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Guided Meditation: Calmness

So, hello and welcome to this third day in a series on the gladness pentad^[1]. The middle one here today is tranquility. Specifically, the tranquility of the body, but we can also consider it a tranquility of the mind.

Meditation is often associated with calmness, and people will do meditation to become calm. But I'd like to propose that the calmness that we develop through meditation is not only for its own purpose, but for the benefits that come with calm. One of the benefits is that our body and mind becomes organized. It self-organizes in the calmness.

When we're not calm, we tend to be disorganized. We're scattered, fragmented, and agitated. Sometimes we're jumping around, sometimes our thoughts are buzzing, or jumping back and forth between things. Sometimes the body can't be still. Sometimes the body just has to keep moving because being still is too uncomfortable.

And the constant movements of the body, the constant movements of the mind, can very easily become a disorganization process that is scattered, divided, and fragmented. As things become calm and there's a settling, in that settling, things begin to shift and change and become organized. The classic Buddhist way of talking about this is that things become unified. But "unified" doesn't suggest the ways in which things cooperate or coordinate that maybe "organized" does.

As we become more calm, more organized, and more settled, it allows the mind and body to heal, to settle, and to come alive in different ways. Most importantly, it allows for a cleaner, more direct operating of our intelligence, our creativity, and our focus. We can bring our intelligence and our creativity to becoming focused in meditation—to being really here in a wholehearted way. A wholeness that is also a wholesomeness.

So, to be calm. Perhaps by mentioning these benefits from becoming calm, maybe you'll give this a try as we sit here, in a little bit more intentional way than you might typically do meditation.

So, assuming a posture that is an organized posture, organized for the purpose of meditation. Just like a painter on a canvas will bring their whole body into being really present. The body is organized and gathered together for the purposes of just being really there, precise with the brush stroke. Or the way a cook might be slicing, making a beautiful slice of some vegetable to adorn a dish. Being right there, precise and focused, the body gets involved and connected. Organizing the body, taking care with your posture so that it's a posture where you begin feeling that your posture—as much as it can in a relaxed way—is cooperating, participating in the meditation. Maximal participation of the body in being intentionally present, here and now.

Sometimes sitting up straighter will allow for a much deeper relaxation of the body than leaning back and slouching in a couch. Initially it seems like it's more work, but over time an aligned body can let go deeply. I read once that the two postures that allow for the deepest relaxation of the body are the yoga posture called the corpse—laying flat on your back—and the other is sitting cross-legged with a spine erect, not slouching.

Gently closing your eyes. So the eyes are not looking at things that are different than being here in the meditation. And one more time, with the eyes closed, making small adjustments to the posture, almost as a ritual of getting the body organized and participatory in the meditation, in being alert.

Taking a few deep inhales, and using the expansion of the rib cage, the torso, as you breathe in as a way of deeply connecting to your body. The stretching, the opening—feel it fully. And then the long exhale, soften and relax. Long exhale, settle into this body. Taking a really deep breath that expands the torso gives the torso a chance to reorganize itself. As you exhale, refine itself.

And then, let breathing return to normal. With normal breathing, relaxing the different parts of the body, both to relax them and also to just begin this process of reorganizing the body to be a cooperative whole.

On the exhale, relaxing the muscles of the face. Softening around the eyes. Exhaling and relaxing the shoulders. Feeling the weight of the shoulders releasing. Softening the belly as you exhale. Maybe there's a way of relaxing the belly as you inhale as well.

Then, in the next few exhales and inhales, feel your whole body in a global way. On the exhale, relax your whole body. Release any bracing you have, bracing against life. Releasing any momentum forward into time, to do, to worry. The whole body softens.

And then relaxing the mind, maybe also on the exhale. A gentle softening of the thinking mind. A gentle quieting of the thinking. Any pressure, tension, or agitation in the thinking mind—let it relax, and let the weight of it settle it, quiet it. So the fragmenting forces of the mind begin to quiet down, and the mind gathers together in a settled place within.

Instead of focusing on breathing from the control tower looking down, imagine that there is a kind of a canal or a tube from the brain down into the belly. As you exhale, all the thoughts and mental activity—awareness itself—moves down that canal, down into the belly, and rests there. It settles there together to experience the movements of the belly as you breathe, where everything is allowed to organize itself around the movements of the belly. If the mind wants to be at peace, you can support that by having the mind rest in the belly.

