Exploring Impermanence Day 2: Mind Watching | Sona

um so welcome everyone just for the recording and um i just wanted to say that my name's sona and i live near adestana and i wanted to start this session off with a bit of a um just looking at where we've come to so far with the mindfulness of nature of mind project so last month there was a discussion using material from in the christ who um wrote a quite a very interesting book called the master in his emissary and basically mcgill christ's theory if i don't know how accurate it is but it's a very very interesting idea of a divided brain where one part of the brain is um receiving all the information and um kind of determining which parts it will go to and a lot of a lot of the processing of the information that we receive through our senses into the brain gets passed over to what he calls the left side the left hemisphere of the brain apparently both both hemispheres of the brain can do most of the functionalities of each the each um what the brain needs to do all the functionalities that the brain needs to do but the left side just seemed to become a bit of a specialist in um in in thinking using rational thought using language um thinking about things in a kind of linear way and often very um analytical and so it kind of cuts things up and breaks things down into parts whereas the right side of the brain has an ability to see more of a wholeness of things and kind of always maybe make a rational sense of that wholeness but it still doesn't it still means that there is knowledge information being processed by that side of the brain and um in the gilchrist he's i think he's um was certainly reading his book and listening to his interviews he's quite concerned about humanity becoming overly dependent on the left functionality of the brain as you call it the thinking analytical conceptual rational side of the brain and losing touch with um and also perhaps not hold not not placing enough importance upon developing the right side of the brain so many of us can think very very well and don't use that side of the brain but the right side is can be a bit left out then this week we've we had on friday we had a little seminar um around near death experiences based on the work of penny satoru and that was very very interesting because what you find when you try to make sense of those type of experiences you're trying to understand it usually most of us are trying to understand it with our left brain which is throwing up all sorts of questions and um and um difficult in a way to fully accept that um that when we die where we don't just disappear that we don't just end it's not the end of things um there seems to be a growing um a growing sort of understanding that consciousness is just a flow of continual things and that when the body dies the consciousness continues somehow not being a fixed thing but more of a flow of of um consciousness is it's very difficult to talk about it and in a way that's what the whole project of nature of mind is about is trying to get a feeling for a sense of what mind is and of course the whole time with this left side of the brain i'm trying to understand it intellectually is the brain is the mind this is it that and um the other side's kind of saying you don't need to you just kind of you've got a mind and just use it and just develop it so if you feel kind of split sometimes that's probably why because our brain tends to split things off and it makes us very very efficient as human beings we can do a lot of things with the left side of brain we can make a lot of things happen we can solve illnesses develop vaccines and so on and and the right side of the brain can develop all sorts of beautiful works of art it can appreciate the beauty of the world and so on but the idea of near-death experiences kind of brings in a very interesting idea because if death isn't the end of our being in some way if we come into this life we live this life and then it ends full stop nothing happens afterwards then it raises all sorts of questions for those who think kind of a bit more existentially what's the purpose of being alive and why am i here if you then then think that um well your consciousness continues afterwards you may come to the conclusion that death the life itself is a kind of way of perhaps developing consciousness the consciousness can be developed as we probably all know we can become more aware if you can become more considerate of other people we can experience things more deeply and so forth and we could see life as a a period a process in which we kind of when we leave life leave this physical life we go away with something more than what we came into this life with and the standard indian and certainly the buddhist approach is that this process continues like that from one lifetime to another and sometimes it's described like a flame it's like consciousness of a candle and the body dies the candle goes out but the flame continues on to another candle so the flame doesn't die but it just transfers so in a sense what we call me eye and so on if if we're over identified with the body that ends but our consciousness can continue so if we start considering and thinking in that way um knowing the mind knowing consciousness becomes increasingly interesting and more important so this is a pretty much the underlying nature of buddhism in the senses that we are trying to develop and improve could even say evolve our consciousness our minds and so we can become more and more and one of the ways in which we do this is to get to know the mind through meditation um a lot of us just i mentioned yesterday that when i first took up um yoga at the end of the yoga class session i did with you do this lying down posture something's called shavasana or corpse pose and when you're lying there for the first time ever you might recognize or realize that you're just thinking that thoughts are just pouring through you and um that's what happens you just got one thought after another's liking it to a radio that's just chattering away with one voice talking about something and almost like another voice talking and for some people this is quite a aha moment sort of a waking up moment realizing actually most of the time i just talk i'm just thinking and most of the thoughts if you explore them and most people that have