I AM Stillness Meditation

Let's settle in to do an exploration of stilling our mind.

We notice that we're here in a body and whatever's going on in our body really affects what's going on in our mind.

So if you're comfortable and warm and relaxed,

You're going to have a different experience in your brain and your thoughts and in your mind than if you're stressed right now,

If something big is coming up,

If you're really tired.

I wanted to talk a little bit about Kaivalya,

Which is a Sanskrit word from the yoga meditation tradition that means blessed aloneness.

So my meditation teacher,

Swami Veda Bharati,

Is in the yoga meditation tradition and he talks about Kaivalya as being the goal of human existence,

That love is the unity of the divine wave recognizing itself.

Know yourself to be that.

Let's give that a moment to permeate,

To settle in.

Love is the unity of the divine wave recognizing itself.

Know yourself to be that.

The brain,

Our body are all affected by trauma.

We experience hypervigilance,

We experience being in survival modes,

Pain,

Illness,

Dysregulation.

So that's happening in the brain and the body and the nervous system.

The vast depths of our mind are not affected by trauma,

By our daily life.

A lot of what we do in our practice is on the level of the brain and the nervous system.

Part of the reason we do that is for general healing and being able to enjoy our life.

And part of it is because the dysregulation,

All of those thoughts are an obstacle to going into stillness.

We can look at the mind as being the surface layer of a lake,

Which can be quite choppy or it could be kind of calm.

And then the stillness as we go deeper into the lake or the ocean,

There's no waves that far down.

It's just stillness.

The nature of the mind is that the vast depths of the mind are always still.

That stillness itself is our true nature.

It's not something we have to reach or acquire.

It might be something that we are having trouble experiencing directly because of these obstacles like thoughts and compulsions and nervous system dysregulation,

Fears,

All of that.

So take a breath for a moment and sense into what is your experience with stillness?

Is it something that you often experience?

Maybe more in the past,

Not so much now.

What is your experience with that?

And the sentence stillness is inherent in us.

Stillness is our true nature.

It's not something we acquire.

It's already here.

Does that feel true?

How true does it feel?

When I look for love,

It is my own self I seek,

My inner being.

Something inside is calling me.

And it is by knowing ourselves and understanding ourselves,

We are able to experience our true nature.

When we think of ways to get to know ourselves,

We often think of meditation as one of those ways.

So when we work with moving from a center from within us,

Meditation is this process of that.

We go from the grosser to the finer,

From the outside to the inside.

We find this calmness in our deeper self under the layers of awareness,

Of thoughts,

Of senses.

When we move to that depth,

That's where we're able to find that strength to draw from and the power to know ourselves,

To be balanced.

Let's take a moment here to rest.

The source of the strength,

Love,

Joy,

Energy.

What is your sense of that?

Where are those?

Where is that?

Is it in your thoughts of your brain?

Is it in your heart?

There's no right or wrong answers to this.

Where do you draw your strength from?

What's happening in your system?

Where do you feel joy?

One of the things that in the yoga meditation tradition we work with are the five koshas,

Which are the layers.

The outermost layer is the physical body,

The body made of food.

And then the pranamaya kosha is the body made of breath and energy.

The pranamaya kosha is the layer of mind,

The lower level of the mind.

Those are those three layers that we really work with in terms of moving on in the world.

And if we have a lot going on in those layers,

Then we have a hard time accessing the deeper stillness,

The source,

The depths of our being.

And so that's part of the reason why we work with meditation,

To try to strengthen our mind so that we can come into that awareness.

So if we keep returning to the higher frequencies,

So the body,

The breath,

And the lower level of the mind are lower level frequencies.

The next layer is our wisdom,

Pranamaya kosha,

Our clarity.

And then anandamaya kosha,

Which is the layer of bliss and pleasure.

And joy.

If we can stay a little bit focused on the wisdom layer and the joy and the bliss layer,

We're not so caught up in the survival and the daily life layers,

Then the higher levels of the mind are very helpful.

They heal the lower levels of the mind.

So we work with this in a lot of different ways.

One of them is we work directly with relaxing the muscles in our body,

Working with thoughts in our mind,

And trying to make sure that we have this smooth,

Continuous breath,

Which is so helpful.

And just allowing ourselves to be in stillness,

And in these deeper or higher layers,

Is also healing from a different direction.

Now,

As we're moving through life,

We're trying to step off this stimulus and response.

So let's go into,

For a moment,

What is your sense of,

Who am I?

So there's something that remains the same through our whole life.

There's some sense of,

This is me.

And as we get deeper into meditation,

We often have more experiences with that.

It's unchanging,

It's permanent.

It's not verbal,

It's not in our brain,

It's in our mind.

We have some sense of,

I am.

And take a moment here and notice your breath,

And your body,

And the thoughts in the mind.

And then let yourself go a little bit deeper.

Notice the stillness.

One of the things that often gets in the way of that is the senses.

So we use our sense of touch,

Of sight,

Of hearing,

Taste,

Of smell,

To move about in the world.

And a lot of that is to assess our level of safety or threat.

So as we're working in the world,

One of the practices that we do has to do with just looking around,

Opening our eyes,

Looking around the space that we're in.

Noticing what's here.

Or bringing our hands together,

Holding our hands,

Or putting our hands on our heart.

We might notice that if we're in an environment that's really busy,

Either visually or with a lot of noise,

That it's quite distracting.

It takes energy to process.

One of the things that happens in our brain is that about 30% of our brain is engaged in looking at visual input and determining if there's danger in that field of our vision.

Part of our brain is assessing hearing.

What are the sounds that we hear?

So if we're overloading our senses,

Which is so common and so easy to have it happen in our culture today,

Then we're spending a lot of energy processing that.

And we're also probably feeling more hypervigilant.

When we're looking at meditating or coming into stillness,

Talking about stillness is our true nature.

And this layer of stillness,

It's not even a layer,

It's the whole rest of the mind,

Is our true nature.

It's not something we have to figure out or develop somehow.

We don't acquire stillness.

We work with the obstacles to stillness,

And then we also do practices that elicit or allow us to invite in stillness.

So one of the things we do is we withdraw our mind from the world a little bit,

Withdraw our mind from the senses.

And that means visual and hearing and our other senses.

And we do that not all the time.

Like it doesn't mean that we can't enjoy a beautiful meal or a wonderful sunset that we're seeing through our eyes or some music.

But we use the senses a little bit more deliberately.

Instead of the world deciding what's going to come into our sensory awareness,

We're making more conscious choices about that.

And then we're noticing,

What is it that I notice when that's going on?

What effect does it have on my nervous system?

And can I bring my attention away from that and into the stillness itself?

We witness all of these different layers of the mind.

That's another practice that's very helpful in working with the mind.

We have thoughts about things.

We have beliefs.

And we can learn to let thoughts be in the background.

One of the troubles with a lot of the thoughts that are happening right now is that there's a lot of urgency because there's a lot of fear in the world right now.

There's a lot of trauma,

A lot of people being hurt.

There's the environment.

There's a lot of different things that are calling our attention.

We're aware of the danger.

And that limits our capacity to be in the stillness because it's so urgent.

Our nervous system is always trying to get our attention.

You need to think about that.

What about this?

And then we get really caught up in catastrophic thinking.

And we start holding our breath and our body gets really engaged.

We feel a lot of tension.

So some of the practices and tools that we use are to allow our attention to be more focused.

So we might do cyclic sighing or the senses practice looking around the room or all of those things.

And another thing that we can do is to go into a practice of awareness.

The intention of this practice is to access or experience our true nature.

The stillness that's always here.

So that's our intention for this practice.

We're going to work with the mantra Soham.

It's written S-O-H-A-M,

But the H-A-M is in Sanskrit.

It's pronounced hum.

And we're going to work with allowing that as our focus.

So instead of letting our senses kind of roam around or letting our awareness or our thoughts to kind of grab our attention,

We're going to,

As much as we can,

Keep bringing our awareness back.

Soham means I am that for which I've searched all my life.

The I am.

Notice how it comes to mind.

What is your mind telling you about that?

But also what is your heart?

What is your body saying?

I am.

I am that for which I've searched all my life.

So we let the sound flow in our mind,

Flow in our awareness.

On the inhale,

The sound is so.

On the exhale,

Hum.

You begin to be aware of your breath.

If you need to relax your body or move your body around,

Then you can allow that.

