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Guided Meditation: Settling into Calmness

Good morning.

So, one of the interesting or very important areas for meditation and the deepening of meditation, or as I sometimes like to think, the "filling out" of meditation. I like the word "filling out" because the idea of including all of ourselves—going deep sometimes can be bypassing or putting aside things, but filling out includes everything. Some of the language of meditation are things like being settled, and settling all of who we are, or becoming composed or unified.

So composing ourselves, so all of who we are is here in a certain kind of balance or harmony or unification. And that's difficult to do if we prioritize certain parts of our life over other parts. Sometimes we prioritize our thinking, and then we get focused on thoughts and ideas and we lose touch with our body and the present moment. Sometimes we prioritize our emotions, and everything is seen through our emotions or felt in the emotional realm.

And sometimes we can prioritize the body. In ancient Buddhist practice, the body seems to have been a huge priority, but not at the expense of these other areas of our life. But it's the beginning place of filling out, of being inclusive, of not getting stuck in the places we usually get stuck in where we prioritize. And one way to prioritize is we identify with it; it becomes the location in which we live. We live in our thoughts, we live in our emotions. And as soon as we do that, we're living in a partial way.

Through mindfulness of the body, there's a way in which we learn how to be inclusive of it all. In a sense, the body can hold the emotions, the body can hold the thoughts. But even more than the body, it's the fluidity of experience. It's the softness of experience, of awareness. In a sense, we begin living in awareness where things are soft and open and inclusive, composed, unified. And one of the ways of doing that is to be centered in the body.

So we'll start that way, and I'll try to guide you through a little bit of the experience or sense of this being composed, settled, unified, as a means for being calm.

So, to gently close your eyes, and without much else, become aware of your body in whatever way your body is now. Maybe without even fixing it or relaxing, just take a few moments to feel how it actually is now, as if you're doing so for the first time. Like meeting a new person, and you're just present and taking them in.

And then gently, there's a way of including more of your body. Take a deep breath where you feel the expansion of the torso widely, globally. And doing that a few times, and then with the exhale, also globally settling into this body. Gathering the body together as you exhale.

Deep breath in, and then on the exhale, relaxing the body.

And then let your breathing return to normal. And then continuing to experience your body globally as you breathe.

As you inhale, feel the body globally. As you exhale, let your body settle, relax, wherever there's tightness and holding.

And then settling into just the experience of the body breathing. But for now, as your body is breathing, imagine the body is like a balloon filled with water, a waterbed perhaps. It's just this fluid, and the whole balloon moves with the water jostling around. Someone touches it, and the whole thing kind of moves, and this is fluid.

So as you experience your body breathing, the movements of the body, feel the fluidity of them as if they're water moving in a bag or waterbed. And feel how that movement and fluidity is a global experience in your body in whatever way that's easy for you. With a settling as you exhale, a settling of the water. And the body has a rhythm of expanding and settling.

And then, rather than prioritizing your body, or your thoughts, or your feelings, prioritize the fluidity of the movements in your body. Letting the awareness surf on them, or float on them.

Whatever feelings you have in your body, pleasant or unpleasant, whatever emotions you have, let them all be included within the rhythm of the body's fluidity, movement, changing. Relax into the movement. It could be very, very subtle pulsing and vibrating.

Whatever distracted mind there is, as you exhale, let it relax into the gentle movements of the body. As if awareness is floating on the sensations that arise and pass—sensations which may be the fluidity of the sensations in the body that come and go. An awareness that holds it all, floats on it all.

And what are you prioritizing? Where are you living? In the awareness, your thinking, your emotions, a particular concern of the body? Can you relax the prioritization to open awareness up, to open the body up? Everything is included in a kind of openness that's fluid.

And with a global awareness, let it all be present. But let all of it be centered on the experience of breathing. As if the movement begins and ends with breathing. As if breathing is the heartbeat of the global experience that doesn't prioritize anything, includes everything, while being centered on breathing.

On the exhale, relaxing back into the place where breathing begins. And if you feel any calm or tranquility, perhaps you can feel it, perhaps you can feel the movements of breathing moving out through that calmness. Coming and going through it, like you're forest bathing in your own calmness. As if you're being nourished, nurtured in a broad, inclusive calmness that everything occurs within.

Being settled on oneself can be calming. Calmness can be a way to settle on oneself, to be settled here in the present moment. And this can be a gift that we bring with us into the world: the ability to be calm and settled with what we're doing. Calm and settled in our conversations with others, not rushing on, multitasking, but offering the gift of presence to another person.

We can do this with our work and our activities and our driving, whatever we're doing, we provide the gift with our settled, calm attention. So we're really here for this life, here for our experience, here for what's around us. And it has an impact; others will feel it. The world will feel it in the ways.

As we meditate, as we come to appreciate the treasure of calmed, settled attention, may we learn how to bring that into the world. To bring some of the best qualities of human beings with it: generosity, love, care, and wisdom that thrive in settled, calm attention.

May this practice be for the welfare and happiness of everyone. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Calmness (4 of 5) Serenity Without Boundaries

So continuing with this theme of the week, which is calmness. One of the words for calmness or tranquility is samatha^[1], and it's often enough in English translated as serenity. And it's seen as the partner of vipassanā^[2], and vipassanā is insight. So the insight practice is partnered with a certain kind of serenity or calmness that gives power or strength or clarity to the insight.

And this samatha, this kind of serenity, is associated with concentration. And concentration is considered to be one of the means of becoming calm. So concentration, or samādhi^[3], is a process of becoming composed or unified on our experience. I like to think of it as beginning with learning how to be centered in our experience, but with the awareness not narrow and tight, but globally soft and expansive.

