Mindfulness Of Mind

Guided mindfulness meditation from our Power of Engaged Awareness course with Fleet Maull, Ph.d., co-founder of the Engaged Mindfulness Institute.

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P, is an author, meditation teacher, consultant, coach, seminar leader, motivational speaker, social entrepreneur, and peacemaker. He is the founder of the Prison Mindfulness Institute, the National Prison Hospice Association, and Windhorse Seminars & Consulting. He is a senior teacher in two Buddhist traditions: the Tibetan Buddhist Shambhala lineage and a Roshi (Zen master) in the Zen Peacemaker Order and Soto Zen lineage.

Transcript

Hi,

Welcome to this guided practice,

Which is module four.

So we're going to where we're exploring these qualities of mind that we can experience,

The different mind states or mental formations that color our experience,

The speed of the mind,

And the extent to which the mind feels busier or more spacious.

So as always,

We'll begin by setting our intention.

So I invite you to set an intention that is meaningful for you.

And you can make it primarily about yourself if you like,

Or you can broaden it to include practicing for the benefit of others,

Specific others or all beings if you like.

And by now we've been working with posture quite a bit,

So I invite you to find your way into that posture that for you feels uplifted,

Awake,

Dignified,

Workable,

Sustainable,

Relaxed.

And then I invite you to continue with closed-eye practice for now,

Unless that's extremely uncomfortable for you.

And then you're welcome to just lower the gaze as we've been doing.

But the invitation is to do the practice with the eyes closed for now to better explore this internal landscape.

And then we will be shifting to eyes-open practice.

So as always,

We begin by bringing our attention to the body,

Which includes the breath.

And again,

We're working with the actual tactile physical sensations that make up the experience we call body and breath.

Those are just words,

Concepts.

But they point to an actual lived experience in the moment.

And by anchoring our attention with that direct lived experience of tactile physical sensation,

We're anchoring ourselves in nowness,

Presence,

Awareness.

So to begin with,

Whether you have the eyes closed or whether the gaze is just looking down the bridge of your nose at about a 45-degree angle,

I invite you to notice,

If you can,

Any mental formations or mind states that are impacting your experience.

And within the exploration of this,

You find yourself getting distracted,

Simply come back to the body,

Reground yourself by settling deep into the body,

Focusing on feeling the body as deeply as you can physically,

The body and the breath,

And let that ground you.

And then again,

Engage with this exploration.

So see if you can notice now if there are any even subtle mind states,

Mental formations,

Moods,

Attitudes that are impacting your experience.

It could be that there's a subtle layer,

Or not so subtle,

Of sadness or longing,

Melancholy.

Or there could be a mental state of contentment,

Peace.

There could be a positivity.

There might be a mental state of expectation or curiosity or anticipation.

So just being curious about your own experience,

Moment to moment,

And seeing if you can notice how it's being filtered through any particular attitudinal quality,

Mood,

Emotional state.

These mind states or emotional states that we're referencing here can be the subtlest,

Subtlest kind of attitudinal quality or mind state,

Even just something like openness or subtle expectation,

Or to full-blown emotions,

Full-blown emotional states like feeling really happy or feeling really angry or really sad or really frustrated.

So just being curious about your own experience of your own mind at this moment.

I think what I'm most noticing about my own mind state at the moment is a quality of curiosity,

Expectation,

Not so much expectation,

But rather anticipation.

So as I'm leading this,

There's some anticipation and some curiosity about where I'm going.

Where this is going.

So what mental formations can you notice that are present for you,

Even subtle ones?

And you know,

If you're struggling identifying something,

You could just focus on,

Well,

Can you notice any basic sense of positivity?

Which could be contentment or peace or gladness or something like that.

Or can you notice any subtle,

You could say negativity,

But it doesn't have to be,

It could be,

Negativity can seem sort of judgmental,

Just a subtle sadness or longing or boredom.

Or irritation of some kind,

Frustration,

Just subtle sort of anxiety or discomfort,

Unease.

