Transcription
Okay. What I want to talk about this morning is samādhi -- samādhi and its relevance to our practice of emptiness here. Many of you will have heard this word before, samādhi. It usually gets translated as 'concentration,' and that's an okay translation. I'm not particularly fond of it as a translation; I actually prefer to keep it in the original Sanskrit or Pali, samādhi. 'Concentration' tends to give a little bit of a different -- not quite a complete sense of the flavour of what's involved.
Oftentimes, unfortunately, what people in the West have taken it to mean -- and sometimes in the East too -- is a kind of microscopicness of attention. In other words, the mind has this capacity as a human being to get very, very focused and narrow, and almost put experience under a microscope. So a human mind can do that, and it's an amazing gift of the human mind. I can, for instance, pay attention to my sensations in my hand right now and get finer and finer, really pinpointing very exact sensations there, a moment-to-moment awareness. But never you will find the Buddha using this kind of equivalence of the word samādhi to a kind of microscopicness of attention. It's not really how he uses it. Rather, it's difficult to define, but I would say something like it's a collectedness or a unification, a gathering of the mind and the body and the heart. The mind, the body, and the heart are unified together in the sense of the body with a sense of well-being. The consciousness is gathered in a sense of well-being that feels actually quite spacious. It's not a tight sense. It's not overly microscopic.
[2:09] Also in the West, as the Dharma's evolved -- remember, the Dharma is very young in the West -- sometimes people have put forward or gotten hold of the idea that samādhi is somewhat irrelevant for us as practitioners, that the real stuff happens through insight and through that kind of questioning. But I just can't agree with that. It's very, very relevant, and I'm going to go into today why. The other kind of idea that people have got hold of is that it's a little bit dangerous, and that we might get attached to samādhi because it can be pleasant and we like being calm and have the state of well-being. There is a small danger of that. Yeah, there's a small danger that one can get attached to samādhi. But I would say it's completely overblown, the fear of that. I just ask you, how many people do you know who are addicted to samādhi? Are you stumbling over these people all the time? Because I'm not. [laughter] Where are all these samādhi junkies, you know? It's actually pretty rare. It's pretty rare. Most people, the balance is way more on the side of insight, not enough samādhi.
And the Buddha, you know, huge, huge emphasis on samādhi in his teachings, as much as anything else he put emphasis on. You could fill a whole talk just with quotes of the Buddha easily on that. But just one -- he says:
Just as the river Ganges slants, slopes, and inclines towards the east, so too [a practitioner] who develops and cultivates [samādhi] slants, slopes, and inclines towards nibbāna [towards realization, towards freedom].[1]
So I mentioned this briefly in the talk last night. This retreat, everyone's going to have a kind of parallel practice of either working with the breath or working with loving-kindness as a sort of parallel, complementary practice. And so, through the retreat, through four weeks, certainly the insight into specifically emptiness will be developing, but also the samādhi and/or the mettā will be developing. So thinking of yourself as really having a parallel track -- and they will blend, but thinking of yourself as being interested in developing, over four weeks, two things.
[4:49] Anyone teaching insight or involved in insight meditation is aware of this. You spend a little time kind of developing, gathering with the breath, and then you begin paying attention to your experience. I wonder, on this retreat, if at least 50 per cent of your meditative time should be devoted to samādhi and/or mettā. And that might seem like a lot, but at least 50 per cent. So if, as a practitioner, I, say, spent 10 per cent of my time developing samādhi and 90 per cent of my time doing insight meditation, I would say the insight gathered from that, developed from that, would be less than the reverse, if I spend 90 per cent of the time doing samādhi and 10 per cent of the time doing insight. It's interesting -- this is quite opposite from what most people would expect. A lot of samādhi with a little insight practice, then the insight goes a long way. Sometimes a little samādhi and a lot of insight practice, the insight doesn't quite take root in the same way or go so deep.
When you come to interviews with John and me, we're very interested in hearing about both -- both your insight practice, the emptiness practice, and very much also the deepening of the samādhi and the mettā practice as well. Some people will be choosing -- I'll talk more about this, because there are different kinds of samādhi. If you're doing mettā practice, you can just do mettā practice and the emptiness practice. That's totally fine. It's a really, really good choice if you want to do that. Then you're developing the mettā. Mettā also develops samādhi, naturally, organically, and you're doing insight as well. Or you could do samādhi and the emptiness, and I would still, as I said last night, throw in a little bit of loving-kindness to sort of soften things up a little bit. I'll talk more about this.
