Mindfulness Of Mind

This Buddhist mediation dharma talk offers strategies and tools on how to be aware of your mindstates instead of lost in them. This talk includes specific tools on mindfulness of mind, unhooking from emotions, and resting in your true nature.

Transcript

So this is a little over halfway through the retreat.

That might be good news to some of you,

And it might be bad news to some of you.

Sometimes what can happen in practice,

Especially on a longer retreat,

Is this can be a place where we're kind of white knuckling it.

And tonight's talk is about working with mindfulness of mind,

Which includes emotions,

Thoughts,

Intentions,

Consciousness itself.

And in particular,

With working with thoughts and emotions,

It's a little bit like learning to ride the waves.

There's lots of big waves and small waves,

And how we develop that ability to ride out all the different waves that we're having emotionally.

In Hawaii,

Where I live,

If you're too goal-oriented in the ocean,

You die.

The people that have a goal,

Especially I've been learning to do what's called free diving,

Where you go way down under the ocean,

And you you go way down under without tanks.

And if you're not sensitive,

And you don't feel deeply,

And you focus too much on a goal,

You lose track of what's happening in the ocean and what's happening in your body.

And those people often have problems and end up dying in free dives.

And I think practice,

Although we don't die,

It's a bit like trying to find that balance of not being too goal-oriented,

And yet knowing where we're going,

And meeting challenges,

And facing difficulties and new things.

At this point in the retreat,

You might be asking yourself,

Why am I here?

And even deeper than that,

You might be asking yourself,

Who am I?

As you see,

This cacophony of emotions,

And thoughts,

And everything come parading through.

Who are you?

Are you all that stuff?

What are you?

They're important questions to ask.

And oftentimes on these retreats at this point in time,

We just see what we're not.

Oh,

I guess I'm not that.

I'm not that.

I'm not that.

I'm not that.

And why we're here is to start learning what we truly are.

And probably at this point,

You've seen that you're not your thoughts.

Not really.

You're not your emotions.

This is important information.

Don't discount this just because you're still struggling.

Practice is really developing.

It's developing a spiritual first aid kit,

The ability to be with all these difficulties.

It's not we're just not making you suffer uselessly.

Might seem that way.

But you're developing,

You're strengthening this muscle of mind that both Rebecca and Anushka talked about,

This ability to have unshakable deliverance of heart.

And when you develop a muscle,

It can be painful.

It can take time.

It can create pain.

So it's not always easy.

But in developing this spiritual first aid kit,

It's so important.

What we're doing here is so important.

The reason why I sit in a chair,

A few years ago,

I had quite a bad mountain biking accident.

And when I fell,

I was on kind of a not very well-used road in the woods.

And I looked down at my leg,

And the bone was sticking up in the air.

And there were no houses not very nearby,

And it wasn't a road that was very well-traveled.

And of course,

My first thought was a lot of anxiety.

Actually,

I got mad at myself.

But then the second thought was,

It's OK.

Even if nobody comes for hours,

I know what to do.

Because I've practiced mindfulness for so many years,

I know what to do,

Even with the pain,

Knee pain.

I was like,

OK,

Knee pain.

Nobody coming,

Freaking out,

Screaming,

Yelling.

I knew what to do.

I just relaxed back into this knowledge.

So even if it seems like you're not doing anything here,

You never know when you'll use it.

You never know.

A dear friend of mine who's been coming here for many years,

It looks like he has a diagnosis of ALS,

Which is a progressive disease where you lose your ability to control the functioning of your body,

And you can't really speak anymore.

It's a really pretty horrible disease.

And as he's starting to lose these abilities,

He said to me,

I'm so glad I'm not trying to learn mindfulness and metta now.

He already knows it.

He knows what to do.

He's ready for his death.

He's ready for actually a pretty horrendous,

Slow,

Painful death.

He already knows what to do.

And he's doing it,

And it's amazing to watch.

So this stuff is useful.

So with mindfulness of mind,

What we're trying to do is we're trying to break the emotional tie to our thoughts and to our emotions.

We're trying to break that velcroing that we do.

You know that,

How when emotion comes up,

You just kind of velcro right onto it?

We're trying to un-velcro from everything.

There's a group in Hawaii where they talk about a practice called Drop the Rock.

Drop the Rock,

It's a Drop the Rock meeting,

Was based on the understanding that,

Left to our own devices,

We as a species tend to lug around these big rocks.

So we each have this rock,

Right?

You probably know what yours is.

They are the rocks of our concerns.

