Instructions In 4 Of 16 Steps Of Mindfulness Of Breathing

So now we're going to talk a little bit about mindfulness of breathing and then invite you to practice the first four steps of the 16 steps.

And as I mentioned last night,

It begins with the preliminaries,

Meaning that we've set up a space,

We've come to a space that's appropriate and suitable,

Somewhat secluded so we don't get caught up in the ways of the world physically.

Then we seclude ourselves mentally,

Meaning we put aside worries and concerns,

We put aside roles and responsibilities.

And when we usually hear this seclusion,

Mental seclusion,

It's actually referring to seclusion from the hindrances.

And I won't go into details about the hindrances right now,

Other than to mention them.

And they are obsessive desire or sensual desire.

Ill will is the second one.

The third one is sloth and torpor,

Meaning kind of mental thickness and dullness.

The fourth one is restlessness and worry.

And the fifth one is paralyzing doubt,

Which is this questioning about the usefulness of something.

It's a lack of confidence in something.

In meditation,

It's usually talked about as a lack of confidence in the Buddha's teachings or the meditation practice.

But it's also just a sense of lack of confidence in things.

And we get paralyzed,

We don't know what we should do.

If we can at least acknowledge them,

Then that's a big step to overcoming.

They all have particular antidotes.

And acknowledging them,

Being mindful of them,

Recognizing them,

Naming them even,

Is one very powerful step to move beyond them.

What's useful to understand about seclusion from the hindrances is that once we recognize them,

Then we're starting to manage them and we can have joy in being able to reduce their impact,

If that makes sense.

So obsessive desire is about craving after or grasping after pleasant experiences,

Usually.

And sensual experiences,

You know,

Senses of touch,

Taste,

Smell,

Touch,

Taste,

Sound,

And mind.

And it's usually this obsession with going after the pleasant.

Ill will is another hindrance.

And ill will is this sense of pushing away.

It's usually based on what we're aversive to,

Unpleasant experiences,

And we want to push it away or avoid it.

And it is divisive and it's considered as an affliction,

Actually.

It's a horrible affliction.

Sloth and torpor is this kind of often thought of as when you.

.

.

It often manifests when we go to sleep,

But it's not sleepiness.

It is more this mental thickness and dullness.

And it just clouds things.

It's really unpleasant.

Actually,

It can be quite pleasant because we're just kind of going off into sleepy bliss or even sleepy bliss and not knowing and cloudiness sometimes.

But it is a hindrance to meditation.

Restlessness and worry is about when the mind is kind of scattered and unable to settle because you're worrying about one thing or your mind is kind of caught off with mental proliferation about something else.

It's just this incapacity to settle and stabilize.

Often it's about regrets about things we've done in the past,

For example,

Often related to what we call worry and rumination in psychology.

And paralyzing doubt,

As I mentioned before,

Is this sense of being uncertain about which direction to go.

This paralyzing doubt stops us progressing when we're uncertain about whether we should go this way or that way or this has got value or that hasn't got value.

When we don't have self-confidence even,

It becomes like we're at the fork of a road,

Not knowing which direction to take.

So the joy of these,

The joy which is really what I want to emphasize here,

The joy of putting essential desire on hold for a bit,

Having a little bit of respite from it,

Is equivalent to the joy of being debt-free.

Interesting.

There was one discourse where the Buddha talked about the joys of overcoming hindrances.

The joy of overcoming ill-will,

Putting it at bay,

Getting some distance from it and even uprooting it,

Is equivalent to the joy of overcoming a horrible affliction,

Becoming healthy after a horrible affliction.

The joy of overcoming sloth and torpor is equivalent to the joy of being released from prison.

Imagine you're in prison and you get released,

There's a joy there.

And the joy of being freed from,

Even relatively,

Free from this restlessness and worry and mental agitation and so on,

Is equivalent to being released from slavery.

In the time of the Buddha they used to have slaves,

So people wouldn't understand what that meant.

And the joy of overcoming paralyzing doubt is equivalent to,

And this is a really cool one,

Arriving at a destination unharmed and with one's possessions all intact,

After an arduous and dangerous journey.

What a cool sort of joy.

So I'm mentioning this because joy then becomes a quality for us to,

As a resource for us to enhance our practice.

So coming back to these first preliminaries,

We gain physical seclusion and we also gain mental seclusion by putting the hindrances aside.

Putting roles and responsibilities,

All sorts of things that are important for us,

Just find some seclusion from them,

We put them aside.

