Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Choedak explores the practical art of managing pain and discomfort during sitting meditation, a cornerstone skill for developing true calm abiding. Rather than suppressing or resenting physical pain, he teaches a detailed breathing technique called qualified round breathing: inhale positive thoughts or visualizations (light, healing energy), retain the breath while letting that positive force dissolve the pain, then exhale to release accumulated tension. The core insight is that pain itself is not the obstacle—our mental rejection of it is. By paying early attention to discomfort before it accumulates, by understanding pain as transient and instructive rather than an enemy, and by cultivating loving-kindness toward the struggling body, meditators can remain mentally calm even when the body is uncomfortable. Choedak emphasizes this extends beyond the cushion: mindfulness of feeling teaches us to recognize that our unpleasant emotional responses arise from our own unskillful management of sensations, not from external triggers. Whether it is a ringing bell, a crow cry, or bodily numbness, our feeling-state is always within our control if we develop awareness in time. Aimed at beginning meditators undertaking formal retreat practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 TtT.mp3
UUID: 3f72f9c5-fd2e-42fa-8ab8-9c190ce78ad1
Teacher: Choedak
Collection: Calm Abiding (Choedak)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,830
With the sitting posture, once you get very good, become good at it, developing mindfulness in the body also means not only doing the mindfulness practice with what you are meditating, but also even outside meditation practices. When you do various physical activities, whether you could incorporate the calm abiding with other activities as well, such as one we tried with walking meditation. Of course, meditation is completely distinct to a sitting meditation. But of course, it actually is a very, very, very, very subtle way of subjugating oneself, not only with walking but every other activities you can also combine with calm abiding meditation. But as you develop some familiarity with the bodily posture, then you move to build what is called mindfulness of body, moves into the mindfulness, I suppose, mindfulness of feeling.
Or mindfulness of feeling by developing the particularly as you continue to sit longer and longer, you may be able to get used to posture, but you still have a lot of physical difficulties. You can’t sit long, your legs go numb, you’re sitting there but just barely and not quite having really calm abiding as such. It’s almost like pain abiding. You just have pain and you try to stay in there. That’s all you can, you know.
And when you have that, of course you have to now manage the difficult, unpleasant feelings to do with the legs and maybe to do with the circulation and the posture, that position in which you haven’t been so used to sitting, and mainly just that. And also just finding the correct, the more you’re able to improve your posture, the more you’re able to get the right kind of cushion, because if you have the right kind of sitting gadgets, if your cushion’s right, maybe because the cushion that you have right there, maybe you need two of those, three of those. I can make four or five maybe. Two under the bottom, one under the knee, one under the knee. So it’s good to know and find out what exactly is the body finds supported by that your sitting becomes, know, sitting becomes possible, not only to sit in the posture, but also to abide in calmness.
While the pain and numbness and aches in the body, to have in the body is quite natural process of living and being in life, there are nothing that you can do physically that is painless. You can even lie on bed sometimes, but all of a sudden a person is turning the other way around. You he’s sleeping on the right, then he’s turning on the left. There’s never a comfortable position, that’s the nature of life. But the whole idea here is to develop mindfulness feeling, is you try to govern your feeling by learning what to do with those feelings instead of suppressing them.
Now if you’re just having a lot of pain, you’re simply trying to sit through so that you don’t really break the session and you’re just holding, enduring it with great difficulty, that’s not the idea. You need to be able to calmly abide because you’re not really calm, you’re having great struggle. And in order that the struggle that you have is not built up, you need to develop this mindfulness feeling by using your breath as an object to meditation. It’s good to move on to. There different types of meditation on the breath, but this first one which I suggest you do, particularly in the morning session tomorrow, first morning session tomorrow that you have after the preliminary practice and the blessing of the speech, you mainly do on that.
Of course, the good fifteen, twenty minutes you might still focus on the posture of the meditation, on on the posture itself. And then move on to this mindfulness of breathing, what I call mindfulness of breathing having quite a few types. This first one which was suggested in the reading is called qualified round breathing. That if you have an intense and aching feeling that is generating,, don’t let them be built up, but try not to localize one part of the body, but try to see the circulation of the body causing the pain move, even if not physically happen, just mentally imagine that you are relocating the pain from the knees to the thighs maybe and then coming up and slowly you actually exhale it each time you exhale. So use your breathing process as an outlet for the pain not to stay on very much, and so you exhale, try to bring back, bring out if you like the tense feeling that you are generating.
