Meditation Instructions Archives - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

A Gateway to Freedom

Vidyamala Burch — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 10:00:05 +0000

This article was originally published in Tricycle’s Winter 2022 Issue. To learn more about Vidyamala Burch’s offerings, enroll in her upcoming course, “Freeing the Mind When the Body Hurts.”

I have lived with spinal pain and paralysis for 46 years as a result of accidents and surgeries in my teens. It has been a harrowing path at times, but the dharma has provided a clear map for training my mind and heart to work with me rather than against me. This has been remarkably encouraging and has given me great confidence in the Buddhist path.

I’ve gained much guidance from an early Buddhist text, the Sallatha Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya 36.6), in which the Buddha gives practical, accessible, and wise counsel about how to change our relationship with pain.

Asked to describe the difference between the response of a wise person and that of an ordinary person to pain, the Buddha uses the analogy of someone pierced by an arrow:

When an ordinary person experiences a painful bodily feeling they worry, agonize, and feel distraught. Then they feel two types of pain, one physical and one mental. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, and then immediately afterward by a second arrow, and they experience the pain of two arrows.

And of course, in reality, when we are struggling with pain, it can feel as if we are pierced by a whole volley of second arrows that quickly traps us in a web of suffering and despair.

The Buddha also clearly states that the wise person will still experience the first arrow, as physical pain comes with having a human body. But he adds this:

When a wise person experiences a painful bodily feeling, they don’t worry, agonize, and feel distraught, and they feel physical pain but not mental pain. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, but a second arrow didn’t follow it, so they only experience the pain of a single arrow.

I love the way this is so simply stated: that the difference between an unwise person and a wise person lies in how they respond to pain, not in whether or not they achieve an absence of pain. It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises. But the Buddha shows clearly how the pain of one arrow is infinitely easier to bear than the pain of multiple arrows.

The Buddha very clearly states the cause of the second arrow when he says:

Having been touched by the painful feeling (of the first arrow), an ordinary person resists and resents it. They harbor aversion to it, and this underlying tendency of resistance and resentment toward that painful feeling comes to obsess the mind.

This corresponds exactly to my own experience living with a painful body. I have watched my mind closely over many years and have taught tens of thousands of other people, and I can report from the front line: it is indeed true that it isn’t the unpleasant sensations in the body that cause the bulk of distress. It is the resistance and resentment and the rapid cascade of physical, mental, and emotional secondary reactions that can ruin a human life.

So how can we go beyond this resistance and resentment? How can we learn to let go of these understandable tendencies? And does the sutta’s teaching apply only to physical pain, or can we apply it to other kinds of suffering?

Through my own practice and teaching I have come to see how the core principle of letting go of resistance and resentment applies to any kind of difficulty. Perhaps we can take heart from this knowledge: in the turbulent times we live in, with their widespread social difficulties, climate change, and geopolitical instability, we can’t control the externals of our world, but we can have agency over how we respond and move from resistance and struggle to resilience, courage, and compassion—both toward ourselves and toward others.

How wonderful that such a pure and simple teaching from twenty-five hundred years ago can give us practical guidance in the modern world!

It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises.

For the past twenty years I have been passing on these precious tools through my work of offering Mindfulness-based Pain Management (MBPM) to others who are suffering. It never fails to move and inspire me when I witness people, sometimes living with great pain or illness, harnessing the power of their minds to reclaim their lives.

A core practice within MBPM is the Compassionate Acceptance meditation. In this practice we learn to open to whatever is present and to cultivate a middle way between practicing denial and avoidance on the one hand and allowing oneself to be overwhelmed on the other. And crucially, we learn to respond to whatever is arising with kindness, tenderness, and love, and to feel into the fluid and changing nature of all experience.

This practice also shows us how letting go of resistance and resentment is not the same as passive resignation. It requires a quality of awareness that is an exquisite balance of being receptive to whatever arises, just as it is, while one also cultivates a creative response. I always say that the behavioral outcome of mindfulness and compassion is choice. Rather than feeling like a victim of circumstances, we can choose a wise and kind response in every moment.

Start by establishing a comfortable posture—either sitting or lying down, whichever posture will be most comfortable for you.

Gently surrender the weight of your body to gravity so the body settles and rests on the bed, the floor, or the chair. Can you let go into a sense of how gravity gently draws your body down toward the floor and holds you and supports you? Can you get a sense of yielding into the surface you are resting upon rather than perching on top of it? If you’d like to, take a few deeper breaths, then let go and release a little bit more with each out-breath. Let yourself arrive in the body and the moment more and more fully.

When you’re ready, allow your breathing to find its own natural rhythm, and allow your awareness to rest inside breathing, inside the whole body, rather than thinking about breathing as an idea. Allow your whole body to be rocked and cradled by the breath—the front, the sides, and the back of the body.

And now, with great tenderness, gently open your awareness to include your pain, discomfort, fatigue, or any difficulty that you’re experiencing. Include it in your awareness with the kind of attitude that you would naturally have toward a loved one who is hurting or injured. If your difficulty is more mental or emotional, see if you can find its echo in your body—maybe tight hands or jaw, or a tight belly—and rest your awareness there. Breathe softly with this experience for a few moments.

If it feels frightening to be with your difficulty in this way, then gently breathe with the fear, coming back to rest your awareness in the breath in the body. And if your breathing becomes disturbed for any reason, then feel free to move into another stabilizing “object of awareness.” This could be the hands, the feet, the bottom sitting on the chair; you can also rest your awareness in sounds. Move back inside breathing if or when you feel ready.

As you open to your experience a little more, notice how you respond to your pain or difficulty. You’ll probably find that you are tending toward a hard, resistant, blocked, or numb stance; or you may be tending toward a sense of overwhelm, such that your pain is dominating your whole awareness. Both attitudes are normal expressions of resistance, and we all tend toward one or the other at different times.

If you notice that you’re a bit blocked or numb, then choose to open a bit more to the painful or tight sensations in your body and very, very gently breathe into the experience. Softening, softening with each breath.

If you start tipping into overwhelm, then choose to broaden the awareness to include other experiences as well: different parts of the body, including areas that aren’t in pain; different sounds, smells, or other senses. Stay grounded and embodied, but choose to place your pain within a broad field of awareness.

Spend time exploring your experience in this way, coming closer to your experience, applying tenderness if you feel blocked or avoidant and broadening awareness if you feel overwhelmed. Always look for the middle way between these extremes through this sensitive and responsive awareness.

As you explore your experience in this way, see whether you can notice how sensations are always changing and how no two moments of “pain” are exactly the same. Maybe as you come closer to your actual experience, you realize, for example, that it’s just your lower back that’s hurting, rather than your whole back as you’d previously thought. Can you apply this precise investigation of experience to whatever your particular difficulty is? And maybe you discover that some of the sensations have aspects to them that are pleasant—things like tingling. Or you may even feel a sense of relief in your heart now that you’re finally turning toward your difficulty and meeting it with kindness and curiosity rather than being locked in battle, struggle, and strain with it, which just leads to more and more suffering and tension.

