Embodied Mind Day 4: Developing Quality of Attention | Maitreyabandhu

so welcome everyone again to the nature of mind um so what we're doing in this six month project is exploring the nature of mind from a whole range of perspectives so we've been in conversation with ian mcgill chris and this ian mcgrill chris work that we're exploring at the moment uh this sunday i'm going off to uh swansea to interview um penny satori who is one of the first people in the uk at least to study people with near-death experiences later on we'll be talking to paul gilbert who's a psychologist and the founder of compassion focused therapy talking to carol bowman who was one of the first people in the uk in the us to study children with past life memories we're talking to bernardo castro who is an idealist a metaphysical idealist a philosopher of mind a non-materialist philosopher of mine so the idea is that we explore the mind from all sorts of different perspectives i've written to someone who's a specialist on octopuses what is the plural of octopus okay anyway occupy octopus somebody should know anyone who can they can put it into the chat because i need to find out um you know the whole the whole intelligence of the octopus is uh remarkable and unusual they can't understand why they're so intelligent given that they only lived for two years intelligence in mammals is usually connected with longevity so um and they're unusually intelligent they're as near as you can get on earth to an alien they're as different from human beings as it's possible to get um so they're pretty close to being an alien they kind of look like it they probably think the same of us but they again um yeah so we're exploring that but this time particularly we're exploring in mcgill chris thought and we'll be doing this every month exploring one perspective on the nature of mind and then seeing if we can go into it more deeply in seminars and then apply what we've learned in meditation and what i'm trying to help us apply in meditation today is if mcgilchrist's belief and and um in this wonderful book the master in his emissary that our our community our society is becoming more and more left-brained that we're becoming more and more like an autistic uh society in which we uh preference uh category uh we preference abstraction um we preference the literal over um we preference parts uh and deconstruction i was an article and all we ever talked about is deconstructing our experience um we we value irony um conceptualization abstraction categorization they're all much very much to do with the left-hand side of the brain the right-hand side of the brain is to do with context it's to do with uh imagination it's to do with whole experience it's where we forget the it's how we understand what language means for instance words are on the left but they're what they mean contextually the tonal range of words which of course is one of the largest parts of words what they mean in context is to do the right hemisphere of the brain and you can see even how we respond to language is becoming more and more left-brained um it's like not being able to get the joke so what we've been trying to do in meditation is uh try to do what ian mcgilfris says in his book was we need to um be delivering the left back to the right his master in his emissary that the right hand side is the master on the left needs to be the emissary and we're trying to do that by from that by using the body particularly because we're trying to have a whole experience we're trying to move from categories and parts even things like leg arm and so on to whole experiences we're trying to unify ourselves uh body speech and mind as it were body heart and mind um enter into a hot new whole where awareness and body and intuition and thought are all running together in a new unity and uh it's very striking in reading mcgill christian and being in conversation with mcgill chris because it's so chimes with my own buddhist practice that the the gateway to depth of any experience whether it's reading a novel listening to a piece of music or meditating is this this experience of wholeness of moving away from abstraction and conceptualization and category into an embodied wholeness yeah um so we've been exploring that by trying to exp have a an embodied wholeness trying to discover that we've also been seeing that in the buddhist sort of perspective on parts and wholeness would the buddha would say yes that's right we get stuck in the top at the top of our mind at the surface of our mind yeah we we get stuck on the nirvana's these five so-called hindrances where our mind gets stuck to yeah and they're they're factors of um disintegration as sagarashtra would call them they the navarrenas are disintegrating they break us up into parts yeah so you know we've got aversion and we've got craving and you can have you can have lust you can have wanting hankering needing you can have anger you can have hatred you can have resentment you can have spite you see that the navarranas by their nature split the person up break you up into little parts very like what mcgill christ is talking about they um they're as as sangaraj just said they're factors of um disintegration and you know that because when you're in a positive state of mind it's very difficult to say whether you're feeling content or happy happy or positive positive or generous the more you're