Thinking is a gift. Thinking enables us to live in this world and to act compassionately. We don’t want to stop thinking. However, we do want to make sure that thinking doesn’t obscure, that it doesn’t get in the way of us practising and contacting deeper levels of experience. One way to do this is to try and calm the mind. Another is to see through the thoughts, so that even the act of thinking doesn’t get in the way. Here we tune in to the sensory aspect of thinking, examining how thoughts can be parsed into mental image, mental sound, and feeling. You’ll use imagination to kickstart this process and get familiar with how you experience thought. Then you can observe thought like watching a mental TV — observing what is happening without getting attached or treating it as fixed and solid. Finally you can rest as the knowing awareness in which thinking arises, tuning into the field of pre-thought knowing as the ground of being.
Tag: noticing
The Insubstantial Self (Guided Meditation)
The ordinary, lower case “s”, relative self is vividly appearing, yet empty. This emptiness is a lack of inherent, substantial, permanent existence. Seeing through the self means to notice that it isn’t fixed, solid, or permanent and doesn’t have to be where you are coming from. This practice investigates the ways in which you feel the self — body sensation, sense of location, thoughts, inner coach/critic, dialogue, or self image. Then you will look closely and see that there isn’t any substantiality to this, that the mind is gluing together sensations and treating them as solid. You’ll find that the self is ultimately unfindable. Once you reach a sense of conviction here there will be a lightness and relief.
You will also explore how the sensations, thoughts, and emotions don’t encapsulate your being and instead notice how when you put all these aside you are left with either a Presence or Absence, which points to a knowing awareness — an awareness that knows itself by itself, without having to be coming from the small self.
Note: these practices can be somewhat destabilising or lead to a sense of disconnection. If you are feeling under-resourced or unbalanced, please be cautious. If you find the practice leads to disconnection then re-ground yourself by noticing present moment sensations and doing normal activities. Reach out or speak with a qualified teacher if you experience continued difficulty.
There is a short talk at the beginning. Guided meditation begins at 3:15.
Attuning to Emotions (Guided Meditation)
Emotions are essential to being human, yet we often aren’t taught emotional literacy or provided models for feeling into and skilfully respond to our emotions. This practice works through different levels of experience — sensations, mind states, and emotions — in order to understand internal experience. Beginning with sensations, you will notice where there is body sensation in terms of warmth, coolness, pressure, texture, tingling, or vibration. Then you will look at mind states: boredom, curiosity, focus, clarity, dullness, sleepiness, etc. You’ll then tune into emotions and see where hearing the words of certain emotions resonates with you — feeling into anger, sadness, happiness, calm, strength, or fear, and the many variations and flavours of these feeling states.
Liberating Positive Emotions
Note: This practice invites you to bring up positive emotions, which can at times also have the effect of bringing up anything that is not that emotion. Be gentle and cautious.
Positive emotions, when freed, become boundless and unconditional. In meditation practice, we can intentionally bring to mind love, compassion, joy, peacefulness, trust, gratitude, kindness, friendliness, humour etc. by intentionally recalling a situation when we felt that way. Through feeling into the felt experience of that emotion, we can notice that the sensations felt in the body, such as warmth, openness, uplifting, groundedness, or connection, don’t have a solid, inherent existence but rather are insubstantial and changing. We can also sense that the self that feels the emotion is insubstantial. The emotion is vividly expressing, without needing to have a solid core, or a separately existing self that is feeling it. This frees up the emotion to be fully expressed and fully felt. The emotions then transform and become boundless and unconditional — compassion for the suffering of all beings, including yourself equally; boundless love for all others; or a deep gratitude for being able to be part of this complex dance of life.
Liberating Emotions (Guided Meditation)
Note: this practice involves intentionally working with challenging emotions. If you are currently not feeling grounded and resourced, you may want to choose a different meditation. If at any point during this practice you feel overwhelmed or disconnected from experience, open your eyes, come out of the meditation, and do something that you find grounding such as gentle movement, walking, eating, or resting.
When related to in skilful ways, all emotions become part of the practice. Here you are asked to bring to mind a challenging emotion of medium intensity (around 5 out of 10), such as frustration, tiredness, sadness, anger, or shame. You can recall a situation or memory when this emotion was activated, using the visualisation in order to bring the experience forward more clearly. You are then invited to look closely at the sensations and thoughts associated with the emotion, seeing them as insubstantial. After searching, you’ll find that there is no substantial, permanent core of the emotion that is inherently existing. You can also search for the self that feels the emotion, also coming to the conclusion that this is ultimately unfindable. In this forge of emptiness, the emotion may then shift and transform, allowing anger to shift into strength, sadness into tenderness, frustration into clarity, tiredness into deep rest, and shame into integrity.
Transforming Emotions (Guided Meditation)
NOTE: In this practice you will intentionally invite an emotion to come forward. It’s best to bring up something that isn’t the most intense or strongest. Choose something that feels of medium intensity and manageable for your current state. The practice begins with 10 minutes of grounding and settling. If at any point you feel either overwhelmed, or disconnected and spaced out, return back to a grounding practice, or stop the meditation.
Emotions are a dimension of experience that occupies a space between physical and mental. These are felt experiences that are tangibly real, yet ephemeral and elusive. It is emotional experiences that make being a human both worth rich and wondrous, as well as difficult and oppressive. Yet we often don’t fully open to the emotional dimension. When we feel into emotions fully and allow them to be there, they will shift on their own. Emotions cease being static or stuck and instead become liquid, flowing, changing experiences that unfold the richness of being alive. Through exploring the emptiness of the emotional experience, it will often transform into an essential quality: sadness becomes love and compassion; anger reveals strength; frustration turns into clarity.
Let be (Guided Meditation)
The one spiritual truth is to “let be”. However, most people need some technique, practice, and system to figure out how to do this. In this practice, you will bring an intention of affectionate curiosity to the whole body space. Working with the body is particularly helpful here, as the body is so tied up in our sense of self and our habitual patterns, plus it also helps us get out of our heads. Occasionally asking “can I be with this?”, you’ll notice when there is resistance or trying to change the experience, allowing you to soften and relax into the unfolding present moment experience. Finally you will notice that who you are at a deeper level is not these sensations, but the awareness that is knowing, clear, lucid, and still.
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.
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.