Hi there and welcome.
This is Julia Friedal and in this talk today I'd like to offer you some ideas that can serve as a foundation to your meditation practice regardless of which tradition or methodology you may choose.
So if you're new to meditation and you're looking for a way to start,
The ideas I'll be sharing with you are a great way to start.
And if you already have a meditation practice,
Maybe one that needs a little freshening up,
I hope the ideas I'll be sharing will help re-inspire your practice.
So as you listen,
Feel free to close your eyes or you can take notes,
Whatever works best for you.
Obviously this is recorded so you'll be able to return to these ideas anytime you'd like.
You may be familiar with the quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery that says,
If you want to build a ship,
Don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work,
But rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
And it's in that spirit that I want to guide you towards your meditation practice.
Rather than giving you specific instructions,
I want to help you fall in love with the immensity of the inner sea and the deep sacredness of our world,
Both seen and unseen through meditation.
Because meditation is much more an art than a science.
If you wanted to learn how to make a beautiful painting,
A person could tell you how to use the paintbrush and teach you some things about color and technique.
But the spirit of a great painting,
That can only come from you,
From your soul searching and the degree to which you've opened yourself to the creative spirit.
The same is true with meditation.
Instructions for a meditation practice are helpful,
But they too will only get you so far.
But teachings,
Teachings that turn you toward your heart and your longings,
Toward a quality and an approach that is loving,
Can set you off on a path that you can then follow and explore on your own,
In your way,
Without limit.
So what I'll be sharing with you today are teachings,
Not instructions.
Let me start with this poem by Mark Strand called,
My Name.
One night,
When the lawn was a golden green,
And the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air,
And the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects.
I lay in the grass,
Feeling the great distances open above me,
And wondered what I would become,
And where I would find myself.
And though I barely existed,
I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine.
And I heard my name,
As if for the first time,
Heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain,
But faint and far off,
As though it belonged not to me,
But to the silence from which it had come,
And to which it would go.
In traditional Buddhist trainings,
Which is the original source of most meditation practices as we know them here in the West,
When one steps onto a spiritual path,
The practice that is always given first,
Before any mindfulness or meditation practices,
Is a generosity practice.
Why?
Because the quality of relinquishing,
The letting go that is central to true generosity,
Allows all other efforts related to the cultivation of mindfulness,
Compassion,
Joy,
To flow more easily.
The capacity to let go is essential to those endeavors.
The spiritual path tends to follow a different route here in the West,
Because we have a need to be skillful with our minds.
We are enticed through the intellect and by mental challenges.
We enjoy the sense of focus and control in that.
And while there are some ways in which our intellect and ambition can move our spiritual process along,
Our intellect and our clinging to control are also major obstacles,
Because they are the opposite of letting go,
The opposite of relinquishing.
A spiritual life,
Which I'll define here as one in which we come to understand the interconnectedness of things,
The oneness,
Is not an intellectual pursuit.
In fact,
The Buddha described the path of enlightenment as a liberation of the heart into love and connection.
So it's the vast heart space that we aim to occupy in our spiritual practices,
Including meditation.
The over-reliance on the intellect in the West,
Which runs concurrent with our fear of the heart space,
Is why many of us here mistake the aim of meditation as a training or quieting of the mind,
As a practice in concentration.
That part of meditation is a step in,
But there is so much more,
Because concentration and meditation are not the same thing.
Concentration has a point of focus.
Meditation is an expansive awareness with no points,
No point of focus.
It includes everything.
Concentration is about control,
And with concentration we're still in the mind.
Meditation is about putting the mind and the need for control down,
And instead opening up to a greater state of vastness and surrender.
To be very clear,
This isn't a criticism of concentration-oriented practices.
Concentration techniques are valuable techniques that can help us move towards surrender.
What I'm saying,
Rather,
Is that concentration is not the same as meditation,
And concentration alone will not transform us.
