Embodied Mind Day 1: Whole Body Awareness | Maitreyabandhu

it's always a bit nerve-wracking when you hear that sound recording in progress yeah but really good to see you all uh really good to see you all i can see about 40 of you on my screen here at addistina the international buddhist center in hereford in england um i'm actually on a retreat for men who who are ordaining uh people so private preceptors would call them so all of us on our retreat are wearing our order robe so i thought it'd be nice for you to see the order robes so we're all here on retreat we just arrived on retreat yesterday okay so we'll start so yeah really good to see you all um it's funny isn't that we also um introduced a lot little parts of your bedroom you know um an open window there someone's fireplace there someone's cat there so it's nice to sort of be zoomed into your life so yeah my name is maitre bandu and i'm going to be teaching um a week of meditation five days of meditation so what i'm going to be doing i'll teach for a bit until about 20 past something like that so sit comfortably for just now don't don't sit in a meditation posture i'll teach for a bit then they'll lead us in a 30 minute 35 minute meditation we'll see how how we feel and then there'll be a bit of time for for asking questions um what we'll do we'll put we won't perhaps don't ask questions during the meditation because it's like opening your eyes in church so when we when we come out of meditation there'll be a chance to ask questions and what we'll do is i'll get nick who's doing the zoom hosting from in london and i'll get him to sort of put some of the questions together because some of your questions are often similar or the same kind of area and i'll get him to put them to question and i'll get him to unmute and ask me i've got amelia here as well who's on the retreat you can see a little tiny bit of his head there he's helping me so that's really great yeah so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be applying what some of uh ian mcgill chris insights we're going to apply them to our experience so you know what we're trying to do with this project is it's first of all explore the mind by listening to or watching these youtube conversations so i hope by now already you've watched our conversations with ian mcgillcrest um i do really recommend them i'm you know i'm not a science person or even a philosophy person but his idea about the hemispheres of the brain i think is an extremely important idea a very rare idea it's a major idea and you can tell because it has great explanatory power that's how you can tell that the strength of an idea is it's this is explanatory power in other words explanatory power just means what it shows you about life when you bring that idea to bear on life you so he talks about culture he talks about history he talks about um you know on one hand but then he also talks about um patients with various kinds of brain damages and what that shows you about the brain so yeah i do recommend you exploring ian mcgill chris thought the book is rather um frighteningly large but yeah do watch the um two interviews that we've done we've done with him actually just the day before yesterday we got an email from him saying that um he would do another uh interview with both of us in person in the london buddhist centre so we'll continue exploring his thought because he's just produced his new book but yes we start with exploring our guest thought and then we tried to go deeper into that in the seminar so nick will be posting the seminar that we did on friday with john of archer in which we try to explore in mcgill chris thought deeply and and perhaps bring more of a buddhist perspective to it um buddhism after all is primarily concerned with the mind and with flourishing your mind of making the best out of your mind here and that's really what meditation is it's a question of how do we make the best of our mind how we do we make the best of our life you know and that's that's something that's crucial for all of us that's crucial for me and it's it's crucial for you so yeah and the seminar will explore the mind and then in these meditations what i'm trying to do is help us um take what we've learned into our direct experience and into our life so ian mcgill chris talks about that there are four paths to truth i'll just make sure i've got this right he talks about reason science intuition and imagination yeah so he says that those are the four paths to truth reason science intuition and imagination and this is someone who is a a psychiatrist who has a great understanding of neuroscience he's someone he's also literally done he used to teach literature at oxford so i was really struck by that that he thought those are the four paths truths and he said that any approach to the truth uh that doesn't include those four paths was going to be in trouble yeah so one of part of his thesis is that imagination sorry reason and science are split off from imagination and intuition yeah and therefore it's going to get things wrong yeah therefore science is going to get more and more um narrowly analytical and reason-based you know reason becomes more and more abstracted and analytical and he then uses this language of the left and right hemispheres of the brain and the left hemisphere of the brain is to do with abstraction to do with an analysis it's primarily to do with understanding things in terms of parts and trying to develop your sense of things by adding one part to another yeah and of course that becomes an infinite