We had the Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss today. We drew on B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness. We had had two segments of practice: a period of lying down in which we rested awareness on the 1st close application: the tactile field of the body; and then a second period of sitting in which we rested awareness on the phenomenal field.
Alan explains that the is 4th close application of mindfulness concerns all phenomena: ” . . . internal dialogue, mental imagery . . . emotions . . . somatic resonances in the heart . . . all arising as entangled experience. Mindfulness of phenomena is all inclusive.” We move our focus from the most easily perceived experience of physical sensation to the more difficult apprehension of the subtle realm of the “space from which thoughts arise. . . . the “substrate consciousness.” He writes: “As we direct awareness to the space of the mind and its contents – something new becomes real for us: the space of the mind that constitutes the ground of all experience.”
We had an interesting discussion about how our practice cultivates “interoception.” Interoception enables us to be aware of bodily feelings of pain, temperature, itch, sensual touch, muscular and visceral sensations, vasomotor activity, hunger, thirst, and ‘air hunger’. Try feeling your own heart beating. Why bother? Studies have shown that the involved areas of the brain are the basis for the subjective experience of our physical beings as feeling (sentient) beings with emotional awareness. This allows us to experience empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Researchers are now busily studying how we can use these “mindfulness” practices to cultivate the ability to emotionally self regulate and to extend understanding to others. I appreciate this approach to practice: one that includes ourselves and others. Caregivers often experience “empathy fatigue.” Perhaps we could lessen this phenomena by including ourselves in the circle of care. I don’t think there is such a thing as compassion fatigue. Compassion is too vast. In the space of compassion we realize ourselves as inter-beings.
Yesterday afternoon my partner shared his picture of this family of mergansers he spied on the river. It seemed like a beautiful expression of inter-beings individual paddlers moving as one: connected in being, in the water of all experience. No one has to tell the baby duckling survival depends on moving together. I will be thinking of you this week as I sit on my cushion and feel hearts beating.