We also,

And I invite you to also establish an intention,

Which is,

Intentions become really helpful because when we get lost in what we're doing,

We remember our intention and it energizes us.

In addition,

When we begin to lose the ego driving all this,

When we realize the futility of clinging to an ego,

And we can start to see that if we make an intention,

It's like setting the GPS marker and setting the GPS on a particular destination.

And also just putting it on auto automatic to go that way.

So you just kind of trust in the process,

There's no ego driving it anymore.

So setting intentions are really helpful in that respect.

Then the first step is we bring mindfulness to the fore.

Mindfulness and we get a taste of what mindfulness is.

There's a subtle joy in mindfulness,

Being mindful in and of itself,

Being aware of what's going on.

It's not necessarily focusing on any one particular thing,

It's just this general being present with experience.

Then we focus on the breathing.

And mindfulness is the first factor of awakening.

As you may have remembered,

I was talking about how we're progressing through the 16 steps and they're equivalent to progressing through seven factors of awakening.

The seven factors of awakening,

I gave you a link to a talk on them.

Basically they're what's needed if we want to wake up.

They're the part of the process of waking up.

Sometimes they're considered in a sequence.

Well,

They're usually considered in a sequence.

Mindfulness first,

Then investigation.

Investigation means we inquire into something,

We look at it,

We develop interest in something,

We're kind of curious about something.

So what we're doing here is we're curious about our breathing.

We're mindful,

We rouse mindfulness,

Then we direct mindfulness to the breathing,

Then we're curious about the breathing.

In the Sutta it goes,

Breathing in short,

One knows one is breathing in short.

Breathing out,

Breathing in and out short,

One knows one's breathing in and out short.

Breathing in and out long,

One knows one's breathing in and out long.

So what we're doing here is we're allowing the breath to settle into its own natural rhythm and we're being curious about the nature of the breath.

So we're just letting the breath do its own thing.

We're not necessarily focusing on physical sensations,

Although often that's the way we kind of know we're breathing by tuning into the physical sensations.

It is the fact that we just know we are breathing.

And these are the first two steps of the mindfulness,

The 16 steps of mindfulness of breathing.

And they incorporate that mindfulness aspect and the investigation aspect of the seven factors of awakening.

The next step,

By the way,

These are the only two steps that we focus fully on the breathing.

This is really interesting.

From here on in,

The breathing is in the background.

Awareness of the breathing is in the background.

It's just sort of happening.

We're not focusing fully on it.

It's just sort of happening in the background.

And what comes to the fore are other phenomena.

The third step is we become aware of body,

Bodily sensations or body in whatever way we can.

Many of you may have done body scan at some stage in your life.

Body scan is being aware of bodily sensations from the top of your head to the tips of your feet.

I find I start to do that particular practice when I'm becoming aware of my body.

Sometimes I can just feel my body as a whole.

I feel the sensations of my body or the posture of my body as a whole.

Whatever,

I'm paying attention to the body.

And for me,

I usually scan with awareness through my body,

Being attentive to the physical sensations,

The representations of the various elements.

As I mentioned last night,

There are four elements of the body,

Earth,

Water,

Fire and air or wind.

Earth element represents hardness and softness,

Roughness and smoothness,

A sense of solidity,

Heaviness and lightness.

This is how we understand the elemental qualities of the body in earth element.

Water element represents stickiness and fluidity and a sense of cohesion.

If you had a lump of sand and it had no water in it whatsoever,

It would just turn to dust,

Just be sand flat.

But if you put water in it,

You make it into a ball and there's some cohesion about it.

So the sense of cohesion is water element.

So water element is also that sense of stickiness or slipperiness that we might feel,

Say on a hot day or if our palms are sticky,

We might feel that stickiness in our palms.

If I invite you to move your tongue around your mouth,

Unless you have an issue with saliva,

And some people can't produce saliva.

I know that that's a particular disorder.

What you'll feel is a slipperiness.

That's a direct experience of water element.

The fire element is whether something's warm or cold or hot or cool.

It's the temperature in your body.

Air element or wind element is this sense of energetic movement.

It's the sense of movement in your body.

So when you're breathing in and out,

You can feel,

We say you're feeling it in your abdomen,

You can feel this movement arising and falling.

That's air element.

It's also,

You know how you have,

If I move my arm,

I can feel a sort of a wind through it.

That's wind element.

In addition,

If I was doing Tai Chi,

And I'm sure some of you have felt this,

You know,

You do Tai Chi or yoga,

Sometimes you breathe in and you breathe out and you feel a kind of a prana going through your body,

Like winds and movements through your body.

That's wind element.

