Facing The Pandemic With The Support Of The Dharma 18/26

How can we deal with uncertainty and fear around us and also within us? How can Dharma teachings support us? How can we deepen understanding and love for life in the midst of chaos? This series of teachings offers reflections on possibilities available to us, including practices we can engage with, lean into, and cultivate. The following talk is about trust and knowledge.

Transcript

So, Today is the fifth week and. . . So this will be the beginning of another approach of meditation that again will be linked with the others in some ways. Although this approach is quite different. And the theme, The main theme around this approach will be on trust. So, Trust, The ability to trust is a, Is another big topic of meditation. I think basically trust needs to, Our ability to trust whatever we will call it, Life or nature or a God or you know, This has to deepen when we practice meditation. Because we'll need it, We need trust so that we can go deeper into meditation. So, Usually what happens when we practice meditation depends on which kind of meditation but this style that we're engaging here, Little by little we gain some self-knowledge. I spoke about it already. . . And self-knowledge in a sense not of having ideas or more precise ideas about ourselves or not even having more precise ideas of who we are. But more. . . Direct knowing of our inner processes and how. . . Anything that is possible to observe within us looks like, Like all our emotion, How an emotion looks like or feels like. Because we start to really pay attention to it, We don't only live it or go through it but we're also interested in it and everything, Mind-states and thoughts and emotions and body sensations and how the, How the world is received within like all the sounds and touch and so all this gets to be more precisely known because we do observe and we are attentive to know these things, Not only to go through them. So, We get to know more and more everything that. . . That is part of our experience. There is also what, What will happen is our sense of self changes our. . . . . . Like if meditation, Let's put it like this, Meditation is one way where we get little by little to know something deeper than what appears first in our being. What appears first, I was again speaking about it, Is like the periferic, Like. . . Job and personality and all belongings and everything that is making this big me. Yeah? . . . Our nationality and culture and things like this is what appears first. This is, If we don't question who we are, Then this is the idea we'll have about ourself. It will be only just about where we're born and then our names and what we do in life and who we hang with and what we love to do and this will be all about ourself in a way. And our character and personality and specificities and skills. Yeah? This will be what defines who I am somehow. If we don't go deeper in questioning, That's it, More or less. And then with the practice of meditation we bring the awareness that is always going out. This is its nature, It's normal, It goes out all the time for finding out what is needed as a species to survive and it is, We're built like this. But we go to this counter intuitive way of doing, We catch this awareness that always goes out and we bring it in. And then when we do that, We'll start to discover places of ourself that are less obvious. That doesn't shine, That doesn't make noise, That doesn't move so much, That are more silent. Yeah? So, We get familiar with what I was calling like an onion, Like the center of the onion, Not the outer peels. But like we peel and we go to the inner, The center. We get familiar with these places of ourself where there is less movement. And for instance in meditation when the mind gets more quiet, And sometimes that happens, Not always, But sometimes that happens, That the mind gets more quiet, Then there will be less self appearing. There will be, Because for a self to appear it needs some mind movement somehow. So, If the mind is very quiet, There will be less sense of personality for instance. There will be less ideas coming about who we are. So, There will be more silence, Less movement, And then less personality appearing, At some point less ego, Less personality, And at some point even less sense of individual self, That may come into our practice. So, The more we regularly take as a habit, We take the habit to get in touch with these places of ourself that are not that obvious, That are not that shiny, That are not that grabbing, That are not calling our awareness. It's not calling our awareness. What calls our awareness is movement, Is a strong sensation. Anything that is strong calls for awareness, For attention. Something that is empty of movement, And empty of strong colors, And empty of happening, Doesn't call for awareness. So, We won't see what is more continuous of ourself, And less moving, Unless we start to disengage our awareness from everything that moves. Hope that makes sense. So, Then what happens when we have a regular practice, Engaging with meditation, And with an intention of exploring, Knowing that we don't know, And really wanting to discover, To find out. Then there will be this quietness that comes, That puts us in touch with some sense of ourself, Where there is less personality, As I was saying, Ego, Personality, And sense of self. And when there is that, When there is less personality, Ego, Sense of self, There is also less confusion. In this moment, There is like no confusion