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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness as Becoming Familiar

So warm greetings, and one of the important aspects of a regular meditation practice is developing more and more familiarity with your own body, more and more familiarity with your own mind, and how the mind and body work together. How they connect and meet. To take the same meditation posture, more or less the same, but maybe every day we develop a heightened sensitivity to the subtle distinctions, differences from one day to the next. The way the body is held, the tension, the patterns of breathing, where the breath is maybe a little bit held, and where it's easy.

And the same thing with the mind. We begin developing a heightened sensitivity to the differences and how the mind is day to day, from even minute to minute: how much energy is in it, how tired it is, how distractible it is, how centered it is—all kinds of things. And this is not incidental, to have this heightened sensitivity; it's actually very important. The more we become sensitive to the subtleties of the body and the mind, the more interesting meditation becomes, and the more we have an ability to begin seeing more deeply and offering more presence to our experience, an ability to relax more deeply.

So to just keep becoming familiar. Take an alert, relaxed posture, and gently close your eyes. Before you start meditating, familiarize yourself with your body. How is it now? What parts of your body are tense, tight? What parts seem settled and relaxed?

Part of the subtle familiarity with the body is familiarity with the minute differences in posture: the alignment of the spine, the placement of the hands. Even half an inch difference of where the hands are can make a difference in the relaxation of the arm and even the shoulders, and the position of the head on the neck. You might try tipping your head down a teeny bit or bringing the head back slightly.

And then gently, ever so gently, as if you're familiarizing yourself with what happens as you do so, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Deep enough that you feel the fullness, but not so deep that you feel winded. Long relaxation as you exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal, and gently familiarize yourself with the experience of breathing. Noticing the activity level of the mind. Familiarizing yourself with the activity level of the mind. Noticing any way in which the mind might be contracted, or tense, or agitated, or dull.

And like your body might relax if you sit down in a nice, easy, soft chair, see if you can have the same movement of your mind as the mind settles down into the body, into the breathing. The mind settled on the body breathing. Steadying the mind, the awareness on the experience of breathing.

And as the mind is steadied on breathing, as you exhale, let the thinking mind become quieter and stiller. Thinking slows.

And as the mind gets a little quieter, stiller, let there be a heightened sense of higher sensitivity to the experience of the body breathing. With awareness centered on breathing.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, turn your attention inside out in the sense of turning now your gaze of your attention on the world, people you'll encounter today, tomorrow. Familiarize yourself with your attitudes and feelings towards others. How is it for you, the people in your life?

And without pushing away any way that you feel, continue to turn this inside out of the heart. So the softness, the peacefulness of the heart of your inner life, is the place from which you gaze upon the world of others. With a well-wishing heart, a heart that has good will towards others, wish them well.

May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free. In whatever ways that are easy for you today, perhaps you can contribute to that possibility. May we live for the happiness and welfare of ourselves and others. May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: Discomfort (2 of 5) Reactions to Discomfort

So to continue this topic of discomfort. It's maybe a simple, ordinary experience to feel discomfort. There's so much to learn from it, and there's so much room for many of us to discover how to be freer with our discomfort, how not to be pushed around by it or react to it. How to be present for discomfort so that we see clearly what's happening, rather than being distracted by the discomfort.

So one of the things to study when we study discomfort—and this is the task of this beginning of this week—is to really stop and take a good look at how you're uncomfortable. When you're uncomfortable, what's happening then? Look for and see if you can understand the unhelpful ways in which you react to discomfort. When things are not comfortable for you, whether it's socially, or physically, or personally, anything at all—what kind of unhelpful ways do you then respond to that, react to that? What comes out of that discomfort, what kind of behavior that is not really in your best interest?

There's a list in Buddhism, the famous list called the Five Hindrances^[1], and they can be understood as five unhelpful ways of trying to cope or deal with discomfort of any kind at all.

So sometimes when there's discomfort, we go to desires. We want something different, we want to be soothed^[2], we want to escape, we want to be distracted. We want things to be different than how they are, and we get pulled into this world of wanting and desire, and it can be quite strong. Sometimes in meditation, you can spend a long period of time fantasizing about something that's comfortable, something that's an alternative to discomfort [unintelligible]. Interpersonally, it could be that we look to have conversations or have activities with others that somehow bypass the discomfort and give us pleasure.

