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Guided Meditation: The Autonomy of Awareness

So good morning everyone, or good day, and welcome to our meditation session.

As we begin this meditation, I'd like to suggest an idea, maybe some of you will find it meaningful. And that is that there are two halves to meditation: there's what you bring and there's what you receive. There is what you contribute to your meditation, and then what you allow. And the meeting of those two is where meditation is.

And so on one hand, what you contribute, it has to do with your autonomy—your ability to engage autonomously, independently from what is happening around you, what's happening within you. And then what you receive is—I like to call it the natural world. That, kind of like you're a naturalist who is clearly autonomous in engaging, observing the natural world that's being studied, but is also not interfering with it, and allowing the natural world to kind of unfold the way that it is so they can be studied.

And so we ourselves are a natural system. Nature is found right here in our body and our minds, our hearts and our emotions. The whole working of our psychophysical system, you know 99.9999 percent of it, there at a minimum, is this phenomenal natural system that's evolved over millennia. And we still don't even know the full extent to which this whole psychophysical system really works. But it works. It keeps us alive, keeps us going for a good number of years. And it's probably more of who we are is the product of nature doing its thing through us than it is what we think, or what we do, what we feel we're responsible for, what we judge ourselves for, what we criticize ourselves for.

So in meditation, we're sitting here to be autonomous. To sit up metaphorically upright, present, attentive. The attention is where the autonomy is found. So in order to make some complicated idea of individualistic autonomy... but it's the autonomy that comes from showing up and being present for the experience, for being aware of "this is what's happening." And in that "this is what's happening," then there's also what's happening is nature. And nature can be trusted. Nature, if we stay autonomous, if we don't interfere and don't participate—and that's the autonomy part: don't participate, don't get entangled or caught in anything. Almost like you're making room to "wow, this is nature, this is a natural world unfolding here."

And my proposal is you assume the natural world moves towards health. If there's tension, it moves towards relaxation. If there's fear, it moves towards relaxation. If there is anger, it moves towards release. If there's sadness, it moves to a freeing of a certain kind, a healing of the sadness. There are all these forces inside of us that move towards health, if we allow it. And so this meeting, and this gesture of namaste, bringing our hands together in anjali^[1], of putting our hands together like this, it's our autonomy and nature that meet in this practice. And then we see what happens.

So, to assume an appropriate posture for meditation, appropriate for you. And relax your gaze. If you're looking at the screen, for example, you might turn your head, your gaze down at about 45 degrees in a way where your eyes can relax. And if it's comfortable, you might close your eyes.

And then to take a few long leisurely and deep breaths. Maybe three quarters full, so it doesn't tire you to breathe deep. Then a long exhale. Slow, relaxed, long, but not so long that it becomes a strain. And then deep full inhales to feel your body, your torso, your shoulders, rib cage. Many of the things that you feel as you breathe in deeply in your torso, you share with many other animals that breathe as well. Rib cage and shoulders and movement, filling of the lungs, it's a natural process. And then as you exhale, to relax the body.

Sometimes as the shoulders, the belly, different parts relax, it's appropriate to adjust the posture a little bit. Maybe sit up a little straighter, open the chest a bit more. And then letting the breathing return to normal.

And on the exhale, softening the face, around the eyes. Maybe the lips can, in the middle of the lips maybe they can part a little bit. Maybe just a millimeter that allows maybe the lip area, the mouth area to be a little bit more relaxed.

On the exhale, to relax the shoulders. Maybe feeling the weight of the shoulders allows for something to release, relaxing to the pull of gravity.

On the exhale, relaxing the area around the heart. Maybe relaxing together with the phrase, "It's okay for now. It's okay." However you're feeling, however things are.

And then on the exhale, relaxing the belly. Sometimes relaxing the belly and letting it maybe sag forward, the weight of it to settle further down, can be a reminder to be grounded here, rooted here in the body, in the lower torso, here, now.