So this non suppression technique is very important, because for you to remain calm, you have to be able to be coping well with the pain, And pain isn’t something you’re avoiding or denying, but pain is something you’re knowing well, why the pain is there. If you understand the pain is there, why it’s there, and you might know what to do with Pain largely comes from aversion and attachment, and it may not have to do with what you are doing now. You might be doing perfectly fine as the technique of meditation goes. It may be some undealt with, unresolved feelings of the past that are registering there. General sort of spots or trapped feelings in the body usually comes out when are doing something like that.
So it’s important not to keep them but to exhale them. See, each time you exhale them you try to relieve the pain and so that you become mindful of the feeling is the kind of three kinds, pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. Now when you could no longer stay calmly because of pain or discomfort that you’re having going through, it’s important to pay attention to that unpleasant feeling early enough so that it doesn’t build up so much until you become very cross at the sitting. And if you become cross at the sitting, on top of the physical pain there will be a mental tension, and almost like you want to sit but you have trouble with the sitting, how the body is not coping very well. So it’s important to not accumulate the discomfort in your mind and therefore while the pain, even the sensation of pain is generating,, don’t keep just focusing on the body as if you are going to be okay.
But even when small pain is paying more attention to it, see how it’s rising and whether there’s a one point in the body where the pain generates and it stays there or all the pain generates from there, you know, and spread to different parts of the body. When you really look at it, your attention to the pain makes yourself keen enough to do something about it fairly in the early stages. It’s important as soon as the pain arises, you see these as something temporal and something external, something external, something temporal and something physical, and try to give the mind the same as what to do with the body, and don’t become the body, just see the body is something you have, and pain is something what the body have. And neither are you pain, You are not the pain. You are in pain when you allow yourself to be.
Yeah. Because meaning that you are, when you become so small that little pain can affect you, you become totally overwhelmed by the pain. But when you have the, I would say, competence to look at the pain, what it is as an object, when the pain becomes an object, there’s little space between you and pain, and because of that, that space allows you to have a say of what to do with the pain. So you’re not alarming about the pain, but you know exactly what you’re going to do with the pain. In many ways, the exhalation is a very good one, good thing to do, and as soon as you exhale what you do is you inhale, exhalation usually follows inhalation doesn’t it, as soon as you feel exhaling then you inhale and during inhalation think of something positive, not the pain, not the pain.
The pain is something you have within you, but bring something from without that not painful but happy. The kindness, the gratitude, and all the things you could say, positive thoughts, try to breathe in positive thoughts. The positive thoughts goes to permeate through your body and lungs and goes to the places where you have been feeling pain and completely dissolves those pains by this inhalation. As the breath goes lower and lower, and breath, the inhaled breath becomes the fact that dissolves the pain of your tension or circulation, whatever it is. As you’re retaining the retained air, meaning the retained inhale and inhaled breath, the retention is the period after you exhale and before you exhale.
However short it appears that way, at the very beginning it’s important to recognize there is a distinctive space between inhalation and before exhalation, and that is retention. Try to gently prolong that by visualizing that the inhaled breath has now caused the, I would say, has made the pain becoming more lighter because the positive feeling that you have just brought in has almost healed it as much as you can think. Then, as you’re no longer able to hold it back, hold the breath, then exhale it again. So use the exhalation to take out what was building up as a tension or negative feelings. Because your disapproval of pain itself could be quite costly.
Costliness and it can itself make the pain grow bigger. So if you receive the pain and knowing what you should be doing with it, knowing exactly what you need to do, then you’re not allowing more negative thoughts to build on top of the pain. The pain may be physical, but the rejection by the mind may be a much deeper scar that you may not heal very quickly. So that’s what you’re trying to develop in calm abiding. Even when there’s pain, remain calm and know what to do.
Don’t alarm, don’t think that, oh, looks like I can’t sit anymore. This is not the kind of meditation I want to do. I like the walking bit. I can do the other one. They can do this sitting one if they like.
Where’s the door actually? Not of course nobody’s doing that but mind can almost easily generate negative thoughts, negative things like that, very dissuasive and it’s going to protect you and rescue you from the trouble. It’s actually not, it’s just escapism. We’re all good at escaping and and running away from the real issue. So that’s what’s coming up, you know.