Relaxing on the exhale, and perhaps feeling how the scattered parts of ourselves gather together, settle down together, and fit themselves together in an organized whole. Letting go, relaxing, allowing everything to settle around the breathing.

If your inhale and your exhale is your paintbrush as an artist, and you have to be precise with the brush stroke, let your attention get gathered and settled and focused on each stroke of the breath. As if it's the most important thing of the moment—the last stroke that finishes the painting without messing it up.

And then to end this sitting, imagine that every thought is also like a paintbrush stroke, painting a picture. Maybe painting the picture of the world that you live in. Every thought of good will and kindness is like painting it with a friendly color. And so, to end the sitting with good will for the world, for others, saying to yourself these kinds of words as you paint the world. Infuse the world with your good will:

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be free.

Then, may we be organized in our hearts and minds and bodies, with kindness, compassion, and love.

[Music]

Thank you.

Dharmette: The Gladness Pentad (3 of 5) Calmness Organizing the Dis-Organized Mind

So, we're now at the third talk of the gladness pentad. This is tranquility. Specifically, it's tranquility of the body, but I like to think it includes calmness of the mind as well. Here the language is not that we are calming anything, but rather there's a calming that happens from the momentum of the meditation, of the practice. It's like if you sit still and upright when you're really tense, the body just wants to relax and settle. You just kind of find yourself settling without intending to do so.

In the same way, for the mind, there's a way in which things are allowed to settle. They quiet if we get out of the way, if we don't perpetuate our busyness and our activities, simply by being still. It turns out that this deep relaxation of the body is supported by gladness and joy, the first two steps of this gladness pentad. With gladness and joy, there's a contentment, a sense of well-being, that it just feels safer to relax and let go. It feels warm and cozy to be present, so the body wants to relax more. It's like it has been tight and shivering in the cold, and then it stands in the warmth of the sun and soaks in the warmth, and something begins to relax. So, in meditation, we can help with the relaxing and calming when we allow for it as part of the art of meditation.

Meditation is often associated with becoming calm and tranquil, and it's a very useful quality of meditation. But it's not so often talked about how the calmness and the tranquility that comes along is not for its own sake. Many people feel that's enough: "I was so stressed out, it is nice to be calm." But the calmness begins to allow for a reorganizing of the mind and body. I especially think of the mind getting reorganized. A disorganized mind is all too often our experience in life, and we only realize that when we sit down to meditate and see how much the mind is jumping around, fragmented, or preoccupied. We can be so distracted we don't even know we're distracted, or so preoccupied we don't even know that we're preoccupied until we sit down and see it.

To begin to be present, awake, and clear, and to see what's happening in the mind, begins allowing the mind to settle. It's kind of like making breathing room for something to settle. We can also participate in that relaxing sometimes, just being with the breath and relaxing it, being with our mind and softening the mind. The more that we're awake, attentive, and relaxing, the more the mind will self-organize. It's like the self-healing properties of our body and mind are not enabled if we stay scattered and stressed. It's as if we're keeping ourselves away, interfering with the self-healing, self-settling, self-organizing aspects of our mind.

As the mind gets more organized, less fractured, and more gathered together, the purpose, as I said, is not just to be calm, but so that our intelligence, our creativity, and our focus can operate in support of the meditation. The idea is that the calm is not an end in itself, but allows for a deepening of concentration and settling—a greater sense of settled, concentrated wholeness. This is not another fragmentation, like a laser focusing on something and pushing everything else aside. Rather, everything is allowed to settle together. Nothing is left out, nothing is held at bay, nothing is repressed or denied. In this self-organizing, everything comes together and can find a way to work together, to cooperate and coordinate for the purposes of meditation.

I was told recently about a game that uses some kind of technology attached to the head that can measure brain waves—whether a person is agitated or calm. Apparently, it's a game where there's a ball between two people on a table, and it's wirelessly connected to these headsets people are wearing. When we relax, the ball moves away from us towards the other person. So it's a competition to see who can get the ball into the other person's goal or on the other person's side of the table. But what's required is to be relaxed. You can't strain; you can't be competitive in a forceful, straining way. The person who wins is the one who is most relaxed, which probably also means the most unconcerned about winning.

