Mindfulness 101: Am I Doing This Right?

In this talk and guided meditation recorded live at the Boston Mindfulness and Insight Meditation Meetup, we get back to basics about what we're doing -- and not doing -- as part of a mindfulness meditation practice. This session is a good introduction for new practitioners and the merely curious, as well as an opportunity for experienced (or lapsed!) meditators to refocus.

Transcript

Good morning everyone,

And thank you for joining me.

For those who do not know me yet,

I know we have a lot of first-timers here,

For those who do not know me yet,

I am Ron Levine from Mindfulness and Blue Jeans.

As some of you already know,

I fell ass-backwards into mindfulness and insight meditation.

It's 2022 now,

Right?

So what's it been,

24 years?

April of 1998?

24 years ago,

I started doing this.

I was in a time in my life where I had started dealing with clinical anxiety,

Depression,

Panic disorder,

And my panic disorder had blown up into agoraphobia.

I was unable to leave the house without melting down,

So obviously I couldn't work,

I was on short-term disability.

My life had ground to a halt.

And I was fortunate enough to be paired up with a psychologist who even back then was already several decades deep into practicing and teaching mindfulness and insight meditation.

And he gave me some of these techniques as a way of working through my issues.

I was not impressed with his suggestion.

My feeling was,

Hey,

My life has stopped,

I can't work,

I can't go out,

I can't go past my front door,

I can't do anything.

And here's this guy saying to me,

Oh,

Why don't we watch the breathing for a while,

See what happens.

Great,

Thanks,

That's terrific.

He didn't give me anything else at first,

And I was sitting at home all day anyway.

And I figured,

Okay,

I'm going to try this just long enough that I can honestly go back to him and say,

Look,

Dude,

This didn't work.

Can I have the real treatment now?

And as I say,

That was now 24 years ago.

I have not had that conversation with him yet.

And here I am doing things like this.

So I'm just about at the point where I'm ready to admit there might be something to all of this.

And here we are.

So welcome,

Thank you for being here.

Periodically,

And particularly at the beginning of the year,

I like to do my,

Am I doing this right session?

An introduction to mindfulness,

Insight meditation,

What the hell all this is,

Right?

We're going to cover what we're not doing as part of a mindfulness and insight meditation practice.

We're going to cover what we are doing,

And we're going to cover how we're going about it.

I'm going to move fairly quickly because there's a lot to cover.

We're not even going to scratch the surface of what there really is in this rich practice.

So I'm going to be throwing a lot at you.

The point is not,

If you are brand new to this,

The point is not to catch every little nuance of what I'm saying.

What I'm really doing here is offering,

If you will,

A bunch of on-ramps to what this practice is driving towards.

And some of them may resonate for you and some of them may not.

Now much of what I'm covering here comes from Theravada Buddhism.

The hell is Theravada Buddhism?

Theravada Buddhism is concerned with the study and practice of the teachings of the historical Buddha from 2500 years ago,

As best we know them as they've been passed across time and space,

Right?

2500 years around the world,

As best we know them.

The Buddha himself taught in this same way.

You could spend years,

A lifetime,

Studying all of the Buddha's teachings and their complexity and nuance and how comprehensive they are and the.

.

.

But you don't have to do that.

He didn't try to instill in everyone who came to him the entirety of his teachings.

There are numerous on-ramps and depending on who his audience was,

He would share what seemed most appropriate for them,

What would most resonate for them in their lives at that time.

And they could take that and follow that all the way to the end.

It's kind of what we're doing here.

So if some things resonate and some things don't,

As we like to say,

Take the best and leave the rest.

Okay?

This is about your experience,

Your practice.

So with that said,

Let's dispel a few myths about mindfulness and insight meditation right out of the gate.

Let's talk about what we're not doing.

Consider for a moment that at any given instant,

Including this one,

We are experiencing countless sensations from both inside and outside of the body.

