Exploring Impermanence Day 3: Going Deeper | Sona

i want to start well done nick i'm supposed to give him a signal to record and that was the signal i'm going to start now um so yes i was going to start with um just remembering um the interview with um penny satori who talked in in her interview with matrabandu which they did a couple of weeks ago and was recorded and is available on the standard website of nature of mine um she talked about near-death experiences that's what she's kind of well known for she wrote a book she did a based on i think it was based on a phd studies and it was the first serious academic work or academic research into people who have experienced near-death experiences and i remember the main one of the main things i got from that interview was suddenly the subject of death became kind of rather beautiful it was almost like the experiences that people were having who had these near-death experiences seem to be very very positive on the whole um she did report that there were a couple of cases where people's experiences weren't so positive and in the in in the seminar that maitre bandung and nialavacha [Music] mentions another book by i think an author called grayson who also researched in the states of near-death experiences and he only ever encountered people having positive experiences after death or near death rather so you can't you can't come back from death basically that's what death is but it was very positive for kind of myself almost you know getting on in life thinking like it's um maybe something almost to look forward to um but i certainly not had no plans whatsoever to move the date forward when that's going to happen but it just made me realize that and i had been thinking about this since last year when i was at a talk at a hospice i've been doing some work with someone at a hospice in herefordshire and um of course they're dealing with people dying a lot and a good friend of mine and she was giving a talk and she talked about how when we can face death when we can come to terms with death it enhances life the the other thing that um penny satori mentioned and and michael bandura drew out in their talk was that people who had these experiences of coming very close to to being to dying to passing on um often most of them seem to return to life in some way changed somewhat sometimes in a very very big way that their life changed their values changed how they um what they did with their life changed and it all seemed very very positive the changes seem to be [Music] well i would call them positive changes that the changes that [Music] where they kind of felt the need to perhaps be more helpful to others um i don't know if i'm reading that into it but that's kind of what i always think of positive is where we are both kind and caring about ourselves and we're kind and caring about other people and so it's it's interesting is it in our society i mean how often do we sit in a cafe with friends or sometimes going for a drink or a dinner and start talking about dying in my experience it happens very very little and even as a buddhist who um has thought about meditated on death for quite quite a few years as well it's not something that i've experienced people find fascinating so fascinating that they want to talk about it usually there's other things that people want to and it's it's often um perhaps we know really in a way it's the subject that we just don't know how to talk about but it may be that we're not frightened of talking about death we just don't know how to talk about it we don't know what's going to happen i mean we can talk about how our um what we what we feel when we think about death and dying and it's something in the back of our mind all the time um sometimes right at the back of our mind is that life has a certain limit to it and that one day we will use up that allotted time as it were and we will be faced with passing on in one way or another and last couple of years i have seen people pass on my father died last last year unfortunately died at home and you know but you could see him kind of gradually fading away he he was 103 so he had a kind of good good innings as they say in england in cricket but um um just recently um a good friend of mine abounds in manchester who had been ill with um she had an illness she was dying from basically she just passed away last sunday and um yesterday we had a um an open space um it's actually online as well but it was in one of the buddhist centers for her and she was someone that um she started a group actually in manchester wins in the manchester buddhist center where people met specifically to talk about dying and i think it was called something like relaxed and open um and i can't remember what it was called rot anyway in some of the word tea but i thought it was really interesting that um people had this in quite a courageous way or an interest way of actually sitting down purposely discussing death and their attitude towards it the feelings for it and so on but i've come beginning to realize more and more it's like reflecting on nature you know we come alive we live our lives when we die it's everything in nature's like that and sometimes it's easier to approach in nature we can see the trees in the certainly in in the uk where the trees seem to die in the autumn and come alive in the spring is a big reminder and um yeah from time to time we lose near deer people and pass away but you know this this sort of almost like seasonal rotation or um the natural way of life that things come into being and then pass away and coming to terms with the fact that it does have an end um at least in this life that our um our life as we know it at the moment will come to an end coming to terms with that having a and even having a near-death experience for those who had it seems to be a very positive thing and it may be something we might reflect on um and do with other people if um just as an experiment if we wanted to but it it's it is very very interesting um the idea that coming closer to death