tried to um [Music] count the number of thoughts you have and what sort of thoughts you have and estimate there's something like 70 to 90 000 thoughts that you have a day and most of them you've had before and quite a lot of them are not very um positive they tend to be kind of looking on the negative side of life so to get into the habit of just regurgitating or ruminating on these same old thoughts of just going round and round when you start waking up to this fact you think well wouldn't it be nice to actually do something about it to turn to turn the radio down maybe to put some better programs on if you want to use that of the radio something more interesting something a bit more creative and it's possible to transform your mind so that your mind is more creative that it can [Music] it can respond in much more creative ways to all the sorts of things that happen to us in life um so buddhism i would say that probably the a lot of the buddhist practices meditation practice are helping us to kind of tone down the activity of the left brain we want to talk about in terms of brain and up the activity of the right brain so buddhists for instance had rituals um not just meditations meditations can be extremely imaginative ones and someone said yesterday i enjoy doing those much more than just being aware of your breathing and um it can through all the different rituals and things you can just feel that you are becoming more and more alive so but this morning we're not going to do any rituals we're just going to work with the mind meditate again i just like to say a little bit more about motivation um those of you who practice meditation i know a lot of you who are in this group have practiced before and if you're new to meditation probably the first thing you begin to realize that if you set yours your mind on a task like something simple like just being aware of the in and out flow of the breath very quickly your interest goes somewhere else it um some people find it boring just watching the breath quite honestly it can be incredibly boring just sitting there breathing in breathing out breathing in reading out and then suddenly your mind thinks well why am i doing this or wouldn't it be nice if i was reading a book or having some breakfast or doing something else so what do you the first thing you know or notice when you take up meditation and um which you're of probably still dealing with 20 or 30 years later is that when you set your mind to focus on one thing it very easily goes to another thing and it very easily goes to another thing and another thing and there's lots of associative thoughts because your mind jumps from one thing to another some people will stay with one thing like planning activity or something of their day but the mind is going to what's interesting so how do you meditate how do you actually learn to bring your mind to to focus on one thing um well first of all you need a certain amount of motivation um you may need to remind yourself why you're doing it because um sometimes you just sit there you're watching your mind you know watching your mind going here and there you realize you're not doing the focusing on the breath you think why am i bothering this just seemed to be too too too much too hard so it can be helpful just to remember why you might want to to meditate um i've no idea why any of you want to meditate um but um usually people come to to learn meditation for two reasons um one is that um what you could call psychological or emotional but basically we feel unhappy we feel um there's something wrong with our um life is quite painful um living the life we're living due to a lot of stress of modern life and so on um for other people it might be more existential that um you know we're quite happy living our lives um we get along all right but there's this niggling sort of part saying what's the point what am i doing this for and uh what's life all about you know why am i here and that would you could call that the more existential aspect that can be unpleasant as well of course and um usually nowadays i would estimate that more people will come to meditation due to more psychological mental factors they're looking for peace and tranquility you know a reduction in stress and an increase in well-being and so on but sooner or later if you carry on meditating the existential questions will start coming creeping in actually because you'll start thinking more deeply about things and if you come because of existential issues to start with you'll probably start noticing that there are aspects of your being that are getting in the way the kind of some sort of psychological habitual things that you have that you have to look at and deal with otherwise you don't very difficult to make progress in meditation so the two things often come together and that's a kind of a rather negative way of looking at why you take up meditation it's because something's wrong but there's also another aspect to meditation and that is it seems to open up all sorts of new possibilities to make your life a lot richer helps you to not react to things so automatically so spontaneously but to have a more creative approach of how you do things so today we're going to um continue with an exploration of mind on this course we're not actually going to teach people how to meditate we're really discussing and exploring approaches to meditation i think if you're new to meditation or you haven't meditated before i would strongly recommend that you um attend one of tree rapid centers or somewhere else where you can learn to meditate by an experienced meditator you usually need to as a beginner quite a bit of structure so there's much more structured ways of meditating than what we're doing today um and i can recommend tree right now the addistana website is probably a good place to go if you wanted to find more information and explore places where you can get some help in meditating i often see meditation is like learning a new musical instrument i recently a few years ago um decided to learn about music to learn to read music and try to play the piano and then i went on to ukulele which seemed to be easier but um one of the things i realized when i was learning to play music was that you have to do quite a bit practice and technique but technique just practicing technique so if you're