And of those countless sensations,

Our subconscious mind is filtering them and presenting to us just that subset that it thinks we might need to know about because there's no way we could consciously deal with all of them.

Of those ones,

It says,

Oh,

Okay,

Here,

I'll put this into your consciousness.

You might want to know about this.

Of those,

We now have a particular perception of them as we begin to feel them based on past experience,

Based on past memory,

On judgments,

On what we want,

What we don't.

Perceptions filtered through experience.

And then we interpret them through that.

So with all of this sensation,

Perception,

Filtering,

Interpretation,

All this,

Why am I saying all this?

Because this.

With all that going on at every instant of our lives,

In what alternate universe,

In what alternate universe does it make sense for us to come to this practice saying,

I need to clear my mind.

I need to stop thinking.

Well,

I need to stop thinking is a thought in itself,

Right?

Do we sometimes experience a relatively clear,

Still mind in this practice?

Yeah,

That comes up sometimes.

Is it pleasant?

Yeah,

It usually is.

Is it necessary?

No.

Do we have a say in it?

Not really.

That clear mind will happen sometimes,

But not because we're requiring it.

Okay?

So we can drop that right from the get-go.

That is not part of this practice.

Trying to not think.

You find a way to make that work,

Contact me afterwards.

I want to know what you did.

Something else we are not doing.

Many of you have taken a look at my website.

You'll see one of the very first things that I point out is what I teach,

This practice,

This real practice,

I say it right on my site,

Real practice for real people.

We are not climbing up on a mountaintop with a gorgeous sunset and a bowl of kale.

Okay?

We are not trying to generate some kind of transcendent experience.

We are not entering a mystical trance.

Are there kinds of meditation that do that?

Yeah.

This isn't that.

This isn't that.

We are not here to never experience a negative feeling.

Something you may have heard of in spiritual circles called spiritual bypassing.

Oh,

I meditate.

I don't get angry.

I don't feel bad.

This is such a.

.

.

Okay.

This isn't that.

This isn't that.

I call my practice mindfulness in blue jeans.

This is a blue collar practice.

We are finding out about ourselves.

We're not necessarily going to like everything we see.

That's okay.

But we're going to get a little dirty in the process.

If you go through an entire spiritual practice and find every bit of it pleasant and beautiful,

Check your practice.

Everything might be missing.

The last thing that I'll say that we are not doing is we are not withdrawing from life.

That is sometimes a misperception people have of a practice like this is we're trying to remove ourselves from like unplugging.

Right?

And yes,

Sometimes when we sit,

We go to a quiet place where we will not be disturbed and so forth.

But the point of this practice is not to get good at sitting on a cushion.

You get good at sitting on a cushion.

Okay,

You got good at sitting on a cushion.

So what?

Who cares?

This practice is meant to be brought out into our lives,

Into the world.

And in fact,

In a way,

I was fortunate in a sense with what brought me to my practice.

Again,

I was agoraphobic.

I was unplugged.

I was completely withdrawn from life.

I couldn't leave the apartment.

I came to this practice so that I could begin to actually live again and in fact live in a way I never had before.

So we are not withdrawing here.

We are embracing life.

This is a life practice.

So I've talked about what we're not doing.

What are we doing?

We are in mindfulness and insight meditation developing a skill.

What skill?

We are developing the skill of clear seeing.

Clear seeing of how things actually are and how we are actually living.

How the world really is.

How we really are and how we negotiate the two.

Why the hell would we do that?

Are we developing clear seeing for its own sake?

No.

So I talked about the Buddha earlier and the Buddha's teachings.

The Buddha only taught one thing.

One.

How do we alleviate our own suffering?

Not pain.

Suffering.

Or one of the teachers that I quote a lot in these sessions,

Instead of suffering,

Which can be kind of a loaded term,

Because sometimes we think of suffering and we think of like Sisyphus trying to get the boulder up the mountain and we're just overwhelmed and things like that.

Or sometimes we take it the other side.

We romanticize suffering.

Oh,

I suffer for my art.

