Staying Present Whilst Practicing Mindfulness

In this session, we discuss the challenges around staying present with mindfulness, including overwhelm, ego attachment, and the gentleness needed to proceed with care and compassion. We also explore how mindfulness is a skill, meaning that with practice, you will improve.

Transcript

Question. Is there a fragility in mindfulness, Such that we are at risk of being swept away by thoughts? Or does its endurance grow stronger? How do we distinguish fleeting awareness from insight and habitual judgment? Can we stay present with gentleness, So we can avoid clinging, Labeling, Or false identification, And remain aware of ego's subtle influence? This will feel like a bit of a cop-out answer, But I can't not say it. With practice, With time spent meditating, The answers to those questions will reveal themselves to you, And I understand that that is not a detailed answer, But it is a learnt skill, And oftentimes with skill-based practices, You start off quite immature in the practice, We start off with a lack of knowledge or understanding, We start off seeing a potential way down the road, But we are here, And the only way to understand what will happen is to walk the journey, And the answers will come, And more questions will come, But the process of answering those questions will come internally as you practice, And the reason I say that firstly, And I'll sort of give a more detailed response to the questions directly, But very quickly when you go deep into the mind, And into this sort of subtle inner spaces, Words lose the ability to describe what is happening, We go beyond perception, The words that are used in this question, Ego, Influence, Even the concept of a thought, Awareness, All of these things, All of those words are descriptions of something, Right, Every word is a label, And to be able to sort of conceptualize what that is, We have to agree on what those terms mean, And I know I'm sort of circling around the point here, But like if we take the idea of awareness, Or consciousness, Or ego, Try and define those terms for me, It would take a lot of words, And a lot of back and forwards dialogue to even get to the same point, But you will have a felt sense of what it means internally, I say all of that to say that this whole process is you discovering your own truth of where your mind is at any one stage, So the more you practice, The deeper you will get, And we'll communicate and discuss and ask questions like this with those words, But those words are just fingers pointing to the moon, They're just like saying, Hey consider this, As opposed to the truth of what's happening internally, So that's my first sort of broad conceptual, And perhaps relatively useless answer, Other than saying keep meditating and the answers will come. However, If we attempt to answer them more directly based on the understanding, Sort of from an external perspective, Does our endurance grow stronger? The more we practice mindfulness, The more ability we get to focus upon the object that we've chosen, Traditionally the breath, And the more we become aware, The quicker we see our mind when it's lost in thought, And the less likely we are to lose that focus, So the fragility reduces over time, When you start you find yourself bouncing, You find your mind quite chaotic, You focus your attention on the breath, You have the broad awareness capturing things as they go, And you'll get a deeper understanding of the, For lack of a better expression, The machine that your mind is operating, There's a part of your mind, The awareness, The mindfulness, The self, The observer, And then there's the mind that it's sort of trying to become aware of, It's almost like a dual consciousness sort of thing, We're trying to continually focus the mind and become aware of where it is, And that is a skill, It is a skill, And if it is a skill, It means that with practice you will get better at it, You will get stronger at it, But at the start it will be harder. And the second part of this question, How do we distinguish fleeting awareness from insight or habitual judgment? I think that the idea of distinguishing itself may be problematic, You become aware of what is arising in the moment, That's it, Mindfulness is the awareness that arises from purposely paying non-judgmental attention to the present moment, The better you get at that skill, The more you will see, Am I in a space of habitual judgment, Is this insight, Am I fleetingly aware of something, Your vision will become clearer as to where you are at, And you'll just witness it, Insight will come, Insight into the nature of what is arising. In a meditation I recently did, I realized that in sort of a flash, That the thoughts and moods and memories that were there, Was a habitual response, Born from past connections, Deployed upon a person in my current life, And I almost in a moment saw that process and saw how it was impacting the relationship in my life, All of that came up, Okay that's interesting, Note that down, Return back to the focus upon the breath. Can we stay present with gentleness so we can avoid clinging, Labeling a false identification and remain aware of the ego's subtle influence? And once again, And I'm sorry to say it, But it's practice, The deeper you go, The more subtle the influences you'll discover. I've been meditating for quite some time and the awareness that I shared just then, Just came up, That's been impacting me for quite some time, But it's very subtle, Because there's multiple layers, Like try and discover the habits that feel like you and your personality, But it's actually born of something else, You keep getting more and more and more and more subtle, You keep discovering, You keep revealing, You keep seeing, It's like you're gently moving away the layers of illusion until you see more and more and more of the truth, And I'm not convinced that there is an end point, People talk about enlightenment and these spaces, And maybe there is, Or maybe we just keep discovering more and more of our truth, We look at what causes the mind through a scientific lens, What causes personality through scientific studies, You discover it's a cross-section between genetics and environment, Quite significantly the environment, Humans are quite adaptive, But what created our environment that we grow up in literally happened and began in the womb well before the brain structures that we're using to analyze it even existed, So we're constantly and maybe perpetually forever just uncovering and trying to see the reality as it is for what it is right now, This moment right now is all that exists, We've got this baggage of the past in the body, In the mind, In the personality and in the thoughts and plans into the future, We keep bringing our focus back to the present, Back to the moment, Back to the breath, And then our mind wanders into something, Perhaps caused by something from the past, Perhaps it's just a random thought, We just acknowledge it and bring it back, A little bit of a rambling answer there, And you notice there's a lot of different words that are circling the truth of what we're trying to say, That sort of harks back to what I was saying at the start of the answer to this question, Is all of this is me attempting to describe the present moment, Reality as it is for what it is right now, So I encourage you to continue practicing, Continue exploring those questions and continue to just allow this moment.