And the autonomy I'm talking about is very, very simple: the autonomy of being aware. To be aware without entanglement. To be a naturalist of yourself. An awareness, perhaps, that's receptive, allowing. You might have preferences, you might have ideas and judgments about what's happening, but awareness does not. To disentangle yourself from your preferences and agendas, judgments, let them be. And take refuge in the simplicity of awareness. There is where we discover our autonomy and freedom.

And for now, just assume that everything else is nature. And you're allowing there to be a meeting, a recognition, a knowing, contact between awareness and nature.

And with the rhythm of breathing being relatively constant, it's a good place to stabilize, steady yourself in that meeting between awareness and nature. Nature is a natural functioning. Even if you are controlling your breath, it's okay, that's nature too. Just be aware of how things are in an autonomy of awareness. Just aware, and the meeting of awareness and breathing.

How simple can you be with your awareness, present moment awareness? Just aware, what is. And everything else, everything what is, is nature. Be aware, don't participate in it. Just see it for what it is, nature. And as you step away, maybe the healing forces of nature, the harmonizing forces, have a chance to operate.

As we come to the end of this meditation, it's a gift to yourself and to others to have this open, autonomous capacity for awareness. Inclusive of the people in your lives, people you'll encounter today, the people of your communities, immediate communities, wider communities, the communities of people on your continent where you live, and around the world. And in this autonomy of awareness, to let it be a channel through which your heart can sing. Your heart can smile in appreciation and valuing of others.

They too are nature, profound, important part of a whole. Who knows what important parts they play, but they too can move towards harmony, healing, wholeness, when they're held in awareness and care. And may we, with our capacity for awareness, hold all beings in our care.

May all beings be appreciated. May all beings be valued. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we contribute to all that.

Introduction to IMC's Meditation Instruction

So good day everyone, thank you for being here and part of this valued community of meditators and people interested in the Dharma^[2]. And I certainly appreciate my opportunity to come and share something that's very important for me.

And I'll have one announcement, lest I forget later. Today, Barry and Jan Rothman are going to host a discussion group after the Dharma talk on Zoom. I think that the Zoom link is at the very top of the chat, and I'll try to post it at the end when I finish here. It's also on IMC's website on the bottom right, in the "What's New" section. There's an announcement there for it. And in the calendar, which is on the bottom left, it's listed there as an event, and you click on the event and then the Zoom information is there. So it's a nice time, nice way of being in community and talking about the Dharma.

So for the talk today, I want to start with a story I'm fond of, as an introduction to what I'll be talking about.

There was a person who was well learned in Buddhism, many years studying with the great teachers of the era. Studied all the great books and sutras and commentaries. And so, but then at some point, went to a Zen master. And now with a piece of beautiful paper, calligraphy paper, and asked the Zen master to do a calligraphy. To write down the most important teaching of Buddhism in this calligraphy. There's a tradition, especially in Japan, that Zen masters will do calligraphy, and sometimes they're on scrolls, and their scrolls are hung in a respectful place in a home. And so in that custom, the person went to the Zen master and made that request.

And so the Zen master thought about it for a while and then wrote, with great focus and presence, wrote something on the scroll. And the person was very excited that this great Zen master was going to write the essential kind of nugget to what Buddhism is about. And the Zen master wrote the character in Japanese for "attention." Just that one word, "attention", single character.

And the person said, "Oh no, no. You seem to not quite have understood. I want the most important, the essential, the key teaching." And so the Zen master took another piece of paper and with great focus and presence wrote another two characters now. And the person was very excited to see it now, but certainly there'd be something profound. And the Zen master had written: "attention, attention."

So then the person explained, you know, they're well studied, they've read all the great philosophies of Buddhism, they really have surveyed the whole terrain, lots of teachers they've studied with. And they're sophisticated and they know a lot already, so you know, "can you really kind of capture the really the essence of the philosophy of the teachings?"

And the Zen master says, "Oh, now I understand. Okay." And took another piece of paper and with great focus and presence looked at the paper, composed, attention in the moment, grounded here, and then wrote: "attention, attention, attention."