That may be kind of grounded in a physiological experience of stress and your mind is experiencing it as a kind of unease.

So just being curious and realizing that these mental states,

Mental formations can be continually shifting and they can be many layered,

Can be like peeling back the layers of an onion and there are subtler and subtler states.

So just like in exploring physical sensation and really trying to drop into that level of experiencing how sensations arise as pleasant,

Neutral,

Unpleasant,

And being able to have awareness around the mind state,

Which is what we're talking about now,

The mind state arising of aversion,

Attraction,

Aversion,

Ignorance.

So we're inviting again now that awareness,

That gentle effort and curiosity to really notice whatever you're feeling in the moment and it may be continually shifting.

And of course it could be that mind state of aversion around some physical discomfort you're feeling or it could be the mind state of attraction around some physical comfort you're experiencing or pleasure or it could be the mind of ignorance or kind of checking out a disassociation or a lack of awareness that's arising around a quality of neutrality.

So what's there for you?

Sometimes when we intentionally practice mindfulness,

We seemingly shift out of what's been going on in our day,

Our life,

And shift into a kind of a neutral mode.

So I invite you now to be curious about sort of how you've been feeling today altogether.

What's been going on for you today?

Would you consider this to be a day when you woke up in a good mood and you've basically been in a good mood,

Positive frame of mind most of the day?

Or was this a day when you woke up in a bit of a bad mood or a bit of a funk?

Or this is a day when you've had some challenges that kind of really got you frustrated for a while?

And then maybe extending that to how's your week been?

How's your life been of late this week,

This month,

This year?

In general,

Your overall state of happiness,

Dissatisfaction,

Connectedness,

Loneliness?

Just being curious,

Maybe allowing some of that to arise now.

Gently allowing some of that to arise.

So what's arising for you?

And again,

Sometimes the actual practice of mindfulness where we notice any distraction,

We come back to the breath,

We really try to focus.

And that's important in terms of grounding,

But it can be suppressive in a way.

And that's why sometimes we feel,

Well,

When I practice,

There's nothing going on.

And then I step back into my life and there's all this stuff going on.

So here,

Inviting us to stay with the body,

Stay with the breath,

Stay with the posture,

And at the same time,

Relax,

Open a bit,

And allow perhaps what's been going on in our lives today,

Yesterday,

Over the last week,

The last month.

But allow ourselves to feel in that a bit,

To notice different attitudinal qualities,

Different moods,

Different mental formations,

Or mind states.

Just notice how they color our experience.

And just as we were working with physical sensation,

We can notice how these mind states also arise as pleasant,

Neutral,

Or unpleasant.

And then there's another layer of our conditioned reactivity around that,

Of being attracted to or wanting to hold on to a particular mind state,

Feeling aversion toward a mind state and wanting to push it away or withdraw from it,

To change,

Shift to something else,

Or some quality of a lack of awareness around more neutral states.

So just being curious about all that.

Now I invite us to be curious about the speed of our mind,

The speed of our mind.

Now,

Because we're in the midst of a formal session of mindfulness practice,

Our mind has probably slowed down a bit.

Maybe not,

Maybe there's some energy,

Some momentum of discursiveness going on,

But just being curious about the speed of your mind at the moment.

And if it does feel very slow,

You could also open to and reflect on what it's felt like today,

Yesterday,

The last week,

And so on.

Just open to feeling that energy of how the mind moves.

When it's moving faster or sometimes seems to really be speeding,

Or when it's slower.

And part of the mind moving fast is we tend to be one or several or many steps ahead of ourselves.

We're very rarely like right here in the present moment.

We're constantly planning and planning and strategizing and anticipating and worrying and thinking about the next moment,

The next moment,

The next moment.

And so we're kind of living out here in front of ourselves somewhere,

Ahead of ourselves.

And sometimes,

Of course,

We get stuck and go and start ruminating about the past as well.

