Exploring Impermanence Day 1: Being in the Flow | Sona

um [Music] so this is the second month in the project the first month we had a seminar with uh um [Music] on this subject of kind of divided brain which is um and in the gilchrist subject he wrote a book called mastering his emissary and very very interesting man very very interesting um i think it's a theory still um about having two hemispheres of the brain where one collects all the information passes it across to the other side the left brain which usually works in a form of um thinking using logic language and thinking in a kind of linear way and but the bright brain is quite capable of thinking it can think more metaphorically using poetry stories and so on and most of us nowadays tend to think in this more left-brained way using logic as i say logic and using language and thinking you know you know sort of one thing happens after another like in time and um mcgill christ is concerned that the human race is becoming too one-sided um in in this way so it's um he he had something to say about mind and it it's quite useful just reflecting you know how your mind works to you are you always thinking about things in that way or do you tend to think in some other way i know some people can think in visually my mind certainly to thinks logically and uh sometimes i wish i could just switch it off anyway i'll say that more about that in a moment and then this on friday evening we had a seminar with a game with michael bandu nyana bacha um talking about um penny satori's book an interview on near-death experiences and so this seems to be becoming an increasingly popular area for many people in life and i i kind of suspect it's because death is one of those things that one of those issues in life where we we don't find it easy to go towards it's as though you know we well certainly when we're young we don't even think it's going to happen for a long time and as you get older you you're forced almost to start thinking about it a bit more and i think it's a way of like leaning into the subject instead of kind of trying to confront death straight on um looking at near-death experiences is a very very interesting way of come coming closer to to the issue of death of course many of us are afraid of death we don't know what's going to happen afterwards um but the i found the interviews with penny satori very very encouraging because it seems to suggest um almost with certain amount of um evidence if you like if you call it that so many people have had near-death experiences it seems to suggest that what we call consciousness or mind doesn't just end with death but it continues in some form or another after death or maybe it doesn't continue in a form at all so this is where we get into buddhist metaphysics and i'll try to avoid that just by the way um i've i've no idea how many new people there are on have joined us on this course and in a way this is a kind of a reach outreach of course it's trying to attract more and more people to just discover to work with their mind and take an interest in mind so i'd like to give a particular warm welcome to all of you if you're new and particularly if this is the first time you're on one of these events um i could just say a little bit about my own experience of mind um by way of introduction um i had a rather strange experience when i was about six or seven um it was as i i went to i was put in bed by my parents and um i was lying there and i suddenly realized i was awake i was awake i realized i was lying between sheets in bed in london and um it was so it was so my brain just started working and i started asking myself how did i get here i don't know why i asked that question but it the whole experience was odd it was just like waking up and i started thinking and nowadays i think i must have been using a very left brain approach to my thinking because i i asked the question how did i get there and then i went back and back and back i went through my parents my grandparents their grandparents right back to the first people and then i thought well how did the first people get to be here and then i assumed by this word god this being i had heard about have created them and most people stopped there but my brain didn't it wanted to know who created god i just assumed that if there was a god something must have or some somehow another it began and around about this point i started realizing there was a problem that no matter how far you went back there was always a point beyond beyond that and nowadays i realize it's what's called an infinite regress you just you don't actually get an answer but it actually terrified me um completely terrified um that the world could not have begun because there could never be a before the beginning see and you things just can't come from nothing so i wasn't so much interested in the end of things at the end of life and death i was terrified about the beginning of things and um i think i did find death a bit frightening because i thought that's when i would understand that it was all all wrong i somehow felt that reality the reality that i had around me really wasn't really real and um maybe i mainly had to deal with fear for the next few years and when i was 13 in a maths lesson of all places i um i was doing some um some some project with hyperbolic functions and things and you know these you have these curves on um hyperbolic curves and uh parabolia um curves i can't remember now but i worked out that um only part of a curve is a practical use for people like on the x y axis and that the curve continued off to infinity but never reached the its own maximum and what was interesting about this is it it was it was a kind of metaphor for me for mind i realized that um you could only think about certain things with the mind that we had and there were certain things you couldn't think about because there was no way of thinking about them so i came to terms with the fact that i had a mind that was very limited and but i also had a sense that there might be another faculty another way of being that would allow me to deal with this issue that i had as a small child um so that was very very reassuring i thought oh well i just have to live my life within this kind of box of parameters that i couldn't think about things outside of i couldn't think of how big the universe was that was outside the parameters of this box of mind and i came to terms with that so i became aware i