regret that you you you never get to wholeness through parts the right hemisphere of the brain is to do with context it's to do with wholeness you know um it's it's a whole experience a right hand side of the brain and his thinking is that the right side of the brain hands over some of the work of the brain to the left hands over things like categories particularly you know cup of tea and zoom link you know that's all being managed by the left part of your brain all the um category things you need to do because you couldn't live without that you know life life would just be pouring into you you need categories and abstractions to sort of put them all in little boxes like little zoom boxes um so um but then the mcgilkers would say that that needs to then be handed back to the right hemispheres needs to go right left right in other words go those parts and then gone are then delivered back to the whole context because that's only it's only through a sense of the whole that you'll get any real experience any real meaning in life yeah um when i got involved in buddhism i was at art school and um you know in those days everybody said the word foucault or derrida um and what uh my experience with that at the time was what both of them did i don't know whether they actually did this because nobody actually read foucault or derek i've never read a word of either of them but as long as you can pronounce it it doesn't really matter um you know every tea break under the 22 year old dad managed to get the word fuco in somehow but what we were taught was that you the way to understand things was to break it down into parts and then you looked into the parts and you saw there was nothing in them so it's a bit like getting a car and taking it breaking into parts and then saying well it doesn't work and we did that with meaning we did that with value we did that with beauty we took things that were valuable holes broke them into parts and then said that the parts didn't have anything in them and it's very very looking back on it is very very destructive so we need to have a new sense of the value of the whole yeah so i'm this week um i won't every day talk so much about mcgill chris but this week i'm going to i'm particularly going to be emphasizing intuition and imagination we'll be also using reason we won't be using any science apart from the zoom link itself um that's as close as science as we're gonna get because i don't have a scientific thought in my brain um we're going to be emphasizing um intuition and imagination so we're going to be working primarily with intuition in relationship to our body now many of you i know will have meditated for a long time i'm hoping that some of you have never meditated before um just a little ad you know do those of you who have been meditating for a long time do get the word out about the nature of mind project do help us in that because we're trying to reach beyond people who know you know if you can pronounce the word maitreya bandhu it doesn't look like a curry then in a certain we're trying to we're trying to reach beyond those people who can pronounce my name yeah um we're trying to meet new people yeah so those of you some of you you can see even on this screen you know you've been you've been meditating possible as long as me even so if you could help the project by spread you know you know saying that how good it was this morning and spreading it to all those friends who have never thought of meditating but yes we get so those of you who have been meditating for a while you might find these sessions a little bit slow because we're going to start all the way back from some very essential basis yeah i'm not going to assume you know anything about meditation and actually all of us need to keep getting back to that none of us know that much about meditation however much we meditated because it's like saying you know the mind and the mind is unknowable it's mysterious it's it's infinite from a buddhist point of view so we're going to be exploring the body particularly and i'm going to be exploring doing that through intuition and imagination primarily so just to add to our imagination we're going to the start of each meditation each morning i'll read a poem just to draw that that imaginative world into um the meditation but today i want to start very simply by really emphasizing uh the body yeah um [Music] now even when we talk about emphasizing the body one of the one of the many things i got from reading uh the mastering's emissary is even our sense of our body to use his language can be far too left-brained we can relate to our body as if our body is a thing um as if it's an extension of ourself rather than something something sorry something rather than spirit we live through um yeah so even our attitude to our body can be abstracted and analytical rather than embodied rather than full yeah so for instance when i say in a meditation bring your awareness to your feet very often what people are doing are bringing their awareness to their idea of their feet or to their mental picture of their feet even when you say feet you have a sort of mental picture so nowadays more and more i've been trying to say things like be aware of the energy of your feet because it's slightly death it's less easy to picture that but quite a lot of the time with even with experienced meditators our body sense is still an analytical sense a stepped back sense a category sentence even feat is category you know legs it's like it's like we're just checking through to categories what