And what about your thoughts and emotions? Are you having any thoughts and emotions about your pain or difficulty? Can you let them come and go moment by moment—neither suppressing them nor overidentifying with them? Can you let them go as you rest with the basic sensations in the body moment by moment, held by the kindly breath?

Be sure to cultivate an attitude that is patient, gentle, and tender.

Now saturate the breath with self-compassion. As you breathe in, let a felt imaginative sense of kindliness flow into your whole body; and as you breathe out, imagine kindliness flowing out into and saturating your whole body. Breathe with a deep sense of kindliness, care, tenderness, and compassion toward yourself.

Allow the whole body, including any pain or discomfort that may be present, to be rocked and cradled by the breath. If you still feel dominated by resistance, allow that to be saturated by the kindly, gentle breath without judgment. Accept all your experience with great tenderness.

When you feel ready, bring the meditation to a close.

I hope you have found this practice helpful. The central approach of cultivating a middle way between denial and overwhelm, softening resistance, and releasing into flow and kindness can be taken into all the activities of daily life. Moving again and again from fighting to flowing can indeed be a beautiful gateway to freedom.

The post A Gateway to Freedom appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Slow Down, Take Your Seat

Ayya Santacitta — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:00:14 +0000

Times are urgent, and we need to slow down in order to decide how to respond to the many challenges we face—from environmental degradation to widespread war and violence, to name just a few. We need to make space to be with our experience as it is, to allow what is and to relax into it.

Connecting with our experience teaches us a lot about ourselves and how we meet and interpret the world. We can begin to notice our attitude towards what we encounter in any given moment by asking ourselves, How do I deal with this? What do I do with it? How do I relate to my experience? This investigation is the hallmark of the Buddha’s teaching, while experience itself is actually secondary. By looking at our lives in this way, we begin to see with increasing clarity that all phenomena are constantly changing and are therefore unable to offer us lasting satisfaction. This insight is the master key to freedom and the reason why we meditate.

First, find a posture you can sustain for half an hour or so, and as you take your seat, do so with all the beings behind you who have brought you to this moment—all the human ancestors, animal ancestors, and plant and mineral ancestors. Be aware of all of them behind you and all the future generations in front of you, and in the midst of all this, take your seat. Take your seat in order to know the path in this moment, to see yourself and the world a bit more clearly. Really honor this very deep impulse, which is in all of us. It’s a deep calling that we’ve had the good fortune to connect with and now we’re able to respond to. Just take that in—the fact that you can do this.

Begin by connecting with your body—feel your weight on the cushion, on the chair. This piece of earth, this piece of planet that we call our body is in constant exchange with the biosphere. Feel the gravity of the earth element pulling you toward the ground, offering you stability and a place to be and practice.

As you spend time with your body, be aware of the heart area as well and the emotions that you feel there. Notice what is present for you right now. If you’re not quite clear, that’s OK. Just notice the confusion or the numbness, the resistance to connect with what you’re feeling. Whatever it is, that is what’s happening, at least for now. Practice is not about changing our experience. Rather, practice increases our ability to be with what is. To accept and allow, to make space by creating a bigger container for our thoughts and feelings, to cultivate qualities that will help us work with our experience.

Next, be aware of the mind. Is it open or contracted? Is there a sense of hurry or stress? Just notice what’s there, and as you do this, be aware of your breathing. Allow your awareness to rest on the body breathing. If you notice the mind wandering off into thinking, just come back to the simplicity of the body breathing in and breathing out. With the in-breath be aware of the body and what’s happening inside you. Then relax into boundless space and silence with the out-breath. Listen to the space, listen to the silence, and allow the mind to open. Whenever you notice that the mind wants to contract around a thought, gently let go of the impulse and come back to listening. Gently lean into spaciousness and silence while allowing movement and change—giving room to it all.

If you become conscious of a feeling or some sort of response to what’s happening, just gently hold it in your heart and allow it to spread through the body—the form of your being. Let it deeply in-form you, so that through that knowing you’ll be able to sense what you need to do next. By inviting that seeing to ripple out through your body and mind, you stretch and grow and integrate a little more world and life into your being. How does that feel for you? Can you sense the raw energy that comes from releasing old feelings or tensions? Or do you need to honor that which still needs more time to release? Each decision is individual, and you’ll become more fluent as your practice unfolds.

Through repeated practice, we begin to see the futility of holding onto that which is constantly changing.

Now drop the perception of spaciousness and silence and just be aware of that which knows about the spaciousness and silence—what we call the knower, or conscious awareness. Be the knowing. Rest as knowing, like a mirror with the capacity to reflect without doing anything but simply knowing that something is happening. Just be the knowing without interfering with what is known.

Practicing in this way allows identification with our personality and our experiences to wash away, like removing a stain from a cloth. Through repeated practice, we begin to see the futility of holding onto that which is constantly changing. We see that all phenomena have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then letting go occurs as a natural response of a mind that understands the way things really are.

Now come back to your body and the seat, becoming aware again of the gravity of the earth element pulling you toward the planet. We belong here and we have what it takes to respond to our situation. Starting with ourselves—by investigating our body, heart, and mind and what we bring to our experience—is the first step. From there we train to open and receive what is emerging so that we can respond more appropriately and skillfully.

Times are urgent, we need to slow down. We are vessels standing on the shoulders of all who came before us, and we also form part of the foundation for what comes next. Wisdom and compassion arise from physical and mental activities conjoined. Our daily lives and our meditation practice need to inform each other—that’s how we shed ballast and arrive at a greater perspective, enabling us to respond in a balanced manner and then let go. Being human is an experiment and always has been. The Buddha’s teachings show us how we might live that experiment in the clearest and most compassionate way.

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A Guided Practice for Cultivating Attention

Sharon Salzberg — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:00:22 +0000

Mindfulness is a relational quality. It’s not about what’s happening, it’s about how we are with what’s happening. The point isn’t to utterly control our internal and external environment—the point is to have a different relationship to everything.

Mindfulness can go anywhere: It doesn’t take the shape of what it’s watching. So we can be mindful of those beautiful, wonderful, tremendous times, we can be mindful of those difficult, painful times, and we can be mindful of all the neutral times. It’s a quality that can go anywhere. That’s the biggest, most expansive sense of what our meditation is about.

When we sit and consciously cultivate mindfulness, through sitting meditation or movement meditation, like walking, it’s a period of dedicated attention. It’s the key to being able to bring that attention into our day. Very often, the foundational exercise in mindfulness has to do with the body, because it’s the most concrete, it’s the most available to us. We take the attention we have cultivated on the feeling of the breath, and expand it to other sensations in the body.

Some experiences will be very, very pleasant. Some of the experiences, of course, will be painful. It’s just the nature of being in a body, and we get to see what it’s like to be with the painful experience. We see if we can open fully to those experiences without all of those mental add-ons. We come back to the experience in the body, and then we have the opportunity to see more deeply into the nature of what’s happening.

