We call it attentional stability in mind training.
Staying with an anchor is the foundation of any path of transformation.
For real evolution to occur,
We'll have to.
.
.
Engender some resolute determination of staying with ourselves.
So the Buddha taught over 40 anchors in his teaching career about how to stay with ourselves.
You choose one feature of life itself and then you bind to it.
So we call Samatha an exclusive practice because it excludes everything except your anchor.
And there's over 40 anchors in the lineage of Zen practice,
But the one that the Buddha taught the most.
And the one that he practiced himself.
Was the breath.
Because we take the breath wherever we go.
And so it becomes the ultimate mobile device.
The greatest technology for connection.
Because it's here with us for as long as we live and we can bind to it in the practice.
So here's the three steps for Samatha.
It's a very simple,
Exclusive practice.
It excludes everything but the anchor.
And in our case,
It'll be the anchor to the breath.
To bring it even more distilled,
I'd recommend,
Because there's a lot of different places in the body that you can feel and bind and anchor with the breath,
That you focus on the breath as it naturally arises and falls at the locus of the hara.
The belly breath.
The natural occurring belly breath.
So here's the three steps.
Step one.
Observe the anchor.
Observe the belly breathing.
Step 2.
Observe when you're off the anchor.
In Samatha,
We call it off task.
A gentle observation of I've fallen away.
From the focus I'm honing.
Step three.
Return.
Observe the anchor.
Observe when you're off task and return to the task.
Of riding the natural occurrence of the breath waves from the Dantian.
From that sea of chi just beneath the navel.
So in essence,
Shamatha is a practice of recognizing when we're off task.
We're spying on ourselves.
The word for that in English is introspection.
To observe when we've slipped out,
When we're no longer involved in the follow-through.
This is how we develop self-trust.
Authority,
Agency as a practitioner to notice when you've fallen out of the follow through.
You're recognizing distraction.
You're recognizing when you've bound instead to a certain storyline.
When your gatheredness dissolves.
That natural inborn awareness when that central gatheredness starts to scatter.
Observing that moment and calling yourself back to the task.
That's the simple brilliance of shamatha.
You don't need to make it fancier or more mystical than that.
When you recognize.
That you're off task.
It doesn't mean that you've failed.
It doesn't mean that the practice isn't working.
Our nature,
The nature of the mind is naturally mercurial.
Distractible.
And that's a good thing in a lot of ways because we can juggle many things simultaneously.
But we're watery.
Our nature is like a slipstream.
So what we're developing here is a maturity to recognize.
When we're being hijacked.
Yeah?
To discard what's hijacking us.
And stay in the nucleus of our intent.
That process needs repetition.
It occurs over time.
We call it a developmental mind training.
Because you'll be on task.
You'll be riding the breath.
And depending how resourced you are and what material you're bringing in and how vertically aligned you are in your three wisdom realms,
Maybe you'll be on task for one breath.
And then you fall off the anchor.
And then you're back on for maybe a half a breath and you're off again.
All right,
If you really gathered,
Maybe you're with it for.
About 20 strokes or so.
The long-term meditator can really stay in a shamatha practice after decades of meditation.
Maybe 20 minutes.
You know,
The Dalai Lama's been practicing for over five hours a day since he was about seven years old,
And he will say that he notices how much more swiftly he goes off task if he hasn't meditated for three days.
So after three days.
Even with the wealth that he's built internally with many hours of practice and lots of mentorship and influence into his inner field from a young age,
Even after three days,
He notices dramatically,
He says,
The difference.
So it'll be a natural occurrence that we fall off task.
But every time you notice.
And you recognize that you've been hijacked.
That you've been pulled astray.
You have the opportunity to plant another seed.
There's a new neurological pathway.
That you're carving when you move to step two.
Recognizing you're off task.
And then gently coaxing yourself into step three,
Returning.
Not with an edginess,
Not with the inner critic,
But with this gentle.
Come home.
Just keep coming home.
It's like the Ram Dass quote,
We're all just walking each other home.
You're going to walk yourself home in step three.
And every time you do,
You're creating a new neurological pathway.
Of potential.
To focus.
And that gets baked in to the lattice of the brain.
So maybe you're on task for two breaths.
You fall off task and return.
Well,
Maybe the next time you'll be able to take three lengths,
Three strokes of breath before you go off task again.
So new neural scaffolding.
Without this style of practice,
We're compelled by.
Any angle of stimulus entering into the sphere.
We call it the monkey mind,
Right?
Because we're swinging from branch to branch of whatever wave we're wanting to ride.
And it's our intrinsic nature to focus.
So if you were to just think.
In this moment to the last time.
Just even in this morning,
Moving through your noble silence,
That you were focused on a single point of awareness.
Maybe it was walking to the dining hall or pouring a cup of tea.
Just choose one feature of this morning that you were compelled by.
And notice that your mind has this natural myopic.
Feature.
It can hone this ability to focus on one thing,
And then we go out into more spatial,
Broad awareness until something else pulls our interest.
Oh,
I need water.
I'm going to focus entirely on that for a moment.
And then we get spatial and broad again until something else comes into the stream.
And if we're not practicing.
Then what we're getting pulled by becomes less skillful.
And then we're very vulnerable to temperament,
The waves of conditions.
So mind training is not creating a new mind.
And that's really important to understand,
Especially when you enter into the austerity of a Meditation Hall.
We're not trying to create a new mind.
We're not trying to emulate a master.
That would be fantastical thinking.
That's fantasy driven.
And then we'll constantly be judging ourselves in the practice about how we're not measuring up to that ideal.
We take the ordinary mind as it is right now and we train up the capacity for control for that myopic.
Attentional stability.
We're training up control that's very different than being controlling.
The intentionality to focus,
To stabilize our attention so we're not at the whim of circumstance.
Getting pulled by mood tolls.
Endlessly chasing circumstances so that we can feel some sense of satisfaction.
It needs to be pointed out.
We need to hear it,
That we have this myopic capacity to focus.
And it won't just occur.
It needs to be trained.
So this is what the insight seekers,
This is what the Buddhas,
What Zen masters have been pointing to all along.
Now thousands of years of meditation under our collective belt as a species,
What we know is our mind state can naturally focus.
And it needs to be trained so that there's an endurance to that focus and we have the capacity.
To live in the gift of rest.
In a spacious way.
So mind training begins with this.
Development of attention to the anchor.
It's one pointed,
It's singular,
It's simple.
Shamatha is ordinary.
There's nothing special.
Does it need to be ceremonial?
Or ritualistic.
It's the bare bones of the practice because the breath is ongoing.
It's always available wherever we are.
We're never bereft.
Of the breathing body while we're here.
So one of the things I want to mention before we.
Moving to the doorway of practice because we'll need some real context.
To practice with integrity.
That'll hold us lifelong.
You lie.
Hear so often people say,
Yeah,
I meditate.
And I'm always curious,
What's your method?
I hear often,
You know,
I just sit and let what comes come.
That won't stabilize you lifelong.
You'll need a method,
A process to bind to.
So that you're not pulled by the confluence.
It's the spine.
Samatha is the spine,
The foundation of any.
.
.
Practice field.
So we're observing the ordinary breathing process.
We've established that so far.
We're not influencing its pattern.
And that's a really crucial ingredient I want to bring in because most of us come in through the doorway of yoga.
A lot of my students come on retreat from yoga classes,
Yoga practice,
And breath awareness in Samatha is very different than breath awareness in an asana practice.
Asana and Pranayama which will also do.
Is focus on enhancing the breath.
