MEDITATION AND PERSONAL KINDNESS with Dr Ian Gawler at HAP23

thank you thank you everyone good morning um I'd really like to take just a moment to acknowledge Beth thielen I know she's going to get a big thank you tomorrow but best we've become good friends through our connection here at this conference and what you and Tony your partners Tony Steele in this work done's been remarkable and I would feel remiss if I didn't take a moment just to acknowledge it so thank you [Music] and the good news folks is you're here you've given yourself the day you got through the traffic you found the place you can relax you've arrived so I'm talking about meditation and personal kindness and merely it's a pretty unveiled attempt to encourage you to meditate so I'm just curious how many of you have got a pretty much daily practice of meditation yep so I always just support you and not encourage you and for those of you aren't the whole idea of what I'm going to present is to give you some more encouragement and perhaps the best way of all to do that is to have some personal experience so can I suggest we might just take a few moments to uh settle and really arrive more fully and what I'd like to suggest is if you've got anything on your lap perhaps you just pop it on the floor for the moment so you won't be disturbed and then it's good to just sit just as upright as your body is comfortable perhaps your feet flat on the floor a little apart and perhaps with your hands just resting on your thighs or kept in your lap just notice what works best for you then you might like to lean back a little and feel the support from the back of the chair and then you might like to join me for a few moments and just let your eyes close gently and do what you can to let go of whatever you've been involved with up to this time some of you have probably had pretty busy few days or weeks morning aim to just let go of all that leave the past in the past and do what you can to allow the future to unfold in its own time and if there's anything that's strong in your mind at the moment perhaps you can just park that and come back to it later and just have that intention of bringing your awareness more particularly to this present moment so perhaps it helps with that just to bring your attention more particularly to your breath and just be interested to notice what it feels like to be breathing in and breathing out just a gentle curiosity and what about you might notice is that each time you breathe out the breath just tends to taper away longer finer subtler and then there's often a little pause before you breathe in again so I'm to let go of any effort to actually breathe in again just allow the breath to come back in of its own accord effortlessly effortlessly and as you continue to hold your attention on the breath you might notice too there's just a natural tendency to let go a little with the out breath breathe out don't need to make any more or less of it there's just a natural tendency to relax release a little that go a little with the out breath so breathing out the out breath going longer finer satellite just tapering away gentle feeling of letting go a little pause and just allowing the in-breath to come back of an of its own accord and just feeling the ease of it all natural ease of it all it's almost like you're just flowing with the breath going with it [Applause] then you might like to take your attention up to that point between the eyes a little into the forehead and you might notice there what's like a still quiet center point of Stillness maybe you notice that point of Stillness a bit more particularly behind the clot behind the closed eyelids point of Stillness it's almost like you can move into that Stillness like a merging melting coming together sometimes it can feel like you're expanding out into this Stillness going with it going with it more and more deeper deep I just simply letting go letting go and just resting quietly for a few moments effortlessly Thirty go foreign foreign just let your eyes gently open again sort of feels like it might have been a good idea to take up all my time with that but uh I'm just curious in that little exercise we just did how many of you got some sense of that Stillness that I was talking about quite a few because that that really highlights one of the main useful points to be aware of in meditation and that is that our mind actually has two aspects and I think many people are quite familiar with one but not so familiar and certainly not so connected to the other so so the first aspect of the mind we could call the active mind and that's the domain of our thoughts both conscious and unconscious in our emotions and and the others this still mind which is beyond all that activity of the thoughts and the emotions and if we just examine the two a little and look into them a little the the active mind we could say is the domain of the individual we talk about my mind my thoughts my emotions and it gives us this very strong sense of individuality and it's quite dualistic so it's like I'm here and you're there on the center of the universe and everything else is going on around about me but at the same time internally there's lots of thoughts going on animations and they're changing all the time and they can have very differing effects sometimes they can work for good sometimes they can be downright dangerous and John Milne summed it up really well in Paradise Lost where he said mind is its own place that's interesting enough in itself but he said mind is its own place and of itself can create a heaven of Hell or a hell of Heaven so it's pretty clear with our mind we can do all sorts of interesting things it could be good it could be bad and understanding something of that active mind helps to ex explain the wide range of human expression and emotions we feel so by contrast the still mind we could say is the domain of the Transcendent it's beyond all these thoughts and emotions and it's it's really non-jualistic it's a bit hard to Define and it's been called by many names but it said it's beyond words Beyond description unborn unceasing the very essence of space yet it can be experienced as the pure wisdom of our own awareness so with the active mind thoughts and emotions some people in the West sorry in the East refer that to that as the monkey mind jumping around from one thing to another we could call it the ego mind some people just politely call it the intellect the still Minds known by many names we could call it the Transcendent mind some call it samadhi Nirvana Buddha mind God uh Allah Yahweh it comes by many nice Brahma in Tibet the active mind is called Sim sem and the still mind is referred to as rigba and again it's hard to Define these things clearly but Rigby's got a lot to do with our original unaltered state of consciousness you could also say that the active mind is to do with how we appear to be and the still mind is to do with more to do with how we really are and the still