Every time we get up,

We reach down for our big rock,

And then we lug it to the door,

Down the stairs,

Roll it into the back seats of our cars.

Then after we drive someplace,

We open the back door,

Get out our rock,

And carry it with us wherever we go,

Because it's our rock.

It's very important to us,

And we need to keep it in sight.

Also,

Someone might steal it.

So what's your rock,

And can you drop it?

And the way we pick up the rock is two ways.

We get either seduced by the story,

The emotion.

We get fascinated by it.

Or we push it away,

The opposite extreme.

We get aversive.

I will not have that emotion in my life.

Well,

We know how well that works.

And why?

You know,

Why is pushing away the same?

Because when you push something away,

You have to grab it first.

You notice that?

So either way,

You're grasping at your Velcroidean to whether you're falling in or whether you're pushing it away.

So really,

What we're trying to do here in this retreat is develop a right relationship to our emotions.

That's about letting them be,

Leaving them alone,

Just letting them be as they are.

We don't have to do anything about them.

When I was thinking about this talk today,

I was thinking that really,

Working with emotions is like working with a four-year-old.

With a four-year-old,

You want to first be compassionate.

Right?

You know,

When they're screaming and yelling and something's happening.

But you also want to be skeptical.

You know how they come to you and like,

Wah,

Wah,

And you can't even understand what they're saying.

And you're like,

All right,

Settle down.

What's going on?

Talk to me slowly.

And you know,

Everything's in these big,

Exaggerated terms.

And you have to just kind of settle it down.

And then you don't let the four-year-old lead your life,

Do you?

You include them as part of who you are,

But you don't put them in center stage.

Our mind actually was never meant to be in center stage.

And that's when we talk about,

In this path,

We talk about right view.

It's realizing their true view.

It doesn't have mind at the center.

So a couple ways to work with emotions.

First way is to label them.

As much as you guys hate this,

Or you might hate it,

It really works.

And actually,

I was just at UCLA a month ago working with my friend who runs the mindfulness research program there.

And a study just came out of UCLA that showed,

It was by a guy named Lieberman,

That showed that labeling,

Labeling actually changes the part of your brain that you're using.

So they did CAT scans.

Actually,

MRIs,

I'm sorry.

And they looked at the brain.

And when a person had a scary emotion come up,

They saw a scary emotion.

If they didn't label it,

The emotion just stayed in the amygdala,

The lower area of the brain where you have the fight or flight response.

If they put a label on it,

Like anger,

Fear,

The emotion immediately went to the prefrontal cortex,

Which is up here.

And the whole stress response shifted and changed the person.

Anxiety went down.

Everything shifted.

And they tried just giving the person any label.

So like when they would see fear,

Anger,

They would say Tom,

Julie.

But that didn't work.

A label that fit actually shifted the part of brain that you were using.

And Chaz and I were actually in a research study out of Boston University a number of years ago.

And the woman there is starting to show that not only does it change the area of your brain you're using,

But mindfulness and practice actually increases the thickness of your cortex.

So it actually starts to make a structural change in the brain.

And it was based on number of hours logged on the cushion.

So the more hours you had,

The thicker your cortex got.

So luckily,

The Buddha knew this a long time ago.

So in his sutta on contemplation of mind,

Which is part of the four foundations of mindfulness,

He talks about knowing,

Contemplating mind as mind.

OK,

This is labeling.

Oh,

Knowing mind as mind.

Knowing mind as lustful.

Knowing a mind free of lust as free of lust.

Knowing a hating mind as hating.

Knowing a mind free of hate as free of hate.

Concentrated mind,

Distracted mind,

Knowing all of this.

He also said to know mindfulness that there is mind.

So that's consciousness itself.

And from this place,

We can abide,

Detach,

Not grasping at anything in the world,

He says.

I mean,

He knew that this stuff worked.

OK,

So there's the labeling.

Then there's compassion.

You can't just have a label without compassion.

It just doesn't work as well.

So if you have a four-year-old kid and you're like,

Oh,

It's just sadness,

That doesn't help them very much,

Does it?

So with a four-year-old,

You want to think about compassion.

Oh,

Ouch,

That really hurts.

Often whenever I'm having a really strong emotion,

I'll just go,

Ouch.

Just feeling the pain of it,

Because when we're suffering,

One of the practices is compassion.

It's really what this practice,

The essence of it,

Is welcoming all our children home.

So everything that we've pushed out of our life that we don't want to feel,

We end up having to bring it all back home and accept it completely.

