Lessons

Lesson Info

Body, Emotions, Mind, Stress, Anxiety

move energy through the body, you know? So even though we're being still, I think Jamboree asked that question yesterday about the movement of the body, obviously you don't want to lock the body up when you're meditating and that can actually cause a lot of problems for you. So you want to have a feeling of the energy moving through you as you're practicing not any big dramatic way, but just that you're not locked when you're sitting, you know, meditating like that, it's more like peaceful and feel some kind of fluidity and then of course meditation can move into motion and a lot of disciplines around the world have come from, you know, you probably know this but the the article kung fu which is, you know, came out of the Shaolin Buddhist monasteries in china and mm hmm, the relationship between mindful movement and meditation, that's obviously something that we can all explore. Uh more and myself, I've talked quite a bit in the yoga community um and Yogis obviously already you know, s...

ort of uh comfortable sitting cross legged on the floor or being with themselves in a certain way. So that's a tremendous uh leg up, so to speak. No pun intended on the meditation practice and the book that we're offering if you enroll in the program. Um the e book that I put out is really a compilation of talks given within the yoga uh community to teachers who are starting to teach meditation in that environment. So even though it sort of came from that, it's a lot of more in depth kind of discussion about these principles that we're talking about here today and uh over these three days. And so you can, if you register for the course that that comes along with it, and that's just being published now, so you'd get sort of the first for us hit on that. Excuse me. So, you know, we when we're climbing a mountain, right, you pause from it, you look back and see where you came from, you look up a little bit to see where you're going. Uh it's very interesting when you get to the peak of the mountain, what do you do? Yeah, look at that, you get to get the lay of the whole land, the whole situation. Um, and then what do you do? Cool, you go back down the mountain. So, in a way that sort of describes our journey, we think we're sort of going someplace and then we get the view and in uh but as we called the King's View or the Queen's View, um kind of you see everything from the aerial perspective, but then very much part of the journey is coming back down, which means coming back into your life and, you know, having that sense of perspective, informing your daily life is sort of what we talked about yesterday joining the heaven principle and Earth like in the flower arrangement. So, mm hmm. We're um as human beings, our role in the cosmos according to uh these ancient teachings is to join heaven and Earth and connect that principle of vast open spaciousness and clarity with the practicality of everyday life. And even to the extent of being protectors of the whole sphere of life here on our planet. We have a kind of very high role in terms of taking care of this place. And sometimes we're doing better than others in terms of fulfilling that most of the sacred traditions in the world have had some kind of idea about taking care of um taking care of spaceship Earth or mother earth, what everyone call it. Um in the short in the intimate world, it means taking care of our house and taking care of our uh huh family and taking care of our friends. So maybe we could start our session with a little period of meditation in general. This is um considered a really good way to settle our mind down, you know, looking back, looking forward then settling into being present again, because all of our actions take place in the present. That's just the kind of sort of indisputable fact. Uh and even the thoughts about the past, even the anxiety that we're experiencing about the past, the hopes and fears about the future, all that's occurring in the present mind. So there's a lot of reason to work with the quality of the present mind because that's where basically all the experiences coming from. Um and it's almost shocking when you realize that that's all we have actually, because clearly the things in the past are over and the things in the future haven't happened yet by definition. Right? So the president is kind of a very powerful arena in which our actions have a lot of meaning. You know, our mind is able to perceive very clearly around us what's going on. And in some way we're sort of trying to with the meditation practice tune into the power of that. Um I know there was a wonderful book called The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle, you know, the Power of Being present is something that people have been pointing to since time immemorial in a lot of different cultures and a lot of different ways, so, Mhm. And as I said yesterday, you know, it's not a question of then we don't have any agenda. People go, well, wait, if I do that, then I won't even remember where I am or what my job is, what I'm supposed to do later. But what we're saying is that you can have all that, but it doesn't have to be made out of uh concrete. We recognize the fluidity of that and in the President we can really shift those things, We can really make decisions and institute actions that are going to