6.0 Instruction: Attending to the Breath 2

Part 6.0 of 10. A progression of brief sessions of instruction for developing stable attention, still awareness, and global compassion. Recorded live.

Transcript

So,

I thought that we would begin with a review basically of yesterday.

Where we will be going is to awareness,

But let's just get started with attention again,

Because it's not as if once you begin to do awareness practice that you outgrow attention and that there is no more practice for you of attention focused on the breath,

Because the conditions of your life,

Your circumstances of the day are going to be changing.

It is one of the gears on your bicycle and whatever your mind needs at that particular moment,

You go back to it.

If you are plagued with rumination,

This is the meditation that you would do.

You would focus on tactile sensations of the breath so that you can add that mute switch to the ruminating mind so that you can do productively awareness meditation without just constantly being shanghaied,

Because if you try to settle the mind in its natural state like we will be doing a little bit later today,

Without having subdued the torrent basically.

So,

The first couple of levels of shamatha are described by shamatha masters.

The metaphor is like it is a waterfall.

This is your mental experience.

It's just a cascade,

A torrent,

Like drinking from a fire hose or something.

So it is,

You know,

That's hard to do,

Settling the mind in its natural state,

Because it's just too much of a torrent.

So you let this turbulence subside with breath meditation.

And then after the torrent,

A little later than in the stages of shamatha,

It's described then that it becomes more like,

First of all,

A river in a steep canyon,

Then a river in a broad plain,

So that the flow of the water begins to slow down,

Less turbulence.

And then eventually in the final stages of shamatha,

It is a river that has flowed into a vast lake or the ocean.

You know,

It's just.

.

.

So we want the initial practices of our breath meditation then are all about getting that torrent to reduce to the intensity of it,

Of our mental activity to calm down so that we can begin to distinguish the arising,

Abiding and dissolving of individual thoughts then.

And then we can really do settling the mind in its natural state when it's,

You know,

Individual appearances rather than just a flood.

So the way that we do that again,

Let's just go back to the.

.

.

We first of all establish the base of relaxation.

A key to relaxation is the exhalation.

You release all tension.

But first of all,

We start with every meditation session breaking the flow of the ruminating mind and we do that by eliminating,

Maintaining first of all our peripheral awareness on the one hand.

So right from the very beginning,

We're establishing that anomalous type of mind,

Simultaneous awareness and attention.

So we maintain awareness but we don't demand our attention be disciplined yet.

We let the monkey romp around in the room but looking out,

We only paper over,

Well we don't paper it over,

We just let the monkey bounce around between five windows rather than six.

Right?

If you think of the monkey mind as a room suspended in space with six windows,

You know,

It's a cube,

A window in each wall.

You can only,

The monkey can only look out one window at a time,

Right?

So let the monkey bounce around.

You're not disciplining it much yet but just saying,

Take the view from all five windows,

You know,

One at a time.

But the sixth window is off limits because we're going to just allow the sixth window,

Mental activity,

To remain in peripheral awareness and not allow attention to take one element out to examine it closely,

Selectively,

Exclusively.

So our attention is not captured by mental appearances but any of the other five are okay.

But if you are,

So that is how you begin to bring your mind into the sensory present moment of experience.

Because the mental activity,

The ruminating mind,

Is going to take you away from the present moment to a fantasy of the future,

Memory of the past,

Right?

So let those memories and fantasies be,

Don't suppress them,

Let them be but let them be in peripheral awareness.

While attention romps around wherever it wants to within these five domains of sense experience.

But if your eyes are closed,

There's not much sight input,

Visual input.

If there's no food in front of you,

No scent,

No taste,

That leaves just two sense fields really that are going to be supplying a lot of information for your attention to just bounce around and ricochet.

Oh,

Sound,

There's that air conditioner.

Oh,

Somebody's coming in the room.

There's the buzzer.

That's okay.

Let it go.

Oh,

There's that pain in my shoulder.

Oh,

There's that itch in my ear.

You know,

On and on.

It's okay.

And while you are doing that,

You are basically narrowing the scope of your attention,

Right?

And the turbulence is beginning to subside.

So then you narrow the scope again to tactile sensations only.

Now sound remains in peripheral awareness.

And this is where you can really begin to experience that your peripheral awareness has not collapsed.

It has not become the American electoral system where winner takes all because you are still aware of sound.

