Week 1 Mindfulness Instructions

First instructions for a 6 week introduction course to mindfulness, created by Brent Morton, Spirit Rock and IMS trained meditation/dharma teacher.

Transcript

Welcome to the meditation instructions for week one.

Nice place to start is by thanking yourself.

Thanking yourself for showing up,

For doing this practice,

For maybe trying something new.

Taking a step in your life towards more ease and peace and awakening.

Finding a posture that embodies the qualities of dignity and ease and wakefulness.

We start the meditation practice by finding a state of ease and peace in the body.

Notice how the weight is resting on your sit bones,

Those two bones and your buttocks.

Try to even out that weight.

Even weight on the left butt,

Even weight on the right butt.

It tends to straighten things out.

It can be nice to have a little curve in your low back and your shoulders open.

Externally rotate a softness through the sides of the neck to help that.

Letting go of the face,

The eyes can close and soften,

Softening the backs of the eyes.

Softening the jaw,

The throat,

The belly.

Allowing that soft jaw,

Soft shoulders and soft belly to be our starting point.

Where we begin the meditation is from this place of softness.

Those three parts,

The jaw,

The shoulders and the belly are often the most loaded places in the body.

The places where we carry the most tension,

Emotional tension as well as physical,

Mental tension.

So practicing relaxing the jaw,

The shoulders and the belly.

And from that place of softness we'll allow the hands to touch.

Doesn't matter how the hands touch,

You might gather them together in the lap.

And imagine I stop you on the street and I say,

Hey,

What do you feel in your hands?

A common response to that question would be,

I feel my hands touching.

That's a fine answer on the street.

In mindfulness meditation practice we're going for something deeper.

So there's no sensation called hand.

Hand is a concept,

It's a mental concept.

It's a thought we associate with an experience.

But there's no sensation called hand.

What we actually experience in the hands is what I call lived experience.

It's a dance.

We can feel softness,

We can feel hardness,

We can feel tingles,

Pressure,

Vibration,

Swirling,

Expanding,

Contracting.

And as we rest the mind on that level of being,

We'll begin to see that things are changing,

Things are dancing.

The mental concept,

Hand touching,

Tends to happen.

Things are changing,

Things are dancing.

The mental concept,

Hand touching,

Tends to have a rigidity about it.

It's almost like a snapshot.

It's black and white in a way.

And it doesn't really exist in time.

It's more frozen.

The actual experience of hands touching is something much different than the thought,

Hand touching.

So feeling the hands and allowing a word to form in your mind related to what you feel in your hands.

For example,

You might feel your hands.

And notice softness,

The word softness forms in the mind.

Try to hold the two in your mind,

The word soft and then the experience soft.

The word soft has its history.

We might associate it with various objects in our life.

Our bed is soft.

The experience of softness,

However,

It's much different.

In mindfulness practice we go for this lived experience.

We learn how to live here.

We build a home in the lived experience.

You might say the beginning meditation is to warm up to this home.

In the same way you've been feeling your hands,

Feel now your breath.

And I invite you to take ten seconds to notice where it's easiest for you to feel your breath.

When I say feel,

The lived experience,

The swirl,

The pressure,

The vibration,

The dance of breath.

Perhaps you notice the breath most easily in the nostrils.

Just watching the breath like you would a stream allowing the breath to be breathed.

Perhaps you notice the breath most easily in the nostrils.

Just allow the mind to rest in the natural flow of breath.

Maybe the swirl of the breath in the nostrils.

Maybe the warmth of the exhale,

The coolness of the inhale.

Maybe there's a tingling.

Simplify your life down to breath coming in and out of the nostrils.

Not thinking about the breath or creating any story about the breath.

Simply living the breath.

A great line from Joseph Campbell is,

I don't believe human beings are looking so much for the meaning of life as much as they're looking for the experience of being alive.

That's what we're up to,

Feel the life in the breath in the nostrils.

In the same way you felt the nostrils,

Perhaps you felt the chest more easily.

Rest the mind in the chest,

The breath in the chest.

You might notice rising,

Falling,

Swirling,

Vibrating.

Simplify life down to feeling breath in the chest.

Perhaps the belly was the place most easily felt for the breath.

Great practice is actually to place a hand on the belly if the breath is difficult to feel.

The belly is one of the most loaded,

Energetically places on the body.

We tend to carry tension there,

Carry the mother-in-law in the belly,

Or the mortgage payment or I-5 in the belly.

A very useful thing for anyone's life,

Especially if this has happened to you,

Is to get the breath flowing in its natural state.

So when the belly is tight,

When we're full of tension,

There might be this tendency to have a reverse breath.

A healthy breath,

The belly gets large,

Expands with the inhale,

And then falls naturally with the exhale.

In breath brings a big belly,

Out breath brings a small belly.

When there's a lot of tension in the belly,

The reverse is often the case.

The belly gets small with the in breath,

Large with the out breath.

Rather than making a project out of this to get the perfect breath,

Or the perfect meditation breath,

Simply focus on relaxing your body.

A relaxed body will breathe in the proper way.

You don't have to make a project out of it.

Simply relax the belly.

It might be helpful to sigh your relaxation in.

And then simplify life down to rising belly,

Falling belly.

What you will no doubt come to find is that this is extremely difficult.

The mind is a wild white horse,

The Tibetans say.