appearing, There will be no doubt appearing, There will be no fear appearing. It will be like a moment of silent presence with nothing happening, Or not much happening in it. And on the opposite, If there is no, Not this knowing myself as space, Or knowing myself as silence, If it never happens in my life, Then everything about myself will be what has been constructed in time, Since my birth, Maybe before, In some traditions or whatever. And then it is very likely that there will be identification. So, All about me is this tendencies and ways of being, And mind frames, How the mind has been framed, And this will be everything about myself. And there will be more insecurity, More doubt, And more reasons to fear. So, When we have this practice of self-knowledge, We can say that self-knowledge, And I want to again repeat self-knowledge, Not about having very clear ideas about ourselves, It's not about ideas about ourselves, But the more there will be a direct knowing of our fine space within, The silent space within, Then there will be with that, More sense of security. And from that, Will emerge a natural trust, More trust in life, Or whatever, In myself, Or whatever, There will be a more trustful way of working in this life. It's interesting to see that in our actual society where we grow, We are from different countries, But I think there's something quite similar in this. It's like the question of who I am, Or spiritual search is not present anymore. Yeah, I don't know, Like old times, I have this idea of like my grand-grandparents, And going to church, There was not much about self-inquiry in that, But still the question of something bigger than me, Something, You know, The question, Like the presence of that idea was there. Where now it's kind of nowhere, I don't see it, I don't know if it's the same for you, But I don't see it very much here around, Like people, Where it's all about body, And possessions, And work, And you know, And politics, But there's not this other aspect of life that is present, And I think this is since our culture, Like our mystic culture, Which was supposed to be the church, Failed because we couldn't trust it anymore, And then it's been kicked out of somehow, Yeah, And then now it just doesn't, This question of who am I, Which is in the bible actually, When God asks, I don't remember who, When I say, Tell me who you are, Then if you have to answer this question, You have to start a big journey of search, Yeah? So, But I think that question of who am I, And the possibility of being something else than just this body, And being something else than just identified with what I'm doing, And what I own, And these things, It's just not very much mentioned anymore, And so what happens in our world now that we can see around, Is there is a lot of confusion that we can sense, A loss of meaning, And a need to control, A need to control, To control our life, There's no trust, We need to control our life, And we need to control nature, And we need to control everything, Because when you don't trust, Then you need to control, This is just, So it's the same as an individual, If I don't have any trust in life, Then I need to control everything, The more I have trust, The less I will feel the need to control. If we go, I lived in India, And I've been interested in Indian culture, And there, It's like, Their lifestyle is based on trust, And it's almost at the opposite of our world, They don't like it, It's a very big generality of course, But if you sense in the atmosphere in India that so many people don't try to control their lives, They just trust, They just trust, They see everything is happening, Not themselves doing it anyway, Work is happening, Money is happening, And sleep is happening or not happening, And everything happens or doesn't happen, They're not doing anything, So that doesn't work either, It needs a balance in the ability. And in meditation, We face exactly the same need of a balance between control and trust. If we think that meditation is just about controlling the mind, And the ability to, When I see I'm distracted, I bring back my awareness, And my breath, And I maintain it here, And this, If we see meditation only like this, In my perspective, It's bound to fail, It's not enough. I think often meditation suffers from lack of trust, And then the people who practice meditation from a long time, They hang to a technique in meditation, As if this technique will save me, Or this technique will bring freedom or enlightenment, Or whatever the aim is. And I don't believe that any technique can do that. I don't believe, I think techniques are kind of good tools somehow, But I think somewhere on the way we need to, The technique, We need to let it go. It's good for sometime a long beginning, Okay, But it's not like this technique until the end, I don't believe. And also trusting that this is the technique, And if I practice the technique all my life like this, Then I will reach, I don't believe either. There's not, For me, There's not enough trust and space given to the practice of meditation. And for me often, I feel when we practice meditation in that way of practicing a technique, We're in the way of what needs to happen, Because we do concentrate always in the same manner, We train the mind to concentrate always on the same manner, And we always kind of go in the same hole. There's no space for something else to meet us. You know, It's like, And I think we can understand this, If we have this sense that life is very, Very, Very vast, And what wants to come in is