Category: Guided Meditation

Not Me, Not Mine

You cut your fingernails and brush the clippings away. A moment ago they were you. You don’t go back for them.

Settle. Let the body be heavy, the belly soft, awareness wide enough to hold the whole of it. Then listen. A car, a voice, the hum of an appliance. As each sound arrives, label it silently and lightly: not me, not mine. This one is easy — obviously the sound isn’t you, obviously you can’t keep it. Notice what happens when you say so anyway.

Widen from there. The pressure of sitting, an ache, the rise and fall of the belly. The breath has been going all day without your permission; the air was outside a moment ago and will be outside again. If you were going to possess a breath, which one would it be, and how would you hold it? Then feeling — warmth, unease, whatever tone is here — already shifting as you turn to look. Then thoughts. Where did that one come from? Was there a decision before it arrived? Thoughts happen on their own; we take the credit after the fact.

Then look for your sense of self. It might be tight, everything glued together and about you. It might be loose and open. Either way, it is arising. Not me, not mine.

Nothing here is being got rid of. A rainbow is vividly there and has nothing solid in it. Open your eyes, look around the room, and keep looking that way.

Impressions in Awareness

A motorbike starts up in the street. You hear it, and then it is gone. You were never going to hold onto it — you couldn’t have, even if you’d tried.

Settle, and let the mind fall open. Now listen. Traffic, a bird, the hum of an appliance. Let awareness grow until it is big enough to hold all of it, then listen for the silence — in the gaps between sounds, underneath a sound while it is still going. Sounds arise out of that silence and fall back into it. Impressions in awareness.

We start with sound because sound is the easy case. Widen from there. Visual forms, reflections on the surface of a lake. The body sitting and breathing, every sensation arising inside an awareness bigger than the body. The feeling of this moment, whatever tone it has. Thoughts, each with its location and shape, and a glimmer of stillness behind them that they return to.

Then look for your sense of self. It may be subtle, barely more than a feeling that this is you. It may be coarse — craving, aversion, thoroughly identified. Either way it is sensation, feeling, and thought glued together with a label stuck on it. Me. That is just happening too. You do not need to grab any of it. You do not need to hold it still.

Rest as the awareness it all happens in. Then open your eyes, look around the room, and carry the view off the cushion.

The Loving Warmth of Awareness

A sound arrives. A car in the street, a bird, someone moving in the next room. Can you hear it through love?

Settle first. Let awareness fill the body part by part until the whole space is bright, then rest with the overall feeling of it — rich and complex, or vague and murky, or beyond words. Whatever is here is fine. Keep the body as your base.

Now imagine the space around you as filled with golden light. Awareness itself, warm and bright, as though you were submerged in something viscous and gold that nourishes every cell. Each sensation arises into that warmth, saturated by it, and falls back.

Whatever appears, welcome it. Each sound. Each visual form. Each sensation in the body. May this be welcomed. May this be held in loving presence.

Include the resistance — the agitation, the boredom, the part of you that doesn’t believe this is possible. Welcome that too.

Then take the view that the warmth is not yours to generate. Awareness is doing the loving. It is all around you, through every cell, and it is holding you.

Let yourself be held.

Come back to the felt sense of the body. Notice what has softened, and what has not.

Open, Soften, Allow

Something has bothered you and the thought will not stop turning. The body is tight, the shoulders drawn in, the world narrowed to the size of the problem. On another day you are out walking and everything is roomy and unhurried. The difference is the grip.

Clinging, craving, aversion, grasping — different words for one movement: taking hold of experience and trying to keep it fixed. It is felt in the body. Which is useful, because what is felt in the body can be released there.

Settle, then let awareness fill the whole body, part by part, until the whole space is bright. Tune into the felt sense of it — the overall tone, like dialling in an analogue radio. Notice the clear sensations, and what is vague and murky. Whatever you find is fine.

Now look for the holding. A contraction somewhere. A pull for this to be other than it is. It is in thought too — the mind solving, fixing, reaching towards something later. Find it. Stay with it a moment.

Open, soften, allow.

Take resistance the same way: soften around the sleepiness, the agitation, the doubt. Let it be here. Take the pleasant that way too. Released from the grip, what is pleasant tends to open further; what is unpleasant tends to dissipate.

Then feel the whole body again. Tight, or roomy. Solid, or moving.

You do not let go. You stop holding on.

Drawn from Rob Burbea’s teaching on ways of looking.

The Self-sense Spectrum

A sound wakes you in the night. Nothing much has happened, and within a minute the body is tight and the mind is looping — what was that, who caused it, why this, why me. Hours later you are walking in the sun and everything is fine. The body is open. There is nothing to cling to. Same person, same day.

Place a number between zero and ten on what is being felt. Zero: the self-sense faint, thin, perhaps completely gone. Ten: contracted, fixated, everything is about you. Most of the time you are drifting somewhere in the middle without noticing.

Sensation first: what you can hear, see, feel. Then feeling — not the story of the emotion, just its energy in the body. Then thought: distinct images and inner sounds, or a stream bubbling away.

Then ask: what is my self-sense right now?

It’s a strange question. It doesn’t land the first time.

Now watch how the mind binds it all together. A sound, an agitation, a thought about who did this — glued into a solid, fixed, “you”. When the gluing runs unwatched, the contraction is strongest. See it clearly, and relax.

