The breath is a source of energy and of relaxation. It can be used to bring alertness and brightness, as well as to find calm and ease. The breath has been used in many meditative and contemplative traditions as a way to regulate the nervous system, settle the mind, and to shift perception — sometimes even in ways that are psychedelic. In this practice you will begin with finding comfort. You will then follow the breath carefully and attentively, allowing the body to relax and the mind to settle. By checking in with the quality of attention, you can notice the energy level of the mind, and find balance through inclining to more alertness or more relaxation. You get to take time out of being you and instead shift into just being: this body, this breath.
Tag: meditation
Pointing Out Awareness (Guided Meditation)
You experience many sensations and contents of awareness: sounds, images, body sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts. You can observe these and be with them. But these sensations are not you. You can have an emotion, but you aren’t an emotion. An emotion can’t fully define you. Your sense of experiencing goes way beyond this. Thoughts might reference a sense of self, but there is awareness that knows the thoughts and knows the spaces between thoughts. When the mind settles, you can notice the awareness that knows these contents. You are this awareness that is like a wide open sky. Just as the sky is more than the clouds, awareness is more than its contents. This awareness is continuous and spacious. It is a bright, clear, lucid knowing. Rest as this awareness that is completely whole and unbroken.
Practice: 15 minutes samadhi, 15 minutes pointing out instructions on awareness that is aware of itself.
Burnout and Meditation Part 1 – Systems and Self-Compassion
~10 minute read / 1900 words
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A quick warning and disclaimer: I talk about mental health difficulties and systemic issues here. This writing is without gory details but please consider your state before proceeding. This text is from my perspective and your experience will differ, please take what is useful and leave the rest.
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This is a series on meditation and burnout. I’m thinking through the causes of burnout, why it is such a challenging experience, what to do in the moment, meditation practices that create important shifts, and developing an understanding that will lead to burnout being done with, for good. This first part sets the view that burnout is sustained by external and internal systems and that self-compassion is the key to beginning practising with this.
While the September retreat on burnout has a waiting list, registrations for the 23-26 January Retreat are open.
What is Burnout?
Let’s begin with a definition. Burnout arises when demands exceed your capacity. It is a state of depletion that results from an extended period of stress and demand without appropriate support. Burnout is associated with chronic stress, working in caring professions, caring responsibilities, big life events, activist work, or perhaps just witnessing the turmoil of the world with little recourse.
Burnout is a state of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and sense of hopelessness. The phenomenological experience differs person-to-person: it can be felt physically as a heaviness, pain, or tiredness that is not relieved by sleep; emotionally as a sense of misery, flatness, malaise, or depression; or felt existentially as a sense of hopelessness, futility, or worthlessness. Burnout generally comes with a decrease in skills and capabilities: moving and thinking in slow motion, problems seem harder, increased self-criticism, finding the right words becomes a challenge, your memory falters, task-related skills deteriorate.
It brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s refrain: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” It’s the drive to continue to perform, care, and give effort after the resources have been used up.
Interconnectedness and Non-Separation (Guided Meditation)
So much of being a human is dominated by a sense of separation. There’s an underlying sense of being an individual entity that is somehow outside of the environment. Yet when looked at closely, your being is intimately interwoven with all of existence. You are made of the same minerals as the Earth, a home to bacteria and micro-organisms, your body is sustained by the air and sunlight. Each person you know has affected your existence, and you have affected them, in ways that can be pointed to directly. By resting into a sense of non-separation, you can find a prior sense of relatedness; a sense of the field of relation that comes before separation.
Can I be with this? (Guided Meditation)
Can I be with this? (Guided Meditation)
Duration: 30:07
Letting be is a core principle of Buddhist meditation (and perhaps a key tenet of all spiritual practices). To let be means to be with what is experienced, exactly as it is, with no need to change it. In this meditation, you will be guided to bring a curious, welcoming awareness to whatever is arising, gradually including sounds, sights, body sensations, thoughts, and emotions. The key here is welcoming any resistance. To aid this you can visualise resistance by seeing it as a Part of your mind and letting it take a form, or imagining placing it beside you. You can also use the trick of taking whatever is causing difficulty as unchanging — the one permanent thing in the universe — as a way to release the urge to change. Finally you will explore the felt sense of your whole body in this moment as the unfolding experience that is more than words and somehow in excess of what is present. Ask yourself: can I be with this, exactly as it is, with no need to change it?