Let yourself be comfortable.

We're going to do this for 10 or 15 minutes.

Allow the sound to arise like you're hearing the sound in your mind.

Inhaling so,

Exhaling hum.

And allow the sound and your breath to be continuous and smooth.

If you're holding your breath,

See if you could soften your stomach area as you breathe out.

Release any tension in your neck and shoulders,

Your jaw,

Down through to your toes as you breathe out.

And then begin to focus your awareness on the flow between your eyebrow center and the base of your nose where the nostrils meet the upper lip.

And let your awareness and the sound flow in that channel.

Inhaling so,

Exhaling hum.

The eyebrow center just behind the forehead.

It's not strictly a physical channel,

It's an energy channel from the eyebrow center,

The base of the nose,

And then feeling the sensations of air.

Breathing in the sound so,

Breathing out hum.

Breathing in I am.

Listening to the sound of the mantra so,

Hum.

And also being aware of the meaning of the sound of the mantra.

And if your mind wants to follow another train of thought,

Bring it back.

Inhaling so,

Exhaling hum.

Let the sound be smooth and continuous,

Flowing in your awareness.

Breathing in I am that.

Again and again,

Let your mind flow in that channel.

Sometimes when we've been doing this for a while,

All of our attention begins to flow with the sound so,

Hum.

And sound is flowing with the breath.

And the sound gets quieter and quieter,

More subtle.

You might invite the sound into your mind,

Let your breath awareness move to the background.

And allow the sound to just repeat in your mind so,

Hum,

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum.

I am.

I am the awareness in which this sound is flowing.

And as the mantra gets quieter and more subtle,

Notice the stillness all around.

I am the stillness.

And if you notice thoughts in your mind or any kind of fear or anxiety,

It just means that your attention has drawn back up to a surface layer.

Allow yourself to come into awareness again of your body and your breath.

Deep inhales,

Long exhales,

Let your whole body soften as you breathe out.

Come back to allowing the so,

Hum,

To flow with your breath.

Listen to the sound in your mind.

I am that,

I am that.

Let go of breath awareness and invite the sound into your mind.

Let it carry you into the stillness.

True nature of our mind is stillness.

Be aware of the vibration,

Listen to the sound.

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum.

I am the awareness of sound.

I am the awareness in which thoughts arise and come through.

My brain is engaged with thoughts at times.

And awareness has not changed.

Awareness is always here.

Deep stillness in which the thoughts are passing through.

Focus in on the awareness itself.

Thoughts are distracting you or physical sensations or the breath.

It's okay.

We have a body,

We have thoughts in the mind.

We have a rhythm of the breath that might be soothing or that might be a bit dysregulated.

We can come back into awareness.

These are all things that are happening in awareness.

Sensing into this thought,

These words,

I am the awareness itself.

I am aware of my body,

Thoughts,

Sensations.

And I am the awareness in which all of this is happening.

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum,

So,

Hum.

Another minute or so,

Sharpen your attention again.

Listen to the sound.

I am that.

My nature is stillness.

Ever pure,

Ever wise,

Ever free by nature.

Nature is stillness.

And as we bring in awareness of the movement of the mind,

Sensations and energy in the body,

The breath,

Stay connected with the stillness.

The sound,

So,

Hum,

Repeating in the mind.

Bring your hands together,

Create some warmth by rubbing your hands.

And bring them over your eyes.

Open your eyes into your palms,

Remaining aware.

And even with the eyes open,

This deep stillness is always already here.

And when you're ready,

Bring your hands down.

Notice where your attention is right now.

Notice how your body feels,

Your breath.

What is your experience right now of your true nature?

Sometimes in our practice,

We sink deeply into knowing that.

Other times we have glimpses,

We dip into it,

And then something happens and our attention gets taken back into the thought stream or something.

This is a beautiful practice to come back to again and again.

I am that.

I am the awareness in which all of this arises.

And sometimes we enjoy what's arising.

Sometimes it's more troubling.

But I'm not the thoughts in my mind.

I'm not my body.

I have this experience in my personal life,

My personal body.

And awareness is who I am.

Thank you all for being here.

And for all of us to take a bit of this into the rest of the day,

To glimpse that again,

Bring that back into awareness.

I am that.