This Unfolding Mystery Day 2: Breathing into Constrictions | Vidyamala

let's actually just start with a little moment of presence so really bringing ourselves as fully here as we can just for a couple of moments perhaps putting down your tea if you're drinking tea closing your eyes if you find that comfortable and let's just allow our awareness to drop down into the body and feeling into the points of contact between the body and the chair the floor whatever you're sitting on or lying on if you find it helpful you could take a deeper in breath and then arriving letting go a little more fully with the out breath doing that a few times if you'd like to settling resting arriving with each other and allowing your breathing to find its own natural rhythm opening phase on the in-breath and a settling phase on the out breath foreign tuning in to your emotional weather how you're feeling today seeing if you can allow it into awareness allowing it into awareness as flow so if you've got difficult emotional states notice any tendency to solidify these and to react to them by pushing them away or getting overwhelmed dropping into body awareness and this quality of everything being a little more fluid than we normally realize so we're just bringing all of ourselves into the session body our emotions what kind of thoughts are flowing through the mind let them come let them go okay so let's bring that to a close opening our eyes again yeah and that's an example of a very short little practice that we can do anytime during the day a little breathing space for feeling overwhelmed agitated uptight anxious anything like that just to stop drop into gravity drop into the body soften around the mind the body the heart can be surprisingly effective even just for a couple of minutes like that okay so good morning everybody or good evening for those of you who are on the other side of the world lovely to see you again yeah really lovely to see you again i really enjoyed being with you yesterday so we're going to explore more deeply the kind of material we uh began yesterday we're going to do this particularly around breathing but our alum uh i'll just do some introductory comments first of all yeah so as i said this is the session as part of the nature of mind project which is the six-month curated exploration of this great mystery of the mind such a kind of vast um potential of our minds and we know so little about it and it seems in our culture certainly in in western culture we've developed some quite unhelpful uh attitudes to mind um we seem to have lost touch to some extent anyway with the possibility of of mind or consciousness that's um really deeply expounded in some other cultures and certainly some eastern cultures over the century this this idea that mind has a potential to be vast and open and boundless and full of love and luminous and radiant you know very often we think of mind as this kind of chaos in our heads that's my that's my mind and we we we've completely lost touch with this potentiality for a different quality of mind that is uh what arises i think when we've learned how to work with all the entanglement of um of what we call the self and usually we usually we're completely identified with the sense of of the self being sort of limited self-referential even self-centered and then others out there the world's out there and with this kind of discrete autonomous completely separate uh unit tumbling through life that's very often what it feels like doesn't it but in in the great eastern traditions and i'm a buddhist and i'm talking from buddhist perspective it's seen that yes that is true you know we do have all that day-to-day experience but we make this fundamental um mistaken perception of concretizing everything concretizing everything fixing it making it static rigidifying it we're just rigidifying around it and then we react to it it is quite strange what we do when you start to get a bit of a different perspective it's like wow is that really what we do you know the the fundamental insight that i introduced yesterday was impermanence it's one of the various central things that the buddha saw in in his own experience the buddha being a human being like us who lived in northern india about two and a half thousand years ago and he took himself on this great adventure of turning inwards and really deeply deeply investigating you know what is going on in there what is the mind how does the mind function and he's the one that that first saw very very clearly this mistaken perception we're not living with flow but we're contracting against it and then we build up all these layers and layers and layers of construction on the basis of that we solidify all that as well and then we react to it mainly with creating an aversion i'll say more about that in a moment but the main point i'm wanting to make is that we can um if we want to be open to the possibility of mind and consciousness not not only being this more limited um uh limited way of being there's the potential for mind and consciousness to open and to become vast and boundless and i love the way in all the all the great traditions they also call it radiant and luminous and the buddha said this mind is luminous when free of the adventitious defilements and adventitious defilements is a kind of technical way of talking about all the constructions that we create through our misperception and through solidifying around experience so all the three speakers so far on the on the course have been asserting in their own ways that they believe that consciousness is primary so this this mind this potential of um experiencing mind as as uh kind of more free more open more fluid that this is this is primary and that all the material things that we experience in the world are secondary is everyone muted everyone could just mute themselves please thank you so that's very interesting isn't it because normally we think the material things are primary and we don't really even pay attention to consciousness so it's quite an important reversal of our normal perception consciousness is primary and then so then we get the great question well how do we explore this you know what's the what's the method if you like for exploring the idea that consciousness can um well it's much bigger than just this kind of narrow little world that we we usually experience you know if we if we're willing to entertain that as a possibility then as well okay so how do i begin to taste that more directly that becomes the question so it's all very well to have that as a theory but then we need the method and buddhism is is i think extraordinary path of providing methods you know the buddha had his insights and then he spent the rest of