had a mind and um later when i was about 18 um in a kind of dream or vision i had a figure that i now identify identify with a buddhist figure called um [Music] in the chinese form um sort of appeared to me and well to keep a long story short basically told me the most the the meaning of life was just to keep going it didn't really matter where you come from or where you were trying to get to it was the act of going that was really important actually the act of living life was the really important thing so for some reason this was incredibly reassuring too and it shortly after this i just i happened to discover buddhism for um and found the buddhists the buddha said something very very similar that with our present mind there are certain questions we can't really ask even can't even find an answer to but the most important thing is to deal with what the the issues that we have in in life so that was my experience of um of mind um i could also say that my mother was a spiritualist so a lot of the things that penny satori talked about in her interview and was mentioned briefly by matrabandu and nyalavacha on friday i was quite familiar with and i also remember when i i went to live in stockholm for a while and my teacher sang raksha he gave me a book on emmanuel swedenberg who also had um an experience of watching people um peculiarly at the end of his garden in stockholm he used to watch them cross over and he realized that they were people leaving this life crossing over into another life so this whole idea of the journey and getting to a point and then crossing over i was quite familiar with from my mother from her spiritualist meetings and then again later from swedenborg who i found very very interesting see used to be an engineer as well which is my own background so yeah i found all that very very interesting um [Music] so we have a mind and it seems as though um we use this term mind quite freely it's actually in english the word is one of those words that means all sorts of things isn't it we say you can mind your own business you can say it's on your mind and we kind of identify mind as a thing a thing that we have but um if you start exploring it it becomes more and more complex the very first seminar buddhist seminar i attended was a one that dealt with mind it was called outlines of mahayana buddhism and i was i was i came from an engineering background so i hardly knew what some of the words meant um in this text and found it all rather confusing and i remember saying to sanger actually at the end i don't really understand how to to approach mine there's just so many different words that you can use so many different ways so many different levels so many i i just find it all a bit confusing and there was something he said that was kind of um seminal to really to my own practice he said well maybe the um um maybe the most important thing to do is if you want to know what mind is to watch your own mind so you know like what is mind you can think about it you can read about it you can approach it from all different angles but in the end the only thing you can be sure of is if you watch your own mind watch what's happening in your mind and so i thought that was interesting and after learning to practice yoga i realized when i was lying down at the end of the first yoga session um and watching um just being aware of my body i just suddenly realized that there was my mind was just thinking the whole time it was like a radio broadcasting thoughts i hadn't realized this until i suddenly was lying there and thinking wow i just can't i'm just thinking the whole time i can't stop thinking and there was one thought after another and so [Music] i kind of thought that was interesting and and i was really interested in if i could switch them off and just experience things in a different sort of way so that's been my practice i think for the last 30 or 40 years is trying to come to terms with the fact that this your mind's a bit unruly it's a bit wild sometimes it just seems to go wherever it wants to and no matter how much you train it um you can eventually you know get some get it to do certain things that you want to but basically it's it's it's weird the mind it's weird and it's wonderful and it's interesting and one of the things i wanted to link this particularly to what penny's um talked about which is pointing us to towards the fact that there's death um in our lives and that life is um [Music] begins with birth and it continues and then we die and you know we we um often avoid that subject last year i happened to be a um talk that someone gave her a hospice and um the thing they said that really struck me there is that when people are able to confront death it's as though they can live more freely so something is released in them and if you're avoiding death the whole time if you really do not want to [Music] you know take into account that you're going to die so you just avoid it you don't even people don't usually talk about it we hardly ever see a dead body um in in the west in in modern industrial cultures bodies are taken away quickly and i have seen several dead bodies in my life and you kind of realize it's it's normal but it's just part of nature that things come into being and then things die all around us it happens all the time particularly if we go out and walk through nature we see it everywhere and it's one of those things about life that brings so much fear and grief particularly when people die and something we have to deal with but if we could approach life perhaps with a sense that the begin beginnings and endings is something very very normal that is happening all the time and i wanted to use these meditations this week to sort of go into this subject of realizing that um mind is like an experience or as a flow of experiences if it's a consciousness is a like a river if you like rather than a fixed thing and that um all our experiences are connected with a flow they don't there's not an experience that's kind of static that's stuck you may often sometimes feel as though we're stuck in an experience but if we start to analyze and watch it carefully we realize as it changes i've done a lot of work with people who suffer from chronic pain and they also report that when when you have chronic pain pain isn't just static that the pain comes and goes or sometimes in waves and i know from my own experiences of having migraines um that you can say i've got migraine