Befriending the Silence a 30-Minute Meditation with Jon Kabat-Zinn | Episode 2

[Music] [Laughter] but let's take some time now to once again uh with full intentionality us establish ourselves in a posture that embodies wakefulness and dignity and safety wherever you are however you find yourself whatever your circumstances are at this moment and giving yourself over to experiencing the body sitting here breathing and just resting in an awareness of the breath coming into the body and the breath leaving the body and befriending the silence that is here whether i'm talking or not the silence in between and underneath my words and the the vast silence in in your own being the stillness that we were pointing to yesterday when we spoke about the um thoughts and emotions being like waves on the surface of the ocean and that they can be very turbulent and agitated and extremely powerful at times and yet if we drop down below the surface there's uh gentle undulations and stillness and that's as true for our awareness if not much more true than it is for the ocean and so even in the midst of the full catastrophe of the human condition and we certainly are we can in taking our seats really take a stand in relationship to whatever's going on and the turbulence and the challenges of it it all and find a kind of domain of strength and clarity and stability and calm not as an escape from anything but as a resource for not only enduring but as best we can facing every single one of the challenges big and small that are on the horizon for us and that are in our faces right now and so [Music] resting in this silent wakefulness that for now is focused as we did yesterday on a sense of the body as a whole sitting here breathing and riding on the waves of the sensations moment by moment by moment and breath by breath by breath again eyes opens fine eyes closed is also fine whatever you find most uh congenial to stabilizing your attention and again for those of you who are fairly new to the practice just a reminder that the mind has a life of its own and it's not necessarily going to stay focused in some kind of invariant way on the breath in the body but sooner or later it will be drawn here and there and everywhere especially in the midst of strong emotion and um the instruction is is very very important and illuminating it's not that this is a problem when the mind is uh has left the object of your attention and gone off someplace else it's that our minds are expanding the curriculum of what needs to be embraced so noticing what's on your mind when you notice that it's no longer on the breath in the body just noticing what is on your mind and the emotional valence of it and how strong it is and and whether whatever it is is appearing in the body as tension or as contraction or as energy of one kind or another and where is it located and that can all happen within a few instance to just recognize where the mind is and how it is manifesting in the body and then just let it be and come back to the breath sensations and featuring them once again center stage in the field of awareness and then just like exercising a muscle might involve many many reps this will go on endlessly and each time with a huge amount of patience and forbearance you just notice what's on your mind feel the effects that it might be having in the body whatever they are and then for now just simply re-establishing yourself primarily with awareness of the body sitting here in a dignified erect the posture or lying down or whatever posture you're adopting and breathing so this is important because it's not about the breath we're simply using the breath to anchor and train our capacity to attend as a vehicle for something much bigger which is to actually trust that our awareness is already holding everything and making it available to us in ways that are truly liberating truly transformative truly giving us new degrees of freedom for being in relationship to very very difficult challenging and unwanted stuff so inhabiting the space of awareness moment by moment by moment and at the same time using the primacy of the breath sensations and the sense of the body as a whole to anchor us in this vast dimensionality of human awareness that's already ours so we don't have to acquire it we just have to keep access to it as open as possible so just this moment just this breath coming in just this breath leaving the body just this resting in this timeless moment we call now in full awareness and just for now letting go of the future including even the next moment and letting go of the past and everything that's come before and taking up residency here as if your very life depended on it and you wouldn't be tuning into this program unless in some deep way maybe merely intuitive but nevertheless some very deep way you already knew that our lives do depend on it or we've got better things to do with this hour and we don't so awareness and stillness then become completely synonymous with wakefulness with mindfulness and for the openhearted quality of awareness that we sometimes call that i sometimes call heartfulness it's all right here in this silence in this in-breath in this out breath so where is your mind right in this moment how is it in the body right in this moment the invitation is not to think but to feel your way into it to take a look to come to your senses all of them of which there are far more than five and awareness is absolutely critical for all of them to function with greatest effectiveness and efficiency how is it in the heart how is it in the mind how is it in the body right in this moment and knowing it not merely through thought but non-conceptually through the embracing of this moment in awareness and just for fun in the remaining minutes of this guided meditation seeing if you can expand the field of your awareness around the body sitting here breathing and just let it be as big as it wants to be so that it can include sounds for instance it