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Guided Meditation: Knowing, Sensing, and Calming - Shelley Gault

How's the sound? Is that okay? A little loud maybe? No, it's okay.

The typical Sunday morning sit is a silent sit, but Tanya and myself—my name is Shelley—are teaching a retreat this weekend, and all the retreatants are here as well as the greater community. We thought we'd share a little bit about the practice that we've been leading during this retreat.

The focus has been on something that Gil^[1] has been talking about a lot lately: knowing, sensing, and calming. The title of our retreat is The Body and Heart at the Center: Knowing, Sensing, and Calming. I will do some brief guiding, leading us through these three aspects that are part of the way we create the conditions for the mind state of mindfulness to arise in us.

Mindfulness, sati^[2], awareness—it's such a beautiful aspect of our mental capacity, the ability to see clearly, to see what's happening, to see what's going on in our inner lives. These three ways of knowing are all really supportive of that developing.

So just very simply to begin, just get a global sense of yourself sitting in the meditation posture that you're in. Knowing how your limbs are arranged. Knowing how the temperature of the air feels against your skin. Knowing what your basic mental attitude is, your mood right now. Maybe having sat the previous sitting period, or maybe just having come in from outside with a more activated mind. Just knowing the whole global state of your mind and body, and letting there be just as much ease as there can be in that state, in the posture, and in the mind and heart.

And then letting the sensations of breathing be the focus of your attention. Just allowing the awareness to receive the sensations of breathing and knowing that you're breathing. Just knowing it very simply. You know, in the suttas with the instructions on mindfulness, the initial instructions on breathing say the practitioner breathes in a long breath, knowing, "I'm breathing in a long breath." Breathes in a short breath, knowing that. And the same with the out-breath. Just very simply knowing this is how it is right now. It's short. It's long. It's rough. It's smooth. It's easeful. It's labored. However it is, knowing it. And this knowing is something that carries through our entire practice. It's very basic, very simple.

And then there's the sensing. Sensing is more direct, in a way, than knowing. It's not mediated through concepts, through mental activity. We can sense the breath, the sensations of breathing. We can sense the air moving in through our nostrils and down the back of the throat, down into the bronchi and the lungs. We can sense that without defining it, without naming it. It's known to us in a very direct, somatic way, and that's sensing. We talk about feeling. We feel the breath, and that's what we mean by sensing. It's a more direct way of knowing than the cognitive, which is mediated through mental activity. But they're both really useful. Sometimes the sensing happens first. Sometimes the knowing happens first. Sometimes we only know because we've sensed. Sometimes we find it difficult to find the sensations.

But right now, just sense into what it feels like to breathe. What it feels like for the air to enter the nostrils, pass by the soft palate, go down the windpipe into the lungs, expanding the chest, expanding the belly, making the ribs expand. Often the shoulders will lift. All those things can be sensed. And then as we breathe out, often there's a sense of relief. What are the sensations as we breathe out?

And for a lot of us, I think these first two aspects of knowing—the cognitive knowing and the sensing—lead to the arising of some ease, some relaxation, some calming. And the calming, the relaxation, allows the knowing and the sensing to be more subtle, more open. And it's also fine to invite a sense of ease, a sense of relaxation. The instructions say to breathe in, tranquilizing the bodily formation, or calming the bodily formation. Calming what's arising in the body in relation to the breathing, to the knowing, to the sensing.

Often all three of these can be happening at once. Sometimes they happen in the order in which I described them, and sometimes one happens before the other, but they're all very useful as foundations for the mind state of sati, of mindful awareness to arise in us, giving us the clarity that leads eventually to insight.

So, we'll just sit silently until the bell rings.

Announcements

Good morning everyone and welcome to IMC. I know Nancy has an announcement.

Hi everyone. My name is Nancy Hamilton. I'm the program director here at IMC, and we're thrilled to have two teachers here today teaching something sort of new. It's probably happened before at IMC, but not recently: a multi-day non-residential retreat started on Friday evening, all day Saturday, and now Sunday, weaving in and out of the Sunday morning program. Many of you already know Tanya, a longtime IMC teacher, and we're so thrilled to have Shelley Gault here with us. She's from Santa Barbara, and you may see her on Happy Hours online and also the 7 AM YouTube sittings.

