So we've been practicing the 16 stages of the Anapanasati,
Which is mindfulness of breathing.
And each stage,
Each step is complete within itself.
So we don't need to be concerned about making our way through the steps.
But more,
Let's just be fully present for practicing with what is.
Be content with whatever the practice is and the focus is at that time.
And as practice develops,
Sooner or later the body will start to feel settled and unified.
We'll be breathing with the whole body and relaxing.
As we develop the ability to be more content,
More happy to be here,
Then we'll experience more well-being.
And this makes it easier to notice what's going on in the mind,
The mental activity,
And to relax it.
It's nice to have a sense of well-being so that we can look at some of the craziness that goes on in the mind and not be disturbed or troubled by it.
We see this as just mental activity as opposed to making it personal or judging ourselves.
We just experience mental activity as mental activity and then we can relax and calm down.
And those are the first eight steps of the Anapanasati.
The whole practice of the sixteen stages kind of makes a dramatic shift with step nine which is experiencing the mind.
This is a pivot,
A deeper dive into our spiritual life.
The word chitta is usually translated as mind and sometimes it's translated as heart-mind or even just heart.
The word chitta is so important in some ways because it's the closest thing that we get from the Buddha to something that maybe we would call in English the self,
The idea of self.
In Buddhist orientation is seen as representing some activity of the mind.
It's an idea,
An interpretation,
Something that we hold on to.
And there's this desire not to get involved with the whole idea of self.
You know sort of like well what is the self?
Who am I?
This investigation is considered more complicated and stressful than is useful for deepening meditation so we sort of put the idea of self aside.
And then chitta,
The mind,
Is what takes its place.
The mind is not a thing.
The mind is the aggregate.
It's the the gasalt of all mental activity in the way we experience them.
It's fluid.
So it's not a thing to get attached to or see as something as solid.
It's just dynamic and fluid.
And as we go deeper into meditation it gets very clear how fluid and changeable the mind is.
How the experience of the mind changes with different levels of concentration and levels of clarity.
So it's fascinating to watch how we sense and feel the mind.
How it oscillates between being kind of contracted and small to being really expansive.
The mind can be all kinds of ways and when the body gets relaxed the mental mental activities also relax.
And then the mind states tend to be more welcoming.
They're dynamic states rather than this thing.
So what you'll see is that the mind,
When we're really relaxed,
It's not something easy to hold on to.
We can have desires in our practice to get concentrated.
But if we get really close,
We kind of realize there's nothing that we can hold on to.
It doesn't make sense to cling to anything in the mind.
If we cling to anything in the mind we're actually getting involved in the mental activity which is just a subset of mind.
So any kind of involvement with these activities like our thoughts,
Our interpretations,
It narrows and collapses the freedom and the openness that is the sense of the mind.
That's why in step 10 we're invited to satisfy and glad in the mind with a sense of wholeness,
The sense of being complete and centered.
So this is when the practice of the anapanasati switches to concentration practice.
And concentration practice is not a separate practice.
But we can develop concentration,
You know,
We can develop it just by doing mindfulness of breathing,
Mindfulness of breathing in mindfulness of breathing out.
We center ourselves.
And then we have a mind state that we feel that we're intimate with.
So we take the whole mind state with us as we center ourselves on breathing right back to the first one.
And the breath becomes kind of the wind that moves through the mind state.
So the breathing becomes more and more the place where we gather ourselves.
It's almost like if we were sitting in the center of a room and there were concentric circles around you,
Like all of your best friends,
Your family,
People who support you.
They're just there to be with you,
Hold you and love you and show you that you're good.
And you can kind of rest and be at ease.
So we gather ourselves together in this way.
So breathing in,
One settles in,
Breathing out and then one settles in.
Breathing in,
One gathers ourselves here and breathing out.
One gathers ourselves here.
And this gathering,
This centering and settling.
It's difficult to do if we're preoccupied with thoughts and ideas and emotions.
It works best when we're relaxed,
When we're not tight or contracted or nervous about things.
You know,
We can have our thoughts and our contractions,
But we don't have to get involved with them.
They can be in the background.
And as we get more gathered in the thoughts and the feelings and the emotions start getting oriented as supporters for the process of the mind being centered on the breath.
So if we're thinking,
Our thoughts actually become very simple about staying with the breathing and feeling the breathing.
If there are emotions or feelings happening,
They're also connected to the process of being settled.
This is kind of part of the settling.
And with further settling,
Everything kind of begins to come in.
It gets really sweet.
There's this sense of being settled and connected and not distracted.
If there's a sound or sensation in the body,
It's just kind of held softly in our awareness.
It's included.
It's not a problem.
It's just part of the landscape of a settledness,
A softness.
Samadhi concentration is sometimes called unification,
The unification of the mind,
Making it whole.
And I'm very aware that this is not an easy experience in a daily life practice.
And describing it in this way can set up expectations,
Can set up striving,
Comparative thinking,
Like I'm never going to be able to do this kind of thing.
I'm never going to be in that state of mind.
This is why the early steps of the anapanasati are so important.
We're always just staying attentive to the stresses and strains of what's happening in the body,
Our reactions to them,
And relaxing them.
We're always attentive and sensitive to how we get trapped in our mental activity and our thoughts.
And we're always ready to relax them.
So these early steps in the anapanasati,
In the mindfulness of breathing,
Are so important.
Like always keeping them close and being content just to do them.
And coming back to experiencing a spacious mind,
A way of being,
And then getting caught.
So rather than thinking that it's a mistake or a problem that we're always supposed to kind of be at our growing edge and not getting caught,
It's actually kind of this back and forth discovering ourselves.
And what's going on is we're slowly kind of working out the kinks,
You know,
The wrinkles that need to be ironed out.
This back and forth.
It allows us to become more whole and settled in our practice.
So we don't need to be concerned if these deeper teachings are not quite working for you.
You can trust that they'll work in some way.
So always be content to do whatever step you're on.
That's that's truly the practice.
So thank you for your kind attention.
As we move deeper into this third tetrad into the mind.