So that everything is in a certain way included. Not that we're paying attention to everything and understanding everything going on, but there's a feeling of openness in the body, a feeling of openness in the awareness that's not stuck in any one place or fixated in any one place. Sometimes concentration practice is associated with one-pointedness, which can just be putting the attention on one place. But that can be translated into a stuckness, into a fixation on one place, which tends to be detrimental to the person who's getting concentrated. The idea is that awareness can be very soft, open, even a kind of expansive feeling to the attention, the sense of presence that we bring.

It's kind of like if you have a big container, like a big jar full of sand, and at the bottom, there's a cone, and at the bottom of the cone, there's a little valve. And you can turn the valve, and the sand pours through. From the top, the middle falls in first, and everything else follows. And so, it's kind of like we focus maybe on the breathing, but in the breathing, we're opening the faucet, and everything begins flowing down through the force of gravity. Everything is included, everything kind of orients itself towards being here in this experience. That can't happen if we're prioritizing one part of our experience over other parts of the experience.

If we're prioritizing our emotions, or prioritizing our thinking, and even prioritizing certain parts of our body, or ideas about the body, or prioritizing what should be happening too much. I like to think of this as living in emotions, living through our thinking. Some people live through certain component parts of who they are, rather than living through the totality of who we are. When we do that, we're limited. Buddhism has the idea of freeing ourselves from those limitations of being partial.

Sometimes we use the language of identification. We identify with our emotions, we identify with our thoughts and our ideas, meaning that we define ourselves by them: "I emote, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am. I'm in pain, therefore I am. I suffer, therefore I am." So we live in those things, we take up a stance on those things, we prioritize them in some way. And it's not to dismiss the importance of any of this, and sometimes we need to give caring attention to all these different parts of ourselves, but to do it in a way where we don't live in it. We don't give over-importance to it so we limit ourselves.

So this idea of composing ourselves, or unifying ourselves with awareness, so that the sense of presence with the body, the sense of being here, is much more expansive and open to the fluidity of change, the movements, the aliveness, the animated fluidity of life from moment to moment that includes all of the above. Because we're not compartmentalizing, or fixating, or in conflict, or pushing some things away, things become settled, and then serenity begins settling in.

We have an easier time getting settled on something, and we can settle on the breathing. Like the sand all gets settled through this faucet, we open this valve and things just flow in. So we're centered, and everything comes along and is around it, gathers, and is part of it. But it's not an intentional gathering in; it's more like we're open and relaxed. That's why relaxation is so important in meditation. When we relax, things have a chance to flow into the center. If the center is breathing, it flows into there, and things have a chance to then settle. So there can be a calmness, a tranquility, a serenity that begins to occur.

And I find it interesting that the greater the calmness, the more the calmness has no boundaries. The calmness almost feels like it extends out into the air, the space around me. With my eyes closed sitting, I can't really feel the difference between the inside and the outside of my body in relationship to the calmness. The calmness spreads and opens and has space for it all. The calmness can hold our sorrow, it can hold our anger, it can hold our pains, it can hold our joys. It can hold the thinking mind. All this has a place, but we're not prioritizing it, we're not living in it. It can just be there in the fluidity, the movement, the softness of life as it unfolds.

So samatha is to cultivate it through concentration. It might be centering oneself on one's breathing, but it's a centering where there's an opening going on. So on the exhale, to center ourselves on the breathing, and maybe with the exhale also feeling that there's an opening up into the experience of breathing. And then on the inhale, there's also an opening and receiving the experience of breathing. So we're centered on the experience of breathing, but that open feeling is one where things open up so everything can pour in, the sand of our life, everything can pour in. And it isn't so much that it pours in and fills it, as it just pours through. Everything is fluid and moving and flowing; nothing is stuck.

The deeper experiences of tranquility are ones where everything is flowing, everything is included, everything is allowed. It's a dynamic nature, everything is a process. Unless we fixate on it, or we think too much about it, then we can imagine it's stuck or something.

So samatha is very much an embodied experience. And the ability to begin feeling and sensing calmness in the body is an important foundation for this deeper calmness that comes with a concentrated mind, a unified mind. A mind that knows how to be present in a steady, rooted way, here for our experience. I think of this calmness a little bit as the ballast of a boat. The boat might have a keel that's quite heavy, and no matter how strong the wind blows, the boat might tip a little bit, but it comes back to upright. So the calmness is the balancer. It lets us move relaxedly with things and then come back to upright, to presence. We don't get knocked over.

Calmness is also sometimes associated with being porous. Because things are so calm, it's almost like the body, the mind, the heart is just so open, everything just passes right through. When there's no calmness and we're fixated on something, when we over-prioritize or identify with some part of ourselves, it's kind of like putting up a wall. Life hits it, life reacts to it and bumps into it, and we have to deal with it. But when we're relaxed enough and don't prioritize or fixate on any one thing, then the experiences of life kind of move right through. We're porous to it.

This is not to be aloof and distant and disconnected from life. It actually lets us feel a deeper connection, a deeper presence, a deeper intimacy that is both an intimacy to ourselves, while there's a kind of intimacy with the world. So these are some of the deeper benefits of cultivating calm and tranquility, specifically from meditation, the concentration or unification practices.

So maybe you can try it. Today you can see how you can relax any way the mind is fixated, or prioritizes anything, or identifies with something as "me, myself, and mine." See if you can open up the space, open up the space of the body, the heart, the mind, to be more inclusive. That creates space within which things can relax. A little tool for doing this is giving yourself time. Do things with lots of time. Opening up and making space for just being open, let it be open in time as well. Give lots of time to your experience, to what's happening, so that this samatha, serenity, can hold you, can contain everything.

So thank you very much, and I look forward to the next talk on calmness tomorrow.