She's kindly brought along her husband—and sorry to shout you out, John—but this is the face behind the name that makes many offerings available to us on AudioDharma, including retreat talks from IRC and the retreat talks from this weekend. So since we have the great opportunity for you to be here, I just wanted to offer deep bows of thanks to John as well.

Tanya and Shelley have been teaming up to do various things. Last year they taught a 4-day retreat at Hidden Villa, and they will be teaching a 4-day retreat at Hidden Villa next year, October of 2027. In the meantime, there's a retreat at Hidden Villa coming up this year. This October 2026, a 4-day retreat will be taught at Hidden Villa by a team of four teachers who I call the "Fab Four." I don't think they call themselves that; I think they call themselves the "Friendly Four" [Laughter], which is fabulous still. So that's Diana Clark, Kim Allen, Ying Chen, and David Lorey. They are teaching a 4-day retreat at Hidden Villa starting October 29th, and registration is now open on the IRC website under off-site retreats. If anyone is interested in the Hidden Villa retreats or in supporting Hidden Villa retreats by joining a team of volunteers from IMC, please let me know, or write your name on a notepad that I left on the front table. It says "notes," so just write your name and your email address, or if you like old-fashioned voice-to-voice communication like telephone, you could write that down too, and I'll get in touch with you.

Just one more thing before I stop is I just want to mention that the Thursday evening Community Dharma Nights have resumed. Those are 6:30 to 8:00 PM on Thursdays, and it's been kicked off with an Intro to Meditation series taught by Dharma leaders Lish Dorosin and Doug Wiebe. You can join this program at any time; come to any of the Thursday nights. We're excited that those have returned. So thank you.

Any other announcements?

Body and Heart at the Center: The Middle Way - Tanya Wiser

So, good morning. Thanks. There are probably five or six bodies that could fit on the floor up front if people wanted to just come up with a cushion. Just come on in. I'm sure there's more spots, too. People can scoot together more. So, if you want to be in the hall and you're comfortable on the floor, just get a cushion and come on in, and I think we'll make room for you.

Nice to be here and to see many familiar faces. So the retreat that Shelley and I have been teaching together, we called The Body and Heart at the Center: Knowing, Sensing, and Calming. My talk today will incorporate mostly stuff about the body and heart at the center, but hopefully, you got a feel for the knowing, sensing, and calming through Shelley's guided meditation this morning.

Mindfulness of the body in the Dharma is a profoundly important practice, and it's often called kāyagatāsati^[3], mindfulness immersed in the body. The body is just so alive with experience. We've got the pulse, the breath, warmth and coolness, pressure, movement, the sensation of air touching the skin, sight, and sound. And sound is not just hearing, but vibration that we can feel in our bodies.

And this body is continually receiving and responding to life through the sense doors. We have six sense doors in Buddhism. The eyes see shapes and colors. The ears hear sounds. The nose smells odors. The tongue tastes flavors. And the whole body—the skin is the largest organ in the body, right? And it feels touch, pressure, temperature. It experiences emotions, thoughts, and memories in this body. So there's so much that we experience through the body. And the mind itself as a sense receives thoughts, emotions, memories.

It is through these sense doors, and only through these sense doors, that we actually experience the world around us and inside of us. All of the sensory information that comes through the first five sense doors comes in as raw sense data, as sensations really. Visual sensations, auditory sensations. It's really the mind that adds the thoughts, the cognitions, the perceptions. So most of what we're experiencing is more like raw data than it is something analyzed, evaluated, or "understood," which is really a translation. It's really an abbreviation, a shortcut, a shorthand, a symbol for something else. Words are a symbol.

The Buddha said, "There is one thing that when cultivated and regularly practiced leads to deep spiritual urgency, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, and to a happy life here and now." All of this is the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? Mindfulness centered on the body. It's a paraphrase of Anguttara Nikaya 1.5.

