the breathing.

Assuming a posture that is suitable for you for this meditation session. The idea is to take an intentional posture, a posture that expresses a little bit of intentionality, like, "Yes, this is the posture I'm in." Adjusting the arms so that they are participating in this intentional posture. Adjusting a little bit the spine in the back, so it too is intentional in the way the spine participates or supports attention.

Gently close the eyes. And especially with breathing now at the center of this meditation, gently take a few full, deep breaths, three-quarters full, and gently exhale as much air as you can without it being a stress or a strain.

Deep breath in, and then relaxing the body as you exhale. Maybe especially as you long exhale, releasing the shoulders. Breathing in, and breathing out, letting your breathing return to normal.

Then, scan through your body and breathe with whatever tension or holding you find in the body. Maybe without immediately relaxing it, but just breathing with it. Continuing to breathe normally, on the exhale now, relax the different places of holding and tension in the body. Soften, attuning yourself to a softening of the body, partly by recognizing where the body does feel soft, or gentle, or quiet.

More fully center yourself on the body breathing. Center yourself on the experience of breathing, gently quieting your mind. Perhaps allowing the mind to become softer, calmer. Breathing in, and breathing out.

As we sit here this morning, if anything takes you away from fully being with your breathing, continue being with the breath, but breathe with what wants to take you away. Breathe through it. Almost as if breathing is a way of better recognizing or acknowledging the forces of distraction and preoccupation. Nothing is wrong, nothing is a problem. It's just something else to breathe through, to breathe with, as it's all held in awareness.

You don't have to let go of anything. Just make sure that sixty percent or so of your attention is on the breathing, not on what pulls you into its orbit—your thoughts, your feelings. Sixty percent on the breathing, breathing with whatever is distracting you, preoccupying you. No need to struggle with anything. Instead, breathe with it. Breathe through it. Sixty percent of the attention on breathing, and forty on what's happening.

As we come to the end of the sitting, I want to say that it's also possible to breathe with others, in the presence of others, and to keep a good part of our attention staying with the massage of breathing. It's a protection from getting caught in conversation, or caught in reactivity or self-consciousness when we're with someone. When we're not caught in reactivity and thoughts, it might be easier to access kindness, care, and generosity. It might be easier to be attentive to the other person—attentive in a way that doesn't box them in, limit them, or diminish them somehow in our own eyes, but keeps them open, keeps them available, makes room for them.

May it be that as we go through the day, returning to our breathing can also be a returning to a place of calm, peace, or ease, from which we can reconnect to our goodwill, well-wishing for others, our care, our love, our compassion. May it be that mindfulness of breathing supports warm-heartedness in our encounters with others.

May it be that this meditation practice that we do is applied to improving the life of all beings. May this practice we've done this morning be for the happiness and the welfare of others. May it be for their safety and peace. May it be for their non-oppression, their freedom. And may it be that even in the smallest ways, we contribute to make this possible. May our care and goodwill be present in our encounters with other people. May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: Stories - The Sky Is Falling

Good day, everyone. This week, for these little Dharma talks, I'm telling Buddhist stories. Some of these stories contain wonderful teachings and messages. Some of them are like Aesop's Fables, kind of wisdom fables.

There's one that I'm fond of, partly because I've taught it a lot to children. Sometimes, in telling the story to them, I've had them act it out, and there's a lot of running around and sometimes yelling that goes along with it. I'll tell you this story, but please don't take it just as a children's story. Some of these stories have tremendously great value, and this one in particular I think applies to a lot that's happening in the United States with fake news, fear, anger, and things like that.

It's one of the Jataka tales^[2], one of the classic canonical stories that are like fables. They purport to be the past-life stories of the Buddha^[3] when he was an animal, and he's the wise animal in these stories.

In this story, there's a rabbit. The rabbit's not the Buddha; the Buddha is coming. The rabbit decides it's a nice, comfortable day in the middle of the day, and decides to take a nap underneath a tree. He falls asleep, contentedly napping. Everything is fine in the universe.

Suddenly, something large falls on the ground right next to the rabbit. Clunk! Boom! Bang! The rabbit wakes up with a jolt and concludes that the sky is falling.

The rabbit jumps up and runs along, yelling, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" He comes across other rabbits, and they ask why he's running. He says, "Run, run, because the sky is falling!" So the other rabbits join him. They run into more rabbits, and it's the same story. More rabbits are running, and they're all yelling out, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

Then they come across a group of deer. The deer ask, "What are you doing?" The rabbits say, "The sky is falling! Run, run!" First one deer runs, then a whole herd of deer runs, and they're all yelling, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

They go along further and come across rhinoceroses. The rhinoceroses ask, "What are you doing?" "The sky is falling! You have to run for safety!" First one rhinoceros runs, then many rhinoceroses are running. By this time, the ground is shaking because there's so much weight and so many animals are running, afraid of this falling sky.

