Hello there.
There's a saying in the Zen Buddhist tradition,
How we do one thing is how we do everything.
Or at least,
I would say,
How we do one thing is how we do a lot of things.
And meditation is no exception.
I wouldn't say how we do meditation,
But how we treat meditation.
It's indicative of our approach to life.
Let me give you an example or a metaphor.
Imagine a vending machine.
You put your dollar in or your euro,
Your pound coin,
Whatever it is,
And you press the button for a Coca-Cola and out it comes.
You put another coin in,
You want an orange juice,
Out it comes.
You put your money in and out comes what you want.
Many of us treat meditation similar to how we treat a vending machine.
We expect what we want.
Occasionally the vending machine may let you down.
You put your money in and nothing happens.
So you might curse at it,
You might give it a slap and complain,
Go to the desk and get somebody to get your drink out for you.
But normally you get what you want.
I would take that same mental attitude to meditation.
Okay,
So I'm meditating.
So I want what I want.
Where is it?
I've been meditating now for three days or three weeks,
Three months,
And I'm not getting what I want.
You may do for a while,
Actually.
You may feel more peaceful or more calmer,
Whatever,
For a certain length of time.
But meditation doesn't give you what you want.
It gives you what you need.
Now imagine,
This is a crazy scenario,
But imagine that you go to a vending machine,
You put your money in,
You press your button for a can of Coke or whatever,
But out comes a note and the note says,
Take a five minute pause.
It's not what you want,
But it might be what you need.
And you put your money in,
Another time maybe a note comes out,
Sit down and have a cup of tea.
Or next time pay attention to your thoughts.
Don't believe your thoughts.
Maybe a note comes out,
Welcome your sad feelings.
If a vending machine did that,
You wouldn't really spend much time around it,
Would you?
Because it's not,
We have an agenda,
Of course.
We have an expectation that the vending machine gives me what I want,
And rightly so.
That same expectation we take to meditation,
It needs to give me what I want,
And it won't.
Meditation isn't about getting something.
It's about an exploration of your experience.
It's about honesty.
And this is not our usual view of meditation.
Most meditations,
Or a lot of meditations have soothing music in the background,
And that's fine,
But that's not true meditation,
That's relaxation.
Not to be confused with what I call true meditation,
Or awareness,
Or mindfulness,
Self inquiry.
Nothing wrong with relaxation,
But that in itself won't get you very far.
It won't change your life.
So meditation is about exploring who we are,
So we sit on the cushion,
Or we sit in our chair,
And we bring attention to what's actually happening.
Right now,
What's happening?
Let's take a pause and just explore what's happening.
Let's do a couple of minutes of true meditation.
So you take a deep breath.
That just helps you to arrive in the present,
Arrive in the body.
Now we ask ourselves,
So what's happening?
So we feel the body.
There are bodily sensations happening.
There are sounds happening.
We welcome and open to the bodily sensations.
We open to and welcome sounds.
Not only the sounds we want,
But all sounds.
The sound of the distant traffic,
Or the tweet of the sound.
We notice bodily feelings.
There might be one of feeling calm.
We might feel agitated.
It doesn't matter.
The contents of the moment are not that important.
Welcoming them and just experiencing them is what we're here to do.
So just feel the body.
We notice the breath,
The movement of the body.
We just feel that.
So there's a rising,
A turnaround,
A falling.
And in this space of awareness,
We also notice thoughts.
Some thoughts we like,
Some thoughts we don't like.
Some thoughts we class as positive,
Some as negative.
Many we may class as just neutral.
Head fillers.
We are not trying to have a blank mind.
Declare away all thoughts.
What I want you to do is just to notice those thoughts and just say to yourself,
Thinking.
That's all it is.
It's just thinking.
It's your belief in them that fuels them,
That keeps them busy.
Once you notice that you're lost or you're hooked into your thinking,
Just unhook and say to yourself,
Silently thinking.
Simple.
Now you can carry on sitting quietly with your eyes closed if you wish.
I'm just going to say a few words.
After teaching probably many hundreds if not thousands of people meditation,
The one thing that almost everybody wants to do is to banish thoughts,
Is to have a blank mind.
And so they spend weeks,
Months,
Maybe years trying to get a blank mind,
Thinking that that's what meditation is.
You will never ever ever succeed.
Not for long anyway.
You can blank your mind for three seconds,
For 20 seconds,
Even for a minute.
Just stop breathing and the mind quietens down.
How long can you do that for?
So what we do with meditation,
We are seeing into the nature of thoughts that they just happen.
Pop,
Pop,
Pop,
Pop.
They just arise.
You're not actually thinking them.
And so what we do,
We sit back as it were and just watch.
That's difficult at first because we hook into them.
But over a little while,
A little bit of sitting practice,
Watching your thoughts in daily life,
You start to sit loose to your thoughts.
They don't trouble you so much.
You don't get hooked into quite so many of them.
And what has been previously a very busy place,
Your head,
Becomes quieter.
Not because you've tried to get it quieter,
But because you're not fueling it.
And then the thinking mind becomes a wonderful tool rather than a tyrannical ruler.
So be careful of or be mindful of treating your meditation like you want something from it.
You expect something from it.
This is what I want X,
Y or Z.
Like a vending machine.
It's not a vending machine.
It's an exploration of your experience.
So if you listen to some of my other talks and meditations,
What we do or what I do is to just explore this in different ways.
Thank you.