in a positive state of mind i don't just mean an up state of mind which is a different thing a cheerful state of mind but the more you're in a genuinely positive state of mind your experience coheres doesn't it into a new unity the more integrally happy you feel the more generous of what you are the more grateful you are the more outward looking and caring you are genuinely so at least not in a kind of mock way the more your experience comes to you as a as a whole that you can't break down into parts you can't tell if you're feeling generous or outward looking or and so what they positive states of mind cohere into this new unity that we're that we're looking for um so we we've been trying to work with the nevarin doesn't as i said um every time you sit to meditate unless you're in meditation it's less you're deeply absorbed in direct experience of the body or glowing sense of well-being and loving kindness or deep absorption in the breath if you're not in that place you'll be in one of the nevada nursing and the nevarinas are also to do with a kind of closed-heartedness yeah um even things like slothfulness and tiredness they're a kind of contraction yeah um that's why i've been talking to them stretching out the awareness really the the the the narrowness the hindrances are to do with a kind of closed-heartedness or a or a um hard-heartedness what we need in meditation more and more is a is more heart yeah more heartfulness more openness so i've been emphasizing in this week of meditation wholeness of body experience and this and cultivating a sense of heartfulness of um well-being of contentment of of ease and so on you're looking for this rich wholeness it's not um you're trying to get out of that tendency to break things down into parts and you're trying to move away from a habitual automatic sort of hard-heartedness caused by all sorts of factors you know that we get and we get kind of habituated to a kind of sort of hard-heartedness so that's what we've been uh exploring so far and we've been exploring that in in various ways so what i want to come on to today um yesterday we were i was talking about looking for you know a kind of micro habit of micro aversion you know like every time you get distracted to use that word do you sort of i don't know what what happens in your mind do you kind of slightly tell yourself off about it do you sort of do you roll yourself do you roll your eyes at yourself um you know what happens in that moment when you get distracted is there just a little just a little ice cube of micro aversion when you notice that oh i'm not this isn't going very well this meditation's not going as well as yesterday i wish i could meditate like such and such a person i'll never get anywhere in this we can often have this habitual habit of a micro aversion where we we feel slightly frustrated disappointed with ourselves yeah um and we need to separate that from a genuine wanting for more than ourselves we we need to be looking for more than us from ourselves but not in this kind of i don't know telling off kind of way not in this subtle but sometimes insidious kind of self-criticism now it's tricky to get this right because as i said yesterday self-criticism is important it's just it's not the same as self-condemnation as self-thoughting which is quite different so you're wanting more from yourself but how can we find a way of wanting more from ourselves that is saying yes to ourself and let's do what we can do a bit more not saying no to yourself yeah um i mean these things are sort of easy enough to say it's the question of catching yourself doing it because these habits of our mind um because they're habitual you you just don't notice that you're doing it yeah um they they're habitualized so you don't it's quite difficult to catch what you're doing when i used to meditate i used to sit down to meditate and my basic view was in my life i you know it might try my i try my best but nothing really comes of it you know that was you know i come from the west midlands and that is the sort of world view i grew up in really you know that you yeah you do you you work hard but nothing much will happen you know and that you can't expect to enjoy yourself really um because life is hard that was a sort of worldview um for me um yeah so and if you have that view that when you sit down to meditate nothing much will happen that's what will happen nothing much will happen your view of your experience shapes your experience it's one of the things that buddhism is particularly concerned to teach you any way you look at experience will edit experience for you so if you think that nobody likes you that's what you'll experience if you think people are out to get you that's what you experience if you think that there are power hungry people trying to change your life pattern that's what you'll experience your experience conforms to your view it's a confirmation bias that psychologists talk about um so what we need to do is find a way of wanting more from ourselves without doing that in this kind of self-thoughting um condemning kind of micro habit of micro of a micro habit of micro aversion yeah so i want to go a little bit further on from that today and then tomorrow i want to take a step right the way back and talk about the goal of meditation where we're going because we're not just working with our mind as it is now we're trying to move