we're trying to do is have a whole awareness of our body that is not an awareness of part so one of the things we're going to be doing today and i think i never quite know what i'm going to teach until we do it but what i want to do i think is mostly just experience the whole body and i'll talk us into that and through that we will do you know i'll start with a body awareness practice just to sort of open up the body a bit but i really want us to be emphasizing this question of wholeness of unification as we go on we'll even want to try to go a bit further than that so that our awareness and our body are unified if you're not careful even with the body it's like do you remember those of you are old enough have daleks they've got this sort of thing up here which is possibly an eye i think um and it's almost like we're meditating with our body like a dalek you know so when we when we think of our feet it's like this sort of dark eye just looking at our feet um it's our brain just sort of looking down at our feet as it were so we're trying to have our awareness and our body unified [Music] unity remember is the gateway to depth the only way your mind will go deeper is if you've got some full unity a wholeness and that that means unity of body and mind and emotion and intuition and even include the word soul as a poetic sense of the deepened sense of the body um so it's easy to talk about that analytically but we're trying to get a whole experience of it you know so what i'll do is i'll lead us through a meditation and uh and we'll meditate for about 35 minutes i think something like that um i'll see you see how it feels even on the zoom call i can sometimes get a feel for how the meditation is going i don't know how but i sometimes can um we'll see how it goes i'll read a poem at the start and at the end but yes if you've got your we won't be doing a particular practice i'll just we're going to do it very simply each day today we're just going to explore this question of being aware of the whole body yeah so i'll just say one more thing about that before we start so one of the things we're going to be doing throughout this meditation is stretching the mind out to feel the whole body so what will happen probably unless you're very absorbed is your mind will go off into a distraction or your mind will narrow down to a part of your experience i don't know a sore knee a pain in your back and all you need to do is not is just stretch your awareness out again yeah and that's what we're going to be doing today yeah and i'll i'll keep on bringing in an imaginative intuitive approach because we're trying to move towards truth um and as ian mcgilcre said to do that we need science reason imagination and intuition and we need a whole body that's unified with awareness easy said much more of an arm to do so if you want to set yourself up now for meditation and uh as you know you need to be as comfortable you want to be as comfortable as possible so there's no rush get get all the things that you need and if you're at home you haven't got cushions you might want to sit on a like i am on a hardback chair um you need to be but upright [Music] what you might do we won't do it here but what you might do is dim your screen um it's um just be nicer on your eyes so you might want to dim your screen on your computer so that um you know it's not the light of the screen isn't shining too much on your eyes but yeah setting yourself up to meditate and yeah we're just going to be exploring our experience we're not doing anything massively spiritual or philosophical um we're just going to you know just just explore just be open to things and particularly open to the body so when you're ready closing your arms foreign as soon as you've closed your eyes bring your attention into your body so the easiest place to start is the weight of your body on the cushions or the chair remember you're not trying to think about your body you don't need to do that you're just feeling it open up to the weight of your body on the chair all the cushions your feet on the floor your knees on the floor if you're sitting on the floor i'm just going to take us through just settling into the meditation so firstly see if you can soften your face soften your brow soften your eyes soon as you soften your eyes your mind starts to quieten down just see if you can soften your jaw soften your mouth so you're not using your face just now so your face can be completely soft then bringing your awareness into your shoulders and just imagine your shoulders dropping down your back so you can feel your shoulders you're not thinking about them you can feel them often enough there's some discomfort in the shoulders but we can still be willing to feel that we don't need to push against that will only make it worse so you can have just this soft thought that the shoulders are soothing out smoothing out and then bringing your awareness into your belly notice if you're holding on in your belly and we're often doing that unconsciously we don't realize we're doing it we're doing it habitually so you won't be able to make it relax just see if you can feel any grasping gripping in your belly and just see if you can soften it thank you you might do that by breathing into the bed a bit more and on the out breath so this sense of the whole body the whole system mind and body and feelings all of it calming down settling down and then noticing your thighs again we're often subtly or not so subtly gripping on with our thighs doing that without noticing it see if you can let go