allows us to live more fully in the present so if we're always trying to tuck something away and keep something hidden and not face it we're actually using a certain amount of our energy and um life force i suppose just keeping that thing hidden away and usually these things are much better brought out into the open and coming to terms with accepting and benefiting from in many ways today um yesterday also um there was you know i i happened to spend a bit more time looking at the news and of course you're just on the news at the moment there's just a lot of dying there's a lot of death um happening and um so it is much more in the forefront of our minds whether we like it or not um just by you know looking at the news newspapers or reading the news watching the news these days so we are kind of confronted with it and it's in a very unpleasant way so it's not exactly helpful i don't think to see things like that but then of course when we start reflecting on life as having a beginning and end we might start reflecting as i said the other day on what what we're doing with our life and what's important to us in in our life and um it's also i found myself reflecting on um on the war in the ukraine and you know the people are fighting for something the ukrainians are desperately trying to fight for i guess their freedom and that's what we i assume really resonate with that i certainly do is that we all want to to be free to have the opportunity to be free in our lives and to be able to live the life in the way that we want to and as my mind just goes from one thing to another then the question came up well what do you do with that freedom if if it's so valuable to us that we're prepared to die for it even as some of the soldiers are um and others fighting for that it's so dear what do we do with the freedom when we have it and for those of us that experience you know a great deal of freedom and what what are we doing with our freedom and it may be when we don't know what to do with our life what we can do with this freedom that we we have and it's relative freedom as well because there's quite a lot of things we have to do in life um that we're not free from um it can it can be quite disturbing as well so when we are free and we have that opportunity to do something more with our life then and we don't know what to do with it this can be quite distressing and um so it's one of the aims at least in from my mind of you know this whole program of the nature of mind is like looking at what we can do with with our life without freedom and from my point of view it seems to be that human life is very very precious because of the opportunity of living a life that becomes meaningful so so if we if we take the view that at the end of our life we will kind of leave this life our consciousness will continue into a completely new other life but what we do is we take something with us a sort of a knowledge or um something has happened in this life that's made this life worth living that's kind of transferred as it were with our consciousness into the next life it it kind of makes um it makes rather a nice sort of package in a way which for me is very very important that um it then means that i take this life to be so precious but such a precious opportunity to help my consciousness or to develop my consciousness make more of my consciousness so that it will be continuing in the future and um i think that's a a very positive way of looking at life basically whatever we think about anything really we don't really absolutely know whether it's true or not but this is a for me a very very positive way of understanding how to live my life that it has a beginning it's a precious opportunity to transform myself and to leave this life with the trans more than what i had when i came into the life and i think we have that opportunity every moment of the day and those people that feel that they've done something with this sort of transformative process when you face death it makes it a lot easier it seems and you feel like yes you've taken this precious opportunity you've done something and it's um you've learned something as it were and you you haven't wasted it and so um sometimes it feels like we waste a lot of time in life and we can feel really bad about that but perhaps even understanding that we sometimes wasting our life is in itself a transformative thought of transformative um something that you know will help us to you know feel that we've done something with our life when it comes to the point where we have to leave it and i guess by even being here in this group being here together you know with sort of over 100 people so we're you know we're all interested in this we're all interested in um maybe we don't even know that but there is something that's um stirring within us to you know consider what is the point what is consciousness where's the nature of mind so um then you have you have this sense of okay where human life is precious and how do i make the most of it and you know you might think sonja's going to say will you meditate um but i don't think um i think we could look at it in another way one of the things that you can see about the ukrainian war is that there is a lot of death and dying and suffering but there's quite a lot of focus in the media on something very very positive the response of so many other people to want to help so maybe we you know kind of it's so obvious that we want to help we've missed that bit but just like millions and millions of people are wanting to help the people who are suffering um in that situation and so that um if there's nothing good about wars but at least sometimes it brings out the underlying kindness and caring that we have in a much more powerful way than we perhaps normally would experience it that's something that struck me yesterday of all the people in fact i found it very very moving seeing so many people collecting money collecting things to sell and just making things helpful for others so this seems to then moving on this seems to would