affect the future in a positive way, and also kind of use the energy of the past in a positive way. So this idea of transforming even very difficult circumstances, like we talked about this morning and challenges um into opportunities to cultivate the best qualities that we have, you know, and as I've said many times, if somebody wants to simplify the buddhist path in training, it's really cultivation of awareness and compassion. Those two things. If you don't like either or both of those two things, it's the wrong, the wrong deal, right. So somehow I can't find any personally any flaw there in terms of either of those sort of quality is being brought out um to the fullest possible extent. And we would even go as far as to say that actually that's what we're made of as human beings. The quality of awareness and kind of communication and open heartedness almost defines our species at its core. And of course we lose track of those things and we have dark times, you know, that happened and people get very self centered and uptight and scared and sometimes you see, you can clearly see that somebody's activities are coming out of a fear of whatever, maybe not being acknowledged as such, you know, maybe looking like a weird kind of confidence, like, you know, you see somebody who's actually afraid like, you know, an abusive boss, it's usually somebody who's afraid but uh you know, not really copping to that and sort of so there's no softening and there's no kind of um, we shouldn't be that boss. I think it's fair to say people if we have a choice, we would want to be more to the open, compassionate and wise boss. Right? So mm and that sort of leads into today's topic uh, this afternoon's topic, which is we're gonna talk more about emotions and our body and our experience of the world in a very direct way. And we're gonna do a few contemplations. But I thought we could just start by doing a little sitting practice together. And again, I know people are coming in and out of the workshop online. Um and I think it's helpful even if you're not to just review the technique of shamoto meditation or the mindfulness meditation. So maybe I should have one of you lead it at this point. You know, it's that kind of, this is basically that this tradition is a relay race and you passed the baton on from teacher to student and then they're expected to run with it and pass the baton on. So maybe somebody in our live audience could just review the three steps of doing the mindfulness meditation, or do you want to do it together? And each one take a step and talk about it a little bit. So who takes number one, raise your hands on here, Okay, Allison, uh the first step is taking your seat. Um and that could be either in a chair or on the floor. You want to have the tops of your hips above your knees so that you don't put stress on your lower back. Um And you can do that with cushions, like the ones we're sitting on. If you're seated you can use a cushion to elevate your feet to get your posture and alignment and then uh extend your spine up. And you were describing it almost feeling like there's a string kind of pulling you up. Um Rest your hands on your knees. Um And shoulders kind of, you can push them back and then just let them fall and move your chin in and back a little bit just to get kind of a neutral spine between your neck and your back. Uh then your gaze with your with your face forward, your gaze would drop to about ft in front of you. Great. Yeah. and then having established the seat step two, would somebody like to Jump onto that 1? I'll take the easy part breathing and breathing through your nose through your mouth evenly. Um I'm not sure what more to add them. Well what's the key point of number two? What's the title of the segment? What about the breathing attention, placing your attention on the breathing? That's actually essential point is of course your breathing already anyhow. So the idea is we were placing the attention onto breath going in and out. Anybody want to add to that? The second one, Yeah. Feeling the air come in your nose, paying attention to the sensation of the breath, how it fills your lungs, how it moves through your body. Okay. More specifically all those are right but specifically we can have pay attention to the breath at the tip of the nose going in and out of the body. That's one choice that we can make the other is feeling the stomach rise and fall with the breath and the third one would be feeling of breath throughout the whole body. So you should choose one of those three and if you're confused about which one to choose, just focus on the feeling of the breath at the tip of the nose going in and out. Okay. And that is a question of placing your attention. No two is placing your attention on the breathing in that particular way julie. Uhh if you find your thoughts taking your attention, you can label them thinking and then bring yourself back to focusing and bringing your awareness to your breath perfectly stated. Okay, so that's our practice. If you do enroll, there's a sheet that goes through these instructions fairly clearly that you can easily download. So um and review. But that's basically the practice. So now I'm just gonna be the timekeeper. The students are already becoming very experienced now and kind of capable of communicating this forward to others. So um my only advice is keep it