Bringing Meditation Into Everyday Life
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Meditation for Everyday LifeDavid Nichtern
Bringing Meditation Into Everyday Life
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Meditation for Everyday LifeDavid Nichtern
Lessons
Introduction - Why Meditate?
15:12 2How to Meditate - Taking Your Seat
12:59 3Placing Attention on Breath
04:32 4Labeling Thoughts as Thinking
06:35 5How to Meditate - Leaving Some Space
12:19 6Bringing Meditation Into Everyday Life
11:30 7Digging Into the Practice Part 2
05:51 8Obstacles Along the Way
08:29Obstacles Along the Way Part 2
08:59 10Body, Emotions, Mind, Stress, Anxiety
26:56 11Body, Emotions, Mind, Stress, Anxiety Part 2
06:28 12The True Meaning of Success
18:28 13The True Meaning of Success Part 2
03:40 14Developing Compassion for Ourselves & Others
04:39 15Compassion for Ourselves & Others Part 2
29:34 16Compassion and Mindfulness
26:27 17Compassion and Mindfulness Part 2
08:11 18Happiness and Joy
18:15 19Happiness and Joy Part 2
04:06 20How to Go Forward
10:59 21How to Go Forward Part 2
07:31Lesson Info
Bringing Meditation Into Everyday Life
the idea that we're going to look at as I promised this, Okay, let's say you do start to meditate and have a meditation practice and you know, for most of the students that I work with were talking about half hour a day. That's, and even for newer students, or 20 minutes a day is plenty for a lot of people. That's a big change in lifestyle to make that kind of commitment. And most of them, I say four or five days a week, 15, 20 minutes a day, but some kind of commitment to that and regularity that actually shifts um shift the way we spend our time. But even if we did that, unless even we did a half hour a day or an hour a day every day, let's, let's say, let's say somebody got very disciplined in an hour and a half hour in the morning, half hour at night and Well that leaves 23 hours in the day, you know, and what are we doing then? So here's um, you develop this kind of meditative capacity, you know, skill, you can sit like a buddha, you know, that's beautiful. Now we ring the bell O...
kay? I gotta go now what I'm gonna do this, I gotta run over there, I got to do the thing and these guys are calling, they're gonna come over in a few minutes, you know, it's okay, you know that, come on and we basically for 23 hours a day. All right, going high speed. And if you're anything like me, you never get your to do list done. Is that true? Does anybody actually do their to do list? Let's be honest. I have it on my IPhone now and it just is, it's probably like 40 pages long and probably has things on it that I don't even remember why I was supposed to do this in the first place. And then everyone. So you go through your to do list and you go I better move this one back up to the top. So how could we possibly with the world that we actually live in? Which is not really a contemplative environment per se. Bring some of these kind of qualities that we talked about spaciousness. Um all this spaghetti, this guy is looking at you see here bringing meditation to everyday life. That's the spaghetti of everyday life, the activity of it. How could we bring that somehow in closer alignment with this kind of meditative wakeful kind of quality. And so the issue is then can we work with mindfulness the rest of the day? And can we um begin to color flavor our world in that way. Um So in terms of our tradition, this is called post meditation. Post meditation so interesting. Everything is organized around the sort of meditative practice. So instead of looking at life, you call it post meditation. So for certain mm intense Yogis practitioners Spiritual seekers, maybe that's how they see their life. It's 24 hours in some kind of practice situation. And how can I incorporate everything into that? You know, I would have to say in all honesty, that's for me practices first and then every other situation is coming into that darkness first and then everything second. But however we prioritize it would mindfulness as a flavor, enhance our life. And it's all in all the dimensions of it and the way we experience it is. Well, I want to introduce this idea called the Gap. The Gap you know. Uh there's actually kind of pause, you know and like, you know, as a musician, if there's no gap, if there's no pause, the music becomes like horribly busy and compressed. So the gap is just a moment, you know, that happens all the time where we just can recognize some kind of pause and it's very important in meditation practice. The way we learned it this morning, right? You're sitting there and even when you're trying to meditate your mind is nonstop, right? For most of us, it's just like a little, so we're introducing the idea of a gap of recognizing well, uh, and then coming back to the breath. That's a very powerful little moment there. And um I, I did ask my friends in Japan if they had a word for that and I don't remember it, but it's kind of negative space, just space that's not filled. I think it's cool mom. Yeah, mom, Right, That has so english, we don't have really a word for that. Exactly. You know these are natural moments that happen in transition in which we do what I call awakening from the daydream. There's kind of a daydream quality. We're kind