playing mute say the piano you would learn to play scales that was one of the things i had to learn to play and just train my um synapses just so that i could read a note here hit a note and then play scales over and over again and sometimes it was it was a bit um uninteresting even bordering on boring and frustrating sometimes because it was hard to do but when you get the hang of it it's kind of you start you're feeling so good and you realize you can you can actually change yourself and sometimes you can even produce a bit of music because you can make notes follow one another and something flows and it's very very enriching but it does need constant practice i think anyone who practices to become a professional musician practices something like three hours a day so if you wanted to be a really good efficient meditator you would probably have to change your life so you could create three hours of practice a day but i think meditation might be even more difficult than an instrument but once you can play an instrument you can join an orchestra and once you're playing in an orchestra or a choir or singing a choir you can have an experience that is um wonderful it's something happens that's more than the sum of the parts and those who have experienced that we know i'm talking about so meditation can bring a lot of richness and bring a lot of new things new wonderful things to you to your life so today we're going to go back to just ex experiencing really what happens when i set myself the task of doing something simple relatively uninteresting how can i remain focused on it so there are two ways of approaching that is one you and we're going to be becoming aware of the breath i yesterday i said mentioned about a metaphor of a boat um i say like a yacht being anchored in a little bay that's how i see it nice sunny sort of mediterranean bay uh clear water and um you're there on the yacht the sails are down you're just still a little bit of a wind and not much you drop the anchor the anchor hang fixes you in the bottom and your boat is just sort of blown around a little bit but it doesn't really move very far from the spot that's the whole point of the anchor and this you can use this analogy for doing this practice of what you could call mindfulness or being aware of breathing so that you just use the breath as an anchor to come back to and it's a bit like the boat it will wander off and then you'll remember oh yeah i was supposed to be anchored to my breathing so you just come back and you don't give yourself a hard time when you wander off because that's what your mind will do and that's what we're exploring really the other way of approaching this is you start off with this being anchored on the mind and then you notice your mind wandering off and then if you're if you can feel more aware of what your mind's actually doing like what thoughts you're having what feelings you're experiencing you could think oh that's interesting and you will what where you may if you wanted to go far enough in that way you could start analyzing because the left side of the brain will start doing that analyzing what thoughts am i having and you could divide these thoughts up into thoughts about wanting something something pleasant that you want to bring towards you thoughts about something you don't want you are something you don't like maybe a person or some situation you want to push it away so very often we have this kind of i want this i don't want that approach this is what causes a lot of stress in life and some of us are very very good at just doing nothing we're kind of our thoughts are wandering around we don't know we're not particularly wanting anything um we might be thinking about you know the best way to um with the best route to go to working or to do something somehow i even find myself trying to multiply numbers together which completely seems ludicrous but um it's a bit like um just keeping my mind active sometimes so um you could have well you could have something that's you're craving for something that you're pushing away or that you're just kind of confused about you don't really know what you've done you can develop your ability to watch your mind do that and then when you notice it's doing that you don't want to stay there analyzing it too long you can just bring it back to the breath and be anchored there so that's all i'm going to say now and we're going to practice this i know when people are being led through meditations it can be slightly irritating if someone talks too much so um if you're a beginner some people prefer that someone's talking and holding you kind of reminding you to come back so it's very very difficult as a leader in the meditation to get it just right in fact you know you can't get it right for everyone so if i'm talking too much for you then just see how you react to that that would be probably another thought like we should shut up you think oh that's a thought and then you would um think oh yes an unpleasant thought okay that's interesting and so you can work with your own mind in that way and the whole process becomes incredibly interesting even breathing becomes interesting you can ask yourself how do i know i'm breathing where am i breathing where is breathing you you might start analyzing what's it for and you know it's keeping you alive and you might think well wow wonderful i'm breathing i'm alive and you can rejoice in that so all sorts of things can happen if you don't just sit there and think ah breathing in breathing out breathing in breathing out or what i've gone to now tonight it can just become kind of very repetitive and slightly boring so you do need to sit up a little bit and make an effort but not too much effort if you make too much effort it becomes counterproductive and tense um so the idea is to be alert and you could call this practice watching the mind by anchoring it to your breathing it's like a breathing anchor and mind watching watching what happens in your mind and not trying to think too much about it and letting the thoughts come acknowledging them you may be carried away versus an interesting thought and then you can just let it go and see if you can come back to this training of remaining kind of more still more anchored to your breath so just introducing a little bit of ritual i'm going to ring a bell at