We get to be it all so we can love it all.

That's why we're here.

And you notice on this retreat at this point,

You've gotten to be everything,

Haven't you?

Raging maniac,

The perfect yogi,

The quiet one,

The loud one.

You get to be it all,

Don't you?

And the teachers that are sitting up here have gotten to be it all,

And we're just the ones still standing after having seen everything about our minds over and over and over and over again.

So there's the labeling.

There's the compassion,

Compassion for the four-year-old.

There's the noticing the untruth.

This is a very important piece in working with thoughts and emotions.

You know how a four-year-old is.

They just exaggerate.

They say a lot that's not true.

I'm such a bad person.

Someone said this today.

I mean,

That sounds like one could believe that,

Doesn't it?

But to question it,

Is it absolutely true?

Is it really true?

Many of you might know Byron Katie's work.

She asks these questions,

And they're very essential.

Can you absolutely know it's true?

I'm a bad person.

OK,

Were you a bad person when you were sleeping?

OK,

Were you a bad person when you were sleeping?

Were you a bad person when you were taking a pee?

If there's even one second when you were not a bad person,

Then you can't say that's true.

So why believe it?

Another untruth we say,

I can't stand another minute of this retreat.

Guess what?

You're still here,

So you must have stood another minute.

So that wasn't true,

Was it?

The mind loves to say,

I just can't stand another minute of this,

Or I can't stand another minute of him or her.

But then it does.

So it's fun to see that it lies all the time.

And what happens is we're poking holes in our stories,

And one hole after another.

It's like if I were to put a piece of black paper over these lights,

And you wouldn't be able to see that light there,

Would you?

But then slowly,

That's our true nature.

We have this story covering it,

Which is the black paper.

And slowly,

We poke holes in it through inquiry.

Is that true?

Is that really true?

Huh.

And we just keep poking holes and poking holes until the paper becomes almost transparent,

And then it just falls off,

Doesn't it?

This happened to my muffler a few years ago.

The rust just,

But this is what happened with depression for me.

It was just,

I said that depression left my life after 40 years,

40 years.

Because through practice,

Enough holes just got poked and poked and poked,

And it just couldn't hold water anymore,

That depression.

And it fell away.

And once it was gone,

I was not going to pick it up again.

Another area to look at with your mind is how the mind creates divisions.

A friend of mine who was in a group the other day,

She said that she met a biologist who told her that bacteria in your body,

In order to attack you,

Whether a cancerous bacteria or a viral thing,

It has to establish itself as separate to do its job.

So this is what the mind does in a way.

It establishes itself as separate and creates kind of a civil war in order to really give us this mistaken view.

So if you can just start to see how this separation,

This idea of separation,

Isn't really true.

The only separation that ever really happened,

I see more and more,

Is a thought.

Byron Katie says,

The only stressful thing that ever happened in your life was a thought.

So we create these divisions.

My godson,

He's on this retreat.

And when he was quite young,

I'd come to visit from far away.

And he was like about four.

He would say,

Are you a good guy or a bad guy?

Because that's what kids do at that age.

They create this black and white,

The good guys and the bad guys.

That was the time of Power Rangers,

I think.

So it's watching that four-year-old mind that wants to create these distinctions.

And even as adults,

We do this story.

A man is stranded on a desert island and builds two churches.

When he's rescued by a passing ship,

The captain asks him,

Why did you build two churches?

He points to the first one.

This one I go to every week,

He says.

Then he points to the second.

And this one I wouldn't step foot in.

Are we doing that here,

Creating a sense of two churches inside our heart,

The good yogi,

The bad yogi,

The one who's doing good practice,

The good day of the retreat,

The bad day of the retreat,

Just watching that.

Maester Eckhart talks about knowing this place where distinction never gazed.

Can you imagine what that is?

A place where distinction never gazed.

It's here now.

And then mind steps in,

Creates a distinction.

So really what we're trying to do is let the mind be,

Let our emotions be.

How to leave them alone and just let them be as they are.

Let them unwind themselves.

And this is a process.

You don't turn a cruise ship around on a dime.

Takes time.

It can take time.

So part of being on retreat is learning to love the process,

As Rebecca said her first night,

Learning to be curious about this process.

Because really the process is all you have.

The process is your retreat.

It's not the insight you're going to get or the insight you got.

A few years back,

I used to live in New Mexico.

And I was part of a place called Llama Foundation,

Which is way up in the hills that's at 9,

000 feet in the mountains.