I suffered for this.

I said,

You're not going to take my suffering.

Sometimes it makes more sense to use the word stress.

Stress.

Nobody wants their stress,

Right?

We're not going to give me my stress.

That's my stress.

I'm not going to.

Suffering.

Stress.

So what do I mean when I say suffering and stress,

Not pain?

We're alleviating our suffering,

Not our pain.

Here's what I mean.

Pain we don't have a choice about.

We are living in these bodies,

On this mud ball,

In this atmosphere.

We're going to feel pain.

We're going to feel physical pain.

It's one of the first things we experience when we come out into this world,

Isn't it?

We're going to experience psychological pain.

We're going to experience emotional pain.

Gonna happen.

Don't have a choice.

Suffering.

Stress.

These arise when we do not deal with our pain skillfully.

I often like to say you can divide our lives into two parts.

We've got those first formative years of life where we are experiencing and encountering all kinds of pain for the first time.

And what do we do?

Well,

We throw a lot of shit at the wall trying to figure out how to make each kind of pain stop or at least decrease.

And at some point we find some strategies that seem to do that.

And we don't really stop to ask if they're sustainable,

If they're skillful,

If they're really the best way to go.

Because we're what?

Two,

Three,

Four,

Five years old?

Just make the damn pain stop,

Right?

So we find these coping mechanisms,

These strategies to deal with pain.

And once we find one or two of them,

Oh,

That works?

Hell yeah.

Give me more of that.

Keep doing that.

And that kind of becomes our hammer,

Right?

Any time the pain of a nail comes up,

We hit it with a hammer.

What if our pain isn't a nail and it's something that a hammer is not appropriate for?

It doesn't matter.

We have our fucking hammer,

Right?

And we're going to hit that thing.

And if it doesn't work,

What are we going to do?

We're going to hit it harder.

So we develop and ingrain these coping strategies for dealing with pain.

And so I like to say we have these two parts of our lives.

We have the early part where we develop these coping strategies.

And then we have the rest of our lives where we deal with the fallout of using those coping strategies,

Right?

Because usually the ones we come up with first aren't sustainable,

Cause other issues.

But now they're habitual.

What you're seeing helps us penetrate through that.

Begin to see how we are actually living.

Thought,

Speech,

Action.

So there are a couple of things that I want to say about this practice before we get into the,

Well,

How the hell are we doing this?

Okay.

The first thing is this,

The same way I said stress instead of suffering.

There's another word I often like to use instead of pain.

Works for me,

May not work for you.

Discomfort.

To me,

The thought of discomfort,

More manageable.

I had an experience when I was in college and some of you have heard this story.

I share a lot of stories for those who are new here.

I share a lot of stories cause I feel like they help really illustrate these concepts.

And when I was in college,

This was several years before I started my practice.

This was in my,

The clinical anxiety and depression came out of years of denial and distraction about a trauma that I had had.

And this was still during that time when I was engaging in those dysfunctional coping strategies,

Right?

I had a teacher in a sociology course who gave us the assignment of going to an AA meeting to report on it.

I'd never been to an AA meeting.

A lot of other people and women never been to an AA meeting and we felt very uncomfortable about it.

What we're allowed to,

That's invasion.

Like with the,

Of course she'd been teaching this class for years and she knew that what was coming and she looks at us and she says,

The meetings that you'll be going to are open to the public.

You're allowed to be there.

And I understand that some of you,

Even in light of that,

May feel uncomfortable with this.

And my blood pressure went down a little bit.

I'm like,

Oh,

Okay.

She's going to give us an alternate if we feel uncomfortable.

Some of you may feel uncomfortable with this.

That's absolutely fine.

You may feel uncomfortable and it's your right to.

What?

It's like she made it clear that we were going to do the assignment anyway,

But that was really interesting to me.

You may feel uncomfortable with this.

That's fine.

That's fine.

I'm in college.

I'm like 22,

23.

Never had anyone put it to me quite like that before.