Elsewhere, the Buddha described the cultivation of the body and the cultivation of the mind as deeply intertwined. When the body and mind are underdeveloped, pleasant and painful feelings can enter the mind and take hold of it. If you think about an emotion, an emotion comes with energy to do something. Any sort of emotion we have, you can take a snapshot of it and easily identify it for the most part because the body takes action that follows the emotion. Sadness, anger, whatever it is. Very simple. And so if we are not aware and we are not mindful, and we just follow those emotions, we might collapse in sadness or we might act out in anger. But when we cultivate this mindful awareness and mindfulness, those same feelings can arise, but they no longer dictate what our actions are. We will feel them, but they no longer will rule what we do with them.

The Buddha taught this about understanding, working, and cultivating this awareness of the mind and body. And he also placed similar emphasis on cultivating the heart. Often the heart is actually considered the heart-mind, citta^[4]. This is how it is referenced in Buddhism. And the way that he taught us to cultivate the heart is to cultivate the brahmavihāras^[5]: loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity, until the heart becomes abundant. These are words he's chosen, right? Expansive, immeasurable, and free from hostility and ill will.

So the body can be cultivated, the heart can be cultivated, and the mind can be cultivated. And really, it happens together. As we become more able to inhabit our body and to know what we are sensing, like Shelley said in the meditation, sometimes I watch my own mind like, "Oh well, I only know this because I sensed it." I only know what the breath is like because I'm sensing it. I don't know if it's short or long unless I sense it. It has to be felt. How else do you know whether the breath is short or long? Maybe if you're hooked up to a monitor and it's telling you, maybe then you could know cognitively because you can't sense it.

There's so much happening, and it takes much longer to cognitively process information than it does to sensorially experience it. The sense data happens much more quickly. We often will have butterflies before we realize we're nervous, for example, and the mind can be thinking about things in ways that generate butterflies. So knowing, sensing, and then this calming—to me, it's almost like the knowing and the sensing create the calming. This mindfulness, being able to be mindfully present and aware of what's going on without being under the power of what's going on, creates calm. So as we learn how to be in the body in this way, and sense and know what's going on, we can become more receptive to things, to life, to ourselves, more responsive to life, to ourselves, and generally just more free.

Just back to this quality of being in this body. This is really where life is lived. There's a line from a poem by Danna Faulds that I like: "I breathe in the breath of life and life breathes me. There is a shimmering presence in every soul, a pulse of being that transcends all thought." That is something that I experience when I'm in meditation or in quiet in nature. That's that feeling of being breathed, that feeling of shimmering presence and the pulse of life.

And as I become more intimate with my body, I become more intimate with my heart, more attuned. Many years ago, I started to track whether my heart was open or closed. It just became a key warning sign for me, a guidepost like, "Oh, how am I going into this situation? What's happening? How am I responding? Can I feel a sense of openness in my heart or am I kind of closed here?" Just tuning simply to that quality gave me so much information about how I might be approaching something. But it was something I would feel, and really that's connected to the mind. That's the citta heart-mind. But this beautiful quality of the heart in this chest right here can be felt and sensed. So much easier to detect than to try and discern cognitively for me. I could notice if I was holding back or moving forward, bracing or softening, right here in the body.

The thing about life is, it's in motion. It's a river. It's a field of change. And to practice well means we have to be attuned to these constantly changing conditions inside of ourselves and around ourselves. Just like a river runner, somebody who's paddling a river has to remain really attuned to all the changes of the river, the currents, and the conditions, which are constantly changing because the river changes. Shozan Jack Haubner^[6], who's a Zen Buddhist teacher, says that truth, which is the Dharma, "is always only ever in motion. It's a great dance partner. It moves as you move. It never stands still. You just can't capture it."

This idea of walking a path, right? In the Dharma, we're taught to walk the Eightfold Path. We're taught to walk a path, and it is in motion. It is as life is. It is a natural thing that is constantly manifesting and blooming every moment. So, it's not something that stands still. It's something that we need to be constantly attuning to.

In the body, we can track this dance of truth. Track the Dharma. It's through the tightening of the chest, the softening around the eyes, the warmth spreading through the body, the impulse to turn away, the willingness to remain present. All of this is signaling, sharing information for us to know and track what is happening, what is our response? Is there greed, aversion, delusion present? What is going on here? And as we do this and sense this, we're right there. We're in direct contact, in immediacy, in this intimacy with life, with our experience.

