Mindful Of Relaxing Mental Activity

The eighth step of ānāpānasati is: One trains oneself: one calms the mental activity. One relaxes the mental activity. Relaxing is a natural process of settling. As we get more settled in meditation and focused on the breathing, we start shedding a lot of the concerns of the day. As we're more here, there starts to be a heightened sensitivity to different aspects of our experience.

Transcript

Ah, So the anapanasati, The mindfulness of breathing in and breathing out. We've been with this for many sessions now, Over a month. And the eighth step is one trains oneself, One calms the mental activity, One relaxes the mental activity. And as we move into the next eight steps, I was contemplating just sort of moving in a slightly different way with these next eight. So I'll talk about that a little bit next week. It will be much more organic. Won't be so I think I'm going I've been going through it in a step by step way through the text. And I'm going to go into a more organic process in these next ones because they're, They're more organic, They arise naturally, When we focus on these first eight. So relaxing, Relaxing the mental activity. I think for many of us, That's, That's all of the practice, Right? Relaxing is a natural process of settling. As we get more settled in meditation, More focused on the breath, We start to shed a lot of the concerns of our life for the moments that we're sitting. And as we're more here, There's a more sense that there's more sensitivity to the different aspects of our experience. So we begin to have more well being, More happiness, More gladdening of the mind, As it's said in the text. And also, We begin to develop more sensitivity and more awareness to the mental activity to our thinking mind. And we, You know, Have been seeing this throughout, You know, We can know this thinking mind. And in this step, We're letting go of our thoughts and coming back to our breathing. And, You know, Many of us have heard this instruction over and over to put down the thinking mind and to return to the breath. And what we're learning as we go along and deepen this practice is there's, I think there's more sensitivity to the unsatisfactory quality of thinking. You know, We start noticing that when we're involved in thinking, It's almost like we're alienating ourselves from ourselves. You know, And that's, Maybe that concept seems unimaginable for people who identify strongly with their thinking, As though their thinking is who they are. But as we become settled and calm and more embodied and present, We realize that thinking is just one aspect of our lives. And it's our experience as a human on this planet is a much fuller range of who we are. And if we just get lost in thought, We're actually losing touch with the fullness of ourselves, The fullness of who we are. So there is a kind of alienation. Even if our thoughts are great and exciting and important and got important things to do in the world, We can become sensitive to the impact that thinking has. You know, We're no longer embodied when we're all up here. And another impact to in the body and the experience of practice is that we also have a tendency to ruminate in the unskillful and wholesome thoughts. You know, If we're thinking in a way that's agitating and angry or greedy, Or we read the paper before we started practice, Then that agitation, That fear, That confusion, That perpetuates. And we inadvertently attract more of the same agitation and preoccupation. You know, We can go around all day agitated. So we want to be able to shift that, Have some say in our experience. When I sit down to meditate, You know, I realize that my thinking has somehow created some tension for maybe around my eyes, Behind my forehead. If I'm too busy with my life to really notice the subtlety of it, You know, I often get caught up and I don't even notice what's happening in my body. But as we settle, It's interesting to experience the tension and the tightness. It becomes more apparent how our thinking has manifested in our shoulders, In our forehead, In the space behind our eyes. And so when we feel this tension of thinking, There's a kind of a psycho physical, Like psycho physical system, Like our system, Our internal system, There is a wanting to relax. The more we're mindful of our tension, The feeling of tension itself, Then there can be more of a momentum to relax. And so the instruction to relax the mind to calm the mind. This is helpful, Because when there's when your mind is calm, What we attract is calmness. When the mind is calm, The less likely we're caught by what we've read, Or our thoughts or wandering off into thoughts. And the easier it is to stay focused. I'm personally I've experienced, You know, It's an important practice and lesson. How our minds work as we get calmer. So much more clarity. It's like when you if you wear glasses in your glasses are really smudged, And then you clean them. All of a sudden, It's like a whole new world opens up. And the mind isn't clouded over with thinking. There's a lot of clarity. And now there's also sometimes we feel that, You know, If we're going to be a responsible human being on this planet, We have to engage the mind and show ourselves and show other people how seriously we think, You know, How seriously we care for things. And what's interesting is if we allow the natural quiet and calm to operate, Then it may may look like we are not caring or look like we're just letting things go whatever way that they're going. But I'd like to suggest that our love and care is is responsibility. You know, Even a sense that things are really important to take care of. It can be taken they can be taken care of better if the mind is calm and relaxed. We don't need to build extra tension in the mind to accomplish or fix things or think about things or ruminate on things. So this is really a shift in perspective. To learn how to trust a calm mind. A calm mind is able to engage responsibly. To take care of things is a process of trusting. You know, A process of familiarity of the experience like, Okay, I'm going into this meeting or this conflict with a calm mind and then to see, Oh, This actually works. I don't have to believe in the messages from society that I have to be anxious or angry or preoccupied or apologize for myself. I don't have to engage my mind in some way to please other people. It's possible just to stay really calm and peaceful. And in that, Our natural intelligence comes our creativity, Our responsibility, They can can all operate. Then there's no extra energy going out of anger or frustration or confusion. So this learning, This learning to relax and calm the mind depends very much on our ability to recognize how we're over efforting to recognize where's the agitation, The tension, The pressure. Where are we closing down? Where is the mind holding? So as I talked about on Tuesday, The seventh step of this anapanasati is to feel, Feel the effects of the mind to feel what's going on. And then the eighth step is to relax it. So I'll pause here, Take any comments or questions and yeah, Thank you for your attention. This practice of mindfulness of breathing