but actually what you've got is a whole experience of things happening that seem to come and go and if we can approach life in in this way we probably could experience life being a lot richer and that we could get a lot more out of life one of the things that penny says penny satori said in her discovered in her research was that a lot of people had near-death experiences when they actually had an experience of of coming very very close to death it was transformative it transformed people mostly in a very very positive way um really big transformations took place not just the way they looked at life and thought but it actually changed the whole way they lived they lived their life and so i think it's a wonderful opportunity really to contemplate and realize that life is forever changing which is a bit of a a nuisance sometimes because particularly when we've got it all sorted you know if we get those moments where it's all sorted and it feels right just moved into the new house it's just right got the right job i think that enough money to pay for it if you're rich enough to buy a house or you know you you just feel this is the right situation and then a little thought comes into your mind yeah but it's not going to last very long something's going to go wrong or um or it does you know whatever happens it um you know it's never really static and we resist it and when we resist that we get more problems and difficulties so if we can learn to experience the constant flow the constant change that's taking place all the time i think we find that we can embrace life more fully we can as um one tibetan rinpoche says we can be in love with life with all this sort of beauty and difficulties um but we can kind of embrace it much more and as we do so this can be transformative in our own life and help us to deal with difficulties particularly when they arise and to fully and more deeply enjoy the good things in life when they come along too so so these are my sort of ideas for the meditations is that we excuse me we look at different aspects of our experience and just follow the um follow the flow of a changing way of being and so we're going to meditate if there's anyone who's never meditated before don't worry you don't have to know how to meditate i'm just going to lead us through a meditation if you've meditated before and i'm sure there's a lot of people who have meditated for many many years as well one of the good things about um to to remember about meditation is always approach meditation as though you're a complete beginner beginner's mind is the meditator's mind it should be a mind that doesn't know or expect anything to happen then of course anything can happen if you if you've got an expectation what you're going to get from meditation you'll either just keep reproducing the same thing or it won't nothing will happen in where you want it to um so if you can approach meditation as as like like a beginner if you are an experienced person and if you are a beginner just think how lucky you are because you've got no expectations of what's going to happen you don't know what's going to happen but i tell you one thing that you will find that happens whether you're an experienced meditator or not is that if you sit and try to focus your mind which is what we're going to do in a moment on one thing your mind won't stay still it will go off somewhere after a while now some people get very very good at keeping their mind focused on something you can do this with years of practice or if you've got the right conditions if you go on a a retreat or something where you're this is all you're doing you can get to a place where it's not so you're not thinking ever but your mind is becomes quite still but usually your mind your if you if you think of your minds more like where you're paying what what's what you're paying attention to what you're interested in it's going to to the things that you find interesting now unfortunately the things we find interesting aren't always pleasant we sometimes worry about things and that becomes our big interest so that's where our mind goes so it's good to remember that mind goes somewhere so this first meditation this morning all we're going to do is we're going to use the experience of breathing as a kind of anchor to anchor us in the present moment just like now not thinking about the past or thinking about the future just being where we are now and um and we're going to anchor ourselves in our body so it's a bit like our mind's not going to have gone off somewhere but we're just here here now in our body and the simplest way to do this and also it will bring in a kind of an experience of flow is to be aware of your breathing you can't really be aware of your breath you haven't got a breath what you've got is a process of breathing it's just going yeah it's coming in the air's going out it doesn't you don't have to think about the physiology of it you can experience that everyone can experience it the breath coming in and going out if you happen to be a person that doesn't feel comfortable experiencing your breathing you can experience other parts of your body moving instead of the air moving in and out you can experience the bits of the body kind of lifting and dropping as you breathe so you can try to focus your attention there sometimes it's called a breathing anchor i like this tone because it's like i i when i start breathing anchor i always have an image of a boat in a bay usually a beautiful bay of blue water sandy beach around and i've dropped an anchor off the front of this nice beautiful yacht that i have to be owning in my mind in my fantasy and the wind is blowing the boat around the anchor so it's kind of anchored to one place but it moves around and so i allow my mind to move around a bit but coming back and not getting lost like not going ashore and walking up the rocks or anything i'm going for a swim but just being anchored in that one place you can do by is a that's a metaphor of course for just sticking with your breathing so that's what we're going to do for about 25 minutes half an hour and um i'll just talk you through it um and give you some pointers because you may find that you've just drifted off and you've gone somewhere else instead of being anchored to the boat anchored to the practice um so what what's very helpful is if you can find a posture that you can sit in without moving for 25 minutes half an hour it may not be fully comfortable