[6:56] So samādhi, whether it's coming from mettā or whether it's coming from breath practice, whatever it's coming from, very, very helpful. There's actually -- I'll come back to this later on -- but usually when we talk about samādhi, we talk about it coming from remaining focused on one object, like the breath or like the mettā. But there's also a kind of open samādhi -- and I'll come back to this -- in other words, not just staying with one object, but actually being open to the totality of experience.
Usually, a human being in relationship to experience gets entangled: "I like this. I don't like that. I want that." It gets confused and agitated in the relationship with experience. When that confusion and agitation is calmed a little bit, when we let go, when we're not entangled with experience, the mind naturally comes into samādhi. Samādhi is more about non-entanglement than about concentration. So, it could be that the samādhi comes from focusing on one object, fine, mettā, breath. It could be that samādhi comes from a more open way. But I'll come back to this and talk more about it.
Many, many aspects of samādhi that are helpful. It brings with it, a mind that has some degree of samādhi has a real sense of malleability. This is actually the Buddha's words. To be malleable means to be shapeable: I can make it this way or that way. The mind becomes very usable, the heart becomes very usable in meditation. Yesterday, I said we're going to put out different approaches, many different approaches. And a malleable mind from samādhi is actually quite agile. It's able to look at things this way and that way, and then switch and try this approach, etc. It becomes very agile.
The second factor of samādhi, the gift of samādhi, is refinement of mind. The consciousness becomes refined. What do I mean by that? I mean it becomes subtle and able to notice subtle things. And certainly we want that as a meditator. We are interested in the subtle aspects of experience and the subtle things that shape our experience. This is what emptiness is about. What is building and shaping my sense of the world as it seems to be? Some of that is extremely subtle. The mind has to be that subtle and refined to be able to work with it.
[9:33] Of course, we want steadiness. Any kind of investigation needs a kind of steadiness of mind. If the mind is too scattered and kind of slipping off what we're trying to look at, it's very difficult to investigate.
Samādhi also kind of cushions the mind in a very lovely way, cushions the heart. In other words, whether it's coming from mettā or whether it's coming from breath practice or some other way of approaching it, this quality of well-being that's part of the samādhi actually has a warmth and a love and well-being in it, of course. And that helps. As I was saying yesterday, sometimes practising with emptiness is a little bit scary. Things are shaken, the foundations of things are shaken and called into question, and we need a kind of sense of well-being and warmth to cushion that. Sometimes a person finds themselves in unfamiliar states through deep insight practice. And there's nothing dangerous in them, but the cushioning of the well-being of samādhi actually really enables one to approach these without fearing them.
Occasionally, too, a person with emptiness, occasionally we will a little bit be out of balance in our understanding of emptiness, and we say it veers to the extreme of nihilism: "Ah, it's all empty. It doesn't matter. Everything's meaningless." And there's a scary kind of nihilism, that feeling of nihilism. The emptiness practice is a little bit off balance at that time. One of the functions of samādhi actually is automatically to bring it more into balance so it doesn't veer into nihilism.
Really, with the samādhi, what we're developing is a climate of heart and a climate of mind that's the best possible climate for investigation. And thinking of it that way is a really good way of thinking about it. As much as we're investigating, we're taking care of the climate in which the heart and mind investigates.
It's very easy, and I see this over and over again in relationship to breath practice, for a person to think, "Right, I'm supposed to focus on my breath. That's what we hear. I'm trying to focus on my breath." Very quickly the sense of the practice shrinks. It gets very tight, and I'm just focusing. That's what I'm supposed to do. And then I measure myself in relation to that. When I feel like I'm able to stay with the breath or whatever, I'm doing okay. And when I'm not, I measure myself in a negative way. Really, really common.