of the thighs just have this imaginative sense that your whole body [Music] your mind your feelings it's all calming down quietening down you just imagine yourself becoming more and more settled more and more at ease the road not taken two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry i could not travel both and be one traveler long i stood and looked down one as far as i could to where it bent in the undergrowth then took the other as just as fair and having perhaps a better claim because it was grassy and wanted where though as for that passing there had worn them really about the same both that morning equally lay in leaves no stepper trotting black oh i kept the first for another day yet knowing how way leads on to way i doubted if i would ever come back i shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence two roads diverged in the wood and i i took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference so opening out your awareness to fill your whole body c if your mind narrows down to a thought or an area of the body perhaps an uncomfortable one that's fine that's all right that's natural enough just open out your voice again to include the whole body [Music] and you're trying to do this not from your head but a whole sense of your body sometimes it helps to keep the membrane to soften your eyes and soften your face tuning in to the weight and the warmth of the body so when your mind goes away when you narrow your awareness to a part of your body just opening it out again to feel the whole body it's almost as if their awareness goes a little bit beyond the edges of the body your body isn't a thing that carries you around it's more like a spirit that you're living through keep stretching your awareness into the whole body however the body feels comfortable or uncomfortable or nothing very much that's just fine um b foreign i watched just keeping opening out your awareness to include the whole body uh and just checking your face again softening your eyes softening your brow taking your awareness again into your shoulders see if you can have this sense of soothing your shoulders smoothing them out just imagine that perhaps imagine the breath going into the shoulders or breathing through the shoulders smoothing it all out soothing your experience and if there's any discomfort in your shoulders just breathing into that all breathing through that finding some way of imaginatively using the breath something that's soothing your whole experience um and the same with your belly [Music] noticing any gripping in the belly just using your imagination so the breath is a soothing calming influence on your plate so you can breathe into any tightness any constriction or you can breathe through it you're just having this imaginative sense and you're not trying to do this too much you're not trying to make it happen you're just gently imagining that your breath is calming you down quietening you down soothing your whole experience so it's as if the breath has its reassuring soothing [Music] effect on your body and on your mind you you and then opening out your awareness again and this time even opening out beyond the body into the sounds around you so i can hear a few birds here in herefordshire singing so opening out to all the sounds around you you don't need to listen to sounds they just appear in mind you just open up then include your whole body so that are awareness glued sound and includes the body the whole body c mm-hmm my foreign patiently and persistently [Music] opening up your awareness to include the whole body okay once again opening up the sounds around you wherever you are just now so that your awareness is an embodied awareness your whole body and it's open to [Music] any sounds around you a road not taken [Music] two roads diverged in the yellow wood and sorry i could not travel both and be one traveler long i stood and looked down one as far as i could to where it bent in the undergrowth then took the other and that's just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear no as for that the passing there but warned them really about the same and both that morning equally lay in leaves no stepper trodden black oh [Music] i kept the first for another day yet knowing how way leads on to way i doubt it if i should ever come back i shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence two roads diverge in the wood and i i took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference [Music] so [Music] oh when you're ready coming out of meditation okay good so we've got a bit of time now for questions if you have any questions um if you can you know i will do this i think is if you can put any questions that you've got in the chat and i'll get um i'll get nick to sort of collect them collate them together and see what's useful for us to explore and we'll do that for 20 minutes or so and some of you might need to if you're in europe particularly it's just past nine so you might need to be running off to work if not you're very welcome to stay behind and let's explore any questions that you have if there isn't we can all go off and have breakfast that'd be fine too oh dinner or dinner of course yeah i keep forgetting that we are at this moment around the world um so your next activity is so nick i can see a few questions zooming in so can you see the one that you can ask me this is nick by the way nick is the tech man behind the whole of the nature of mind project we wouldn't be zooming anywhere if it wasn't for him so soph is asking how do you manage fear