ideally it's a posture that makes you feel alert so if you're leaning back and or even lying down the danger is you you'll fall asleep which you're okay i mean some of the things may happen um if you're particularly tired you might need to sit up a little bit more and ideally you want to let the body relax um if you're sitting on a straight chair you can make sure that you've got some support perhaps a bit higher up your back that helps you to sit more erect if you're sitting on a comp by a computer table try not to lean on the table you don't want the light of the computer sort of disturbing you in fact you can close your eyes but most people do to meditate you don't need to look at me nothing's going to happen it's all going to happen in your mind so what you need to do is come out somehow turn inwards and just become aware of what's going in on your mind and um you don't have to look at other people either because um they you know they're going to be turning in in their minds too so sitting in a way that allows you to relax particularly relaxing your shoulders if you can place your hands on your lap somehow if you're sitting on the floor you don't need to sit on the floor to meditate and most people usually find sitting on a chair more comfortable there is a reason why people like to sit on the floor but we'll talk about that some other time so you just sit and have a sense of being supported by the chair and gradually turning inwards means like turning your senses inwards that's why closing your eyes is useful so that you're not being stimulated by visual images and you can just be aware of your body on that being supported on a chair or if you're sitting on a stool or cushions what's actually happening is you're sitting up whilst the force is pulling you down we don't often think about this but there's a force of gravity holding us down and when we're standing up we're kind of fighting with gravity is almost trying to knock us over and pull us down so we're constantly rebalancing when we sit down it's a lot easier to let go let go as it were into gravity with gravity and the chair the earth beneath us is supporting us you can have a sense of just letting go you're not really gonna make you really don't have to make much effort in fact the less effort you make the better really just being aware of any strong sensations you have in your body there may be tension if you're sitting cross-legged you may have tension in your legs or your knees and sometimes just playing paying attention to areas of tension or even pain helps to soften to remove the tension allows us to let our mind settle a little more this is the case of really moving our disability we have of paying attention to different parts of our body different experiences just paying attention to your body and sensations in your body and then becoming aware that you're breathing that could be because you can feel the air flowing in flowing out it may be because you can feel the body opening the [Music] and then kind of closing slightly there's an expansion and a retraction there's a rhythm to this rhythm to our breathing which is very soothing if we can find that rhythm of the in and the outflow what we call breathing whole process and whole massive things happening as we breathe i'm just exploring this the experience of breathing how do i know i'm breathing the question you could ask yourself what tells my brain that i'm breathing what what this is sensations what are the sensations that are telling my brain from breathing so what's interesting your mind goes to what's interesting is there anything at all interesting about breathing about the way i'm breathing when you're breathing or is it something uninteresting which will actually is a trick to be interested is to finding or finding out what's what is breathing boring does it bore you to be aware of your breathing pay attention to your breathing you don't need to really do anything to your breathing and let your breath just come and go it's all been controlled by an autonomic system in your body sometimes we take a deeper breath much shorter breath foreign so what is quite common is that we can maintain an interest in breathing for a certain amount of time [Music] if we are particularly interested in breathing we can maintain that time a lot longer but after a while it seems to normalize and yes we can feel the breath here we can feel it there maybe yes i feel quite calm feeling as though the brain my breathing paying attention to my breathing is making me feel a little calmer and as it normalizes usually what happens we lose a little bit of interest in it and we begin to find that our mind is more interested in something else so it goes off somewhere starts we'll thinking thinking about all sorts of things usually our thoughts are very repetitive it's very rare that we have new thoughts it's usually a thoughts about something we thought about before many times might be a simple thing like what am i going to have for breakfast or lunch or dinner or some other like something will grab you and it's good to realize that this thing that's grabbed you you've considered to be more important than sitting here anchored to your breathing you just gone off which is really interesting isn't it they are you're just going to be sitting here with your mind with your breathing paying attention to your breathing and then you go off somewhere we could get lost in thoughts quite easily at this point and you're just sitting thinking what we often do when we not doing anything else which is start thinking about things but very often we lose kind of a clear awareness [Music] we get lost in thoughts we're not clear that we're actually thinking about something so we could perhaps try to just be aware that when we start thinking about something our mind has just started thinking about something so another part of our awareness can watch this happening almost like a thought we think of a thought as a thing it comes into our mind and we can think oh look i'm thinking again you don't give yourself a hard time for doing that it's just really interesting i'm starting to think and maybe i could just try to come back to paying attention to my breathing that's why i wanted to be anchored to let that thought go you don't need to try to stop your thoughts because you just think about stopping thoughts but you can allow your thoughts to just float off without trying to stop them without trying to stop