What will transform us is finding our way into the beautifully still,
Deeper aspect of the heart space,
Where great settling and spreading can occur,
Where love becomes infinite,
Where the dualities between self and other disappear,
And the veils between the seen and the unseen are lifted,
And our suffering fades,
Fades alongside the fading thoughts of naught-enoughness,
Superiority,
And separation in general.
While the mind excels at making distinctions and differentiations,
And while there are plenty of places in our lives where such capacities are valuable,
The heart does the opposite.
The heart is a holder of all things,
Of all truths,
Of all realities,
Of all paradoxes,
Which is what our world is made of,
And it's like an antenna that reaches out and connects us to all things.
If the heart is in a protracted or protective state,
A closed state,
We feel cut off and isolated,
Sometimes from our own selves.
But when we enter the heart and open at the heart,
That antenna extends in all directions and connects us to all things.
We can be alone anytime,
Even all the time,
And never feel cut off.
Keeping the heart space open and healthy is essential to our happiness and our world,
And meditation is a practice that helps us do that.
So as difficult or maybe terrifying as it may seem,
We want to put down the intellect and view our meditation practice not so much as a doing,
But more as a relinquishing.
A relinquishing of control,
A relinquishing of productivity,
A relinquishing of self and of our story and our attachment to our story.
A letting go of thought in general,
So that in that emptiness,
In the space made available by your relinquishing,
Your true nature and the true nature of all things can be revealed to you.
There's a very nuanced thing I'd like you to understand here,
Which is that meditation is not so much you discovering this true nature.
That would be a doing and a seeking.
Meditation is the letting go of doing and a letting go of mind so that your true nature and the true nature of all things can reveal themselves to you.
That's different.
These are very abstract things that I'm talking about,
Your true nature and the true nature of all things.
But unfortunately,
There are no better words for these things.
Great poets can get close to what they are,
But ultimately,
The only way for you to really understand is to experience them.
And to experience them,
You have to let go.
This takes time and commitment.
And for the modern mind,
It also takes trust,
Trust to stop thinking,
Trust to stop trying to make things happen,
To suspend your mental efforting and open yourself to a different kind of knowing if you've been relying almost exclusively on the mind for all these years.
It's an act of trust to put that down.
But is the mind alone getting us where we want to be?
Are we happy?
Or are we going mad?
That might be a question worth considering.
The last thing I'd like to say about why we do this about why it's valuable to have the deep meditation practice such as this is that in times like these,
When the winds of chaos in the material world are blowing so hard,
It really helps to keep your connection to spirit strong.
When you lose that connection,
Or if you don't have that connection,
You will feel overwhelmed and powerless.
Your spiritual practices are not meant to be an escape from the world,
But rather,
A way to understand it more deeply and move through it more graciously and effectively,
Even when it's storming.
And the truth is,
All these storms in the material world originate from the wounds and chaos in our collective inner worlds.
So we want to do our part and at the very least,
Tend to our own inner world and make it as conscious and peaceful and connected as possible.
So when we close our eyes and turn our gaze inward,
What we're really doing is meeting ourselves,
Meeting our true nature or our Buddha nature as it's sometimes called.
We're opening to and through the vast heart space,
Allowing something quiet and eternal to come forward and help you see that you're already complete,
You're already perfect,
And that you need not look any further for love or happiness.
It's right here.
When we close our eyes and turn our gaze inward,
We're also creating a container in which to bring back together our disintegrated parts.
We bring the body,
Our attention and our feeling self together in the same place at the same time.
A feeling of rest and calm comes instantly,
Simply for no longer being so pulled apart in so many directions.
And through this process of reintegrating ourselves,
We also begin to reintegrate our personal self with all that we belong to,
Which is everything.
Through that comes an even deeper feeling of quiet and stillness.
It's the end of searching and the beginning of being.
And it's so simple.
Now there are two common fears that tend to rise up when we consider the idea of encountering ourselves so openly.
Maybe you've already felt them as I was speaking.
One common fear is that you won't like who or what you encounter.
For Westerners with our problems with self-love,
Which is a large topic in my six-week Compassion Immersion,
If you ever decide to join me for that.