in the body particularly when focusing on certain parts of the body that feel unsafe cringy or uncomfortable yeah like that word cringey yeah so um this is one of the questions we often get is about you know anxiety and the body fear in the body and so on um there's two things i particularly want to emphasize one is um one is well one of the things that we often teach is turning towards your experience so you know feeling that fear what does it actually feel like a lot of fear and anxiety is to do with kind of secondary narration uh it's to do with um what we say in our mind about it i know i feel fearful i feel a bit panicky i feel a bit uh cringy as you said in the body um so see if you can drop out of that kind of narrative um one of the things i notice with any kind of fear and anxiety it's very future based it sets you off into a future mentality or it's going to get worse it's hap or i know it's happening again um why can't i relax and all that kind of stuff so fear is bound to set you off into propulsion that's the buddhist word for it for puncture means um mental proliferation um your mind spreading out into the word thinking about this is going to carry on the future and connecting that with the past that's what puncture does so the first practice uh that we you're teaching in meditation is to see if you can drop below that propuncture even tell yourself that you're thinking about it ruminating about it and see if you can feel it more directly so you might try that more and more however i'm honestly doing a bit of that but more and more i'm just using the imagination and it's interesting that in mcgill christian his book the master and his emissary he he emphasizes the imagination very much which is for a scientist who's very very interested but he like uh sangarashta like bante my own teacher the founder of tree ratna he makes the distinction it's actually pretty much exactly the same as banter as sangarashtra's between imagination and fantasy um uh he and he uses coleridge as his source which is what vantay sangratta does as well so fantasy is um is disembodied it's kind of um fantasy is a kind of wish wish fulfillment is it's particularly disembodied it's it's abstracted it's um it's really to do with wish fulfillment um so we're trying to evolve trying to uncover our imagination one of the things to say about the imagination and perhaps as the week goes on i'll say more is that it's it's embodied and it's related to your experience not sort of a fantasy about another experience [Music] you know fantasies are to do with being another person in another place imagination is to do with being this person in this place but imagining this person in this place um in a different space as it were in a sort of psychic space so what i've been doing more and more is just imagining myself calming down imagining um those fears and anxieties softening and quieting down um even picturing myself doing that yeah um it's looking back on it i haven't i haven't focused on this enough you know this whole idea of turning towards your experience you know feelings and discomfort or whatever if you're not careful you can strangely overdo that as if all your meditation is about feeling things um it's becoming a little bit of a meme that's spreading around um it's important to feel things um but you must be careful not to dignify that by thinking that's what you're trying to do is feel things especially difficult things um [Music] you you can get strangely wedded difficulty even in meditation so what i've been doing more and more is just imagining but imagining in this embodied way okay let's just imagine that i'm sitting even saying to yourself sitting quietly or i'm sitting still or as i said you can quite consciously configure the breath as if that's um soothing you yeah and you don't need to be too fastidious about it that you are sitting in your body feeling your whole body and just imagining that the breath is breathing into any discomforts any fearfulnesses and soothing that all down smoothing that all down yeah um even imagining that you're not feeling particularly frightened yeah now you imagination if you're imagining it will affect your experience um sometimes your your brain doesn't know if you're imagining something or experiencing it so it will start to refigure your experience but you need to imagine in a very unified not too ponderous way i think sometimes even when people try to imagine something imagine their shoulders releasing they do so in a very ponderous and analytical way as if they literally need to sort of see their shoulders and think of you know the muscles relax in a very sort of you know this again a very left brain kind of way ponderous category categorizing rather prosaic approach yeah so try something like that something just you bring in your imagination that's certainly what i wanted to emphasize at the moment so yeah turning towards discomfort and being willing to feel it as soon as you feel aversive to discomfort you'll you'll make it worse yeah um aversion is pushing you away from meditation and you can be aversive to your own experience very easily so you you're cultivating the opposite of aversion so even welcoming in discomforts and fearfulnesses because that tells your brain this isn't a threat as soon as you feel a versatile what you're doing is you're telling your brain you're telling your experience so this is a threat and then you'll marshal yourself against threat and that will push you away from the meditation so you can just imagine the opposite happening that