First three Satipatthanas become strong. Our Satipatthana, our mindfulness practice is as powerful in post-meditation sessions without any special effort as it is in meditation session. So we walk around and we think tree, house, car, yikes, elephant, and we just basically see the phenomena as flows, energy flows, image flows, and we try and contextualize them to their interconnectedness with us, but we try and find the perfect place between ourselves as the seer, those things as the seen, and the act of seeing. Find that place which is intimate with all three yet identifies exclusively with none of the three. If we can learn to breathe correctly, put awareness correctly on the breath and make it part of our habitual life form, a life behavioral pattern or discipline or whatever you want to call it, then everything else, all other practices will be benefited.
When we can do that essentially it’s a method of always checking up. We’re looking in, we’re looking out. We’re looking in, we’re looking out. We’re looking in, we’re looking out. What’s going on?
What’s going on? What’s going on? If we don’t know what’s going on ourself no spiritual method applied has any real power. We have to know. We have to be there.
If we’re not there applying the method. That method is Tibetan example is like trying to punch the sky with your fist. The yoga, the method needs to be linked to something. Yoga means union. The method needs something to be linked to, that what it is linked to is established by the practitioner in his or her mind.
You don’t know what’s going on in your body. You don’t know what’s going on in your emotions. You don’t know what’s going on in your mind. You don’t know what’s going on in your life. Sitting down there and doing stretchy exercises or reading long sadhanas or prayers or this, they won’t harm you but they’re definitely not gonna help.
Essentially it’s just another disconnected aspect of your life. The breathing, learning to breathe correctly always brings you home, brings you home to your body, brings you home to your emotions, brings you home to your thoughts, and brings you home to the factors that go into your life. Lunch break, guys. To enter into tantric practice which is the subject of the workshop tomorrow, said that one needs three essential prerequisite qualities. First, one needs the inner mind or the inner character of spiritual detachment or spiritual freedom.
Sometimes this is mistranslated as renunciation, but it’s not talking about in Tibetan, it’s it’s a drubzik not a gakzik. It’s a positive word not a negative word. So spiritual freedom or something like that, means arising with or having the quality of, means a certain kind of stability or freedom. The idea there is that ordinary untrained beings are like a pack of hungry dogs throw a piece of red meat down on the floor and they don’t give it any thought, they just jump on it and devour it. Another dog gets in the way they fight and bark and bite and so on.
So in the beginning of our path we need to develop an inner place of calm, an inner place of peace, an inner place of contentment, harmony. And of all of the ways of accomplishing that, mindfulness of breath is the easiest, most direct, most efficient. Whenever we feel a little bit of pressure from the objects of the senses, too much noise, too much sights, too many smells, too many tastes, too many touches, gets too intense. We just put the mind on the breath and we get the sense of the spaciousness and the freedom within which all of those appearing phenomena flow. When the mind becomes crowded by attachments, by aversions, by fears, by insecurities, anxiety, stress.
Just put the mind on the breath, watch it coming and going. Almost immediately inner peace, inner calm, inner spaciousness is established. So to practice tantra, this method, breath awareness, is considered one of the great jewels, one of the great treasuries. And the second quality we need So the reason why we need this for tantra is in tantra, when we do tantra, a lot of the imagery we’re working with have to do with sexuality, violence, death, lot of, in particular sex and violence. So if we don’t have this place of inner clarity, inner calm, When we meditate on the sexual imagery, essentially we just make ourselves horny with no real benefit.
We need to meditate on the sexual imagery, generate the warmth or the passion of the sexual ambiance. Without that passion becoming attached to any specific area of our life. It has to be like a gentle perfume pervading our presence. Unless we have this inner spaciousness, this inner clarity, it will always look for an object and in tantra we don’t want that. We want the entire reality as our undefined object.
It should be like a drop of ink in a glass of water going equally through all the water. The sexuality we arouse in tantra must pervade every fiber of our being without looking for a target. Also without avoiding targets, but that’s another issue. Secondly in Tantra we meditate a lot on violence. The deities, the mandala, the guys look pretty tough jumping up and down holding axes and it’s like a divine theater of violence because these two instincts, the instinct to procreate and the instinct to destroy are the two most powerful innate drives of the human psyche.
Essentially, want to procreate with everything and to destroy everything that gets in our way of procreating with everything. It’s like sex and death, sex and death are two most powerful instinctual drives, genetic drives. So with the first, we need spaciousness of the breathing to allow that sensuality to move freely. We need the peace or calm of the breathing so that when we arouse the violent energies They also do not look for her target. The second quality that we need very much, that is very much needed for tantric practice is that of universal love, universal compassion.
