Connecting With Our Experience

How many times each day do you notice that seeing is happening? Or that hearing or tasting or smelling are happening? The world is such a cacophonous, fast-moving place. To me, it feels impossible to be aware of each moment of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, thinking, and emotion. It’s exhausting to even consider it.

But what if we could be that aware, or even just a little bit more aware than we are? What if we could know just a little more often when emotions (like frustration) were happening...before we entered a meeting? Or when sensations (like hunger…or satiety) were happening, before we went for that second latte? Or when seeing was happening, before we drove right past a sunrise or skyline or flock of geese, wheeling across the sky?

Transcript

Morning everyone or good afternoon wherever you are.

Welcome to today's Wake Up Call.

This is Wake Up Call 405.

There's a lot of climate news here in the U.

S.

I hope if you're on the East Coast or in the Southeast all is all is well and my heart is really with our friends in Maui right now and that's just this week as we all know.

So today I'd like to talk about connecting with experience which is which is something I'd like to be doing more of and last time I was saying that the most fundamental invitation of mindfulness for me is to develop the courage to do that and specifically the courage to do that in service of seeing how I create suffering and how I can stop doing that so much and I mentioned that in the ancient mindfulness teachings one way this is explained is in this set of sentences which are paraphrased from a longer piece with contact as condition feeling comes to be with feeling as condition craving comes to be with craving as condition clinging comes to be and then I was talking about the word condition and mentioned that on the simplest level condition means when it's raining and I go outside without an umbrella I get wet the rain being the condition when I'm anxious and I enter a meeting whether I'm aware of my state of mind or not I bring anxiety into the meeting anxiety becomes the condition or one of the conditions and because rain and anxiety are only two of the millions of conditions existing in any moment so the weather my state of mind and everybody else's state of mind all of our histories all of our hopes and fears all of the physical conditions and and possibly depending on what you believe experiences from before we were born so these are all conditions and then I invited you to pay attention to the different conditions in your experience either day by day or even moment by moment over this last week so right now even if you didn't have a chance to do that over the last week maybe take a moment and see what conditions are present in your body right now what conditions are present in your mind right now what conditions are present in your environment right now and we'll do that more when we do our meditation so okay let's look at the phrases again with contact as condition feeling comes to be with feeling as condition craving comes to be with craving as condition clinging comes to be so this teaching is part of something called the 12 links in the chain of dependent origination contact feeling craving and clinging are the sixth seventh eighth and ninth links and what they're pointing at is how suffering happens and they might sound familiar because they're in another set of mindfulness or they're in another mindfulness list the four noble truths so in a way the four noble truths suffering the cause of suffering the end of suffering and the path and and these are the bedrock of mindfulness we all learn these are kind of a shortened version of the 12 links okay so contact feeling craving clinging we know a little bit about what is meant by with one of these as the condition right so now let's look at each of those conditions and let's start with contact with contact as condition and in order to do that we have to understand what contact is so when we're not asleep or unconscious contact is happening all the time because contact is what happens when one of our sense doors connects with an object well what's a sense door well it's the same as in Western scientific thought with one exception our ears eyes nose mouth skin and nerves are the five Western senses and those are five of the mindfulness sense doors but then from a mindfulness perspective there's one more our mind is also a sense door so let's play with that right now become aware of whether your ears are hearing a sound and if you just heard me say that you you'd have to say yes my ears are hearing a sound because you heard my voice and in a moment I'll stop talking and invite you to notice if you're here ears are hearing a sound without my voice and just to say naming what the sound is like Judy's voice or a bird or a person it's not important right now simply notice if your ears are hearing a sound so if you noticed your ears were hearing a sound what you were noticing is contact that instant when the ears hit hear a sound it forms an equation kind of for contact ears plus hearing plus sound equals contact okay now try your eyes open your eyes and look at something without naming whatever you're looking at just see it just as a form and and by the way notice that when I invite you to look at something what I'm really inviting you to do is to pay attention to the fact that seeing is happening just like when I invited you to pay attention to your ears listening they may already have been listening they probably were but the shift is that you began to pay attention to the fact that listening was happening so your ears were probably already seeing if they weren't closed just like your ears were hearing but because I mentioned it now maybe you're paying attention to the fact that seeing is happening and that there's a form being seen and and like with the ears and sound it's not important right now to name the form that's being seen it's just important to know that the moment the eyes see a form contact happens so same kind of equation eyes plus seeing plus form equals contact and now do the nose nose plus smelling plus scent equals contact now the mouth mouth plus tasting plus something in the mouth and again it's not important what it is right now contact now the body maybe there's air moving through the room and you can feel it on your skin or maybe you can feel your clothes on your skin either one it's skin plus sensing in this case plus air or clothes equals contact or more subtly skin plus sensing plus object equals contact the object would be in air or the clothes and we also have contact with our internal body which is called interoception so nerve plus sensing plus object maybe a gurgling stomach or a painful back equals contact hmm and then last but not least the mind if I say pink elephant or statute of limitations the mind probably has a thought which because of the invitation right now it's aware of having so mind plus awareness in this case plus thought and I don't know about you but plenty of times I'm not aware of the thoughts my mind is generating but right now you might be aware because we're playing with this practice and it's the same as with the other senses mind plus awareness plus thought equals contact or with the mind it could also be emotion so the beginning of this wake-up call when I said I was anxious entering a meeting I was really saying I was aware of anxiety and the equation is mind plus awareness plus emotion equals contact okay so there are two important things here to just take away one is contact is happening all day long all day we're hearing seeing smelling tasting sensing and having thoughts or emotions and two most of it is happening outside of our awareness unless maybe we're on a longer retreat and we're really paying attention moment to moment we're mostly not aware that our senses are making contact that contact is happening all the time and that's what gets us in trouble which is what we'll talk about next time how does contact get us in trouble okay so thank you for your kind attention and let's sit for a few minutes so finding your meditation posture for today whatever that is whatever would most support your practice and sensing into the body being here right here in this present moment I love what Tuera Salas says she says your body's right here where's your mind so notice that the body is right here present always and where's the mind bring the mind to the present moment and then taking a moment to get focused bring the mind to the breath intentionally and just notice that breathing is happening see if you can follow the breath maybe even counting in breath out breath is one in breath out breath two and when you get lost which for me usually happens around three come on back start again and then once you feel relatively anchored steady want to invite you to open the awareness to be in an open awareness practice which is where what's happening is just noticing contact if your eyes are closed that sense door may not be one that you work with although there still may be contact of the eyes with an object like color and what about the ears are the ears hearing a sound and can you notice that moment of contact or is the nose smelling a smell or are their thoughts and can you play with noticing the thoughts noticing that the mind is aware of a thought without getting involved in the content of the thought or the mind is aware of an emotion without getting swept away by the emotion just noticing contact as it happens moment by moment how contact the ancient the ancient mindfulness teachings say listen attend carefully and I will teach you the totality of things what is the totality it is simply the eye and sights the ear and sounds the nose and smells the tongue and tastes the body and sensations the mind and mind objects which are thinking and emotion if anyone were to proclaim a totality I could say reality beyond this that person would be speaking of something outside their knowledge and guy Armstrong at our retreat said we could consider this the opening bell the opening bell of practice thank you everyone for being on the wake-up call today it's really nice to see you take good care be safe out there I'll see you next Thursday