Practicing the meditative attitudes

As always, it’s nice to clear some psychic space for the practice. Getting rid of the idea of meditation as something to tick off the to-do list. Letting go of the idea that we need to get somewhere, do something, achieve something more. Looking for the attitude of exploration, just noticing whatever’s currently occupying attention, whatever the mind deems most important right now, noticing that and just consciously detaching or disentangling from any sense that anything important needs to be held in mind. And letting awareness inhabit your body, and to let awareness inhabit your body is really more a noticing that awareness is already present, your body is already here in your sphere of consciousness, just waiting to be turned towards. It’s not like we have to burrow through something else to get there. It’s not like we have to look for something. Just let your body sense open and blossom and unfold to reveal just the experience of being your body. This morning, it can be helpful to visit the peripheries of the body, to include the fingers, the toes, the head, the face. Sensing both the sensations that are passing through these areas and also just the felt sense of these regions of space, regions of body space. Asking the question: What is it like to have a body right now? What is it like to have this body in this moment? And if an easy answer comes to describe your experience, hold it lightly and look beyond any particular label to the ineffable, irreducible, felt, lived experience. And sensing in this experience of body, to whatever extent is available to you, noticing that body is just happening, the experience of body is just present. I don’t make it happen. My experience of my body is given to me fresh each moment. Having this kind of perception—this perception of my embodied experience arising moment to moment in an unfathomable way—can really loosen the sense of me needing to control my experience, to resist this, to resist that, so we can set our intention to practice this wholehearted, open-handed receiving. Right now, this is my experience, and I’m here for it. I want to know it. I want to live. Coming back to this attitude, reaffirming this attitude, allowing experience, recognizing that it’s here anyway. This humility in the face of the mystery of existence—this can really allow things to open out in a helpful way. And it’s only a small shimmy away from compassion. If my experience is a mysterious gift and I’m here to receive, to welcome, to allow, it just makes sense to do so with care, with compassion, with love. Self-compassion in meditation is really the meeting of experience with care, with compassion. What else is there to the self than this ever-changing, ever-shifting experience of body, mind, and heart? So we camp out in this attitude. We inhabit this inner demeanor, this inner atmosphere of compassion and freshness, beginner’s mind. And then from here, we may choose to settle with the breath or maybe the whole space of the body or anything else that works for you. And the breath and the body just become a kind of vehicle for this kind of awareness, this compassionate, interested awareness. Just like toast can be a vehicle for peanut butter—it’s not the main event. Any experience regarded with this kind of awareness will yield a kind of openness and spaciousness and harmony. We sometimes think of the breath or the body as our meditation object. It’s a word we sometimes use—object of meditation. As we stay with our experience and look ever more closely and allow it and welcome it ever more deeply, the objectness of the breath, the thingness of the breath, frays a little at the edges. And the thingness of the body frays a little at the edges. We can see the body and the breath are sort of stitched together from an uncountable array of sensations or from a sort of swirling current of experience. We can find our balance between entering into this kind of deconstruction—where things are much less thing-like—and leaning more towards a sense of enjoying and appreciating. Making sure we include both, so we can enjoy the spaciousness, the harmony, the openness that comes by receiving the breath in the body with care and compassion. We can notice that this breath and this body are not solid things. They’re a kind of drawing of a circle around something much more immediate—the fizzing and popping of lower-level experience. So there are these four aspects or strands to the practice, kind of contained within each other and implying each other. There’s this deep honesty about experience, this opening to feel our inner life, checking in and allowing the body, the heart, to do its thing. There’s this establishing of the meditative attitudes—divine ignorance, mystery, compassion—maybe many other words that embody these attitudes better for you. As the settling of awareness happens, the ping-pong of attention relaxes into a more settled awareness of the body. Then there’s this noticing and appreciating what this does—the way experience opens out, the way the body sense changes, enjoying any sense of harmony and space, enjoying any deeper sense of mystery. This is how we’ll carry on for the last few minutes, moving between these strands, these aspects, in the most helpful way.