So now sound becomes your ally in keeping you,

Your peripheral awareness expanded,

Engaged,

Even though it is not,

You are not allowing either sound or thoughts now to capture your attention.

So you've narrowed the scope of your attention to only tactile sensations.

Narrow the scope again of your attention then to only tactile sensations of the breath.

Tactile sensations that change as the breath enters and leaves your body.

So that could be anywhere in your body.

So you are just beginning to gradually narrow the scope of your attention and as you are doing that,

The turbulence of your mind is beginning to calm,

Subside.

You have shaken,

You know,

When you come to the start of your meditation,

It's like a jar of sediment that's shaken up and the jar is just muddy.

You know,

It's beginning to settle out now.

So the water is clear above,

Sediment below,

And then we begin to give a target.

The next step then is giving a target to the sensation,

To our attention.

Now we really say,

Okay,

I am really being selective and exclusive with my attention.

Now I am going to focus only on tactile sensations of the breath at the abdomen.

And we start with the abdomen because those are the coarse sensations.

Rise and fall of the abdomen in Shavasana.

So if your mind is really distracted,

Go to the infirmary as Alan calls it.

Shavasana,

The most relaxed of the four positions and focus on the coarse sensations of the abdomen.

And then because there are two basic meditation problems that we are trying to steer between,

Stay on the road,

Distraction in the one ditch,

Dullness,

Laxity in the other.

So as a way of supporting clarity then,

Which is the opposite of dullness and laxity,

We can choose a position,

Meditation position,

That supports clarity more than Shavasana,

Which really supports relaxation.

So the seated position provides more clarity and if that still isn't enough,

You know,

Hot afternoon,

After third or fourth session,

Didn't get enough sleep,

Whatever,

Stand up.

And then the fourth that I didn't even mention yesterday is walking meditation.

So which we won't go into that but,

You know,

Probably Matthew Imiguch when he's here will do that because Chuladasa goes into that.

And one of the beauties of walking meditation is that it has the potential to support that simultaneous awareness and attention.

Because we choose a more subtle object also supports clarity.

So that's the meditation that we are going to do now,

Is the more subtle object of tactile sensations at the nose and then remember our attention is captured because of this unconscious weighing process.

And so we can't will our attention to be on a,

What we want it to.

We can begin to influence it though so that all of a sudden there become until you reach this point and then you influence it more and more powerfully until you reach what then is called unification of mind where there just is no more unconscious input.

Everybody gets the same picture.

We're all on the same page now.

All the unconscious voices,

The unconscious minds are now not trying to get your attention because they have all been pacified and trained and they realize she hasn't paid attention to me for 15 minutes.

It's not going to happen.

I have given up.

So that's what happens with unification of mind.

Before that you're basically toggling.

You may not lose your object altogether but you are briefly going off into peripheral attention then but you don't lose your object entirely but then finally even the peripheral attractions are no longer happening and then that finally is single pointed attention when you reach the unification of mind.

But before that what we're working on is stability rather than single pointedness.

So we're not demanding single pointedness too early because you're just going to be frustrated by that but it's stability.

So the way that you develop stability then is by intention.

So basically having a conscious intention because what is in consciousness is available to all of the unconscious sub-minds and all of the unconscious sub-minds then get the broadcast message,

I intend to keep my attention stably engaged with tactile sensations of the breath.

So you just announce that,

Everybody gets the message and then they eventually become less unruly.

So that's one way,

Intention and then returning over and over and over again.

Once you discover that you have been shanghaied remember the disengagement is also unconscious so you can't will to be disengaged when you are shanghaied but again you can train it.

There's an unconscious weighing process that goes on,

You can train that and so you train that one way is by returning over and over again to your chosen object that's like going to the gym and doing reps.

This is exactly what you're doing,

It's the returning to your chosen object over and over again that trains the unconscious sub-minds and then this is the really powerful one and that is rejoicing.

Because what you are doing,

Why is it that after you decide to buy a Prius you have never thought about owning a Prius before and now you have decided okay I'm going to buy a Prius and then for the first time ever you see a Prius on every block of New York City.

Why there must have been a huge sale on Priuses because there weren't any before and now they're everywhere.

Do you think or are you just noticing them now?

Why are they,

Why are you aware of them now and you weren't before?