much different than anything we can think about. It's very different who we are, What wants to come in, And this intelligence that we can see everywhere, In trees, In the beauty of nature, In the functioning of our body, In the thoughts, The process of thoughts, In consciousness, All this is so intelligence, Not man created. This is nature created. Everything we can see is the process of nature, Or the process of life, Call it the way you want. But this is extremely intelligent, And this intelligence is in everything, And we can feel that. I'm not trying to make like very easy sayings, You know. We can feel that we don't see it anymore, Because we go day after day after day, I see as everything was normal, But it's not. It's every time so much creative, And so much the development of a huge intelligence that is in front of our eyes happening, Our body just waking up, Everything, The breath, Every breath, And every detail of life, I can't even name it, Because it's everything that is so intelligent. So when we feel that, We know that it's not a decision of practicing like this, And that that will kind of free us from place where we have harden our views. It's like free us from our misunderstanding about lives, Free us from our confusion. I think we're kind, Well I don't know where you're at, But I feel like as human being we're more or less like we have a certain type of understanding of life, It differs a little bit, But we kind of frame a little bit everything in the same way. Now there are big differences, But it's so small compared to what it could be. So when we have this sense that it's really vast, It's really intelligent, And this what is intelligent is me, Because it's everything of me is created by this intelligent itself, Intelligence itself. Yeah? It is my intelligence beyond what I know of myself. It's not the intelligence of thoughts, But all the mental thinking mind has been happening in the evolution of nature, As well as consciousness, The ability to know is an evolution of nature. So when we have this sense, Then we can start to feel, We can start to feel more trust in this intelligence of life. When we get to, So here I'm running two topics at the same time, So I will try to be a bit more clear. First is when we get to spaces of ourselves where there is more silence, We will notice that there will be less building of self, There will be less constructions of personality, There will be less sense, The ego will not appear at all, Whatever you call the ego, It will not appear, There will be a sense of a more quite spacious something that is still the feeling is still me, But it's not like me in my job, My name, My role and stuff like this. Yeah? And that will bring trust, That knowing. And when we bring back that knowing into a situation, We can recall that and then this will, This is very freeing, And this bring a lot of trust. And then another happening around trust in meditation is that our identification, It's the same process, But our identification, Identification changes. So we don't take ourselves to be this name, This body, This country, Just that we start to also feel that we're more than that. And it will come across as a change in the way we think ourselves. That's what I was saying. If I think myself as being nature, Instead of thinking of myself as being Dhanie, Then this changes something in the way I experienced myself. So I have many examples of this, Like so many times, For instance, When I was going to give a Dharma talk and, And I know like, Sometimes many people are expecting my Dharma talk and I feel some stress coming up, You know, Like I'm a Dharma teacher and some people know me, There are other teachers who give very good talks and this and that. I can sense a stress that comes from, Because I will in five minutes sit in front of that many people and having to articulate something that makes sense. If not, They will think I'm not a good Dharma teacher and then what will happen, You know? So this can come up and then if I identify myself as more kind of, This is not me, Dhanie, Who is giving a talk to those person, But actually it is something that is happening itself. Like that's the Indian way of viewing, Which, And I can feel that also, When I give a talk, Depending on the quality of listening of the people, What will come in my talk will change. So if there's a group of people who have a very genuine, Beautiful quality of listening, What I will say will be different than if I'm alone in a field. There's a, It's not just me, It's the totality of the situation. Okay? So if I see that it's not only just me, I can relate and I can rely on a process that is more intelligent than me having to find out in my memory intelligent stuff to say. That's already one level. And then I can go to another level where maybe I can feel that if I'm there sitting and speaking to other people, This is a plan of life. This is not my plan of Dhanie. I didn't plan that actually. I went to India because I was curious about traveling, About meeting a different culture. And then I met meditation and then I was curious with meditation. I did self retreat. I had no plan of sitting in front of people and starting to speak. And then it happened that I, After some years of self retreat, I found some people who teach, I was interested in what they were saying. I attended retreats. And then one day someone said, Oh, Do you want to sit there and speak about your experience? And then the first year I said no, Because I was scared. I was scared of reinforcing too much my ego. That was my first biggest scare. And to lose my path and to start to believe I'm someone. And then when you believe you're someone you're done, You're cooked. This is finished. Finish your path. Yeah. Then you're another game. So I was too much afraid of that. And the next year I took the challenge and I'm still challenging that. So, And then it happened that I started sitting and speaking with people. And if I can recall that, That they were, I experienced stress because I have to speak in front of a crowd of people. I can say, This is not my choice. This is life that happened, Which is the Indian view. We're not doing this life. This life is happening. Yeah. And when I feel that as part of life, Life is happening. Then this is also the responsibility of life to give this talk, Not only to do with my mind and memory and brain. If you see what I mean, I include more of the potential and intelligence of life than just everything relying on my small shoulders and my little knowledge. So that is trust. There's a change in identification there. I am a little bit less identified as the knee being a teacher and this and that, And more identified to a deeper, More universal way of seeing myself is as a human being happening in life. For instance, Ways of saying ways of like levels of identification and images to what we identify, We can create as many as we want. We can identify to everything and the narrative. I was saying we can change the narrative when I see, If I say for instance, I'm just a human being as other human being created by life, Speaking in front of other human beings. This is just a narrative. Yeah. But that I can say that and speak like that only because it is supported by my practice of meditation. Now, Let's say you understand what I'm saying. You have no exploration of the self, But you understand what I'm saying and you start to say, Oh, I'm a product of nature. And so, You know, But that will not really work. It needs to then question, Oh, How can I see that? How can I feel that? Or then you go into your own meditation and you notice these moments where there is not much happening. You notice these moments where you feel more universal, Less specific, Less constructed, Less separate from others. Already at the level of emotion, We're less different than the level of thoughts. At the level of emotion, We all know the same emotions on the planet. So we kind of more human when we feel our emotion than when we are our, In our thoughts. And when we get to the state of witness, When we witness thoughts and emotion and anything else, When we're present and we witness, Then we're again at a more basic level where we're more in touch with everybody's experience. Like we can sense that this is not just my way of sensing what is to be present to experience, But this is just more universal. It is more what everybody feels, Maybe even animals in their feeling of witnessing. And there's ways to deepen that. There are ways to deepen that. So self-knowledge will bring trust. This is a summary of what I have been saying. Self-knowledge will bring trust, Not ideas about ourselves. That will not bring trust at all. Often it's awful. Like even if we have fantastic ideas about ourselves, This brings a lot of tension. So it's not in ideas about ourselves that we will find peace and wisdom. But in self-knowledge as knowing ourself, In knowing the places of ourselves that are really quiet and not showing up unless we look for, And we're sensitive in our looking, Knowing these places will bring a sense of more trust that will affect the way we live and that will affect the way we meditate. Now this is a healthy wholesome circle. The more there is self-knowledge, The more there will be trust. The more there is trust, The more we can go into self-knowledge. That also works. It works both ways. So because we have moments and many people mentioned that in meditation where there are moments where there is a sense of tension or fear in meditation, Because we feel that something doesn't want to let go, Something is challenged. And every time, Many times when we get to a place that is a little bit too silent or a little bit too not moving or where we really lose a sense that we're used to, The sense of me that we're used to, There can be some unease that comes. And there, We're blocked there. Sometimes we can stay blocked by the unease. Many times it happens that when the mind gets really quiet and this is like we're not aware to, We're not used to be aware of that quietness in our experience. The mind gets really quiet, Then there will be a sense of unease and fear that will grow. And there, We need to have more trust. So you see how it works that way, Both ways. If we practice and we are able to develop self-knowledge, It will foster trust and bring more trust. But we need also to practice trust so that we can go deeper into self-knowledge. It works also that way. So that was the introduction. This was to introduce a practice of trust. And so we need to practice trust so that we can apply less control in meditation. We will still always, Always in my life, I will practice controlling my awareness, Knowing where it is. And if I don't like where it is, Taking out of there and bringing on the object that I choose. So this is a basic and a lifelong practice, So useful. But also I want to have in my practice of meditation times where I trust what life within me is doing, Not me controlling everything. So the practice that we'll do today and this week is a practice of lying down meditation. And that's a little bit