of streaming audio and video in our minds all day and something goes like wakes us up. So that's sort of the idea of gap. We work with it very closely in meditation practice informal meditation practice but in everyday life that was running right there. Did you see? Yeah. Yeah and it's a little break in the continuity and then we continue and we become less maniacal or less obsessed if we work with this energy it's this this is sort of when you obsess if you have O. C. D. I'm not just using it clinically. You can't recognize any gaps. There can't be any gaps. There can't be any holes. Okay so um beginning to work with that principle of waking up from the daydream acknowledging that gap, it begins to like pepper, you can use it to pepper your reality. So activities like um and and also mixing the idea of mindfulness without actually paying attention to what you're doing right now and mindful of the gap. So you're mindful of what you're doing and mindful of this kind of spacious quality rippling through it can begin to really inform how you do things like shop, prepare food, eat eating. You know, in my buddhist training, you know, it's interesting trump in which it was tibetan, but he brought in uh traditions from all over the world to help cultivate these qualities and one was in in the japanese endo they have a style of eating called or okay, do you know that one or okay, Have you heard of it? So it's mindful eating three balls and very mindful. You put it all together and wrap them up. And um when we eat sometimes we lose our mindfulness completely and you know we have no awareness of what we're doing and we might be just kind of so desperate, you know in a sense or so hungry. Not physically, but you know just for you know we might even eat things we don't even want, that's what mine without mindfulness, we will definitely eat things we didn't really mean to eat. So uh these things begin to become the kind of much bigger container for your practice um practicing off the cushion. Um and all can be cultivated. Now the point we got to make right away is without the practice inter practice all those things either crumble or they become kind of empty in a certain way and hollow. So this practice that we learned of doing the mindfulness meditation ourselves has got to be at the core uh because we're really sort of working with our sort of fundamental shape of our mind and our energy. So then though if we establish that kind of thing, everything's further refinement of that. And there's no exceptions even making love or having a beautiful dinner or skydiving for the first time or you know, swimming in the ocean, all those can have the sort of informed by our mindfulness practice uh and can extend it quite a bit further now. What what is going to come up a little bit for us is as we try to practice in that way is life is challenging and it's always challenged you to drop your mindfulness, drop your compassion and just somehow bully your way through. That's our panic mode, wouldn't you say to push through? So the idea is that if we try to uh cultivate what we're talking about, I hope nobody thinks these are bad things to cultivate any kind of patient spaciousness, accommodation, good decorum, clear communication. But as we move towards that, what's going to interrupt our movement towards that is our own habits, our own strong personal habits. That really at this point we have to stop blaming everybody else for those. That's like an important moment there of recognizing that there were holding the reins in our own hands and we have to I think as practitioners develop a kind of patients with ourselves, a um steadfastness that even as we're working with our own negative habits that we're not just going to go along with them and not just you know, feed the beast as they say, you know, and that takes a lot of awareness and it takes a lot of discipline and it takes patience because it's not going to happen in one day. But the idea of including those, those strong habits and mm getting to know ourselves much much much better is so productive in terms of people who are looking for, you know, concrete results. If we don't know ourselves, our actions outside in the world are gonna not be clear. You know, we're continuously sort of bumping up against our own clumsiness really. You know? So the inner practices the formal practice. But now we can couple that with this sort of outer practice of really working with every situation, nothing is excluded. But the point being that these exchanges within life are ultimately going to be the great masters that I study with if they can't bring it right at the dinner table and and sort of or in doing some work project or something like that. If you don't feel that quality of realization in that, uh, the whole thing becomes completely wobbly as far as I'm concerned. So somebody tells you they have great spiritual attainment, but they can't sort of manage their life or their checkbook or if you want my advice, I'd say maybe a little wary, you know, um, and all that, you know, should be under the umbrella of some kind of now. I'm not saying somebody's just rich and efficient, that's not our goal, but compassionate and effective in terms of how you live in the world.
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