So that’s the third topic we’re covering today in the discussion of working with the inner mirror. We need universal love and compassion as a prerequisite to tantra because when we practice tantra we give up the vision of I am someone aspiring to enlightenment. You are someone aspiring to enlightenment. We give up the vision, I am an unenlightened being trying to become enlightened. I am an imperfect being trying to improve myself.
We give up that vision altogether and we say, I’m already enlightened. I’m already perfect. Me, just the way I am, completely, utterly perfect. You, just the way you are, completely, utterly perfect. All things in life, merely a celebration of perfection, sometimes peaceful, sometimes fierce, sometimes power, sometimes violent, but just a great spiritual drama theater played out by the gods and the goddesses of the mandala.
Everything completely in its own way utterly perfect. Because that becomes the vision we no longer accept suffering. No suffering in the world. We don’t think about suffering. We don’t think about others suffering.
Some Tibetan sadhanas mistakenly add in, Tantric sadhanas mistakenly add in, for the sake of all sentient beings I do this practice as though we’re doing it for on compassion grounds. It’s a mistake. You cannot have the vision of perfection and give one inch to imperfection. You add one inch of imperfection, the whole thing becomes imperfect. So therefore before we really take up that practice, our love, our compassion must be very very much a part of the fiber of our being.
Once we take up practice, we don’t talk about love, compassion anymore. It’s finished like learning to ride a bike and then riding a bike. We have to learn to ride the bike of love, compassion before before we practice tantra. When we practice tantra we forget about riding the bike of love and compassion and we simply ride, enjoy the ride, the beautiful ride, the perfect ride, fabulous ride, the great celebration of bliss and luminosity ride. So in ancient times there was always a big argument between the sūtra school or the open school who think we’re all imperfect and we need to work and struggle for enlightenment and the tantra school who says, No, there’s no need for any work or struggle.
Just think I’m already enlightened. So they used to say they’re incompatible. And in the early days of Tibetan Buddhism people practiced one or the other, very few crossed over from one to the other. But in the Kadampa and the Gelugpa schools and now in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism one begins by doing the sūtra or the general training, the open teaching training, and does that for a year or two, establishes the inner basis, and then enters into Tantra. Then when you’re practicing tantra you only use sūtra if you fall out of the tantric vision.
Like you come across someone who is so unpleasant that they knock you completely out of the tantric vision. You can no longer think, am perfect, this person is perfect, I am enlightened, this person is enlightened. You look at them and you think, my goodness, I have never met such an unenlightened SOB in my whole life. And when you do that of course you lose a little bit of sense of your own enlightenment. So when you fall out of the tantric vision you apply some of the general or sūtra or common path teachings like, Oh well, he can’t be blamed at something driving his mind.
Kind of think yourself through it and build back up the picture a little bit and make things relax and smoothen out a bit and then jump back into the tantric vehicle. It’s said before doing tantra one should make these foundations firm. Love compassion, the word used here in Tibetan is which literally means Bodhicitta which means the mind of enlightenment. The word is borrowed from the enlightenment experience itself because love and compassion are, what would you say, the kind of flowers on the fruit of the enlightenment tree because of the past legacy, because of enlightenment, the teachings of past masters of all the cultures and all the world systems and all the planet, because of the innate goodness of the mind which is directed at enlightenment. For these and other such reasons, love and compassion exist in the world.
Therefore we borrow the word bodhicitta. Here bodhicitta has a little bit of a bigger meaning than simply love and compassion but rather love and compassion with an edge. Compassion with an edge, love and compassion with a particular perspective. That perspective essentially is that the more I understand about things, more highly developed I am, the more real or effective or valid become my mere feelings of love and compassion. I can have a lot of love for you, I can have a lot of compassion for you but that love and compassion actually may even harm you if I don’t really understand the situation of life.
We often hear parents destroying their children out of love and compassion, giving when they shouldn’t give, being soft when they should be hard, being hard when they should be soft, and so on. It’s the same with all other things in our life. It’s fine to say increase love, increase compassion, compassion but if we don’t have an understanding awareness with that love and compassion. It can harm us. It can harm others.
Someone like Chogyam Trungpa, one of the great Kagyu masters who taught for many years in America, He used to like to use the expression idiot compassion. If we become so enthusiastic in our compassion that we don’t look at the natural flow of things, We can never put out as an expression of compassion more than we generate inside. Compassion expressed on the basis of non understanding is what he meant by idiot compassion. A real strength of the Indo Tibetan tradition of meditation is that love and compassion are not spoken of as mere factors to be admired, wished for and so forth but that there is a strong contemplative technology for generating those forces within yourself. The idea is that if one cultivates this contemplative technology or utilizes this contemplative technology that love and compassion will become completely one with the substance of one’s being.
Normally we look at something and we think that I like it or I don’t like it. If we like it we like it a little or we like it a lot. If it’s a living being then we love it or we don’t like it, kind of like that. But first we look, then we get recognition, then we analyze a little bit and then there kicks in a response. When we generate love, compassion by means of the contemplative technology this whole process gets thrown out.
We don’t look, recognize, think, decide, and do. Mean admittedly that all happens in a couple of seconds. We see Marilyn Monroe and we think wow, I love. But it actually happens as a contemplative process, as a conceptual process. When we generate this force by means of structured contemplation it becomes, rather than a process that has to be filtered through the conceptual mind it becomes instinctive in our way of saying.
We don’t look with empty eyes and then get eyes of love after we recognize the object but rather the eyes themselves become eyes of love. We learn to look with eyes of love. The Mahāyāna word for this path is the path of the universal hero or heroine. The way culminating in the eyes of love is called the way of the universal hero or heroine because the person who possesses those eyes then becomes beneficial to every person they ever meet in their life, every living being they meet in their life and they never are harmful to them without the good reason. If they’re harmful to them it’s for a higher purpose and with an apology like, Sorry to squash you mosquito but, you know, one of us had to go kind of thing.
And with a prayer that wherever this little fellow goes he’ll go happily. It makes a big difference just or It makes a big difference. When one can get those eyes of love it’s said that no living being fears you. No living being in your presence, if any living being comes in your presence even the most wild and vicious they immediately become tame. So it’s the eyes of the universal hero, heroine.
It’s universal because it excludes no living being. We don’t think he’s a rapist or she’s a rapist so I won’t have love compassion for him or her. We don’t think that person is a child molester so I won’t have love compassion for her. We don’t think that person is a Nazi skinhead who kidnaps Chinese and Pakistani immigrants and slowly tortures them to death over a period of one month and then eats them. Therefore I won’t have compassion or love for them.
No one is excluded from that love, compassion. Similar to the saying by Christ, I think if one of you is un sinned let them throw the first stone. There is no one out there at whom we can throw stones. Given that scenario or given that piece of advice it means there’s no one left to throw stones and if there’s no one left to throw stones there’s no one at whom stones can be thrown. In the Buddhist world to develop this way of seeing, this very unique and special way of seeing, a very precise and special technology, contemplative technology is applied.
Firstly, we have to come up, we have to come to an understanding that we really don’t know what’s going on in life. We really don’t know where the things that come into our life come from. We don’t know why they come into our life. We don’t know where they’re going. These are all unknowns.
We develop conceptual conceptual mindsets. This one coming is good, he’s behaving well, that’s good, that one’s coming is bad behaving badly. So we treat those beings based on mere appearance differently. We think this one I like, this one I don’t like, this one deserves my affection, this one doesn’t deserve my affection. This one I can feel some warmth toward, this one I can’t feel warmth toward.
Meanwhile, we haven’t got a clue who any of those beings are, what any of those beings are on about really. Moreover, we know even less about our self. Who am I? What am I? What is my life?
In the beginning of practicing love and compassion it’s said to be good to cultivate an awareness of the illusory nature. Illusory hair means how nothing is really what it seems. Things have a seeming presence but we just put a label on that seeming presence. We don’t know if we’re putting the right label or wrong label. The number of rightly accused criminals, I suppose, and the number of wrongly accused criminals.
Why do some seem pleasant, others seem unpleasant? Why don’t we have equal compassion, equal love, equal respect, equal feeling for all? It’s a great mystery. You walk into a room, you look at ten or twelve people, you think, That looks like a very nice person, that seems like a sweet person, that person looks a little awkward. We get, based on very flimsy conditions.
Often a simple little thing. Someone walks up to you and gives you a new car or fifty thousand dollars, you think, nice person. Someone else comes up and takes away your car takes away fifty thousand dollars, you think, a miserable sod. Got actually nothing to do with that person, actually what that person is just based on whatever role that person happened to play in our life. Then based on that we create particular mindsets and then we then forget that person, put in the mindset we have about them and then when we ever see that person again we don’t actually see that person.