very simple and don't necessarily feel you need to ornament or create some kind of elaboration on this. It's it's designed to be a very straightforward, simple practice against which we can really see the complications of our mind clearly. It's like putting a clear backdrop up so you can see what's going on. It's funny the remember that show the $6 million dollar man. Mm. Mhm. They're trying to think of how can we show how fast this guy can run? And the way they decided to show how fast you run by putting into slow motion. So you at home were really actually moving quite rapidly here, but we decided to show it as slow motion, you know? And actually the body is moving kind of slow. But the mind you may have noticed your mind is still road runner uh level of activity. So I want to just encourage everybody to really not get frustrated with yourself and having too much expectation or ambition about this. Practice work with whatever arises as completely the ground of your practice and completely workable. Whatever state of mind you have is what you're working with. And that we talked about that the other day is the notion of starting where you are from, where you are, then your practice will always be fresh and you're not gonna just torture yourself and go like I didn't get to this point at that point, and that's called surrender or kind of really opening to what to what you have with you. But of course gradually were saying, we're able to kind of work with whatever arises and kind of attenuated entertainment or pull it into a kind of field of mindfulness and awareness. So this basically brings up our next kind of key topic of discussion. The next topic of is looking at the whole being that's meditating, you know? I mean as I said earlier, sometimes we have this idea, we just sort of manipulating our mental content, you know, and kind of flipping a switch to try to get our mind less speedy and neurotic, you know, like if it was a button we could push, we would push it, wouldn't we? You know, and some people think of meditation that way and they teach it that way. And of course there's a natural sort of sense of calming down and coming into a quieter space of course, but in doing that we might experience a lot of agitation and a kind of sense of turbulence or physical pain or difficulties and then emotional upheavals of all kinds. Um and the safe way, you can almost say it is that kind of the more we dial down and go for a kind of steady awareness, the more of those things are gonna come up and of course a huge amount of our lives experiences in this kind of emotional realm. It's not just thoughts that are kind of innocent and kind of skipping along, going like oh yeah equals M. C. Squared. You know, that's one level of thought or you know the directions, how to get to this restaurant, you know? Um it's feelings that come up strongly during the day and seemed to take over and kind of govern our whole reality and almost like a tidal wave surge, a tsunami. We experience our emotional would like tsunamis, you know, they sort of roll through and kind of roll us over, We can't ride and work skillfully with that energy anymore. So in meditation, we're talking about actually working with that as well, not just thoughts but the whole feeling and texture of the energy of our lives and then we get down to the body level. Body is probably in some way the most profound, you know, because like mai tai chi teacher sat han says, body don't lie, you know, at the level of body is, there's a lot of truth, there's a lot of expression of um it's harder when, when for example, if somebody's having trouble understanding where you're coming from, they read your body language, don't they? You know, and you get like somebody saying, look I'm not upset, you know, you know, it's just that I want and you go like, wow, the words are saying one thing, but the energy is saying another thing and the body is really giving you a very clear indication. So we work with all three levels called body speech and mind, you know those through the speech level is sort of the communication and the dimension of emotional energy. The mind is sort of the pure kind of consciousness level and the body is a very tangible way to work with. So that's why the mindfulness includes mindfulness of the body and these simple things that we do like walking meditation and the flower arranging and the tea ceremony and how we relate to our clothing and our food and our house and things like that. Very very powerful arena. And then we work with the mindfulness of emotions you know, which is basically understanding how we feel, you know, as part of it and not being blinded by unconscious dimension of feelings. That's I think a lot of us we're working with that um feeling like a submarine just came up and a missile came up from underneath somewhere and we don't even know why we're upset. You know? Have you ever found that during the day that you're, you know, like very agitated something? If you say, well, what's going on? Why why do my feelings? You don't even really know? So that's kind of the submarine effect of the emotional life. And then uh the level of the mind is um of course, these three are completely interactive, is sort of the most abstract in a way, you know, most subtle. So when we talk about training the mind, that's it sort of, it eludes a lot of us, you know, we we