Mindfulness practice,
This awareness practice,
This is what we're doing together.
We're gathering on these mornings,
And we bring the mind to a still body,
And then we see what happens.
We watch the way we judge what's happening.
We watch the sensations of the body.
Sometimes we fall asleep,
But we intend,
Our intention is to be here,
Right in this moment.
And my intention and hope for each of you is that the things I'm going to talk about and bring forward will apply in your daily life.
You'll find some use in them.
That's the point for me,
The intention.
This path of practice is about becoming free,
And by that,
I mean you're actually freer to be who you are.
You become free of all the stuff that causes you to suffer,
Or causes your behavior to bring suffering to others.
We become free of all that stuff.
And I've talked about this often because it's so important to understand that the essence of our mindfulness practice of seeing,
Noting,
Feeling,
And noting,
It's a methodology for liberation,
For freedom.
That's why we're doing it,
To be free from the stuff that causes us to suffer.
And so a big part of what we're trying to do here is to learn to pay attention and to begin to see,
Well,
What complicates my attention to just being in the body and just staying with the breath?
Where do we get caught?
What makes it difficult to concentrate?
Because the place where we get caught is also the place that we're going to feel stress and tension.
The place where we get hung up is a very important window into understanding how we will most likely suffer,
Or how we kind of cause problems in our life.
So we start to pay attention to these places where we get caught,
And we all have the capacity to do this.
We can all pay attention to some degree.
You know,
If you pay a little bit of attention to how you're paying attention,
What you may discover pretty quickly is that you can pay attention for a short period of time.
And then what happens is you'll get distracted from what you're paying attention to.
And then the mind goes into future thinking and past thinking and fantasies of all kinds.
Or there's things that happened,
You know,
That are happening in your life,
And you kind of pay attention to those things that are happening.
But if we just gently pay attention to how,
You know,
That is an interesting shift.
How am I paying attention?
What am I paying attention to?
You know,
We can be paying attention,
And then we start thinking about how we're paying attention.
And then there's this whole evaluative quality that kind of sneaks in,
And in such a way that we get pulled into our evaluation and away from being present in the moment.
So it's simple in theory,
But not easy in practice.
In a way,
Mindfulness practice is learning how to overcome our preoccupation so that we can just see clearly like what's happening in this present moment,
Like with all of my thinking and distraction,
What's happening?
And as we get interested in this practice,
How how it is that our ability to stay calm gets disrupted,
Like so we're calm,
And then we see how it gets disruptive.
And that disruption is,
It's not a problem,
You know,
We just,
Oh,
Look at that,
Oh.
Sometimes people who meditate think that losing concentration,
Losing the ability to follow the breath,
The disruption of the thinking is a problem.
Kind of like it's a bad word,
You know,
I got disrupted,
I got caught up.
And I really want to stress that what we do in this meditation practice,
We're not adding We're not judging anything as being bad or inappropriate.
You know,
I think perhaps we need to make peace with the comparative evaluative words that we tell ourselves,
Like good and bad,
And right and wrong.
If we stop applying these words in our meditation practice,
Then we can stop judging and evaluating our life so much.
And then it just gets folded back into attention.
Oh,
Look at that.
Oh,
Look at this.
Our practice is just a noticing,
A noticing of things that arise.
Just paying attention,
What's going on right now?
In this moment,
Notice this,
Notice this,
Notice this.
The felt sense of the cultivation of mindfulness is kind of like you're in your body fully.
And like in the world when we're out practicing mindfulness,
It's like 50% of your awareness is happening within you.
And 50% of your awareness is happening in whatever circumstance is going on.
So when we're sitting,
Our awareness is grounded in our breathing and all and the external is sort of like the mind creating story.
And we keep bringing the mind back to the body.
When we're out in the world,
Engaging,
Especially relationally,
We're staying 50% of our awareness is within us.
We're watching ourselves in relationship to whatever is happening.
And so rather than saying that,
Like,
I'm not liking these circumstances,
Or the circumstances shouldn't be happening.
It's just like,
Oh,
Look at that.
Look at how this is landing in me.
Look at what this disruption to my peace looks like.
This is what it's like.
So I hope you understand this principle.
It's a really important principle.
Sometimes people who've been meditating for years haven't learned this one yet.
It's not saying that there's nothing that really needs to happen.