suggest that we have some underlying tendencies or underlying experiences that we don't always tap into and it sometimes needs a bit of a crisis or a bit of a shake-up for us to recognize that they're there so um being kind being caring being compassionate is something we're familiar with in words we're familiar with feelings when we when we some of us don't feel kind we just are kind we just do kind things um but one of the principles of one of the things that you can discover with consciousness is that actually you can go deeper and deeper into what these underlying things are so so far in the these last couple of days we'd be just looking at kind of things that are happening as it were on the surface of our minds thoughts that are coming and just noticing how thoughts come and those thoughts generate other thoughts and so on but it's very much on the surface of the mind one of the things that people find that are attracted to meditation for it's not just this ability to bring together in a kind of more you could say integrating or a wholesome way where we feel that our energies are flowing together in a in a normal human way but we sometimes get this sort of sense that there's something much deeper and occasionally we can dip down and we can experience this something under the surface which is very very beautiful it's a very there's a lot of energy beautiful energy that can flow out into what's been saying to the world but it initially flows out into our experience through our experience and into the world unfortunately when you um you all know this by now because you've been practicing this that when you sit down to meditate your mind's often all over the place isn't it it kind of um no one's nodding but i assume it is my mind is you're kind of carried away by your thoughts and you know i'm suggesting just stay with your breathing and you might drop deeper in but um what we find is that yeah well that's a good idea well that's an idea and then we think about the idea of dropping in instead of actually the experience of it but um it is possible to do that unfortunately and um michael bandu went into this quite a bit on the first week of meditations that he led is that we have these um hindrances as they're often called then the avaramas in buddhist terminology or blockages to accessing these other layers as it were about consciousness and these these are um quite in quite it's quite useful to know what they are because in ordinary life we can do our best to um to work with them and so i just i just like to mention what they are and the first is um of course craving for things we want things and this is said by the buddha to be like a pond that has dye point um wood into it [Music] it's um it's it's usually connected with central desires you know we have a strong desire through our senses for something so instead of looking at a pond and looking for a clear refr reflection what we see is like water that's mixed up with something like turmeric or some other sort of dye so that it's kind of cloudy it's we can't see through it and then we have and we probably will have um an experience of this from what's going on in the world at the moment we have what's called ill will um even hatred and this is likened to um clear water that's boiling you know like if you see what's happening in ukraine and you you feel this kind of energy this um anger it does really feel like hot and boiling a lot of energy coming up and it's kind of all kind of over the place it's very disturbing so that's another one of the blockages is um this sensual craving for central desire and ill will and aversion another blockage that we have um and it's easy to suffer from is what is called sloth and torpor it's that kind of feeling that you can't do anything you know you've got no energy for it you're just kind of um [Music] it's a bit like well the buddha can he uses the image of water that's covered with plants and algae so you can't really move through it you can't see through it's just kind of still and um i was reminded of this there's actually a pond beautiful ponder in at a standard when you walk by half of it it's like that it's like sloth it's actually a beautiful green carpet but um at the other end of the pond is all clear water and um so you know some people suffer from that they know what that feels like and the the um and other hindrances you will kind of rather unpleasant these things aren't they but if one comes to terms with them you can start working on them the other is restlessness and anxiety so there will be a lot of that going on with people particularly the anxiety and this is a bit like water that's kind of whipped up into waves you know like a choppy sea so there's nothing to sort of settle in you can't just remain still just sit down and then you're kind of thrown around again and finally the the other blockages we just don't know what to do we're not sure that what did what we do is the right thing to do so it's called doubt and indecision and it kind of blocks all our energy so we see these blockages um kind of as it were along the surface of our mind that if we could work with in the ord in our ordinary day life we could drop deeper beneath them when we meditate that's basically what i wanted to say today and what's kind of waiting for us in this depth um beneath the surface is something very very beautiful it's a lot more energy that's kind of wanting to flow out a lot which will give us a lot more confidence and it kind of is self um so it's kind of a system that feeds itself in a very positive way so the more sort of energy that we get from our depths the easier it is to keep the blockages and keep the water clear to remove these blockages and allow ourselves to to go deeper so this is an aspect of the nature of mind is to perhaps consider that your consciousness is only part of it is really available to you and that there's other aspects of it but you kind of know her there but you just don't know how to get to it how to discover it how to release it and how for it to sort of [Music] flow