to a wholly new kind of mind which is unimaginably vaster than the mind we experience now at least that's that would be a bullish reason to meditate is to explore and experience the nature of reality not just feel a bit better valuable though that is so we'll do that tomorrow but what i want to talk about now is something again that's a little bit like this sort of micro habit of micro aversion is in a way it might be a kind was thinking it might be you know i was talking about one of the nirvana's is anxiety and restlessness so it's a bit like a sort of anxious state which is that we could often think in meditation in terms of duration yeah um we often think um oh no i've been distracted how how long was i was away from yeah uh how do i know i've been thinking about this how long have i been away from um or you can think okay i'm watching the breath how i need to be able to do that for longer you know we we can think in meditation in terms of how long have i been meditating um either literally i still have this habit of when i meditate you know i want to know immediately how long i've been meditating for as if that you know nobody could criticize me because i'm i've done i've sat there in on a cushion for this amount of time so i've you know i can hold that up yeah so sometimes we literally think in terms of how long we've been meditating and there's some value in that um and often enough in meditation we think how long have we been on the breath or how long have we managed to stay with the whole body experience i don't know whether you found this but i think this is really on to something that we easily think in terms of how long yeah what duration have i done i need to stay on the breath or on the whole body experience for longer yeah um and i need not to be distracted for so long yeah so what i'm wanting to suggest today is that we change the metaphor from how long am i meditating as soon as you notice you're distracted instead of thinking oh i need to stay with the meditation for longer or i need to not be just distracted so much see if you can change that to let's just focus on the quality of attention yeah so instead of quantity of attention instead of thinking i need to stay longer instead of a quantity of awareness a quantity of being with your experience see if you can change to a quality of attention yeah so all that you need to do when you're distracted is you don't need to wonder about the quantity of time that you were distracted for or the quantity of staying with the meditation you just keep coming back to can i have a richer quality of awareness just now yeah never mind how long i can keep that going for never mind how long i got distracted for i'm looking for a quality of awareness yeah and that quality is a quality of wholeness it's the quality of curiosity i really liked what um i was saying yesterday it's a page mcgill chris said he talked about a pace patient respectful nurturing in that's what you're looking for this this quality of attention that's patient that's respectful of difficulties in your experience that's um openhearted that's interested in opening your heart at least yeah so see if you can move from a quantity how long am i on the breath for or feeling the body for keep coming back to right now let's see if i can cultivate more of a quality of attention um it's an aesthetic thing isn't it quality so you're you're looking to to enjoy your experience you're looking to cherish your experience you're looking to nurture your experience um can you have a bit more quality in your experience just now so what we're trying to build up is moments of quality of attention yeah um so let's see if we can do that today um and what i'll do as usual is i'll i'll read a poem at the start in the end it's another poem this today by richard wilson i couldn't i couldn't i wanted to show you the form of it so that's the form of it um that's the form of it it's um a miracle that each of those little verses there we go this is a little poetry seminar at um 20 past 7 in the morning each of those little verses they're each a haiku in their own right so each verse has got seven syllables and five syllables and seven syllables and um they rhyme you know i don't know how that's humanly possible i can't tell you how difficult that would be to pull off anyway they get your little you know so what you'll be hearing is a sequence of haikus although it actually just sounds like somebody just chatting okay we've done a poetry seminar as well as a meditation seminar so let's let's now get everything you need to settle into meditation so um make sure you're sitting upright so if you if you can sit on the floor um but we're going to be rotating for a little bit longer today and so make sure you've got everything you need make sure you're warm enough and you're just going into the meditation today with this sense of what we're doing what we're going to be doing is cultivating quality of attention you can do that you can do that i can do that you can do that this morning so setting yourself up so you can sit completely still and if you are new to meditation probably the best thing is to sit on something like a you know kitchen chair something like that so that you are really comfortable and you might want to if you if you're meditating in front of a computer you might want to dim the screen or turn down turn on flux some of you are probably