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Guided Meditation: Calm Recognition

Hello everyone. Yesterday, I used the analogy of driving. When someone is excited, they push the gas more, maybe even unconsciously. And when they're maybe distracted or the energy level drops, they really pull back a little bit from the gas pedal and the car drives slower.

Another driving analogy is for mindfulness. On the freeway, when we drive, the idea is for every 10 miles of speed to have 10 feet between you and the car in front of you. So at 50 miles an hour or 60 miles an hour, you have 50 or 60 feet between you, and then you're safe. With mindfulness, we're putting space between the speed of our lives. Some of us are going fast, and the faster we're going, perhaps the more space we should have so we don't crash into things. How to make space with mindfulness is to view mindfulness—especially as we're getting the hang of it and developing it—to see it as a kind of a stopping.

To stop and take a good look. Instead of just going along with the train of thought, with whatever we're feeling, whatever is going on, to the best of your ability, stop to look at it and recognize what it is. And then, once it's been seen or recognized, then pause. What this pause means is to register what happens in the wake of recognizing it. Is the thing experienced more fully once it's been recognized? Once it's been known, is it being seen more fully?

Then, in this relaxed way, stop, recognize, pause, and take in the experience, what's happening then, and then do it again. Then we're not rushing ahead with whatever thoughts and feelings and things we're doing, and we can live a safer life.

This is particularly useful with today's topic, which is restlessness, agitation, and anxiety. To sense whatever it means for you to stop, to recognize the restlessness. This hyper energy that can happen, this hyper-aroused state. Stop and recognize it's happening—not to make it a problem, but stop, recognize, and then pause for a while to just take in the experience. Don't just go along with it. Feel it in the body, feel it in the mind. "Well, this is what it's like." And also to see if you can pause long enough to see what difference the recognition makes. The power of recognition is quite something. So stop, recognize, pause, and feel.

As meditation gets quieter and more calm, then this seeing of restlessness, seeing of agitation also becomes quieter—more subtle restlessness. So taking a meditation posture, and maybe rocking back and forth a little bit, forward and backwards, maybe in a way that feels delightful, to begin being in your body in this meditative posture, and then gently closing your eyes.

And again, perhaps with some feeling of satisfaction to be starting your meditation, taking some gentle deep breaths. And as you exhale, relax. And then letting your breathing return to normal, and feel your body. Kind of a global awareness of your body, maybe with your attention roaming around your body. And as you exhale, relax in your body. Soften in your body. Relax into your body as if it's a kind of homecoming.

Then to gently center yourself on your breathing. As if the comings and goings of in-breath and out-breath is something you're pausing everything else for, so that you can recognize it, know it. Relaxing on the exhale. Receptive to the inhale.

Feeling maybe any pleasure that's in the experience of breathing. Maybe it's a particular point in the cycle of breathing, or maybe it's in a particular part of your body where the rhythm of breathing is pleasant. Relaxing as you exhale and feeling the pleasure of whatever calm or state there is within. Maybe a kind of global experience that's not focusing on anything in particular. A global experience of calm or peace, warmth, as you breathe in the middle of all things.

As you exhale, relaxing the mind. Exhaling and appreciating whatever pleasant calm or peace might be in the mind, even if it's only hints. And letting there be a gentle, calm recognition of what's happening in the present. It can be recognizing the inhale, the exhale, recognizing sensations of the body, or sounds, feelings, or mind states, thoughts.

Calmly recognize, and let there be a pause after recognizing to feel and sense what happens, to register. And if there's any way that you're restless or agitated, stop for that, recognize it, pause, and feel the restlessness, but feel it calmly. Recognize it calmly. So that there's a kind of a meeting, a meeting between whatever restlessness there is, agitation, and the calmness that you bring to it with a calm recognition, a calm pausing to feel and sense the experience.

Whatever way you are, your offering is to calmly know it. And if you're agitated, it's okay. Calmly know, recognize, pause, feel, sense what that experience is like.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to calmly recognize how you are right now, where the act of recognition is calm. You might not be, but take your time to recognize, and to feel, and to sense.

So you're creating a space, so the thinking mind, the reactive mind doesn't just go uninterruptedly. There are pauses, like there would be a pause or a gap with the car in front of you on the freeway. And this ability to stop, recognize, and feel the experience, know the experience, creates space and time for more of our life to emerge and show itself. And it creates more of our life, more opportunities for us to take in and recognize and know others, either when we're in their presence, or when we think about them, or we consider them—people we don't know that we learn about, maybe even in the news.

And to take in this world of suffering and challenge that humans live in, and to offer that loving pause and recognition that allows us to see this life of ours more clearly, even if just for a moment or two. Calmly gazing upon the world, and letting that be an occasion for your care, your kindness, your goodwill.

May you create calm so you can see the world kindly. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (46) Hindrances: Restlessness

So we come to the fourth of the five hindrances. And these hindrances are, when they're strong for us, it's kind of like tailgating the car in front of us on the freeway. We don't have to stop the hindrances, but we want to end their hindering quality.

So, for example, restlessness, agitation can hinder our ability to see, to calmly recognize, to calmly consider what's going on. It hinders our ability to be wise and be clear about what's happening. We don't have to stop being restless, but the idea is to not have the restlessness interfere anymore.

One way to do that is to practice mindfulness. And today I'm referring to mindfulness as the practice of stopping in order to recognize what's happening. And perhaps if we don't appreciate the stopping, the recognition is done kind of quickly, automatically, kind of part and parcel of the usual ways of the mind working, and it's not really stepping out of the stream of restlessness, agitation, to take a look at it.