you're a person who welcomes things and that will send a message to your brain to use that metaphor we don't when we say brain we don't actually really know what we're talking about but you're sending a message to your brain that this isn't something you need to worry about that's threatening you and that will quieten down your mind a bit and then see if you can just imagine that your state of mind your body is in a different place and that will have its respect if you just stay with them okay so any other more questions nick yes there's a couple of questions here about expanding out from experiencing parts of the body and the direct experience of the whole so becca says that she finds that quite tricky to go from sort of experiencing past i imagine the feet and the hands to feeling the whole body sense and luis also says well lewis also says that um is it frequent to have an out of body sensation when you zoom out to have whole body sense and i assume sounds and other sensations yeah that's that's that's very useful very good questions um it's fine to go through parts you know one of the things we might do and what we did at the start there was you know take off experience through parts of faith you know the classic things is to um work with your face as soon as you start to get a slightly stressed you frown and scrub your eyes so you can always come back to that and then you nearly always start to tense in your i say you me as everybody else you know we all sort of tense in our shoulders and so so you can never calm that down and then you easily tighten your belly we you can soften that and then you tend to tighten your thighs as soon as anything starts to feel threatening for you those are the areas to look at and it's fine to just keep to go through that and if you find the whole body sense i don't know you you're sort of struggling with that we'll just go back through those key areas and uh release those with soften those and then as i said you might think in terms of the energy of the body tuning into the energy of the body because it's less easy to visualize um less easy to break into parts we're so i mean it's interesting i mean i you know ian mcgillicub's thoughts is so remarkable one of his thesis is that for all kinds of reasons that human beings are becoming more and more left-brained that they're less and less to do with context meaning um it's interesting that the religious sense is a right brain sense the imaginative senses of right brain um the sense of context it's interesting the language i think as far as i remember is in the left but your your all of your sense of how you read language tonalities whether somebody is to be taken literally or not is all in the right it's interesting isn't it that we we're tripping over speech so much nowadays um oh you said that that was like a micro aggression or that was of this but you're we're missing out on all the tone that was a joke you know um and you know what jokes are you supposed you know they're not to be analyzed oh my god what does he really mean it's a joke but you won't get that if you're right pushed over to the left you'll you'll look at it analytically but hang on you said that i don't know what you mean by that yeah so even things like tonality and speech in other words the whole context of speech is to do with the right side of the brain his theory is that we're various things are pushing us over more and more to the left he actually says that we're becoming more and more like a kind of society with asperger's or a society with um or various kinds of autism um which is which is associated with the left so you possibly will find it more difficult to have a whole sense yeah so just keep on you'll notice an area even that's that thought i'm just going to stretch out my awareness to fill my whole body that's all you need to do don't take it too literally okay like my awareness is a little ball i need to now you see even that you know you start thinking i'm going to just literally stretch out my awareness which has gone into a little ball they're just they're just sort of analytic ideas you know so just just feel go back into feeling the body the warmth of the body is useful um you know make sure you've got your blanket and the warmth of the body radiates doesn't it from the body as you deepen this sense of the whole body my experience is that it actually goes a bit beyond the body i i think it is actually quite useful to open out to sound um it's lovely here in in addition because it's so quiet normally there's traffic and listen to the traffic on the roman road in in bethnal green where i live above the center there um here is you know we were a little bit of a pheasant for these it sounds effective you just open out yeah um when you when you open out to sound even then you think you've gone out to sound or this sound is out there actually sound is just appearing in mind um whatever mind is we don't actually know what mind is but it's just appearing isn't it so you just open out to that just just practice that opening out of the whole to whole experience yeah um and again what i find is that it's not very you know it's not much it's not very much of an experience um it's not that you have this rapturous whole body sense and you know omg it's like my my body is full of mind it's not like that it's just a sort of you know just just nothing very much but it's a whole sense and you're trying to settle more and more into a whole sense yeah um so yeah easier ways is to tune into sound tune into noises around your tune into the