in mind that a good analogy for these two aspects of the mind is the blue sky and white clouds that's one of the reasons I call upon recent meditation book blue sky mind so the blue sky is like the still mind it's pristine vast pure it doesn't get stained and the clouds are like our thoughts and emotions they come and go all the time they change all the time sometimes they're really pretty they can be useful when it rains and sometimes they can be downright ugly and you know we're dealing with a lot of consequence of clouds in Australia at the moment with all the flooding so they're a real mixed bag coming back to the still mind again it's it doesn't change it's a constant and and its nature is unchanging and it's all to do with having Clarity being at peace being connected to do with wisdom and compassion so you could well ask why don't we just focus on the still mind and do what we can to forget about the active mind well the point is the active mind while it makes a pretty poor Master is a great servant and it would be very hard to function actually without a active mind to help us to make the choices and decisions that we do so this is where personal kindness comes in and if we're interested in actually our own welfare and well-being then it behaves as well to take an interest in both our active mind and and the still mind so um it's interesting to notice what our active mind does to us so if I need to speak personally for a moment I've got a broken nose I've got one leg I wear a calf down because it's more comfortable than wearing pants with one leg and so when I go down the street I get quite a few people looking at me and I wouldn't mind betting there's a few projections involved so I'm thinking about that and then I'm thinking about well you know I come from an English Heritage so does that mean I'm an emotional and I'm emotional enough and I look at my dear Italian friends and they've got emotions spilling out everywhere and I've got should I be more like that and then I'm thinking well gosh maybe I'm spending too much time wondering about whether my beloved AFL team Melbourne's going to win the Premiership again in 19 2023 um and then I'm thinking about well gosh all this spiritual practice I've done I'm not enlightened yet this is oh dear so this is what our active mind does for isn't it it's sort of um it's doing all this stuff constantly we're listening to others trying to gauge what opinion they thought of us it's got this internal dialogue sort of raging we take it all pretty seriously if we're not careful and it always leads to a wide range of mental state so The Point again is that the still Minds beyond all that and so in one way we could say having some experience of this still mind gives us an internal Refuge it's a sort of place to go to where we can get away from all that sort of activity both good and bad but you know all that stuff that's going on and find a place of peace and contentment that's totally reliable and ever-present it's not like we have to create it it's there all the time we just have to actually find a way to connect with so if we take personal kindness into our meditation where you pay attention to both aspects of the Mind and with the active mind what Our intention there is is just to help it to settle it's a bit like if you've got a glass of Muddy Water and the glass and the water's like you're still mind the muds like the thoughts and you keep your finger in the glass of Muddy Water and you keep agitating and just get more and more muddy water but if you put the glass aside and just let it settle then the mud settles and you've got the clarity of your mind just there quite naturally so with that in mind um many of you will have noticed I suspect when you started to meditate that you become more aware and one of the first things we tend to become aware of is that there's just a lot going on there's a lot of thoughts there's a lot of emotions and some of them aren't all that pretty and it can be a bit disconcerting so again we just have to take some personal kind just listen to understand it's a bit like if you've got a dark pair of dirty socks when you take them off they don't look too bad but you stick them in water and wash them a little and all this dirt comes out and you think my God so we just have to be patient and realize that as we meditate and we become more aware we see things more clearly and from that position we're able to actually start to regulate what's actually going on with our mind so this is where I've lost my place here we go I'm going to finish up soon um so at the the heart of the meditation is this uh Stillness so if we're really wanting to Define meditation in this sort of context to me it's a process that takes us from our common deep engagement with our active mind into a more direct experience of our still mind and when it comes to do that doing this there are many many techniques many possibilities so what I would encourage you to do which I'm sure you're doing is is to be discriminatory it makes sense to experiment with a few things but then it makes sense to actually fixate you know get get into what really seems to be working best for you and just one final point to make that's really crystal clear with that when it comes to meditation practice [Music] it seems unfortunately true that if you want the benefit you have to do the practice I know that might sound like a bit of a mystery but there there does seem to be pretty good evidence that if people meditate on your behalf pray for you things like that you'll get some benefit and I would always encourage your friends and relatives to do that for you but the evidence is pretty strong the more you meditate the more benefits you'll get both therapeutically well-being spiritually long thing so the this introduces the an easy question of discipline because I think in Australia we'd rather pride ourselves on being anti-disciplinarian but we don't want to get confused here actually because the discipline we're talking about here is a personal kindness I think it's a really good way to understand this self-discipline as a personal kindness It's about recognizing what's good for you and doing more of that so I would really encourage you in your practice uh I think it's if we think about what might help the future the planet I reckon making meditation compulsory at every level of Education you know people argue about religious instruction people argue about sexual um what do you call education I think if we had meditation as a compulsory subject that ran through education from primary school right through the tertiary level would be wonderful uh and I think increasingly we're seeing that so I'd encourage you in your own practice and I'd encourage you to do what you can to help other people to practice thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Happiness & Its Causes

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Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022