I'll just welcome everybody to the Saturday afternoon Hongo meditation class.
There's still a couple more people coming in.
I'll just wait for those.
I see you got the sound over there.
Now welcome to all the people into the introduction to meditation class.
I have a wonderful teacher,
He's going to be in in a moment.
So this class is the ongoing class,
The introduction to class is with James in the next door room.
So in this class I always mention a little important piece about meditation and I think that important piece I was just thinking about a few moments ago,
Always to learn how to bring a little bit of happiness into the meditation because the meditation has to cultivate the joyful part of meditation.
It's one thing to say we're going to be aware,
We're going to be mindful.
It's also important to be still,
For the mindfulness and the stillness must always go along with some happiness.
If during the meditation you're struggling and there's no sort of joy coming up in the meditation,
Then you're not going to get very far.
So somehow,
Somewhere we have to find a little bit of joy in our meditation.
It's one of the reasons why,
You know,
As a monk,
Those of you who know me for a few years know I'm a playful monk.
So I also play around in the meditation as well,
Have a little bit of fun while I'm meditating because the fun engages you.
Just like when I was a school teacher for one year,
The best way of getting your kids' attention is to make the lesson interesting and fun.
You know,
With a few funny sort of little stories or gestures,
Then people focus.
It's the same way when you're meditating,
To make a little bit of fun is important but not just to make it fun,
To deliberately be looking for the joy which comes in meditation.
What I've just noticed is that when we start meditating,
My body becomes nice and relaxed.
Now,
I'm usually pretty relaxed but nevertheless,
You know,
You have to rush around sometimes doing things and because of that there's always some tension stored in the body.
You know what it's like sometimes after a busy day when you go out to work,
You come back home,
You sit in your armchair,
Put your feet up and you get some bodily relaxation.
That really feels good.
There's a certain type of pleasure just in bodily relaxation.
So the beginning of the meditation I want you to notice that after you sat down,
The body is nice and sort of comfortable and you deliberately relax parts of the body.
Hopefully you'll notice that there's a joy of a relaxed body.
Once you can focus in on that type of pleasure of a body which is nice and at ease and open,
You've got a tightness or tension in it,
That pleasure of freedom,
Then you can watch your mental world and do exactly the same.
We know how to sort of relax the body.
We do exactly the same with our mental world.
And when the mental world does start to become relaxed,
It has this particular type of pleasure,
A pleasure when we're not having to be worried about achieving this or getting that,
When we really are relaxed.
And that sort of pleasure of relaxation is something which we should focus on,
Get used to and develop in our meditation practice.
Because that is the pleasure of meditation which will keep you from going off into thinking about this and thinking about that.
And for many of you,
It's the biggest problem in your meditation.
We always think too much.
Sometimes you will notice that when you start meditating the first three or four minutes,
At least I hope the first three or four minutes,
You can be reasonably peaceful.
But then off you go into thinking about all sorts of plans and memories and fantasies and whatnot.
Why is it that we can't stay with quietness and stillness?
It's very much because we fail to perceive the joy into simple being here and being peaceful.
Once we can perceive that joy,
We get to know it and we can focus on it,
It will keep us in that stillness.
If the stillness is just boring,
If nothing much is going on there,
You will find no matter how much effort you put in,
You will never be able to maintain that peaceful still mind unless there is joy there.
Joy is the glue which sticks your mind onto the object.
Without that glue,
You just can't stay there very long.
So you start to notice the happiness of having a relaxed mind,
Not having to think about all this stuff which is the work of your life.
It's really crazy that people do work five days a week,
But then they take their work home with them.
I don't mean on pieces of paper or on their laptops,
They take it home with them in their brain.
Always keep on thinking about it and worrying about it.
And just to be free of that,
To really have some peace is joyful.
It's as if the old simile,
You've been carrying around a backpack full of heavy rocks and you've been carrying around and around and around and now you can put it down and you can relax.
For me,
Because I go travelling a lot,
You go travelling around the world and finally you come home to your own bed,
Now you can relax.
You don't have to wait in queues of immigration,
You don't have to wait for your aircraft to go up,
You don't have to sit with some screaming kid going for 12 hours.
You can relax and this happens.
Now you notice how you can find so much joy in the ordinary,
In just relaxing and being at peace.
So when you even start meditating,
Get to understand the joy of a relaxed mind,
The same way you can perceive the joy in a relaxed body.
