Tag: relaxation

Finding a Path Forward

I’m sitting on the beige, scratchy carpet in the spare room of my unit in Maylands, a quaint-yet-growing suburb of Boorloo (Perth). I’m trying to meditate and have a growing sense of failure. I gaze at the light slowly crawling across the carpet. Restless and bored, I get up and do something else. Maybe meditation just isn’t for me.

Much earlier, I’m sitting on another carpet. This time I’m young, maybe nine years old, and Dad has offered to teach me to meditate. I’m thrilled, it’s all so mysterious to me. What happens when Dad goes off and sits quietly in the evenings? It could be anything! We sit on the floor in the front room of the house with the lights dim. Dad guides me to notice the sensations of my breath. I picture it like I’m watching an animation: breath coming into my body like flowing coloured lines moving through my nose, filling my lungs, then releasing on the exhale to rejoin the atmosphere. I enjoy the feeling of being calm, but I get sleepy straight away. I also feel like I’m somehow doing it wrong —  I’m picturing something but it feels like I’m making it up, using my highly active imagination instead of doing it “properly.” Is this what meditation is meant to be? In the ensuing years I only meditate when in bed as something to do while waiting for my mind to drift off. I don’t recall us sitting together again.

I’m in a chair gazing over a busy Sydney street on a cloudy weekday afternoon. The recent move has been challenging and I’m in the middle of a spell of depression and anxiety. I can’t seem to break out of feeling this way through my usual methods and I’m starting to feel desperate. I come across a book: “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” While it sounds like it’s just what I need, I’m short of spoons and can’t summon the energy to get further than the title. Instead I read a short article online, remember yoga teachers talking about mindfulness, and try to do a practice. I bring my mind to the present moment sensations. I watch myself from a more objective viewpoint. I see myself drinking tea, walking up the stairs, feeling sad, obsessing about a stressful event. I watch a thought arise and pass and suddenly feel a freedom and relief I haven’t felt in ages: I don’t need to be so caught up. But this is only fleeting, fading away mere moments later. After I stop practising I’m right back to rumination. I know that if I could continue this mindfulness it would help but have no idea how to make it stick. It feels like I opened a doorway to a vast beautiful view that closed again in the blink of an eye. I have no idea what the key is to get the door open again, or to keep it open.

In each of these scenes, I felt like I had started school without books, anything to write with, or language to communicate with others. Without a framework and map, I got lost at every turn.

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Once I got my head above water from the period of depression, anxiety, and burnout, I had a moment of insight. I realised that I needed to find some way of working with the mind. It was suddenly clear that my mind was turning an objectively good life situation into something miserable. I felt like I was stuck playing a cursed game that I had invented; I was trapped in a prison of my own creation. Something in how I was relating to experiences wasn’t working. I knew I needed something that would help me learn from these experiences. 

A friend happened to give me a copy of the book The Mind Illuminated and I began practising consistently. I moved up and down the stages of The Elephant Path. The guidance I received in that book, combined with a few chats with more experienced practitioners, brought the practice to life. As I sat, I felt more calm and clear. I learned how my mind could so easily shift into criticism and place blame on myself, or feel responsible for things I couldn’t control, such as a moment of distraction. I saw, moment-by-moment, how my mind constructed this prison.

One morning a few months later I’m sitting on a cushion, this time on parquet flooring. I observe the sensations of the body and the breath. I watch thoughts about my unfinished thesis chapter, what to cook for dinner, an idea for an artwork. There’s a gentle sense of calm and comfort. The bell goes off after 45 minutes and I open my eyes to a soft light angled in through the apartment window. I take a moment to appreciate the warmth of the rays in the cool air. I realise that I’m just…fine. It’s another day and my mind isn’t a bad place to be.

Over the months that followed, I knew that I’d never experience the same difficulty with anxiety and depression. Each day, each week, I noticed the patterns of the mind and saw how intention and attention shaped my world.

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Looking back, it became clear that I was lucky to find a foundational practice that helped make meditation not only function, but also to feel good. The Buddha said that practice should be “good at the beginning, good in the middle, good at the end.” That on its own is a vast beautiful view and a doorway worth opening.

I’m delighted to go back to my roots and to bring this practice to life through a full-day of exploration on the 8th of March. Come join me : )

With mettā,
Kynan

Calm Abiding with Whole Body Breathing

This practice uses the breath in the whole body as a technique to lead to completely staying with the meditation object. In the Stages of Samatha, the transition from Stage 5 to Stage 6 is accomplished through bringing more curiosity (intensifying) until there is an increase in sensory clarity. This then allows for *complete staying* with the meditation object, where there is exclusive attention that no longer scatters or alternates to distractions. Here we use the whole body as the meditation object and then notice the subtle level of sensation, then opening to noticing the breath through the whole body. This leads to a quality of engagement and interest where the body is seen as rich and complex, often becoming a cloud of sensation or waves of energy rather than something solid and fixed. Practising at this level cultivates more calm and clarity than is commonly though possible — the mind becomes both more at ease and brighter than in typical conscious experience.

