Mindfulness For Beginners: Getting Started

Mindfulness stabilizes the mind in the simplicity of the present moment, separated from regrets about the past and anxiety about the future. This meditation and talk provide a brief introduction to mindfulness, its characteristics and benefits.

Transcript

Begin by simply opening,

Sense into the gentleness of simply enjoying the in-breath as it fills the lung,

As the chest,

Peace,

Sensing the calming effect of the breath,

Peace that enters with each out-breath.

Can open and expand with the in-breath and let everything go on the out-breath,

Opening the mind with the in-breath and then releasing,

And now slowing down the breath and being able to draw the attention to the sensations of the breath,

Often the subtle sensations of the breath,

Be in how the air is drawn through your nose or inside your nose,

Passing through your nostrils,

The chest naturally rises and falls,

The movement of the body with each breath rises from down in your abdomen up through your body,

And pick where you can most easily feel the breath and then rest the attention there with each in-breath and out-breath,

Become curious about all of the sensations,

Intimate with them,

Naturally allow the attention to be absorbed there for a moment,

Sensations.

To do right now,

Just allow the mind to rest,

To be or become or achieve just the direct consciousness of breathing in.

You may notice that the mind has wandered to a thought or a memory,

So you can with great kindness welcome yourself back,

Resting the gentle rhythm of the breath,

Happiness may return many times during any meditation,

Every time you return you can feel the freshness of beginning again,

Feeling each new breath,

If it's the first breath you've ever taken,

The miracle of each life-giving breath,

Miracle of being alive,

Joy of each breath.

In your own time,

You gently back,

Rise again,

And if you feel comfortable for the talk,

You can turn your camera on,

Don't need to,

Please enjoy seeing people in the talk.

I'm going to start today a series of talks that cover some basic aspects of meditation and includes things like mindfulness of the breath and mindfulness of the body and mindfulness of emotions and feelings,

Loving kindness practice,

And also just some basic information about meditation postures and some of the mechanics of meditation that might interest you.

I'd like to begin today with a question of why we meditate.

I think most people have a twofold answer.

The first is a recognition that we are suffering in some way.

And there are people who turn to meditation because of some deep challenges in their life could be problems in relationships or family or physical or mental illness or other difficulties.

There also can be a general sense of unsatisfactoriness of life,

That things are just not right,

In some way that maybe is hard to describe.

Or there's a variation on that,

Which is,

We may feel like actually,

We have gotten what we wanted in life,

Whether that's,

You know,

A job or a partner or house,

A dog,

Whatever it is.

And if I realize those things haven't done it quite,

You know,

That didn't kind of perform like you would expect.

I have a memory when I was a young kid of Christmas afternoon,

And all of the stuff that I had dreamed about for months,

And the initial excitement of unwrapping it all and seeing it all piled up there and playing with it for a while.

And then you move into the afternoon,

And looking at this pile of stuff and realizing,

You know,

This is just a pile of stuff.

That's it.

It's just a pile of stuff.

And there being kind of a disappointment that,

You know,

My life was still not complete in some way,

As I expected,

When I got all these things that I had wanted so bad.

So that's a memory from childhood.

But I think it kind of carries over to adulthood,

Too.

There's a second reason I think that people may meditate,

Which is the sense that there's something more out there,

And that there are other possibilities.

And it often is hard to articulate what this different thing is.

But that in meditation,

You get a glimpse of something else,

Of some opening or some kind of another side of experience.

And meditation teachers spend a lot of time trying to explain this juxtaposition between the current state and the different state or alternative state,

And instructions about how to get from here to there.

And there are lots of ways to understand that.

And there can be quite different.

It's sort of like,

If you tell somebody to write a love song,

You're going to get a very different result.

If you ask,

For example,

Bert Bachrach,

Or Snoop Dogg,

Or Puccini to write a love song,

You're going to get something very different.

But it's the same experience.

They're trying to express the same experience.

So too with meditation teachers and approaches.

And before I say anything else,

I just want to address a question you might have about where I get all this stuff.

You'll hear a lot of references to the Buddha.

And that's in part because I practice a lot in Buddhist traditions myself.

But it's also because Buddhism,

Of all the great wisdom traditions,

Probably has the most detailed instructions about meditation.