up and participate in the everyday life that we live and so forth so in the meditation today we're going to again just be sitting with our thoughts and um anchoring ourself around the breath tomorrow we'll do a slightly different meditation actually and we'll do that um and it may be interesting just to to notice if a particular one of these blockages is there it can pretty much guarantee one of them will be and the great thing is the thing well not the great thing is but the way to approach this is it's a great thing i'm noticing it here's a blockage ah i'm feeling i've got no energy i just got sloth and torpor i just can't be bothered doing anything oh it's gonna end and we can think a sloth and talpa is there this will give us some stirring of energy and it might allow it of course our energy might be just i'm really angry and you could think of boiling water let's say use that image and a wildness you know um energy that's just all over the place and you can just accept it and allow it if you the more you accept these things they're clear it says so water clears if there's if it's got dye in it if there's too much sensual desire it clears if it's bubbling up with anxiety if there's no energy that's probably the hardest one is to get the energy flowing from sloth slothmantalpa and if you notice that you have any thoughts about doubts or indecisions you just see them as doubts and indecisions but don't sort of get carried away with thinking about the doubts and in decisions it's just practice coming back to noticing oh there's a doubt there's an indecision and do all this very lightly it's um if you get really serious about it sort of frown and look at i want to find one of these hindrances that would be a hindrance in itself so it's a much more a pace of like relaxing back into just focusing on something and you will notice something will emerge or you would just feel in a certain sort of way and you can say well this is this is one of those blockages it's interesting and you can think well how do you deal with this there are traditional ways of dealing with it one is to just try and let it pass like a cloud another is to develop the opposite so if you have slot and tulpa just think of something really energetic like you know what you enjoy doing that brings you energy and that might be a way of working with it you can also consider the consequences of what would happen if i just keep going keep thinking about this thing over and over again is it going to be helpful and you can see the consequences of what that would lead to for instance and then the main ways of you can sometimes forcibly repress and move apart these inferences but that's something props you know a last resort to um to do that but the usual thing is just to notice things and almost by themselves they're clear so i'd just like to move on now to the meditation because that's probably what you've been waiting for and i'm going to stop talking but i will just remind you um through the meditation that to perhaps learn to accept and work with the mind to see what happens having this sense of um investigating curiosity of what consciousness is is flowing you can feel it flowing because it goes from one thing to another it doesn't just stay static and it may flow very slowly it may flow very very fast in a bubbly sort of way but you can just notice it and um if you kind of get a bit confused you just keep coming back to the breath and experiencing the breath and that's sort of going on in the background all the whole time the rhythm of breathing in breathing out breathing in and breathing out and just noticing what the nature of mind is doing so you first of all need to prepare yourself by probably not looking at the screen um maybe closing your eyes you're free to you know those if you've got the camera on um if you wanted to turn sideways on and not look at the camera um but you you feel like it makes you feel so more present by having your camera on you can do that and no one's gonna you know if you want to turn your back on the camera it's fine as well it's nice to know it's nice for me to see people but you don't have to do that anyway you don't need to look at the camera you don't really need to do anything actually maybe the only thing you need to do is become aware of how you're sitting and noticing any tensions any holding you have in the body and maybe this is what we're all longing for a sense of freedom from having to do anything the freedom to just allow the mind consciousness the flow of thoughts and experiences to settle so we're not like one of those small insects that you know tops around on top of a pond on the surface tension of the water sometimes i can imagine feeling like that i think of that small insects seen in summer but becoming much more like the pond that this a stillness and underlying stillness which is full of energy it's a almost uh confounding really to think of stillness and energy coming together but it's that feeling of potential as you become calmer and by focusing on your breathing usually it has this sense of message to the brain sends a message into our body of calming it's a very calming activity just focusing you don't have to do anything to your breathing just becoming aware of breathing you gradually if you haven't noticed it already you'll gradually notice that it has a very calming effect it's actually altering our autonomic system the fight particularly the fight and flight activity of our brain so we're going to meditate for about 30 minutes [Music] sometimes people talk about hindrances as something you have to work with i don't really like thinking of them in that way i think thinking of them as like blockages to something beautiful it's a much more helpful interesting way and working on them maybe isn't the right way of going about it it's more a case of allowing blockages to settle or where it's needed to feel more alive without sort of forcing anything coming closer to whatever it is that's going on in our mind breathing with it if it seems to be a bit stuck a