And they don't have electricity.

And they don't really have so much running water there.

And I was part of a building project where we were building a teacher house.

Actually,

The first person who was going to stay in it was Bonta Gunaratana,

Bonta Bee's teacher.

So we were building this house.

And it actually took us two summers because of the lack of electricity.

And there was a lot of arguing and disagreements about the building project.

And the process wasn't so great,

Really.

But we had this excellent living space.

It was the best living space on the land.

And so we were really happy because even though the process wasn't great,

We had this house.

And everyone loved it and thought it was really nice.

But it was winter,

So no one really stayed in it except Bonta Gunaratana.

And a few months after the winter was over,

Fire came through and destroyed every single building in most of the buildings at Lama Foundation,

Including this house.

And in that moment,

I saw that all I had was the process.

I had two summers of process that didn't work so well.

And it didn't matter that there was a great house because where was it now.

So retreats can be like that.

So the last piece about working with emotions and the mind.

And this is actually the most important piece.

It's reorienting to what else is here.

OK,

So your mind is raging.

Emotions are raging.

But what else is here?

What else is here?

What else is here?

What else is here?

I call it the and factor.

It's like there's a little kid.

You're trying to take a picture of Mount Everest.

And this little kid keeps getting in front of the camera.

Hey,

Look at me.

Take a picture of me.

And then you go to the Grand Canyon.

The little kid's in front of the camera.

So every picture you take is the little kid.

You know,

The mind,

Right?

And you just want to see the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest.

So it's hard to bring this kid who's always in the foreground,

Right?

Ramana Maharshi talks about it.

It's like a finger in front of your eye.

Your mind is like this finger covering your eye.

It's like what you want to do is bring it out here so you can see everything.

Move it out.

And then it's put in its proper perspective,

Right?

Mind is,

It's just here.

It's just part of all these other things.

The Tibetans say that just seeing through mind is like looking at the sky through a straw.

That tiny view.

So what's it like to let the straw go and see the whole picture?

So you can ask yourself when emotion's happening,

When a lot of thoughts are happening,

What else is here?

You can hit the Minimize button on the computer and let something else come forward.

And to do this,

It's about relaxing.

Relaxing back.

It's about feeling from the neck down.

Mind is mostly neck up,

Isn't it?

So when you relax back and you just let yourself feel from the neck down,

What is it that's here?

What kind of presence or stillness is here?

In the Tibetan tradition,

They talk about looking at what was here before the emotion or the thought and what's here after.

You might even feel right now what was here before you were born.

What will be here after you die?

What is that?

It's here now,

Isn't it?

It's always been here.

And this is when the Buddha talked about the changeless,

The timeless,

The deathless.

This thing that was here before you,

Or born that will be here after you die,

That's here every single moment.

So even if your mind's raging,

Can you notice this too?

Really,

It's not about forcing or effort.

It's just the willingness.

A willingness to let it come forward.

A willingness for the mind just to kind of move back and this to move forward.

This really wants to move forward.

A friend of mine described it like a helium wanting to fill a balloon.

It wants to move in.

It wants to take occupancy of you if you just are willing and let it.

If you just are willing and let it.

Ramana Maharshi used the phrase,

Let what comes come,

Let what goes go.

See what remains.

What remains?

When your thoughts come and go,

What remains?

It's not something you can speak about,

Is it?

It's a feeling you know.

You know what remains.

And if that's too difficult to understand,

Look at the gaps in things.

You know,

Our bodies are made up of mostly water,

Which Anuska said,

But mostly space.

Water is mostly space,

Isn't it?

There's tons of space in this body.

So what about the mind?

There's tons of space in the mind.

Your thoughts just represent such a small amount of mind.

Before in every thought,

There's a space.

Starting to orient to that.

Acharya Sumedho wrote this,

The mind is like space.

There is room in it for everything or nothing.

We always have a perspective once we know that space of mind,

It's emptiness.

Armies can come into the mind and leave.

Butterflies,

Rain clouds,

Or nothing.

All things can come and go without us being caught in reaction or resistance.

So when you can feel that space around thoughts and in your mind,

All things can come and go.

And again,

You don't have to make a practice out of this.

It's just that willingness to let it come forward because this is your true nature.

And your true nature will win out in the end.

Your mind is such a small thing.

It's just a subset of this bigger picture.

So you don't need to worry.

I saw that my true nature was in depression.

You can see your true nature isn't anger.

It's not hatred.

It's not fear.

