Hello.
So today I want to talk to you about a couple types of meditation.
Probably the two main groupings that I think about when I think about meditation and contemplative practices that I'm most familiar with are shamatha and vipassana.
Shamatha in Sanskrit and Pali basically means tranquility or calmness.
The purpose of shamatha meditation is to bring our minds to that state of calmness so that we are essentially training our minds so that when we're in stressful situations,
When we're at work or in the middle of something with our family or children or animals,
When that tension,
When that moment of tension appears,
That we can recognize it for what it is and release that.
And we do so by practicing,
By practicing shamatha meditation when we're sitting,
When our environment is quiet,
When we have the space and time to be able to set aside five minutes,
Ten minutes to practice calming the mind.
Now shamatha meditation can look like many different forms.
One example would be the watching of your breath,
Seeing how it enters and exits the nose,
Feeling the presence of it,
The sensation of it as it enters your chest,
As it,
You know,
Your belly movement and how it feels to be breathed,
Right?
Your body's being breathed,
Let's say.
And that is a way of creating calmness and bringing that and becoming apparent and aware of the sensations that occur in our bodies.
Now vipassana is a focused insight meditation.
It is taking those thoughts which we label and make note of in our meditation and examining them in a state of inquiry to understand their underlying nature.
Why are these thoughts occurring?
How are they manifesting?
What do they point to that's at a deeper level?
Shamatha paves the path for a more in-depth vipassana meditation and is perhaps a foundation piece for practicing that self-inquiry.
For me those two go hand in hand.
They fall under somewhat different realms in Buddhist traditions,
You know,
With more of the Mahayana or Vajrayana paths looking at vipassana meditations.
And perhaps Hinayana path really bringing forth shamatha as a central component.
But wherever it falls,
And inside or outside of Buddhism and other contemplative practices as well,
We see it show up.
That this idea of bringing our minds to a place of stillness,
Seeing thoughts enter and then noticing that thoughts are entering,
Not getting caught up in the storyline that comes with those thoughts when we're sitting in silence.
Letting those thoughts pass and and labeling them as we do.
Thought,
Perhaps.
Or noticing as we're sitting that perhaps our attention wanders to a sound,
Maybe a bird that we heard or bells that are ringing in the background.
And rather than going to see that bird or standing up or looking to see what those bells are,
Labeling it and noting that sound.
Sound is here and sound is present.
And then moving back to the breath and to the thoughts.
And so that is how we practice shamatha.
We practice it in a daily way so that we can bring that to our lives.
We can bring it into any moment that we have that that feeling of tranquility.
That we can even label the thoughts that show up in our regular day and label the sounds that show up while we're walking and notice that those are sensations or experiences and not get too attached to those.
So the contemplative practices that I intend to share over the course of the next few months will fall within these categories of shamatha and vipassana.
And I will talk a little bit about maybe the origin of the word that I'm using.
But what I really would like you to all consider is just how this appears in your life and every day.
And that it's something that's meant to be taken away from the cushion or the seat or the practice into the everyday.
And so that's the way I hope to frame this.
Thank you.