little bit emotionally loaded or if our thoughts are just constantly changing and every now and again we may get this sense of ah i could just drop a bit deeper feel more open and this is where silence is very helpful sitting in the silence the stillness i'm just going to read you a little kind of first really few verses that was found on the retreat that i was on in west yorkshire and chapel wall actually it's it's um you could call it i think people call this a poem called listen because each line starts with listen maybe that's what we can do this meditation listen to the fragile feelings not the clashing fury listen to the quiet sounds not the loud clamor listen to the steady heartbeat not to the noisy confusion listen to the hidden voices not to the obvious chatter listen to the deep harmonies not the surface discord so in case you weren't here in the previous sessions just using our breath as a kind of anchor [Music] like we would anchor a boat on this sea into one place and mine will float around the anchor so it's the anchor is the breath the experience of breathing in whatever way we experience it and then we can just listen uh you foreign uh this they're just reminding us that there's this potential of finding these deeper harmonies but we need to generate and find a degree of stillness and we're alive we're breathing every single one of us is breathing and the rhythm of our breath the beginning and ending is just the nature of being alive and sometimes you got a sense just a moment of what it feels like to be still some people will say to be at peace to be tranquil and the moment goes when we think about it oh there's that moment so let me just come back and it's more useful just paying attention to your breathing so that's the way in the way to open up and free up deeper energy deeper knowledge stronger more beautiful emotions c we find our mind is floating away and we might like to just return to this present moment embodied and we don't even need to think in those terms we just need to become without breathing we're aware of our breathing we'll be completely present in this moment wherever we are at this time in this body letting go of the thoughts just refocusing on the experience of the breath flowing in and flowing out foreign so and if there is a lot of disturbance or a lack of energy then just maybe contemplating just reflecting on this is one of those blockages mm-hmm foreign what's happening now for us what's what are we doing i'm just saying that in case we floated off somewhere got lost so we might like to come back to the experience the rhythm of breathing in flow and outflow rise and fall so foreign foreign if you would like a an image of what it's like to open up and how to approach this opening up to a deeper level of mind it's like a flower often the image of a lotus where the petals can't be ripped open ripped back we just need to allow them to naturally unfold opening up and just in case you feeling that um it's difficult to do this it's perhaps useful to remember that a lotus grows in a pond with its roots in the mud in the mud so we could think of our life as having been rooted in the confusion the darkness the martyr of ordinary life and that's actually where it gets its nutrients the lotus so whatever we are whatever we're doing we're feeding this ability to move towards the light if we want to use that metaphor like a lotus in water moving towards the surface where it petals will naturally open so this really is about including the whole of our being even the bits we don't like we may be ashamed of just letting them be recognizing that our roots can also find nutrients nourishment from all those experiences we drawn together and feed this process of growth unfolding we don't want to cut off the roots they're all part of our being there are many things that will just change naturally we allow them to maybe this same approach applies to um our mind if we start to feel as though we're opening up so much we're floating away just remember that we're in a body this body is breathing so we don't want to leave anything behind we just want to incorporate integrate everything every aspect of our being including our physical body so everything is benefiting from just sitting here experiencing my breathing b foreign okay c just before we finish the meditation let's just perhaps reflect on what's happened during this nearly half an hour of sitting you don't need to be judgmental about it you can just recognize that this happened and this happened then it happened maybe you fell asleep and you woke up maybe something arose your mind something could be pleasant or unpleasant just allowing us a more everyday consciousness to recognize become aware of what happened and if you feel as though anything's changed just kind of allowing that to be there when you may learn something from what happened today if you meditate or when you meditate again maybe something you did you could apply particularly if it was helping to unblock to open up each meditation usually is itself it's not the same it's never the same different things happen but we can learn approaches to using our mind kind of working like an artist works with materials with the mind um [Music] foreign so those of you who need to go um just to say goodbye for now see you again tomorrow [Music] to feel your presence again tomorrow i can't see you and um those who don't have to rush off to anything in particular if you've got any questions or anything you'd like to share then just um get in touch with nick you'll feed me a question chat box or raise your hand i think in the reaction there's a lot of thank yous coming through from uh kathy kalyani annie um anthony simon uh gina dot mary kedrick jess yeah lots of thankies [Music] i didn't want to just share anything that happened even if you have any questions then you can feel free to do that too sometimes so jess is asking uh could you say any more about dealing with sleepiness [Music] well yesterday i i've mentioned about sleepiness just giving yourself permission