can can include thoughts any emotions any turbulence in the emotional realm anything at all and simply rest in this boundless spaciousness of awareness that knows no circumference or perimeter and knows no center and be this knowing that your awareness already is and always has been and that includes of course not knowing and knowing that you really don't know and that that's not just okay but that is so much more in alignment with the truth of and the actuality of things so we can simply rest in awareness and let whatever unfolds unfold as if our awareness sometimes the image is used it's like the sky and i think i might have mentioned this yesterday that storms can arise in weather patterns in this in the space of the sky of the atmosphere turbulence calmness light darkness rain snow and in the mind also again depending on conditions in the world and we're seeing them in spades in this pandemic and economic collapse to for now simply let it all play out in the space of the mind like weather patterns and resting in an awareness that is capable of holding it all and not taking any of it quite so personally because in the end we in the deepest of ways already know that it actually isn't personal may have huge consequences for us in our individual personal lives but it is not personal and part of our ability to navigate it really depends on our willingness to not take personally things that aren't personal and learn to tap deeply into this profound interior resource perhaps the most fundamental aspect of our being human awareness itself and the wisdom and compassion and clarity and kindness and connectedness that it can um offer us not simply as a refuge or protection or a place to stand for ourselves but as a way to be in wise relationship with each other near and far and with the world such as it is and so if you're comfortable with it just resting in the infinite boundless spaciousness of awareness and if you feel more comfortable just connecting to some kind of anchor for your attention then the breath and the sense of the body is all sitting here couldn't be more valuable more useful and it turns out guess what it's the same awareness whether you're featuring a particular object of attention or whether you're simply resting in this open-hearted presence sings choiceless awareness as krishnamurti calls it the boundless spaciousness that is the fundamental characteristic of human awareness and it's fundamentally so much bigger than our personal self-centered self-oriented narratives about who we are so this silent wakefulness adds a whole other dimension to how we can be in wise and emotionally intelligent a relationship to the full catastrophe of the human condition writ large and read small right now in the world we're inhabiting today this last day of march 2020. and is it possible to taste that in this timeless moment there is there are huge degrees of freedom available to us not as because we're in some kind of privileged position but by nature by virtue of our being human these are profound interior resources baked into our truest nature as a species in fact the name of our species homo sapien sapiens reflects just that the species that is aware and is aware that it is aware can we take a presidency here can we abide here at least in this moment with the lightest touches and at the same time knowing that our our very life and in fact in some sense our species and the world our world at least depend depends on it and that will manifest that wisdom and that compassion each in our own ways in our families in our work in our loves and in our calling and our longing in a sense in a sense it's a it's a symphony with all of us playing our parts right here on this uh call on this platform on this uh in this indus net that we're all participating in on purpose having chosen to tune in right now and there's wisdom in just that that really should be acknowledged and so can you feel that this uh awareness and the deep silence that it embraces is always present even while i'm talking even while you're thinking even during emotional turbulence in the mind in the body and it can become if we exercise this muscle or engage in this love affair it can become what the neuroscientists would call our default mode rather than defaulting to mind wandering in mindlessness and emotional reactivity that very often rules and dominates our lives and our life decisions we default to wakefulness in any moment that we do it we're already liberated already free and already far far larger than our narratives about who we are and what we're either what our failings are what our fears are even what our aspirations are our true nature just simply so much bigger than that already so there's no place to go nothing to do and no special something to attain because you're already whole already complete and can meet the world out of this completeness in ways that is exactly what is called for in the moment we find ourselves in now so although i've wrung some bells to signal the closing of that particular meditation practice in fact and you all know this there is no end to the meditation practice mindfulness would be useless if it was only about formal meditation the beauty of it is that it's portable and it's available to us virtually 24 7. and we most need it of course when the proverbial stuff is hitting the proverbial fan which is happening for so many of us in this world in so many different ways in so many different countries and at so many different levels of economic hardship or privilege and we really do need uh to tap into this beyond time and space dimension that's baked into our humanity to navigate the unfolding of the world we're in and the future we could possibly make for ourselves

Channel: Wisdom 2.0 with Soren Gordhamer

Views: 66,876

Keywords: jon kabat zinn, jkz, wisdom 2, wisdom 2.0, mindfulness, meditation, wisdom

Id: 3m0mrdJmJAg

Length: 31min 10sec (1870 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022