unusual in the meditation world. It's not very spread. And in some cultures, It has some bad name that posture, It's not very welcome. There are some traditions like in Burma, For instance, If you lay down in a temple, You'll be kicked out of the temple or some in Thailand also, I think, Not sure. But anyway, And so many people you'll see, They will say, No, You need the spine straight and without the spine straight, The meditation will not happen. That's it. And so it doesn't have such a bad name, Such a good name, But there's something so beautiful in that lying down meditation. There are four, These four postures, Many of you, I always say this, So many of you heard that, But there are four posture, Which is sitting, Standing, Walking and lying down. There are kind of the four push, Formal postures of meditation. And the lying down is every posture has a very different quality. You will have a different experience if you sit or if you walk or if you stand or if you lie down for 45 minutes, One hour, This will be a different experience. So usually the people who have long-term sitting practice and who lay down, They will say, It doesn't work. It doesn't work. I go in spaces where I lose my concentration. I'm not so much present. I'm not sharp at all. And I've tried a few times, But it just doesn't work for me, This lying down stuff. And I think to me, This is a misunderstanding because I think that's right. There's no sharpness or sense of presence in lying down. Of course, It's the posture of lying down induces a relaxation much more than in the sitting. If you see in the sitting, You have to hold your posture. We hold our posture. We have a sense of strength that comes with this holding. We have a straight spine. The straightness of the spine will help the clarity of the mind. Yeah. And then you can be very laser sharp in your observation in the sitting. You won't get that in the lying down. It's going to get a bit more floating around like in states of in between sleeps and things like this. Yet this posture has a lot to teach to us, I think, And a lot to bring in our meditation in the way we lead this life also. For instance, I think that the sitting posture is not the one who helps the most the letting go. For instance, We can really have a very strong, Sharp control when we sit. Yeah, It is the best posture, I believe, For controlling the mind is just sitting, Spine straight. Best posture for controlling the mind. You will have clarity on what the mind does and you will have to decide and agree or disagree with what it does. And so, But then this control, As I was saying, It has a lot of downside also to it. For instance, As I was already mentioning a little bit, When we concentrate on something, We exclude everything else. Yeah. If I concentrate on the breath, It means if I'm really good at concentration, And I'm not, But if you're really good at concentration, Then you will be so much with the object, A candle, A mantra, Your breath, Whatever you choose. You would not hear your name if someone speaks it. You wouldn't notice anything happening around. You will not notice mosquito biting you. You will not notice that it's getting dark and you're hungry. You just, You just so much sharply with the object, You become one with that object that you don't notice the rest. So we, As Krishna Muthi always says, Is concentration means exclusion. You choose one thing and exclude the rest. Fantastic, Very important, So much needed, Not possible to live a decent life without it. Like you can't learn something. You can see if you have no concentration, You cannot even have a friend because you cannot listen to someone. You're all over the place and then you don't get friends because you cannot contact. So concentration is hugely important to practice, But we have to agree that this means excluding, Excluding a little bit something. So in the sitting posture, There is, It is hard to learn the letting go of control somehow. And for some of us, Many in our world, I think we have a tendency to be very good at control, Which is very important, But just one aspect of the two. And we need to, What we need to learn is to let go a little bit of control and trust more life somehow. And I will explain a little bit what I mean by trusting life because it can sound also very, I don't know, I heard sometimes this, Or you have to trust life and that's not so much my thing. But so in the lying down on the opposite, You don't hold the body. You don't have to hold the body. It's held by the mattress. It's held by the floor. It's, You know, You can totally let go of holding the posture. And that induces something totally different in the energetic and the, What happens to the mind. It will wander much more. Then the question comes, Why lying down is still meditation somehow? I think that would be a good question to ask now. Why is lying down considered as a meditation? There is not the sharpness, There is no present moment, Like not so much. And so, I think what will make the difference, So maybe you can reflect for like a half a minute or something. What do you think would make lying down a meditation, Lying down practice? What would, Why would it be meditation? So, In my understanding, What will make that lying down is not, Is more than an nap or a relaxation, Is our intention. If we have enough clarity on the reason why we lie down. At first, Like the body-mind will not recognize, If the intention is not clear, Not much can happen. But if our intention, When we lie down, Is very clearly, If we say, I'm not lying