energy of your body and keep on just keep on doing that just keep on nurturing that but yes i think it goes beyond the body a bit even our sense of our body we think that our it's like mind is encased in a body as if we're wrapped in cling film or something whereas actually you know we all know that people have a kind of vibe and that extends beyond the body um and you do now is so you can just have a bit of a sense that you're aware of the body is going a little bit beyond the body as you as you literalize the body you know even the body is something we literalize here i'm sure all this in the gilchrist would agree with wholeheartedly any other question there's one from lisa uh so she's asking can you suggest how to approach feeling bored when focusing on the body we are so used to stimuli it can be difficult to rest in awareness yes i'm glad that people thank you lisa i'm glad that you mentioned boredom is i think boredom is much bigger an issue than we nobody ever you know we talk people talk about meditation as if we're all bliss bunnies you know that we're all all we want is this lovely kind of quiet moment and we're probably wearing lycra and you know we're just sort of embodied nobody says isn't this actually rather boring between you know i still haven't got around to watching spider-man you know how have i done that you can see how full my life is please feel sorry for me i haven't got around to you know so compared to spider-man you know it's a bit boring but people we all talk as if we don't know all we want to do is just have this quiet 40 minutes of being in the body yeah so i think boredom is much more of an issue than we admit to um you know nowadays it doesn't matter what you say it seems to be as long as you know the main thing we're not worried about is boring each other to death um by you know saying nothing very much so boredom is a this is an interesting experience boredom because um it's sort of it's uncomfortable we can't quite find out where that discomfort is um cebuty as some many of you all know is a teacher in sri ratner he thinks of boredom as a kind of threshold experience which i think is a very useful way of thinking about boredom though nowadays you just don't need to get bored don't you because all you need to do is do something with your thumb and pretty much you know you can download a book you can look at a video you can do something on whatsapp you can send a gift to someone so modern life is set up in such a way as we just sort of bounce off boredom as soon as we feel it i mean i'm finding this you know my wretched phone i'm i'm now like teenager checking my phone and that's just nuts even doing that dreadful scrolling thing which is like you know scrolling is what we do when we feel the slightest touch of boredom so we kind of bounce off it to stimulation and then what we end up with is over stimulation we end up with a mind full of nonsense you know because we've we've been scrolling through you know those little things tick tock or whatever um you know you know which is hardly shopping how is it so um you know what what we're being taught to do is not get bored because nobody wants us to be bored because people out there then the social media wants to grab our attention one of the things that's really crucial now is who owns our attention do you own your attention or does the marketplace own your attention and if you don't own your attention there are plenty of people out there that want it you know so what we want to do is oh gosh you feel a bit bored why don't you buy a book why don't you download this video why don't you book on this you know everybody wants your mind the the part of the world that is most treasureful for people now that people most want to buy is your mind yeah so if you don't work on your mind there's lots of people who are going to take it off you so that you buy something opinionate about something share something yeah so what you can do in meditation is just think of boredom was a good thing here's me i am now a bit bored we're doing this valuable spiritual thing with this old guy [Laughter] um you know and it's frankly a bit boring see if you can feel bored and one way i try and do and see if you can actually be a bit more bored than you are you know so you know this is a bit boring this feeling the whole body so let's see if we can make it a bit more boring um you know actually try to rest in feeling bored a bit more because it's a sabuta's point is a threshold emotion so if you can rest in him it's it's a sign that you're about to go a bit deeper and there's a kind of threshold between a consciousness that which is you know scrolling through instagram and there's an an awareness that is actually quite happy just to sit there and do nothing and feel the whole body there's a threshold between the two and that threshold is boredom yeah so see if you can get bored you know you could think of every morning tuning in so that you can be bored for a bit yeah that would be good that would be good it's a darn sight better than doing that mind-numbing scrolling thing that all of us are doing whatever age we are crikey i'm i'm doing it not now obviously okay so let's say we've got time i think for one more question and there's something you're having to zoom off because so maria's asking do you have any advice on what to do if the breath gets shorter and tighter during the meditation it's happening during many of my meditations it feels very tightening and the opposite is relaxed and spreading out and i struggle to relax it she says