It’s like we’re sitting there staring into space even though they’re right in front of our face. We’re just looking at something there on top of which we have put a mindset sinking, oh this is va la, this is dada, and we put that person, we categorize in that way. We can see that very clearly in kind of coarse aspects like racial issues. And we think, oh, black people are bad, white people are good, white people are bad, black people are good, yellow people are bad, yellow people are good, red people, green people. In that same way we we deal with beings, living beings from mosquitoes to elephants to humans to gods in a very mysterious way.
Mysterious because we don’t understand much about them, much about what the whole process is, yet we deal with them in a categorical manner. That’s my ex wife, she ran away with my house and my best friend, she’s bad. We forget that twenty years ago we thought, or fifteen years ago we thought she was like the sweetest thing this side of Kalamazoo. So when we start practicing the path of the universal warrior, it’s said that we should, or universal hero heroin, it’s said that we should get in a habit of several times each day thinking of three people. One who we like, one who we’re mad at, I wonder who you just put out there, and in the middle someone for whom we could care less like some stranger.
The mind of nearness, the mind of remoteness and the mind of apathy. Then ask our self, why do I like this one? Have this good feeling for this good one? Why that bad feeling for that bad one? Why this apathetic feeling for the one in the middle?
And we very soon see that the reasons these discriminations come in are based on very simple phenomena, nothing very profound really, and in fact the changing of those few conditions changes how we feel about those people. The one who you like so much because yesterday they gave you fifty thousand dollars we found out that their check actually was no good, it bounces. So immediately that good feeling for that person is gone. Turns out the one on the left actually has left you in their will for three hundred thousand. Immediately you think, oh that’s a nice person.
The one in the middle smiles and sends out this wonderful radiance to you and you think, great. That feeling of good, bad, indifferent between peoples, like, dislike, could care less is like a floating bubble that has very little basis in reality. So in the beginning of the practice it’s good to sit and put three people there consciously, Try and see it very realistically who is really bugging you, who is really you’re liking a lot, and who and someone who’s just totally in between. That’s the first step. In the second step, try to contemplate the various ways in which all living beings benefit us.
Love really, liking someone else, feeling love for someone or an affection for someone. Anyone who’s beneficial to you you’ll feel affection for. An aunt who gives you candy, you’ll like better than an aunt who doesn’t give you candy. An uncle who occasionally gave you a little pocket change as a kid, you’ll like better than the uncle who never gave you any pocket change as a kid. Feeling of affection for someone else, this kind of feeling of empathy and affection is a kind of a response mechanism.
So after we get this ability to see how the mind works in categorizing and we develop a bit of a habit of checking up on it, the second thing to do, the second step is to meditate or contemplate how all living beings really are beneficial to you. There’s not one living being who is not beneficial to you. Every single being is of benefit to you in some ways. For instance, the food we ate today at lunchtime, you know, someone cut cut those vegetables out in Western Australia, someone else like cleaned them and packed them, someone else carried them to a car or a truck or a train or a boat, someone else shipped them, someone else picked them up and carried them here and there. Probably ten to twenty to thirty thousand hands were involved just in delivering that simple little meal and then who built the trains or the boats that carried those vegetables from Western Australia and who supplied them with gas and oil and so forth.
In the Zen tradition at the beginning of every meal you hold up your meal like this and you think, this food which comes to me through the kindness of ten thousand hands, ten thousand hands, I think that was in the old days, that was just getting it from like the farm down the street to your dinner table. Now it’s like fifty million people have to somehow be involved to get that plate of vegetables onto your table. So in that way all beings are directly kind, know it or not, conscious or not. And you may think big deal they’re just doing their job, know making some cash. But if you’re walking along the street and a wish fulfilling jewel falls into your hand by accident or if it falls there by design, there’s not much difference, is there?
Either way you get the wish fulfilling jewel. So either way they are equally beneficial and because they’re equally beneficial then they’re equally Kind, unconsciously or consciously kind. So we think like that how all the living beings are kind. Now then we may think, those ones who are like harsh and ugly and mean and cruel, they’re not kind. Like someone beats you up or punches you or robs from you.
