I'm happy to be here.
I was just thinking,
Two years after that went very fast,
Didn't it?
Lots of familiar faces,
Some new faces.
I was just in Sydney,
Had the good fortune to attend the teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
And as usual,
His Holiness was stressing the importance of compassion and helping people.
So Cora had good timing with her email and she asked me how much I would teach.
So can I just ask how many people are beginners?
Tuesday nights usually a beginner class.
How many people actually are first-time meditators or just a few times?
Okay,
Mostly experienced.
So actually the methods of meditation for beginners or experienced people aren't that different actually.
So we just keep doing the same meditations with the same objects,
The same meditation objects.
And what happens is,
And we call it a practice.
So our meditation is a meditation practice.
It's something that we keep practicing.
What changes is the experience of the meditator,
Which is an internal experience.
But basically,
Especially with Anapanasati,
Breath meditation,
We're taking the physical feeling of the breath as the object.
And we use this method.
Picking up a meditation object allows us to put down all of the other objects that the mind has become involved with.
So that means thoughts about the past,
Thoughts about the future,
Thoughts about other people,
Thoughts about yourself.
All of that is conceptual construct.
And we're very often completely lost in it.
So this is why meditation is actually vitally important because it helps us get some space and some perspective from these things.
And experienced meditators really do come to see these kind of thoughts as thoughts.
And we really do learn to understand that the future isn't going to be what we think it will be.
No matter how much planning you do,
It won't go how you plan it usually.
We also learn to distrust our memories because you notice if you meditate a lot that when you're in a good mood,
You'll remember the past one way.
You might remember the kind things that people did for you and look upon the world with gratitude.
But when you're in a bad mood,
You can look at the past with a completely different perspective.
And so we begin to notice that moods,
Qualities which are affecting the mind,
Affect the quality of the thoughts.
So it's very important to develop a lot of mindfulness.
And mindfulness of breathing is the Lord Buddha said,
The crown jewel in the crown of meditation methods.
And we all have faith that Lord Buddha knew what he was talking about.
So Anapanasati is a very good foundation for meditation practice.
It becomes more refined the more you practice it and it deepens your understanding of how to practice with breath meditation.
It becomes a richer and richer practice.
So it's not on one level,
It's a simple and basic meditation method.
On another level,
The mindfulness that you cultivate while practicing it sincerely and the wisdom that you develop while practicing it sincerely makes it a very profound meditation practice.
But that depends upon our practice.
So one of the most important things in meditation practice is of course consistency.
And people who live in the city in this age will usually find when you come to meditate that there's a lot of thoughts or a lot of sleepiness,
A lot of dullness because minds are very busy.
And it's very important in our meditation practice that we have a quality of determination to sit with things as they are every day.
Because what you'll find is some days you'll come to your meditation cushion and your mind's all over the place and you think you're not going to get anywhere but the mind will become peaceful some days.
At the very least when you're trying to practice mindfulness of breathing and you are sitting and there's a lot of thought,
At the very least if you're aware of your thoughts that's better than being completely lost in them.
And many people find that after the meditation session,
So as we meditate the mind gets more sensitive and we get more focused and more we're looking taking a closer look at what we're thinking.
We can be quite critical of our experience and we can be thinking oh my meditation isn't working,
I can't meditate,
It's too hard,
It's not peaceful,
Where's the peace?
Those kind of thoughts.
But then after your meditation you get up and you notice a sense of relaxation,
A sense of clarity,
A sense of serenity that you're taking back into your life.
That's coming from having put forth the effort to meditate for that 15 minutes or half an hour or 45 minutes.
So it's very helpful and you can't just look at that meditation session and decide it worked or it didn't work.
Basically you're generating or regenerating a quality which is very helpful and then you can take that quality back into your daily life and you'll notice even if you just meditate for 50 minutes a day particularly in the mornings,
You'll notice this quality of awareness which is a bit more objective like something observing.
You'll notice there's more of that,
A quality of awareness which is observing your thoughts,
Your relationships,
Your bodily posture and you'll have a bit more choice.
Mindfulness is objective and so you get a bit of a sense of if we stay with the awareness over time we get a sense of things that we should trust and things that we shouldn't trust.
We get an intuitive sense of what is wholesome,
Unwholesome,
What will cause suffering,
What will deepen peace and well-being because you can step back from your habits and you can see your habits as habits and you can see well when I say this unskillful thing the result is suffering for myself and others even though there might be a moment of relief or a moment of happiness when you have a moment of revenge,
You say that nasty thing but if you can see it in perspective you see that it's not worth it.
But we need mindfulness to know that and so what happens is the more we practice you might be able to say something unskillful because you're feeling impatient and you're having a reaction and you have a choice.
In the past you didn't have a choice you just felt something and you said it,
You practice your 15 minutes or half an hour a day now you realize you begin to have a choice.