I imagine that you don't win by falling asleep, and you don't win by spacing out. You have to be very present to notice which direction the ball is going and whether the mind is becoming more stressed or more agitated, or if there are places you can settle and relax to quiet the mind.

Learning this art involves being alert, present, tracking what's going on with intelligence, and keeping it relaxed at the same time. Many people only know how to do one or the other, but the practice is to do both, and then to use our intelligence and creativity to gather more fully and focus more fully just here in our meditation.

In this last meditation, I suggested a creative image: thinking of attention like a brush stroke, like you're a painter painting something. For every inhale and every exhale, you have to have the very precise and clear, relaxed focus of an artist putting the finishing touches on a very refined, detailed painting. It might be exquisitely beautiful, and you want to put the last little thing in it and not mess up, so you are very present. If there is stress or tension in the artist's hand, it won't be quite right; it has to be very relaxed but very focused. Every exhale is a brush stroke, and every inhale is a brush stroke of this painting.

This metaphor partly borrows from the ancient Buddhist language, Pali^[2]. In one of these coincidences or accidents of the language, the word for mind, citta^[3], is the same as the word for painting. They have different roots, so etymologically they're not related, but somehow in the way the language evolved over time, they came to have the same pronunciation—they are homonyms. But it's a wonderful coincidence that the word for mind and the word for painting are the same, because maybe there's a way in which how we're present and how we engage in attention is a way of painting the mind, painting our experience, and painting ourselves into being a whole, organized, and gathered together self, with everything working in harmony.

So how do we harmonize mind and body? Part of the way is to allow them to harmonize by being calm and being settled. Some of that we can do ourselves. We can relax the tensions in our muscles while staying alert in the body. What we don't want to do is relax and become limp. Limpness is not the tranquility that the Buddha was pointing to. The most limp person would end up like a cooked piece of spaghetti, with no tautness holding it up. We are not supposed to become limp, and we're also not supposed to be tense. We need some kind of tautness, some kind of vitality and energy that keeps us alive, upright, and engaged, but also something that allows for a very deep relaxation of the body and the mind. It's phenomenal what can happen in meditation.

I offer all this to you as a suggestion or as ideas to encourage you to lovingly and relaxedly participate and support this organizing, self-organizing, defracturing movement of meditation. Part of the reason to settle the mind is so that we can become more intelligent, creative, and present for our experience. For those of you who have minds that jump around a lot, some image might be helpful.

For example, as you exhale, you have the focus of a painter with a paintbrush. With every little step of the exhale, you're painting it; you're right there tracking it. Or maybe what's the attention you need if you want to cut some fruit like a mango or an avocado, where you put the knife down and you don't want to cut through the skin. You cut it in half, and from the inside, you're slicing it down to the skin. What's that focus right there for that cut that you need to do?

Maybe you have other images that you like that work for this. Maybe an archer, really getting the whole body organized, settled, and connected. An archer can't be tense, but they have to be taut, and everything is organic. The whole body is organized for the purposes of the shot, and everything takes its time to really be there to hit the target.

To approach meditation as an organizing practice is supported by tranquility. The more we have gladness and joy, the more natural it is for the body to feel cozy, content, and feel like it can settle, relax, and participate in this reorganizing—moving away from the disorganization of stress, resistance, and agitation.

Look for opportunities to be tranquil. Sit on a park bench for a little while, or look out the window and have tea. Look for opportunities to relax your body while standing in a shopping line. Don't read the magazines that are there as you're waiting, and don't judge what other people in front of you in line have bought. Standing there is a chance to soften and relax your body, and maybe relax your mind.

Look for opportunities today to relax and be tranquil. Do this not just for its own purpose, but to see if you can notice if in that tranquility and calmness, there's a way in which your body and mind come together, become more whole, organized, gathered together, or unified.

Thank you, and may you have a tranquil day. Not just because you're tranquil, but because as your whole system starts coming into harmony, you'll be better prepared for tomorrow's topic, which is happiness. Thank you very much.

Announcements

I also wanted to mention that yesterday I talked about the day-long retreat I'm teaching on Saturday that could be seen as a continuation of this series. It's a day-long teaching and meditation on the Four Noble Truths. The information for that is on the "What's New" section of IMC's website. It's also being offered through the Insight Retreat Center, so if you go on their website under "Day-longs" or "Online Retreats," you can see it. It's a Zoom retreat.

Thank you very much.