down because I want to sleep to ourselves, I'm not lying down because I want to find some relax or something like this. I'm lying down because I'm curious to discover spaces of myself that I don't know. I'm lying down because I want to be met by life that is within me. I'm lying down to give space so that whatever needs to happen, Happen. You know, I'm lying down because it's like I abandon myself to this intelligence that is within me, This intelligence that is myself beyond what I know of myself. If that rings a bell, If that means something for you. If you have this sense that there is this very deep inner intelligence that is much more than what we know, Then we need to give space to that also. And we need to call that to make a, Like a vacuum so that it sucks that, You know, This is longing. The longing will call. The deep longing will create a sharp intention. It's like, It's like a prayer. It can be like a prayer. It's like calling for something. Everybody will have his story and his way of naming and of saying, But that intention then works. And we can understand this very easily with our sitting practice. If you reflect and remember on your experience, How come that when you sit in meditation, You're totally lost in your thoughts sometime. And suddenly you remember that you were not there for that and you come back to the breath or whatever. What makes that at this point, We got to know we were lost into our thoughts. It is in my understanding, The intention that we had when we sat for meditation, We decide that we want to stay with the breath. For instance, We're always saying the basic, There's much more than that, Of course, But just, We decide, I want to be with the breath. This is my intention. The more it is important for me to be with the breath, The more during my meditation, I will always remember, Oh, I was supposed to be with my breath and come back. If I sit out of habit, Just like this, And have no clarity of intention and let the time pass, This remembering will not come. So the more the intention is strong, The more it works on the background of our mind, Where we're, When we're not aware. Another example of that, That I'm sure you all have experienced is, When, When you're sleeping and the next morning you have a very important appointment, Maybe very early and you don't trust your alarm clock. That happens many times to me. You don't trust that it will ring. Yeah. Then in the night, During the deep, The depth of the sleep, There is something that wakes me up. I say, Oh, What time? Oh, Okay. Still not the time. It's still, Still not four. Okay. And then I will sleep and maybe one hour after again, One hour after again, Oh, I will come out of sleep. Not because in my sleep I'm saying, Oh, Maybe I should wake up and watch the time. You know, But my intention is there. Even if I'm not and it works, This is how, How important clarity and intention we spoke about this in previous, Weeks or so, This is how important the clarity of our intention is because we don't know that this is what is deciding where we go and what happens. Our deepest intentions take makes our path and our directions. So in lying down meditation, We can use that. If we clearly lie down for our spiritual path for giving room, For being open, For welcoming, For receiving life, For, For, For, For better self knowledge, For being met by that, Which is innocent, Which is so intelligent for, Or to God or to you name it the way you want. It doesn't really matter. It's the clarity and, And authenticity of, Of the intention that will do the work. And then, Because we're lying down, We have less power of control. We can't control our experience so much anymore because in the sitting, You can control very sharp, Not in the lying down. It goes, It goes like this. And often what happened is that we will go into sleep. Okay. We have to trust. This is a practice of letting go, Which means also we are letting go of deciding what needs to happen in this meditation. Not easy. It's a challenging practice for many. So those of us who are control freak, You'll see that's really difficult, Really difficult to trust, Very difficult. For some people, This meditation is a nightmare and the legs are shaking like this, You know, And there's, There's a kind of, And the mind is so fast and something just doesn't want to let go. So this is good. Then if it happens to you, Then you have to walk through that, Lay down again and again until something release. This, This will bring, This will change the quality of your sitting posture surely and the quality you walk into, Into life. Also, This will bring more trust. So we also open a space there where they can be resilience. So for instance, This posture and I had the feedback of the French group just before this. And that's the feedback that came the most is, Is like people who have difficult times in, In like emotionally usually, Yeah. When you have difficult emotions, Sometimes the sitting posture will not help. If you're well balanced, You can apply the exploring of emotion through concentrating directly on the feeling of the emotion. This is so beautiful, So helpful. You'll get so much knowledge and direct taste of what are the, The, The, The emotions, Their quality. You will have knowing of them and the awareness that you shine on the emotion will transform the emotion. Beautiful. I recommend very much, But that's not always possible. There are times where you, The emotion is just bigger than what you can cope with and, And, And they're all coming together and you're