Now, if you are doing your meditation in the form of sitting, it’s important to remember balance. You don’t want to sit in a particularly painful posture. You don’t want to hurt yourself in some way. But if you can sit comfortably, and maybe not shift posture, at the very first moment of some kind of difficult sensation without straining your body, it will open up a world of investigation. (Where is the suffering, actually? Is it in your knee, is it in your mind?)

It’s not a process of grim endurance and somehow making it through. It’s much more a process of the invigoration of exploration and discovery. And it’s quite empowering to realize that we can transform our minds so that our relationship to pleasure and pain and neutrality can all be different.

Guided Practice: Mindfulness and the Body

So let’s sit together. We’re going to experiment now with a body scan in our meditation practice. You can sit comfortably or lie down, however you feel most at ease. And begin by once again bringing your attention to the feeling of the breath. Just the natural sensations of the in and out breath. If you’re with the breath at the nostrils, that may be tingling, vibration, warmth, or coolness. If you’re with the breath at the chest or the abdomen, it may be movement, pressure stretching, release. You don’t have to name these things, but feel them. This is where we rest our attention.

(Pause).

And then bring your attention to the top of your head. You don’t have to use imagery or visualization. But notice if there are actually any sensations that you can perceive: tingling, pressure. Again, you don’t need to name them, but feel them. What we normally take to be solid is really a living, moving sea of sensation.

Simply noticing, slowly bring your awareness down through your face. Some sensations are pleasant, some are unpleasant, some are neutral. We’re cultivating the same kind of balanced awareness with whatever we’re picking up.

Notice your ears. Notice the back of your head. No judgment. No condemnation. Simply being in the moment with whatever you’re perceiving. Notice your neck and throat, your shoulders.

You may feel some stress and strain, the accumulation of tension. It’s okay. Of course it would be tempting to spin out into ways to “fix” this tension.

But our goal here is simply to be aware and have awareness itself be the vehicle of transformation. Let’s just be with our experience as it is right now, relinquishing as many add-ons as may appear.

Bring your attention down through one arm all the way through to your fingertips, and, when you’re ready, the other arm.

See if, in this process, you can make the shift from the more conceptual level of thinking, for example, of “my finger,” to the world of direct sensation. Pulsing, throbbing, pressure, vibrating, heat, cold, again, without needing to name these things. This is what we’re feeling.

And then bring awareness down through the back. One teacher once commented to me that in the West we tend to be so forward-oriented, we don’t even know we have a back. So what’s it like when you fill your body with this kind of awareness, this kind of attention? Just sweep your attention through your back, and then chest, stomach, groin.

Bringing your attention down through one thigh to the knee and then the other, down one leg, all the way to the toes, and, when you’re ready, the other leg.

You can sit or lie there, feeling the aliveness of the body. Feeling its ever-changing nature.

And when you feel ready, you can open your eyes.

(End of practice)

This is one of the most accessible forms of attention. So much of our day is built around simple sensations. We can cultivate attention to these simple sensations throughout the day.

For example, if you’re in a meeting, every now and then, see if you can feel your feet touching the ground. It may sound simplistic, but it’s actually very powerful. If you’re washing your hands, instead of, at that very moment, trying to think through a presentation you’re going to give, see if you can simply feel the sensation of water on your hands.

If you’re reaching for a cup of tea, or a cup of coffee, pause for a moment and simply feel that contact as you actually experience touching that cup.

These are just some of the simple ways we can break some of the crazy momentum of our day, and bring ourselves back to a state of mindfulness.

♦

Excerpted from Sharon Salzberg’s 2013 Dharma Talk, “Real Happiness: A 28-Day Meditation Program.” Watch the full Dharma Talk here.

This article was originally published on August 26, 2022.

The post A Guided Practice for Cultivating Attention appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Thinking About Thinking

Wes Nisker — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 14:49:43 +0000

Beginning meditators are often shocked to realize that they can actually observe and investigate their own mental life. Equally astounding to many is the fact that cognition can go on without them, taking care of this or that business, interpreting and reacting in habitual ways to whatever experience registers in awareness. Seeing more clearly into how the mind functions tends to shatter some of the meditator’s most cherished beliefs about cognition, consciousness, and the nature of self.

As Tibetan teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche states:

The stream of thoughts surges through the mind of an ordinary person. Often called “black diffusion,” this state is an unwholesome pattern of dissipation in which there is no knowledge whatsoever about who is thinking, where the thought comes from, and where the thought disappears. One has not even caught the “scent” of awareness; there are only unwholesome thought patterns operating, so that one is mindlessly carried away by one thought after another. That is definitely not the path of liberation!

Think about your mind for a moment. What is it? How does it function? Does your mind have anything to do with matter? Could you have a mind without a brain? Where exactly is your mind? And what exactly does it do?

For all of our sophisticated understandings about the ways of the world, we remain almost completely ignorant of how what we call “mind” is generated. Most people know more about how coffee is produced than about how their thoughts are created. Most know more about the firing of their automobile engine’s pistons than the firing of their brain cells’ synapses. People spend more time learning how to reprogram their DVR than learning how to understand their mental habits. If we had any inkling of the problems and suffering that result from our ignorance of and inattention to the workings of our mind, we would immediately drop everything and go on a crash course of intensive meditation.

Exercises: Mind Games

Following are some specific exercises that can be used to conduct an active investigation into the nature of your mind. Any of these exercises can be used either in conjunction with or independent from a regular course of meditation practice. In my teaching experience, I have found that these meditations and reflections can lead people to profound insights, even if the exercises are done only a few times.

An important thing to remember when playing the mind games is to be gentle with yourself, and not to judge too harshly what you will observe in your mind. Be assured that your lack of mental control or confusion is a common, species-wide condition.

A second important point to remember is that these meditation exercises are not about getting rid of our thoughts. This notion is one of the most common mistakes of beginning meditators. There are indeed times when a determined attempt at blocking thoughts can be useful, such as in the development of concentration, but a mind empty of thoughts is not the goal. Not only would it be an unnatural condition, but furthermore, if we could actually get rid of all our thoughts in meditation we would never get to see how our ordinary mind functions.

One useful way to regard your thinking is to recognize it as a natural occurrence. See if you can view thinking as a pulse similar to your breathing or heartbeat, a vital part of existence—with all of its attendant difficulties—gifted to you by evolution. Then you can begin to explore your mental life as a scientist of the self, applying mindfulness to this amazing natural phenomenon.

Thought Happens!

10-minute practice

The first exercise is very simple. Just sit down and close your eyes, and for the next ten minutes make the firm intention not to think a single thought or give rise to a single mental image. You can either try to focus on your breath as a place to put your mind, or just sit there.