Sometimes you stop halfway through the sentence you're saying the unskillful thing and you tell yourself don't do that and you can stop.
The more you meditate you find that before you say the thing the thought might be formulating and you're about to say it and you have enough mindfulness to say to yourself don't say that.
So this is very helpful especially for people who believe in karma because the more mindfulness you have and the more choice the more distance you have from your thoughts being able to look at them a little more objectively the more choice you have then you can choose not to make the bad karma that you used to make and you can choose to make good karma instead which is very helpful.
Another practice that we can practice in conjunction with breath meditation is of course loving kindness practice.
Myself I feel that loving kindness practice in the modern urban context is vital.
I think fundamentally important because there's a lot of finning of competition and because of the way the news media works generating anxiety and fear you're always on this verge of thinking the economy is about to completely collapse and it's all going to fall apart but I've been hearing that for 20 years now and every time I come back to Australia people have really expensive phones and great new cars but the economy is always about to collapse and you know maybe it will maybe it finally will but the thing is that the news generates an incredible sense of anxiety in your mind and that sense of we have to get rid of Gillian Gillard she's whatever you know we have to do something so it's all going to fall apart so the other thing is fear about losing your job that kind of thing and fear about environmental change there are things which are very concerning happening in society in the world so what we need to do is balance the anxiety and we see it in perspective okay there are threats okay there are dangers and there's still a great deal of good as well and so the media doesn't do that the media sensationally reports the bad things that are happening occasionally there's a feel-good story but usually it's stuff that's generating anxiety and fear so it's good to balance that by pacifying anxiety and fear and generating well-being one of the things his holiness said in his talk in sydney was that he believes that the human species is at heart good at heart compassionate and at heart kind because the very beginning of our lives begins usually by being breastfed by the mother and the baby is incredibly vulnerable so basically without a great deal of tender loving care for a long time for a period of years none of us would have survived and he was saying like the news media would never go and report this woman woke up three times during the night and breastfed her baby and this woman bathed it changed it snappy cuddled it every time it was anxious settled its emotions isn't it amazing how kind this one person is and he said but actually this is occurring all the time everywhere and it never gets mentioned so it was very beautiful it's just kind of look at this and then also in a place like australia taking care of sick people taking care of old people there's a great deal of care occurring in just about every suburb and it doesn't get reported so basically the foundation of human goodwill is still there and people taking care of each other as as best as they can it's still happening a lot so it's when we cultivate qualities like loving kindness we can see things more in perspective as they don't believe the message that it's all doom and gloom and it's all falling apart and everybody's bad you need to balance that perception i'm very fortunate i live in rural thailand i don't have a television i don't watch news and i know everyone in the village and we don't have that sense that everything's about to fall apart and uh it's very nice i just see the same kids every morning and the same old people and occasionally someone gets sick occasionally someone dies but basically there's a sense of a community helping each other and it's just plow the fields plant the rice plant the corn harvest it send the kids off to school put food in the monks bowls it's just you know ordinary life day after day with no particular sense of incredible doom and gloom on the horizon so but i notice when i come back to cities and i notice when i pass through bangkok at that level of uh and you look at people on the street there's that sense of closeness not trusting people and that sense of wanting to cocoon yourself and be in your your private world you're going to text the people you want to talk to and you're going to tweet the people and upgrade your facebook but you don't look at the people next to you and you don't talk to them and that's actually not very when one has that experience on one level you're getting moments aren't you of of warmth or feeling of connection but it's pretty abstract on another level you feel closed off from the people that you're right next to and you feel like you don't trust them and that's also what i'm just saying i think it's good to balance it i think my sense is people are getting a more of a sense that the world is hostile and that people are untrustworthy and you have to just uh keep your eyes down and and do what you want to do when you want to do it but don't connect with other people and if you can balance that with at least bathing your own heart with loving kindness i would hope a couple of times a day pacifying some of that anxiety and developing a bit more trust that most people at heart are good and most people won't go out of their way to harm you and that also yourself at heart in your in your heart of hearts it's good and we need to reaffirm that and get back in touch with that and what you'll find is a lovely sense of relaxation a lovely sense of trust and an intuition about the human potential because the human potential is extraordinary and we when we're completely lost in our concepts and when we're completely lost in our fears or our desires whatever it is that sense of you know i need to get a better job i need to get the right partner i need to renovate my kitchen i've got to upgrade my facebook and all that stuff that that people do i'm not okay it's coming from a sense of something's lacking i'm not okay and and consumerism is training you to do that because the more not okay you feel the more you feel that you need stuff from outside the better the economy is but that's not it's not very healthy and if you can fill your own heart with a sense of loving kindness you might find that the kitchens find this way it is and the car you have will work for a couple more years and you don't have to put all that pressure on you to go and