meditating on phones and things like that so that might not need to do that good okay so when you're really closing your eyes as soon as you close your eyes see if you can come back to the whole sense of the body weight in the body and the cushions and our poor body can feel comfortable or uncomfortable heavy or light a bit buzzy or a bit sort of stuck and we're training ourselves to be open to that whatever it is the body is just like the weather it's no good complaining about the weather you just have to open up to feeling the warmth of the body the weight of the body so really feeling the support of the cushions of the chair the support of the floor and your feet and your knees if you're sitting on the floor so and then once again softening your face softening your eyes and your brow a new job [Music] really see if you can suffer all the muscles around your eyes we're spending so long looking at screens now it's really lovely just to close your eyes and soften your eyes bringing your attention into your shoulders i'm just imagining your shoulders releasing relaxing you're just imagining that in a kind of light way you're not kind of pondering over it you can actually feel the sensations of the shoulders you're not picturing the shoulders or thinking about them or abstracting them somehow okay um [Music] again your belly see if you can [Music] notice if you're gripping in your belly literally holding onto your belly and see if you can let that go one of the ways of doing that is really feeling the weight of your body on the chair or the cushions giving your weight to the chair or the cushion okay [Music] so your whole body is calming down quieting down your eyes are soft your brow is soft the shoulders are dropping down your back your belly yourself a measuring worm this yellow striped green caterpillar climbing up the steep window screen constantly the lack of a full set of legs keeps humping up his back it's as if he sent by a sort of semaphore dark amigas meant to warn of large things although he doesn't know it he will soon have wings and i too don't know toward what undreamt condition inch by inch i go so in this meditation we're really working on a quality of attention a heartful interested curious warm quality of attention today we're going to move between the breath feeling the breath in the body and the whole body so first of all see if you can tune into your breath breath is massaging your body from the inside see if you can bring a rich quality of attention to the sensations of the breath and when you get distracted if you get distracted just come back to a quality of attention a heartful quality of attention foreign okay so if your experience is uncomfortable you can imagine that the breath has a soothing and smoothing out effect on your mind and on your body foreign okay when your mind goes off come back to a quality of attention on your breath you don't need to worry too much about how long you're staying with it just nurturing a quality a heartful quality of attention so okay so broaden out your awareness to rest in the whole body keep stretching out your awareness to fill the whole body okay coming back to this quality of attention foreign uh keep stretching out your awareness to fill your whole body taking pleasure in your experience value again my okay so b and again focusing more on the breath but still [Music] really just appreciating your experiencing if you can warm up your attitude to your experience it's a kind of respectful cherishing keep coming back to this quality of attention this warmness appreciative that's empathic that's more and more resting on the breath tuning into the soothing smoothing calming effect of the breath c [Music] you okay coming back into a quality of awareness even if that just means imagining quality of awareness imagining an appreciative awareness that'll have an effect as well foreign c b first again opening rewind is to include your whole body opening up to your body sensations foreign foreign including in your awareness the sounds around you so there's the body another sound so food measuring one this yellow striped green caterpillar climbing up the steep window screen constantly the lack of a full set of legs keeps humping up his back it's as if he's sent by a sort of semaphore dark amigas meant to warn of last things although he doesn't know it he will soon have wings and i too don't know toward what undreamt condition inch by inch i go [Music] [Music] [Music] true okay good so when you're ready coming out of meditation yes so once again there's um time for any questions that you might have i'll get nick to um bring you down to connect us with compilations of questions if need be you there nick yes he is asking uh or saying i find it easier to imagine some things than others for example whole body breathing body listening but when maitreyo bandu says to try imagining how we want to feel for example contented it seems to have more of a mental element to it and therefore give rise to thoughts much more any tips for this ah yes that's very interesting um yeah i suppose uh i our imagination works our imagination works in kind of mysterious ways if it sounds like god doesn't it but um my sense is that the imagination comes in from a little bit to the side it's one of the one of the qualities of your imagination it's not something you can will quite isn't it it sort of comes in at the side of it um i i am afraid i write poetry and that's a nice dog i pray and um you know they poems always occurred to me just at the moment i don't really haven't got time to do them or haven't got time to write them down or i should be doing something else you know um you don't sit down and think i'm going to write a poem about being content but if you do it's almost inevitably an awful poem um imagination comes in as it were from the side it comes in it comes in because it's not because it's whole and because it's not um wheeled so much it tends to come in from the side so you one of the things you're always doing in meditation is sort of playing a bit with your imagination to find out where it sparks off where it lights up like you know in the meditation just now um you know i was working as i was teaching and then suddenly i had this little memory of having a joke with the art of archer my friend who is here on the retreat with me and as soon as i was just sort of remembering that joke and you know how you laugh between friends that that's actually what then just then feeling that sort of laughter between us and fun that's what opened up my experience you know you know not the diligent not so much the diligent opening up to the whole body [Music] so you you that then that sort of crept in and that you need to keep an eye out for that and the trouble is of course if i then that might work if i bring that to my tomorrow then often enough it won't work you know um uh imagination has its own kind of dynamic um which sort of isn't your business um you can see why you have this idea of the muse you know that it's not to do with you entirely yeah so um you're trying to be aware of any moments where there's an opening up a warming up heartening to your experience a unification of your experience and yes if you sort of if imagining being content doesn't work for you in that way then at least not work for you this time because next time it might weirdly um then see what is working for you sort of a bit on the lookout for that um yeah so you're sort of looking for where you have this intrinsic sort of sense of you basically are looking for sort of embodied pleasure um you know unity and so on and you're trying to sort of find that a bit um so you'll need to explore that in your own meditation part of meditation is is this curious exploratory uh attitudes where as long as you know what you're trying to do you're trying to have this whole experience that's unified with the body the mind and the heart on one end and it's it tends towards well-being on the other it depending on how you look at it yeah um and then you're trying to settle into that experience more and more so it permeates your whole experience so when i had that little memory of having a laugh with the olive archer i just felt that sort of you know that like humor and pleasure with being a fruit with a friend and i just drew felt that in my body and just enjoyed that pleasant sensation here and now it's not a memory anymore memories it's not happening in the past and i'm thinking about it it's sort of here and now and um i just let that be in my body and i dressed into that yeah so you can you know you can do it like that something comes to mind or a thought or a so-called distraction sometimes if you catch them you can just drop beneath the literal thought of it into the feeling in the body or you can cultivate that you can try to remember a time when you felt happy and connected and more complete and whole you might not use those particular words for it um might just be that time with your friend or whatever so whether that answers your question but yeah i do i do think imagination is something that you never get the hang of you know you can't just think okay i'm going to do that imagination thing again and make that happen it never works like that the muse is like i'm not interested in you anymore um you have to do your bit opening to the whole body um bringing things to mind that you feel might open up your experience feeling the breath in the body keeping your imagination embodied and integral not split off and alienated or fantastical and then she the muse might step in [Music] yeah so find out what works for you really sophie's asking uh she's saying i notice i experience jolts of the body when i feel like i'm going deeper into my experience have you had any experience of this and if so how can i work with this it makes me feel like i'm starting again yes that's interesting um i i did have a whole time in my meditation life when i experienced that a lot it was actually quite fashionable for a while and you know everybody used to do everybody used to do that like that's in um there's a bit of a fashion i'm not always sure what to think of it um sometimes i get it still you know sometimes it can be a release of energy um you know that's what meditation is about is releasing energy unifying the mind so that the mind isn't isn't broken up and polarized against itself so much of our energy is wasted by trivial thought and self-polarization and so on and negativity actually we waste a lot of our energy on sort of simple negativities um so sometimes you can experience that access of energy as a kind of jolt in the body and uh that might be fine um what what i the the sort of caveat output to that is i noticed that i also had a view that that's what it was which would actually create it