Presence and Buddha Nature (talk)
Video recording of a Dharma Talk from Day of Practice (14:10)
Audio only:
Register for the Day of Practice — next on Sunday 3 August.
This is an excerpt from a talk at the Day of Practice. I offer some thoughts on Presence, Buddha Nature, and Awakening. For me, I got into meditation to experience benefits such as relaxing, focusing, and improving my mental health. While these did come, the biggest shifts occurred when the practice opened to something more profound. Here I offer a way of thinking about what we are doing in meditation and where the path leads — towards recognising the interconnectedness and relatedness of all things, and to understanding ourselves as an integral part of the whole.
I’m currently available to meet one-on-one with new students.
Just Being (Guided Meditation)
Meditation practice can be finding methods to get out of your own way. The sense of self and operating as an individual self, while really useful in daily life, is a limiting factor on your sense of existence. By dropping out of your habitual patterns, more opens up. This practice focuses on relaxing and settling through tuning in to the present moment and then following the sensations of the breath. While doing this, you allow all other sensations to come and go in the background of spacious awareness. Then finally you will drop the breath or let it fade into the background and simply be — allowing all the body sensations, sounds, thoughts, and feelings to come and go, without getting caught up. The universe continues on, vividly appearing, without you having to do anything at all.
Inviting Relaxation By Doing Less
In this practice you will be gently guided to relax through connecting with the body, feeling into each body part and inviting relaxation. This relaxation is a kind of doing less — there was already some tension or tightness and you are simply intending to release this. You can also relax *around* any tension you find. This relaxing is a mode of allowing the sensations and feelings to be exactly as they are, reducing any clinging or aversion. Finally you will check in with how you are relating to the experience and if there is any resistance, embracing and allowing this. When resistance is fully allowed, it too will shift, soften, or change in some helpful way.
Cosy Disinterest
YouTube | alternate | audio only (32:56)
Fully give yourself permission to relax. Allow all of what arises to pass by like clouds in the sky. This guided meditation provides instructions on skilfully ignoring all content that arises by gently bringing attention to a sensation in the present. By keeping close to the present moment, experience simplifies and settles, allowing a sense of well-being to grow. This is a great practice to come back to in times of turbulence or busyness in order to drop into relaxation.
Community, Sangha, Support
Hi friends!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of community for practice.
I recently returned from spending some time in the United States practising on retreat, teaching, and spending time with the communities over there. It was an amazing trip. I spent time meditating in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona (so many cacti!). I got to meet people in person that I’d talked with for countless hours over Zoom in the last two years. I also had my brain scanned while meditating in service of building a neurofeedback device to help meditators reach deep states of samādhi (more on this later).
But the biggest thing for me was getting to be around the community. There’s something powerful about people coming together, whether that is to practise on retreat or in a local class or just hanging out in a park and eating burritos. There was also something special about seeing communities that have been built over years and have developed a pragmatic approach to supporting each participant in their own development.
In my own practice I’ve found that community has been incredibly important. I’ve made some wonderful friends through practice who help me tremendously with their kindness and encouragement. In Buddhist traditions, we might refer to this as the saṅgha. This is one of the three jewels that we can take refuge in, the others being the Buddha (others who have gone further on the path), and the Dharma (the teachings, or the practices). My understanding of taking refuge in the saṅgha is to go to the community for support, to find inspiration, and to be dedicated to supporting each other and cultivating the practice. Being able to rely on the community to assist us, to shelter us in times of need. The saṅgha gives us the courage to move forward.
Then the question to ponder is:
Do you feel supported in your practice? How could community help your practice?
Spending time with meditators overseas affirmed my goals of building a strong community of like-minded practitioners and doing what I can to support building a community.
It has been my goal to not just offer teachings but to build a sense of a connected community. This means that I will do my best to create spaces that are accessible, offer different pricing options and scholarships, and provide support for wherever you are in your practice. I want to dedicate myself to connecting people with the type of community that will be conducive to reaching their individual goals, whatever they are.
I’d also like to create networks that allow you to be able to connect with each other outside of the classes and support one another as peers.
There’s a lot of work to be done here but it seems more important than ever that we find ways to collectively work towards cultivating our minds, consciously working with the ways that we suffer, and finding new ways of relating to experience.
I hope this encourages you to find community in whatever form feels appropriate and beneficial. If there’s some particular format of class or retreat you are looking for, or some kind of community interaction you are seeking then please reply and let me know. Otherwise I hope to see you at a class or retreat soon 😀