[12:22] There's much more to this aspect of samādhi than just focusing. Really important. And I was talking, I think with the work retreat group the other day about this. We'll go into it again. We want to see, right from the beginning in practice, a much bigger picture of what's going on. Very easy for the picture to shrink: "I'm just learning to focus." You have to stretch it again and again. Right at the beginning of every sitting, establish a sense of a bigger picture. So, here I am. Let's say I'm working with the breath. I stay with the breath. Two seconds later I'm off on who knows what, with the fairies somewhere. In that moment that I'm off, when I realize I'm off, the mind is awake to where it is. I know where the mind is. That's one meaning of the word 'mindfulness': I know where the mind is in that moment.
In that moment of realizing that I'm off, I'm actually gathering and developing the factor of mindfulness. It's not a failure. It's something very useful, very powerful, very important. See that the mind's off, and I bring it back, and I see it goes off again, and I bring it back, and I see it goes off again, and I bring it back, and I bring it back. That movement of bringing it back actually gives the mind muscle, power. It's a bit like -- imagine that I had a big muscle here! It's giving strength to the mind. An untrained mind doesn't have strength. Okay, so that's also a factor of samādhi. So don't think, "All I'm doing is bringing it back. All I'm doing is bringing it back." That's really a part of the practice. It's not something to be dismissed.
In the moment that I'm off, it's a very interesting moment. In the moment that I find that I'm off, it's a very interesting moment. I can see, maybe I have a pattern, very common, a pattern of self-judgment. Maybe that comes in right there: "Ugh, you're rubbish at this, you'll never get this together, you're a failure, you never were any good" -- however it goes. In that moment that I see that I'm off the breath, I can just not feed that pattern of judgment. Do you see what's happening here? Instead of the narrow view of 'just focusing,' in the moments that I'm off, instead of them being seen as as failures, they're actually moments of opportunity. They're a moment of mindfulness. They're a moment of potentially developing that muscle of mind by returning. They're a moment of the opportunity to let go of self-judgment. Okay? It's not just the case that when I'm with the breath it's a success, and when I'm not it's a failure. It's a much wider picture going on. Very important.
[15:25] I might have a habit of becoming impatient: "Oh, come on, come on. It's taking so long!" Same thing -- self-judgmentalism and impatience are habits of mind. If I get caught in that train, I'm feeding them. If I can see that moment as an opportunity to let go of impatience and judgmentalism, it's actually widened to an opportunity. I just don't feed the impatience. I just return with kindness, with firmness but kindness, not feeding the impatience, not feeding the judgmentalism. We've gone from this very narrow, tight picture of "I'm just trying to focus; that's the point" to actually a lot of stuff is getting cultivated.
Samādhi is interesting, because you can actually be quite focused and not have a state of samādhi because there isn't that well-being. Why isn't there the well-being? Because there are strands of judgmentalism and impatience around. If I had a choice between letting go of judgmentalism and impatience, and focusing, I know which I would choose. Letting go of the judgmentalism and focusing is going to be much more helpful in the long run. But they're both going on, so actually we don't have to choose. They're both going on. They're both part of what I'm talking about -- this climate of samādhi. So really to think about a much bigger picture.
Now, most people have gotten used to a very tight, small picture, that it's actually just about focusing. Check this out in your practice: "How am I relating to my practice? Has it become too tight?" It will keep shrinking, probably, because that's a habit like so many other factors of the mind, and just to keep expanding it, keep re-reminding yourself of this bigger picture. If it's just about focusing, it will be too dry. The practice will be too dry, too joyless, too tight, only a matter of time before you feel like giving up, before it feels like it hits a brick wall, or it just kind of crumbles out of dryness. It's really crucial, this bigger sense.
[17:38] Okay, I mentioned briefly samādhi can be from one object, like the breath or the mettā. It can also be from an open sense. People have different relationships with staying with one object. Oftentimes it's not a very popular thing with people, and they like to open up more. That's fine. It's absolutely fine to open up the consciousness. But check this out. Please, for now, only do it if there's a really felt sense of samādhi coming from it. You feel that when you open up, there's a marked sense of something shifting. The body sense feels -- there's a sense of well-being in the body, the mind calms down, etc. So don't just open up and 'be with what is right now' just because you're feeling like the samādhi is a bit uncomfortable, or you'd rather not. For right now -- we'll modify this as the retreat goes on, quite soon -- but if you're working with an open practice, make sure that there's a real sense of samādhi happening.