talked about training, the body got to talk about um you know, looking at our emotional life. Sure, now training the mind is very subtle because it's just kind of hard to put your finger on her mind. So basically we're dismantling its called ego. They use the word ego. Um, there was no real american english word for this. Um, and I think in buddhism it's representing a couple of different words, but it might be closer to the idea of constriction, Something's tight, ego is tight, You know, when, you know somebody who's like to self conscious and they're like two, they're too tight is what it is, is a kind of constricted quality to it. And so the energy is not flowing well. And if you find yourself personally in that situation or in a work situation, it's almost like you can feel that if there's some way for us to practice becoming more familiar with our constrictions, that's a very good first start because usually it's a dark corner, it's sort of a place that we don't look. So when we meditate, what we really mean is we're bringing awareness into something that's really what meditation is bringing awareness to something. In this case we're bringing awareness to the body, the emotional body and the mind. So maybe if we did stress leads to anxiety and let's use our established technique of content contemplation. And now we're gonna go into the put on our scuba gear and look at anxiety together. What have we looked at so far in the contemplations? Remember stress generosity. So we're looking at sort of what we characterize as the negative dimension. Also the positive dimension of it, just to see what we have. So if you take your seat again and now using that kind of sorbet of the mindfulness just take a few breaths and sort of bring your awareness to your breathing. So in a way this is our way of settling down. You know you could do this before a big board meeting. Just everybody take three breaths together very powerful. Okay and now we're gonna conjure the feeling of anxiety. Uh huh. Yeah if you feel to relax you won't be able to do it. It is interesting in itself isn't it? But let's remember the last time we felt really, really anxious, see if you can think of a particular event um that happened. Okay I got one you do you all have one think of it, hold on to a particular event that recent history that you are very anxious about the outcome of something and as you focus on that event in your mind try to hold your mind to this contemplation as we have in the past. Don't wander off now. You're very vividly present in a sense with that event and you're thinking about what happened to you during that anxiety provoking moment and what did you experience? You know, what was the onset, like? How did it start if you can track sort of where it came from, if you think it has an origin of any kind and as it arose, you know, what did you begin to experience? Were you able to go with that experience or did you begin to feel like I'm in a space where I don't want to be in. Were you joining with that experience or resisting having a So you have to stay, you have to use a lot of mental concentration here to stay with this. Now, as the feeling came on of the anxiety, where did you experience that in that situation? Did you get a headache? Was your breath shorter? Was it not really a physical sensation at all? Did you feel a kind of energy? Mhm. Kind of electricity? Of any kind? Um Did parts if you want to shut down? Did you feel like you're going to overload mode? What did that feel like? And also how did you react to that feeling? Did you feel like you could ride with it and explore it or did you feel like this is dangerous? I don't I don't want to be here with this feeling. Was there something dangerous about the feeling? Something unsettling about it? Something difficult to be with. Was there any intelligence? And it was a completely fearful or an irrational? Or was there some intelligence in there? Was the anxiety didn't have an intelligent to mention to it. And if so, what was the message? What message was coming through to you? And if you could detect that message, how did you relate to it? Did you, did you, were you able to receive that message or were you too panicked to understand the meaning of it? And then gradually as the event dissipated for you? What did you experience? You experience a kind of return to a normal, kind of more normal state of consciousness and relaxation and ease? Did it leave a lingering feeling? Did it linger with you some harry? And is it present now in some form? Is that very anxiety about that event currently right now in your current mind, present, is it present anywhere in your current body? And is it present anywhere? And you're kind of feeling body, your emotional energy? And if it's present now, can you identify it as a sensation of some kind? Where is it now? Where exactly is that feeling now and then? If you can identify it, you can try just letting it go if it's a muscle. If it feels, if you feel like it's in your shoulders and their tents, you can just try letting, relaxing them and just find your way back to a kind of more ease fel space and then gradually you can just kind of open your eyes and let the whole process of contemplation dissolve and you come back have a sense of being here sitting in this room. Uh huh. And you know there's a little journey you're taking to explore inter space.