But we're very rarely right here.

But when the mind speeds up,

It tends to be that we're anticipating,

We're getting caught up in a lot of momentum about anticipating something and projecting into the future.

So see if you can have some awareness of the current speed of your mind.

And maybe just reflecting,

Maybe you can have a sense of how the mind has been fast or slow throughout the day today,

Or yesterday,

Or this week,

Or just getting a sense of that,

Being curious about it.

And again,

There's no right or wrong with any of this.

It's simply learning about ourselves and being curious about our own experience of being alive in this body with a heart and a mind.

We're feeling beings,

We're sensory beings,

We're thinking beings,

We're mental beings,

Emotional beings,

Physical beings,

Spiritual beings.

We're just feeling into all that with curiosity,

Openness,

Non-judgment.

And finally,

The final quality I'd like to invite you to be curious about is whether your mind feels particularly busy at the moment.

And this might seem similar to speed,

But it's a little different.

Like how occupied is your mind?

Your mind might not be going terribly fast,

But there could still be,

There's a lot of thought,

A lot of discursiveness.

And we may not be getting caught in it,

So it may not be kicking into speed of mind,

But still there may be a lot of activity,

A lot of discursiveness.

We might just be in an environment where there's a lot of sound,

A lot going on.

Or does our mind feel somewhat spacious or even somewhat empty?

So just being curious for now,

How does your mind feel in terms of being kind of full of content and busy,

Occupied,

Or being more spacious,

Less going on,

Even somewhat empty,

Somewhat like that quality of the mirror analogy that I used earlier.

Now,

Generally,

When we're practicing mindfulness in a formal way this way,

Our mind is going to tend to slow down and it's going to tend to be more spacious.

So again,

Just to notice and be curious,

You might really kind of open to and invite in what's been going on today,

Yesterday,

This week,

In terms of really connecting with how the mind moves,

You know,

In terms of that momentum,

That speed,

And in terms of the sort of real estate of the mind,

How busy is it,

How many things are there,

How tightly packed is it with thoughts and emotions and perceptions and sensations and so forth,

Or how much is it spacious and not so occupied.

And then finally,

You could be curious about the interconnectedness or the connection between these different,

Many,

Many different possible mind states,

Mental formations,

Attitudinal qualities,

Moods,

Emotions,

Between the speed of our mind and its momentum,

And between the content,

The busyness or the fullness versus spaciousness.

So we're getting a sense of how these things are interconnected and influence each other.

Again,

Just being curious about all that.

It's not like we really have to figure it out or you're going to,

But just,

You know,

Kind of being curious.

And,

You know,

The insights,

The connections,

The sort of connecting the dot into the gestalt of things happens quite naturally and organically just through the practice of inquiry,

Openness,

Curiosity,

With the qualities of beginner's mind,

Appreciation,

Gratitude,

Non-judgment,

And so forth.

So again,

I invite you to continue this session for as long as you have time or you're able.

And until our next session to work with awareness,

Being curious about these qualities of mind,

The different mental formations or mind states that color the experience we're having,

Attitudinal qualities,

Mood,

Emotion,

Even very subtle ones.

Being curious about how our mind moves,

The slowness or speediness of the mind,

And how that can have a momentum to it.

And then the content of our mind,

The busyness,

How occupied is our mind versus how spacious.

And you can work with this in your formal practice and even perhaps more importantly in your mindfulness in the midst of daily life practice because it's there that you're going to experience the mind moving more.

You're going to experience more obvious mental formations,

Mind states.

You're going to experience the busyness of the mind or the spaciousness of the mind,

Perhaps in a more pronounced way than when you're settled into formal practice.

Okay,

So wishing you good practice and through this process of inquiry and coming to really understand ourselves and know ourselves at a deeper and deeper level.

And we'll see you in module five.

Reviews

I like how Fleet’s calm presence delivered this instruction, expertly guiding me to be curious about the nature of mind-all tye while coming back to the body and breath.