During the ten minutes, notice if any thoughts appear in your mind. If they do, remember that they appeared independent of your conscious will or direction. These thoughts will be your first clue. You have just seen that your thinking can go on without you. After all, you had vowed not to think for ten minutes, and thoughts came anyway. Who was doing the thinking?

If you did go for a full ten minutes without one thought appearing in your mind, you are a freak of human nature. For most people, thoughts and images will appear many times in a ten-minute period, all by themselves.

One of the most shocking insights for beginning meditators is this realization that they are not necessarily generating their own mental life. The more one meditates, the deeper this insight penetrates, and the harder it is to find “the thinker.” The more deeply one sees into the cognition process, the more shocking it can become, and also the more liberating.

The next time you do this exercise, try taking the simple vow—as strange as it may sound—to not think about your thoughts. If a thought arises, be determined not to analyze it or cogitate over it, but simply to notice that a thought has occurred, and then let it go. You might think of each appearance of thought as a “thought event.” Just watch the blips of thought appear and disappear. You are learning to be an observer of your own mind.

Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret?

15–20 minute practice

For this mind game, simply listen to yourself thinking. In mystical writings you may have heard about developing a third eye or wisdom eye. In this exercise you can develop a third ear. And then eavesdrop on yourself.

For this exercise to be revealing, you should plan to sit for fifteen or twenty minutes at least. After closing your eyes and centering your awareness on the breath, simply turn your hearing toward whatever thoughts arise. Listen to your mind as it monitors the world, worries over your future, judges your success or failures. Listen to your mind talking to itself, always going on about something.

After you listen for a while, see if you can sharpen the focus of your inner ear, so that you catch the very first hint of a thought or image. Listen for the beginning whispers of thought, or even the initial impulse to think.

As you begin to catch your thoughts earlier in their creation, see if you can just let them go before they complete themselves. Practice allowing thoughts to occur without identifying them as yours, analyzing or judging them, or believing in their significance. Don’t worry that you might die or completely come apart during this exercise. Remember that you are simply investigating your mind, and that it will quite readily return to “normal” functioning.

You might also listen for the almost imperceptible whispers of thought that often play through the back recesses of your mind. Can you hear all those thoughts that might have gone on almost beneath consciousness? Thoughts that might have died as minor impulses or instincts?

The Name Game

A practice for any duration

The practice of naming or labeling can be very helpful as we examine cognition as well. When we give each thought a simple category—“planning thought,” “judging thought,” “regretting thought”—it helps us to be a neutral observer. The process of labeling relaxes our identification with our thinking, and therefore weakens our habitual reactions. We are actually gaining enough distance from the thought to notice its ancestry and characteristics. Labeling will reveal what kind of thoughts predominate in our minds, and also how those thoughts are related to certain primal motivations or tendencies.

To begin the practice of labeling, take a few meditation periods, and as thoughts appear in the mind, simply give them a silent mental label, such as “thoughts” or “thinking.” After you become familiar with this technique, you can get more specific with the labels. For instance, you might categorize a thought or group of thoughts as “planning,” “worrying,” or “analyzing.”

The practice of naming is like becoming a biologist of the mind, classifying the flora and fauna that come into view and noticing how they are related to each other in the ecosystem. You are not specifically looking for anything, but simply noting what occurs and which species predominate.

Remember, you have permission to be creative in these meditation exercises. They are not sacred rituals. Go ahead and give personal or even funny names to your thought clusters, or find new ways of dividing them into categories.

⧫

Adapted from Being Nature: A Down-to-Earth Guide to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness by Wes “Scoop” Nisker © 2022 Inner Traditions. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.InnerTraditions.com

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A Gateway to Freedom

Vidyamala Burch — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 04:00:17 +0000

Asked to describe the difference between the response of a wise person and that of an ordinary person to pain, the Buddha uses the analogy of someone pierced by an arrow:

When an ordinary person experiences a painful bodily feeling they worry, agonize, and feel distraught. Then they feel two types of pain, one physical and one mental. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, and then immediately afterward by a second arrow, and they experience the pain of two arrows.

And of course, in reality, when we are struggling with pain, it can feel as if we are pierced by a whole volley of second arrows that quickly traps us in a web of suffering and despair.

The Buddha also clearly states that the wise person will still experience the first arrow, as physical pain comes with having a human body. But he adds this:

When a wise person experiences a painful bodily feeling, they don’t worry, agonize, and feel distraught, and they feel physical pain but not mental pain. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, but a second arrow didn’t follow it, so they only experience the pain of a single arrow.

The Buddha very clearly states the cause of the second arrow when he says:

Having been touched by the painful feeling (of the first arrow), an ordinary person resists and resents it. They harbor aversion to it, and this underlying tendency of resistance and resentment toward that painful feeling comes to obsess the mind.

How wonderful that such a pure and simple teaching from twenty-five hundred years ago can give us practical guidance in the modern world!

It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises.

Start by establishing a comfortable posture—either sitting or lying down, whichever posture will be most comfortable for you.

Be sure to cultivate an attitude that is patient, gentle, and tender.

When you feel ready, bring the meditation to a close.

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5 Meditation Tips for Beginners

Tricycle — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 10:00:11 +0000

“Am I doing this right?” If you’re new to meditation, you’ve probably asked yourself this question. Many beginners (and even experienced meditators!) struggle with distracting thoughts, sitting still for long durations, a lack of motivation, or just general confusion as to whether or not they’re doing it right. In reality, there’s no wrong way to meditate. When starting out, it can be helpful to remind yourself that meditation practice is exactly that—a practice—and the best way to overcome obstacles in your meditation is to continue practicing.

There are many different forms of meditation practice, the most common being mindfulness of the breath. Other practices include lovingkindness (metta), mantra, taking and receiving (tonglen), visualization, and zazen, or just sitting. What Buddhist meditation techniques have in common is their purpose to help us cultivate the mind, leading to clear awareness, equanimity, and wisdom. If you find yourself needing additional support in your practice, try seeking out a Buddhist teacher, joining a local sangha or meditation group, or forming a meditation group of your own.

Here are five helpful meditation tips for beginners, no matter what style of meditation you end up practicing, followed by a list of additional resources and guided meditations.

Allow Your Meditation Goals to Drop Away

“If you’re sitting in meditation to get something—whether it’s peace, tranquility, low blood pressure, concentration, psychic powers, meaningfulness, or even enlightenment—you’re not here. You’re off in a world of your own mental fabrication, a world of distraction, daydreaming, confusion, and preoccupation. It’s anything but meditation.

It’s probably true, for the most part, that certain health benefits can be found through meditation. But if you’re doing this for that—for some reason, purpose, end, or goal—then you are not actually doing this. You’re distracted and divided.

Meditation is just to be here. This can mean doing the dishes, writing a letter, driving a car, or having a conversation—if we’re fully engaged in this activity of the moment, there is no plotting or scheming or ulterior purpose. This full engagement is meditation. It doesn’t mean anything but itself.”