his life uh teaching very practically and uh using very clear methods how we can all begin to unwind all these sort of mental constructions and drop into something more broad open and loving and the primary thing we need to do is to be willing to experience ourselves be willing to come closer and closer to what is actually going on we have this great investigation that becomes a great question of life really you know what what what is it like to be alive how can i come closer and closer and closer to this lived experience of being alive and what are the processes where i fall into this misperception and create all these layers and layers of of suffering for myself based on rigidifying you know what what actually goes on and uh and bernardo castro he also says this this uh idealist philosopher who was the main um interviewee last week he says all we have is experience i thought that was very interesting you know he's got lots and lots and lots of um conceptual ideas and conceptual theories about the nature of reality but he also also boils it down to all we have is experience and very often we turn away from experience because it can be unpleasant so we've got all these habits of how do we avoid experiencing ourselves but the great um opportunity is to learn to come closer and closer and closer to what's actually going on and then to unwind all the ways we create suffering and that does mean being willing to be with unpleasant experience sometimes and i'll say more about that a bit later it does mean that so i really love the idea that awareness this practice of coming closer to direct experience as it's sometimes called is a path of of tremendous courage tremendous courage because sometimes people think meditation's a bit kind of indulgent naval gazing um you just want to be happy for yourself even you're a bit selfish i think i used to think that before i started to meditate but over the years i've i've i've really loved saying oh this is a path of courage this is a path of huge courage and bravery and it builds tremendous resilience builds tremendous confidence because we're not afraid anymore of what's what our experience is so we come closer we stabilize we settle simplify practice is actually quite simple in its ultimate sense meditation practice or this sense of coming closer we realize that the actual simplicity of perception in potential at least and uh yeah this sense of stability courage and love all these things arise when we're willing to just be with what's actually happening and i also think and i think this is an important point that it's a very altruistic act so rather than seeing it as well i just want to have be a bit calmer have a bit more peace of mind a little bit more settled be a bit stronger perhaps that if we become a person who is able to be with life as it happens able to have more inner spaciousness able to have more mental clarity able to have more love more sensitivity more robustness definitely makes us more robust then we then every person we come into contact contact with will be affected by that and then they might be affected by that and they become a bit quieter a bit more stable a bit braver a bit more robust and then the people they come into contact with will be affected so it all ripples out into the world and we are all deeply interconnected deeply interrelated if we accept this idea that everything's changing which i introduced yesterday everything's changing and flowing then where are the hard edges between us if i look out into the screen i see you all i'm being changed by that i'm being changed by your facial expressions i've been changed by um you know are you are you is your camera on or off and it's fine if you got your camera off there's no judgment there but those of you who i can see you know i'm taking you in and that's changing me right now you know no one seems to be asleep so that's good so i'm i feel a little bit more relaxed i think i'm good people are at least awake and then maybe i smile and you smile and we both smile together that's what's happening now which is nice we're both affected by that so this is going on all the time which is quite an awesome thing to reflect on that we are kind of co-creating our experience of what it means to be alive so if we become a person who's a kind of more stable more robust clear kind participant in that stream then that will affect the world i strongly believe that so it's great to just reflect oh this is an act of courage it's an act of bravery it's an act of strength and it's an act of altruism and i personally find that very motivating and very engaging and it really matters so let's come a bit closer to this process of of perception you know what's going on and what the buddha uh said is that we have this body we have our own sort of everyday mind an everyday mind and this kind of boundless mind they're not different they're not separate it's more like the everyday mind is the functioning within this great as bernardo called it this great ocean of consciousness so we have this sort of everyday functioning and there's always this um this ever present vastness there as well that normally we're split off from so in the everyday mind here we are we've got senses eye ear nose tongue body and mind is also considered sense in buddhism we have thoughts daydreams that pop up and just the way that we you know look out the window and see something or we hear something the mind also has its own activity as a sensing organ so we have all those and then they come into contact with the world so we have the inner uh ability to perceive and then we have the things that we do perceive so i'm perceiving you for example by looking at you i can hear the central heating roaring and hoping that you can't hear it um certain smell in the room just the sort of smell of a room not any particular smell but it's there so that's going on all the time and then what happens is very very quickly very quickly there's this initial arising of i like this or i don't like that very very very quickly just i think that the buddhist had something like 1 45th of a finger snap now of course that's not to be taken literally but it's just extremely extremely quick there's this initial arising of like that oh don't like that or neutrality the initial arising i'm a bit that doesn't engage me that doesn't interest me boredom yeah and then but when we're not aware most of the time we immediately then contract around that turn these things that we're perceiving into solid objects and we get into desire craving we want more of the thing that we perceive as pleasant and we push away the things we perceive as unpleasant and we kind of get confused about the things that are neutral and we go through