to have a little sleep um i mean let's face it most of us are probably very tired a lot of the time and sometimes when you sit still and you you just not doing anything you can have this it kind of comes to you exactly how tired you are for anyone who's been on a retreat will know this um and if you ever go on a retreat you'll probably notice the first day you're usually feeling exhausted you know you just feel like you want to sleep all the time and it's as though this kind of like a busload of tiredness comes and bashes into you and you just feel tired so the same thing will happen in these short short sessions of meditation that um some people will feel tired and um yes it's not easy to deal with tiredness it's not easy because if you start forcing yourself to be awake which works for some people um [Music] you can do that by opening your eyes as i said yesterday you can also give yourself permission to handle sleep and you know if you fell asleep for two or three minutes um you probably certainly it's what i do if i'm tired really tired particularly if i'm not leading it's a bit difficult if you're leading falling asleep but um um it's hot that's how i find it so horrible when i'm tired and i feel like oh to be doing something instead of just like relaxing back and um if you're on a chair it's relatively safe you're not going to fall off it probably you could just have a little cat nap you're right again um if it goes on for too too long and you're always feeling sleepy when you try to meditate you probably need to look a little bit more closely at what you're doing in your life and you know usually i think a lot of people feel sleepy if they meditate later in the day so if you what i always do on a retreat is i try and have a little sleep before an afternoon meditation um and then when i meditate i don't i'm not using that time to catch up on my sleep so kind of energized so if it's something that's an ongoing difficulty it probably does require looking at how you can perhaps get more sleep and unfortunately getting sleep isn't an easy factor you know a lot of people don't sleep well these days and so a lot of people are tired but there may be times when you can take very short little breaks in the day and just close your eyes and drift off and you maybe you could train yourself in that to some degree if you particularly have difficulty sleeping at night it's the usual time to sleep so it's a big big area to sleep but you know that's these are the things that come to my mind when you're [Music] so harvey's saying i sometimes find it difficult to distinguish the meditation dropping deeper from just sloth and torpor very good question yeah i um i sometimes i know exactly what you mean sometimes i think i've had this wonderful meditation and i realized i've actually kind of fallen asleep and feel refreshed afterwards um yeah maybe you just have to sit with that question harvey and um um i think it will become clearer um you know it kind of contemplating the energy that you feel is the energy one of kind of torpor which is like blockage you know sort of that is no energy there or is it a sort of a feeling of um there is that sort of relaxation or opening um so it's kind of like probably just noticing it and i think that's the way you work with it really it's just that you you begin to feel actually i'm just um i need a bit more stimulation if you actually need more stimulation in meditating it might be useful to to actually purposely think about something so or use a metaphor you know like i talked about train taming a horse i i find something like that quite stimulating the idea of taming my mind and what would you do with a horse if it was like didn't really want to walk it was too tired to walk it was just experiencing so much sloth and talker you might have to sort hey come on you know and you know whisper to the horse to come alive in a way so you know you could perhaps approach things in that way so it is probably the most difficult blockage to deal with because there isn't much energy to do anything actually so paul is saying as i meditate i can become tranquil and calm but i feel like i carry the same stuff and stay on the surface it can feel frustrating i keep thinking there's a doorway to another form of awareness but i go past it and feel i don't get into any depth is this normal well i think let's say it's normal if you start meditating and you just do a little bit each day it's not it's pretty normal to not find a way into going deeper if you've got very supportive conditions like you've got time which is quite very precious these days and difficult you've got time like being on a what call retreat where you actually spend quite a big part of the day practicing you're more likely to start experiencing these moments of opening if you've got a beginner's mind you and you don't know what's going to happen that's also a very good state to be in because anything can happen if you're kind of like looking for dropping deeper you're probably not going to drop deeper because you ask what your kind of focusing on so it it is very much um a case of um well first of all it requires a lot of patience it's like a lot of things that you want to become good at you have to put the time in a certain amount of energy and patience and it takes a long time to become good at it to be able just to access going deeper when at will is something that might be very desirable but it's probably not very realistic for most people um unless you were a full-time meditator that's all you ever did and then you might even then suffer from sloth and tulpa because you're not doing enough activity so it's we expect things these days to you know to um arrive straight away you know some of us sign up for things like amazon prime so we get whatever it is we order the next day immediately so we sometimes take this attitude into trying to meditate i'm going to meditate and watch my breath right where's this opening and you want it to happen immediately but it's much more like the growth of a flower you