Samādhi, whichever way around you talk about it, is a skill. It's a skill. And that's actually a word that the Buddha uses: a 'skill.' And you know, in our lives as human beings, we've learnt loads of skills over the years, loads and loads of skills. To tie one's shoelaces is a skill. To learn to walk is a skill. To learn to read, to write -- these are all skills. If later in life you learnt a musical instrument or art or something else, or a foreign language, these are all skills. They're all skills.
What's our relationship with learning skills? This is really important. When we're very young, we learn a lot of skills very quickly. And oftentimes as a person grows up, the relationship with learning skills becomes much more difficult, much more loaded, oftentimes because the self-sense has got in and started measuring itself in terms of how well it learns it. "Don't take up a musical instrument, because I might feel like a failure. Don't do this. Don't ..." And there's always this shying away from learning skills because I might not feel good in doing it. Really good to inquire: what's my relationship to learning skills and new skills? What's my relationship also to goals? You know, if you ever had the joy of watching a little baby learning to walk, there's definitely a goal orientation there. I mean, innocent and young as it is, formed in that younger mind, definitely wants to learn to walk, you know. What's missing at that age is the self-judgment. What's missing is the self-judgment to make it a potentially painful process.
[20:40] Learning skills needs a climate of kindness and a climate also of happiness. In fact, when the Buddha was asked, "So, samādhi leads to happiness. But what is it that leads to samādhi?" He actually said, "Happiness leads to samādhi."[2] Interesting that it actually rests on a state of well-being, of appreciation, of nurturing what I was talking about last night -- qualities like gratitude and appreciation, love of nature, kindness. All this brings a kind of basis of well-being and happiness, sort of just a low level, unremarkable level of happiness, on which the samādhi rests.
It also, as I very briefly alluded to last night, it takes playfulness and a willingness to experiment to learn a skill. Really, really important qualities for a meditator. Just, am I willing to try this and try that, and make a mistake, and do it differently, and see, "What would happen if I did that"? That's how we learn. That's really how we learn.
Now, as all of you know, as we sit down and we try and focus, and we try and develop our samādhi, what we often run into is the opposite. It's the opposite. And by virtue of wanting samādhi, we will notice the opposites more, actually notice them more. We notice hindrances. And I'm not going to go into them specifically this morning, but you know (1) sense desire, and (2) aversion, and (3) sloth and torpor, this kind of sleepiness and fogginess and dullness, (4) restlessness, the fourth one, and (5) doubt. They're going to come up. They're absolutely going to come up. There's no question about it. No matter how long you've been here, no matter how long you've been meditating, they will come up. They're part of the practice. And it's important to have the tools of working with them, so please bring this to interviews and question and answer periods. But even more importantly, to actually expect them to come up and to expect the waves, really to expect the waves.
[22:59] Two things are really important with the hindrances. (1) One is not to take them personally, okay? They are factors of human consciousness until that human consciousness is fully liberated, an arahant, fully enlightened. That means they're going to be coming up for quite a while. [laughs] And it's okay. Can we see them as human rather than personal? It doesn't mean that I'm rubbish at meditating. It doesn't mean I'm getting nowhere. It just means I'm human, and I'm not enlightened yet. Okay? Really, really important to see if one can just cut this personal-taking, cut the taking it personally, just not engaging it. See it as human. (2) Second thing is that many of the hindrances, it's very easy to get hooked into believing what they're saying. So, believing, if it's doubt, getting lost in the story, or aversion, someone here or someone elsewhere, and believing what the mind in the hindrance, what the hindrance mind is saying, getting into the story. Is it possible, again, to kind of unhook from that, not to believe the verbal content, the mental, cognitive content of the hindrance? Just see it as unpleasant energy.
Samādhi is really a lifetime practice, and it takes patience as such. It's really something we're going to be developing for the rest of our lives, probably everyone in here. And to view it as such, to have that patience. (It's a lot of info. Are you still doing okay? All right.)
Hindrances get more subtle. In other words, like everything else, there's a spectrum of subtlety. So, at one end, we're fast asleep and snoring, and our neighbour has to quietly waken our self up. That's extreme sloth and torpor. And it happens, and please do wake up your neighbour gently if it does happen. Something called 'sinking' is a more subtle manifestation of that same hindrance. It's not really that we're nodding. It's not even that we feel particularly sleepy. But the edge -- we lose the edge in practice. We lose the sense of brightness and immediacy of presence. And there's just a slight quality of the mind sinking a little bit, just a little bit.