There’s no problem, nobody has broken their legs in meditation, nobody has broken their jaws in meditation, so you’ll be perfectly safe. It’s just a temporal numbness. You just have to think like that and then you realize you don’t allow your negativities to grow because otherwise you you alarm, don’t you? We don’t allow. We think, oh, looks like I can’t sit, this is ridiculous.
Probably I should be doing something else instead. What can I do? Everything becomes interesting except sitting, you know. That’s really usually you’re very very fidgety, you’re very jumpy, anything, anything good. So that’s when you’re very very vulnerable.
So don’t let that happen. Therefore, fairly early on when even the pain is small, don’t deny it, pay attention to it and exhale it. Again and again exhale them. After exhalation bring positive thoughts. Think that this is only temporal, I’ll be fine, I have seen many pains in life, they all come and go.
This this will be very safe. This I’m learning, learning to govern my feelings because feeling, mindfulness feeling is a very big, big subject if you really are. A lot of our suffering in life has come because of our unskillfulness in managing feelings. Feelings are never provided to us as ready made by the way. Feelings are made difficult by our inability to manage them.
Generally have their unpleasant, generally have their origin in great conflict between aversion and attachment. An aversion to pain itself can cause the pain to go worse. And if you have a general understanding of pain as a prevalent nature of life, then you don’t reject pain as something that is an obstacle to your meditation. And therefore you should see the pain as part of living. And we may not have looked that way until in meditation but that’s the fundamental teachings of the Buddha.
And this, it’s important to learn about that and therefore of course, there’s a section in my writing here on page thirteen in your manual, Meditation on Pain. And during the time of the meditation, within the pain, you can’t say, oh, should go and read that in the book. But of course, you have read this, and then within the meditation you know exactly how to positivize pain by accepting the pain.. If you reject the pain, it doubles. It really, it increases, it blows out of proportion.
And therefore it is important to have these thoughts, for correct attitude, right view about the pain. When pain will bring me onto the path, you’ve got to give meaning to pain. Pain will bring me onto the path of cultivating inner strength, know, and exactly that’s what you’re trying to cultivate, being able to sit through without being daunted by pain, without being discouraged by pain. So if we are easily discouraged by pain, we are falling prey to negativities of ourselves. It will teach me the skills to accept and see how it arises and falls.
It’s important to see the pain is never provided, comes to us ready made. Pain is not an external thing, it’s not something that comes to us. It was very much the posture maybe, your body isn’t so used to sitting like this, and probably you’re wearing a bit too tight a pants, loose clothing is suggested highly, and there’s all sorts of things like that later on to think about. Maybe what can I do to, and instead of rejecting the pain, you realize what are the things you can do to prevent pain from arising? But when they arise, what should be my fundamental attitude?
Pain will teach me, you know. Pain will teach me. When you see your pain as a teacher, your relationship to it changes. You have respect for pain. As a result of that, you will learn what you have, never would have learned otherwise.
And not only that, pain itself doesn’t exist, pain is not a substantial thing, inherent thing that exists. And pain comes as soon as the day we were born, I don’t know whether you remember or not, as soon as we were born we cried. As soon as we were delivered, the midwife, I’m sure she would have heard us crying., I’m sure she would have heard us crying. So pain was part of part of everything. It’s too hot, it’s pain. It’s too cold, it’s pain.
You know, nothing is satisfactory. Unsatisfaction is alive. When you are not sitting, want to sit. When you are sitting, want to get up. It’s that sort of thing.
You know, never is any one thing satisfactory. So it’s not because sitting is a problem, but it’s because we are attached to what we want certain things to be and we don’t have a lot of room to accommodate the difficulties that come along the way. While paying it my full attention, that is the pain, paying it my full attention, it will whisper, I always whisper about it, rise and fall, meaning saying it’s only transient, only transient. Yes, breathe it out. And the more you breathe it out, the pain without freezing it, without resenting it, without grasping at it, the more you breathe it out, it will flow out.
Otherwise, it may be heard as a loud scream from the outside saying, you can’t sit like that. It is bad for your body or something. It will destroy your legs. You will never get up again. Do you know what you’re doing to your body?
Amazing. I can hear the screaming me. I’m sure he did that too. Seeing the rise of pain will show me how to teach, how to search the way for methods to heal and realize that running away only deepens the pain. Because if you run away from it, meaning that if you don’t pay attention to it, despise the pain, you reject the pain, when you do that you’re going to double the trouble by despising pain.
But if you understand pain, you don’t negativize the pain. You see the meaning. There must be something that’s going to teach me. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s good.