There's nothing that could,
That should or shouldn't happen.
Rather,
It's just one more thing to pay attention to.
Just seeing the arising of what's happening in the body and the mind.
And noting it and seeing it.
One more thing to learn to pay attention to.
And you may wonder,
Why is this important?
Why is this valuable?
In my experience,
If we learn to pay attention well,
There is freedom to be found in that attention.
We're lighter in a way.
We're lighter.
We're not entangled.
So whatever is happening in our life,
We're not entangled in it.
And I really hope that you get a taste for this,
Or at least an intuitive idea that no matter what is happening,
We can just attend to it,
Noticing what's happening in the body,
What's happening externally,
And meeting it in a very different way.
You know,
In paying attention in this way,
Whatever's happening,
Even if it's really a strong not liking,
We're not caught or trapped by it.
It doesn't oppress us.
And it's not driving us to react.
We just see it,
Like the experience in the body may be a lot of pushing away,
It may be very uncomfortable,
Not liking.
And just to know that,
It's like,
Oh wow,
I've got butterflies,
I'm sweating,
This isn't what I want,
There's not liking happening.
And just to see that,
There's a power in that.
Because we're not getting pushed around by our inner compulsion or the pressures of the outside world.
We're not getting pushed around by it.
We're learning how to use our attention in a new way.
And when we start practicing,
We pay attention to just two things.
And you know,
Even if you've been practicing a while,
These two things are really important to pay attention to.
One is our posture,
And one is our breathing.
And the idea with posture is it's really helpful to be stable in whatever posture you're taking.
You know,
I often think of like,
When I was a kid,
They had these commercials for Gerber babies and these little toddlers are sitting in their diapers and they're sitting upright and they're kind of interested in something that's happening.
But their spine,
They're really erect.
Their back is erect,
And they're so attentive and upright.
And so I often think of that,
And that's the posture,
An upright posture.
It provides a way of being awake and present.
Something that I've found helpful is as I'm sitting upright,
The belly's kind of soft and the lower back,
The lower spine,
It's in its natural curve.
And the way to actually access that curve is to let your elbows really rest kind of down and back a little bit.
So your shoulders are upright and your elbows are resting down and back.
So that natural curve is happening.
If your elbows are too far forward,
That's not going to work out so well.
You're going to start to feel the pressure on your back.
And then we use the breathing,
You know.
The breathing doesn't work for everyone,
But because it's,
You know,
It's continuous,
You know,
We're always breathing.
So it's something that we can connect to.
The breath is really about anchoring our attention.
There's a rhythm to breathing.
It flows in and out.
It comes and goes.
It's actually easier for the mind to pay attention to something that is kind of changing very subtly,
But that's anchoring,
You know,
It's changing because sometimes the breath is long.
Sometimes it's shallow.
And the breath is also,
It's tied to our emotional life,
Our psychological life,
Our energetic life.
And so we can tap into it.
So for example,
If you're afraid,
You know,
When we're afraid,
The breath can,
We hold our breath.
Sometimes it gets so tight and constricted.
And if you're really relaxed and kind of happy,
Your breath is just really fluid.
If you're nervous,
Again,
There may be some holding or the breath might be really fast.
And so just connecting with the breath,
You know,
This is,
If you can do this a couple of times a day,
You're cultivating a daily life mindfulness practice,
Just connecting with the breath.
Because then in that moment,
You can see,
Well,
What else is happening?
What else is happening?
You know,
That three breath journey that I've been inviting you to explore,
It really has a calming effect on us.
It's not always the case,
But generally it's calming.
And most people who follow the breath,
Or at least tap into the breath throughout the day,
Will find that they can find some peace and some calm.
You know,
It feels easy to take three breaths.
There's less tension,
You know,
And who wants more tension?
So back to this guiding principle,
You know,
In mindfulness,
We don't hold up that the great goal is to become more peaceful.
Okay,
Just want to remind you that yes,
Following the breath creates calm and less tension.
But this is not the goal.
The goal is to pay attention to what's happening.
So if you get more agitated as you meditate,
Which sometimes happens,
Remember that the goal is let me pay attention to this.
Let me fold this back into awareness.
Let me bring mindfulness to my agitation.
So thank you for considering this practice and these words,
And I'll turn it over to the group for reflection now.
Thank you.