This is the kind of thing, as practice develops, that one wants to become sensitive to when that's happening. And it will happen. It's like air currents -- they're just drifting a little bit this way, a little bit that way. Or sea currents. That's the nature of the environment that we're in, in terms of heart and mind, as meditators. So it's always drifting one way or another. And to be sensitive to that. Is it just a shade of dullness, just a shade of losing the edge? And can I reinvigorate and reconnect? And what do I need to do to do that?
Restlessness is another one. Again, it has a spectrum. Not that we might feel particularly restless, or "I need to get out of here," or the mind just won't settle down -- it's more like we're with the object, but there's just a little bit of a tendency to slip off the object and go and follow a train of thought or a train of imagery. That's sometimes called 'drifting.' The mind drifts off, off the object. And again, we want to be sensitive to all this, and just be aware of when it's happening. To reinvigorate, reconnect when there's sinking. When there's drifting, it's an interesting thing. Because the mind is going off the object, we tend to think, "Oh, I need to grasp the object more tightly; really, you know, firm up my holding of the breath or the mettā or whatever it is." But actually, sometimes it's the opposite. We actually need to relax, relax the mind in relationship to the object. It's funny. It's a bit like holding a wet bar of soap. If you squeeze too tightly, it will shoot out of your hand. The mind is like that. If you hold it too tightly, it will shoot off into other thought.
[27:38] Probably the most common reason why people kind of give up their practice of samādhi, or kind of just let it go a little bit, is that a feeling of tightness can creep into the practice. I'm trying to stay with one thing or I'm trying to settle the mind down, and it can feel tight, and people want to just let go and kind of be with experience in a choiceless awareness, etc. Incredibly common. And that will come in, okay? We will, at times, have a sense of tightness. There's no question about it. And part of the art of samādhi is learning to work with that tightness, learning to work with it.
We want to, as much as we're sensitive to sinking and drifting, we're also sensitive to tightness. So you want, part of the mind is aware, when is it feeling tight? When does it feel tight? We'll notice that in the body. Okay, so body awareness is actually really fundamental to samādhi deepening, whole-body awareness. That whole-body awareness reveals when the mind is getting tight, because a sense of contraction or tightness will come into the body, somewhere in some way, even if it's subtle. And so we learn to be sensitive to this sense of tightness and to experiment with just relaxing the body and relaxing the tightness. And this is part of the skill, part of the art.
Later, in a couple of days, really, when we get into the emptiness practices per se, you can actually learn to use the emptiness practices and the insight practices as ways of letting go of tightness, and we'll talk more about that. But it's almost as if there's some tightness, and you can loosen them, loosen that tightness through the insight practice, not necessarily just through the samādhi practice.
[29:42] Okay, so breath and mettā are the choices for this (or open, but as I said, only if you have that real sense of samādhi there). And there are many options here in terms of ways of working with the breath and ways of working with the mettā. Some people like to work with the breath at one point in the body, usually either here at the nostrils or down here in the belly, and that's fine if it works for you. I really want you to find what works for you, whether it's mettā or whatever way of doing the mettā, or way of working with the breath. If you're using one point, like one small point, sometimes you can probe that point. It's like the mind goes into it, yeah, microscopically. And that's actually really helpful. And other times it's as if the mind receives, receives the breath at that point. One's a more active, and one's a more receptive. As a meditator, you want to be playing with these. It's quite subtle, but you want to be playing with these two approaches. At different times, one will be helpful. At different times, the other will be helpful. We're willing to play and willing to experiment.
Another way of working with the breath, and I know some of you know from working with me, is a whole-body awareness. The whole body is actually breathing, whole body expanding, relaxing, feeling energized, letting go, and nourishing that well-being in the whole body. And that's completely fine. But finding a way of working with the breath, finding a way of mettā that works for you, that feels good. And please come and talk to us about that. Even if you're just doing the breath, as I said, at least drop in one practice a day of mettā. That will be good.
The Buddha has this phrase: "sensitive to the whole body."[3] We want, whether we're using the breath or the insight meditation or the mettā practice, sensitive to the whole body. Really letting the practice be anchored in, or keeping an awareness of the whole body sense, whether you're working with the breath at one point or the whole body, or the mettā. The mettā practice, there are actually a few things that are being balanced. I'm throwing out a lot, because people are doing different things. I know it's a lot of info. In mettā practice, three things are balanced: (1) the phrases, if you're using phrases, (2) the image or sense of the person that you're giving mettā to, and (3) the body sense, the sense of the whole body. And that whole body sensitivity is actually crucial. It's really crucial. Sometimes people lose that in the visual sense or over-focus on the phrases, but to keep that there.
The body in samādhi and mettā practice is absolutely fundamental. It's really about the body, funnily enough. We tend to think of meditation as a mental thing. It's really about the body. It's funny -- it's a very physical thing, meditation. And it's about the whole body. The whole body sense is actually very important in meditation. It's really, though, about what we might call the 'subtle body,' funnily enough, and this is very important in terms of the mettā and in terms of the breath.
We tend to think of the breath -- here's the breath coming in and out. It's oxygen moving in and out. It's air molecules moving in and out of the lungs. As the mind calms a little bit and some degree of samādhi is established or developed, we begin to be sensitive to what we might call the 'subtle body,' which is, I would just say, the texture, the experience of the body as a whole. Now, it might be that there are some kind of currents that go with the breathing, with that -- in other words, there's a very gentle 'in and out' of the whole body with that. It might be that it feels like the body isn't really breathing. It's just a sort of field of energy. It's a field of vibration and texture. And that's what we call, we could call, the 'subtle body.' It's important in breath practice as samādhi deepens. It's also important in mettā practice. That's the thing that you want to stay in contact with. And in a way, for mettā, in mettā, for example, you're radiating from that subtle body space. [34:23] That ends up being, funnily enough, the fundamental piece of samādhi practice. It's about the subtle body.
Now, sometimes, as human beings, we feel blocked. In fact, quite a lot of the time as human beings, we feel different parts of our body are blocked -- neck, or in the throat is blocked, or somewhere in the middle of the head, in the sinuses, or in the heart area, often, or the belly. Something is blocked. We can say it's subtle body energy, blockages in the subtle body energy. Again, as you, as we learn more the insight practices, there are actually ways of using the emptiness and the insight practices to unblock those subtle energy blockages. When they're unblocked, automatically the mind, the heart goes into samādhi. When the subtle body energies are not blocked, there's a natural state of samādhi. You could say that's what samādhi is: it's an unblocking of the subtle body energy. And the mind is just there with that. The heart is just there with that. And vice versa. Like so many things, vice versa: as the mind deepens in samādhi, it unblocks the subtle energies. It's the same, same thing. Later, as I said, as I keep saying, we'll talk about using the emptiness practices as kind of lenses for looking at blocks and difficulties, and actually, because they're ways of letting go, they're ways of unbinding blockages, and then samādhi can come out of that. So using the emptiness practice particularly to work with what's difficult.
Okay. Just to say a bit more about this, the relationship of samādhi and insight practice. Mostly, it's put out, or we put out as teachers, mostly we put out, "First you do the samādhi, and then when you're calm enough, you do the insight." And there's a lot of truth, and obviously that's very helpful. But I would rather that you think about this, as meditators, as balancing the two. There's not like, "First you do this, and then you do that." Think about this retreat, and maybe your life from now on as a meditator, as balancing these two approaches, insight and samādhi, and just thinking about these are two things that need to be addressed in my life as a meditator, and on this retreat. Sometimes samādhi first, calm a bit, and then do the insight -- a lot of what I'm saying now applies to the whole retreat, so I hope you can remember it -- but it might also be that you do the insight first, and then out of that, then go to the samādhi. It's not a 'one leads to the other' here. They lead to each other, and they reinforce each other.
[37:25] Sometimes, funnily enough, a person is reflecting on emptiness and analysing emptiness and contemplating emptiness, and feels like there's some insight there, but then goes to do the samādhi, and practises samādhi for a while, and just rests in the samādhi for a while. And a funny thing happens. Not always, but a funny thing happens: some of the insight from before, it's almost like the samādhi -- and it could be insight from like a week ago, or two weeks ago, or even more -- it's almost like the samādhi has a way of, a retroactive effect of kind of making the insight accessible, or viable, or real, or usable.
In a way, we can contemplate something in our insight practice -- I'm sure you've seen this with impermanence and stuff; you look at impermanence in insight meditation, da-da-da-da-da, or you see a personal pattern, and somehow, it feels like it's clear, but then it doesn't really stick as an insight that makes much difference in the life. This is very common. Samādhi has that function of making it stick, and the funny thing is that it can even do it after the insight sometimes. It has this retroactive effect -- possible.
Basically, you want to think about balance between samādhi and insight, really balancing it over the retreat. Too much samādhi (which is rare, but occasionally it does happen), and the mind doesn't want to investigate -- "I just like being really simple and hanging out in the niceness" -- and doesn't want to contemplate, doesn't want to analyse. Too little samādhi, and the mind isn't able to really go deep in its investigation, in its analysis, its contemplation. It's too excited, too agitated, too scattered. Or there's not this cushion of well-being and warmth and love that I was talking about.
Samādhi really comes from letting go. When there's letting go, samādhi arises. So whether that letting go happens through insight practice or emptiness practice, or this or that, letting go brings samādhi. We can use, and we will be using, as I said, the insight practice to lead to samādhi. I'm going to say something that might not make that much sense, or it will make sense for some of you right now. A person lets go using the emptiness practice or the insight practice, and a space begins opening up through letting go. And say you're just contemplating impermanence or contemplating non-identification or something, and that allows consciousness to open up to a space. And that space has a texture of peace or joy or well-being or something. Then a person's actually able, with practice, to filter that out of the space, and if they want to, begin to concentrate on that sense of well-being. And you're going from a more open state to a more gathered state. That might sound abstract right now, but it's something that will probably come about for you.
People have different histories with samādhi practice. Some of you have done quite a bit of it, and some of you have done very little, and it's fine. It's really fine. Sometimes we're trying for samādhi, and the mind won't go. It won't settle down because something's blocked, usually blocked in the internal energies, or scattered in some way, distracted in some way, or obsessed in some way. And it actually needs some insight to let go or unblock something, and then the samādhi can come. Usually, though, we would say we need a little samādhi before the insight.
How are you doing?
Yogi: Can you talk about insight? Can you just explain? I'm a little bit confused ...
Rob: Yeah, okay. We will. We're going to start. These first two days, we're just focusing on samādhi or mettā practice. Okay? Monday, I think it's Monday morning, I'll introduce, I'll give a few choices for different kinds of insight practice. What I mean by that is working with specific contemplations. It's not just being mindful. Specifically contemplating impermanence, really tuning into impermanence, specifically contemplating a kind of relaxing of the relationship with things, specifically contemplating non-identifying with things. I'll explain this more, but that's what I mean by insight practice, not just being mindful. And yeah, sorry, thank you for that.
Have you had enough, or ...?
Yogi 2: What exactly, when you say we're going to do samādhi practice or mettā, what exactly do you mean by samādhi practice?
Rob: Samādhi would involve both the mettā and the breath. Very practically now, for these next two days, we're just doing that. We're not doing any insight yet. I'll talk about emptiness tonight. But in the practice today and tomorrow, to either work with the breath, or work with the mettā, or a combination. Okay? And samādhi means just learning to calm and develop that kind of gathering with that. Okay? That's all. Finding ways to work with that that feel helpful.
If you, as I said, if you want to work in a more open way, really making sure that it's not just coming out of a default or a kind of sense of aversion to focusing, but there's really this sense of when I open, really sense something go into a space of samādhi when that happens, to some degree. Just practically, does that make sense for everyone?
There are some interview slots today. If anyone wants to check in, by all means do so. And if you're kind of not sure how to work, take advantage of us, come, come and check it out, tweak your practice, refine it, etc. Find a way that works. Any other questions about what I said? Okay. I was going to say a little more about samādhi, but I'll leave it to tomorrow, and maybe tomorrow we'll have a question and answer period, as well, in the morning. So, today, tomorrow, really thinking about just gathering the mind, gathering, gathering this sense of unification as much as possible, either through the breath or the mettā or both, or maybe some of you with a more open practice. Clear? Okay.