day just through the day ricocheting off our sense impressions in this way and then we we so say something's unpleasant we don't even notice some placement resist straight into oh don't want that then we have all kinds of thoughts and emotions about that experience we build up a whole layer of sort of density um of a version dislike all the thoughts i don't i don't like that i don't want it um why me i don't like that person all the stories about that person and we just we just get lost on these endlessly proliferating layers and it all started with a sense impression it all started with the initial arising of unpleasant so it all started with a sense impression so every single moment of life we've got all these sense impressions pouring into our minds as it were and we always have the opportunity to um release around that compulsive craving and aversion and this is very central to what the buddha saw and very central to what he taught so the practice becomes uh really knowing this direct experience of sensation and i don't just mean physical sensation but also sounds and tastes and smells and these initial thoughts that we have and learning to sort of inhibit i guess that's what we're doing we're learning to inhibit the compulsive falling headlong into those sense impressions with craving an aversion and learning to just be learning to just be with the flow of life pouring through us moment by moment by moment all this richness because it's enormously rich and very beautiful when we learn how to sort of be closer and closer to what's actually happening i said yesterday that the present moment can sort of bloom into something very rich very multi-dimensional but while we're pushing and pulling against experience we're not going to be able to drop into something something uh more open and spacious because we're so caught up with this tussle with our sense experience yeah so we kind of release we come closer we release these compulsions release and then of course what happens is another kind of experience arises which has the taste of freedom has the taste of openness has the taste of release and we can learn how to rest there learn how to rest there and then that will quite naturally intensify and build and maybe i say at this point this is one of the reasons why we go on retreats we go on retreats so that we can simplify our lives have less going on as it were and then we can have uh a sort of purer sense of this investigation of what is my experience the purest sense of this investigation of what does it mean to be alive and we often have periods of silence on retreat so then you're reducing one of these sense impressions which is talking and then you can come a bit closer to what's underneath the compulsions a bit closer to this more open spacious awareness and there are some retreats that the nature of mind project is offering so maybe i'll just drop this in at this point there's one on from the first the first to the fifth of june i think nick's probably going to put it in the chat box later um and it said a very very beautiful place in herefordshire at astana and it's called change your mind change the world so it's exactly what i've just been talking about if we can change our mind so we're not completely sort of tangled up with this everyday mind we can drop into uh greater spacious uh kindly awareness then we will become a person who who's able to go out into the world in all our daily interactions and be more of a force for good as it were so that's then and then in august there's another retreat just called the nature of mind retreat 26th of august the 2nd of september and i'm going to be on the team for that which i'm really looking forward to so yeah retreats are a fantastic way to in a sense put ourselves in the lab and investigate more clearly okay so um in the practice this morning we're going to explore breath a bit more fully and this flow of experience a bit more fully and see if we can learn how to um sort of inhibit the compulsions inhibit the compulsions and to rest in flow rest in this more open fluid awareness and the reason why i want to explore breath a bit more is because we are always breathing of course something like 20 to 30 000 times a day we breathe in and we breathe out it's amazing and we do that our entire lives of course and breathing is such a fantastic uh experience of flow in potential we have this this capacity every moment of our lives to use what's happening right now as a doorway to a more fluid sense of experience and breathing is flow of course it is it blows in the air flows in and the air flows out so that's one reason i want to do this because if you can taste into more fluid open breathing that's your doorway to thinking ah that's what life is like life can be more fluid and open and then you look out and you see the wind in the trees and it's like oh that is that is also air just like the air in my body that i'm temporarily borrowing for each breath you might look at a river flowing and you you begin to see these ways that we that that flow is echoed everywhere in the world and breathing we've got the echo in ourselves and quite a tangible sense quite a tangible sense like that even our bones for example our entire skeleton is completely replaced every seven years it's amazing so you could say our bones are also flow but that's harder to perceive isn't it because our bones obviously seem so solid but breathing breathing has that quality of fluidity flow ceaseless movement and we can use that as our doorway to the impermanence teaching but secondarily breathing can tell us an awful lot about the state of our mind because most of us have inhibited breathing most of the time this as soon as we have a a mental state that's tight we generally hold our breath so let's just do a little exercise together to get a sense of that so if you make a fist with one hand and what's happened to your breathing anyone breathing out there you're probably holding your breath i would guess straight you make the fist then straight where we hold the breath okay so now imagine that you're directing your breathing into the fist and what does the fist want to do it wants to open that's amazing isn't it yeah so um what that's showing you is the fist is a metaphor for any contracted state any contracted state it might be physical maybe physical pain it might be mental anxiety fear worry craving it might be emotional it's kind of closing down contracting tightening experience as soon as we've got any of those things we've got we've got this extra layer of breath holding and then of course that starts to spiral so you've got the tightness you've got the tight mind you've got the breath holding you get more physical tension hold