Once you can experience that joy,
The mind will stick to the object,
Which at first is just the present moment,
Or just like silence.
Every time I do that exercise,
I won't repeat it now,
I've done it too many times on a Saturday afternoon,
Of noticing the space between the words,
It's always a very delightful thing for people to notice the silence.
When you're not thinking,
When you're not planning,
You just hear and no thought is going on in your mind.
There's a certain type of joy in that silent awareness.
So see if you can understand that joy and just really get off on it,
Be like a connoisseur of the joy of silence.
And then you know it's so easy to stay silent.
It's just like when you're enjoying silence and somebody speaks,
You ask,
Shut up,
I'm enjoying the silence.
That's what happens to all those thoughts.
You say to the thought,
Shut up,
Look,
I'm enjoying this.
When that joy is there,
It grows,
It gets more intense.
At first you have to look for it,
Like searching for gold,
It's not on the surface,
It's in there but you've got to see it and find it.
Once you find it,
Now I know just what this joy of meditation is.
And that just starts to really grow.
So if you can cultivate that joy at the beginning of the meditation,
Once you go on to things like observing your breath,
From the very beginning the breath becomes a very beautiful thing to watch.
It's not having to force your mind onto the breathing,
You just enjoy being with your breath.
It's just delicious.
The joy has already been started,
You're cultivating it more and more and it gets to the point you're having such a good time.
It really means having a great time watching your breath.
You can sit for hours without any problem whatsoever,
With no force,
No effort,
You're just sitting there having a great time.
You're developing these joys which many people don't understand,
They don't appreciate,
Which are their very fine joys.
It's like the difference between,
As you said,
From personal experience,
When I was very young I couldn't understand why people like classical music.
It was so boring.
Give me Jimi Hendrix with all that noise.
But now you get a much more refined taste and you're moved from things like Beethoven to Bach and now you move to the sound of the wind in the trees and from the sound of the wind in the trees to the silence of the mind.
Deeper and deeper refinements of your pleasures of sense,
Of hearing.
This is just what we're doing here.
Receiving the joy,
The happiness of a relaxed mind.
Just being with the breath.
Sometimes I compare it to the times when you used to go down to the ocean by yourself.
Or by some lake,
I remember this lake in the north of England,
Which was in the middle of farmland,
No one was around,
Just sitting by it.
It was just so peaceful there.
No girlfriend problems,
No study problems,
No problems at all,
Sitting there just watching the ducks.
That type of simple pleasures.
And all you could see is just the waves on that lake coming and going.
All you could see in this meditation,
Nothing else to do but be by this beautiful lake or your mind.
That's a primordial symbol for the mind is a lake or a pond.
And just watching just these waves of breath come and go.
It was its simplicity.
And it was just so relaxing and so beautiful for a busy student.
And when you appreciate that,
Then when you start to watch the breathing,
It gets so delightful from the very beginning that once you're on to that stage of a delightful breath,
The rest of the meditation becomes so easy.
The light gets more and more,
It gets deeper and more sort of powerful and you just can't stop yourself.
You just go into some really deep meditations having the time of your life.
So in this meditation,
Please look for the delight from the very,
Very beginning.
Just the body relaxing,
It's so nice to have a body which is at ease,
Which isn't demanding that I do this and do that.
It doesn't demand that I cough,
That I sneeze,
That I scratch,
That I go to the toilet,
I give it a glass of water.
It's just there,
Comfortable and free.
And you know that.
If you've ever had a foot massage,
I remember just sometimes as a kid when I was in London in the cold weather,
You'd be tramping through the snow and your feet were all cold.
Even though you've got these boots,
There's always snow gets in there somewhere or whatever.
And you come home and you soak your feet in hot water.
All those are so nice,
You just relax instead of soaking your feet in hot water.
That delight is the delight of a relaxed body.
Or if you haven't had that experience,
You know what it's like when you first wake up in the morning?
Maybe a satter,
You don't have to get up early and go to work and you're in your bed really cozy,
You just don't want to get out.
If it wasn't for having to go to that damn toilet,
You would stay there for a bit longer.
You just lay down there,
It's really nice and cozy.
That delight is what I'm talking about,
The delight of a relaxed cozy body.
Transfer that into a relaxed and cozy mental world.
And then you're off on the delightful meditations.
Oh my goodness,
It really takes you to places which you think could never exist.
The beautiful delights of the mind.
So don't please,
Never forget to cultivate the joy.
You can start that off at the very beginning of meditation.