the start of the meditation that wasn't me ringing the bell that was me dropping the ringer on the bell [Music] so just to help those of you that are new to meditation or you feel like you're you'd like to think of yourself as being a complete beginner again you don't know what's going to happen and if you can put aside all your expectations of what you want from meditation perhaps just focus on sensations in your body first of all so we have this body wonderful body for some people it goes wrong it goes wrong for all of us at some time or another but um usually it functions pretty well and it has a certain mass and weight and if you sit there you may have a sense of that weight being that sense of weight of the body is created by the force of gravity holding us down and we can feel this is so we can feel this force in different parts of our body wouldn't go looking for the force because you won't find it but what you can find is sensations you can feel your bottom on a chair or a stool or cushion and that's because a lot of the weight of the upper body is pressing being pressed down if you're sitting on a chair you can feel your bottom on the chair your feet on the floor if you're sitting kneeling or cross-legged you may initially feel a certain amount of tension in the joints sometimes that tension can be released any tension in the body can be released to some degree by being aware of it and you could do that by imagining you're breathing into that part you're not really breathing into it but you're connecting your breathing with that particular sensation of tightness attention in the body and as you breathe out it may trigger your nerves [Music] neurons to release some of the tension breathing out is often a very calming thing to do i'll say something more about that in a moment about breathing and calming the time being just kind of moving through the body feeling the weight very often people when they're sitting become aware of tension tightness in different parts particularly around the shoulders back there may not be very much you can do about it it may be you need to adjust your posture you don't need to sit still and just and experience pain or difficulties you can move readjust and a lot of these tension in the neck and shoulders and back is caused by how we place or how the head is aligned with the rest of the body the head is a very heavy limb of the body and if it's falling forwards it's going to pull quite a lot of muscles into tension in the back and the shoulders and if it's tipping to one side it's going to do the same with other muscles so even with your eyes open to start with you could check if your head is straight because your you're two eyes if you've got two eyes working that can give you a horizontal line that tells you if your head is straight and the chin can come in or it may maybe better to think of the top of the back of the head being lifted up and this will align your head with the chin feeling so it's moving in slightly and throughout this meditation it's quite good to come back to your posture and sensations in your body and just check what's going on you could turn your attention to the fact you're breathing how can you tell what tells you you're breathing is it the sensation of air passing into through your nose into your lungs is it the movement of the expansion of the chest or belly it's the you have a diaphragm in your chest that's pressing down when you breathe in it pushes the organs beneath it outwards so there's got a lot of movement going on in your body as you breathe break my mute if you're not breathing very deeply and for most people not perhaps everyone but for the majority of people just being coming away just becoming aware of your breathing has a very calming effect on you on your mind calming effect on your brain calming effect on the autonomic system that is on watch for any dangers distractions of any brilliant ideas all that can be calmed down by simply enjoying more the breath coming in and going out if if breathing in and out kind of makes you feel uncomfortable then maybe focus on the sensations in the belly or in your back these will be caused by the breath coming in and going out we may just like to feel the air flowing in and flowing out so all sorts of things you can discover about the breath and i i would imagine it's the rhythm of the breathing it's very calming apart from the physiology of oxygen being taken to the lungs and so forth but the feeling of a rhythm of a flow in will flow out the beginning and the end which ends with a new beginning this is perhaps a reflection [Music] or an image for life coming into being going out sensations coming in dissolving thoughts coming in and dissolving foreign b foreign so ideally the thoughts that arise in the mind when they arise notice them as best you can let them go someone said yesterday that they spend a lot of time and trying to meditate planning things so sometimes we have what you could call more emotionally charged thoughts that you keep coming back to we notice them but this is over too dominant in our mind and the way we could approach being with these thoughts is akin to i call it the horse whisperer technique it's a bit like if you want to train a wild horse it seems to be better not to force it to do things but to try to get up close and make friends with it so to use this analogy with breathing if you are finding yourself just being constantly poured in a certain direction certain thoughts go with them give yourself permission to think them and at the same time see if you can be aware of your breathing while you're thinking of those thoughts kind of multitasking you just give yourself permission to think that thought and then in the background there's still the breathing going on this rhythm of breath coming in they're coming in and going out if you're just drifting you one thoughts just coming in after another well just notice that you're drifting like a boat just drifting around and you have an anchor you can come back to your breathing if you're drifting and a bit sleepy you might make a little bit of a little bit more effort to come back and focus on the breath but not too much effort that causing tension you have to decide what you need to do today is mood in the way you are at this moment c foreign what we may begin to realize that although we