By knowing its transient nature, I’ll find the space to flow and spread. Sure you will find the space to flow and spread, and also an outlet. The two nostrils are well designed for that. And to find the wisdom to nurture and nurse part of me that is in pain. So you pay even more attention.
Your loving kindness is there to your body. You’re not chastising your body for being such a thing. Some people don’t like their body. I wish I had his leg. I wish I like his back.
All of a sudden they have aversion to their body and their body isn’t as good as almost think that other people’s body must be immaculate. Look at him here. Why am I like this? Look at her. I wish I wasn’t like this.
All of a sudden, we question our body. It’s amazingly very very dangerous thing to do that. It’s good to say that probably everybody is more in pain than me. Maybe my pain is just very small. When you start thinking like that, you’re really nurturing your mind.
Otherwise there is amazing tendency to alarm. Pain humbles my arrogance and crumbles my attachment to health, you know, because health, however you because health is only health when you appreciate when you don’t have pain. Now, okay, how long have you been sitting? Forty five minutes. How many minutes were pain?
How many minutes were not pain? And the many minutes that were not pain is pain free. How about that? Feel happy about it. And then five minutes pain, never mind.
So arithmetically you’re far better off. If you think like that, you positivize. You positivize. Oh, I wasn’t in pain the whole time. It was only for a few minutes and I managed to, managed to do something about it.
That’s what it’s called. Because otherwise we tend to be very negative about little pains. Almost like, oh you’re coughing, you shouldn’t be at work type of attitude. As we should be immaculate to be at work. It reminds me of the fragility of the body and it purifies my negativities.
It’s good to mean give meaning to pain. Even when you have pain, it it gives you the it gives you to purify. It is purifying my negative karma of the body. Let them all come now. When else can I come?
This is a good mood. I am in meditation. I’m in retreat. I’m here to purify, may all the negativities of my body come, they may. And so you’re more sort of invoking them.
Some people may hesitate to invoke them because they may all come together. Others may find that’s a very intelligent way to deal with pain instead of trying to think I’m totally, you know, so strong I should never be. Like that. Body is fragile. It’s good to know the body is fragile.
It is crumbling even if you don’t do anything. Even if you lie in bed, think it’s comfortable, you’re not, you know, you’re breaking into slowly the body is dying. Really, it’s really true. Look at your hair, look at your hair, nose, look at your skin, scrunch up papers. Look like scrunch up papers.
After age forty five, definitely your skin become like scrunch up papers. You have a check, know? You buy all this black mold lotions and all those these things, it’s time to feed yourself. Look at it, there’s nothing that’s going make you look better. Fortunately or unfortunately.
You can see why the great masters don’t mind about their bottom going so hard. Because they know it’s going to be hard anyway down in the coffin. So they’re not attached to the body. It purifies the attachment of the body. Purifies the attachment.
Let these purify all my sufferings of life. Know? I mentioned this actually brings a lot of tolerance. How do you try to increase your ability to tolerate this distress? Where do you go and learn it?
Ask the boxers, the people who do boxing, and people who do all kinds of sports, you know, hit themselves on this on the where all this padding and then like bullocks, you know. There’s no reason just to cross the line, you know. Just to cross the line, how how are gonna get better in life? It’s just I’m not joking, but it’s strange, really. I mean, see, there’s a lot of diligence, there’s a lot of stamina, only if we are willing to.
Just to carry the ball on the other their line for your club. How much? Oh, maybe it’s your family all cheering up. Is that the reason you’ve got a lot of stamina? Why don’t we bring people in the whole family to watch us meditate?
Hey, come on, boy. Come on, come on, boy. Maybe that’s a good idea to learn that. Oh, you will do it. Come on, come on, do it.
And have some trailers here to carry out just in case we get injured. Very inspiring people get really inspired, they’re so strong. This motivating factor, what motivates people to find the strength and stamina and forbear the difficulties? They know the guy is just as strong as you, but yet hit each other as strong as possible. Oh.
This is no battleground. This is just yourself. There’s no opponent kidding, hating on you. This is just you sitting still. Just still have struggles, you know.
As the trial and test of life, pain evokes hidden wisdom and as a timely reminder it says pain is prevalent. You know, who is not in pain? You know, whatever they do in life. Meditation, this practice of this which I have set out at the very beginning, may all beings have happiness and cause of happiness, this is my dedication. This is my gift.