thoughts arising if you're making any effort at all it's just to remind yourself to come back and be anchored in your experience of breathing maybe finding something of interest in that experience there's so many sensations happening when you're breathing foreign and then of course you go off again another thought takes you away sometimes that's that thought leads to us subsequent thought and then another thought and another thought before you know what's happened you're thinking about a whole mass of different things three the purpose is this if you like exercise just allow yourself to come back to the sensational breathing um so in this practice let's just also pay attention to the experience of thinking because this is very interesting but um sometimes when we when our intention is to let the mind become still maybe like a water on the pond that pool of water where the water's still we could look through it could see the bottom and pond but more often than not particularly if we're a bit agitated restless the water is kind of whipped up into waves so short choppy waves and we're just kind of bouncing from one thought to another thought sometimes the waves are more like swells so it's like a long thought another long thought it may be that if you are if you've got up early or you're very tired your mind may be a little bit sort of foggy so the water is full of um plants kind of something a bit so stuck sometimes it's even as though our lines are a bit kind of stained with a dye covered in algae what kind of where we feel just i can't really make any efforts or just too much at times our thoughts get caught up with something that's really strong has an emotional one there's quite a lot of emotion invested in that thought bit pleasant or unpleasant it's like really taking us away from allowing things to settle so what sort of thoughts what's your mind like at this moment in terms of these images and by the way your mind doesn't necessarily exist in your head you may feel you can imagine the mind existing more in the heart region chest and in the background there's still this experience of the rhythm of breathing is constant flow [Music] something begins and something ends something begins and something ends and then it begins again okay we close i reflect on on the proposition if you like of what would be like if my mind became still like a pond so that whatever i look at whatever i'm tasting touching hearing smelling thinking this kind of what has a stillness to it richness to it could be more absorbed in the sound look at the shapes the colors as objects without having to tell a story an explanation about them what would it be like if i could still the mind or just allow the mind to still become still so the water becomes clear the waves slow down allowing any thoughts that arise just to flow through like a wave beneath us like lift us up begin to distract us from just letting go [Music] we let go we just settle down what would it be like if i could live my life like this from a place of stillness clarity open-heartedness when we feel more expansive less tight allowing yourself to be in a state of what you could call just being doing anything without thinking about anything in particular so and then just lastly we could just maybe rejoice in the fact we have a mind we have this ability to pay attention we can even be aware of ourselves being aware yes aware that we are having a thought does have an effect on us the kind of reflexive consciousness we have that can just be aware of what we're thinking what we're thinking what we're experiencing it's pretty amazing and it may be frustrating if we feel as though there's very little control over that mind is rather unruly but we may think of it more like a wild horse full of energy full of potential power strength mortality we may just consider that training a horse takes time patience it's a challenge life's full of challenges and if we can rise to that challenge in a positive way even if we've been sitting here just thinking about lots of different things maybe we could rise to that challenge and think yeah it's interesting to train my mind it's like more control i can let it become still still a little bit of training maybe all sorts of new things will begin to emerge if the mind becomes still quiet perhaps if nothing else has happened from this practice we may have a sense that at least we've discovered more clearly from just observing that our mind is constantly changing and this is you could say the nature of mind one of the aspects of the nature of mind that it's not a fixed thing it's more of a process process of thoughts feelings emotions sensations coming and going coming and going [Music] so so you can continue um sitting being more of your mind if you want to if that's comfortable um it could also become more um back to a normal awareness and if you have any questions you'd like to ask me um i can't guarantee i'll be able to give you an answer to all your questions but uh do my best um and nick will collect you can put your questions in the chat box if you want to um you could also i think probably that's the best place to put them but if you're not comfortable with doing that you could use the reaction button and put your hand up and you can ask the question so we could do a few questions like that and then nick will collect technical support in london this is title on the picture he'll collect um some questions and if he can gather them together so there's a sort you might ask a question that represents several um sort of interests that people have nick if you if you can do that if there are a lot of questions let me know how many questions so alex greenwood is asking uh how important is it to steal the body sorry can you just repeat that couldn't it this volume is quite slow here so alex greenwood is asking how important is it to steal the body how important is it to steal the body um well i i guess there's a there's a question behind this is another part of that question because um you could steal the body because it's tired or all sorts of things but to steal the body in terms of stealing helping your mind to become still there's different ways of looking at that actually because um if you're if you've got a um a mind that's incredibly active or you know is really worried about things i mean if you've been watching the news and you feel that you just can't stop thinking about war or something else you've seen in in