I think it takes us a while to get to that place. And over and over again, we have to get back to that place. I think about the Buddha and I think about the story of him and how his practice evolved over time. He was living this luxurious life as a prince, being catered to and having all the beautiful things and luxury. His father was said to have kind of sheltered him. There were things that he saw when he got out of the castle that were wake-ups for him, and they woke him up in a way that made him not want to continue to live the life he was living. So he left in search of a different kind of experience. Somehow he wanted to be free from what he was experiencing, what he was feeling.

So he spent years and years first striving and working really hard to try and master the art of meditation. He found these renowned and skilled, deep meditation masters to learn all kinds of fancy meditation techniques. And he got so good at them that the masters asked him to become the master. He was really working hard, training, applying all this effort, striving, and trying to achieve and attain these experiences. And he did, but he decided they weren't fulfilling, that it wasn't achieving what he was hoping for.

So he actually just walked away from that. But then he turned to a very different approach, which was to renounce, to give up, to put away everything—austerity. He would deprive the body of food, no bed, no comfortable clothing, sleeping on nails, getting down to eating a grain of rice a day, it is said, to the point that he was dangerously emaciated and potentially on the verge of dying. So he went from this intense seeking to this intense rejecting, right, all in the same search trying to get free. And so these feel like opposite approaches, which they are, but they are both ways of trying to control our experience. The Buddha was working to try and create an experience, but neither brought him freedom.

The turning point came for the Buddha, potentially near his premature death, when he had a memory arise. It was a memory of himself as a child sitting beneath a rose apple tree. This is described in Majjhima Nikaya 36. He says, "I recall once when my father, the Sakyan, was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose apple tree. Then, quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities, I entered and remained in the first Jhāna^[7], rapture and pleasure born from seclusion." And he wondered, "Could that be the path to awakening?" And he actually said, "Yes, this could be."

This little description, I'm going to really stretch it out here using my own imagination because there's so much around the conditions here that are implied but not clearly spelled out. So he's with his father who's working the fields, and with their employees, we'll call them. So these are all people familiar to the Buddha. You can imagine that there are people who are working in the field, and there are people there to support the people working in the field, including the father and the son. So this is a community of people working together.

Plowing is a very rhythmic practice, right? Back and forth. So there's this back-and-forth activity that's happening, the sound that's happening, this sort of regularity of rhythmic action. Just take a minute to imagine—we're not talking tractor sounds, right? This is plows pulling through the field, people making sounds, just sort of this movement of people orchestrating together, working together.

Imagine you're there and you're on the outskirts. You're sitting down under a rose apple tree, which are said to be quite lovely trees. You have the tree, let's imagine, at your back. You have the shade. You have people around you who know you, who care about you, who are actually employed to care for you. You have your father. Your father has told you to sit and wait. There are no devices. There's no way to escape in some fantasy device. There weren't books at the time. So he is just there, simply there, accepting being there in this way that would generate a sense of belonging, safeness, a soothingness with the rhythm and the familiarity and the coolness.

Potentially, all of this creates a condition. And so the Buddha was able to relax and be present, and in that experience, let's imagine that the rhythm of the plowing and just being there, the rhythm of his breathing, that he just naturally fell into mindfulness of the body and breath. And as that happened, Jhāna concentration, samādhi^[8], arose. This was not him working to create it. So it did not have to do with control. It had to do with allowing and opening to a naturally arising process.

What's remarkable is that here the Buddha has spent years pursuing heightened meditation states, and then refusing any form of pleasure. He's so devoted, eating a grain of rice a day, it is said. He's fixated. He's been working. He's devoted. I mean, think about how determined you'd have to be to be living like this, right? So determined. And in this moment, his mind is flexible enough to drop all of that determination, that commitment, and open up and say, "Wait a minute, there's another way." And in front of these companions who essentially shunned him as a result of his decision to eat, he recognizes—part of the sutta says—"Oh, this body, I can't have that experience if this body is falling apart. I have to eat. I actually have to take care of this body. Oh, I haven't been taking care of this body."