The untrained mind in Buddhist Asia is often equated to a monkey running from place to place,

Subject to subject,

Past,

Future,

Fantasy,

Sleepiness,

Dreams.

It's not just you,

This happens to everyone.

You do not do anything wrong.

It's not your fault even that you think.

It is the nature of the mind to think.

That's what it does.

It secretes thoughts like the salivary gland secretes saliva.

It just happens.

There is an extremely important moment in meditation,

Especially in the beginning.

This one moment is perhaps the most important moment in all of beginner's meditation.

This moment decides the fate of many a would-be meditator.

This is the moment you wake up after having been lost.

So we are following the breath,

The sensations of the breath wherever they are most easily felt.

And then we lose it.

We slip into thought,

Fantasy,

Daydreams,

Whatever.

Then there comes a moment when we wake up and realize that the breath is no longer being felt.

We realize we've been away for five minutes or a half hour.

In that moment of waking up,

The practice is to come back to those three points of contact,

Jaw,

Shoulders,

Belly,

And relax them.

Find that place of ease in the body and then get really good at doing that.

And from that place of ease,

Come back to the breathing.

Often in that moment of waking up,

We do other things that aren't so helpful for meditation.

One thing is we often judge ourselves.

We say,

Oh,

I suck.

I'm a bad meditator.

Lost it again.

And then we get discouraged and we put our meditation cushion in the closet next to that electric guitar we never learned how to play and the unicycle and so forth.

Another thing we do that's not so skillful is kind of get sucked in by the land of thinking.

We have these really interesting thoughts maybe.

Maybe we have an interesting thought of,

I don't know,

What's for dinner.

And then at some point we wake up and realize we've been thinking and then it's almost like the momentum of the thoughts sucks us back in.

We start to think,

Oh,

I shouldn't be coming back to the breath,

But let me really figure out what I want for dinner.

Thai food,

Yes.

I'll get the tofu,

Three stars.

I had the pad kie meow last week.

Oh,

Yes,

The breath.

Oh,

But this is a really good one.

I'll just give myself maybe 10 more seconds to think about Thai food,

Then I'll come back to the breath.

So that's another way we get to think about our thoughts.

So that's another way we get hooked.

The instructions,

Again,

Are to come back to those three points of contact.

When you notice that the mind has lost contact with the breath,

Come back to a soft jaw.

If the teeth are ever touching,

The jaw is not soft.

Come back to soft shoulders,

Open shoulders.

Come back to a soft belly.

And you also might adjust your posture so that you're more upright,

More dignified and at ease.

Think of that coming back as an opportunity to practice some mental qualities very important to meditation.

One of them is letting go,

No matter how seductive the thought.

Try to practice letting go of it and coming back to the breath.

That can be very difficult.

Try to practice patience in the sense of coming back again and again and again,

Endurance,

That willingness to connect again and again and again to the object of meditation.

And know that this is a path with a beginning,

A middle and an end.

The beginning is different than the middle.

The beginning is much like chopping wood.

It's manual labor.

You might spend the whole of this half hour doing nothing but coming back to the breath again and again and again,

Even though it wandered every time you brought it back.

This is the practice.

This is a phase.

It gets easier.

That's the science of meditation.

It gets easier over time.

You can draw that on a graph.

Each time we wake up,

That's our chance.

That's our chance to come back.

That's the crossroads.

We can either choose to go back into the land of fantasy,

Daydreams,

Future,

Past,

Kind of this black and white land of thought,

Or we can choose to connect again to the lived experience of life.

The moment of waking up,

The choice is up to you.

No one else can do it for you.

Resting the mind in the part of the body where the breath is most easily felt.

Feeling the lived experience of that breath.

When you notice the mind has wandered,

And that moment of waking up,

Connect again to softness in the body,

Jaw,

Shoulders,

Belly,

Uprightness in the posture,

And then pick the breath right back up.

We'll practice this for the next ten minutes together,

And I'll ring the bell.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And may whatever beneficial energies this practice may have for us,

May we offer up those energies to bring about benefit for all beings.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Reviews

Very nice! Always good to come back to the basics. Very calm guidance. Thank you. ☮️💖🙏🖖🪷🕉

Perfect instructions with right pauses and time for practice. Great. Than you

Most authentic - Amazing!

Nice clear instructions good focus thank you

Great instruction for beginners, gave me a new perspective on meditation. Very nice voice (and a lovely sense of humor). Thank you 🙏

Very helpful❤️🙏.

Great beginning meditation. Insightful and clear directions.

My first day with 365. Thank you.

Helpful thank you 🙏🏼

Although I'm not a beginner, I got a lot out of this. I love the stuff about the mind wandering into thoughts about Thai food and other regular daily stuff.

Very nice introduction to Mindfulness Meditation. I've studied it before, and today's lesson added more understanding to the practice. I really enjoyed Brent's soothing voice. 🙏

Looking forward to week 2

Great, look forward to continuing

I've meditated before...I'm just returning to the beginning. I have ptsd and trying to cope with it. This is a good one.

Thsnk you. Good instruction. Background noises in recording are distracting.

Fantastic! Everything was spot on - pacing, guidance, explanations, humor - making this a definite winner for anyone beginning meditation &/or practicing breathwork. Absolutely love the singing bowl at the end (lovely change from a bell)!

Wonderful! Thank you!

Beautiful ☆ Namaste Brent ☆