Wait,

You mean discomfort's okay?

Holy shit.

Never thought about it that way before.

That's one of the things that we do in this practice is we learn how to skillfully approach discomfort and recognize that uncomfortable does not necessarily mean unsafe.

Now with that said,

We are still taking a compassionate approach to this practice.

What do I mean by that?

The first insight I ever had in my practice was if you fight yourself,

You've already lost.

That was the first thing I saw when I started practicing because I'd spent almost a decade fighting myself,

Essentially fighting against my body and mind to not panic,

Which was,

Of course,

Causing panic,

Right?

Exactly one of the cycles that we unravel in a practice like this.

So we don't fight with ourselves.

We are making space for ourselves.

We are taking a compassionate approach because fighting with ourselves doesn't work.

Like I said earlier,

We're not trying to clear our minds.

We're not trying to stop thinking.

We are simply opening up to it.

I like to say that this practice will give you everything if you ask nothing of it.

Is that easy to do?

No,

No.

I mean,

We all have a reason for being here,

Right?

That's why it's a practice.

Like I said,

We're developing a skill.

One other thing to keep in mind about the compassionate part of this is I do want to address this because it comes up a lot in spiritual circles.

The notion of the only way out is through.

If you're here listening to me right now,

It's probably because you're going through something.

And a lot of times you'll hear people say,

Well,

The only way out is through.

And yeah,

Okay.

Most of the time,

I'll agree with that.

But I like to add something to that.

The only way out may be through,

But you don't have to do it all at once.

In fact,

It may not be healthy to do it all at once.

As my own teacher likes to say,

Don't make yourself sick getting healthy.

Okay?

Compassion.

This is often a three steps forward,

Two steps back affair.

That's fine.

It's fine.

Mine has been that way for almost a quarter of a century.

So let's get to what we're actually doing,

Right?

Or how we're doing this.

I mentioned earlier about all of these sensations and perceptions and interpretations and feelings and thoughts and whatever.

What are we doing?

We are,

In a mindfulness practice,

Observing all of those things.

Not necessarily all at once.

We might pick one or two.

But all of these things that are happening,

We are observing them as the processes that they are rather than getting caught up in and identifying with the content of the storylines that we spin about them.

We're observing processes rather than getting caught up in content.

What does this do?

Well,

It does a couple of things.

For one thing,

We begin to see and acknowledge the arising and passing of all of these processes.

I'll give you an example,

Another one of my stories.

When I first started seeing the psychologist who got me started,

One of the things that he said to me was,

Well,

If you didn't have agoraphobia and this panic,

What would you do right now?

I said,

Well,

I'd probably go to Harvard Square.

This was the 90s.

Harvard Square was still cool back then.

I miss the old Harvard Square.

And he says to me,

Well,

Why don't you go to Harvard Square?

I said,

Well,

Duh.

I'd have a panic attack.

It's like,

I understand.

Extremely uncomfortable and scary experience.

Not discounting that,

Not minimizing that.

But then what?

Then what the hell do you mean?

I just said,

Panic attack.

Hello?

Panic attack.

Understood?

Understood.

But then what?

And he just sat there and he just shut up.

And he was going to make me talk next.

And eventually,

Based on previous experience of the past eight years,

I had to say to him,

You know,

Well,

I mean,

At some point it would end.

It's like,

Yeah.

And it was very interesting.

The shift that happened there.

And I still remember this.

I went from I will have a panic attack and then,

Of course,

Froze on that image of me in the middle of the public with the,

You know,

Freakin' and that became the frozen image I was stuck with.

Right?

End of story.

Bang.

Done.

This is forever.

Right?

And I go from I will have a panic attack to it will end.

This acknowledgement,

Not just that it's a process,

It's not me,

It's a process that,

Like anything else,

Is impermanent.

When we engage with this kind of what's sometimes called a choiceless awareness,

Sometimes you'll hear the phrase bare attention,

Which is a little more controversial,

But that's a story for another day.

