Mindfulness Of Breathing In Joy And Happiness

The joy and the happiness we expereince in practice are considered to be feeling tones. Called Vedana in the Pali. So there are three basic categories of feeling tones, pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral.

And sometimes if you, if you tune into that sign, that part of an experience, you actually tune into the part upon which you're reacting.

Transcript

So,

We've been talking about these 16 stages of breath meditation.

And the fifth stage,

Which we talked about on Tuesday,

Is experiencing joy.

And just to review a little bit,

The first four stages have to do with getting into the breath and beginning to relax the body.

So when the body is not tense,

It's more relaxed,

It's easier,

It's easier to be present.

And then once you're present,

You want to learn to calm the body,

The way that the body holds tension.

And as you get more present and relaxed,

That tends to bring a sense of well-being,

A sense of joy.

And as I said last time,

Joy is a good thing to experience.

And so the instructions are that when you experience that joy,

When there's joy happening,

Experience it,

Take it in.

And there's an art to taking in meditative joy so that it actually enhances and deepens our practice.

And then let that joy actually spread in the body to become more full.

That joy when we get really concentrated and absorbed,

It's sometimes called rapture because it can be very intense.

And then at some point,

The next stage here is experiencing what's known as sukha.

Sukha is happiness.

And so here the idea is that at some point,

After you've experienced enough rapture,

Enough joy,

Your mind naturally moves away from the joy and you settle into something that's more satisfying which is happiness or a kind of,

It's not a physical pleasure,

It's not sensual pleasure.

It's more of a spiritual pleasure,

The inner sense of just delight.

So the process of deep absorption through breathing and relaxing goes through the stages of joy which can feel energetic to happiness which is more of a ease and settling back.

It's more satisfying.

So both of those,

Joy and happiness,

Are considered to be feeling tones called vedana.

Vedana is the word in Pali.

So there are three basic categories of feeling tones.

There are pleasant feeling tones,

Unpleasant and neutral,

Neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

And sometimes if you're tuned into that,

Into those signs,

That part of the experience,

You can actually tune into the part which you react to.

So you might get,

You know,

You might be experiencing joy and then the reaction is to hold onto it.

Or you might be reacting to an idea in the mind that seems unpleasant and then you have to move because it's unpleasant to be in the body when you think about that.

Or you may be reacting to sensations that are pleasant.

You want to bring more of those sensations in.

So part of the equation is often what has a big impact on us and what we do.

So the feeling tones have a big impact on us.

So the instruction is to pay attention to the feeling tone experience.

Just pay attention and that is another way that we become free of it.

We're just aware of it.

It's just there.

So the feeling of joy and happiness,

They're pleasant,

Both of them.

And so the mind is somehow engaged and the feeling,

The sense pleasure of it,

In order to go further in the practice,

To go deeper in the practice,

We have to be able to relax with it.

The mental formations,

The mental activity that are involved in taking pleasure,

So not clinging to it,

Relaxing it and just interpreting,

Ah this is pleasure.

Or registering it's pleasurable or there's happiness,

That's the feeling tone.

And when you acknowledge it in that way,

Just unpleasant,

Not clinging to,

Not pushing away,

There's a calming of the mental formations.

So mental formations are the mental activity that's somehow associated with producing all the joy and happiness that we experience.

So in this next step there's a stepping back from the pleasure.

So instead of being fully immersed in the joy and the happiness,

We step back and discern what's the type of mental activity that's happening here.

Is it pleasant?

Is it unpleasant?

Is it neither?

Sometimes you can notice that you're looking for pleasant or you're looking for joy and when you don't have it then there's a version that arises.

So that's the mental activity that's behind all of the seeking.

So this is a lot if you haven't heard these ideas before,

But this is kind of the process.

And it's just to say this is just one way of interpreting these next four stages.

So step five says,

Experiencing joy,

One experiences joy and enjoyment.

Step six,

Experiencing happiness,

One knows,

Breathes with happiness.

Then the next,

Experiencing mental activity,

This is where we're getting to know the mental conditioning.

What's going on in the mind?

What's the flavor?

What's the impact on our mental activity to have joy and happiness arise in our experience?

And then the eighth step is to allow it all to calm down.

So that's again one classic way of describing this.

There are many different ways of describing this.

In my personal practice,

I don't spend a lot of time in the feeling tones of joy and happiness.

It arises subtly.

In the breath practice for me,

The absorption can bring a feeling of contentment,

Of joy.

That the fact that I'm here,

I've arrived,

The mind isn't kind of pulling me this way and that way.

It's very satisfying to be absorbed in that way tends to produce well-being and it brings about the conditions for contentment,

For happiness.

So rather than dwelling in those experiences,

I tend to experience the aspect of mental formations,

The activity that's going on that comes in louder than the joy and the happiness,

The pleasant,

The unpleasant,

The neutral.

That seems to my mind is conditioned in the way that I see those things.

I find it important to see those things and for meditators to address preferences,

To look at our likes and our dislikes,

To at least,

At the very least,

Identify them.

And then as we experience them,

Learn to relax with them and settle them.

I'm of the view that it's very important for people who are doing Buddhist practice to practice with unpleasant experiences.

And it's unpleasant to do.

You know,

It's very important because if you want to be free and you're only free when things are pleasant,

Then you're not really free.

That has been my experience.

You have to learn how to be able to handle all of it.

And for some,

You know,

Some people take it as a personal affront that somehow things are uncomfortable.

Like if I'm having knee pain,

It shouldn't be that way.

So it's very important to actually learn to be willing to practice with discomfort because our intent is to find or discover a place where we're not caught,

Where we're not entangled with it.

So one of the first steps,

One of the first aspects of sitting down to meditate is a feeling of somehow approaching it all with inclusivity,

Including it all.

Allowing everything to be there and not to be in conflict with what shows up.

And for some people,

That's a huge learning.

For me,

Absolutely,

This is a big practice for me to learn how to be to not be in conflict with what goes on when I sit down to meditate,

Not be in conflict with the distracting mind or the strong emotions that can come up or memories or body sensations or feelings,

Not be in conflict with it.

So it's sort of like putting out the question,

How do I include this too?

So I'm trying to say as part of meditation,

Wise meditation,

It's learning to work with causes and conditions.

Those causes and conditions that influence the mental activity.

So rather than feeling that anything has to happen when you're sitting here meditating or anything that is coming up in meditation is wrong and shouldn't be happening,

A wise meditator just sort of takes it all in.

So this tetrad,

The second tetrad contains an entire universe of practice.

You can go into this particular tetrad and spend a really long time there and find it really beneficial because pleasant and unpleasant and neutral are such simple concepts,

Are such simple experiences,

Learning to pay attention to them and seeing how we relate to them and how we build ourselves up from them can help us cut through a lot of mental activity and can lead to a really natural and deep peace and tranquility.

So in one through four we're relaxing the body and in five through eight we're relaxing the mental activity.

So I'd like to stop here and take any questions and then next week we'll enter into the third tetrad.

So thank you.