This is my generosity. This is my practice. I’m going to dedicate this for such and such people. And to do that, you can be able to do that. Observing my own pain opens my heart in a compassionate way, and I experience a burst of compassion towards others with more pain than me.
Think of all the people living in war ravaged places, famine stricken places, ravaged by so many incurable diseases, having very little thing to eat or live or for shelter, just think of that. And then you realize this is nothing. These are for solemn purposes of benefiting other beings for my spiritual nourishment. Seeing how trivial my own pain is, I become patient with myself. I find strength and tolerance and acceptance rather than in rejecting the pain.
So you therefore turn to these qualities, positive thoughts, you know, tolerance and acceptance rather than in in negative feeling of despising and rejecting the pain. I feel gratitude to those. So these last two verses are not so relevant only only for people who are in hospital or many have have difficulty managing pain and so forth. But but those verses are good to remember, meanings of those ideas are good to remember, and then find this is what I call mindfulness feeling. So mindfulness feeling is transmuting unpleasant feeling into pleasant feeling.
Maybe not straight away unpleasant into pleasant, but try to neutralize the pain, pain, the unpleasant feeling into neutral feeling, not so, not too bad. You try to downplay the pain if you like. Oh, this is nothing. I’ll do something about it to to reduce it. When you do it time after time, so your whole qualified round of breathing is this.
Just breathing in, positive thoughts, and inhale, by exhaling that, and when you retain it, try to cause that to dissolve any pain, and like you pour water in the bottle, whatever stains or dust in the bottom of the bottle or wherever it is, it floats on the surface, yeah? So when you pour in the water of the positive thought, it brings up all that staining and then until it comes out. And so, and when you fill it in yourself with all inhaled positive thoughts, it totally assimilates due to the retention and then retention therefore enables yourself to exhale. And the more time you exhale, the less the pain remains or frozen or you’re not grasping or resenting that long, you’re doing something about it. And you keep doing that as many rounds as possible.
Sometimes go back to the body if you have become physically settled in. Physically become more settled in by doing that. Maybe just do that, that whole idea of inhaling, retaining, exhaling. First get used to these three sort of mantras, you don’t say them, but in mind, inhaling, retaining, exhaling. You try to coincide that simultaneously when you are doing the inhalation.
Inhaling time, inhalation, retaining however sure that is retained, exhaling. Once you get the rhythm in the mind going, then try to associate inhalation with positive thoughts. Maybe white bright light. Think about light if you’re a visual person, then a feeling person. Bright light comes in form of oxygen, just completely bathes you, saturate, washes everything inside you when you do the inhalation.
When you retain it, it completely goes merged with the nervous system and blood and therefore retained energy completely merges with your whole interior body which is pretty red and so red color and when you exhale it brings out all the things, all the things that has been scrubbed or washed by this positive energy that went in and then exhale brings out. So exhale releases, relieves, it releases and relieves the unpleasant feeling, inhalation improves the furthering of that practice of relieving of yourself. Then almost you become, you neutralize the difficulty, the effect of the pain to the extent that you’re able to manage them as they arise. You don’t a habit of backlocking unpleasant feelings and then not knowing what to do later. It’s not like you’re actually dealing them well.
Because remember, calm abiding is about paying attention. If your present state of experience is painful, you pay attention to that. Otherwise, know, you’re going to sort of suppress them and it becomes a difficult pain, difficult enough to make yourself have a strong aversion to sitting. Almost you’re looking at a cushion, you don’t like to sit. That kind of aversion and tension can build.
So it’s important to deal with while it’s small. It’s trying to sort of extinguish the fire while it’s only small. You know it’s usually a good idea to do something even as you see small before seeing any flames. Likewise, you know, so a little bit of movement of your body, make the sessions, have mini sessions within the sessions, so to speak. And don’t try to have a long session outright, In a short but short session but within within short sessions make them make them even shorter by span of concentration, having a couple moments of rest, and then exert your effort.
Various types of effort is required throughout calm abiding meditation. At the very beginning, beginners, it’s exerted effort. You’ve got to exert all the effort there is, and usually the span of that effort is not that great, long. And you have to be contented with that, But you have to master the ability to repeat many, many short exerted efforts. You know, you should be generous with your effort, if you like.