Allowing one's true nature to be revealed can be a frightening idea if you believe your true nature is not good enough or that it's somehow fundamentally bad.
But I assure you,
Nothing could be further from the truth.
As you encounter your true nature,
You will find there's no such thing as not enough or not lovable.
Those thoughts are symptoms of the shortcomings of our modern societies,
And they just aren't true.
It doesn't even exist.
But you can't know that just by me telling you that.
You have to encounter this truth yourself.
So it takes a little bit of that trust that I was talking about earlier.
The second common fear is that all the undealt with pain that one has been storing away will all come up at once like some great flooding,
And then it will be overwhelming and unmanageable.
While it's true that in this process of meeting yourself,
You will begin to encounter and release your pain.
It's also true that our psyches have lots of self-protective mechanisms built into them.
So this releasing doesn't happen as a flooding.
It happens in manageable bits.
One thing will arise and in time you release it.
Then another thing arises and in time you release it.
Until one day you're actually free of the pain you've been holding and carrying around.
But it's not a flooding.
So having said all that,
Before we go into a meditation practice together,
Which we will do,
I'd like to offer you four guidelines or four commitments that I consider to be the foundation for any meditation practice.
The first commitment is to approach your meditation from the heart and not your mind.
If you approach yourself from a transactional mind that wants to check something off the self-care or spirituality list,
Yet is unwilling to let go even a little bit of who you think you are or your material world concerns and beliefs,
From there you will not get past the shallow surface and you're unlikely to feel engaged in your meditation.
And that's going to happen sometimes.
But if you approach yourself with love,
With a willingness to surrender and a willingness to meet yourself just as you are in that moment,
To feel your way into the heart space so that you might saturate in the love and the belonging that it already knows,
Then you will feel connected to your meditations and you will also be transformed.
This means giving your body and its nervous system the time it needs to quiet down from all the thinking it's been responding or reacting to prior to your sitting.
So approach with love and patience with these intentions.
That's commitment number one.
The second commitment is to be still,
To be still in the body.
So make sure you set yourself up comfortably enough that you won't have to adjust every few minutes.
Commit to not adjusting your body every time your mind asks you to.
Sometimes your mind will make up a reason you need to adjust just to distract you because the truth is it's a little afraid of this vastness that you're opening to.
But if it finds that you aren't responding to its instructions or requests to adjust,
It will eventually give up.
So commit to stillness,
Not rigidity,
But stillness.
And as the body finds this stillness,
The mind will eventually follow.
The third commitment is to allow everything about the experience to be exactly the way it is.
And when I say that,
I don't mean that allowing as something for your mind to do some kind of active allowing.
It's subtle,
But I mean it more as a state of awareness.
Just allowance and awareness of the waters moving the way they move and drawing no conclusions about it.
You simply listen like you listen to the rain or observe the way you observe a river without needing to change it.
And the fourth commitment is to be easy and light about everything,
Not masterful or serious,
But easy and with a very light touch.
So for example,
When you notice in your meditation that you've strayed with your thoughts,
Simply begin again with lightness and ease and friendliness.
Just find the breath again to start again,
No matter how far you may have strayed or for how long,
The breath will still be right there.
And so you simply begin again with a very light touch.
One of the most common mistakes we make is to think meditation is complicated.
We want to think that there's some secret method or secret code to crack because then we feel skillful and important.
But meditation is so simple.
It's about trust and surrender.
The path to surrender will be a little bit different for everyone,
But that's really all it is.
When you make it complicated,
You work against yourself.
The more simple you can get,
The deeper you will go.
One last thing I'd like to offer you is a simple auxiliary practice outside of your sitting practice that can help you with this letting go,
Which is to simply let yourself be with and in silence more often.
See if you can practice not squirming and not filling the silent spaces up when they come,
Whether you're alone or with someone else.
Silence is a profound and generous space and within it is the same encounter with self and with what is,
With what's true.
That's why most people avoid it,
Quite frankly.