your breath a bit more then your mind starts to get a bit more unruly maybe more disturbing thoughts come in hold your breath a bit more and we just get lost in the spiral of of uh contraction so it's very like what um bernardo was calling the whirlpool he uses this image of of our kind of everyday self we've got we've got the ocean of the mind and then we've got the everyday self which is like a whirlpool and it creates its own vortex and it gets tighter and tighter and tighter and that can so quickly happen you know we have something that's a little bit contracted we hold the breath and then we're down the vortex but the really great news is if you notice that you become aware of that you think i'm holding my breath you release you soften you open you allow the out breath it's full expression because generally we generally it's the out breath that we're inhibiting you allow your out breath it's full of full expression the in bleth will flow back in in its own time and straight away that vortex is opening again and the intensity of the whirlpool is softening a bit more and then we can remember there is this broader way of being we can remember that this is the great ocean there yeah so that's a really great little practical tip just notice breath holding during your day and yesterday i talked about um this quality of yielding yielding up to the support and if you're yielding up to the support you could try this right now you know really sort of give your weight up to the chair and soften your buttocks relax your bum and you could ask yourself is it possible to hold my breath at the same time as yielding and softening through the buttocks and you'll probably find you can't do that as soon as you soften and yield the breath will have released a little bit you can't do those two things at the same time and you can't be tight and contracted and yielding and resting at exactly the same time so this is another very practical skill we can develop just learning how to yield rest and i think there are physiological reasons why relaxing the butt it can be so powerful and around breathing but i'm not going to go into those now i haven't got time but to take it from me that if you remember to soften the buttocks that will help your whole what we call whole body breathing which we're going to have an experience of in a moment so that's an important area the pelvis the buttocks obviously the the main diaphragm big muscle that sits across the body uh about here massive big muscle and it moves down on the in-breath and relaxes back up on the out breath very natural process you don't need to force it does that 20 30 000 times a day that's an error we'll be investigating in the practice there's the area at the back of the mouth that's important where the the air flows into the body on the way in and flows out on the way out and we're often quite tight there so a lot of us inhibit our breathing in this area so if you make this noise yeah i can't hear any of you but i'm sure you're all doing it i can see you're doing it that's the area that's in this area that's good to be curious about in the practice and see if we can keep the jaw soft maybe yawn now and then see what it feels like at the end of the yawn and that's what we want to try and generate during the day this kind of softer jaw the tongue soft that's important and then we've also got back breathing there's a lot happening in the back of the body as we breathe obviously the back of the lungs the back of the ribs and then it can also be breathing and echo of breathing in the lower back yeah so let's move on to the practice now and it's going to be an exploration of whole body breathing and uh see how you get on and this will be coming into a deeper sense of flow in the body and then coming a bit closer to our direct experience of sensation and we're learning the skill of if we come closer and closer we can interrupt the compulsion the compulsive compulsions of reacting to our experience so if you just get yourself set up in your posture ah so settling arriving resting if you want to take a few deeper in-breaths and really release with each out breath then by all means doing so and then when you're ready allowing your breathing to find its own natural rhythm opening phase on the in-breath subsiding face on the out breath and allowing awareness to slide out of the head and to fill the body very like we did yesterday to come closer to this process of embodying this experience of being alive in this body this body that seems so dense and static but is in fact process like everything else in this world so being aware of the feet and the legs being aware of sensation temperature tingling buzzing energy seeing if we can be aware of it from the inside so we're not abstracting it and thinking about it from the outside but we're resting in the experience from the inside there's any discomfort any unpleasant sensations noticing the tendency to contract against them to harden maybe hold your breath a little bit seeing if you can broad and soften open and let the sensations flow through the moments just as sensation free of all the layers and layers of contraction resistance holding rigidifying got pleasant sensations in the legs enjoying those and calm let them go and flow flow through the moments likewise i'm coming up to the buttocks checking that the buttocks are soft that you're yielding into the support receiving the support how wonderful we have this chair beneath us this planet beneath us that holds us that supports us allowing awareness to fill the torso the front the back the sides coming inside to pour through the shoulders down the arms all the way to the hands and the fingers seeing if we can let the hands and the fingers be supported so the shoulders can fall away from the midline of the body falling into gravity seeing if we can let the fingers and the hands rest in each present moment not reaching for the future clinging onto the past and now including the neck and the head in this broad body awareness seeing if we can experience the head as a limb of the body than just the seat of thoughts feeling into the physicality of the head temperature let the face be soft so having this broad sense of the whole body now beginning to arrive more deeply inside this process of embodying only experience that's arising moment by moment all the sensations pouring through our awareness seeing if we can notice the arising of the tendency to contract against unpleasant sensations in the noticing releasing yielding resting into the support and seeing if we can really be curious about the story of discomfort the story of pain drop the story and let it be a flow of sensations moment by moment likewise pleasant feelings if