make all that money to get those new things because when you get them you won't feel content you won't feel full you won't feel happy anyway you'll just start feeling like you wish you got the lexus instead of the mercedes doesn't work but what does work is the buddhist teachings on dana sīla and mental cultivation if you are sharing a portion of what you have with people if you are maintaining good ethical standards if you do have a daily meditation practice and you cultivate loving kindness your practice forgiveness you're being patient you will start to feel more and more well-being more trust and you'll have moments where you glimpse and this is very important you have moments where you glimpse your true potential which isn't has absolutely nothing to do with looking youthful or handsome or beautiful it has nothing to do with being it savvy your potential has nothing to do with the externals of your life it has everything to do with the nature of your mind which is here it's internal and so that's like when you close your eyes and you don't get completely lost in the concepts and the media and the the delusion basically of society and how deluded we all are when you turn inwards from that you begin to glimpse that when the mind isn't affected by the five hindrances it's a radiant and spacious thing which feels perfectly content and full and that's wonderful but it takes effort but it's very rewarding all you have to do is just what i said what the lord buddha said be generous share to the extent that you can and uh be ethical and doesn't mean you never make mistakes and it doesn't mean we don't have bad habits but it means that we're trying to do better we're training ourselves to be virtuous and you're doing that because you want to experience a lack of anxiety you want to experience well-being so you're doing it as a gift to yourself as well as to others and then we do our daily practice so that we can see all of the thoughts that we have as thoughts and we don't have to take them personally and the more the more mindfulness you have you start to develop a little bit of samadhi and the most samadhi you have you can take some distance and you really can see a thought is just a thought and a physical feeling is just a feeling an emotional feeling is just an emotional feeling and i don't have to take any of these things personally i don't have to hold on to them and have my mind burdened by them you can put it all down to the extent that you can and if you can't put it down you can get some space from it at least i'm just saying i don't need to i don't need to be this worried i don't need to be this anxious it's okay and uh so just as a bit of an introduction lead a bit of a meditation now let's do some breath meditation and some loving kindness meditation so awareness is our nature to have awareness as a conscious being when you're born there's a certain amount of awareness and awareness is functioning at your eyes your nose your ears your tongue your body you're aware of tastes sounds sights smells feelings we train ourselves in mindfulness training to be aware of all of these things without being completely absorbed in them so what's usually happening is the awareness gets completely absorbed in objects and there might be a little bit of what we call sati sampajanya a mindfulness that sees in perspective or in context but usually it gets very absorbed and that can happen with thoughts as well that's the mental sense base thoughts about the past thoughts about the future thoughts about your career your relationship all of that stuff but these are thought constructs and so in mindfulness training in meditation we're just aware of these things more objectively so a sound is sound when you hear a sound when you're meditating you just know it's a sound and you're hearing so it doesn't matter if we like it or we don't like it we don't have to comment on it so when we're meditating with breath meditation it's not conceptual and uh this is lord buddha's discovery very very important is that this is the path that goes to the other shore you go inwards the other shore isn't out there it's not you're not going to find the other shore the deathless the unconditioned through your eyes or through your ears or through thoughts so none of that is to be trusted in terms of the spiritual aspiration we're looking for something inside this nature that we have to know we're going to reign it in and allow it to rest within the parameters of the body and then refine it and so that comes through pulling back and letting go of sensory experience letting go of mental experience so we train with the breath the wonderful thing about the breath is that it's there all the time and so we have our meditation object right there with us all the time at the beginning of the sit it's good to be aware of the entire in-breath so there's feelings physical feelings coming in at the nose and the chest and then the abdomen and physical feelings as the breath leaves abdomen chest nose it's good to use mental noting i think when we think a lot it's good to count actually counting can seem a bit boring but it's actually very effective because it gives the mind something to do so i'm going to suggest that you note one at the nose two at the chest and three in the abdomen on the in-breath and then note three at the abdomen two at the chest one at the nose on the out-breath breathing in aware of the breath at the nose chest and abdomen one two three breathing out aware of the feelings of the breath the natural breath that the abdomen chest nose three two one just bringing our awareness to bear on the physical feeling of the breath nose chest abdomen abdomen chest nose abdomen chest nose in the first few minutes it's okay to take a few deeper breaths just kind of getting clear about the perception the awareness of the feeling that's what we're aiming to be aware of just feeling that breath setting the intention to know it clearly as it is breathing in one two three breathing out three two one and when the thoughts come as they do it's okay just don't follow on with them don't feed them one two three three two one one mindfully knowing the feelings of one in breath mindfully knowing the feelings of one out breath and seeing thoughts as just thoughts and seeing feelings as just feelings not mine not my thoughts not my feelings just a thought just a feeling pleasant feelings unpleasant feelings physical feelings mental feelings neutral feelings arising staying for some time changing ceasing not mine not a self resting in the awareness that knows these things like that thought is just a thought of feelings just a feeling the body is just a body the body breathing input breathing out though you
