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Mindfulness of Breathing (51) Samādhi

The 16 stages of Anapanasati^[1]—each stage, each step along the way, I think it's nice to think of it as being complete in itself. To not be so concerned about making one's way through these steps, but to be fully present for practicing with what is, and content with whatever the practice is, whatever the focus is for the time.

But then as it develops, practice sooner or later, the body starts feeling settled and unified. The whole body we're breathing with and relaxing the whole. As we develop a kind of ability to be a little more content and happy to be here, then we have a feeling of well-being that makes it easier to both notice what's going on in our mind, the mental activity, and to relax it, to tranquilize it. And it's nice to have a sense of well-being so we can look at some of the craziness that goes on in some of our minds, and not be disturbed by it, or troubled by it, or reactive to the unusual things that we can think and do and feel, but see it as just mental activity, as opposed to making it personal or material with which we should judge ourselves. And so, to experience the mental activity and to relax it and calm it down.

In a little summary, that's the first eight steps of Anapanasati. And then the whole practice of these 16 stages takes a dramatic shift with step nine: experiencing the mind. And it's kind of like this is a pivot into a deeper dive into our, maybe we could say, our spiritual life.

The word mind, citta^[2], is usually translated as mind, or mind-heart, or even heart sometimes. And it probably is, to be a little bit of a Buddhist heretic—to border on it—that the citta is so important in the teachings of the Buddha and so generally respected, that it's the closest thing we get from the Buddha to something that we would maybe in English call the self. But this idea of self, put in a Buddhist kind of orientation, is all seen as representing some activity of the mind, some idea, interpretation, something we're holding on to. And so there's a desire not to get involved in this whole idea of self and "what is the self" and "who am I." That investigation is considered more complicated and more stressful than is useful for deepening our meditation, so we get to put the self idea aside.

But the citta, the mind, is kind of what takes its place. But the mind is not a thing. The mind is the gestalt of all the mental activities in the way that we experience that. And so it's a fluid thing, not a thing to get attached to or to reify into a solid thing. It's dynamic and fluid. And it gets very clear as we go deeper and deeper in meditation how fluid and changeable the mind is, and how the experience of mind changes in different levels of concentration, different levels of clarity. And it's fascinating to watch this, how we sense and feel the mind kind of oscillates between sometimes being contracted and small, and sometimes being expansive, sometimes being all kinds of ways.

But when the body gets relaxed, the mental activity is relaxed. Generally, the citta, the mind state, tends to become very welcoming, very wholesome, a very wholesome, nourishing feeling. It's like we've discovered a treasure inside, a treasure of well-being, of goodness, of wholeness, of intimacy that is a kind of a state rather than a thing. And it's a dynamic state. It's not something that's easy to hold on to or cling to. I mean, we can have desires for it and all that, but if we get close to it, we realize there's nothing here to cling to, or it doesn't make sense to cling, because if we cling to this mind, we're actually getting involved in a mental activity which is a subset of the mind. And getting too involved with these activities of mind, the thoughts of the mind, interpretations of the mind, narrows and collapses the freedom, the openness, the fullness that is the sense of the mind.

And that's why in step 10 we can satisfy the mind, we nourish the mind, we gladden the mind with this sense of wholeness, the sense of being complete or centered. So there's a sense of well-being, a certain kind of well-being.

And this is the foundation for when the practice of Anapanasati switches to something we can call in English, concentration practice. Or that concentration practice is a separate practice, but we can develop concentration in doing mindfulness of breathing in, mindfulness of breathing out. Because we center ourselves, we have this mind state that we're intimate with and feel, and we take the whole mind state with us as we center ourselves on the breathing. The breathing becomes the very wind that moves through the mind state, kind of the massage that moves through it. And the breathing becomes more and more the place in which we gather ourselves, the place in which the concentric circles of our life hold counsel, gather together, and are present for and supported.

It's like^[3] you're sitting at the center of a room, and there are concentric circles around you, and all your best friends and family and supporters just come there just to be with you, and hold you, and love you, and show that you're good, you can rest in yourself, you can be at ease.

And so we gather together all of ourselves. And the word that's usually translated as concentration for step 11 of Anapanasati is not actually samādhi^[4]; it's a different word that looks like samādhi. I didn't look and get it exactly right, but samādahati^[5]. And it more literally means a gathering together. A gathering together or a settling, a settling in here.

And so, breathing in, one settles in. Breathing out, one settles in. Breathing in, one gathers oneself here. Breathing out, one gathers oneself here. And this gathering, centering, settling is difficult to do if we're preoccupied with thoughts and ideas and feelings, emotions. It works best when we're relaxed enough that we're not tight or contracted around that, or nervous about those things. Those things can still happen, but we don't have to be involved in them. They can be in the background or on the side, or they can be in the outer chairs in that circle of all our supporters there. Or as we get more and more gathered in, the thoughts and feelings and emotions all kind of get oriented as supporters for this process of the mind being centered in on the breathing.

So if we are thinking, they're very simple and innocent thoughts about staying with the breath, feeling the breath. If there are emotions happening or feelings, they really feel connected to the process of being settled, it's almost part of settling. The goodness, the wholeness, the wholesomeness, and nourishment seems to flow with or out of being settled on the breathing and being with the breath.

So this process of settling, of gathering together, gathering in all of who we are, it continues this process of becoming whole. In the first tetrad^[6], experiencing the whole body and then relaxing the bodily activity. In the second tetrad, experiencing the mental activity, all the activity, and relaxing it, contributes to that sense of the mind as a whole, the gestalt of the mind. And then going further, settling, everything begins to come in. And when it gets really sweet, the sense of being settled and deeply connected and not distracted by things, then when there's a sound or something else happens in the body, a sensation, it just seems to be soft and tenderly held and included. It's not a problem, it's just part of this wonderful landscape of subtleness, of softness, of intimacy, of care, of attention.

So samādhi is sometimes called the unification, unification of that mind, making it whole.

I'm very aware that this is not easy to experience, and describing it this way can set up expectation or striving for it, or comparative thinking, like, "I'm never going to be in that kind of state."

If those kinds of things happen, that's why the earlier steps of Anapanasati are so important. Because we're always staying attentive to the stresses and the strains that happen in the body around our reactions, and then relaxing those. We're always attentive and sensitive to how we get trapped and caught in our mental activity, our thoughts, our judgments, our interpretations, and our comparative thinking, and we're always ready to relax those.

And this is so important, these early steps of Anapanasati, to always keep them close by, always being content to do those. And that's the massage that we do, to always go back, catch ourselves, do the earlier steps again and massage ourselves. And then we come back into a nice mind state, a nice way of being, and then we get caught again, and there's a massage back and forth. And rather than thinking of this as a mistake or a problem, and that we're supposed to be always at the growing edge of the practice, it's actually this massaging and going back and forth and discovering ourselves that is slowly working out the kinks, slowly working out the wrinkles that need to be ironed out so we get more and more whole and holistic and settled in this practice.

So don't be concerned too much if these teachings we do now, for these deeper and deeper teachings, don't quite work for you. They'll work in some way, you can trust that. You might not be aware of it consciously. And always be content to do whatever step that you're on, and we'll continue.

So thank you for today, and we'll probably continue for a while now, at least a few days into the week, with the samādhi and concentration. Thank you.