—Steve Hagan, “Looking for Meaning”

Stay Flexible Within Your Structure

“Maybe the first rule we should begin with, if we want meditation to be in our life for a long time, is: Don’t make a rigid structure and then chastise ourselves when we don’t live up to it. Better to keep a limber mind and develop a tenderness toward existence. We missed a day? We’ll begin again the next day. There’s no race. Where are we going anyway but right where we are?

But I also want to encourage having a structure. Perhaps this is the second rule: Structure is a good thing. It’s easier to return to something solid than to an amorphous intention. So let’s begin with that five minutes—that time structure—and even clarify it more: When will I sit those five minutes? First thing in the morning? Right before I go to sleep? When the clock says noon, no matter where or what I’m doing? If a time is picked, it sturdies the practice.”

—Natalie Goldberg, “Rules for a Long-Term Relationship”

Find a Comfortable Posture

Before you begin, review your posture and get comfortable. Here’s a checklist:

Adjust any supports you use to help you sit comfortably.
Your head, neck, and back should be aligned, leaning neither forward nor backward, nor to the side. Your shoulders should be even and your hands level with each other so your muscles are balanced.
Your lips should be closed, your teeth slightly apart, and your tongue against the roof of your mouth, with the tip against the back of your upper teeth.
Start with your eyes closed and angled slightly downward, as though you were reading a book. This creates the least tension in your forehead and face. If you prefer, leave your eyes slightly open, with your gaze directed at the floor in front of you. Your eyes will move during meditation, but when you notice they’ve shifted, return them to where they were.
With your lips closed, breathe through your nose in a natural way. It shouldn’t feel controlled or forced.
Relax and enjoy yourself. Scan your body for any tension and let it go. All the activity of meditation is in the mind, so the body should be like a lump of soft clay—solid and stable, but completely pliant. This helps keep physical distractions to a minimum.

—Pema Chödrön, “Nothing to (Im)prove”

Allow Thoughts to Come and Go

“When you are practicing zazen meditation do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears that the something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer. In five or at most ten minutes, your mind will be completely serene and calm. At that time your breathing will become quite slow, while your pulse will become a little faster.

It will take quite a long time before you find your calm, serene mind in your practice. Many sensations come, many thoughts or images arise but they are just waves from your own mind. Nothing comes from outside your mind. . . If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.”

—Suzuki Roshi, “Small Mind, Big Mind”

Sit with All Experiences

“Some of us sit only when our lives are going well. When difficulties arise, we stop our practice rather than sit with disturbing emotions such as anxiety and anger. Others sit only when facing a big challenge, hoping that sitting will help us get through it. Being aware of these tendencies is part of what we face in sustaining a regular practice.

What hinders and intimidates beginners especially are experiences such as restlessness, sleepiness, and boredom. If we view these energies as part of the practice itself instead of what we need to get rid of in order to meditate, our sittings will be smoother and we will develop the inner strength to be able to be with all experiences with greater equanimity.”

—Narayan Helen Liebenson, “The Refuge of Sitting”

♦

More resources for beginners:

Articles with guided meditations:

“Breathing” — Joseph Goldstein provides instruction on vipassana meditation using the breath as an object.
“Being in Body Time” — Willa Blythe Baker offers a practice for cultivating awareness of the present moment by paying attention to the body.
“A Guided Practice for Cultivating Attention” — Sharon Salzberg shares a body scan meditation practice for cultivating attention and returning to a state of mindfulness.
“The Shamatha of Survival” — Lama Rod Owens gives instruction in shamatha meditation, and discusses the role mindfulness played for him as a means of survival in a world of harmful projections.
“Walk Like a Buddha” — Thich Nhat Hanh teaches how to bring mindfulness and peace into everyday life with a walking meditation.

The post 5 Meditation Tips for Beginners appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Rising and Falling: From Mindfulness to ‘Bodyfullness’

Will Johnson — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 14:38:38 +0000

In reflecting on how my practice has evolved over the years, I look back over my life and remember quite vividly the first Buddhist retreat I ever attended almost exactly fifty years ago. It was taught by a wonderful Thai monk, Koon Kum Heng, who presented a classical Theravada practice that he called rising and falling. For seven long days I did nothing but observe how my breath caused my front belly wall to rise and fall on the inhalation and exhalation. With each inhalation the belly could be observed, and eventually be felt, expanding outward. On the ensuing exhalation it would contract back in. The movement never stopped. Over and over and over again while sitting in an upright meditation posture, standing, lying down, and walking slowly from place to place, I did my best to focus my entire attention on my belly as it rose and fell on the breath.

Such simple instructions, but like everything that first appears simple, it was far easier said than done as inevitably I’d find that my mind would wander off on a parade of errant thoughts that with uncanny success would hijack my awareness and leave me oblivious to the rising and falling of my belly. The practice only became somewhat stabilized toward the end of the retreat when I realized I was no longer observing the rising and falling action from the safe distance of my mind but was actually feeling the expansion and retraction of the belly and grounding myself there.

At one point during that retreat I recall chuckling to myself over a reminiscence about a phrase that would not infrequently come up in conversations with friends of my parents. Oriented toward succeeding in life (which to them mostly meant going into medicine, law, or business), they would often remark when I told them as a teenager that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life: “Well, you’re not going to just sit around and contemplate your navel, are you?”

During the retreat I realized that they really had no idea about the source from which that phrase—which they viewed pejoratively—had arisen. To them it meant not committing to anything and wasting away your life. Yet here I was, hour after hour, day after day, doing nothing but “contemplating my navel,” and I loved it! By the end of the retreat I felt that my center of gravity had dropped down out of the thoughts in my head into the felt presence in my belly. Thought would appear and evaporate so effortlessly that I had my first clear awareness that I was not my thoughts. I was not the mind that thinks and the speaker of those thoughts. Instead, I was the grounded feeling of presence emanating out of my belly. It felt so relieving and wholesome. Endlessly rising and falling, rising and falling, and I loved going along for the ride.

Only many years later did I understand that this practice of observing the rising and falling of the belly in response to the breath draws on the opening instructions on breathing as recorded in the Satipatthana Sutta, one of Buddhism’s earliest texts whose words have been attributed by some scholars to the Buddha himself. After telling us to sit down in a posture of meditation with the spine erect and upright, he instructs us to become aware of the breath as it enters and leaves the body, and he goes on to tell us to conduct this examination at the front of the body.

Throughout the long history of Buddhism, the two most popular places at the front of the body to explore these instructions have been the nostrils, where breath can be felt to go in and out, and the front belly wall that can be felt to rise and fall unceasingly in response to the breath. Constant observation of the breath can be so potent and effective that many Buddhist traditions understandably focus exclusively on this opening instruction. But this is not where the instructions end. Just a few short sentences later, in a completely remarkable statement, the Buddha suggests that we no longer just focus our awareness narrowly on one small place at the front of the body but instead breathe through the whole body.

