“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Feel the breath. Not just as sensation, but as something arising out of everything else. Lungs. Air. The trees.
This breath leans on all the breaths before it. Thousands upon thousands.
The feeling of sitting. A sound from outside. The mood you’re in. Each one held in a web of causes and conditions. The specifics don’t matter. Feel the web.
Then watch for the next thought. Where did it come from? You didn’t decide to think it. Leave it as it is. It belongs too.
Open out. Spacious, at ease. Look past the separate things.
What if this moment is made in relationship with everything?
When you open your eyes, notice how things appear.
The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
— Sengcan, Hsin Hsin Ming
Sound and silence. Calm and agitation. Pain, and what is not pain.
Each one known only against the other.
For a while, try having no preferences. No likes, no dislikes. Just being.
Feel what’s here, murky and hard to name. Ask, can I be with this?
Notice the mind wanting stillness, pushing restlessness away. Soften around the wanting.
Then relax the distinction itself. Put it down, like a heavy bag.
No self. No other. All just happening.
When you open the eyes, look for where the meditation ends.
A chariot cannot be said to be different from its parts; it is not identical with the parts, nor does it possess the parts.
– Chandrakirti, Madhyamakāvatāra 6.151
Look for the self the way you’d look for the chariot.
First, call it up. Recall something from today and notice where you held on – this is me, this is mine. Or picture yourself sitting across from you, as in a mirror. Or imagine someone pointing at you and shouting, thief! Something rises to defend. What is it protecting?
Notice how it feels. Continuous. Solid. Standing on its own.
If a self like that were real, you could find it. So search.
Start with sound. Is the bird song you? The hum of the fridge? Then the body: pressure, warmth, the texture of your clothes, the tightness in the shoulder. Then feeling. Call up a little joy, a little sadness. If you were a feeling, which one would you be? Then thought, and the narrator, and whoever the narrator is talking to.
Is there anywhere else to look?
Take each layer slowly, until you’re certain.
Where the self appeared to be, a spaciousness. Rest there.
The self comes back, like a rainbow. Vividly appearing.
Whatever is not yours, let go of it. Your letting go of it will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time.
– Alagaddūpama Sutta, MN 22
Not me. Not mine. Uncontrollable.
Take up a lens that sees all experience as not-self.
Start with sound. Sounds are just happening – you don’t get much say in them. Listen to the whole soundscape at once, and touch it with the phrase, lightly, like brushing it with a feather.
Then the breath. If you were the breath, which breath would you be? This one? The next one?
Then feeling, the texture of what is felt. Then thought. You didn’t decide for the next thought to be there. It comes from everywhere.
Then turn toward the one meditating. The thinker, the observer, the one sensing. Where is that? How do you actually experience it?
A sunset. Vividly appearing, and you can’t hold onto it. Unhook, and notice what this way of looking does.
There is still knowing, bright and clear. Open the eyes, and notice what things look like now.
No one lives his life. Disguised since childhood, haphazardly assembled from voices and fears and little pleasures, we come of age as masks. Our true face never speaks.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Before you sit, grab a pen and write down your qualities and roles. Kind, caring, prickly, pedantic. Teacher, parent, neighbour. The ones you have applied to yourself, and the ones that have been applied to you. Then place the list to the side.
Settle. Let the whole body hang off the skeleton, filled with bright awareness. Tune into the gaps, the little space between the sensations, between the thoughts, between the feelings.
What is your sense of self right now? Maybe a thought. Maybe a density, a contraction. Maybe an image of yourself meditating.
Glance at the list. Are you being those things right now? Are you being caring? Are you being a friend?
They vividly appear. Yet there’s no core you can find that really is that.
Unhook. Put it to the side, and notice what happens.
A wooden chair on a bonfire. Flames lap at the frame, a leg falls into the ash, then the whole frame collapses. At what point is it no longer a chair?
Settle first. Let the body be heavy and relaxed, filled with bright awareness. Then bring forward your usual sense of self. Where do you locate it? Behind the eyes, in the heart, somewhere just above the body?
Now, lightly, as an experiment, let your right leg vanish into open space and be replaced by a whole new one. Then the left. The arms. The heart. An eye of a different colour. Half the brain, then all of it. Are you still you?
Look at the screen. Faces, a room, someone talking. Now find one small patch of it and see only colour. Points of light. The mind has to reach in to make those points into a person. Tune into that reaching, and the screen starts to thin. Paper thin.
Settle first. Let the body be heavy and relaxed, filled with bright awareness, until the whole body is held at once. Then notice how things appear now. Whatever you arrived carrying may have a little more room around it. Nothing was removed. It is being built differently.
