We had the final meeting of our Introduction to Meditation and Mindfulness series at Yoga Bliss today.  The course content is adapted from the wonderful work of Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal.
Last week we focused on mindfulness of emotion. We use the breath to stabilize our attention and then we focused the lens of attention on the compelling emotions, feeling freely in sustained awareness. This week we bring in mindfulness of thought.

Welcome Everything

We try to develop mindfulness to be all inclusive, to include all aspects of our life. To include breath, body, emotions, thoughts, the world we encounter –  sights, sounds, smells, everything. Nothing is outside of awareness.  That is what makes it sacred.   The term “Big Mind” is sometimes used to describe the mind that holds everything.  That doesn’t mean that we don’t act with discernment in the world. We keep our awareness and our hearts open, even though we might say no to something.

We keep our hearts and minds open through the strengthening of mindfulness. As mindfulness gets stronger and stronger, our attention is set free from what we are mindful of.  When we have strong sensation or pain in the body – we often react to it, we tense around it or try to push it away.  We may have feelings of anger, despair or self-pity.  All these strong reactions can become entangled with what we are attending to.  As mindfulness gets stronger, mindfulness itself begins to disentangle itself; it becomes independent.  An analogy often used is that of a lotus flower. A lotus flower grows up out of the muddy water, but as it blooms it’s untouched by the mud. A beautiful white lotus is rooted in the mud, but it’s not touched by the mud. It has this purity. As the mindfulness gets stronger it’s becoming free from the mud, the places of attachment or aversion.  In mindfulness meditation, we aim to be aware of thoughts. To include them in awareness, and in that inclusion, with time, learn to be free of them.  Sometimes the mind does become silent.

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We had the third meeting of our Introduction to Meditation and Mindfulness  series at Yoga Bliss today.  The course content is adapted from the wonderful work of Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal.  In our last meeting we focused on mindfulness of the body. We use the breath to stabilize our attention and then we focus the lens of attention on the continuous array of physical sensations. This week we bring in emotion.   We experience such a wide range of feeling.  We rejoice and despair.  With mindfulness we can feel freely and also be free from being driven by emotion.   We find freedom in allowing our emotional life to flow.

Trusting Emotion

Meditation is a space and time to deeply trust our emotional life.  Rather than deny or hold onto an emotion, we can trust this emotional experience can move through us.   All emotions are a form of communication.  We can listen to what is being communicated when we feel angry.  We don’t reactively act on the anger.  We have enough trust in the process to open to it more deeply.   A transformation of emotion is possible in this opening.   We begin to sense the depth of our emotional life  and what underlies our everyday busyness. 

It’s very important to distinguish between what happens in life, the difficulties in being human, and the secondary reactions we have to them that add to our suffering.  How are we reacting that’s different from just letting a difficulty be there in its simplicity?  In mindfulness we don’t judge ourselves negatively for our feelings or reactions.  We try to wake up from the trance of our conditioning.  We try to pay attention and notice what’s actually going on.  It only matters that we wake up.  We notice and don’t add anything more.

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We use the breath as the foundation of meditation practice. One of the functions of the breath is to becalm the mind and to sense yourself:   a living being . . . with six sense doors:  sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch and in the Eastern contemplative tradition thought, a sense door that perceives what goes on in our minds.  What does it mean to simply sense?

In meditation we let things simply appear through whatever sense door they appear in.  We let them be there.  Notice them when they’re there and when they go away, let them go. The emphasis is on being at ease. You’re not trying to accomplish anything; you’re not trying to force your meditation to become anything, just staying at ease and allowing things to occur naturally.

All kinds of sensory experience arise. There may be a sound outside.  Let the sound come to you; you don’t have to go to it. An itch will occur; let the itch arise. You don’t have to do anything about it, just let it be there, be present for it.  A thought arises, just be aware of the thought.  You may experience restlessness . . . an eagerness to accomplish or fix something.   You may try to block out what you are perceiving.  The idea is to stay present. If sensation arises, be really present for it, take it in, allow it to be there, offer your presence to it. When it goes away, let it go away.

In the mindfulness tradition, this is called choiceless awareness. You don’t choose what arises, you don’t choose what you pay attention to, once you’re here and present you allow, choicelessly, whatever arises to be there. You’re not in conflict with anything. You’re not trying to manipulate anything or hold on to anything; just letting things be. In that radical letting-things-be, you let yourself be. Many people don’t have much experience with letting themselves just be. We’re always trying to fix or improve ourselves, to defend or protect ourselves. Let it be. Then the meditation practice unfolds and deepens with that sense of beingness.

Over time, you may find life unfolds with less stress and more freedom.  Insight arises when we start being present for our life in a careful way.  We develop more concentration and stability in daily life with practice.  Mindfulness in daily life is bout being easy, open and present to what arises without getting entangled.  Rather than withdrawing we connect more fully to life.  Our presence is like when we bring two hands together, relaxed palm to palm, simply making contact with living experience.

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