So this idea of attention is so important for this tradition, for Buddhism. And everything you need to know and need to occur in Buddhist practice happens through the vehicle of paying attention, being attentive to what's going on. And a beginning class in meditation would tell you to start being mindful, start engaging your attention in the present moment. So in some ways it can be seen as a beginner's practice, but it's the same practice for someone who has been practicing for years. Someone who has matured in the practice, reached full maturity for it, it's still attention. The core practice is the same. And so the practice of a beginner and the practice of someone who's practiced for a long time is in some ways the same. And people who practice for a long time, it's always good to go back to the beginning, to really start over again in a sense.

But we start over again. If we've done practice for a long time, we don't quite start over. The practice is the same attention. The basic instructions might be the same as for a beginner, but we bring something along. Something accompanies us from the maturity of our practice that creates a little different context for doing the basic practice.

So what I'd like this talk to be about is an introduction to meditation practice. And so it's meant for people who are maybe pretty new to all this. Maybe this is your first time coming to a talk at IMC. And also some of you I know have practiced for a long time. And I hope it's going to work for you too, that you don't say, you know, you're ready to turn off the YouTube channel because "oh, it's just going to be an introduction to meditation, I know all too well what meditation is about." I hope that you'll appreciate as I talk these minutes that it offers something a little different.

So the reason for this topic is that my current plan—which is subject to change by tomorrow morning—but is to, for the next few weeks on the 7:00 AM teaching that I do, to go through the basic instructions in meditation practice that I teach here at IMC. Like, I teach a five-week intro to meditation class periodically. And that follows a pattern. And the pattern is, the first evening we talk about breathing, the second evening we talk about mindfulness of the body, the third day is mindfulness of emotions, the fourth one is mindfulness of thinking, and then the fifth time is everything else kind of. And so I thought we would go through that one week at a time. So a week on breathing, a week on body, a week on emotions, and a week on thinking, and then maybe a week or two on some other things. And I feel it's really, really useful to come back to the beginning, to basics for everyone. And as I said, I think that basics are not just basics. For people who have a lot of experience, it's still the basic practice, but hopefully something accompanies that. There's an understanding and insight, an approach to starting over again that is both just starting over again, sharing the practice of a beginner, but somehow there's something else that's happening there along with it.

So that's the plan. And so this talk today is a little bit like an introduction to the series that I'm planning to do. So I wanted to take the opportunity to contextualize, step back a little bit more objectively, contextualize the instructions in meditation that I've been doing here during this pandemic time and also at IMC, and how it fits into the larger scene. Because all instructions are probably—not the best choice of words, but—are contrived, are artificial. They're something that are constructed and made and presented. And as such, they have history.

And the way that I teach this five-week intro class at IMC, I'll tell you the origins of it.

So when I went to practice Vipassana^[3] insight meditation in Thailand and Burma, the instructions were very simple. In fact, in Burma, I showed up at kind of like the ground headquarters, this ground zero for the whole, in some ways, the Vipassana movement that spread into the West. And they gave me a cassette and a cassette player with the 15-minute instructions in the meditation. And that was the extent of the instructions that I used for them for eight months that I was on retreat there. All the instructions were given in 15 minutes. And the simplest way of understanding, repeating those 15 minutes is: focus on the sensations of your breathing, and if something becomes more predominant, more compelling than your breathing, let go of the breathing and bring your attention to really see what it is that's pulling you away or what's more compelling. And when that's subtle enough—somehow it doesn't have to stop, but subtle enough and no longer so compelling—go back to your breathing.

And so it was a lovely practice for me to discover. Because in doing Zen practice before that, the focus was so much on breathing and on posture that there were no instructions for emotions, for thinking, for all the kind of wider range of our experience. And in Vipassana, I learned that these simple instructions included this wide, all of our humanity, everything was included. And I remember when I was, after practicing in Burma for a while, I got so happy when I realized at some point that this practice taught me to be mindful, be present for everything in my experience. And the reason I became so happy was that I knew that if I was mindful, there was a way of being free, liberated from experience. And this idea that no matter what the human experience is, because I knew now how to be mindful of it, I could find some kind of freedom, some kind of peace, some kind of independence, some kind of autonomy, disentanglement with it all. And I still couldn't do it so well, but now I knew the theory: I could be free anywhere I go if I keep practicing mindfulness. So that was what these extra instructions—very simple. And there's certainly more that happened in those 15 minutes of instructions, but it was all done like that.

I came to practice a little bit here in the West, and then at some point I was invited to become a teacher in this Vipassana tradition. And only then did I really kind of start attending Western insight meditation retreats. I hadn't done a lot of things here in the West. And here I've discovered they taught the instructions in a different way on retreats. They would start on the first day teaching about breathing meditation and they get grounded, get settled. The second day they talk about mindfulness of the body, partly because by the second day people's bodies were aching and challenging. The third day they would talk about instructions in mindfulness of emotion. And by the third day that was often kind of challenging for people, so that was useful. And the fourth day they talk about mindfulness of thinking. And then there'd be some other things the next days of the retreat. And that was a pattern.

And so I was introduced to that pattern and I thought this was a nice pattern. As part of my teacher training starting in 1990, I was asked to take over a small meditation group in Palo Alto. And I taught them for every week for about a year or a year and a half or so until it became clear it'd be useful to do instructions in meditation for people. So then I offered for the first time, but I had never received any kind of basic meditation class, instructions in meditation class, which I was about to teach. And so I didn't have any reference points for how you do it. And I certainly wasn't going to do the 15-minute instructions that I got in Burma. So I thought well, the way that they're taught on retreat, that's a very nice sequence. And it leads up to the way we're taught in Burma, because after you get the full set of instructions, then you know how to be present for everything. And that was what they were building to on the retreats, by the fifth, sixth day, then the instructions were similar to what they are in Burma. So I thought, why didn't I teach a five-week course following the instructions on the retreats.

And one of the reasons I was motivated was that the class was an hour and a half—actually initially I think they were maybe 45 minutes—but it's longer than that 10, 15-minute instructions on a retreat. And so I then thought you know, those instructions are so brief, there's so much more to say about the instructions for each of these things, so I want more time. So initially I had 45 minutes and then eventually it became an hour and a half, in order to go into some real explanations, real care around how to teach mindfulness with each of these areas. And so I kind of made up this course that way. And that's what I've been doing and other people at IMC have been doing now for almost 30 years.

And I think it works very well, but it's only one way of practicing, one way of giving the instructions. In the pandemic last, earlier this year, I gave like 60 or so talks that were basically instructions on mindfulness of breathing according to the Anapanasati^[4] technique. And that's a whole other way of practicing which I find tremendously valuable, but it is different. I've been asked now repeatedly to do a similar series on the Satipatthana Sutta^[5], the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, which if you take that as your primary instructions is a little bit different again. It's a little different technique. So one realizes all these different ways of doing it. And so my hope in offering the classic now for 30 years way it's done here at IMC on this sequentially, is that even if you don't take that as the core technique in a sense, it's laying a very good foundation for how to include breathing, body, emotions, thinking in whatever technique you do. You become wiser, you're more understanding. I've also hoped in teaching this at IMC this way that it is also relevant for people who never meditate, that people in their ordinary life will also find it useful to understand some of the principles, ideas that I teach around breathing, body, emotions, and thinking and the rest of it. And so when I do an intro class I'm trying to kind of make it relevant in such a broad way.

So that's kind of like the background. And so hopefully to prevent a little bit of confusion if some of you come to the 7:00 AM teaching and say, "Wait a minute, just early in the year we had this all 60 steps, you know, the 16 steps, the 60 talks about it on Anapanasati, now how does this fit in?" So I hope this helps a little bit. And in terms of the Satipatthana Sutta, I'm planning next year to do a series on it and probably do a little gap before I do it after doing this current series on the basic instructions here. And hopefully the basic instructions here will be tremendously supportive for understanding Satipatthana.