So we're not going to indulge it, but we're not going to deprive it. We're going to care for this body. He decides to take care of this body that is going to be our companion for life; it is our gateway to life.

It's pretty profound if you think about it. That he then dropped all of that, went off, sat down, and decided to practice in the way he remembered, and that is what led to his awakening. Maybe you could say he went from striving to trusting. And maybe this is the Middle Way. Maybe this is this Middle Way between trying to control things and becoming available and responsive to life. Becoming attuned to our circumstances and the conditions within which life is unfolding and able to respond. Because just like that river traveler or rafter, we have to paddle harder sometimes, and less hard, and differently, and move over here. We have to adapt and move based on conditions. It's not just a passive availability. It requires discernment, engagement, knowing, sensing, and being present or calm or available enough to know how to shift weight from left to right, or whatever it is we need to adapt.

It occurred to me at some point, well after it happened, that I had my own modified version of a rose apple tree moment. And I'm guessing we all have those moments. And that moment became a tremendous resource for me. It arose for me at a critical moment in meditation practice that was so helpful. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about that memory that came up for me, and I'm going to invite you to contemplate and think about your own rose apple tree moments.

Mine came when I was pretty young. We would spend summers at this cabin, a very rustic, very primitive cabin that had access to a lake. My father was a teacher, so we were able to spend a fair amount of time at this cabin so we could swim and just sort of live close to the land. It had a pit toilet and just a one-room cabin, built fires, no electricity. So we were really living simply. Of course, no phones at this point.

I loved being on the water. At some point my father got a speedboat, and he would go out and fish and I'd go out on the boat with him. I didn't fish, but I would lay down on the bench in the boat. The seat could flatten out and I would just lay there. When you're fishing, the boat is just sitting there. But there are little waves, so there's this motion. You can hear the water lapping on the boat, and the sun or the clouds, you know, the weather is there and you can feel it. There's not a lot of sounds. Maybe you hear people's voices off in the distance laughing or talking to each other, or another boat going by, but it was a small lake and not a busy place.

I just remember laying there and feeling the gentle rocking and the sound of the water and the sensations of my body, and this warmth would wash through me and I would feel peaceful. I wasn't falling asleep. I wasn't daydreaming. I wasn't writing stories in my head. I was just resting and abiding right there as this little kid. And I loved it. My whole body just soaking up this experience.

And like the Buddha, my father was there, my family. I had this familiar place that I had been spending time in, so I felt safe. There's this rhythmic feeling in the boat, this lapping of the water. Really, I was meditating and I didn't know it. I had no word for it, no idea what I was doing, but I loved it.

And this memory popped up for me at a time when I was really trying hard on a long retreat to meditate. [Laughter] And it just broke free everything that I was trying to do. And I was able to open up and relax and just allow the practice to unfold in front of me.

We get ourselves caught up in all the striving, we're trying to follow the instructions, or we give up, we collapse into our emotions, or we give up into our ideas that we're never going to do it. But if we can just be available, know and sense, be calm, be present, be alive with this life that's happening—not when we think it should be happening, but what's really going on right here and now. These moments. This is what presence is, and this is what mindfulness is about, connecting with presence in this really open and receptive way and allowing this natural thing that unfolds like a spring of water inside of ourselves that will just come forth.

So there are these conditions that support us. Like this weekend we've been creating this condition here at IMC. And as far as I know, it is the first non-residential retreat at IMC. Going for refuge, taking the precepts, coming together, practicing together, and being in noble silence together. Just this beautiful way of being together, and having John chant and play the guitar, and we do loving-kindness, mettā^[9], at the end of the night. Creating these beautiful conditions that support our opportunity to arrive and be at home in our bodies, at home in ourselves, at home with others, and to be more available to this life. What a wonderful thing that you have joined us and we have joined you together in the middle of this retreat experience.

I do hope that my memory inspired you to connect with some of your own memories. Good, I see some heads nodding. They're really powerful, these memories. Just recalling them. There's something about it—it's like an instant instruction that your system knows how to get there, and it's a reminder. We don't have to make it happen. We can just reconnect with the experience and kind of let go and remember how to be there in this open, receptive way. Feeling the breath, receiving sound, sensing the pressure, warmth, movement. You know, it's pretty simple.

