Sitting in meditation is sometimes like just coming into intimate space with ourself as we would with a friend or a lover or a child or anyone we care for so deeply.
We feel they're hurt as if it's our own.
Coming into intimacy with ourself can feel familiar or very unfamiliar.
Maybe this is a friend that we've been spending a lot of time with or not so much.
Maybe we miss ourself.
Like all intimate relationships,
Every feeling is natural and comes from time to time.
We get excited,
We get bored,
We are afraid or angry or kind or welcoming.
We're welcoming or toward this being that is ourself.
My teacher,
Sylvia,
Said in a talk I heard recently,
Don't get distracted because when you get distracted,
You're at risk of becoming unkind,
Getting confused,
Concentration or samadhi,
The settledness,
The collectedness,
The gathered togetherness of our qualities of perception,
Attention,
Gathering in our cognitive and perceptual faculties into a steady or less scattered stream is one of the most powerful ways to come out of our reactive,
Active,
Wounded,
Emotional and nervous system patterns.
If we can find it,
Steadiness.
So whatever posture you're in,
Let the body delight in,
Rest into this posture,
This shape of the body.
Whether it's comfortable or uncomfortable,
It's good for it to be as comfortable as possible given the state of our bodies right now.
Rest into it.
If there are aches and pains that can't be released at the moment,
We relax around them,
Envelop them in compassion,
The body in compassion and care.
There's no need to obsess.
Sometimes the body's comfortable and sometimes it's aching,
Hurting.
It's the same with the heart.
If you get as happy as you can given present conditions,
Then don't worry about it too much.
We're going for steadiness.
So as you find the posture,
Resting into the posture,
You find the mind and rest into the mind.
In the body,
You might know what it's like to feel fidgety or restless and to get really spacious and relax.
Let the restless energy just be energy that hums through the body in stillness rather than burning it out in movement.
It's okay to be restless.
Or you just get relaxed and insist a bit on stillness.
It's the same in the mind.
The mind likes to wander or tormented is wandering.
Restlessness is a quality of the mind jumping from one story to the next,
One thought to the next,
One complaint to the next,
One fantasy to the next.
Bring the mind to just the field of the body and breath and presence.
And feel the restless energy,
But don't give in.
Stay using that bit of effort to steady the mind.
If it helps to hold on to the breath quite closely,
You can make it a short leash.
Stay with the in-breath.
Every moment of the in-breath.
Stay with the turnaround,
Stay with the whole out-breath.
After a few breaths of stronger effort to stay,
It usually becomes easier.
You can lighten up on the leash,
But not too much.
Resting into the open space of mind.
And we can only really listen to a friend if we can't stop obsessively listening only to ourself.
You have to set aside the work of the day,
Other things going on,
Really bring our attention with some generosity to the experience of this friend,
Not wanting to be somewhere else.
And as we sit together,
Encourage the breath as the post we tie the leash to.
That anchor can be anything steady,
Sounds,
Posture.
When you feel the mind wanting to wander,
Or if you notice it already has.
The training in samadhi is not to follow the thought or analyze it or even really label it,
But just recognize that the system has gone from steadiness to unsteadiness,
Stillness into action.
Doesn't take anything to come back to stillness other than stopping,
Whatever's going on.
You just let go,
Whatever the story is that leaped in.
Nothing needs to be done with it.
Stops on its own when you notice it without any wanting,
Wanting it to be something or go somewhere.
This is a training in doing less,
Ultimately in having moments of doing nothing at all.
Because when we learn that,
The ground drops away or the sky opens or the body knows something about being alive that we just can't sense so easily when we are so busy.
So we'll sit together in a wide circle into the deepening quiet of the evening.