You have to be generous with your effort and that however short they are, you exert them again and again and again and that’s what makes your mind going back again and again in the body and when the pain comes you again and again do the qualified round of breathing. Qualified round of breathing what I would define is that when you inhale, you qualify the inhalation by bringing one positive thought necessarily. That’s qualified inhalation. And otherwise, not qualified inhalation. It’s wasted inhalation because you didn’t get to bring anything positive with inhalation.
Qualified retention is that as a result of this inhaled positive breath it’s actually able to neutralize or downplay the effect of unpleasant feeling the body was generating And therefore, retention is actually dissolving somewhat the severity of the pain that you have. And qualified exhalation is that as a result of the exhalation you actually felt as if you did release something, that nothing is building up in you because you’ve already poured it out, so to speak. And if you keep doing again and again, without necessarily counting them, but doing them over and over again, This is called qualified round breathing. And most people need to do that while they’re sitting there in order that sitting posture in which you’re developing. But you still have your legs go numb and various happening, but your mind isn’t affected by that.
That’s a good thing to reach to. Mind isn’t affected by it. Your mind’s still happy and calm. Body is in quite a different situation, but it knows very well. Because the mind is saying, oh, I own your body, but you’ve got to have that, will you?
Please don’t reject it. I’m not rejecting you with the pain, so please play safe with the pain, so to speak. Your mind’s attitude about the pain is one of positive. Because of that, however numb or painful or sometimes stiff your body is, you’re not worrying as much about your body anymore. And that’s a really that’s a really remarkable breakthrough.
You’re no longer worrying about it. It’s no longer distracting you. Your body’s discomfort or lack of comfort doesn’t really distract you, doesn’t really make you feel discouraged. When body is no longer an obstacle to you, but more of a help to you, you have gone beyond gone beyond, you know, gone beyond actually the the bodiliness of oneself. And therefore, the rest of the meditation practices come about and will be dealing with the actual thought itself.
It’s not so much of the physical thought itself. Then you become, you’ll meet different sets of experiences. Mindfulness of feeling enables yourself to not only to be able to do that in a meditation session, but even in everyday life situations. When you see the feelings are never ready made, they don’t come to us ready made. They just whether our mind is a state of aversion or attachment or doubt or fear or whenever mind is afflicted by either of these, it takes no time to develop unpleasant feeling.
Because even if the even if the door opens flung by a wind, you’re with the door. You know? There’s nothing. There’s no reason whatsoever. Poor door has been designed to flung like that.
Move like that. If people push this way, it goes that way. People push from this it’s like that. That’s the nature of the door. Particularly people people just want to open it so quickly and go this way.
Of course, even that my mind has become very fidgety, so that we become very fidgety, easily become upset, meaning that we are we are so, yeah, so vulnerable to get upset. It’s not because the any the movement of door is is inherently cause of cause of agitation, but but the how unskillful we are in managing our own feelings. If we are not a stable feeling in our mind, thinking, and a contented feeling, we are not contented and happy feeling, We are our negativities are there on the surface and all needs a little bit of provocation, you know. And a little bit provocation, it could be even a cry of a bird, you know. Shut up, you crow type of thing, You know, you’re med you’re trying to meditate and and all the the crow just lands on that branch or tree next to your window and it just crows all the time.
It’s interesting. Our feeling just comes like that, you know. And not only feeling, it becomes emotion, you know. It’s amazing. It’s good to watch what turns what into.
You can stop A turning into B or B turning into C. Can stop that, whether there is anything there. When you see a bird, maybe he’s saying, hello, how is your meditation? It’s nice to see you sitting there early morning. Maybe that’s what he’s talking, and we just didn’t know how to he didn’t understand.
Poor bird is trying to say hello, nice to see you so early up. Up. It’s amazing whether any sort of sensory stimuli, sound or object moving or flash of lightning or sun shining your eyes, whether that agitates you or not. I had to try that when we were doing this afternoon session. The sun was right on my face because of the light coming from there.
And I say, oh, that’s a good practice. I don’t need my body. I got the sun here. And then otherwise you can cross out the sun straight away or the window or anything or the place where I’m sitting. Anything can easily stir me up.
It’s interesting. Yeah? So mindfulness feeling is what takes us to become in a state of particular state of mind. You know? Is it because of the sun?
Or is it because of the crow of the, you know, cry of the bird? Is it really? Or is it me? And often when you’re not calm, you don’t think it’s me. You think it’s a crow.