But actually, as Dalai Lama puts it, those people are especially kind. The ones who steal from you it’s because you’re a little miserly, you forgot to be generous for the last year or two, so they relieve you of that practice of generosity. The ones who beat you up a little bit, they teach you kind of non attachment to the physical body. They definitely teach you humility. They help you overcome pride and arrogance.
There’s nothing like a good thrashing to overcome pride and arrogance. And in a way if someone kills you they’re the most kind of all. They give you the great celebration of release. I mean we don’t ask them to beat us up or we don’t ask them to steal from us or we don’t ask them to kill us, but if it happens, You know when Buddha lived and died he said the woman who after he had fasted or eaten next to nothing for six years, Sujata, a milk lady came along and offered him some milk rice and very rich bowl of of Indian milk rice. It’s got like nuts in it and honey and all these kind of things.
So it’s like the like sexual union. And so that’s an auspicious kind of omen for the balancing of all of your male female female hormones and psychologically the balancing of your male female aspects of your mind and spirit and so forth. So it’s kind of like auspicious like that. Then you form this symbol here with your hands generally, Tibetans always do, and again that the circle is a symbol of the female sexual organ and the reason for doing that is that because it’s just as the female sexual organ is the passage, through which all that lives comes. Everything that is born, all humans are born through that passage.
In the same way, all wisdom is born from the female intuitive aspect, from that aspect of our mind which is which is female intuitiveness. So when we meditate essentially we’re trying to rest or lean back into our intuitive aspect of our being, not into conceptual thinking or disciplined thinking or philosophical thinking or contemplative thinking, but simply resting back into the intuitive aspect of our mind which is likened to the female quality, is given which is like la table, the table in French is female. Anyway, that’s female. Usually it’s said you touch the thumbs, if you do like this you touch the thumbs, because in so doing you complete the electromagnetic circle of the bodily aura. So it’s sort of like bringing the energies of your electromagnetic system of your body into balance.
So that’s the formal way. Another option is with the arms like this particularly if you’ve got long Tibetan sleeves, Mongolian shirts. A lot of Lamas meditate like this. When you do that, again the electromagneticism of the body is kept, together. The circle is formed by the arms rather than just the fingers symbolizing the source of all life and the arms lay against these veins here cutting off or reducing the flow of blood to the lower part of the body.
So you sit like that and then you just breathe through the nose in a very natural way. You start out by breathing in deeply and breathing out deeply for your first five or ten breaths. As you breathe out push out the last little bit of breath essentially because you want to clear out the base of the lungs. But after the first few breaths like that you simply let the breath come and go in a very natural way keeping the mind on it. In the first Satipatthana, the Satipatthana of the body, as you’re doing this you put your consciousness as though it were at the crown of your head and then you imagine it’s almost like a little feather or something that very very slowly comes down the center of your body.
And it comes all the way down your body until it comes right to the very base of your body. Sometimes you bring it right down the legs to the soles of the feet and then bring it back up. And at each place you try and get a sense of what’s going on in that part of the body. In the first few breaths as you go down you feel for tension. You try and feel any tension anywhere in your body.
The idea here is if you’re emotionally tense there’ll be tension in the body. Intellectually, conceptually tense tensions in the body. Not attuned with the flow of phenomena? Tensions in the body. Now the body isn’t the source of those.
It’s just the place in which we’re getting the symptomatic reactions. But because the symptoms are there it’s a way to trace back through the flow of events. So we start at the top and we go down, down, slowly, slowly down, down, down, down down. Then when it gets to the lower part of the trunk we can either bring it to the pelvic floor and have a sense of the whole base of the body or else we can sort of let the consciousness as they’ll fan out go down the legs all the way to the soles of the feet. And once we’re down there then again just feel it, feel the consciousness coming back up as though your consciousness were a little fluff feather or little balls of light essentially just sweeping through your body like that.
As you get in any place you try to feel like start at the crown of the head, just feel the crown of your head. You can feel the hair unless you’re bald. You can come down a little bit through the center of the body. So feel yourself poised in behind the eyebrows sort of at the center of the brain. You get a sense of the brain sitting there.
Try and get a feeling for its presence. Then as you come down, at each place you try and get a kind of a visual sense of what is there based on your sense of anatomy and try and get the physical sensation that those bodily parts are making. So in the beginning of a meditation when you sit down you imagine yourself no, when you sit down you just let the breath come and go in that way. In the old Kadampa tradition, they used to say count the breaths. When you breathe in you think one, when you breathe out you think one, when you breathe in you think the number two, you breathe out you think the number two.