When we engage with this kind of choiceless awareness,

Where anything is allowed to come up and be and process,

Arise,

Pass,

This does a couple of things.

First off,

We are engaging in what researchers call task mode thinking,

Which is exactly what it sounds like.

It's the kind of thinking when we engage with some kind of task,

A project.

We're doing something focused with the mind.

What's the opposite of task mode thinking?

It's what they call default mode thinking,

Because it's our default.

And what is that?

That mental time travel horseshit we're doing most of the day.

Imagining worst case scenarios,

Being depressed about the past and anxious about the future,

All that shit,

Right?

That's default mode thinking.

When we are observing these processes as they are,

We are engaging in task mode thinking.

So we are getting out of that rumination.

And in that process,

We are seeing one of the truths that the Buddha himself taught about,

Which is this impermanence.

We always picture that worst case scenario and figure that's when time's going to stop.

Right?

Nothing in my life has ever been permanent,

Ever last,

But this is the one.

This is the one.

Worst case,

That's the one that's going to stick around forever and that's it.

Not my experience.

I've had the experience of thinking that.

It's never panned out that way.

So merely bringing attention to this process is enough to change our experience of it.

It's just kind of like what they mean when they say the observer is the observed.

We're observing.

But we're changing as a result of the observation.

It's a simple practice.

But it is not easy.

And often what is not easy is keeping it just that simple.

Two other things I want to say,

And then we'll sit for a bit.

This is a powerful practice.

It is not a forceful practice.

What's the difference between power and force?

With force we are trying to exert control.

That's what I'm talking about when we say,

I have to clear my mind,

I have to stop my thinking,

I have to calm down,

I have to do this,

I have to do this.

How's that all working out for you?

If we could just think that and make it happen,

Would any of us be here right now?

No.

I'd be off doing something else and so would all of you.

But it doesn't work that way.

So what do we do?

We set conditions for clear seeing and insight to arise.

We can't say when or how they will do so.

But they will be much more likely to do so and will do so with greater frequency if we set the right conditions.

When we plant seeds,

We plant them in fertile soil.

Plant them,

We'll look at sunlight.

We water them.

Skillful conditions.

Can't make the damn things grow.

Right?

At some point we have to step back and say,

Look,

I set the conditions.

Now what happens happens.

Based on what happens,

Then I know what to do next for the next set of conditions.

But until then,

I got nothing.

When we decide where our practice must go,

We shut ourselves off from where our practice could go.

We plant seeds,

Give them a chance to grow.

Watch what happens.

It's part of that compassion.

And then wisdom will arise when we see what the results are.

And when we know what to try next.

Last thing I'll say before we get started,

And I'll guide you through some techniques for doing this.

Why do I call this session,

Am I Doing This Right?

Well,

There's a couple of reasons.

First off,

It's generally the most common question when somebody starts a mindfulness or insight meditation practice.

But there's another reason for it.

And this was something,

Another one of those insights that I stumbled into early on and really helped me,

Particularly with the compassion piece of this practice.

Because I'll tell you flat out,

Self-compassion,

Not one of my strong suits.

Nah.

I have to work at it.

Like anyone else.

Or most of us.

But I did have an insight early in this practice which really helped.

And this is why I think it's critical to share it with everybody.

When we inevitably ask ourselves in the course of practice,

Sometimes many,

Many times in a single sitting,

Am I Doing This Right?

The answer is almost invariably yes.

Because in that moment,

What are you doing?

Well,

You're looking at what you're doing.

And you are discerning,

Is this correct?

Do I need to make an adjustment?

What's happening here right now?

What conditions am I setting and what results am I receiving?

What is this practice,

If not that?

So if you find yourself asking,

Am I Doing This Right?

In that moment,

In that moment of asking,

In that moment of openness,

In that moment of curiosity,

In that moment of observation,

Yeah.

Yeah you are.

Yeah you are.

And as we'll go through as we sit,

The bulk of this practice tends to be coming back again and again and again after,

You know,

Falling off into a storyline and a memory and a worry and noticing and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back.

And that's for anybody.

That's for me.

That's for the teacher that got me started who's been doing this for over 50 years.

Okay.

Every moment is another opportunity to begin again and come to where we are.

Let's sit for a bit.

We're going to go through some of these.

The one cue that I like to give before we begin sitting is if you are in a seated position,

It is helpful to have your hips elevated higher than your knees,

Which is good both for your posture as well as your breathing.

If that is not possible right now,

Not a federal offense.

Something to keep in mind for the future perhaps.

And I invite you to begin with eyes closed if that is appropriate for you.

If you do not like to have them entirely closed,

You may just lower the eyelids a bit and lower your gaze so that it's about four to six feet in front of you on the floor.

And I always like to begin by imagining that I am suspended from the ceiling by a string that is attached to the top of my head.

That's a nice cue for sitting up straight without adding any extra tension to do so.

If you find that you do have some tension in your body right now,

That is completely fine.

That is completely fine.

We are not here to argue with it or to fight with it or to try to make it relax.

You can't force relaxation,

Right?

That's just adding tension to tension.

If there is some tension,

Allow it to be tension.

It will change and it will leave in its own time.

Maybe today,

Maybe not.

I also like to notice what is in contact with the floor or the chair.

So there's a sense of grounding.

Something is supporting us and it is capable of doing so and we can allow it to do so.

So we have a grounding at the bottom.

And if it doesn't feel particularly grounded right now,

It's there.

And we have this lift at the top where any part of our body that is not actively holding us up may relax in its own time.

Let's take a moment just to notice any sensations or perceptions or feelings at that grounded bottom,

At that lifted top,

Or any place in between.

Just noticing what we have here that we're starting with.

Gu graves.

Practice we will anchor on our breathing.

Let's begin to bring our attention to the breathing.

And notice if your breathing changed once we brought attention to it.

It usually does.

Now we may think we need to have a meditative breath,

Right?

Something long and deep and contemplative.

Not here.

Our meditative breath is simply the breath we are observing while we're meditating.

My breath is rarely particularly deep and long and slow.

We can observe many of the characteristics that I was describing earlier simply in the breathing.

For example,

The breathing is a process.

It is impermanent,

Inconstant,

Shifting,

Arising,

Changing,

And passing.

We can observe that.

The breath is powerful.

Keeps us alive,

Right?

But it need not be forced.

Our bodies don't need us to do anything to breathe.

It knows how to breathe.

So similar to that identification I was talking about in the Harvard Square story,

I will have a panic attack which got shifted to,

It will end.

Well it's kind of like that with the breathing,

Isn't it?

Sometimes when we are trying to focus on the breathing we might say,

I am breathing.

I've never been partial to that.

I like,

There is breathing.

Breathing is happening.

I don't have to do a damn thing.

Except maybe watch this process of it happening and unfolding on its own.

Like that plant I was talking about earlier.

I'm setting the conditions of observation,

The breathing.

Well,

I'm just watching that play out.

Now I didn't do that overnight.

I spent years meticulously controlling my breathing in an attempt not to have panic attacks.

At first I didn't even really know how to not try to control the breathing.

If that's something that resonates with you right now,

That's fine.

If you are unsure or unwilling or unwilling to relinquish control of the breathing right now,

That's fine.

You may observe that process.

Right?

We're not trying to control the controlling either.

We're observing our experience as it is right now.

Can we do that just with the breathing,

However it is?

Let's take a couple of minutes with that.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

You may find it helpful to use one of those phrases I mentioned earlier,

Like I am breathing or there is breathing.

You may find it helpful to focus more on the in-breath,

More on the out-breath,

More on the space between the two.

You're allowed to experiment in this practice.

In fact,

You kind of have to to see what works best for you.

And what works best for you,

What works best for you,

May change over time or even within a single sitting session.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Now,

In the process of making space like this,

This is really what we're doing.