Suppose a magician were to hold a magic show at the four crossroads, and a keen-sighted person were to see it, reflect on it, and examine it radically. Even as they see it, they would find it empty; they would find it hollow; they would find it void of essence.

— Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta, SN 22.95

Examine the self-sense that closely and release clinging. Not gone — vividly appearing, but without the solidity it seemed to have. Rest as what knows this.

This Fleeting World

Thus should you think of all this fleeting world:

Like a drop of dew, or like a star at dawn;

A bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning

In a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream…

See through the lens of change. Sounds arise out of silence and disappear back into it, and even the constant ones waver. Bring the body forward: look at the edge of a sensation that feels solid, and find the flicker there. You never take the same breath twice. Then thoughts — each with a beginning and an end, or one stream, flowing, never the same for long.

The mind gives solidity to what has none. Look this way for a while and notice what loosens. There is often relief in it: nothing here to hold.

Then open your eyes, and notice what lens you are looking through now.

— Vajrachedikā (Diamond) Sūtra, translated by Rob Burbea

Peering Through the Lens of Perception

When your experience of life deviates from life as it objectively is, the lens is revealed. Between the world as it is and the world as you meet it, there is a way of looking. It involves everything: from how you have slept to your beliefs and emotions. Like squeaky-clean glass, you look straight through without noticing it.

Sense what is here now. A warmth, a tension, a sound, a passing thought. With each, notice its tone: is this pleasant, or unpleasant? Stay for the small movement that follows — the mind leaning in toward what it likes, drawing back from what it doesn’t, quietly sorting the world into good and bad.

That leaning is the lens. When you catch it, relax. Let the pleasant be pleasant without chasing it, the unpleasant be unpleasant without turning away. If resistance comes, let the resistance be here too. Then take one step back toward the thing itself, before the mind decides what to make of it. Even here, the lens is shaping what appears.

Steadying the Lens

Find one steady thing. Your seat, the uprightness of the body, or an object across the room. Notice the solidity already present. Rest your attention there. Borrow its steadiness, and let it spread.

Thoughts will come, wanting to be solved, wanting to carry you off. You don’t have to feed them. Each time you notice, that noticing is a fork in the road — be glad you caught it, and choose to come back to what is steady. It doesn’t matter how many times.

This is a way of looking: not something you force, but a stance you take, and then wait. Give the body, the heart, the mind their time. Peace of mind is only a short way off, on the other side of habit. Get out of your own way and the system settles on its own. The steadiness was always its birthright.

A Box of Darkness

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

— Mary Oliver

We learn early to feel the good emotions and put the rest away, so that we are easy to be around. Fear, anger, sadness — set aside, the lid held down.

Here we lift the lid. From a ground of stillness — the weight of the body, the breath, somewhere in you that feels stable — we turn towards a feeling we would rather not feel. Not somewhere safe, exactly. Somewhere brave enough to feel it.

Evoke a scene. Recall a memory. Let the feeling come, and let it be here — not pushed away, not acted out, but received as a signal, something deep in you speaking for a reason not yet clear.

Then look closely. Where does it live in the body — warmth, pressure, weight? Notice it is already changing. Search for the anger, the sadness, the fear itself, and find only sensation, shifting. Search for the one who feels it, and find no one there.

Only space remains, and energy moving through it.

The box, opened, was always a gift.

Meditation Workshop: Lenses of Insight

Meditation Workshop: Lenses of Insight

~ A full-day Dharma Deep Dive ~

Event details

9:00 – 5:00 pm Sydney time
Sunday 6 September 2026
Online via Zoom

Description

You’ve been practising meditation and cultivating some calm and stability. You can sense that practice is doing something real. After sitting, you feel better. Somewhere along the way you heard that insight is where the deeper, longer-term shifts happen — the seeing-through that changes how you experience yourself and the world. But insight has stayed opaque. It’s hidden in dense books, unfamiliar terms, and pointing that never quite lands as something you can do yourself.

This workshop is a way into insight meditation as a practice you can understand and work with directly. The ground is a simple reframe, drawn from the teaching of Rob Burbea: meditation as a way of looking. How you attend shapes what appears. When you learn to look through particular lenses, experiences that felt solid and fixed begin to soften and loosen.

We’ll work with a map of how experience gets built — a spectrum running from tight and contracted to open and spacious. The Buddha’s four noble truths give the why: where there’s clinging, more is fabricated; as clinging releases, experience loosens and frees. From there you’ll practise two ways of looking, seeing through the lenses of impermanence and unsatisfactoriness. Turned towards the sense of self, these same lenses start to loosen how solid “you” feel — the first openings of not-self. The way you’ll know it’s working is bodily: a felt sense of relief, of release, as things become less solid. These are the foundational practices that open doorways towards emptiness — the deeper freedom the traditions point to.

The aim is that you leave able to practise this yourself: a map, a handful of tools, and enough of a taste in your own experience to keep going. Through curiosity and experimentation you’ll test these ways of looking and gain confidence from directly recognising how insight is practised and the difference it makes.

About this format

This workshop is taught through embodied experience: guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, grounding movement and breathwork, and group exercises.

You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice for first-hand, direct experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to group activities and to listen generously as part of the community.

The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.

Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, full silence is not a requirement. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.

This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a stable internet connection.

This workshop is suitable for practitioners with some experience of meditation. This work can open up some challenging territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable.