Foundations of meditation - presence, harmony & compassion

I always think that this moment of entering into meditation is quite an interesting one. I think it’s quite important to see that there’s not really a moment when you start meditating. It’s not like you’re not meditating, then suddenly you are meditating and there was some quantum leap that happened. We don’t want to make meditation into something completely different from everything else in life. So see if you can watch yourself sort of sliding into a more meditative awareness rather than sort of leaping to the breath and hanging on at all costs. You can actually just first just recognise, okay, I’m here sitting in this place. Almost like, I don’t know, just changing the focus on an old camera, we’re just bringing something different into focus, something that’s already there, bringing our present moment experience inner landscape, out of the shadows into awareness. Phrase like "inner landscape" can just roll off the tongue easily, but it’s not something that’s actually very easy to define. There’s a whole world of experience. The layer of consciousness that we call the body, the layer that we might call the heart layer that we call the mind. These three layers are not really separate, but reflecting each other and sort of shading into each other. We can sort of deliberately turn towards each of these layers just to kind of tune in a bit more deeply. So tuning to the body layer, there’s always far more going on in any of these layers than we can hold all at once. So let go of the need to do that. Just be a willing witness to the life of your body. So the breath is moving, providing a kind of rhythm, a kind of background beat over which the rest of your embodied experience is playing. There are other identifiable sensations, like tension here and there, no doubt. The way the clothes feel against the skin, the way the cushion or the chair feels underneath you, your heartbeat. But also always there’s a whole array of sensations that we can’t really name, don’t really feel easy to describe. Subtle tingles and feelings of movement in the body, gentle fizzing and popping and pulling at a more subtle level. Noticing these actually helps bring us to a more subtle, attuned awareness, because we’re needing to be a bit quieter, a bit more sensitive to pick this up. That’s why we take the time to notice the subtle tingles in the toes and the fingers, of vibration in the chest, whatever else may be happening at this level, to witness the body on this more subtle level. We need some kind of curiosity, some genuine interest, and to help us stay in this place of just receiving and witnessing without getting so tangled up in this or that experience. We need some compassion, some goodwill, some friendliness. This allows us to receive our experience without needing it to be different. Compassionate awareness just allows everything to be as it is. It just wants to meet life well, doesn’t need to be in the driver’s seat. So we can bring these foundational attitudes in: curiosity and compassion, in the very way that we receive our experience this morning. It’s not about thinking curious thoughts, thinking compassionate thoughts. It’s in the awareness. It’s in the very recognition and noticing of the moment-to-moment arising of your body. It’s infused with kindness, like watching kittens play or substituting whatever baby animal works better for you. Maybe it’s obvious, maybe it’s not. Your emotional life shows up in this sensitive awareness of your body. We can see how our mood kind of colours the background sense of the body. We tune in in this more subtle way. It’s like underneath this sensation and that sensation, there’s a kind of background which is often felt to be kind of vibrating or coloured or textured in a particular way. If there’s restlessness and agitation, it might feel like the space is sort of buzzing around. If it’s soft and kind of gently glowing, then that can be the impact of some joy or some relaxation. If it feels like you can’t even tune into this space, then maybe we can recognise a little bit of tightness, numbness. Obviously, this isn’t a static thing. It will shift and change particular parts of the body. There may be obvious experiences of emotion, the way that anxiety can tighten the belly or throw confetti around in the chest. The way sadness can sort of open the heart, but in a melancholy, deep, bluish kind of way. So again, we’re bringing curiosity that enables this subtlety of awareness, this noticing of much more depth, more nuance, and this compassion that can just allow everything to be as it is. And then again, not separate from our emotional life or our embodied life, our mental life is present, either humming in the background or stealing the show in the foreground. As thoughts come and go, they impact our body; they impact our heart. They create ripples, ripples of anxiety, excitement, spirals of distraction. We never need to worry about turning the mind off in meditation. This should never be our orientation. If we had a button that did that, then we wouldn’t need this practice so much anyway. Actually, we just want to stay at the level of our immediate embodied experience. So thoughts come, and maybe the forehead is squeezed with tension, maybe some emotion, subtle or obvious, ripples through the body, and that’s where we stay. There’s a kind of mirror of the mind. Except mirror implies two things that are really separate. So this is what we mean by inner landscape. These different aspects of our experience that are really continuous and kind of fade into each other, always changing from one moment to the next, never the same, and always far more going on than we can hold with any kind of attention. This is your inner landscape. You might notice how when we really tune into it in a more subtle way like this, when we really do it justice, rather than a cursory checking in, it actually responds well to that. It sort of reveals more; the edges of things soften a little bit. Sometimes experiences that felt difficult feel a little bit easier. So having tuned in to ourselves in this deeper way, we’ve laid the foundation for bringing in some steadiness and some harmony. Not by turning anything off, not by blocking anything out, but by resting with the rhythm of the breath. The breath, like the kind of breeze that flows through our inner landscape, touching its contents not as somewhere to go that’s anywhere other than here. We can attune to the breath with the intention to rest here and to kind of gather ourselves here, encouraging this sense of harmony and settledness that the breath can offer if we meet it well. And for the breath to offer us these gifts of harmony, of steadiness, we need to bring this subtle awareness here. It can help to really stay with the breath on a very close level for the whole duration of one cycle of breathing. Often, if we’re instructed to just notice the breath, we do so on a very superficial level, get underneath that level, and rest with the whole in-breath, noticing how its texture changes and shifts at different points throughout the inhale. It’s not just one constant experience. And then when the exhale begins, follow it all the way home again, sensitive to how it changes. And then resting for a moment in the gap between one breath and the next, like a conversation, the breath will respond to the way that we pay attention, the way that we bring awareness. It will naturally deepen, lengthen, become softer. If our awareness becomes deeper, softer, closer. We want to just let go of too much of a sense of trying to experience the breath. Trying to notice the breath can end up being a kind of narrowing down and can end up excluding other aspects of experience. We don’t need to do that. Like we relax back into this awareness in which the breath is just there. So for the last few minutes, we can rest, taking in our inner landscape, settling with the rhythm of the breath, encouraging a sense of harmony and gatheredness, bringing our sensitivity, our curiosity, our compassionate awareness. Just as we were really present for the transition into meditation, can we be really here for the transition out of sitting practice? We don’t need to turn mindfulness off; just kind of reaffirm to ourselves the boundaries of our physical body, the space that it’s in, the time that it’s in. Allow anything to stretch, to wiggle, to move, finding your way out of the practice, opening the eyes.