So that's the beginning instructions for today's meditation.
So please,
If you're not already in your meditation posture,
Please get in your posture now.
And off we go into the delightful space called meditation.
I should actually say if anyone's come here for the introduction to meditation class,
That's being held in a room to my right.
This is for the advanced expert meditators.
Oh,
You're good enough.
So when you close your eyes,
Spend time with your body,
Relaxing it.
And what relaxing means,
You're not holding anything tight.
You find some tight spaces in your body and you loosen them.
And sometimes I do imagine,
If some tightness there,
I imagine these two invisible monsters in my leg.
And they're putting some sort of tendon tight or pulling the muscles.
I just see that imagination.
I just tell those two little invisible monsters,
Let go.
When they let go of that tendon or that muscle like a taut elastic band,
It loosens and becomes all floppy with no tension in it at all.
Sometimes visualizing tension and visualizing what happens when you let go helps.
The other thing I learned how to do,
If there's a knot of tension somewhere,
Like a hard ball in my stomach or in some thigh or something,
If there's a knot,
A ball of tightness,
I just imagine it expanding.
Because when you expand things,
It doesn't get worse,
It doesn't spread the tension,
It actually dilutes it.
The more I spread it,
The less tense it becomes.
So sometimes I learned it's a ball of tension to spread it to the edges of the universe,
To become so dilute it's not there anymore.
These are all ways of visualizing the body relaxing.
Even the word,
You never say relax,
You say relax.
Even the tone of the words helps you let go.
Stay with your body,
Don't rush this.
Being in a hurry is another way of making you tense.
Going slow is a way of avoiding and letting go of tension.
So how's your body feeling?
Can you start to notice that type of pressure,
Like when you first wake up in the morning and your body is relaxed?
When you notice the joy,
It actually grows.
It allows you to stay with this pleasant feeling of a body relaxed.
You tend to relax even more.
By focusing on the delight of relaxation.
Yes,
The delight is not there.
Just focus on your balance.
Turn the corners up and initiate happiness with a smile.
All that does is turn the mind's attention to the joy which is always present.
Then the body becomes relaxed.
Many burdens have been let go of when you relax your body.
The body responds by giving you happiness.
When the body is relaxed,
Then we can turn to the more important mental world and do exactly the same.
In the mental world,
It's like things are being pulled tight,
All the demands which people put on you,
And even worse,
All the demands which you put on yourself,
All stretching you like an elastic band,
Squashing you like a sponge being compressed.
Let all of that go.
So there's no tight spots,
No stretch or tension in your mental world at all.
It's called letting go.
No goals to attain,
No baggage to drag from the past.
What does it feel like?
Then you notice the joy of a mind beginning to relax,
Free at last.
Don't forget to continue the awareness of the joy of just being here,
With nothing to do,
Nowhere to go,
Nothing to attain.
You perceive that joy,
You'll find your thinking will stop.
One just doesn't want to wander anywhere because it's having a good time.
Now you're just relaxing your mental world,
Anything in the physical world comes up,
Just relax it,
Expand it,
Loosen everything.
So your job is just to do that.
Stopping holding things tightly,
Stop stretching things.
Nothing becomes loose and natural and free,
So that nothing is pulling at you,
Nothing is pressing on you.
So you're as light as a cloud floating along the sky,
No weight,
No burden.
Notice the joy of that.
Joyfully just being here,
No work to do,
No duties to perform,
No journey on which you have to travel.
Maybe,
Maybe you may recognize you become silent.
Focusing on the joy of the peasant moment.
You don't want to disturb the beautiful feeling of relaxation by these words,
Which create all the disturbance,
Like a mobile phone going off during a concert,
Like the thoughts going off during a quiet meditation.
Just here enjoying the peace of now.
Or in experiment time that we've had.
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But if you wish to focus on your breathing,
To know the breath as it comes in and out of your body.
Regard the breath like the waves on the lake.
Gently coming in onto the shore and then receding back again.
The air coming from the great sea of atmosphere,
Coming into your body and receding away again.
Beautiful rhythm of life.
Watch your breathing with gentleness and respect.
Don't control your breath like a boss controls the workers.
Reach your breath like a friend,
A colleague,
A being with whom you are walking hand in hand.
Notice the joy,
The joy of peace,
Being free from the world,
Having nothing to do,
Just be with this breath.
A true holiday.
Time to be.
There is no place to go.
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How do you feel?
How much peace,
Joy,
Have you developed?
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