And for the first four or five minutes do it like that sinking a number because what happens is as we’re going about daily life the kind of conceptual mind gets cranked up a little bit. We can’t get kind of thought heavy. So if we sit down to meditate, even though we make the body quiet and the emotions quiet, the conceptual mind is still kicking over like you just counted like a whole bunch of money before coming home and you’re trying to remember if you forgot ten dollars or hair or left twenty dollars there or you’re making dates with five ladies or guys and you can’t remember which ones were at which times and so you’re trying to straighten them out in your head. Whatever you’re doing, that conceptual activity kind of carries over in your mind. So if you just sit down and tell yourself to relax it won’t work.
And so the best way to do is fill the space of the conceptual mind with a very simple concept. In this case it’s just a number. So you breathe in you think one, breathe out you think one, breathe in you think two, breathe out you think two, breathe in you think three. Breathe out you think, three. And you do that for a few minutes and it makes the conceptual thought process forget all the stuff that was clicking around inside it.
In body Satipatthana, you know, you do in body Satipatthana, that’s generally how it’s done, is you start at the top of the crown and you go down to the feet and then you come up and then you go down and then you come up and you go up and down. If you do it like a ten day retreat or a one month retreat, you do that sixteen or eighteen hours a day every day, that whole time period. Because you’re not actually bringing energies up or down. It’s just your mind, your awareness. So you’re trying to essentially just explore your own bodiness.
I think the idea here is generally we humans tend to get fixated on sensory data. We don’t get inside the machine generating the sensory data. Inside the machine generating the sensory data. So a Satipatthana of the body is to kind of give us a more intimate sense of our own bodiness. Earlier I mentioned this idea of how most humans, untrained humans are go-log pa, head on backwards.
The first problem is with the body. We don’t really understand the nature of our own. We live in our body but we’re like guests in it who never really look around it very much. I mean we polish the outside and we do lots with the outside and we pour things in and we dump things out and all that sort of stuff but we never really become very intimate with the subtle workings of our own body and particularly how our body is not just a generator for the emotions and the mind and experience but how those but it’s really more a channeler of emotions, mind and experience. And that those channelized emotions, thinking, conceptual mind working flows and experience impact the body.
And the body in turn impacts how they flow. So the first Satipatthana isn’t trying to adjust or readjust energy flows within the body but simply to teach us to be more centered in our body awareness, to become more aware, mindful of our the nature of our body so that we live in it in a more balanced manner. So generally we start at the top and go down. People who don’t like doing that often they’ll just put the like if it feels uncomfortable to you, if you do it a few, you know, for a few hours or a few days or weeks or whatever and it feels uncomfortable, what’s often recommended is that you put it on the rising and falling abdomen. So you just imagine your consciousness as being inside the body at the top of the abdomen and as you breathe in.
But whichever technique you do, it’s good to do it a few times during the definitely before each meditation session, a few times during the day just to remind yourself of it and every few minutes to just look at your breath for a matter of few seconds to see how you’re breathing. Like take five deep breaths and just feel your centeredness or lack of it. Move the body a bit just to get a sense of where you are, how your sense of body mind balance is, where you think you’re balanced in the body. One Tibetan text recommended that you kind of when you’re walking, for instance, try and say to give yourself a sense of being like a martial artist moving or like a warrior moving. Like get a sense of the totality of the flow of your body and its whole kind of very powerful presence.
For this body Satipatthana the other thing that’s very useful to do in your own, in your home as opposed to doing it publicly is to do in the morning and in the evening a very slow walking meditation. It really helps on the bodhisatTibettana because you get a when you sit and you do body Satipatthana you get one sense of your bodiness and one sense of your breathness. So I think great breakthroughs in meditation more often happen when you’re sitting quietly than they do when you’re moving or walking or interacting. But on the other hand much of your life is past moving, walking and interacting. So a physical to get a sense of that awareness in movement is very important.
And most of the Buddhist traditions, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Chan Zen and some aspects of Tibetan practice suggest that once or twice a day you do a walking or a moving meditation because it gives you a whole different sense of breath and body relationness. Like when you sit down you seem very close to your body. Your breath is very nice, seems very relaxed, very natural. When you do it as a moving meditation you force yourself to go very very very slowly and to feel the bodily’s energies, kind of the way the skeleton holds it all up, the way the muscles supplement the skeleton, the way the breath empowers the whole process. So I’d actually like us to try that.