have a lot of stillness in the body sometimes there are unpleasant sensations from just sitting still sometimes tensions which we can release a little but maybe not completely overall there's a kind of stillness to the body but there's often a lot of activity going on in the mind a whole whole city of activity and focusing on the breath is helping us to find a little space a little park bench where we could sit not all that activity going on around us without being too caught up with it like the noise the traffic of their own mind to occupy to notice the more beautiful things more vibrant bright enjoyable aspects to sitting still and every now and again just becoming more aware of your posture you may need to adjust slightly if you're tensing up or if you have pain that's causing you to be more focused on the pain than anything else yes if you can find a another way of sitting you can adjust and coming back to being alive being alive to your breathing it's probably good not to think in terms of watching your breathing but actually being your breathing you are just breathing it's an experience there is an experience of the mind wandering off as well as another experience well you may begin to experiences that your mind isn't a brain thing consciousness isn't in the brain it's in the brain but not just in the brain i guess maybe it's all around us it's rather mysterious it is just mysterious consciousness and it's useful to include the whole body whole body awareness as you breathe as you become more aware what's happening the processes of thinking feeling ideas forming and dissolving emotions arising being accepted more often begin to dissolve into stillness uh um every now and again you have a sense that the mind is becoming like a mule pond stillness the fog if there is a fog of the water being polluted with allergy or dies too much plant life maybe it begins to clear maybe all the ripples or waves begin to die down then you may even get a sense of clarity so something new an amazing man nudge okay it may be good to also to reflect on the fact that when the mind becomes still it doesn't just experience stillness can experience tranquility but it's maybe the analogy would be of a wild horse if one recognizes one's mind is being a bit wild it's really difficult to tame it seems to have a life of its own but the image of a horse a wild horse that's unbroken is one of energy something beautiful about that energy but there's something even more beautiful about that energy flowing into an activity kind of bringing together of all the different aspects of mind into a constant flow can have a tranquility often seems to give the impression of being still and quiet but it could also be the tranquility of a mighty river a powerful horse galloping or a river flowing two different metaphors but all this energy coming together the vast amount that is all there within all of us so coming from the depths of our being powerful energy beautiful bright the energy we need to deal with being alive being human flowing together um and lastly we could just reflect that this energy that we have in a sense is part of everything there's well over a hundred of us all together sitting still in spread out many countries many different places at least all doing the same thing bringing together kind of wholeness of being we might just reflect and become aware of other people without necessarily looking at the screen just knowing there are people there meditating just like we are like i am as human beings we long for contact or connection it's what makes us human c um maybe one of the things that we find fulfilling in life is bringing that sense of wholeness not just to ourself but to friends family people around us connecting in a deeper kind of way one mind touching another mind flowing together [Music] and realize that some of you particularly those in europe may need to leave now because it's 8 o'clock here 9 o'clock in europe and different times elsewhere but um don't move too quickly you might like to just have a little bit of a stretch move the body around feel the body waking up and um one of the approaches to meditation is quite useful after you've practiced meditations just to reflect on how it went for you and did you know anything so something you could bring into the practice when you do it again so it's um it's always useful sometimes people wait for the bell and the bell goes and they just jump up it's almost like a jack-in-the-box spring up it was quite good just to sit and even if you didn't have a particularly enjoyable time sitting still once things happened it's useful to know that and just to recognize and accept this one helps this whole process of becoming more aware of what's going on for you in your consciousness but we have a bit of time now for those who might want to ask questions and if you want to put them nick's going to collect the questions um hopefully and [Music] tell me and i'll do my best to answer there's no questions yet but there's uh quite a lot of appreciation coming through and uh thank yous and uh kathy's saying it's great to connect with your minds across space and time amy saying it's a wonderful to be led through and to to meet you through this medium it's a trouble when you sit for quite an english mind questions disappeared if anyone's had any interesting experiences whether we're meditating up they would be happy to share them that would be nice to hear as well so katherine's saying my mind is constantly wanting to seek a self-identity okay self identity when i was driving here this morning i was thinking quite a bit about this that um as buddhists once often has this idea that one has to um kind of overcome or get rid of um sense of self of your self-identity but um i don't think it's actually very very helpful to think in that way um i think it's probably if that's what catherine meant by that i'm not sure but um when i was thinking that um we've all got an identity we all know we've got a self we are our self and um it would be really odd not to have that self but we're also um beings of habit you could say i to our we are our identity is very much based on habit of what we think and who we are and instead of trying to remove the sense of self it might be more useful to think in terms of removing unhelpful habits so um you know just rejoicing yourself rejoicing your identity rejoicing being who you are not everyone finds that easy actually we often have a bit of a downer on ourselves but um pretty remarkable things aren't we we're human beings that you could see it like this process of evolution we've got this body and brain and mind and something and it's an absolutely amazing and even if we feel a bit down about ourselves you know objectively it's just amazing and but we do sometimes have bad habits and these bad habits are the things that causes problems um you know where we may be in the habit of wanting craving for too many things and not getting them being frustrated we could look at some of these these sort of as we become more and more more and more aware of what we do in our mind we can work on the habits that we have and um we can feed the good ones the ones that perhaps bring joy brings spaciousness and a sense of expansion of the mind and we could work on kind of reducing the energy we put into the other habits of things we do that we know make us feel tight and limited um eventually making us unhappy really because we're dissatisfied with who we are when that happens so instead of thinking in terms of identity as a kind of a thing that we have i i personally find it more useful thinking in terms of i am just my thoughts and my views on my habits and all these things i can change i mean i can't really change the way i look very much i can shave my head and i could lose weight i could do a few things but that would be very important but what i could do in my with my mind is massive how i could transform my mind it takes a lot of time and training but it starts with just paying attention to becoming aware of what we're actually doing and by the way this in buddhism is what's called buddhist ethics it's simply working with your mind to reduce the things that cause you suffering maybe other people suffering and limit to you and then feeding the um habits that we have all the things that we know that bring joy and bring some you could call love into the world into our life that make us feel bigger and we're more um feel kind of more proud of ourselves being a human being who is able to be generous and kind and giving and so on so this is um really you know one talks about morals and ethics but in buddhism it's kind of very practical it's just um [Music] like you could just carry on being miserable by making yourself miserable or you can start trying to become sort of less so by creating more positive habits and than just seeing what works for you but having the confidence in yourself as being able to change which is really important if you haven't got that confidence if you have to have one belief in life as a buddhist it's the belief that you can change if you think you can't change and you're stuck then maybe you need to sort of um reflect on that more and just notice actually everything's changing why are you so different you know are you kind of an absolute you know perfect unchanging being or or are you also in the process of constantly changing so if you're accepting your like everything else everything's changing why don't you just think about changing for what makes you feel bigger better greater more and um it's a very positive message isn't it that we can all become more more and more on the way to the most whether that is but um you know there's no nothing stopping us apart from our own habits so and one can't make small of that it's very very difficult to change habits of course but the first thing doing to recognize is that there would be some advantage in changing those habits and learning how how our minds function in terms of watching our thoughts and emotions and things and giving more weight to the ones that we find helpful and positive kind kindly once and less weight less attention to the ones that are unhelpful well that's a bit of that so uh ida has a question i'll allow her to unmute and as you can speak hello everyone hello sauna um you can't hear me fine right sorry can you hear me yeah yeah okay um first of all i found the meditation and very helpful and whatever you say is very inspirational it was a very pleasant experience and i wanted to share what was interesting for me which is maybe not very interesting for others but this is what i do during meditation as well i'm not kind to myself and i caught myself when you before meditation you had told us to maybe categorize our thoughts during meditation and i caught my thoughts 100 percent almost hundred percent were negative um usually towards myself or full of fear very fearful thoughts um stressful thoughts and what really helped me was your analogy to the wild horse because i was also unkind when i caught myself during those unkind the unskillful thoughts i was like ah you did it again kind of very gently i noticed that you're drifting away you have drifted away come back but with the wild horse analogy i could sense that i wasn't really totally drifting away i was in control although i had drifted away i was still with the breath and i was still in control so that was a very um very good feeling yeah yeah thank you so much for that yeah but i don't know how to change sona i don't know how to maybe just being aware that my thoughts are full of fear and negative thoughts for others and myself maybe that'll help me change well it sounds to me like you do know what to do and you're doing it and you just need to keep doing it you know that um um whenever and you're not alone in this so many people have negative thoughts probably the majority of the majority of all our thoughts and what you could call negative they're about us and you know self-centeredness and what we need what i need what makes me happy and sort of kind of not very generous in a way but we do have lots of very very positive thoughts and even the thought of doing something about changing yourself is extremely positive so starting to rejoicing you know you can smile at yourself go up you know just have a positive thought and you once you've had one positive thought you collected positive thoughts and so on you have moments of peace and you can have more moments of peace and everything can change but it is a slow process you can't you can't get away from that and you shouldn't um i mean the danger is you think you can just change easily and you find you can't and then