Then they come across elephants. Pretty soon, there's a huge herd of elephants pounding against the ground, shaking the earth, everyone yelling frantically, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" They are heading toward a big cliff. They are beside themselves in their fear; they don't even know where they're going. They're just sprinting toward this cliff, and they're all going to fall right off.

But towering above this cliff, on another kind of mountaintop, is a great lion. The lion in the story is the Buddha. The lion looks down, sees what's going on, and sees the danger that all these animals are in. With a giant leap, the lion leaps down in front of the charging animals and roars, "Stop!"

All the animals screech to a halt in front of the lion. The lion says to them calmly, "What is going on here?" The elephant says, "Well, the sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The Buddha—the lion—says, "Well, who told you that?" "The rhinoceros told me that." The lion asked the rhinoceros, "Who told you that?" "The deer told me that." Asking the deer, the deer said, "The rabbits." Asking the rabbits, the rabbits all turned around and pointed to the first rabbit. "That's the one who told us."

The Buddha said to that rabbit, "Where did you get the idea that the sky is falling?" The rabbit said, "Well, there was this loud bang, something falling right next to me." The lion said, "Take us there."

So, with some trepidation, the rabbit led the whole large gathering of animals and the lion back to underneath the tree. It happened to be a mango tree. Lying on the ground right next to where the rabbit had napped was a mango. A mango had fallen off the tree and landed right next to the head of the rabbit.

The Buddha pointed that out and said, "There's no sky falling. It's just a mango." Everyone relaxed and went back to the different activities that these animals had.

So, it is a story of not running from what we're afraid of, but taking a good look to investigate what's really happening. We must ask ourselves this very important question: "From where did I learn this rumor, this idea?" What's the source of that? The idea is understanding the source of our information. Is it just our opinion, like it was for the rabbit—a wild guess? Is it rumor? Is it what we've heard from someone else? We don't really know for ourselves, but we've heard, "Oh, I've heard a story, this is how it is out there."

Then fear is triggered, or anger is triggered. If it's something we've seen directly, maybe it's reasonable. But if it's many steps removed from the original source, aren't we becoming like the herds of animals running toward the cliff? Aren't we starting to create realities, creating worldviews, understandings, enemies, scenarios, and doomsday ideas that we're running from? We get preoccupied and lose our sensibilities.

Who is going to be the lion that stops us? That says, "Stop. Let's go back and really take a good look. Let's investigate what's really happening here and follow the steps back." Probably there's not going to be a lion or a Buddha that's going to jump in front of us. But the Buddha, for us these days, represents our own capacity to say, "Stop." A real, healthy stopping. Stopping our running away, stopping running in circles, stopping our spinning out. Really stop, turn, and look at what is happening. Turn and look toward the danger, if it's appropriate to look at it. Look toward our fear.

There is a kind of courage needed in Buddhist practice to stop and look at what we're afraid of, to stop and look at what we're angry at. To really look at what's going on here. What's the real source of my reactivity, my reaction?

I know for me recently, I was somewhat angry with someone—maybe mildly, just a kind of annoyance or irritation—and I stopped to take a look at it. I realized very quickly that a huge percentage of why I was irritated or annoyed had to do with the stories I was making up about the situation, not the actual situation. I didn't actually have all the information about what was happening. I was guessing, making a picture of what it was, and then reacting to my own picture, not to the person. Then I realized, "Oh, it isn't the other person I have to contend with, I have to contend with myself." So I stopped, looked, saw where it was, and found it in myself.

You have the ability to stop. You have the ability to turn and look to see what's really the source of this. Where is the beginning of this? Maybe it was just a mango that fell on the ground.

To support this ability to stop and take a good look, you have your breathing. You have a habit of coming back and just breathing with the situation. Breathing not to deny anything or turn away from anything, but breathing consciously gives us patience. It gives a little bit of room, breathing room, space for the mind to look, investigate, and see what's really going on. We don't have that if we're caught up in all the animals of our mind spreading rumors to each other and spinning out, when the whole zoo of our mind is starting to race and run toward the cliff. Stop, take a look.

If you think the sky is falling, stop and take a good look at where that idea came from. Maybe you'll find instead—maybe, just maybe—that there's a sweet, ripe mango waiting for you. Some treasure, some sweetness, something delicious, something wonderful waiting for you, if you really look deeply at the situation, including yourself.

Thank you, and we'll continue storytelling tomorrow.