you notice you're chasing after them grasping then release around that and let the sensations flow through the moments or maybe you're just bored or feels a bit dull bland neutral that's the case getting curious what does neutrality feel like come a little closer and now we're going to explore this process of breathing a little bit more closely and seeing if we can drop into more fluid awareness of breathing so first of all let's allow our awareness to gather inside the belly or the abdomen the soft front of the body beneath between the pelvis at the bottom the ribs at the top and resting inside any movement sensations of breathing in this area maybe a very gentle opening expanding on the in-breath subsiding on the out breath if it feels agitating in any way then you could broaden away let's come back to the buttocks on the chair the feet on the floor just edging back in when you're but how ready we have the ceaseless flow in the body air becomes breath breath becomes air there's all this movement in the body as the breath expresses itself now coming back down to the buttocks again noticing if there's contraction that you're starting to grip in the noticing you can choose to rest and yield and settle and maybe as we do that there's a sense of the echo the breath echoing down right to the bottom of the torso down to the pelvis to the pelvic floor you need to force or strain or look for anything special just allowing breathing to feel a little bit more off the torso dropping low and deep now let's explore breathing in the lower back so allowing our awareness to rest inside the lower back and is there any echo or expression of breathing in this area maybe the angle is changing a little bit on the in-breath and the out breath maybe it's broadening on the in-breath subsiding on the out breath no need to force or strain but we've got some great attachments from the back of the diaphragm higher in the body that go all the way down inside the body to the inside of the lower back so every time the diaphragm moves there can be an echo in the lower back any point if you notice contraction and hardening against your experience see if you can notice the breath holding that comes with that and breathe into that area release and let go particularly with the eyebrow just like we did with the fist exercise earlier going up to the upper back feeling the movements and sensations in the back of the ribs in the back of the lungs shoulder blades spine again being careful not to force or strain it's a natural flow now broadly for of the whole bag the length of the bag the breadth of the back the landscape of the back resting inside breathing inside the whole back it's rhythm there's flow back breathing is naturally calming so during the day if you're feeling stressed agitated dropping your awareness inside breathing inside the back in this way will be naturally calming so you could try that coming through now to the chest the lungs the ribs movement in the breastbone sort of opening phase on the in-breath subsiding on the opera again if it's agitating dropping your awareness lower in the body or on the back of the body always checking that the buttocks are still soft now allowing our awareness to flow up inside the body through the neck and into the head checking the angle of the head that it's poised sometimes as we meditate the head can tip forwards or backwards side to side so adjusting if need be releasing a little bit through the base of the skull and open this in the throat let's explore this whole extraordinary dynamic of air becoming breath and breath then becoming air again this transition from the outside world to the inside world and back again so that's through the nose and this is area at the back of the mouth the throat that we investigated earlier so often tight and blocked so let's let the jaw be soft the tongue soft the lip soft allow the air to pour through this area on the way in and out of the body and again if it feels tight or tense relaxing the buttocks that's the quick way pelvis and the jaw are physiologically connected and sometimes it's difficult to really soften around the jaw if we've got lots of deep habits but if we release the buttocks relax the buttocks it will release the jaw not broadening awareness to be aware of the whole body this whole process of embodying in each moment so there's the legs the torso the arms neck head let's have a broad awareness of breathing in the whole body maybe having a sense of the whole body opening a little bit in all directions on the in-breath subsiding a little bit in all directions in the out breath we call this 360 degree breathing always with this quality of rest resting down into the support letting the body soften a little bit allowing breathing to express itself freely or as freely as we can sense at this time every time you notice a moment of contraction rigidifying against this basic experience being in the body sensing breathing in the noticing you can choose to release release back into flow c this is a training in being with what's actually happening in experience inhibiting the compulsions of pushing away aversion pulling in grasping craving it's a training and allowing life to be fluid and open allowing the mind to release into this much more open way of being so foreign foreign 2 and now let's let go of any effort whatsoever and just be absorbing the effect of this investigation this exploration if everything suddenly softens and comes together that tells you you were trying too hard um it's reflecting for a moment in our own way about how we can take this into our daily life what stood out for us in this practice every single moment is an opportunity to catch the arising of the compulsions and to release around those drop back into the body into stability into the flow of breathing foreign bring a tiny bit of movement into the body now as you bring the practice to a close maybe fingers and toes and notice do you immediately grip around your breathing can you keep the breathing soft fluid as you begin to introduce movement coming into slightly bigger movements maybe the hand turning around the wrists notice all the ways you tense the body straight away see if you can drop release open as you move in the noticing of tensing we have this choice point where we can inhibit the escalation of that and come into bigger movements when you're ready opening the eyes what's your body calling for and just uh if you can give it then do so yeah just really taking this practice with us as we transition from that sort of more inner world although as i was saying earlier on even this idea of inner is not as fixed and rigid as we normally think yeah maybe getting a sense that our world pulls a little less