If we keep our attention with that direct experience, it gets complicated when our mind starts weaving in and out of it, making meaning, starting to direct the process. That's when it gets complicated. And the mind is designed to do that very thing, so don't get impatient with it.

Embodiment. This is what I'm really talking about: being embodied is a practice. And learning to bring mindfulness to this body-based experience is something we can cultivate and grow and grow. It becomes more easily, more naturally available to us. It's about listening to the body, this receptiveness. The body, the nervous system, speak in sensations, and the way that it feels heard is by our feeling those sensations, receiving them. It's like emotion. It is energy, a feeling. And emotion means to move through. But you notice that if we don't feel an emotion, it gets stuck, repressed. It lingers. But if we can open up and let ourselves acknowledge what we're feeling and sense it, it doesn't linger. If we meet it in this simple way, it moves through. It's felt. The message has been received. Okay, we're ready for the next message.

So again, we're working on being available, but not in a blank or passive way. We have to be attuned. We need the wisdom, and this knowing of what's going on, and the sensing, right? And this attunement to the heart, because the heart for me will tell me what is happening in my mind. Is my mind closed, judging, controlling? I'll feel that. Is my mind receptive, open? I'll feel that.

There's this lovely metaphor or simile that is used often about awakening: the two wings of awakening, which are the wing of wisdom and compassion. I've always sort of thought about these two wings magically flying, but you know, the wings don't fly without the body. We need the body. We've got to be in that body.

I think I have a poem I want to read. I'll just read that and then I'll take a couple of questions. This is by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. It's called "Self-Talk" and it really speaks to controlling versus allowing, because I know in my body the power of spaciousness.

I command my heart, Stay open. Stay open. And I growl as it clenches and hardens and granites and steels. But my terrified heart keeps clenching anyway, tighter and smaller and stuck. I said, stay open, my voice demands, as if with intensity I could force a release. And the heart curls in, intent on survival, like a heart that has learned before it is not safe to love. And it hurts to be small. And it takes so much energy to clench that finally it's exhaustion that helps me to hear the softer voice beneath the command. A quiet voice that arrives like the slightest of waves. The voice that arrives like low morning sun. And the voice enters the clench of me like gentle rain meeting dry earth. And it says, Of course you're afraid. For now, it's enough to remember the possibility of opening. For now, it's enough to remember the possibility of opening.

Q&A and Reflections

So, we have time maybe for one or two questions in the hall, and then Shelley and I are going to invite everyone who's not on retreat to come with us out into the main community hall. And we'll leave the people who are on retreat here to maintain noble silence, and we'll shut the accordion. So, if anybody wants to speak with us individually or even as a small group, we'll be out there. But in the meantime, any reflections or questions or comments that anyone would like to share?

Questioner: Hi, Nana. Hi. And I want to confess something, and I feel a little bit careful, and at the same time I want to share with you a little bit of the impact, and I take full responsibility for this. I am so used to IMC having an open door.

Tanya Wiser: Yes.

Questioner: That I was a bit surprised that I wanted to come and practice yesterday and I couldn't.

Tanya Wiser: Yes.

Questioner: And I am the very first person who wants to support retreats, right? It's like, yay.

Tanya Wiser: Yes, that's an excellent thing to do.

Questioner: And I wonder if—having this is something to consider. I could be incorrect in this, that if we close the doors for the sake of having retreats here...

Tanya Wiser: Yeah.

Questioner: That it might have an impact on the community that is so used to the open door.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah.

Questioner: And quality to it.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah.

Questioner: So this is just something that my heart wanted to express, and I am not saying that my ideas are the right thing to do.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah.

Questioner: But just as a possibility of giving voice to that.

Tanya Wiser: Thank you, Nana.

Questioner: Yeah, but I so appreciate that this is being offered.

Tanya Wiser: Thank you, Nana. Yeah, it really is... it's very interesting to try and create the retreat experience in a sangha that has a very different, very open-door flow. So I am very aware of the tension, and grateful to hear, and sorry to hear about the pain for you. Very. Yeah, so thank you for sharing. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you all for your kind attention.