that's real down there and it's just reinforcing the sense that i'm useless i can't do these things so i don't want to play down the difficulty of changing but if you see it as a challenge and like human beings really benefit from challenges you just i mean some of the same life is enough a challenge just living but um you know challenged to do something more interesting it's a quite a useful way of approaching things i think so when you take up a challenge you always fail you know that's the whole point of a challenge that you know you're you're failing all the time but you're also overcoming your failure and you do it again and again and again and you get somewhere so so ming is asking uh i sometimes have music playing when i'm meditating what should i do about that well in his head in his head well um i don't know really i don't have music playing in my head but i i would i would practice enjoying it you know maybe you can enjoy the beat and the rhythm of the music and you could breathe with it breathing in breathing out breathing in breathing out breathing in breathing out feeling it relaxing now you may change the music you're playing in your head and see what happens to that so i don't know it'd be interesting to get a um a report on sort of different ways of practicing with music playing in your head i think if you just try to stop it it's probably counterproductive you just produce some other tune um that's going so um accept it and just think well is it a pleasant thing is it something i want to happen is it um yeah what sort of music is it um whatever you could just sort of use that sort of analytical function to just work with that for a bit but not just forcing it away and if that's helpful i just have problems in my mind that i want to solve usually so watching head music sometimes i might be able to write a good song so very agile uh sorry uh viraja is asking uh would you say something please about being sleepy during meditation oh yes i was thinking of saying something about being sleepy when we were meditating and um depends on what time of the day um i think you're in australia aren't you and [Music] there aren't you um so if you you're going to probably be in a time of day when you feel a bit sleepy but um what i've found helpful um when i've been on retreats and so on and doing a lot of meditation and times of the day i'm sleepy um i sometimes just give myself permission to go to sleep i i just sit and fall asleep and usually if i do that i i almost like have this sense of well sometimes my head goes like that in a jerk and i probably get a shot of adrenaline going through my body but if you um if you're not fighting sleep um you feel sometimes feel less sleepy and you might even have a little sleep and then you wake up quite bright that's been my experience so um you know it might be useful just to say oh i'm feeling sleepy i'll have a i'll have two or three minutes sleep and then you can spend another 20 25 minutes being awake so it's um if you're kind of working on feeling sleepy i'm really tired i've got to wake up i've got to wake up you you end up just in a battle really between trying to keep yourself awake if you you can do other things like you can open your eyes and look around a bit and you can um also do walking meditation if you're very sleepy you just mean everyone i think is in a room on their own so you can get up any time in this in this way of doing things and that's all i can think of maybe other things rebecca's saying i had quite a difficult thought uh thoughts and it felt heavy in the left hand side of my head i tried to breathe and to relax and to let go but a sense of it remained as heaviness in my head for a little while yeah it's quite interesting that you felt you had a heaviness in the left side of your head um when i came across in the gilchrist and i thought of developing the right side of my brain i wondered if i could actually experience the right side of my brain and i started focusing on it and i actually could feel as though it was as i my awareness my paying attention to the right side of my brain made it more alive and um so if you can actually feel that something's happening in one side then you recognize well you've got another part of your brain that you may be able to feel as well and it might have more lighter brighter aspects to it which may counter counterbalance or help to resolve the issues that are causing the tightness usually people get um i mean if you think about it a lot of us experience fear because we're thinking about things that are frightening if we stop thinking about things that are frightening usually the fear is not there um it's not always it may be in the background somehow but usually our thoughts and our analysis of situations certainly in my mind because i'm quite a thinking type person and produce fear and then i have to kind of accept that's what i'm feeling and feeling quite fearful and do something about it you know what i do if i'm feeling fearful in the day for instance i get up and do things and move around and do a task like washing up or something but um what i've come to realize that fear's an interesting thing you have a an autonomic um something part of your brain will produce fear when there's a threat to you a real life threat but looking at most of you who i can see with your cameras on i can't see anything threatening you at the moment there is no dog or big tiger or you know um you know something in the background about to attack you so any you know any fear that's coming is probably being self-produced and it's not easy to stop that being produced but it's good to know that that's what's happening we do actually produce a lot of the anxiety and fear through the habit of the way we behave and so i mean you you will find it if you're the sort of person that watches the news about the war and you're doing it all day long you'll probably at the end of the day feel more and more fearful um if you just watch it once a day you'll probably forget about the war for a good part of the day and then you might feel guilty that you're not worrying about all the people but then that's just all thoughts it's not doing anyone any good actually worrying if you're going to do something make a donation or whatever that's positive if you can do those sort of things but the rest of the time