How to Meditate - Leaving Some Space
Lesson 5 from: FAST CLASS: Meditation for Everyday LifeDavid Nichtern
How to Meditate - Leaving Some Space
Lesson 5 from: FAST CLASS: Meditation for Everyday LifeDavid Nichtern
Lesson Info
5. How to Meditate - Leaving Some Space
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
How to Meditate - Leaving Some Space
So we talked about you know, what is the view of this practice? And just to review very briefly, the idea of being kind to ourselves is a sort of fundamental notion here and not kind of going from a place of aggression and sort of hard edge but softening into the practice. And um we we talked about things notions like being truly inquisitive about one's own existence and how one's life is unfolding that that kind of pure curiosity, which we called Progeria. And and then we talked about the method of meditation and developing some precision with how we work with our mind and the analog of having some precision about how we work with our body being a sort of way of easily hooking into it. People have a lot of ground in terms of working with body. So the idea that there's some method or some system for working with the mind and we reviewed the mindfulness meditation practice or chama to meditation. The idea of this afternoon. First workshop is to recognize, first of all, I called it leavi...
ng some space that there is some wisdom, there's some potency, there's some power and value in leaving some space in your life. Maybe the, you know, sort of common logic these days is just get as much done as you possibly can and then cramps some more in. And so you end up at the end of the day, you know, kind of like you to do list only has three things left on it and they moved to tomorrow's to do list and you crash, we just go like we're dead. So we're not really using our energy evenly at that point, you know, And the idea of the meditation is not to to make you a specialist in being in some kind of special meditative state, but how to monitor how to gauge your energy and engagement with the world as as you go through life and to do that. It makes sense to cultivate that. Like anything, if you want to cultivate strength. Like if you if your job you need to be physically strong for it. You do exercises that build that up. So the exercises that we're doing, we leave a little bit of space in our day, our day has tons of time in it, by the way, people, so I don't have time to meditate. All you have to do is say, well give me your schedule for the day and you look at this, this, this and this and those are all things that you prioritize over doing this particular practice. It's as simple as that. So somehow, if we can recognize the yeah value of leaving space and of course the meditation is a very formal kind of space to leave. it's really very concentrated. But even the idea of having a conversation properly with somebody is meditative. So if you all could take your seat meditation seat, Mhm. And if you're just joining and fresh, I'm going to review a little bit about that. You can either take a comfortable cross legged position on the uh floor on ideally on a cushion and a flat mat cushion and round cushion called the xaf. Ooh! Um and so that your but is a little bit elevated because you're going to be more comfortable than sitting flat on the floor. If you're used to sitting on flat on the floor, that's fine too. And then your pelvis should be slightly higher than your knees. So if you're noticing that your knees are sticking up, take more cushions and get them underneath you and go up a little higher in a parallel world. You can be sitting on a chair and if you are sitting on the chair you have your feet flat on the floor in front of you. Um you're sitting upright so your back is sort of liberated from the being supported. There's a kind of independent strength that you're feeling. It's like coming into a kind of powerful position in a way that the seat but relaxed at the same time, then your hands can just float down and rest on your knees or thighs depends how long your arms are. You will of course see people meditating all kinds of gestures with the hands and things like that. And again, those are all fine. But we're keeping it very simple here and we're just relating to the kind of downward energy of the hands down and grounding energy. And then remember we talked about elevating the spine, elongating the spine. Excuse me. So that if you find that, you know, you're starting from here, that's okay. And then just sort of we mentioned pulling up from the on the hair a little bit and so that the spine just kind of stretches upward. We've been had one person say he felt taller after he did the practice, which is which is fine. And then with the chin tucked in slightly. And as you remember, we talked about this being an awareness type of practice. So if somebody sneezes in the room, that's okay, uh we just noticed that and the eyes are open with a soft downward gaze. I know some of you wrote in that this is new to you and that's fine. Just try it out. The principle of the eyes being open is that we're sort of working with kind of openness of the sense perceptions and as opposed to just trying to go deep inside or something like that, it's a kind of inside and outside are very porous when you're doing this kind of practice, like when you're swimming in water, it's that feeling of The two environments mingling the inside and the outside are mingling so in a sense very relaxed about our whole sense of effort and you know, trying so hard to do something, but there's a tartness to it, like the way a bow is on an arrow, I mean on a, the way a string is on a ball has a certain tartness to it, but it's not tense. And as we mentioned, if you, during the practice session, you know, get into sort of feeling that it's painful for you physically too difficult. It's okay to just bring your legs up in front of you um or even stretch if you need to. That's fine. Yeah. Like what, what you're doing over there is this sort of, you feel like, oh my back is killing. You can just, I'm just going to roll back up but try to avoid making that your whole practice, this is not stretching. Okay, so any of those gestures and movements are meant to sort of create equilibrium rather than become a distraction for you. Mm hmm. Yes. So I have been taking your seat. What's the second step? Okay. Right, okay. I used the specific word when I'm looking for from the was one point of this one placement of attention, place your attention on your breathing or let's say that a couple of different ways become aware of the breath, right? Ride the breath, sort of a feeling of riding the breath with your awareness, feel the breath, it's okay. Again, it's not a highly conceptual kind of thing, you don't need to describe it or analyze it, it's just you're there, you're sitting, you're good posture, you're breathing and you're aware of that fact, you're leaving space. So as you're resting your awareness lightly on your breath going in and out, you can choose one of three uh ways of working with the breath. The first one is that the tip of the nose, There's a very classic buddhist uh exercise, you just become aware of the breath going in and out at the tip of the nose and you can choose that if you like, it's usually easiest. The second one is if you like, you can just feel the breath rising and falling in your abdomen, right? The stomach rises and falls with the breath and you can just sort of feel like that accordion uh huh kind of happening. It's like you're bellows again, the awareness here is just the the breathing is the object of the of the meditation. So we're not trying to manufacture and manipulate the breath. This is not uh if those of you who do yoga, there's not any kind of prana yama or breath practice breath work. The breathing is a natural breathing, but the breath itself has becomes the object of our concentration. So don't try to manipulate the breath in any way. Just let it be natural breathing. If sense perceptions fire, you know if you hear something in the hall or I smell something or feel the wind on your skin, Those are just naturally arising moments of perception and you can just let them come and go. We don't try to manage that process during this practice. So again, we're just resting. Are awareness on our breath. The third way you can do that is by feeling the flow of breath throughout the entire body. The first way is the tip of the nose. Second way, stomach rising and falling. Third way is just feeling the breath going in and out of the body with its entire cycle. You can just choose one of those three that works for you. Then we add in the third ingredient of the mindfulness practice. Does anybody remember what that was? I think okay label thinking. So this is um kind of extra little tweak of the mindfulness because we get lost and thought were gone. Most of us most of the time we're doing meditation are lost in thought and the way trump. Remember I used to say it is my teacher said we're actually only pretending to meditate. The only time we really meditate is when the bell rings at the end. So whatever it is, just without judging it, labeled thinking and then come back to the breath coming back. So let's try that together for five minutes. This is the practice that we're kind of developing together. And if you're at home, give this a try, even if you're just joining us and We'll resume our conversation in five minutes, so we'll do a period of sitting there without, without me guiding it.
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