turbulent and then engaging with all these other flowing beings out there i'm just going to stand up myself yeah if you need to move your body stand up or anything like that please do so okay okay lovely um so i'm aware that the the europeans might need to leave us now because it's an hour later if your clocks change at the same time as us they have no idea if they did so yeah if you need to leave but then wonder wonderful to have you here and to practice with you and again you've got this wonderful field of practice for your day noticing all the moments that you harden against experience and then dropping releasing and paying attention to the the breathing in the body in particular the jaw that's a really good gateway the back of the body breathing in the back of the body the belly and the buttocks the bum these areas are the kind of important uh physiological areas for whole what we call whole body breathing and you see during the day how many times you can have a sense of 360 degree breathing it all becomes so interesting this kind of endlessly uh unfolding experience of being alive yeah what it means to be alive and how can we soften the hard edges how can we soften the hard edges good and for those of us who are staying um now actually before maybe before people leave i will just mention again i know it's been said a few times in the project that um this is very very important to this project that it's offered free of charge very very important as is this i believe personally learning to work with our minds learning to work with our consciousness is the great endeavor of our lives for the sake of us and for the sake of the world as i was saying earlier that the world needs people who have got some kind of mastery over their reactivity you know it makes us safer and it will make the world a more benevolent place we're living in these very very challenging times as we all know and we're seeing we're seeing the consequence of individuals with minds that are not trained in in the direction of compassion and love and awareness so it's very important that suffer free but of course these things do unfortunately cost money to put on so if you would like to make a donation that would be really brilliant and nick will put the link in the chat box and the suggestion is 50 pounds for the six month series and that will be really really wonderful and that means that these offerings of of mind training heart training resilience or abundant robustness courage altruism they can flow out into the world all the more strongly yeah good okay um nick anything yep so we've got one here um so uh lisa is saying thank you very much for your wonderful guidance she's asking uh for advice relating this to the menopause or other hormonal states when hormones can make you feel like you have no control over the body uh what would the buddhist approach be yeah brilliant um yeah i i i actually recorded i think 26 meditations for a menopause app a couple of years ago it's called stella if you want want to look that up the stella app and uh really it's exactly the same as everything i've just talked about so the the hormone you don't have control over the hormones that's true they're raging through the body causing all kinds of mental and physical consequences but that the way that manifests will be through sensation in like a hot flush as the sensation of this really unpleasant heat in the body um and as a woman who's been through this myself i know how weird it can be you know that it's not just heat is it there's all kinds of other weird feelings that you get but they're just sensation so the the practice is to notice that notice the arising of that sensation notice the tendency to go oh no it's happening again it's going to be awful contract around it narrative about it stories about it because you've never had that hot flush ever before you're just you you're basing anticipation on memory which can be helpful in life but can also be unhelpful because it might not be the same so you you kind of ride it out as sensation and the sensations are always changing so you kind of ride it out and you really work on the habit of closing down around it and rigidifying i think this word of this word rigidifying is very accurate you know you've got something that is by its very nature fluid and then you go and you solidify with your perception and then you react to it it is the definition of foolishness and we all do that all through our lives we rigidify concretize and then react it's mad but that's what we do um so yeah it's all the same principles just all the same principles stay with the direct experience and let it flow as much as we can and really what that is is is in reality noticing all the ways that you're not letting it flow this is a very very important point i made it yesterday you know nobody just lives in this lovely fluid awareness all the time well i don't know anybody that does but i know people who have gone more and more and more adept and skilled and noticing the arising of the crunching down and learning how to release back into flow again that is the lived practice lived practice isn't being in this perfect state oh wow it's all lovely and open you know life happens things happen things impinge we have these habitual arisings but we can get closer and closer and closer and closer to that initial arising and get more and more skilled and adapt ah i'm doing it again let it go and the it's very very important i i think i said this yesterday to be good humid with ourselves very very important rather than thinking oh everyone else is just living living in this lovely state of openness and i i'm the only one who's tormented by my mind you know we're all tormented by our minds in one way or another and just hold it all lightly hold it all lightly yeah maybe i'll just say at this point as well that's um yeah i've been practicing for many years now i started in 1985 i'm too old to do the maths for a long time and um you know i used to think that if i was a buddhist if i was if i was training my mind in this way i'd become more serious you know because you sort of have these these um stereotypes of the monk who's very sort of mindful and slow and serious but what i've discovered to my delight is one of the the fruits that i most enjoy is becoming more lighthearted and i find that really i i just want to tell any of you who are starting out on this it's so wonderful that you become more light-hearted you don't become more sort of oppressed by the earnestness of life um able to be good humid about one's own foolishness that's very important and even to laugh oh i'm doing it again just hold it lightly yeah so i developed this little little slogan for myself during the pandemic