I’ve wrestled and danced and struggled and played with that culminating instruction for the better part of my life on the cushion. What could it possibly be pointing to? Over the long years I’ve come to realize that the initial instruction to become aware of breath at the front of the body refers to the classical practice of mindfulness but that the culminating instruction to breathe through the whole body takes us into the world of bodyfullness.

What might rising and falling mean to the exploration of bodyfullness?

To breathe through the whole body you have to do two things. First, you need to awaken the felt, shimmering presence of the entire body. How could you breathe through the whole body if you’re unable to feel it? On every part of the body, down to the smallest cell, minute, tingling, buzzing, carbonating, pulsating sensations can be felt to exist. But, deep in our own thoughts, we have little awareness of their vibratory presence. In fact, we have to blanket them over to be able to function in the quality of consciousness that passes as normal in the world that is so often, as Thich Nhat Hanh famously observed, lost in thought. Experiencing the entire body, from toe to head and everywhere in between, as a unified field of felt vibratory presence, is the first step in the awakening of a bodyfullness that can experience breath interacting with the whole of the body.

The second requirement—and this is the most radical piece I bring to the dharma conversation—is that we need to allow subtle, continuous, amoeba-like motions to occur throughout the entire body in resilient response to the force of the breath that wants to make its transmitted way through a relaxed and awakened body—not unlike how a wave moves through a body of water. In most presentations of meditation, we’re instructed to sit completely still, like a stone garden statue of the Buddha. But this frozen stillness not only doesn’t allow the breath to move through the body, but it also causes so many of us so much pain and discomfort in long retreat.

Over the decades, as my awareness expanded naturally from an exclusive observational focus on my belly to an inclusive felt awareness of the whole of the body, I’ve come to realize that these altogether natural motions in my body start with giving my entire spine permission to rise and fall on the breath. The joints in the spine are no different from joints anywhere in the body. They’re there for one purpose and one purpose only: to move. In a deeply relaxed state I can feel my entire spine lengthening as I inhale and shortening back down as I exhale. In other words, I can feel the entire spine rising and falling. What I’ve found over all these long years of fascination with sitting down on my cushions is that, when I enter into bodyfullness and experience how breath can be felt to interact with, stimulate, and move through the whole body, a plug gets pulled on the consciousness of “lost in thought,” and the altogether natural dimensions of awakened body and mind, which “lost in thought” keeps us forever removed from, are revealed effortlessly and spontaneously.

***

sit down in a posture of meditation
just feel yourself sitting there
as tall as you can be
but as relaxed as you can be

focus your attention
on your belly

even in the stillest of bodies
your belly can be observed and felt
to rise and fall
expand and contract
on the inhalation and exhalation of breath

rising and falling
rising and falling

observe the motions
feel the motions
become the motions

***

now broaden your focus
to include a felt awareness
of your entire body
leaving nothing out

pass your awareness
slowly through your body
from head to foot
awakening felt shimmer
through the simple act
of focusing your attention
on a part of the body
like shining a flashlight
into a dark corner of a basement

***

relax as you inhale
and feel your entire spine lengthen

your lumbar spine moves and lengthens
your thoracic spine moves and lengthens
your cervical spine moves and lengthens

as you exhale
feel the entire body shorten back down

inhale fully and deeply
down from your diaphragm
down through your pelvis and legs
into the earth

simultaneously
feel how the breath can be felt
to lift the entire body upward

rising and falling
through the entire long shaft
of the upright body

***

breathing down into the earth
grounds and stabilizes clarity of mind

as it initiates the rise
stay grounded in the earth

when you feel the breath
causing the head to lift
let go and soften
the top of the head
the muscles around the eyes
and both sides of the cranium

feel the energies
in these three places in the cranium
billowing open
let vision and sound
replace thought

explore the rising and falling practice of bodyfullness
while you’re sitting formally in meditation
while you’re standing and walking
and making your way through your life

◆

Try Will Johnson’s Tricycle online course, “The Posture of Meditation,” at learn.tricycle.org.

The post Rising and Falling: From Mindfulness to ‘Bodyfullness’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Practicing on the Edge

Joseph Goldstein — Mon, 30 May 2022 10:00:49 +0000

Each month, Tricycle features articles from the Inquiring Mind archive. Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984 to 2015, has a growing number of articles from its back issues available at www.inquiringmind.com (help Inquiring Mind complete its archive by donating here). Today’s selection from the Spring 2003 issue, Fear and Fearlessness, was adapted from a talk by Joseph Goldstein.

When I imagine the mind of the Buddha, I think of a mind without boundaries, a mind without limits and therefore without fear. I see our own path to awakening in this light. On our journey of opening, we come to the boundaries of what is familiar or what is comfortable. It’s precisely at these boundaries that the deeply conditioned pattern of fear begins to emerge. We find ourselves being afraid of what in any particular moment is the truth of that moment. We need to learn how to work with this fear. Otherwise, our lives become fragmented; we split off from parts of ourselves, from parts of what is true in experience.

In our meditation, when we reach the boundary where fear begins to arise, we can slowly train ourselves to relax and open. Through this practice, we develop a great strength and equanimity of mind. The first step is learning to see what it is that we’re afraid of. In this way, we come to recognize it clearly, to see what limits us and then to explore the possibilities of going beyond those limits.

The most obvious experience where fear may arise—and the one we can work with the most simply—is of physical pain. We’ve been very conditioned in our lives to avoid unpleasant sensations. We can see how this manifests in meditation practice; if we’re not really mindful, we automatically shift our position simply to alleviate discomfort. There’s a teaching in Buddhism that says: “Movement masks suffering.” Usually, we think we move because we really want something. But it’s interesting to see it from the other side, that we’re often moving simply to avoid dealing with what’s present. It’s an instructive exercise to watch throughout the day, to investigate why we move. Seeing this begins to change our relationship to pain.

To work skillfully with pain and discomfort, and to slowly decondition the response of fear, we need to recognize different kinds of pain. First, there is pain as a danger signal. We put our hand in fire; it hurts; we take it out. The Dalai Lama calls this response “wholesome fear,” which is really another word for wisdom.

We also can experience pain when we feel accumulated tensions or old traumas stored in the body. Often, in meditation, it’s the discomfort of that untangling that we’re feeling. Understanding discomfort as an unwinding can create a sense of interest and a certain quality of ease.

There are also stages in our practice, stages of insight, where unpleasant sensation is just what’s characteristic of that stage. It’s very useful to know this, because our common interpretation is that pleasant is good and painful is bad. A painful sitting may well be a deeper place of practice than a comfortable one.

So the first area where we can see fear arising is with physical pain. We come to the edge, the boundary, of what is acceptable, and right there is the place to practice. It also can be helpful to turn our attention to the knowing of the pain, to the awareness itself. We might think of awareness as an open window; everything that’s known is simply appearances, things arising in the openness of the window. But the openness of the window is not affected by anything that appears in it. To the degree that we are recognizing, or abiding in, the openness, we stay in a place of equanimity.