overwhelmed by life. And, And then this, This is a time where you need to let go and you need to trust and you need to embody trust somehow. And then the lying down practice is very useful. And that's what, What was said by three person on the last just one hour ago on the Sherry, Like people who have challenging emotions in these times, Because these times are also, We are challenged by emotion, By the situation of the world. And we may become even more challenged by emotion. And surely as soon as we work towards death, Some emotion will come, You know, So we'll have some emotion to deal with. And sometime, As I was saying, Shining the awareness on them is fantastic and beautiful, But sometime, We also need to embrace and, And, And let them be and give them space. So this, We know that in sleep, For instance, This is the time of the day where there's the most resilience, Where, Where all the, There's a saying in English, Like, The brain is taking the, The sleep is the time where the brain takes the rubbish out. And, And so all the stress that we had in the day and all the difficult and challenging emotions find their ways during sleep. Yeah. So it's a resilient time, The time where we out of the picture somehow, And there, This is already one very beautiful benefit. And if you add that with a pure and beautiful intention, You know, Then this is magnified. Then there will be, You can get a practice that helps you transforming difficult and destructive emotions, The lying down practice. Creativity, Creativity, Because sometime in the sitting, Like the one, One very obvious example is when we practice meta well-wishing practices in the sitting posture, We kind of, We are very kind of orderly and often it's always the same person who comes to mind. We more or less with the same thing, It deepens little by little, We find deeper and deeper meanings to our wishes. Beautiful. But when you do it laying down, You get all kinds of person coming to your mind and, And, And you'll get all kinds of wishes to them. Like it will become much more creative because there is less control. And many people, Uh, Use lying down meditation before, Uh, Writing movies. I read all before player for writing musics because, Um, They, Because there is more space. So something totally different can come in yet. And because we're less in the way somehow. So for creativity and also for having creative response to life, When you're stuck in, Uh, In, Um, Some, Some difficulties at work or some repetitive, Repetitive patterns or, Or some, Uh, Even some technical things on the building you're working on or whatever. Sometime by searching with a shop awareness, You turn round and sometime it's just when you stop searching and you give a little bit of space, That's something very different as an answer comes, You know? So the alternatives of control and letting go in meditation is very important, Which means the alternatives to some extent of sitting and lying down meditation. Then after, Uh, Of course, What happened is that in, In our, When we have a lot of practice of laying down, I practice lying down, I think maybe more hours than sitting in the totality. For, I don't know how many years I just practiced just, Just, Just laying down. It's beautiful, Really beautiful. And I'm very rested for the rest of my life. And so what happened is that after, Um, When, When you have, Uh, Enough practice of a lying down, Then this quality of trust and letting go comes into sitting, Of course, And in the way you live also. Yeah. But then it informs the way you practice your sitting meditation. It gets balanced. So it's not that, It's not that, It's not that, It's not that, It's not that separate anymore at some point. And well, Time is flying. Okay. And you have, Um, Other beautiful aspect to the lying down. There are several, One is that for many people, It's a very, It's kinds of many people struggle for many, Many, Many years with the sitting posture and the discipline that goes with, And suddenly introducing some lying down gets them to, Uh, Uh, It does the struggle to lay down. It's like, It's very easy to lie down and then we need a sharp attitude of the mind, Very clear intention, But we lay down often, Like, I don't know if you do like me, But every day for siesta and then after, Uh, In the evening for sleep. Yeah. So these are two times where you just change your intention in the mind that you can transform into, Into meditation. And you can bring the intention in that area of self of search of, Uh, Uh, Self knowledge or of, Uh, Getting in touch with your deepest self or whatever you want to say. So it's just a matter of intention. Yeah. You can. And so many people access without with less trigger, The possibility of practicing meditation. And for so many people that I know after one way or the other, It's also more easy to just sit and meditate, Which was very difficult in the beginning. So it helps sometime, Uh, Getting in the groove of practice, Uh, Laying down. Okay. I think, Uh, I think I sold it well. No. Yeah. So, So now I think we should try. Uh, Okay. So, Um, The posture is, Is, Um, It's easy. You just, Uh, Lay down and, Uh, It works well on the back usually for most, Most of us lying down on the back. If you have some lower back pain, Then you should put a pillow under your knee. And it's very important that you lay down on something quite comfortable, Not directly on the floor or, You know, Or not, You know, On a too thin blanket. If you have a very good mattress, Then this is the best and make yourself really comfortable.