Sometimes people drink alcohol for this reason. Interpersonally the relationship is uncomfortable, and maybe there's tension between a couple, and the alcohol kind of just settles it away and breaks through the barriers of the tension between them. Rather than staying in the discomfort and seeing the interpersonal discomfort as a doorway to a deeper connection to each other to resolve something, people go towards alcohol to kind of just change the whole dynamics. So there's all kinds of ways that people do things: watch television, watch something... another strategy.

Another strategy is hostility. It is to blame, to be angry, blame oneself, blame others, be angry, push things away, throw things away, stomp away, run away out of hostility, out of anger. This is, I don't want this, this is uncomfortable for me. And sometimes there can be a spiral of hostility that builds up anger, irritation. We're uncomfortable, we're irritated that we're uncomfortable, we're indignant that we feel uncomfortable, and so then we feel more uncomfortable, and there's a pressure and it's building up inside. And that makes us maybe more irritated or more aversive. And so it goes until something maybe really unhealthy happens.

Another strategy with discomfort is a kind of giving up, a kind of collapsing around it, and maybe around self-pity, or around hopelessness, or lack of personal efficacy, agency. And so there's a kind of giving up that's characterized in Buddhist language as sloth and torpor, a kind of shutting down, like kind of numbing out.

The fourth strategy is restlessness and anxiety, restlessness and regret, anxiety and regret. It's not so clear exactly what the classic words mean, but there's a whole complex of things that are energizing. Whereas sloth and torpor is numbing or makes us tired, this is becoming energized. So sometimes it's fear: people are uncomfortable and they're afraid of what's going to happen. Sometimes people just get restless in it. They're like a trapped deer or a rat that's pacing around the cage and just kind of endlessly looping and looping, and just trying to take the energy of restlessness and give it some kind of expression with some kind of behavior. Chewing our fingernails, or tapping our fingers, or reaching for a cigarette because we just need something to do, something that energy can go into—something, anything.

And the fifth is doubt: perplexity, indecisiveness. We're kind of stuck in a hard place between knowing what to do and not to do. We're not quite sure. Not to hurt, but here, should we not be here? And who's at fault, what's happening here? And so there's kind of a swirl of confusion, of delusion that goes on when we're uncomfortable. Am I allowed to take care of myself? Am I allowed to be comfortable? I can't really blame someone else, or I'm supposed to be comfortable but I'm not comfortable, and what am I supposed to do here? I'm somehow wrong, and I'm failing at something.

So there's a little description of these Five Hindrances, and perhaps somewhere in those you can see yourself occasionally. And the task in mindfulness practice, the instructions in mindfulness, is to be a connoisseur of these hindrances. Become a connoisseur of how you react unhelpfully with discomfort.

So when you're uncomfortable, one thing is like yesterday: just stop and pay attention to it. Really get to know it, become familiar with it. And as you get more familiar with it now, discover what your common reactive patterns are. Seeing the common patterns is very helpful because they're likely to reappear a lot, and you can get your PhD in the hindrances; it can be on the particular ones that are your specialty. And the idea here is to really get to know it well so that you can't be fooled by it, so you can see it coming in the distance, so that you learn how not to give in to it, but learn how to work with the hindrances.

And it might be the discomfort you're feeling is a lot easier if you tease apart or separate out the hindrances that are operating from the discomfort itself. The hindrances add power to the discomfort or add a kind of hindrance to our ability to see clearly. And so without the hindrances, or with the hindrances seen for what they are and put aside, then maybe we can stay and feel and be with the discomfort in a more direct way. Which we'll see in the rest of these days, how useful that is and what can open up.

So for today, some homework to work at. Maybe not in one day, but set your aim at: when you get uncomfortable today, look around and see what is your unhelpful reactivity to that. And then give yourself time. Don't let go of it right away, don't be upset with yourself for having this reaction, but rather kind of stop and take a good look. So the bumper sticker for today can be: I stop for the hindrances. I stop to look and study, and how does it feel in the body? How does it feel emotionally? Why do I believe in them, or why do I get caught in them? What are the dynamics there, and what's the stickiness, and what are the beliefs that come with all these?

And if you really want to do this with some help, if you have any kind of friend, or stranger, or someone that you can tell that you're doing this exercise, can you share with them a little bit through the day what you're discovering? That might give a little bit more substance to both the study and the understanding that comes from it.

So, may your discomfort and your reactions to them be the arena of mindfulness for this day. Thank you.