So there are these basic instructions. And as a beginner, the instructions are more prescriptive. Meaning, these are the things that we do. For someone who as we mature, there starts to be a shift in the practice where it becomes less and less something we do and more and more something we allow. So more and more the so-called instructions are no longer prescriptive, they become descriptive. So it's more and more that we are discovering a capacity for being aware here, and then we're just receptive in a certain way, and then we're aware of breathing. And so it isn't so much we're following instructions to be with the breathing, breathing has found us, and that's where the practice is. At some point sometimes the body speaks up, and so then we're aware of the body, it's the loudest thing happening. And so that's what fills this autonomous independent kind of capacity just to be aware. Sometimes emotions, sometimes thoughts, sometimes other aspects of all this. And so awareness becomes more something we allow. It develops a certain independence. It's not being directed necessarily, but it might be very specific if one thing is the loudest thing. But it's not like we're doing it, it's more like we're allowing it.

And over time as practice matures, and there's some degree, some experience, some taste of what freedom is like, then the awareness shares with some of the qualities of that freedom. That it's still the basic practice, but it's accompanied by a sense of what freedom is. Or a feel for freedom and disenchantment. And the qualities of that come from a sense of freedom and independence that I call autonomy. That there's a sense that awareness becomes more autonomous. Not that you become autonomous, because that's dangerous in terms of conceit, like "look at me, I'm autonomous and capable, independent." The idea that you are independent, that you are anything, is not really needed in the freedom and the ease and the peace of autonomous awareness.

And so the autonomous awareness, the awareness that can just be, has lent itself to like in the West to the language of to have non-judgmental awareness, to have an awareness that's accepting of everything, to have open awareness, to have—there was a time that was popular—something called choiceless awareness. And so over time there are different trends about how to talk about this, and the current trend as of today here with me is to talk about it in terms of being autonomous, autonomous awareness.

And as practice deepens as I said, rather than the mindfulness being something we do, mindfulness is something we allow. We allow that autonomy of awareness that is not entangled or caught up, or for and against any experience. And then it becomes more and more kind of a marvel, kind of a wondrous thing that there is this free feeling of awareness that's free and independent and not pushed around, not attached to anything, not for anything or against anything.

And then everything else becomes nature. Even things which are unfortunate. Say that you're angry with someone, that they're hostile with someone in a very unfortunate way. The autonomy means that you're not going to give into it, you're not going to participate in it. The forces of hostility and anger^[6] exist within you, but this precious core of who we kind of sense are—the awareness—allows us just to leave it alone. And maybe seeing it and then not identifying with it. And this is one of the characteristics of a mature practitioner, is that there's less and less identification with whatever the experience is. Identification here means that we define ourselves by it, we limit ourselves. "This is who I am." We hold on to it, we grab onto it, that "now I know who I am." That immediately limits the range and the wholeness, the fullness of the experience. And it's not a denial of certain appropriate identities that people have, it's the movement of identification that we have that is the issue.

And so as practice matures it's still the same practice, but what we're doing is we are no longer identifying with these things. And so everything we see then becomes nature. That it becomes just part of the process. And that kind of independence, having those two meet, to hold in awareness whatever the experience is—breath, body, emotions, thoughts, challenges, pain, suffering, whatever it might be—it's a remarkable process. Because then the natural functioning of who we are begins to operate better and better. And this idea of being able to step back, feel the freedom and allowance of a natural functioning that comes when we don't restrict nature, we don't limit it, we bottle it up, we don't become attached to it. And the kind of understanding of Buddhism is that all the unhealthy ways that we live our lives, all the ways that we cause harm to ourselves and others, comes from not leaving things alone, not letting things equilibrate, come to harmony. It becomes entanglement, wanting, contracting around something, resisting something, judging something, identifying with something in a heavy burdensome way.

So the instructions are very simple, basic. And the longer one has practiced them, then basic instructions become even more relevant than they were when you were a beginner, because of what accompanies it. Because now there's a sense and a feeling and this possibility of having it be simpler and simpler. And simpler is not simplistic. Simpler is where freedom is found.

So that's the introduction. And hopefully for those of you who are not going to come to the 7:00 AM, hopefully that was nice for you. And for those of you who do, I certainly look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning or being with you. And we will hopefully go through it in a way that all of us, including me, find valuable and meaningful.

So thank you all and wish you all a good week.