So something inside stops enough to take a good look, and then, a good recognition: "Oh, this is what's happening. I'm restless, I'm agitated." Let the recognition become learning how you can have agency in one particular area, and that is the agency to take the time to recognize what's happening calmly. Take your time. "Oh, restlessness." It can be like that in your mind: restlessness. Restlessness is happening.

The mind might be going at 90 miles an hour, but the recognition is kind of like a person who is driving in the slow lane, or probably standing on the side of the road and looking at that speed, a car going by fast. And so, to recognize calmly, the act of recognition is where we take some agency.

And then, in the agency in that recognition, to pause afterwards to register, take in that experience. And what that can mean is to register, take in the experience of restlessness in a deeper, fuller way, and make space for it, and really feel it in that space that's been created by the recognition. It could also be to take in the impact, the effect that stopping and recognizing has. It might create a little more space, a little more calm, it might slow down the restlessness and agitation we might have.

Restlessness and agitation is part of life. Even in deep meditation, you can feel it sometimes—there might be a tremendous amount of calm, but the mind kind of gets a little bit excited. Sometimes it gets excited about meditation: "Oh look, I'm so calm!" And you can feel the mind getting a little bit agitated or excited. And so, to recognize and relax and let it settle down again.

The two words for restlessness—both words imply this hyper-arousal. Things are a little bit more excited or restless or activated. And so one of them is just called restlessness often, or agitation. And the other word is sometimes called worry, sometimes it's called regret. And it's hard to know exactly what the Pali word is supposed to mean, but the principle is that this is a hyper-aroused state that can happen. It can be worry, it can be panic, it can be fear. It can be regrets; regrets can keep us churning away with a lot of energy. It could be anxiety that keeps us activated.

And so to recognize what it is: anxiety, regrets, physical agitation, mental agitation, restlessness. And to calmly know it, calmly recognize it, and get to know what it's like.

With all these hindrances, the more we learn to be familiar with them and really know what they are physically, emotionally, mentally, behaviorally, then the more we're able to see them coming. We can recognize, "Oh, I'm beginning to go in that direction." And if we can catch something as it begins, there's often a little bit more ability to back off or to pause more or let go of it.

But in order to do that, it takes a lot of familiarity. So with restlessness, anxiety, remorse, agitation, look forward to the day when in meditation you can have a nice bout of it. Rather than viewing it as unfortunate and a drag, and you have to figure out some way not to be agitated—and this is proof that you should never be meditating—take it as an opportunity to study it and get to know it.

I've had fascinating meditations where I was restless, and it felt like ping-pong balls bouncing inside my body. And I was just amazed to watch this energy and think, "Where did this come from?" And just sit there quietly and feel the ping-pong balls bouncing off the sides of my body from the inside, feeling the surging energy in the arms and the legs, or the mind that doesn't seem to want to stop chattering. To be amazed—"Wow!"—as opposed to being horrified or upset.

And then take the time to say, "Okay, this is the time I've been looking for. A time for me to really take in the experience of restlessness, agitation. Let me just kind of sit in the middle of it." Like sitting in the middle of the fire, sit in the middle of it and realize, "This is my chance to feel it, get to know it, become familiar with it. Let me see if I can understand, to see something new about it, something I've never known before."

Is it in my little finger? Is it in my toes? No, where is it? Do you feel any of it along your back? Well, maybe, and maybe not. Where do you feel it? Where is it? What's activated? And what are your beliefs around it? What are your second arrows^[1] that you have about restlessness, agitation, having regrets, having anxiety? And maybe it's the second arrows, maybe it's the reactivity we have with them which is a fuel for the agitation, for the fear, the anxiety, whatever it might be.

And so this thing about assuming agency, assuming that we have some ability to meet a situation we're in. We can't necessarily change it or control it, but we have some agency over our ability to show up for it. And so to stop. "Okay, I'm agitated. Okay, I'm going to stop for my agitation." As opposed to kind of keep doing everything or something, I'm going to stop for my agitation. And if you do that and stop, maybe even close your eyes, maybe you find your shoulders relax a little bit. And that's the beginning of some different way of being with it, and then the agency of calmly recognizing.

So, if you want to recognize verbally in your mind, sometimes that's very helpful. And just say to yourself in a calm way, "Oh, this is restlessness." So that you're decoupling the mind that does the thinking from the restlessness itself. The mind might be mostly restless, but it's like if you talk to someone in the library. You might feel agitated, but because it's the library, you talk quietly. And so you talk quietly in your mind: "Oh, this is restlessness." And then you pause, or you take time, maybe a luxurious time, to feel and know that experience.

And in this way, we're getting wise about restlessness, anxiety, remorse, regrets, agitation—the whole family of things, what happens when we get hyper-aroused. And we're finding a different way to be with it. And begin to appreciate, once you're familiar with agitation, also take the time to become equally familiar with the time when you are not agitated, when you feel calm or peaceful or settled.

Do the same thing there: stop, recognize, pause, and really feel it. And here, we're being able to recognize calm states or peaceful states. We can also see them coming; we can see hints of them and allow them to blossom because we recognize them and make space for them. And also, it makes more room for them to appear, to be there, and we can somehow let that be a richer part of our life.

So restlessness, anxiety, I hope that you don't have much. I hope the practice supports you in not being caught in it. But I also do hope that you look for an opportunity to get to know it better and have a different relationship with it, and practice your agency of having a calm recognition. And so maybe today, I'm sure that there will be some occasion for something in the family of agitation, restlessness, excitement to occur. And take a good look at it.