i don't know whether other people have experienced it i started to rather like the fact that i was having these jolts because i i talked them as a sign i was going deeper so i started to have more of them and i had a friend at the time who very much believed that these jolts of energy were um you know a releasing of tension and so on and he you know it was like he was like meditating next to a kangaroo you know he'd be like he'd be like this all the time and i remember one day just thinking i think i'm slightly making this happen and i just thought i'll stop doing that now and i just i've hardly ever done it since um so difficult it's one of the mysteries of mind is you it's something integral or or is it sort of based in a view like if you start to think well that's good you'll start to have it more it's a bit like you know in some teachers of meditation i've been teaching sort of a dark night of the soul that you know there's a certain point we have very difficult experience in meditation and that's needed and necessary and i'm very uneasy about that i think there's something in it um but if you start having that view you will start having dark night of the soul experiences you're you can be hypnotized as it were by then the sort of painful and negative you can especially if you start to think that's deep now it can be you know but it not isn't necessarily deep and you can get sort of strangely attached to dark difficult experience um they they they can be something you rather kind of nurture and i i know that because i've done that myself um so with all these things it's very very subtle you know you if there is difficulty you're wanting to open to it you're not wanting to pretend it's not there but you're not trying to dignify it either those difficulties are a sign of depth um you know if you're having body releases and it is sort of having this sort of jolting effect um yeah and if that is energy that's great you're not then trying to think well that's a sign of you're going that you're going deeper necessarily and therefore sort of pre-consciously setting yourself up to have it yeah when when you when you enter diana which is a very very very deep sense of meditation it's characterized by pleasure by absorption by this very very beautiful stillness and when you experience the honor even the edge of diana you know if i don't know it's like drinking warm milk you know it's just like the best thing ever in comparison with which the dark knight of the soul or jolting your you know you know electric currents of energy are like nothing you know you just said just don't bother with that stuff you know it's like your whole system is being renewed in indiana um you end up with this very beautiful mind um when i teach meditation i can almost always tell if someone's indiana um they look very very beautiful um not in the way that you know models look beautiful necessarily actually more beautiful than that they sort of have this aura of of a particular kind of stillness and beauty that's really very very noticeable even you know from outside um and i can nowadays i can tell the difference between that and someone who just merely has good posture you know sometimes yogis have sit very very beautifully because they you know worked on a very very good posture they sit very beautifully they're actually completely distracted they just look gorgeous um so it i don't mean in that way i mean something much much deeper and is it you can feel it almost in the atmosphere so yes you can have all kinds of things jolting the other thing that you might experience is things like tingling um rushing sensations i remember feeling my hands getting very big they can all be signs of your mind evening but you don't want to start setting yourself up for them because they'll start to happen um you're always trying to want to go deeper which is still a more unified more pleasurable in if you could cultivate the bright night of the soul or the starry night of the souls yeah anyway that's a one little thought on that sort of experience so tracy asks could you say something about preparation for meditation please i took an urgent call just before the session and it's given me a very distracted experience with lots of micro aversions yeah so yeah preparation is so important to happen that's very good question tracy because i've not talked about preparation and yes i wouldn't recommend an urgent call just before meditation um i mean just to talk about phones for a minute if you you i have taken a phone call in the middle of a meditation it's a very interesting experience because you can be sitting in meditation thinking i'm not getting anywhere with this you know i'm just really distracted this is basically just me i just happen to be sitting here with my eyes closed then you answer the phone you find oh my gosh i'm completely much deeper than i realized it's very good i mean i don't recommend it but it does show you that you can be going much deeper than you think you are and it's worth what's remembering that anyway that's a bit of a digression but so yes preparation is very important um and in in a way preparation isn't a specialization of your life is very important um the buddhist vision of meditation is that you're trying to set up your life to serve your meditation not just sort of pushing a bit of relaxation and well-being into the middle of a of a of a chaotic