You have trained awareness by what you have attended to.

I am attending to a Prius very closely.

My friend in Seattle told me that the numbers 1 and 11 are showing up everywhere now on billboards,

Telephone,

Message,

You know billboards,

Emails,

Everywhere and he showed,

Sent me a picture of the van pool taking him to his Microsoft office.

One hundred eleven thousand one hundred eleven miles and he said here's proof,

The aliens are trying to send us a message but what is it?

Do you think that's true?

He says it's happening more than is statistically probable,

1 and 11 is showing up.

Is that true?

Or did he see it twice and think that's strange and then awareness every time 1 and 11 happens,

Shows up in the environment,

Pay attention.

So that's what exactly what we are doing with our rejoicing.

We are training awareness what is important to us and so taking a moment of rejoicing,

Ah and what are we rejoicing about?

So when we disengage we rejoice,

Ah I am lucid again because for 1 that helps you to recognize lucidity is different than the previous moments of distraction,

It's entirely different mind and the lucidity is the preferred mind.

So awareness,

Let me know when I am beginning to,

When I am lucid,

Let me know when I am losing my lucidity and being shanghaied.

And then so the four R's are the way that you train this unconscious weighing process.

First of all release your grasp on the distracting object completely,

If you don't do that you will just be like entering the dream state once again.

Then rejoice,

Ah I am lucid again,

This is it because you don't have to wonder,

I wonder what lucidity would feel like.

He's talking about lucidity like it's being lucid in a dream.

What is lucidity?

You don't have to wonder that anymore,

This is it.

The moment after you recover from being shanghaied,

That's lucidity,

This is it.

Now you just sustain it.

How do you sustain it?

By returning to your chosen object.

And then the fourth R,

That's the third R,

Return,

The fourth R is to reaffirm your intention.

And so and then you just keep doing that,

Get into the habit every because the cycle of what you are doing is you are attending to sensations of the entire cycle of in-breath and out-breath.

And what you will very likely notice is that there is a flowing out of the breath and then a brief pause before the inhalation begins.

And the inhalation then flows in and at the end of the inhalation there is another brief pause.

So at the end of the,

In that pause,

At the end of the inhalation,

Reaffirm your intention.

So everybody raise your right arm right now and wave at me.

Okay,

Do it again.

Okay,

So when you did that,

Did you,

There was intention when you raised your arm and waved at me the second time,

There was intention that led you to do that.

You got a communication,

You had an intention led by action.

Did you have to say words to yourself to do that?

So that is exactly the way non-verbally reaffirm that intention.

It happens instantly.

But what that will do is it will keep you engaged with the tactile sensations of the breath all the way to the pause at the,

After the exhalation.

And then because my hypothesis is you are,

If you lose your object it will always happen on the exhalation.

You will never lose it on the inhalation because the inhalation you are invigorating.

And so you get a free ride on the inhalation.

So you just reaffirm your intention in the pause after the inhalation to stay engaged,

To make it all the way to the pause at the end of the exhalation.

Then you get a free ride.

Reaffirm your intention all the way to the pause after the exhalation.

Free ride and then you just keep doing that over and over and over again.

When you reaffirm your intention,

Are you saying not to do it verbally?

That's right.

Don't do it verbally.

That will just distract you and conceptualize and muddy the whole experience and take forever.

You just do it non-conce- we do it all the time and we aren't aware of our intentions because they happen very,

Very quickly and non-verbally.

So it's not like affirmation which that seems more conceptual,

Wordy,

Etc.

But you just become aware of the intention.

You remind yourself,

Reaffirm this intention and you'll get what it's like.

It happens in an instant,

Without words,

And it's tremendously effective.

And the first three R's are the same?

Yeah,

The first three R's are the same.

Release your grasp on the distracting object.

Rejoice.

I am lucid again.

This is it.

Return to your chosen object.

And then the fourth is to reaffirm your intention.

So let's just do that meditation with our time remaining.

And so find a comfortable position that could be either a shavasana or a seated position.

Reviews

Plainspoken and clear

Excellent guidance on the breath. How attention and awareness can work in concert and how to work with the monkey mind. I loved the visual of the cube with the windows! Thank you! Namaste 🙏

Excellent concise instruction if you need them on accepting then silencing the mind. Force and resistance is not necessary. Working with the chattering mind