We also come to our boundary of comfort with certain memories or images which arise in the mind. They may come as memories of specific things that happened in our past. Or they may be archetypal images of cruelty, of rage. If we’re not mindful just in the moment when these images arise, they may be the cause of great fear.

When my teacher Munindra first came to this country, he asked me to rent him videos of violent movies, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He kept saying, “Show me the worst!” He was showing me that no matter how frightening, it was really just an image, just a movie. It’s exactly the same for whatever is arising in our minds. When we remember that, we can see through the images that come up so we don’t get caught in fear.

There’s a Zen story of a monk who lived in a cave in the mountains. He spent years making a painting of a tiger on the wall of the cave. It was so realistic that when he finally finished it and looked at it, he got frightened. We do that a lot. We paint pictures in our minds, look at them, and get frightened. When we see this happening, it may be useful to note, “Painted tiger.” We don’t need to buy into the fear.

Fear also may arise when we are not accepting of difficult and painful emotions, such as unworthiness, jealousy, abandonment, rage or hatred. Fear and non-acceptance of emotions leads to insecurity and fragmentation within us. It’s as if some part of us is split off. Through the inner pressure not to feel these emotions, not to acknowledge them, we construct a self-image that we then present to the world. We start looking to others for validation because we have not opened to and accepted the full range of what’s within us.

It’s essential in our practice that we open to these emotions in just the same way we learned to open to physical pain. This does not mean searching for great emotional catharsis. But when such painful feelings do arise, we need to see that they are often bringing us to the boundary of what we’re comfortable with. That’s exactly the place we want to be, a place of further acceptance and opening.

The great power of meditation practice in this realm is that we slowly begin to see the empty, transparent, insubstantial nature even of powerful emotions. Whenever intense emotions such as rage or unworthiness arise, we might try to see them all as kids dressed up in Halloween costumes—ghosts and pirates and witches. When trick-or-treaters come to our doors, usually we’re not frightened. We could see all of the emotions that are arising in the mind in the same way—just little kids in costumes.

Just as with physical pain, certain images or powerful emotions, we also come to an edge in our deepening experience of change or loss. The Buddha would often say, “Whatever has the nature to arise will also pass away.” (In truly hearing this, the listener would often become awakened.) Although the truth of this is obvious, we don’t usually plumb the depth of what it means. Decay and falling apart—impermanence—is inherent in all conditioned, constructed things. It’s not that something goes wrong or that something’s a mistake. Change is the nature of every single aspect of our experience. Not opening to the truth of change and impermanence often becomes a fear of death. As a way of freeing our minds from this fear, the Buddha recommended that we reflect on the inevitability of death every day.

There’s a teaching story of somebody jumping out of an airplane. The first reaction to the freefall is tremendous enthusiasm and exhilaration. But when the jumper realizes that she doesn’t have a parachute, there’s tremendous fear. Then, at a certain point, she realizes there’s no ground; so she relaxes and enjoys the ride. We go through similar stages in our meditation as we see the truth of change; we move from exhilaration, to fear, to a place of equanimity and ease where we understand the empty nature of it all.

Here are a few last thoughts on ways to work with fear. First, we need to recognize it when it appears. It can be helpful to note, “Fear, fear, fear,” watching that the tone of voice is friendly. This noting is a shorthand for that quality of mind which is open and accepting. Relating to fear itself with the quality of lovingkindness and of interest in what’s happening gives us the courage to be with things just as they are.

In our meditation practice, we might experiment with playing at the edge of our comfort zone. Maybe it means sitting a little longer; maybe it means what Goenka-ji, one of my teachers, called “vow hours.” We might take some period of time in a sitting when we make a determination not to move. This may bring us right to the edge of what we’re willing to be with, and at that edge fear may arise. In this way, we learn how to relax, to accept that “It’s okay; let me feel it.” Of course, we need the wisdom and courage to know when the suffering or the pain is too much. We may need to back off from it until we again find some balance.

The Dalai Lama, with his usual wisdom, has given some simple advice on working with fear: “If you have some fear of pain or suffering, you should examine whether you can do anything about it. If you can, there is no need to worry. If you cannot, then there’s also no need to worry.”

⧫

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

The post Practicing on the Edge appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What You’re Not Doing Matters

Kimberly Brown — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 10:00:23 +0000

It’s easy to see what you’ve done to help others. The grocery shopping you did for your neighbor when she broke her arm, the resume you helped your son put together for his first job, all the donations you’ve made and causes for which you’ve volunteered for decades.

It’s also easy to see all that others have done to help you. The first-grade teacher that lent you books and encouraged your interest in reading, the regular that left you a big tip at the restaurant where you worked, and colleagues who spoke up on your behalf when you were bullied by your boss. These are just a few of countless supportive actions you’ve given and received. But you’ve also given and received countless supportive non-actions—moments when you’ve refrained from harmful speech or bad behavior, or someone else refrained from saying or doing something that could hurt you.

It’s hard to see not-doing—but we know that the outcome of not-doing matters. The unkind comments your friend did not leave on your father’s recent inaccurate and inflammatory social media post or the second piece of cheesecake you did not eat—these are non-actions that prevented hurt and possible harm. Not-doing means refraining from cultivating unwise thoughts, words, or deeds. It may not seem as important or interesting as doing something like flying off to deliver humanitarian aid to a war zone or rescuing abused farm animals, both of which are noble and beneficial things to do. But making the choice to use restraint and self-discipline to not-do, is equally, if not more so, as powerful and meaningful. Imagine all the lives that have been saved and protected from injury or hurt, simply because so many people have decided to refrain from driving a vehicle while intoxicated. Or everyone who didn’t get sick because people with the flu or COVID-19 stayed home and didn’t spread the disease. Practicing not-doing means the causes and conditions that create many problems and struggles vanish. No solution needs to be found, no cure discovered, and no help is even necessary.

That’s why the Buddhist tradition is grounded in not-doing—because so much of the suffering in the world could be entirely alleviated if we simply didn’t cause it.

The Buddha’s five precepts—which are practiced in every lineage—are vows of not-doing—commitments to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and over-consumption. The Buddhist practices of mindfulness and compassion are designed to help us uphold these precepts by showing us how to clearly see our thoughts, words, and deeds and the effect they have on ourselves and others. The paramitas also help us develop the skill of not-doing, especially virya—diligence or discipline—and kshanti—patience or forbearance. Practicing virya, we train ourselves to stop habitual activities and patterns of behavior that cause injury or damage. With kshanti, we develop self-control and tolerance toward our difficult feelings and impulses, so instead of behaving thoughtlessly or reactively, we are able to choose not to act at all.

In his book Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.” But it’s not too late to learn the practice of not-doing. You can help prevent a war by defeating its causes—by not acting out of hatred, greed, and delusion. You can contribute to healing the earth by refraining from overconsumption of resources. And you can prevent your own painful feelings of regret, shame, and guilt, by not saying unkind and thoughtless words, and not doing unethical or destructive deeds.