angry indignant you know badly organized life you're trying to create a life that supports meditation so you need for instance as much you need periods of simplicity you need friendship you need as much experience of the natural world as you can a you know pleasurable connection with the natural world is very important as a basis for meditation experiences of beauty a part of a sort of the environment that you need for meditation it's really lovely i've seen quite a few people with their shrines in their room um i think even your room needs to be a place that it's interesting i'll zoom out you get little glimpses of people's rooms they need to be a place that support your meditation that that that have a bit beautiful beautiful as much as one could avoid as it were not you know but somewhere that feels good and aesthetically pleasing and where you feel this is a place i can stay and be at home and deepen you need a place don't you human beings are sort of nest builders for me it's really important i've got my particular chair that i sit and read in a lamp that i read and it it's my place where i have that reading thing you know on my shrine next to me but yeah so what i do to prepare for meditation nowadays i like the one of the worst things i think is getting up in a hurry and rushing to meditation that's one of the worst ways of preparing preparing for meditation you know where you haven't had a cup of tea you've hardly gotten managed to get to the loo um you're already in a hurry and then that will set you off into an aversive state of mind that that's for me one of the worst ways i i've never taken a uh a call just before it but i'm sure that could be bad as well but so rushing into the meditation um uh not giving yourself enough time stresses you and then you bring that into the meditation a lot of meditation isn't calming down from that um so i mean what i do is i wake up in half an hour before the meditation with you know i have to have a cup of tea otherwise you know how life is livable and i just sit for half an hour in my my reading chair in my community and read poems it's a really good time to read poems and poems i hope opening up my imagination a bit sort of emotionalizing myself a bit and then i go down to meditation then if you can it's good to before you meditate just just in that half hour before just saying oh what am i going to do in meditation today that's what i sometimes do as well i just think well what i did yesterday is i particularly focused on this today i think i'm going to actually get let's try this today so you know i'm giving you all these handy tips which if you're not careful just you know endless stream of um handy tips you need to then sort of think okay i must i'll remember that and i'll try that on monday i'll do that one where he said to do that and then i'll choose so that's a good thing to do to prepare just start to set your mind for what you're going to do even just the fact that you you've got up early and you'll think i'm going to be meditating in half an hour 20 minutes that starts to turn your mind towards doing that you know um i think that is actually quite important so it's like you're planting just you're starting to plant seeds i'm going to do this valuable thing because really meditation only works if you value it and and if you value something you give it time you remember i'm going to do that thing you know i i mostly do my own sadhana which was given to me as ordination so when we're or drained into the tree ratna buddhist order you're given a buddha figure to meditate on and you know i take this approach in that approach and i i'm taking approaches into my meditation that i've been teaching so i might think i'll do that today in this today but i think you need about half hour 20 minutes to prepare you know if you like reading poems it's a good time to read poems that's about as much poetry as you're ever going to be able to want to read you and don't feel like me um you know or you just sit in a chair with a cup of tea and you know tune into yourself a bit not in a very heady way or a kind of overdone way you just sort of have a bit of a tune into yourself what i find i think about you but it's very easy to wake up in the into a habitual slightly negative mental state if you're not careful when you wake up because you're tired and so on you you can feel a bit grumpy and then that reminds you of this thing that's on your nerves and that thing that's going wrong or you might wake up into an anxious state um oh i need to do all this stuff today so you're trying to give a buffer so that you either give yourself something better to do like read a poem or i wouldn't particularly suggest for instance reading prose because then you don't want to get into a prose sort of state you're trying to get into a sort of more whole state and poetry at best can do that and at least have help with that or you just sit there with a cup of tea and look out the window just watch the sun start to rise or listen to the bird song i just have a bit of thinking i'm going to be meditating in a bit and i want to take this particular approach i wouldn't overdo preparation you know you don't you're not you know preparing to run a marathon or something um which presumably means you just mainly flex your body a bit i don't know i've never prepared to run anything but yeah preparation is very important i think it needs