the news it might not be a very good thing to steal the body actually to to to sit still you may be better off doing something because that will allow you to take control of your mind but um usually what happens in the process of working with your mind is that you allow the body to become still you kind of close off your senses all the time we're taking in information um we can't close our ears so there always be sounds around so we'll be taking information in and it's part of our survival mechanism we need to be on high alert all the time because something might threaten us so we we have that happening all the time but the more we can just like keep the body still not having to move not having to stay not having to balance that's quite a lot of things we don't have to do and it makes it easier to then kind of focus much more on what's going on in the mind to experience what the minds is so it's it's it's um the question can be answered in these different ways so if you're if you're meditating usually sitting still is the best way and you can sometimes it's a bit of an effort to sit still particularly if you've got some pain or it's uncomfortable if you're very uncomfortable the way you're sitting for instance you can just move i mean there's no point in just forcing yourself to sit there because all you'll be doing is thinking about i can't move i've got to sit still and that would be probably tension creating so when you're when you're trying to work with your mind usually it has two aspects it's one of just calming the mind down allowing yourself to calm down your body to calm down your thoughts to slow down if you like and then you can be much more observant to what's happening and sometimes you just discover there are things going on under the surface which begin to evolve so stillness is usually associated quite strongly with meditation and you images of the buddha kind of um give that message that your stillness is important but you can walk around meditating you can walk around um looking at things and being more aware of them so it's there's no one answer i guess to being still but usually starting off just doing nothing with your body is very helpful well most of the time actually if you're meditating i hope that answered the question and if that was quite what was being asked anything else so uh vijayanandi says after decades of meditation i realized today that i find watching my breath really boring plus i'm resistant to exploring that other meditation practices engage me much more any thoughts on how to best proceed yeah go to other meditation practices or if you wanted to be challenging you know if you find that doing something is boring then why why is it boring you know i mean is watching your breath boring or is it you who's just boring you know maybe you're just bored and you can't just watch your breath maybe that would be challenging a challenging way of looking at it and um that would be interesting to do that would be interesting to say okay i'm bored watching my breathless experience what is this boredom that i'm feeling watching my breath and if you're approaching meditation with the idea you're going to make something happen well that is another way of meditating and what we're doing today is just sitting trying to observe really what's happening and um the fact that you discover something is boring it's really interesting actually i mean microbandi talked about this uh when he was meditating leading meditations four weeks ago and it's it is um the more you can go into your boredom the less boring it is actually because actually boredom itself we can often get bored about all sorts of things and we don't often know how to deal with boredom and usually what we do how we deal with boredom is to distract ourselves so we think oh i'm bored or do something but supposing we thought i'm a human being that's bored so why am i bored why can't i just sit doing why can't i just sit being being aware of being alive i'm just breathing that's what i do i'm breathing i'm a human being is breathing is happening all the time and um you could you could approach things that way if you know that thinking about something in particular visualizing something in particular kind of quietens your mind down well you there's no no reason not it's good reason to do it just calm your mind down that way so but um yeah a lot of people a lot of people find it's very very common when people meditate and they're taught to be aware of their breathing it's so often you find it boring and the very fact that whenever your mind goes off somewhere it's usually because that's more interesting than the breathing everything's really not very interesting unless you start exploring breathing how do you know you're breathing where do you breathe what's moving when you're breathing with all these different diaphragms in your body that are moving around and um is being aware of the breathe of your breath calming or is it stimulating all sorts of things you could refocus on when you're being aware of your breathing if you're just sitting there going breathing in breathing out breathing in breathing out breathing in and bringing it it's going to be boring but it's actually if you're sitting there and you're breathing in breathing out you think oh this is very calming this is having quite a pleasant experience on that will bring a lot of interest to it so you can just not focus on breathing or you could turn the whole experience of being bored with breathing um into something interesting and i say this in a way as a way of approaching life because you can do this with everything in life everything in life that's boring you can when you're bored which you will be at times or some people are never bored because they're always doing things um very active people but maybe very active people need to be a bit more bored sometimes you need to learn how to just hang out and do nothing so i think you should get boring you know the experience of boredom you should give it a sort of um raise it up to a higher level it's a higher level of practice so it's an interesting thing okay maybe enough on board and so roland is asking [Music] when change can be so freeing why don't we want to see it well i suppose this comes down to an um of of being is is about um about ourselves that um we kind of naturally um tend to think that we exist in a sense this kind of fixed entity and um can you just ask the question again um i have a