Okay,
Let's use this evening's sip to go deeper.
Go deeper into the skill that we've been learning of heightened awareness.
As we sip,
Let's gather our awareness.
Feel the smaller triangle or the larger triangle,
Whichever you're working with.
And slowly let all your awareness collect here.
Pull all your awareness in.
Wherever it may have been,
Bring it back to this point and focus on the breath.
Some of you may have noticed that while we sip for these long periods of time,
A lot of pain might be generated in the body and start to come up.
We're going to address this directly later.
And actually,
This starts being another benefit to us,
Another thing we can use to go deeper into meditation.
But right now,
A way to approach these long sips that can help is to use the sandwich sip method.
And this is to have three different sections to your sit.
When you first pick your posture and you come back from your break,
Then pick a comfortable position where you can relax and collect your awareness for a few minutes.
And then once your awareness is collected and you're focused and you've started to enter a deeper state of meditation and you're ready to start to push your meditation,
Then sit in your best posture.
And this will be the meat,
The filling of the sit.
Sit in your most secure,
Most powerful posture.
And then when you've sat to your limit in that position,
Change back into a more comfortable posture for the end of the sit.
In this way,
You break up every sit into manageable sections where you know,
No matter how deeply you sit in the middle,
No matter how much pain might be generated,
You have a position to come out of it and to ease into.
This can help.
This can help both the mind and the body.
It helps to give you the right amount of discipline and effort as well as the right amount of relaxation and allowance.
So let's use this now for this long sit as we focus on our breath.
As we feel the smaller triangle.
And some of you might want to go deeper,
Deeper into practicing this skill of heightened awareness.
So this evening is the time to do this.
Within the smaller triangle,
You may be able to feel a smaller area,
A small circle just beneath the septum,
Just beneath the nostrils,
Smaller than a fingerprint.
See if you can place your mind here.
How does your mind feel being in this small circle?
How does the breath feel when we're positioned here?
Are you more or less distracted?
More or less aware and focused?
Feel the breath coming in and out of your nostrils.
Maybe some of you want to go even deeper,
Want to test the limits of your mind.
Maybe you can feel a small dot beneath the nostrils,
Beneath the septum.
A tiny dot.
Can your mind shrink down to this size?
Can your mind fit within this space?
Just test it and see.
And see how it feels to feel the breath coming in and out of your nostrils when you're in this new position.
This even smaller position.
There is a tradition that people with small noses use this tiny dot beneath the nostrils.
And people with larger noses use a tiny dot on the tip of their nose,
Whichever you are.
See if you can move between these two positions and which one makes it easier for you to focus and feel.
Focus and feel the breath coming in and out of the nostrils.
Tiny dot on the tip of the nose or a tiny dot beneath the nostrils.
Wherever you're focusing,
We always practice the same thing.
We feel the breath coming in and out of the nostrils and we fix our awareness here,
Not allowing anything that may pass by to move our mind away.
If our mind does happen to move away,
Then we simply note what it was that we allowed to distract us and then we bring our awareness back,
Back to the breath in whichever area we're focusing.
In this way,
Every condition is an opportunity to meditate.
Whatever dragged us away.
A thought,
A memory,
A sensation,
Tiredness,
Boredom,
Pain,
Bliss,
A fantasy.
Whatever it was that wanted to take us away from here and now,
We note it and we bring our mind back.
We feel the breath coming in and out of our nostrils as we go deeper and deeper into heightened awareness.
Now let's continue to train ourselves.
Train ourselves in silence.
Good.
Let's build this focus.
Now we know what we're starting to do.
Now this is starting to make sense as we go deeper and deeper into ourselves.
Deeper and deeper into our natural functions using this wonderful skill.
Whether we're staying and meditating more or getting up and leaving,
Focus on the breath.
Feel the breath coming in and out of the nostrils and carry our awareness with us wherever we go.
When we lay down tonight,
Use the skill that we've been building in the full posture section of the meditation.
Don't let any change of posture be an excuse to break our awareness,
To break our ability to be here and now.
And as we lay in bed tonight,
Let's feel this breath naturally moving in and out of our nostrils as we go from the waking state to the sleep state.
And when we wake up tomorrow,
Let's see how quickly we can collect our awareness.
How quickly we can start to feel the breath moving in and out of the nostrils.
This continuous unbroken thread of awareness.
Let's continue to practice.