about half an hour 20 minutes yeah you can and then of course the other thing not definitely not to do is scroll through your phone um more and more of us are waking up and immediately scrolling through our phones that's a that's a really bad preparation because it pushes you into the left hand side of the brain it pushes you into that doing mode and um it's massively bad for you um so that's definitely not to do so don't pick up your phone until after the meditation which you know sounds easy but more and more of us are just getting into the habit of you know looking at the phone it's easier than reading something now on that topic vidyakaya is asked is saying can you say something about boredom and patience and the left brain oh good heavens um boredom patience in the left brain i pressed so trying to say something about patience i mean that it's angry actually he says he said um often we think we're being patient when we're really just being persistent which i thought was really striking you know you think you're being patient with someone whereas really you're just being persistent you just keep persisting with what you're trying to say um um patience the the buddhist word for patience is kashanti and again that's it's a very beautiful word it's got very strong kind of overtones of love um [Music] so patience isn't merely a kind of enduring it's it's a kind of love patience really um when you're genuinely patient with someone it's really a another way of saying that you're empathic with them that there's a love for them and that is appearing as a kind of patience with them um patience is very very sweet and it's actually very rare i think um so one of the things that we're cultivating in meditation is this patient a patient with difficulty a patience with our mad mind you know our nutty mind that's just really you know you wouldn't you know you you're glad that it isn't a youtube channel that anyone can see because you know it's really not most of it's not viewable you know um sort of a huge patience i think has got a certain sort of humor with it um and not taking yourself too seriously in the wrong kind of way um [Music] it's not taking i think patience it also means not taking the hindrances the nevarran is too personally so say you're in a bad mood or you're i don't know you're really anxious or you're very feeling very doubtful well you don't need to take that too personally you can be sort of patient about that that's just that's just the winds of the hindrances blowing through you everybody has that stuff or you know you you're having lustful thoughts or that doesn't matter you know don't don't take it all too seriously um one of the things that we that gets the snarled up with the nirvana's where the hindrances is taking them personally thinking that they they say something important about who i am and what my meditation is so if you think oh i can't meditate i'm not this sort of person i'm in such a bad mood today today it's going to be rubbish because i've got up late and i'm already in a jungle state you know you don't need to believe those thoughts they can appear to you very believable you don't want to believe them too much so easy to get into oh no i i've really got out of the wrong side of the bed today you know i shouldn't have taken that call and now i'm really jangled you can just say okay never mind you know you need to be like a dog you know dogs can get upset by things and then once the upset has gone they just you know they just put their their muzzle on their paws and just sort of smell a bit you know you know they don't carry it with them um we carry our lives with us um so see if you can be patient with the nirvana because you don't need to take your thoughts as seriously as you think you do i say you i mean me um yeah so i i'd really i think that word kashanti that buddhist word goes so often the traditional buddhist words are a bit better because they they've got more when you look at what they mean they've got this love sense that word kashanti it's not merely a grim endurance and you know making the best of it's actually something much more cherishing than that and yeah if you get bored then start to take that kind of softening interested attitude to that why am i bored how am i feeling bored um as i said the other day let's how about i try and feel more bored um and then you want of course your mind starts to get a bit interested in that and then you're not bored anymore boredom is a good thing basically we need to get much better at it i think that might be all the time we've got so um yeah thanks very much and uh really good to see everybody again um really good to see you all tuning in so tomorrow we'll have one last exploration in meditation but for now let's let's uh unmute and we can say bye-bye across the world and see you soon hope you have a good rest of the day whether a day if you're in the uk or europe or an evening if you're on the other side of the world so see you later bye-bye you can mute if you want to you can say about my i think nick has run off so because he's like he's good to see him bye everybody thank you very much bye bye thank you so much thank you goodbye thank you that was really great

Channel: Adhisthana

Views: 937

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Id: wcR_Hv5RusI

Length: 88min 16sec (5296 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 10 2022