At Home in the Whole Body (Meditation and Talk)

Guided meditation 30 minutes, talk 4 minutes.

Through meditation practice, we can make the body a comfortable place to be, relating to the body in such a way that the body feels like home, no matter where we are. Even when there is pain, discomfort, or tiredness, the body can be a place to rest and settle. This practice explores using whole body awareness as the meditation object. This whole body awareness includes all of the sensations of the body, as well as tuning into the overall texture or felt sense of the body space that can be rich, complex, murky, and have a more-than-words quality. Use whole body awareness as your practice of calm abiding, or use this as a support to insight, open awareness, or imaginal practice. By opening to the whole body and resting here, you can gradually cultivate a sense of settling, ease, and okness — deeply shifting the state of the body towards rest and nervous system regulation, while also shifting the relationship with the body such that whatever arises can be held in awareness with equanimity.

What do you yearn for?

In this practice you will be invited to consider deep questions about your practice, what you love about the path, what it is you yearn for, and what the next step you can take is. This can be a welcome refresh of intentions or provide an antidote for when practice feels stuck or lacking inspiration. Importantly, these answers don’t need to be final and also don’t come from a place of thinking, but instead are felt as arising from deeper in the being. In this practice you are guided to do this through a gradual relaxing and focusing, coming into the body and tuning into the felt-sense of the whole body space. The self-guidance compass is the sense of trust and confidence that the practice is unfolding in the way it needs to, being cared for appropriately and leading you in the direction you would like to go.

Balancing Effort

Effort is a key aspect of meditation practice. Too much effort and the practice becomes tight and frustrating; too little effort and practice becomes slack and directionless. Progress, especially in calm abiding (śamatha) practice, is greatly aided by finding the right balance. In the Elephant Path, this is done through phases of intensifying, where more curiosity is brought in and the meditation object is engaged with more and more, then phases where the practice becomes about easing up until a balance is reached. This practice explores alternating between strong effort and ease, gradually settling into an eased up effort that is both calm and clear. The possibility of continued practice is effortless effort — where the mind stays with the meditation object just through the slightest intention and everything arises and ceases brightly and clearly, without any doing or paying attention whatsoever.

Roomy Awareness

This is an equanimity practice accessed via resting as spacious awareness. While awareness is sometimes felt as spacious, it is other times felt as roomy, meaning that it has enough room to hold whatever arises. This roominess is about allowing whatever is present to be there, held within this field, rather than getting contracted or stuck with a particular sensation, thought, emotion, or sense of self. You can also take a universal view, tuning into the vast expanse of the universe that is all-encompassing, and noticing that the universe itself doesn’t reject anything — everything is accepted and welcomed in the universe. Eventually this acceptance allows everything to be like rain drops falling into the ocean, everything is held and melts into awareness.

The Many Facets of Rest

Rest for the benefit of all beings.

Rest, while under-appreciated in our culture, is an essential part of being human. When we rest, we recover resources and capacity that allows us bring goodness forward. Well-rested, we show up with presence, patience, and kindness. This practice explores this intention and how we can practice towards rest, gradually doing less and less, resting more and more into our deepest nature. Beginning with setting a Presence Anchor and finding a sense of grounding, you will then use the breath as a tool to allow the mind to gradually calm and settle. The breath then becomes a tool to rest more deeply into the body, continuously releasing into this embodied presence. Finally, you rest as awareness — without doing anything, without meditating at all, you can rest in complete effortlessness. Rest as this awareness which is totally eased up yet brightly knowing.

Thinking as Flow of Sensation

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.

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.

Sounds as Waves in an Ocean of Awareness

Take the view that all sounds are like waves emerging out of an ocean of awareness. Each sound is known the moment it arises, by this awareness — the sensation and the knowing are inseparable. By tuning in to this quality of sound, you can take the view that all sounds are washing over you, known as expressions of this spacious awareness. Then you will turn towards internal experience and see that thoughts, emotions, and the sense of self also all arise within spacious awareness. Seeing this allows all internal experiences to be there, held within this bright ocean of awareness. This leads to a sense of being deeply connected with everything that arises, fully allowing all of these expressions to be there, while not having to be the self that it is happening to. Instead, you can simply be the spacious ocean of awareness.