And that’s what the laying blame on as habitual no habit we have normally upon. Whatever problem we have, we tend to lay blame on something next to us. And when we do that, we definitely have a fundamental problem. And we try to address that, a very very strongly frozen feelings of enmity, resentment, and grudge. When you keep them, then then they they just come up, they just manifest Because they have been left unaddressed and suppressed, they manifest, and we become very very vulnerable.
While they come up, if you’re really mindful of the feeling, you can say, oh this is, you can you can feel, you know, about to you’re about to feel crossed at the crow, but you can say, oh, this is my and a poor crow. He’s just fine. I’m just getting this way. I should manage my own feeling. If you if you talk like that, you can stop that feeling turning into into anxiety or anger or or agitation.
So in in the end, when we when we talk about mindfulness breathing, qualified round of breathing, is trying to teach us a skill to manage our feeling. You know, because some of the problems people have are usually very tiny moments. It’s just a just a lack of awareness, lapse of awareness just blew the whole thing apart. Such a small and trivial problem that became a huge problem. It’s there we need the clarity, there we need the conscience to say, it’s only this, come on, it’s nothing.
And when you can’t do that, then the hearing of the sound of the crow can make a huge cause of commotion and reaction. We don’t know how to be proactive. Calm abiding is to tune us, tune us how to be proactive, to do something that is beneficial, even it takes time to engender it. Let’s give the time before you before you, you know, you know, react too quickly, too soon without careful examination. Whether whether I mean, you really, really examine it.
There is nothing nothing ready made as a feeling that comes to us. It’s only it’s it’s just bare. It’s a it’s a it’s just a trigger. It’s it’s a it’s a it may be a provocation. But but when you want to when you become so attached to your calmness, any noise can be pretty difficult to get on with.
But when you’re not attached to calmness and noiselessness, but just the calmness, generally speaking, calmness means your response to it. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear any sound. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have other feelings. But whatever comes, your response to it is calm. As long as you know the response is calm, no crow, you know, crows or no sound, whatever you hear is going to agitate you.
So this is how you go and manage mindfulness of the feeling. Mindful feeling is very important because when you hear someone say something, when you see someone do something, or whatever it is, initially there’s a perception. Straight away there’s a perception that you don’t have to question. Usually we think that’s the whole truth, but that’s the whole truth that you’re seeing. And usually our natural response is straight away to think that’s the whole thing and we therefore approve or disapprove it.
We don’t realize our appearance may not be real at all. It may be completely non existent. It’s just like the jaundice perception. The jaundice perception. When a meditator wants to be so calm, he’s so attached to calm, Any noise will any noise can upset him.
But good meditators go and meditate in the intersection of roads, Calcutta or something, something like that, not in Australia. Australia is too ideal to be there as a meditation. Too quiet to really have good meditation to happen. But of course, solitude is highly praised for for beginners to go and practice that. But generally speaking, it’s not aversion to noise.
Not aversion to noise, it’s not calmness. It’s a total dissolution of the noise, you know, that you’re not going to be completely, you’re never going to be sort of easily sort of upset or agitated by any form of noise, because you understand noise is only noise the way you hear it, and not because it is audible. When you want to listen to the crow crow, some people deliberately go and watch bird watching. Wear a hat, take binoculars. Oh, I heard it.
Come over here. Shh. Come over here. They might even take some tap recorders. They’re, you know, so nice.
Did you hear that? Why can’t you meditate on a crow cry as an object of meditation? It’s interesting, yeah. So it depends what you what do you want, what you make of it. Not not so much it’s the crow cry, but what do you make of it?
So when your mind is accommodating, this is what we call awareness. If you have awareness, there’s no point, there’s no danger in focusing on that. And then see that, use that a secondary reference object. Because the reference after all, your body is a reference object or you have a calm abiding. It’s not everything.
It’s only a reference to gauge your calm abiding. Likewise, here you’re finding a second object which you focus. And therefore, instead of rejecting the sound, you you try to focus on that to increase your degree of awareness if your awareness increases. Because it does. As soon as you thought you were really meditating well until you heard the noise, didn’t you?
But actually it woke you up. And you should be thankful for the crow. Thank you crow, because it’s a great teacher’s great humility. It’s good to hear some noise noise and some restlessness in and around. It’s pretty pretentious thing that every fine is fine.
So quiet and dead silence. I’m not encouraging make noise, but but it just if it happens, just have some tolerance because that’s the whole idea of of how do you govern your feelings, you know. And and and it is important when mindfulness feeling is really really to do with that. If you’re now becoming if you’re becoming better in the meditation how