Try seeing the body as empty. Not as an idea – as a way of perceiving. Notice what happens when the word itself arrives.
Whenever there is belief that things are real, desire and hatred are generated. Without that belief no defilements can occur. And when this is completely understood, all views and afflictions dissolve.
– Nāgārjuna, Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (translated by Rob Burbea)
Something in you may lean towards this. Something else may pull back. Fear, excitement, a voice saying this is too big to begin. Let each of them be here. How do you see yourself, standing in relation to this?
Then take the view, lightly, as an experiment. Everything you are experiencing lacks inherent existence. Vividly appearing, yet insubstantial. Points of sensation, glued by the mind into a self and a world.
In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized.
— Bāhiya Sutta (Udāna 1.10), translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Nothing added, nothing pushed away. When a sound arrives, note it lightly: hear. Not the car or the voice, just the act of hearing, acknowledged and let go as the next sound comes. With eyes open or closed, see. Light, darkness, colour, shape. Then the body — the contact where you are held up, the hands, the breath. Feel.
Then turn inward and find the same three. A felt sense in the chest, an emotion hard to name: feel in. Rest attention where thoughts seem to happen and wait, as if in the cinema of the mind. A picture of dinner arrives. A voice says you have to cook something. See in, hear in. If you get caught up, replay the last moment. Was it an image, a sound, or a feeling that drew you in?
Is there anything you know that did not come through the senses?
Just seeing, hearing, and feeling, with no you in it. Then open your eyes, and keep looking this way.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The Elephant Path is an ancient meditation teaching, believed to be a transmission from the Buddha-to-be Maitreya and written out by Asanga in around 500 CE. It describes the Nine Stages of Calm Abiding — a map of how experience shifts as the mind deepens in meditation. In this meditation, we traverse all the stages, using the appropriate antidotes and techniques at each stage to progress to the next. Through this we move from scattered monkey mind all the way to effortlessly stable attention. By practising The Elephant Path, you learn how to navigate the mind and how to cultivate different states of mind. This makes the mind a nice place to be — not only from landing in calm and clarity, but also from the confidence of knowing how to move the mind appropriately to whatever is present at any given moment.
The practice of calm abiding culminates in effortlessly stable attention — you sit and focus, returning again and again, until it becomes automatic. There’s also a way to begin with effortlessness. Start by opening to effortless spacious awareness. Release the body and mind. Drop all effort, relax to the max, give up. Rest as the awareness that is already here and knowing. From that place of spacious ease, gently intend to care about the body. Through just the slightest intention, the body appears brightly and vividly in the foreground. Attention is stable without tension nor doing. Let go of everything and rest into the body.
The path of calm abiding leads to effortlessly stable attention with equanimity and tranquility. A key to this part of practice is first building up to complete staying and then, when the time is right, easing up in effort. This easing up is a releasing, softening, and relaxing in such a way that the practice starts to flow by itself. Because of all the work done to establish stable attention and bright metacognitive awareness, the mind can, with only the slightest intention, rest into the body. This occurs at stage seven of the elephant path. You will ease up gradually, bit-by-bit, noticing if distractions again interrupt your continuity. When this works, it feels like the less you do the more focused you become, that there is no difference between meditation and non-meditation, and that there is a profound background stillness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meditation presents the opportunity to cultivate both calm and clarity at the same time. This leads to a quality of mind that is, compared to ordinary states of mind, more alert while also being more relaxed. This is a state of deep resource. It allows for nervous system regulation and being connected and engaged. From this collectedness of mind, craving and aversion arises much less intensely. In this practice you will use the sensations of the breath at the belly as a way to ground and settle, allowing experience to simplify. Then you can bring in the practice of focusing on the inhale to bring more energy, drawing upwards; while using the exhale to relax and settle, drawing energy downwards.
This practice weaves together two threads: relaxing and calming the body by gently bringing attention to the whole body space; and knowing the body from the body. Awareness is effortlessly already aware, without you doing anything or needing to make awareness happen. So too does the body know itself — the body space is filled with bright, clear awareness. In order to get a sense of this, you allow the body and mind to settle through calming and collecting, then tune in to how it feels to inhabit the body, from the body. Allow awareness to drop down into the body space and behold itself.
Sit upright, with care and respect. Sit with dignity. When you sit in meditation practice, you dignify yourself, the community, and the practice. Recognising that each passing moment is constantly changing, you open yourself to the uniqueness of each experience. This body, this breath. The body calms and eases into comfort and stability. As you sit, poised and balanced, you begin to notice this palpable sense of presence, a quality of knowing awareness that is immovable, imperturbable, and fully awake to each passing moment.
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.