which was take life seriously hold it lightly take life seriously hold it lightly because life is serious of course it is but hold it lightly [Music] so you know during during our days if we're aware we'll just notice all the times that we are inhibiting this sort of open awareness open consciousness but be good humid about and think wow i'm noticing how amazing is that i've come closer and i'm noticing what my habits are i'm noticing this compulsion to push away the unpleasant and chase after the pleasant and just get bored by the neutral i'm noticing that how amazing and because i'm noticing i can chew i can then choose what do i do next and you just drop back into awareness drop back into awareness every moment is a new chance that's also a nice little slogan okay so becca's saying um thank you for the meditation the grounding into and allowing the supports and relaxing the buttocks is a complete revelation you said something about why this works physiologically could you perhaps say a little more about that please hmm okay good um that we've got um let me try and see if i can it's not going to work is it so we've got um lots of diaphragms in the body so we often think about the diaphragm being this big the big central diaphragm don't we this this big muscle that goes across here but diaphragm means membrane between two spaces and so there's lots of different diaphragms in the body and there's some that are particularly relevant to breathing so you got this this big one here there's also one at the bottom of the torso in the pelvic floor so um so your pelvis is like this at the bottom of the body and the pelvic floor also moves with breathing when we've got whole body breathing there's an echo in the pelvic floor and if you don't know where your pelvic floor is if you imagine that you're if you're sitting on a chair you're sitting on a flat diamond flat diamond and the front of the diamond is your urinary pubic area and the back is your anus and the two sides of the diamond is your sitting bones bones that you can feel in your buttocks yeah so we often think of the pelvis as being bony and rigid which which it is in some ways but the pelvic floor is the area inside that diamond and that soft tissue so the pelvic floor can um i mean you won't feel it directly it's not like it's like pelvic floor exercises it's more like an echo an ocean swell but they can be a very gentle opening and toning so you're allowing your breath to drop right down inside your body and if you relax robotics that enables the pelvic pelvic floor diaphragm to express itself basically if your butt is so tight you're gonna you're gonna be contracting the pelvic floor diaphragm then everything starts to rigidify but if you if you have your buttocks soft and the pelvic floor diaphragm can be participating in the breathing process yeah and the reason why i go into this series because there's another very important diaphragm here the vocal or cervical diaphragm so we need to allow that to also participate in breathing by just being open and soft yeah but all that's quite technical and the the higher teaching is relax your bum if you do that all will be well okay good so miriam is saying i noticed when i come close to noticing my experience as it is to being open to experience i feel anxious is interesting she says uh it feels like all the guidance you've given is just as relevant to this but i wonder if there was any more to say about that yeah thank you miriam thank you for saying that because that's very common and i'm really glad that you've um articulated that for the sake of all of us so as you're saying the the guidance is relevant so then you bring exactly the same quality of attention to the anxiety so initially it might be you're just coming into the body sensation and then i've got anxiety so then you bring the awareness to the anxiety what does that feel like what are the sensations um you know again you try to let go of all the layers and layers of narrative about the anxiety and stay with the what would sometimes call the bear experience the direct experience yeah so that's that's one thing but if but of course that that doesn't always work because anxiety can be quite intense can't it so you're staying with it and it's just building and building and it's getting too much so then you back off then you back off you broaden i think going into the back of the body is very good for things like anxiety that going into the lower back is very good because often anxiety is all around here or it might be a lot of thoughts so it's all kind of upper part of the body so if you go into the lower back and feel the movements and sensations of breathing in the lower back then that can take you away from where all the agitation is and you just drop and rest in the lower back or it might be coming to your feet you might be coming to your hands where have you got stability so you look for stability and groundedness and then when you've stabilized you might edge back and edge back in again to the exploring the anxiety so it's quite dynamic and um um i mean a good analogy i think is is surfing you know if you look at a surfer i've never surfed myself but looking at a surfer they're riding a wave but they're continually making adjustments on their surfboard they're continually they're not consciously monitoring but they'll be aware of the the the nature of the wave how the wave is changing they'll be aware of wind they'll be aware of the board and this is constant adjustment and that's what we do with our awareness it's dynamic it's creative it's flexible so think if if you're staying with experience and it's getting too much then you you do a little adjustment and you broaden your back off so maybe this the anxiety is intense then you think how many up how many other things can i be open to right now in this great landscape of experience how many other things are i've got tingling here and i've got warmth there maybe open to sounds that can be very good i can hear the sound of the birds but you allow the sounds to come to you rather than your mind flying out the window to the birds you allow the sound to come to you as beautiful the sound of the birds i'm breathing hear the birds and then you won't be so anxious most probably yeah so i hope that's helpful so amy's asking do you think the whole body naturally contracts due to just existing in samsara and low-lying anxiety as a mortal human that's a great question yeah i think it probably does actually yeah i think i think that being a mortal human as you put it um it's quite demanding isn't it you know just kind of dealing with everything that comes in in our lives and then just dealing with the body that ages and so on and yeah in