I think it’s big enough here for us to do it, we can do it in a of a circle around the room but what you do is you take this hand, left hand, put your thumb inside, fold the fingers over this and pull that thumb and fingered bit under your ribs into the V under your ribs. And on this side take this hand, you cover this and kind of pull it in a little bit. Then as you walk this acts as a kind of an amplifier on your breathing process. It gives you a very deep sense of your own breathing process. The way your breath is flowing, the connection between breath and heart, and then how the whole this part of the body with all of the organs, the stomach and all this how they’re all interconnected with that breathing heart blood flow energy flow process.
I’m gonna take this off I think, well I can leave it on. I stand up because we’ll keep talking. But people can stand up here and make a little bit of a circle. So a circle kind of like this and we’re just going to walk in a clockwise circle. So you take your hand like this, so we’re going walk like this, right?
So you should look this way. That’s right, in Australia clocks go the other way around, right? Okay, so take your hand like this, this, this, hold it over here. Now as you walk you keep the knees relaxed, bent just a little bit and we’re going to make a perfectly straight line but try and imagine that your body is like water. There’s no starting and there’s no stopping.
So your movement is completely one hundred percent fluid. You feel the fluidity of the flow of your breath, the fluidity of flow of your bodily energies and then you try and get this movement physically to be fluid. So could you move over here just to fill up this a bit so everyone try and have a good circle around here. Madame, you’re out of the circle or so? You have to move back there.
Yeah, get it nice and neat and tidy here. We Buddhist like a perfect circle. Leonardo da Vinci they say was the only one who could do it without a compass but there you go. Okay, ready? And so, it goes heel to toe but as though you were a flow of water.
And as you’re doing it you’re breathing naturally, deeply and naturally. And the way your awareness is postured when you’re standing on one foot, That’s the kind of centeredness you want to develop for when you’re going about ordinary activities. You want to have that same sense of being intensely present in your body, aware of the breath, aware of the body and by means of that being intensely present in whatever is happening. So you guys are an easy bunch to teach to. I can get you doing anything.
Okay, people just find their place now. Do you think Buddha was serious when he taught that meditation? Essentially, the idea in Dharma and Buddhism is that all the different aspects of our life are interconnected. The body is interconnected with the feelings, interconnected with mind, interconnected with the world that we experience. That something in the world manifests in the mind and the emotions comes into the body.
Something in the body goes in the emotions, into the conceptual mind, into our life. These things are all interconnected and that our body is the very important crossroads of all of the different dimensions of our being. So that by learning to be more intimate with our body and to listen to it more carefully that essentially we get echoes of the workings of the emotions, of the workings of our conceptual mind frame and of the structures of our life or the dharmas of our life. Doing this kind of simple walking practice is important in a lot of different ways. We get a very strong when we do it, we get a very strong sense of the kind of double implication of almost everything about us.
When we do it our body feels on the one hand very weak, like we could fall down any moment, but it also feels somehow very strongly present like if we fall down we’re going to break something. We feel the strength, weight or the gravity or the intense presence of the body at the same time as its almost weakness if you will. As we move like that we get a sense of how the body is continually a flux of energies, that nothing in the body is ever standing still. When we put the mind on something else like we’re looking at television or we’re looking at the stars or we’re looking at some external data or we’re thinking conceptually, we don’t notice that during that whole process the body has a complete life of its own. It’s going through a complete life of its own.
As it goes through that complete life of its own it is generating input into our emotions, into our conceptual mind frameworks and into our life patterns and it’s simultaneously receiving input from those spheres. So we start with breath awareness by placing it on one’s body, then after we do this for a few weeks or months, generally we stop doing the body sweeping thing. We come down and just do the rising and falling of the abdomen. We just place it on a rising and falling of the abdomen. When you walk try and just whenever you’re not doing something don’t just allow the mind to get into a bunch of mental gossip and rumor mongering with itself and essentially letting the energies drain away into worries about the past, plots, plans, schemes for the future and meaningless meandering away from the here and now.
Just simply let the mind relax right into the hearer and now without thoughts, without any extra effort, place it on the breath, bring it to the abdomen. When you do that, sitting-wise, you watch feelings, watch emotions. That’s the second Satipatthana. Emotions there has a sense of how everything, every thought that arises, every input data that arises, we tend to subliminally or subconsciously categorize as good, bad, indifferent. Categorize as good, bad, indifferent.