mind that constantly um segues off into things i have to make sure the so when change can be so freeing why don't we want to see it okay so there's probably a certain amount of fear then in that question but we don't want to see it we don't want to see change and that is because we have to come to terms with the fact that everything's changing like we're all getting older every single moment we're getting older every single moment we're getting closer to death that is something we don't want to accept and we don't like change and we want things to be if we can fix something even i was thinking um over the weekend you know this is saying there's one thing you can be certain of and that is you're going to die i'm not actually sure that you could be certain you're going to die i mean i think you can be pretty sure your body is going to fail and um the body will stop working but to say it's going to be death means that you're going to be experiencing it which means you're kind of not dying i don't know if you can see what i mean but i think why we don't like change is because we're really trying to feel confident in ourselves as being a human being and it's not easy to re-frame that and think of ourselves as a constantly ever-changing marvelously beautiful ever-changing process of being and enjoying change when they happen um we our tendency in life is to hold on to things because when we hold on to things it gives us a sense of our own identity but as things change and we adjust to them everything kind of moves and goes out of kilter and it's it can be exhausting as well we're constantly responding to things changing but um that's life isn't it you know the weather's never the same sunny some days it's raining other days you when you want it to be this way it goes that way and if we um it's a bit like if you're driving a car you're constantly moving the car onto university drive you're constantly turning the wheels speeding up slowing down because everything's changing around you and if you can go through life accepting that's how you're going to live your life instead of wanting to park the car and just sit there um you it kind of makes it all more interesting really and um so i guess there's there's a certain fear in um in change and a discomfort causes quite a lot of suffering really because things are outside so many things are outside of our control in fact the only thing you can really control is what's going on in your mind and that's really hard to do as well so amy is saying my mind is often going over plans and scheming when i meditate i try to label my experience but perhaps what i really need is to plan better outside of meditation any tips yeah amy um my mind does that as well and um you know i i'm sitting here meditating i'm thinking about the next thing i'm going to say so i'm kind of scheming and planning it's just so it's so normal but if you if you find it yeah if you wanted to probably maybe all of us need to do this is to give ourselves time to think about things a lot of people take up meditation to quieten their mind to become calm and they what they end up doing is planning and thinking about things or dealing with anxieties and fears and so on and um and you know in a way that's what they're using their time for but you could see meditation more as a kind of training you know it's a bit like going to the gym you're going to the gym to exercise the body well if you think of meditation more as a kind of training of the mind so that when you're doing meditation that's what you're doing is training the mind and you're not planning you're you may have to come to terms with the fact that that's what you you keep doing keep planning but you're training yourself to get away from doing habitually doing that thing but you probably do need to plan and work out what you're going to do that might be your personality type um some people just are able to not playing and just deal with things as they arise but they'll they'll have other issues they have to deal with but so many people nowadays didn't almost never sit down and just do nothing um usually people feel guilty doing nothing you know you feel like they're being it's wrong to sit and do nothing to sit just and look out the window and just let your mind wander let your mind plan you know you you might actually have a piece of paper by your planning and write down well that was a good plan i'll write that down you kind of make some progress with the planning um but if you're not doing the things that you really want to do and need to do and the only time you've got in your day to do them is when you're meditating that's what will happen it's just um it's just normal and it's yeah it's it's um probably you know the whole nature of mind project will be a training in trying to help you to discover what you're doing with your mind all the time not just when you're meditating and but you will need to sometimes stop doing things because when you're fully occupied with something your mind's functioning in a very focused and you know very directed way and so it's not easy to actually be aware of what's going on in the mind and having control of it so that's usually the best answer is to it's bad news for a lot of people find more time so it's like prioritize what finding more time means like re-prioritize your activities and um you can do this even like you discover that you can make time when you're walking from one place to another you can actually start planning you think i'm going to plan myself and walk to the bus stop or to the shops or something if that's what you want to do if you want to feel anxious or you can't help feeling anxious you could give yourself to feel like time to feel worried and anxious that's just part of your being is is kind of throwing that up so you can give yourself time to do that and then you just kind of there's spaciousness of course that's not easy in this modern world we have so much to do and um it's you have to be you have in a way you have to like learn to be more and more creative with your life and just take control of it a bit more i suppose and try to recognize you have some control um even in small ways just a few moments here and there of doing nothing see what happens good luck there's a there's one here that says how does a person who really understands that everything is always changing behave differently to someone who doesn't what qualities do you gain from integrating that