buddhism there there is what's called what's called dukkha and dukkha means this kind of discomfort i guess discomfort of life and one level of is what's what's called existential dukkha so we've got this kind of existential unease i think um because we're not living aligned with the way things are it's quite simple you know the way things are is that everything is fluid and open and we are a kind of um sort of condensation of that not rigid and fixed we're also fluid a bit like the whirlpool you know we're a kind of whirlpool within that but what we do is we concretize and we solidify and then we try to we try to live as if we are solid in a solid world and that doesn't work does it because you know things things that we want to last will fade this is another really weird thing we do perceptually with pleasant things we want them to last last forever and we get disappointed when they fade with unpleasant things we assume they're going to last forever and we concretize around that and build up great narratives about oh it's going to go on forever but actually it's not that is also going to fade that is that has also changed so the the our fundamental misperception leads i think to this existential um tension because we're not living aligned with the way things actually are we're living aligned with a kind of constructed view of the way things are which is fundamentally wrong around uh we we rigidify we fix we make things static yeah so that's i think when we're dropping into this more sort of open way of being there's also such a relief well i feel such a relief because like oh this i can taste the truth of it i can i can sense the truth of it so that existential anxiety starts to soften a little bit and then then you taste the kind of pleasure of it the pleasure of being more open and fluid good so rachel is saying uh thank you video marla sometimes when i try to relax some tightness it works and softens and sometimes i feel like i get a refusal do you have any tips for what to do then yeah very good thank you so yeah relaxations a very interesting um uh quite tricky word i think because generally if we try to relax it won't work because we're trying and if you try to um do something which is is of by its very nature opening you just you're trying to you do you're doing how do i say this um and i'm sure you all know i mean if you try to force relaxation you often just get more tense so it's more that there's an allowing your kind of and and i think dropping into into the the soft buttocks on the chair you're not trying to relax but you're just allowing oh i can just release i can soften i can be um softer on this chair relaxation will naturally arise but trying to relax in my experience generally doesn't work it just becomes another effortful activity which is the complete opposite of uh relaxation and so you have to kind of trick yourself we have we are we've got tricky minds so often i use the language of coming in through the back door so if you try to go into the front door of relaxation you will get a refusal you'll be thrown out of the house be like no i don't want you so you sneak around and come in the back door so in my case it would be you know very often i find coming into the back of the body and just being aware of breathing in the back of my body and releasing on the out breath that will soften my experience but if it was like right i'm gonna soften my experience now that probably won't work it's too confrontative you need to be you need to be quite delicate with your mind i'm going to go into this a little bit uh more tomorrow about becoming a mind whisperer because horse trainers have ways of training horses and one way is the kind of front doorway which is where you just basically harness the poor creature and break it in they even use the language of breaking it in sort of breaking the horse and horse whispering is much more subtle and much more sensitive and likewise i think with the mind trying to break the mind doesn't generally work or you know force force the mind into discipline but we can learn to become mind whisperers so maybe we can be relaxation whisperers how can we invite it in without any degree of force good yes i think that's it for the questions so far good okay so you got your homework it's quite complicated homework today just being aware of 360 degree breathing noticing contraction um and now we've got the added subtle layer of trying not not forcing anything allowing things to arise that's the other thing about what the buddha taught is everything is a flow of conditions and what we are is the is the coming together of lots of different conditions and one of the conditions is is what we do with our minds you know how we how we use the ability the facility of choice and so on so it might be that if you feeling really uptight and you want to relax you just need to create the conditions where relaxation will arise and that might be going outside looking at the sky taking some deep breaths turning your computer off having a lie down so you create the conditions and then that thing will arise rather than forcing it okay good well i'm gonna i'm hungry i don't know about the rest of you here in the northern hemisphere i'm ready for my breakfast people in the southern hemisphere i hope you have a wonderful evening and a good night's sleep um on the basis of what we've done together softening yield you can rest into your beds that'll be nice and see you all tomorrow look forward to it very much we're moving on to the mar onto thoughts and emotions tomorrow so similar you know really sort of practical ways that we can work with the entanglement of our mental and emotional processes and lots of images and so on i'll bring in lots of images and metaphors and the other thing i'm i think i'm supposed to be saying to you is um that these are all available for catch up are they is yesterday's session online yet nick yeah yeah and so you could tell your friends about them if you want to because one one of the aims of this project is to um make these resources for training our minds and hearts and becoming these more resilient courageous kind beings in the world making these more and more widely available so uh if you if it if there's anyone you know who might be interested to you you could tell them to join tomorrow people can pick up during the week of course but also they can do it on catch up on youtube lovely okay thank you all very very much and see you tomorrow thank you bye bye thank you thank you thank you so much [Music] pleasure

Channel: Adhisthana

Views: 1,057

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Id: cH08CSyQj84

Length: 84min 47sec (5087 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022