But if you can learn to be with it in your daily life,
You'll have a much easier time dropping into your meditations as well.
There's a quote I love by Terry Tempest Williams.
She wrote,
Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the moon exposing the night.
Behind darkness is our fear.
Within silence,
Our voice dwells.
What is required from both is that we be still.
So having said all of that,
Let me take you into a simple meditation,
A deep dive into stillness and silence and the heart space.
So please set up a seat that's comfortable enough that you can be still for 10 or 15 minutes.
If a classical cross-legged seat is not very comfortable for you,
You could sit upright in a chair or on the sofa with your feet planted flat on the ground.
You could also sit up against a wall for a little support that way.
It's important to have a clear upright spine so that your heart is not hidden back and so that the body can breathe easily and efficiently.
So you want a clear line as best you can running through the brain,
The heart and the belly.
And so when you're ready in your seat,
Rest your hands on your thighs,
Either turned down or turned up either way and close your eyes.
Let's start with some physical grounding.
Simply become aware of the ground or the floor beneath you and your seat.
If you're sitting cross-legged,
This can include your legs.
If your feet are planted down on the floor,
Become aware of that connection through your feet to the floor.
And while you stay grounded and connected through your base,
Through your seat,
Let the spine straighten and lengthen itself up.
And for a moment,
Just be in your body.
And then without changing anything,
Notice your breath moving in and out of the body.
And let the belly move naturally with the breath coming and going.
And while you stay lifted through your spine,
Encourage your body to relax.
So lifted in the spine,
But then the body kind of draping down.
And scan around in a loving way and pause wherever you find some tension and invite that area specifically to relax.
Remember to do everything so lightly with just such a light touch.
Stay aware of the breath coming and going.
Let your general attitude just be very soft,
Not in the slightest hurry to get somewhere or discover something or to get something done.
Just relax into the body and the breath.
Just relax into being.
And then feel your energy start to trickle down from the mind,
Down the throat passage.
Let it trickle down into the chest and the heart space.
And then down into the lower part of the belly where you're breathing.
Stay with the breath.
Let the breath be a place you can relax down into.
Just rest your attention right at the bottom of the belly like on the sea floor where you are breathing.
As you may notice,
Just by attending to your breathing,
Your whole nervous system is starting to calm down.
So stay with the breath.
If your mind gets active,
Your breathing will change.
And so when you notice a change in your breath or you notice you're back in thought,
You want to simply begin with that same light touch,
Guiding yourself back to the breath away from thought.
And while your breath continues,
Bring your awareness back up to the heart center and begin to switch over to a different kind of listening from this center,
Just an openness there.
Not an active listening,
Just an availability.
And then let that openness spread into every cell.
So from the heart center,
This openness spreads into every cell,
Awakens.
Imagine every cell in your body open and listening,
Not seeking any sound or any information,
Just simply available to what it hears in whatever form,
Simply available and open without any expectations.
Let it be really,
Really simple.
You might notice what's going on in your mind here.
Notice if it's becoming cynical or frustrated.
Notice if it's feeling unsure,
If it's doing it right.
You're doing it right,
Even with those thoughts coming up.
These kinds of thoughts are normal responses to the attempt to surrender the self,
To surrender the story and open.
So don't try to push the thoughts or the story away.
Instead,
Just allow the mind to go through its process without you.
If you try to push the thoughts away,
The mind has already won because it has taken your attention.
So just stay light and aware and open.
That's all you're doing.
So so simple.
For as long as you try to do it right from your mind,
You won't be in the feeling of it.
You have to relax a little bit and trust a little bit.
And keep your whole approach soft,
Not tense,
Not in a rush,
Not aggressive.
Everything light and easy and just as it should be.
Open to the stillness and the quiet that already exists.
Feel the quality of letting go,
Of allowing and not controlling,
Of relinquishing all your ideas and just bathe in the empty space and allow whatever is.
I'm going to go silent for about five minutes.
And then the meditation and this talk will conclude with a gentle bell.
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