Good, bad, no interest. Don’t want, want, good care less. The conceptual mind gets involved in that process, in that the framework of the conceptual mind is an important, adds an important dynamic or factor to that feeling mechanism. So usually we’re not aware of this subconscious or subliminal good, bad, indifferent good, bad, indifferent process going on. Because we’re not aware of it, much of what happens to us in our life is done in unawares or is done without awareness.
The decisions we make often it’s because subliminally we’ve thought good, bad, indifferent. The courses, the paths we take during the course of a day often just arising because subliminal distinction into good, bad, indifferent. That good, bad, or indifferent could or could not be valid. It’s pretty well random. It’s just conditioning that has made us come to think of them as such.
The result is that we don’t look at things openly, we don’t look at things freshly, we don’t look at things with a new mind. We’re looking at things through the eyes of times gone by and mindsets gone by. We’re living a world which has long since passed. So this second mindfulness is essentially intended to put us in a place where we keep an eye on this process of good, bad, indifferent. Good, bad, indifferent.
We just put the mind there on the breath and we let the mind remain natural. Thoughts come and thoughts go. We’re not looking at the thought for what it is or where it’s coming from or where it’s going, but we’re looking at it from the point of what quality does it seem to have? Good, bad, indifferent? What feeling tone is it spreading across our body and across the landscape of our mind?
Good, bad, indifferent. And then we just note it and let it go. Note it and let it go. Mindfulness of the third Satipatthana, mindfulness of the mind flow. We can take any place of the breath on that.
Most of the teachers that I trained with, they like to put it on the point that when the breath goes up the nostrils and turns down to come into the body, right at the top of that kind of sinus is the turning point, you get a kind of cool, it’s kinda cool, a little bit warm, sometimes a little warm, sometimes a little cool. It’s hard to tell but it’s distinctly pleasurable. You get a very subtle pleasure sensation at that point of the body. You just keep the mind on the breath there and you just watch the thoughts that come and go. You don’t think I want to think this or I don’t want to think that.
You don’t repress negative thoughts or encourage positive thoughts. You simply observe the flow of the thoughts. Unlike the previous Satipatthana where really what you’re looking for is the feeling tone they’re creating and trying to get away from that instinctive response to feeling tone which is essentially rooted in past preconditioning, some of which is valid and some of which isn’t, most of which isn’t. Here we’re not doing that, we’re just simply observing the breath while watching the thought flows. When we notice a thought flow we just think.
We just make a note of it. thinking of whatever, whatever the thought is. Often in this phase of the meditation you get really powerful visionary experiences. The thoughts become very powerful, powerful daydreams. Often they will seem to be recollections of previous lives, sort of visions of kind of karmic coincidences and whole perspectives on realities in one’s life, things along those lines.
The masters say that when that happens, don’t get excited about anything or don’t don’t get depressed about anything. Like, you remember things from early childhood, traumatic experiences, pains. You remember things perhaps from previous lives or think that they’re from previous lives, drownings and being strangled, so on and so forth. Often you remember the negative things before you remember positive things, kind of those the pain of the negativities kind of buries a whole areas because we’re afraid to look at that pain, that whole period of our life or period from previous lives kinda disappears. At this point in Satipatthana it’s said to be quite easy to release knowledge of past lives.
As you watch the thought flows, you essentially see early as the mind becomes more and more subtle, then you can work more and more back into the past of this life. You can remember childhood, pre childhood and then even prenatal, you can arouse those memories all of which are buried within you. Remember being in the womb, remember being born. Each of those levels that one goes through in that way, in a way it’s, in a sense, it’s a matter of coming to terms with and working through certain kinds of painful experiences. The pain of birth, pain of the consciousness leaving entering the sperm ovum mixture buries or is a door through which we must walk to get to the memories of the Bardo.
The pain of our death in the past life is something we must get to to remember that past life. And so on. So in this third SatTibettana, it’s just a matter of sitting, looking at the mind, watching the visions, making note of them as they arise and then just facing them, walking through them. Sometimes when we’re doing it we’ll start crying over something. Not us men but women.
Men more like gnash their teeth like But as we come to see certain aspects of our lives which have been very deeply frustrating to us, which we haven’t really wanted to come to terms with, we kind of sometimes weep about it a little bit as we’re working through it or or sometimes gnash our teeth a little bit. Sometimes it goes very deeply. People in their meditation are sort of going and start making like a of little whining sound. And that’s done in group retreat. Usually everyone sits around them and kind of just chants pleasantly and tries to make them feel better.
But without without