But you'll also hear,

From me at least,

Christian influences,

Christian contemplative influences,

In part because I was in a Catholic religious order many years ago.

And I've greatly benefited from that.

And then also a lot of neuroscience and psychology,

Because I really,

In essence,

Feel like everybody is telling the same story when it comes right down to it.

So I'm going to give you some of these contrasts between the before and after,

Different ways of understanding it.

And I just encourage you to just listen to see what strikes you.

Some of it may not resonate or be important or just have any meaning.

And also just to emphasize,

None of this is necessary to get benefit from meditation at all,

Just to be clear.

All right,

So the first one,

I'll give you this kind of juxtaposition between the before and after,

Which is looking for something versus everything is already here.

One way of summarizing this kind of baseline unsatisfactoriness of experience is that we're searching for something that's not already here,

And that we're trying to change in some way things that are here because they're not good enough.

And even if we have something good,

We're experiencing something good,

There's a sense of there could be something even better out there.

So don't stop with the good.

It's not good enough.

In some way,

This trying to fill some kind of emptiness or need or sense that something's missing.

And so the alternative to that is a sense of the radical okayness of experience right now that you don't really need in this moment.

And you can just try it by pausing for a moment right now,

You don't have to close your eyes and just without doing anything for a second,

Feel into the stillness of this,

Just this small amount of quiet,

Ask yourself this question about is there anything lacking?

Right now you can imagine that,

You know,

The sense of liberation or freedom,

You have a sense that you don't have to look for anything else.

There's a story from the Upanishads,

The Hindu scriptures of the musk deer.

And one day the deer was roaming through the woods,

Suddenly sniffing the air detected a whiff of exquisite scent,

Which stirred its inmost depth so profoundly that the deer started trying to follow the scent and find the source of this heavenly fragrance.

So keen was its longing for the scent that endured the harshest conditions season after season in its desperate search and it searched continuously without rest for years until one day exhausted,

It stumbled off a cliff and was fatally injured.

While taking its last breath,

It smelled from its own wound the scent arising that it had searched for so relentlessly and realized that scent was coming from its own juxtaposition before after.

Grasping and pushing away versus allowing everything.

There's a simple meditation which we might try in another session of noting how the mind naturally assesses every experience to categorize them into whether they're pleasant or unpleasant.

And this is something that we naturally do as humans.

The difficulty comes when the mind takes as kind of its chief organizing principle for all of life this notion that we want to try to maximize the number of pleasant experiences and minimize the number of unpleasant experiences.

And there's no objection of course to the mind making sure that the necessities of life are provided and so forth.

But the mind tends to have no stopping point on this continuum.

One small example,

We just bought a new car and it has heated seats which today are considered a necessity.

But I was surprised to note also that it has cooled seats so you no longer have to endure that slight,

That brief time between when you get into the hot car and the air conditioning comes up.

So left to its own devices,

There's no end to this.

I think there's really no end to this,

For the mind at least.

But the difficulty is that because there's no end point,

Then there's no sense of ever having arrived between the maximization of the pleasant.

So the opposite.

The opposite is to allow everything to stop resisting the way things see if you can be just as they are in this burden,

Your happiness,

Pleasant,

Unpleasant.

Alan Watts,

The Zen teacher,

Offers this experiment.

He says,

Imagine that you're able to dream at night about whatever you want with perfect vividness for as long as you want.

So in a single night,

You could have a dream that felt like it lasted 80 or 90 years,

An entire lifetime.

What would you do?

Obviously,

You'd fulfill all your wishes,

Choose every sort of pleasure.

You would be a hedonistic blowout from beginning to end.

Then suppose that you do it again the next night and then the next night and then the next night.

Soon,

You would say to yourself,

This really isn't very interesting.

In fact,

I'm bored.

Let's create a surprise,

A dream in which I don't know what's going to happen or what will occur next.

And you start to like that and decide to make it even more interesting.

You dial up the risk,

The uncertainty,

Adding obstacles in your way,

Obstacles you might not be able to overcome until finally you dream the dream of living the life you are actually living today.

Let's take a moment right at the end here to go back inside just for a moment.

Just relax into a comfortable posture.

Sample the difference of experience,

Yourself,

The city,

And the world.