We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday. We continued working with the four foundations of mindfulness inspired by the teachings in B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness.
We practiced with the third application: mindfulness of thought. We started by establishing centered awareness in the sensory field of the body. Then we shifted attention to the domain of mental experience: ideas, thoughts, images, desires, emotions and aspirations. Alan encourages students to experience the more nebulous, boundaryless nature of our minds. He says the space of experience precedes any other space we can perceive. He asks some provocative questions:
Is the space of your mind susceptible to outside influence? Might it contain events that are accessible to you and others simultaneously? Perhaps the spaces of our minds interpenetrate. To test with experience, release all grasping on to your own psych, fixated upon “I, me, and mine.” . . . The psyche is a tiny cell in which to be confined – the substrate [“space of the mind”] is infinitely spacious.
