We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss today. We’ve been working with the four foundations of mindfulness: awareness of the body, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions and then all phenomena. We drew our practice inspiration from B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness. We included two practice periods and a walking meditation.
Alan suggests ways of enhancing concentration by balancing two mental faculties: mindfulness and introspection. He writes that “mindfulness requires discerning, ethical concern. We must apply mindfulness strategically and discerningly because we care about ourselves. Are we flourishing or are we sowing the seeds of our own misery and discontent?”
He encourages us to apply mindfulness to whatever presents itself, from moment to moment in any of the six fields of experience (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking). We must be “fully engaged and attentive as if we were gazing face to face with someone. Mindfulness of the tactile sensations of the breath means being face to face, from moment to moment with respiration. . . . not remembering past breaths . . . not lost or floating . . . we remain focused continuously on current sensations of breath.”
The faculty of introspection means attending to phenomena arising within the field of reality that we call “I & mine.” “I attend to my body, the position of my hands, sensations in my abdomen, movements of my mind and sound of my voice. Introspection is attending . . . to the state and actions of one’s body, speech and mind embedded in an environment. Introspection monitors processes of body . . . and mind . . . Monitoring during meditation may include mindfully attending to sensations of breath while introspection monitors the meditation process. Introspection is the quality control monitor for the entire process. . . ”
Alan is like a cheerleader urging us to recruit what we can to support our endeavor and to dedicate the benefits we realize from practice to the greater well being of everyone. The quality of meditation practice can be an amazing reflection of how we approach life. Some times I find myself automatically “doing” from one day to the next with just brief periods of “being” interspersed in the day. I’ve found great motivation to live with more intention and purpose in a circle of friends whom I consider my teachers.
Alan teaches “in this practice, rather than getting caught up in conceptualization, we simply sustain an ongoing flow of sanity. We practice wholeness rather than fragmentation. Concepts entail fragmentation and isolation, locking on to a construct that is divorced from the rest of reality.” Our capacities to think and self-reflect are such gifts. What an intriguing adventure to use them to explore the expressions of consciousness both within the realms of “I and mine” and “we.” For me, “we” includes all phenomena: people, four foots, feathered, scaled beings, plants, microbes, earth, waters and the sky. I think it is the concern for this wholeness of being that brings us together.