Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 18-minute session, Choedak teaches a practical breathing technique for calm abiding meditation that transforms physical and emotional discomfort. He explains the qualified round of breathing: inhaling positive thoughts (imagining white light), retaining that energy to neutralize pain, and exhaling to release affliction. He emphasizes mastering short, repeated efforts of concentration rather than forcing long sessions, and addresses how mindfulness of feeling applies both in meditation and daily life—showing how external triggers like noise or movements don’t inherently cause agitation, but rather our unskillful response to them does. A crow’s cry, a door flung open, or harsh words only become problems when the mind is unguarded and reactive. The teaching culminates in a call to awareness: by understanding that feelings are not ready-made but arise from our own mental state, practitioners learn to respond calmly to any stimulus, turning obstacles into teachers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 TtT.mp3
UUID: ef09e11b-8df4-431c-bc31-359b53d8f13a
Teacher: Choedak
Collection: Calm Abiding (Choedak)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~2,785
Mindfulness feeling is transmuting a unpleasant feeling into pleasant feeling. And 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 until it comes out. 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 become physically settled in, physically become more settled in by doing that. Maybe just do that, the 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 retaining, exhale. Once you get that 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 You don’t have a habit of backlogging unpleasant feelings and then not knowing what to do later.
It’s not like you are actually dealing them well. Because remember, calm abiding is about paying attention. If your present state of experience is painful, 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 short sessions make them even shorter by span of concentration, having a couple of moments of rest, and then exert your effort. Various types of effort is required throughout calm abiding meditation. At the very beginning, beginners is 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 there are however short they are, 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 the inhalation. Qualified retention is that as a result of this inhaled positive thought, 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 that sitting posture in which you’re getting developing. But you might still have your legs go numb and various happening, but your mind isn’t affected by that. That’s 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 but but it it knows it knows it 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 pliance doesn’t really distract you. It 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, you know, gone beyond actually 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 part 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 in 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. You know?
Because even if the door opens flung by a wind, you’re angry with the door. 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, 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 but the how unskillful we are in managing our own feelings.
If we are not a stable feeling in our mind, thinking and contented feeling, we are not contented and happy feeling, We are our negativity is a day 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 of the crow just lands on that branch of 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 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 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, like 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 were doing this afternoon session the sun was right on my face because of the light coming from there. And I said, 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? Is it because of the crow 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 a habitual 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 and suppressed, they manifest, and we become very very vulnerable. While they come up, but but 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 agitation. So in the end when we talk about mindfulness breathing, qualified round of breathing, is try to teach us a skill to manage our feeling. You know, because some of the problems people have are usually very tiny moment. It’s just a just a lack of awareness, lack of conscience 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 when you can’t do that, then the then the then the hearing hearing of the sound of the crow can make a huge cause of commotion and reaction. We don’t know how to proact. 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 that time before you before you, you know, you know, react too quickly, too soon without careful examination. Whether whether when 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 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, 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 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 lazy meditation. Too quiet to really have good meditation to happen. But of course, solitude is highly praised 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 aversion to noise, you know. You’re not going to be completely, you’re never going to be sort of easily 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 inherently agitating. When you want to listen to the crow crow some people deliberately go and watch bird watching. Wear their hat, take binoculars. Oh, I heard it.
Come over here. Shh. Come over here. They might even take some tape recorders. Go, oh, so nice.
Did you hear that? Why can’t you meditate on the crow cry? As an object of meditation. It’s interesting, yeah. So it depends what you want, what you make of it.
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 as 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 you instead of rejecting the sound, 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. Great humility.. It’s good to hear some noise and noise and some restlessness in around.
It’s pretty pretentious thing that every fine is fine. So quiet, dead silence. I’m not encouraging to make noise, 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 it is important when mindfulness feeling is really to do with that. If you’re now becoming better in the meditation how to manage your feelings by doing that qualified round of breathing, No doubt you will find