So this week we have been focusing on establishing mindfulness.
And on Tuesday we had a really beneficial and delightful discussion after practice that I want to revisit for a few minutes.
And for those of you who were not there for the practice,
The practice challenge was that sometimes guided meditation and the sound of the teacher's guidance can occur as a disruption.
Like the disruption is bad or something.
I got disrupted,
You know,
It doesn't land well.
So I just want to say that when we do this meditation practice,
We're not trying to judge anything as being bad or inappropriate.
Rather we're just trying to fold everything back into our attention.
In other words,
To notice this,
To pay attention what's going on,
To notice this,
To notice this.
And so what we do is rather than saying that the teacher shouldn't be guiding the practice or should be guiding the practice,
What we try to do is fold everything back into attention,
Back into awareness.
Oh look at that.
That's what a disruption looks like for me.
That's what it's like for the mind to get hooked and carried away.
That's my not wanting mind.
That's what it's like.
That's what it's like.
And I bring this up because it's an important principle.
Sometimes people who've been meditating for years and years just haven't learned this one yet.
And there's nothing wrong with you haven't learned it yet.
It's a hard thing to learn.
It's hard to learn that there's nothing that should or shouldn't happen.
Rather it's just one more thing to learn to pay attention to.
And if you learn to pay attention well,
There's freedom in that.
There's a way of paying attention where we're not caught and trapped or oppressed by what's happening around us or influenced by or driven by what's going on inside us or outside of us.
And that gives us a tremendous amount of power to go about our life.
The third Zen patriarch said the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent,
Everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction however and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
If you wish to see the truth,
Then hold no opinion for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning of things is not understood,
The mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
This is a rich and important teaching.
The path of mindfulness is the path of no preferences.
And when we prefer one thing to another and we get concentrated on it,
Like I prefer it when it's silent,
Or I prefer the guided meditation,
Or I don't like or I do like,
And then insert the blank.
You know for example,
If I prefer silence,
Then in order to have silence what do we have to do?
We have to mute ourselves or we have to go someplace where there's no sound and even without sound there's something,
Right?
You know we can turn down the volume on our computer but then there's the trash truck that comes or the neighbor's dog starts to bark or the traffic outside.
So these lines that I read you are from the Zen verses on the faith mind.
I encourage you to write that down,
The Zen verses on the faith mind.
Look it up.
And the one line that really speaks to me is to set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.
That is just so true in my experience.
My mind is so motivated by my preferences and I see it all the time.
It's become almost comical for me because in the seeing of it,
It doesn't run the show so much.
So we're practicing to use our attention in a new way and we can place attention on a single object,
Be it the breath or sound or sensation.
And when we can do this successfully,
That changes the character of our experience.
It really does.
Thoughts no longer arise and positive experiences can begin to flood the mind.
It can be very pleasurable to have a concentrated mind and there's freedom in it.
And it's really nice and helpful to become calm and peaceful and concentrated in mindfulness meditation.
But we don't hold that up as the great goal to become peaceful.
The goal is to pay attention.
That's the goal.
So if you get more and more agitated as you meditate,
Which sometimes happens,
Remember that the goal is to let me pay attention to this.
Let me fold this back into the meditation.
Let me do mindfulness of agitation.
And one of the things that we're trying to do here is to learn to pay attention to seeing what complicates our attention.
Where we get caught.
What makes it difficult.
Because the place where we get caught is also the place that we're going to feel stress.
And the breath,
Breathing,
Breathing is generally calming.
Unless there's been trauma,
Breathing is a calming source because it's continuous.
It's going back and forth.
It's a wonderful place to train yourself to be in the present moment.
And the trick for this mindfulness meditation is how to keep yourself in the present.
And as you've all already found out,
It's difficult to stay in the present moment.
The mind has a mind of its own,
Right?
It will take you away.
So we're trying to train the mind to stay in the present.
And we can offer careful attention to what's going on.
And from a Buddhist point of view,
All the wisdom,
All the insight,
All the enlightenment that you need to have in your life will be found and will only be found when you are able to stay present.
If you're not present,
You're not going to find it.
It's not going to be there.
So the breath,
The breath is the place you train yourself to calm down enough to settle the mind,
To concentrate the mind enough so that your mind can be here in the present moment.
So thank you for your kind attention and we'll continue with this establishment of mindfulness in the next week ahead.