know all you if you've got a garden those of you have got gardeners you know you can't rush it you know everything has its season you prepare the soil you make sure there's nutrients in the soil you remove the weeds you get as much sunlight on the plants as you can and then things will naturally grow or not sometimes they don't grow but usually if you get the conditions right for developing the mind the mind will grow in that more organic natural way you can't really push it and if you're sitting looking at a flower waiting it to blossom right it's going to take a long time isn't it if you're sitting waiting for your mind to go deeper it's probably not going to happen very easily if you just have this idea that it can go deeper and it can you can open up you may be surprised one day when it's opening up but um i i'll just share something with you about my own life i started meditating when i was in my early and i would say probably for the first 12 years i had very little experience of my of going deeper in meditation my mind just seemed to wander here and there just maybe occasionally i had a sense of stillness but what i didn't notice is that outside meditation i was changing and i think that's far more important than having a good meditation it's sometimes things happen to you that you just you just don't even know are happening to you when you're doing them so you probably need a bit of faith in this but it kind of is a feedback loop that will give you confidence if you start practicing meditation regularly even a little bit each day um ideally longer um as much as you can and the more you do that probably the effect and then just be aware of how you're dealing with things in the day for instance if you're getting angry about things you may notice that you're not getting angry so often or at least you're catching yourself when you are angry just before you start arguing with someone you might notice you think do i need to do this and that would change your life and that would be the effects of meditation so it's far more useful to think of meditation the effects of meditation outside of the meditation rather than being waiting for experiences to happen in the meditation so it's kind of the meditation's just a place of being and then um not getting frustrated if nothing's happening because a lot more might be happening than you realize so i think that's quite a useful way of looking at things might not have answered your question exactly how you wanted it to answer but i think that's useful anything else nick becker is saying the metaphors of the hindrances as various states of water were incredibly helpful i felt both powerful choppiness as well as a bubbling of anger a question is there a water metaphor for doubt and indecision oh there is didn't i mention that if i i did a um a little powerpoint um a while ago i should have um um i don't think you could see it actually if i held it up but it's a it's actually a photograph of um of muddy turbid water um can can you see that i can just about sit on my camera so it's like dark muddy water that's kind of doing this and it's it's compared to um looking into water you want to see the reflection maybe of yourself but the water is turbid it's unsettled it's muddy it's kind of in the dark um so that's that's the kind of metaphor well that's where i get mentioned earlier if i find a way of sharing this little powerpoint on on the nature of mind i'll i'll um just make it available it's just a few i found it very what i found very interesting was finding images that actually these states of mind so i just you know looked at unsplashed or something like that to find some images that um kind of represented these things and it had quite a transformative effect first of all i can remember all the hindrances or the uh quite easily because i have a visual mind really anyway just by the way okay uh so that's it for questions but there's a couple of comments here so uh katrina says i'm interested in you using the word blockage to describe the hindrances i feel that i'm working with them rather than a blockage uh interesting to consider how descriptive words give different experience in meditation yeah yeah well the original word is [Music] and it can be translated as a hindrance something that's hindering you from getting something or stoppage something is stopping you or blockage and i don't know whether it's partly because i was used to be an engineer but i like this word blockage i think mike trabando talked about is a covering it's as though something's covering up um something else so [Music] i think one of the dangers when you talk about hindrances it does you know for for a lot of people it means they have to work with them you know it's like working with the hindrances you have to kind of grit your teeth and get a frown work with with it but you know the actual working isn't the working it's the kind of opening up to so another engineering term is a bit like if you've got block drain and you can put down some sort of fluid that just dissolves all the blockage away that would be not very pleasant images actually it's not a beautiful one [Music] it's probably in a gardening thing it would be like giving a bit more you know making sure the plants in the sun and uh feeding it giving it water um to remove its first you know um and that would be kind of more beautiful sort of way of looking at it so yeah just noticing that actually a lot of the time we're just hindering ourselves using that word hinderer from experiences that we could be having [Music] just to give you an example this would be quite useful in the next thing i'm going to say is that and i mentioned this before if certain things in your life that we do which are connected with one or another of these hindrances will give us a kind of kinesthetic a bodily experience of tightness of crampness of things being held in tension and then um other things we would do will give us a sense of opening relaxing and expansion and the most um the most obvious one that comes to mind to me is