yeah that's a very good sorry what's his name again miriam that's a very good question maria um i think a lot of people have this at various times possibly when you first start meditating particularly or early on in meditation uh and you know as soon as if you're not careful as soon as you're aware of the breath you sort of tighten putting you around the breasts sort of pounce on the breath and you tighten it it's easy to then you know get into that slightly short breathing thing um you're slightly tightening around the breast basically um and sometimes just your awareness of the breath sort of has that effect doesn't it so what i would really recommend is you just back off from the breath back right the way off for it yeah really just think actually just never mind the breath just coming you know coming back into the back of your body you know your lower back coming down in your body opening out again to sounds opening your again to uh your whole body experience and you know you might come to the breath later but you're just going to just back right away from it it's just a sort of little glitch that people can get into i think i got into it once you know you start to associate awareness with a breath and start to associate an aware breath as being a short tightened breath i think that that's what happens is all sorts of glitches you can get into in meditation that's why it's so important to be taught you can't learn it from books or or from watching youtube clips it's just not doable you need this kind of interaction and a lot more you need to be on retreat but that would be my yeah that would be my for we'll we'll talk more about that as the week goes on but that would be my thing just back right off of the breath open up the awareness to the whole body open up the weight as to sound you know just think i'm not doing breath um i'm going to do something else that's fine then we'll gently bring them back but that glitch will gradually soften out if you just back keep backing off it if you notice it happening just saying okay backing up even open your eyes if you want to and i've been just opening all the whole senses up yeah um we can we'll we'll get back to the breath there's no no worry about that okay look we need to draw this to a close just to ask us to ask you to help the project the mind for the nature of mind project so there are two ways you can help the first way is to is to share a nature of mind with anyone that you know really um just you know put on facebook um put it on your instagram this morning i just did this meditation why don't you here's here's the way of registering people can register for free for the project as soon as you register you'll just get all the emails reminds you about the meditation reminds you about the next seminar you don't need to think about again about it'll all come your way so one way you could help us is to really get the word out by spreading it on your social media let's use if we know social media is here to stay so instead of putting up another kitten video or an opinion about the world you could just share something that's a bit useful that would be a really good thing to do and then the other thing we need of course is money we always need money not me of course i'm a millionaire no i'm not that's a joke we need the rights out of the brain to really measure um yeah so this is our you know nature of mind project culminates in a large retreat hope here at danish ghana in summer i'd like this project to continue i'd like us to be doing nature of mind season two season three you know like i wanted to be a boxer to do that we you know we'll we'll need money um on this first six months we're trying to raise uh something like 20 000 something like that so what we're suggesting is that you know you know say that you've watched the watch the interviews and then you watched the seminar or joined in the seminar and you've joined these morning meditations for a week what we're suggesting is if you could give around 50 pound for that that would be great some of you could give more than that some of you can't give that much that's fine uh you know we're the first thing we did is we managed to get nick nick is a digital native because there's no way i could have done any of this and we need to support nick for instance and um so he's working full-time on the project otherwise the project wouldn't happen you know we're doing we've bought all these cameras so we can do um good filming and so on and we want to do a lot more with this we want this we i'd like you know in a year's time to do this again with you know a thousand people on call not not however many got now to do that we'll need money we could do so much if we got money so if you can i say people always say if you can get but everybody can if you can afford a cup of coffee and a cake in town you can afford and i can afford that you can afford to give us some of your money yeah anyway i'll i'll i'll remind of that occasionally during the week but listen that's all we've got time for now so what i'm going to suggest i'm going to ask nick to allow everyone to unmute themselves and that can we can do finish with a big cacophonous goodbye so you can nick is press the button probably so you can now unmute and we can all say goodbye from wherever you are goodbye from lisbon thank you and goodbye

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 2,092

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Id: YRanVdnepKY

Length: 90min 33sec (5433 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022