you if you can work with your mind you can just see that um so much is just the production of the habit of being you thinking your thoughts and you can change that so you've already started changing it practicing sitting still watching you breathing and noticing that you're having thoughts and then you can either let the thoughts go or breathe with the thoughts brief of the fear and things begin to change so natalie tambini is saying uh had a brief sensation of floating whilst meditating which hasn't happened before wow so this is something to maybe watch out for those of you are fairly new to um meditation or even those of you who go a bit deeper in meditation so strange things can happen and sometimes they're very very pleasant i think i think i would associate floating with being very pleasant um it's almost like floating out the wrist restrictions in my body i would imagine that was very pleasant sometimes you can have feelings like you're falling it can be quite frightening and disconcerting and what what you you need to kind of remember this is just you're just having an odd little thing happening it's best to not sort of blow it up into either a great wonderful thing because then you'll be expecting it to come back again and be disappointed when it doesn't or if it's uncomfortable it will probably just pass you know it's just um it's just what happens in in in the mind when you give the mind space to kind of readjust itself and go deeper things connect you know all sorts of things can emerge sometimes you know think traumas and things like that can emerge as well um if it's a really serious one you probably may need to see some professional help but a lot of people just experience things coming up and they recognize that just things coming up and you just allow them the space to come up maybe grief or something like that let it come up and um it will go and just be kind to yourself so much you could say about all these things but i better restrict myself anything else yep so amy is saying sometimes the experience of breathing is very present but it's tangled up with the thinking in the background how can i gently sharpen the breathing and fade out the thinking well if if it's sort of happening naturally you're doing something that's probably already making it happen if it's going into the background i suspect that almost everyone who meditates will have a little bit of thinking going on in the background even when you go really deeply into your meditation there's part of you that's it's not exactly thinking that you're knowing that you're going deeply into your meditation so it's um probably something you have to accept there's a bit of you're never going to be completely free of thinking maybe you don't even need to be or you don't you shouldn't be um but it's where you're the main part of your focus is and that's really important and if you can keep it coming back to the one thing um that will dominate more and more and then probably find the thinking just gets attenuated um increasingly so that you know it's not so tight and not like a lump but just sort of spread out like a vibration somewhere [Music] worry too much about i think it's probably it will happen naturally i don't maybe you're not worried about it anyway sorry that's it don't worry about it it's most of us have thinking in the foreground and the breathing in the background a bit so um it's you know we're having to swap that around okay i just um would like to remind you that if you do need any um any more instruction in in meditating that it's very useful to learn different techniques of meditating and um [Music] i don't really know about other buddhist centers i've been only ever been to a true rat in the buddhist centre i think my whole life i have met other buddhists of course but um i know in our tree ratna buddhist centers people teach um two types of meditation to beginners one is mindfulness of breathing which is usually done in four stages there's a really good when you're a beginner to have structure and that you can just move from one phase to another and then eventually you can kind of allow yourself to experiment much more and then the other meditation is about um developing more um [Music] love loving kindness um it's good metabolism of a kind of universal loving kind of what makes what i said before it makes us really human being able to experience joy happiness compassion for those who are suffering and so forth and that comes about from allowing our hearts if it's a metaphor to open and for love to flow more freely and some people find that particular that way of meditating far more effective than being aware of the breathing um so there'll be someone in the in this project that will be doing more compassionate type meditation so i'm not sure who at the moment but um video marla i think's coming teaching next month so you may find that that gets developed but if you're new to to meditation it is good to go and learn these techniques and it gives you a kind of something to come back to and keep practicing with makes it a lot easier and if you're a sort of a old hand as it were meditating sometimes it's good to go back to the techniques and just do them again because you you sometimes can get into habits that are not always helpful and so yeah it's it's useful just to think of yourself as a beginner you could even go back to a true rightness center where no one knows you and pretend to be you know people who are in tree right now could do that anyway hopefully there's quite a lot of you that are not in true ratna and um are just joining this project and so pleased to have you here so i think that's is there anything else i need to remind people of i think we're more less any more burning questions so so i think we could just open up to just let everyone share their joy with on each other and say goodbye if you want to come everyone if you wanted to i loved it thank you so much i'm so grateful to you nick thank you bye everyone bye thank you everyone thank you bye thank you so much thank you thank you bye-bye bye-bye thank you thank you everyone thank you [Music] thank you very much

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

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Id: pjF8Hz_phmU

Length: 85min 42sec (5142 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022