Stay Meditation

The following meditation will help you cultivate the qualities needed for not-doing, and give you the freedom to recognize when the most skillful and beneficial action is doing nothing at all.

To begin, find a quiet place where you can sit or lie down without being disturbed.
Set a timer for fifteen minutes, then keep your phone and computer out of reach. Turn off any music or television, and don’t talk.
Get still. Stop moving around. Don’t close your eyes. Keep them half-closed, lowering your gaze softly a few feet in front of you on the floor. You don’t need to move your eyes around because you’re not looking at or for anything. Keep them still and just let the light enter.
Rest your hand on your belly. Bring your attention here and take five conscious breaths, perhaps inhaling a little more deeply, and exhaling a bit more fully, noticing each rise and fall with the palm of your hand.
Place your attention here, on your belly as it rises and falls with your breath. You don’t have to change your breathing. If you notice you’re trying to control it, do your best to let go and just rest on your natural respiration.
As you’re sitting, you might notice emotions or impulses to get up, to make dinner or check your email, to do anything except stay. When this happens, you can place your hand on your heart and gently say to yourself, “Stay.” You can repeat this as many times as needed, breathing in “Stay” and breathing out “Stay.” Continue like this for the entire fifteen minutes, resisting the urge to get up, to do anything but stay.
When the timer ends, don’t jump up and abruptly and start a new task. Take a moment to mindfully stop the alarm, inhale and exhale a few times, and take a big stretch. Be sure to say thank you to yourself and appreciate everything you didn’t do.

The post What You’re Not Doing Matters appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A Reminder to Pause

Kathy Cherry — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 19:02:02 +0000

When I was introduced to meditation and embodiment, I knew it was working because I’d be at work and suddenly I’d notice that my shoulders were creeping up. I had never noticed that before—I’m sure I walked around with my shoulders up around my ears for most of my life. Just tuning in allowed me to start to drop my shoulders down. When the shoulders would drop, my belly would soften. I’d start to have access to the story, and I could start to unplug from it. That grip, that trance that I was in, would start to release.

We can start to use these embodied experiences as a clue that something needs our attention. We need to pause, take a breath, and add some time and space into whatever is happening. Our nervous system is designed to activate and deactivate as needed, depending upon our environment and the circumstances that are happening. But the effects of ongoing stress, systemic injustice, relational ruptures, and loss can cause our system to get stuck. The continuity of mindfulness allows us to see and feel those patterns, so we’re working with the intellect as well as the body.

Because continuity of mindfulness is more about practicing out in the world, rather than offering a meditation, I’m going to offer a series of short pause practices, or mini practices, that can be scattered throughout your day. For all of the practices, feel free to work within your range and within your body’s capacities.

The hardest thing about this will be to remember to do them, so maybe you can set a couple of alerts in your phone. You can also use mealtimes, bathroom breaks, or your commute to just take one or two minutes to check in, work with the nervous system, and bring yourself back.

The First Pause Practice: Where Is My Mind Right Now?

Believe it or not, I used to work in the fashion industry, which is a very fast-paced environment. In one of my first interviews, they outright said to me, “You’re only as good as your last collection.” There’s not a strong sense of safety and well-being in that industry, and it was really easy to get caught up in all of that drama. I was caught regularly, feeling off for large chunks of my day, so I started to do this pause practice, asking, “Where is my mind?”

When I was going into the office, I found it useful to do this pause practice on the subway platform. I’d be waiting for the train, and I’d just notice: Where is my mind right now? Am I having a fight with somebody in the future? Am I defending some choice that I’ve made? Am I worrying about whether something is selling or not? Where is my mind right now? By pausing, I’d notice that all of my stress was in the future or the past. Right here, nothing was actually happening. The pause called me back to the present and invited me to settle.

There’s no need to change your position to practice pausing. Just start to tune in: Where is your mind right now? Notice what’s present. Are there any images? Any words? What’s the general flavor of your mind in this moment? Are you noticing a sense of hope, a sense of exhaustion?

Can you feel the impact of all these thoughts on the body? Is there a tightness in your shoulders? What’s your belly like right now? Check in with your eyes. Are they leading your body? Are they resting back? Where is your mind? You can start to let your eyes travel around the space, noticing textures, colors, and sounds. Maybe bring in a little bit of movement.

These practices are meant to be short. They’re meant to interrupt that trance and invite us back. Stress and activation cause our attention to collapse in on our problems, triggering a state of overwhelm. This practice of “where is my mind?” helps us to remember that we’re more than that problem. We can start to expand our awareness and release tension by observing different sights and sounds. This releases tension and invites us back into the present moment. Part of coming back to that present moment is this sense of agency of “I can.”

The Second Pause Practice: Extending the Breath

The second pause practice is extending the breath and noticing the effect. The breath is one of the few ways that we can directly impact our autonomic nervous system.

Take a breath in, and slowly breathe out through your mouth. As you’re breathing, you can also add a hum or a sigh. As we’re adding that hum or that sigh, notice the resonance in the throat, in the heart, or down in the belly. As you do this, observe any sensations of settling and letting go. If you’re around people and it would be weird to make a sound, you can simply inhale and exhale through the mouth, softly pursing the lips almost as if you were going to whistle. You don’t have to make a sound.

As the breath empties out and comes back in, keep noticing: how does this voluntary action impact the involuntary response in the body? What’s different now?

The Third Pause Practice: The Butterfly Hug

Our third pause practice is called the butterfly hug. Most people find this practice soothing, and it’s great as a simple settling device before walking into a meeting that you think may be difficult or after a stressful interaction. You can even try it before bed to settle the system.

Take your hands and cross them. If you can put your thumb prints together, you can do that, but if that doesn’t work, just cross your hands. Then, place your hands with the thumbs at the nape of the neck and let the fingers extend out to the collarbones. You can start with some bilateral stimulation by patting your fingers against the collarbones on alternate sides. Experiment with the speed and the heaviness of the thump, noticing how your body responds. Then, gradually let the hands slow, come to a stop, and notice what’s different now.

The Fourth Pause Practice: Staccato Breath

Our fourth pause practice is called staccato breath. This last one is for clearing and energizing when you need a bigger tool to shift the energy or mind state that’s present. Take three to five quick inhales through the nose and then one exhale, a little bit forceful, through the mouth. Try doing about three or more cycles of this practice. What you’re looking for is a sense of a shift—of being cleared out, being reset. Notice what’s different.

***

Continuity of mindfulness allows us to course-correct throughout our day. We become familiar with the places where we get caught, and over time, we start to pause more naturally. It’s a little reset—a breath here, a breath there. We can check in with that embodied presence, with the thoughts that are cooking in the mind, and then we see what’s needed, perhaps calling on some of our internal resources or external resources to help invite that ease back in.

♦

Adapted from Kathy Cherry’s Dharma Talk, “The Wisdom of the Body: Connecting with Your Inner Resilience”

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