when you're being helpful to someone about 20 years ago i decided that i wanted to be a carer to someone who happens to be my wife nobody and i would say that deciding to care for someone else and quite deliberately and putting a lot of time into it transformed my life completely and before that i used to experience a lot of inner emptiness a lot of dissatisfaction and just take putting someone as it were before me and being bring out a generous it just seemed to open out um gave me a sense of um [Music] openness and flexibility and freedom that seem to allow something to fill up this emptiness that i used to feel and um so you know giving giving things i'm going to ask you for some money in a moment so this would be a moment where you could um do that but what i really like to get across to you you can tell often when you're in a state of um where there's more of a sort of something blocking or hindering you from something greater it's because there's often it feels like for me it feels like a tightness a crampedness a narrowness and then i look for things to do i actually take that away that open up make me feel more like i can be creative i can respond much more freely to a situation an argument might be a good example someone irritates you someone close to you often they say something and you feel like you want to say something back or you get an email and it's it's criticizing you you just want to type down something back and the whole movement is like one of uh tightness and fighting and you know um sometimes that's quite good to get your energy going but you know often it's just a reaction it's like someone's pressed a button but you do this so um if you can be more open more flexible um wider when some things the things happen that we don't like in life we can give ourselves space to consider how to best more creatively um work with that and the things that we do find really helpful in life we can see that as a kind of positive feedback loop where we think oh when i do this i feel so much better so let's do more of it the more of it the more of it and so it kind of keeps feeding in and your spaciousness becomes more you can't get to a point where you you can even feel like your consciousness is all around you rather than just stuck inside you i mean often we think of mind as being inside but maybe it's interesting to think of mind as being all around us maybe when we meet another person he's got patrick sitting near me maybe his mind and my mind are overlapping in some sort of strange weird wonderful way and he's sitting there so still and calm he's probably making me feel still and calm and maybe my talking is making him a little bit excited and so he's feeling so kind of overlapping and it's very nice a very pleasant city with patrick so um so i'm going to just ask you now there's not many people that are trying to help other people work with their minds to open up to become much more creative one the main aim of this project as far as i can see is to get to get out to as many people and with the same message that um exploring the nature of mind and opening up is such a wonderful thing it's wonderful for the individual and collectively is wonderful for society the family for society for the sort of tribe you live with in the whole world it's such a wonderful thing to do so if you'd like to support us in this work and you haven't done so at the moment um you could make a donation and watch how you feel um as you make that donation you might at first feel the tightness like you don't really want to part with money or um because we prefer money we don't have a way of dealing with gifts of clothes and things like that but you know some money um transferred into the bank account where we can support this just notice how i notice there's sort of tightness and then when i do it i think ah i just kind of feel good about myself and um this is sort of like brightening and opening up and um you know then i wonder why i'm not doing it all the time so that's something else to reflect on but just at this moment if you're feeling like that you'd like to experiment and you would like to give some money or some more money then please support us in this work we would like this project to continue way into the future and grow and involve a lot more people so this is kind of a pilot scheme and you're all helping us to discover work with and develop this project so if you'd like to support us i think nick's going to put in a link to me and if you could if you wanted a figure um something i i like people to suggest a figure to me of how much to give something like 50 pounds would be really go a long way to to helping us keep this project going and just lastly i'd just like to say that we're going to there's there's some events happening later in the year one event i'm on in september is the kind of culmination of this first um this first stage of this um nature of mind to be a retreat here at addistana be quite a large retreat we hope might rabindu and team vidyamala um and so on and we get to meet in person and if you can't meet if you're a living abroad or it's not possible if you can be online as well i believe so just to you know highlight that and you can find details of that on there to start website so i think i better leave it there actually um and um leave you opening your hearts and um going off into your day or to your night with a sense of freedom so i hope that's happened and um i hope you come back tomorrow and i'll see you tomorrow we're going to do a different meditation tomorrow so we won't be just exploring the breathing and thoughts i won't tell you what it is it'd be a mystery to look forward to so thank you very much um mute everyone now if you want to say goodbye okay thank you bye thank you thank you it's wonderful thank you thank you everyone thank you thank you

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 377

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Id: RuT3tXsS7fU

Length: 86min 42sec (5202 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022