understanding um i think when you come to terms with the fact that everything's changing um you can also be become a little bit more aware that you you're the author of change that you can actually change things in a way that is more helpful to you certain certain things happen to you um you're given some you're given um let's say you're given some bad news or you let's say you look at the news and it upsets you okay so you've you've got first of all you've got the upset the grief that maybe of what you're seeing and and hearing to deal with and you need to have give yourself time to deal with that but then what you may do is you might be going you might start ruminating kind of going back over and over and over again thinking about that thing and it's kind of taking you over it you've kind of lost control of it so um you remind me what the question was again because i can't i can find my mind segueing off into something else yes it's how does a person who really understands that everything's changing behave differently to someone who doesn't and what qualities do you gain from integrating that well yeah coming coming drawing myself back a bit really um i think actually your um it's it's a question of are you really aware of things changing i mean basically you don't need to think about things being changing all the time you just start noticing things are changing and i think the great thing about knowing things are changing when you feel stuck in a particular state i was talking about boredom before you know that boredom won't be there forever when you're stuck in a state of anxiety you know that you won't have to be in that state of anxiety forever you know things change so that you can actually um make you can have a more sort of optimistic view of life i i reckon if you if you know that things change if you're not going to be so stuck with things um if you're just not aware that things are changing all the time usually what people do not everyone but it'd be quite um normal is you're trying to fix things you're trying to get the building blocks of your life in place and keep them there if you see what i mean like you build your life up out of different aspects different compartments and your job your family where you live and everything you try and get all these things in lines so that they they stay where they are but life doesn't allow it to stay there like in that line for very long things get moved and if you don't accept that what happens is you you cause yourself a lot of grief and not suffering and you just why does it go wrong all the time why can't it just be still why can't i just have it like i want it and you it's just so frustrating but when you think oh this is life you know it's just gone wrong again and i'll put it back into place and just carry on in that way you can have a much richer and fuller life i think and you you can actually use change to your own benefit you think well i think i'm a bit stuck i'm sort of a very positive self view we can change that if everything changes you don't have to go on thinking in that way you could change where you are it's not easy we have a habit of being who we are but we can change who we are and that opens up all sorts of possibilities so it allows us to be so much more creative in life all right one more question so that's it for questions but there's a lot of thank those thank yous and appreciation coming through so i'd just like to say one last thing is that um the project the nature of mind project is something that um has been started up by initially by mitra bandung one of archer and um we're trying to make this available to as many people as possible and in order to do this i mean i'm in a studio here with all special equipment at haddistan and nick with technical supports in london who's employed to help make this whole project work seamlessly and [Music] working on bringing more and more people in more experts into the whole project to to give it to give it freely to as many people as possible but we are looking for support supporters to help us do that and this kind of support we're looking for is if people could consider making a donation of ideally something like 50 pounds for this six-month project that um is going to be available to is going to be available online even after it finishes for a long time but to make this whole thing happen and then even better still to be able to repeat it in the future we're looking for support so one of the things you could consider is you know to do with change you could change your bank account slightly i mean after all it's just numbers in your bank account it's not real money it's just numbers you can move some of the numbers into another place and um that's change you know you're kind going with change and um that would be wonderful to support that and the other thing you can notice about making donations and supporting things it actually changes how you are and how you feel that you feel more expansive and usually you feel happier when you give things so um just like to invite you to support to really partake in this project not just by being a recipient but actually by support actively supporting us to continue this project into the future and so i think we got a link somewhere where people could go and um and grab the moment you know if you feel like giving something now just don't do it you know because your mind will change and later in the day you'll forget or you think oh i don't know about that you know i might spend it on something else but uh you know just at the moment just learn to grab the day grab the day and um up a day just make something happen um positive and see how we can see how it affects you maybe on that i'll have to close there and um well we just got a few more minutes but i think you could um maybe we're all in a community at the moment there's still 70 of us on this um platform you could all unmute yourself if you wanted to and just say goodbye to whoever and just to give you a sense of all being in this big community which we hope will grow and grow to thousands of people hi everybody thank you everyone thank you so much [Music] thank you bye pleasure see you tomorrow thank you bye okay all right thank you very much see you tomorrow bye

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 907

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Id: XjNj32xzv1g

Length: 82min 32sec (4952 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022