So being attentive to those experiences,

Recognizing them is what we're doing here in this third step.

So we're doing things in the background,

But we're just recognizing sensations.

And I might invite you to scan with your mind through your body to recognize various sensations.

When we do that,

The fourth step is related to relaxing,

Letting go.

It's called calming physical activity.

And how does it go?

It goes.

.

.

Look,

I'll just read you the instructions,

And then I'll clarify this last step.

The instructions go like this,

Here,

Go into a forest or root of a tree or to an empty hut one sits down,

Having followed the legs crosswise,

Keeping the body erect and having established mindfulness to the fore,

Mindful one breathes in,

Mindful one breathes out.

So that's the preliminary and just before we step on the first step.

Then having established mindfulness to the fore,

Mindful one breathes in,

Mindful one breathes out,

Breathing in long,

One understands I breathe in long,

Breathing out long,

One understands I breathe out long,

Breathing in short,

One understands I breathe in short,

Breathing out short,

One understands I breathe out short.

That's the first and second step.

We're having this comprehension,

Clear comprehension,

We're having a clear,

We're exercising curiosity or an interest in the breath,

And we're understanding it,

We're seeing it for what it is.

Then it goes like this,

Experiencing the whole body,

I shall breathe in,

One trains experiencing the whole body,

I shall breathe out.

So that's what I'm talking about,

Experiencing the body in whatever way you wish.

I'm suggesting you experience it through physical sensations,

But you might just want to feel it,

Experience the body as a whole,

Grounded in the posture that you're in.

And then the last step,

One trains calming bodily activity,

I shall breathe in,

One trains calming bodily activity,

I shall breathe out.

So it's this,

One,

What happens then is you start to relax,

Breathing in,

Breathing out,

Relaxing.

And you probably know the relaxation doesn't come from doing anything,

It's actually from not doing something.

Relaxation comes from not tensing up,

Not resisting,

Not holding on,

Relaxation comes from letting go.

So I was tempted to do progressive muscle relaxation with you,

But I think we won't this morning,

I think we'll just go straight into this first tetrad.

But in essence,

What I do when I get to this step is I breathe in,

Breathe out,

Relax.

I breathe in,

Breathe out,

Let go.

Actually,

Let's all do an experiment for the moment.

This is part of progressive muscle relaxation.

I invite you just to grip your right hand and fist as tight as you can and hold it for a few moments,

Hold it,

Hold it,

And breathe in and out and let go.

Just let go,

Let it go.

I mean,

You'll have to drop it if you let go of all the tension in it.

Let go of the tension and relax.

Breathing in,

Breathing out,

Continue to let go of tension.

Continue that letting go.

Continue to let go.

Breathing in,

Breathing out,

Letting go.

Okay,

So now I'm inviting you to your left hand.

And of course,

Don't tense up your muscles,

They've caused you any pain,

But tense up that muscle,

Tense up your fist,

Your forearm,

Your bicep as tight and as tense as you can and hold it and explore what it's like to have tension in that part of your body.

Hold it only for a few seconds.

Breathe in and breathe out and release.

Let it go.

Let the tension go.

In every breath,

It's like the tension thermometer comes down.

10,

9,

8,

7,

6,

5.

Breathing in,

Breathing out,

Relaxing even a bit more.

Now I'm going to invite you to,

And I won't look at your faces,

But I'm going to invite you to screw your face up,

Like tighten it up.

I can't see my face right now.

Tighten your face up so that it's,

You know,

Cursing your lips,

Pushing your tongue up against the roof of your mouth,

Furrowing your brow,

Tightening your jaw.

Tighten it up,

Tighten it up,

Hold it,

Hold it.

Now breathe in and out and let go.

Let go of all the tension in your face.

Let your forehead smooth out.

Breathing in,

Breathing out.

Let your jaw relax,

Your mouth might even want to open.

Doesn't matter if you dribble,

It's okay.

You're just letting go,

Nobody's looking at you.

Breathing in,

Breathing out.

Let go of that face you're putting on for the world and relax.

Now I invite you to just relax your whole body.

Breathing in,

Breathing out,

Relaxing your whole body.

Noticing tension and releasing it.

Thank you.

That's just a little,

I mean,

A lot of you are psychologists or mental health professionals.

I'm sure you know that exercise back to front.

You've probably done it thousands of times with your patients and clients,

But that's an example of what we're doing,

In my view,

In this fourth step.

Okay,

So let's do it.

Let's just go into doing it.

So I'll just turn the recording off and turn it on again for the first four steps of mindfulness and breathing.