We're tuning in,

Paying attention,

Making some space.

When we make space,

Things will usually arise to fill that space pretty quickly,

Particularly if they've been waiting for some space to do so for a good long time.

And what are those things usually?

Thoughts,

Thinking.

Now,

Like I said,

It's not particularly skillful in my experience to try to stop thinking,

But that doesn't mean that there are not skillful ways of managing thinking.

So I'm going to offer a few techniques that you may find helpful.

One that tends to be the most popular is the conveyor belt technique.

And in this one we can imagine that all of these thoughts that are coming up are going by us on a conveyor belt.

And some of these thoughts are very attractive,

Very shiny.

I want to go over,

Pick it up,

And hold it up to the light,

And shake it,

And check it out.

We don't have to do that right now.

I guarantee you,

Every single thought on that conveyor belt will come around again.

There will be ample opportunity to check it out.

You have not missed your chance.

But we don't have to do that right now.

That's not what we're here for.

That's not the condition that we are setting.

We are setting the condition to simply watch them,

And allow them to pass through.

And perhaps come back and pass through again,

And again,

And again.

Another technique is the labeling technique,

Which is particularly helpful for recurring thoughts.

When it comes up,

We place a label on it.

It could be as specific as that thing I gotta do tomorrow that I'm worrying about again.

It could be as general as worry.

We have a label,

And we just slap it on there.

And every time it comes up,

We just put that label on again,

Again and again.

And like with the conveyor belt,

That begins to create a little space,

A little distance,

A little less identification with that recurring process,

And some familiarity with the way it just keeps popping up.

It's like,

Oh,

You again?

I have to label you again?

All right,

Well here's your label.

All right.

It begins to take on this sort of jaded,

Been there,

Done that.

Oh,

All right.

Again with this.

Okay.

And we begin to see,

Yeah,

Clear seeing what's really happening.

What am I doing with what's really happening?

And how's that working out?

If you're dealing with some kind of physical discomfort,

Same thing.

Okay.

I always thought of physical discomfort,

Whether it was an actual pain or perhaps an itch.

It's like this monolithic,

Static thing in my body.

Just want it to get out.

Stop.

Go away.

Just kind of shut yourself off from it.

And when I started this practice,

I was like,

Well,

Wait a minute.

What's actually here?

What if I move towards it instead of away from it?

What if I stop arguing with it?

And I found some really interesting things like it's not monolithic.

It's not static.

There's movement.

There's shifting.

There's energy.

There's pulsation.

There's increasing and decreasing of intensity.

There have been times in my practice when I have felt a particular discomfort somewhere that I've tried to really zoom in my attention on it to the point where I could pinpoint exactly where it was located and found I could not.

It just kept moving.

Every time I thought I was looking right at it,

It went somewhere else.

Almost like those little floaty eye bubble things,

Right?

You can never look directly at them.

You try and look at it.

They move.

I found that with physical pain.

Amazing.

Would never have known if I didn't make a little space,

Pay a little attention,

And develop the clear seeing to realize it.

And I found that to apply to thought process,

Feeling process.

They all kind of follow that same pattern.

Let's take another couple of minutes before we wrap up the sitting.

And you may try one of the techniques I mentioned.

You may just continue to focus on the breathing.

You may try something else entirely.

You you you you you whatever technique you might be using if any always beneath it behind it all around it there is breathing if we can allow breathing something so critical to our survival if we can allow breathing to be breathing we naturally over time with practice begin to allow other things to be as they are that doesn't mean we don't work to make changes when it's appropriate this is not a passive practice this is an active practice we are actively working towards alleviating our own suffering our stress so we're developing the clear seeing the discernment to know this is something that requires some skillful action and that is something that can be allowed to play out without my interference even if there's an unskillful voice that wants to interfere right clear seeing we know the difference we suffer less and that's what we bring out into the world

Reviews

A lot of wisdom in this session . Thank you for sharing your stories . Much love and gratitude ❤️🙏