Because it comes and goes,

Doesn't it?

So that which isn't you will leave eventually.

The presence is so much stronger than mind.

It just works through mind.

It can come through any time.

One of my friends was swimming in the ocean outside of Maui where I live,

And he was way off of a dive boat.

And while he was way out in the ocean,

He realized that a shark was coming at him.

It was a tiger shark,

The kind that kill people there.

And he put up his fists,

Which is what's recommended when a shark comes at you,

With hope that you can punch it in the nose.

And as the shark was coming,

It came closer,

And it was just a few feet from his face.

And it stopped,

And he looked it in the eye,

And it looked to him in the eye.

And in the moment of complete fear and realizing that he could be eaten,

His mind just emptied.

While he was looking at the shark,

Everything dropped away,

And this presence came forward.

And he knew that it would be totally fine whatever happened.

He was just completely calm.

There was no time for mind.

And when mind dropped away,

This true nature came right forward.

And the shark just kept looking at him,

And then it turned and slapped its tail and wrapped him out of the water.

And then it swam away.

And he said from that moment on,

He runs a very successful business on the island.

He said he hasn't worried about his business.

He hasn't worried about his life because he knows that this,

Which is the truth of who he was,

This okayness came through,

And it will come through for all of us.

Even at a moment where we think we're going to be,

We're going to have a violent death.

So certainly it can come through on retreat when we're wishing we could die.

Or even just in a moment that is just completely plain and ordinary.

So you can trust in this.

And there's many,

Many stories of this kind of thing happening.

Ramana Maharshi says,

Your true nature is that of infinite spirit.

The feeling of limitation is the work of the mind.

Your true nature is that of infinite spirit.

It's how to remember this.

That's why we're here.

How to remember this infinite spirit.

A friend of mine sent me a piece about our song.

And I think of our spirit a bit like a song.

And actually in Australian Aboriginal cultures,

Where I was a few years ago,

They have these things called song lines.

And they really believe that your song is your whole life.

You sing your ethics,

You sing your morality,

You sing your teachings,

You sing the truth of who you are through your song.

So she sent me this piece,

My friend.

When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant,

She goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the child.

They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses its unique flavor and purpose.

When the women attune to the song,

They are the one who brings the soul to the heart.

And when the women are the one who brings the soul to the heart,

When the women attune to the song,

They sing it out loud.

Then they return to the tribe and teach it to everyone else.

When the child is born,

The community gathers and sings the child's song to him or her.

Later,

When the child enters education,

The village gathers and chants the child's song.

When the child passes through the initiation to adulthood,

The people again come together and sing.

At the time of marriage,

The person also hears his or her song.

Finally,

When the soul is about to pass from this world,

The family and friends gather to the person's bed,

Just as they did at their birth,

And they sing the person to the next life.

In this tribe,

There is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child.

If at any time during his or her life the person commits a crime,

The individual is called to the center of the village,

And the people in the community form a circle around them.

They sing their song to them.

The tribe recognizes that the correction for the behavior is not punishment.

It is love and the remembrance of identity.

When you recognize your own song,

You have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.

So what is this song,

This thing that's been here for you?

What is it that you can trust,

No matter what?

No matter what happens in the world,

No matter what happens in your life?

It's important to know who you are.

It's important to know your song.

It's important to know what you can trust.

It's important not to be seduced or velcroed to your mind.

So you can remember,

Always remember the truth of who you are and what's really important.

That's why we're here.

So my wish for you is that you know who you are,

You find this,

And you hold it in view and you keep remembering it over and over.

And any time those emotions or mind states come up to seduce you or trick you,

You label them,

You look with compassion,

You question that four-year-old.

You remember what's true.

This is what the world needs now,

These people that know who they are,

Not people who are seduced by their mind or their fears.

So I have a tradition of playing a gospel song at the end of my talk.

So this song is about wandering and coming home.

I am a poor,

Wayfaring stranger.

I have no home and I have no rest.

I am just going over yonder.

I am just going home at last.

I am a poor,

Wayfaring stranger.

I have no home and I have no rest.

I am just going over yonder.

I am just going home at last.

I'm going home to see my mother.

I'm going home to see my daddy.

I'm just going over yonder.

I am just going home at last.

I am just going home at last.

I am just going home at last.

I am just going home at last.

Reviews

Leaving my rock at home today in hopes to walk lightly and mindfully through my coming days. Your talks and meditations have been a staple to my developing practice and I have so much gratitude for your wisdom 🙏 thank you Amita.