Transcription
What I want to go into is samādhi -- samādhi and its place on this retreat, and its place in the practice of emptiness that we're doing. Some of you will be familiar with that word, samādhi; others, maybe less so. It's a word the Buddha used a lot, and put a lot of emphasis on, and talked about it a lot. Usually it gets translated as 'concentration,' which is okay as a translation, but I'm not a big fan of that translation. It can be a little misleading. When we say 'concentration,' in English anyway, the mind tends to think of a very sort of microscopically contracted focus. Samādhi may involve that, but actually, as it gets deeper, it doesn't. That's not really what it's about. So rather, I would prefer saying samādhi is something like the mind and the body feeling unified -- unified and settled and steady in a state of well-being. It involves the whole mind and the whole body, settled and steady, and it involves a sense of well-being.
Sometimes people hear a concept like samādhi, and they think, "Do I have it? Have I ever had it? What does it look like? Will I know when I've had it?" -- as if it's a kind of on/off switch. A lot of these concepts -- same with mindfulness, same with compassion -- it's actually maybe more helpful to think of it as a sliding scale. So just like calmness, for instance: "Have I had calmness?", someone was saying the other day, outside of here, in an interview. We tend to think in terms of on/off, rather than there are degrees of calmness, and we move along this scale. And we're interested, in the case of calmness and in the case of samādhi, [in] encouraging gently a movement of a bit more calmness, a bit more samādhi. So rather than setting up too much of a duality, and "Have I got it? Am I good enough to get it?" (which oftentimes is what the mind brings to this kind of thing), just thinking of it in that less rigidly black-and-white way.
On this retreat, obviously, as I said last night, we're offering a lot in terms of insight and emptiness practices -- a lot of possibilities. What we would like, though, is actually that you feel yourself to have two parallel practices, so to speak -- two parallel avenues in the meditation. One is the emptiness and the insight practices, and the other is samādhi. Now, the samādhi (and I'm going to talk about this) may come through the breath practice. It may come through mettā. It may come through something else. There are lots and lots of possibilities. But if we say that you think roughly in half and half (roughly 50 per cent of your time sitting and walking), think of that time, and divide it in two: half for emptiness practice, half for samādhi practice. In the interviews, certainly, we're very interested in hearing about both, and developing both, finding ways to develop both. They're parallel practices, and they're very complementary, which is part of what I want to go into today. So there's a reason for that. There's a reason for suggesting that. Oftentimes, we might hear about samādhi, or read something, and it says that it's kind of irrelevant, that insight is really where everything [happens]. That's where the liberation happens, and samādhi is just a bit of a sidetrack.
It's understandable that that can be a view. It doesn't seem to bear out. There are always exceptions, but it is very relevant. It's very, very helpful in terms of the way that our insight deepens to bring some freedom. People often, and again understandably, fear that if they spend too much with samādhi or get too into it, they'll grow an attachment there, and they'll get stuck there, because it can get quite nice. And that, again, will be a cul-de-sac, a sort of dead-end street and a distraction from liberating insight. Again, not really that true. Occasionally it's true, but for the most part it's not. And if it does happen that way, it's always something that one can move beyond and see through. So the Buddha was a big fan of samādhi. If you just flick through the Majjhima Nikāya, The Middle Length Discourses, every few pages he's talking about it.[1] He says:
Just as the river Ganges slants, slopes, and inclines towards the east, so too [a practitioner] that develops and cultivates [samādhi] slants, slopes, and inclines towards nibbāna.[2]
There's a natural movement in samādhi that actually moves to very deep insight and to freedom. They are not, as we sometimes hear, moving in different directions. I really don't think that's the case.
So why is it so helpful? There are actually many qualities, you could say, within the mind state or the quality of samādhi. There are many qualities that are helpful. A mind that is settled and steady in a sense of unification and well-being, a mind of samādhi, actually is a very malleable mind. Oftentimes, the mind does not do what we want it to do. It does, actually, anything but what we want it to do. But as the mind finds its way into this more soft and unified state of well-being, the citta, the mind, the heart actually becomes malleable. It becomes agile. It becomes able to pick up and use different approaches. As I said last night, we're offering lots of approaches meditatively. The more the unification, the well-being, the samādhi, the more able the mind is to try this, to try that, to play around with experience, and its relationship to experience, and its ways of looking at experience, which is basically what we're going to be doing here. It's able to do that, and it's able to switch between modes of playing with experience, and playing with the ways we're looking, and investigation, etc.
As the mind opens or settles into, finds its way into samādhi, to whatever degree, the consciousness is moving into a deeper state of refinement. Again, sometimes people get hung up on this: "It's about focus and concentration!" And yes, it is about focus. It's about being able to keep the mind steady on something to investigate it. I can't investigate something unless I can keep it in my focus for a while. So focus is certainly a part of samādhi. But all these others qualities are actually equally important.
One of them is refinement. It's not so obvious, but as the mind deepens in samādhi, it's actually becoming more refined. The qualities, the texture of consciousness actually becomes more subtle and more refined. And in that, because the mind, the consciousness is more subtle, we're actually able to see more subtlety. Actually, the deeper we go into emptiness, the more subtlety we need to be able to see. So we talk about the way, in a very, very subtle way (we'll get into this in the retreat), the mind is actually fabricating experience in different ways. Some of it's extremely subtle. To be able to see that, we need this deepening subtlety that comes with the samādhi.
Steadiness, another factor (we already talked about it). Steadiness has a number of aspects. One is, as I said, the capacity to stay steady with one thing or one dimension of experience or element of experience that I'm investigating. I'm just able to stay steady, and look at that, and learn about that, and question it, and I keep it there. The steadiness of the samādhi also begins to permeate the being as an emotional steadiness. Not always linearly -- sometimes with samādhi there's quite a lot of rocking. But more and more, the being and the emotional life and the heart feels, in a very deep way, steady in relationship to life. Again, just in terms of the freedom that that brings, and the capacity to stay steady with our investigations -- huge.
Because of the well-being that comes with samādhi -- and again, we're talking about a spectrum here, so it's a little well-being, a lot of well-being, whatever; anything moving on that spectrum -- because of the well-being, there's also a kind of cushioning effect, you could say, that samādhi has. As I was saying last night, sometimes with emptiness, and a person meditating on emptiness, or just hearing teachings on emptiness, there can be a little bit of fear at times, or a little bit of shakiness. One of the functions of the samādhi and well-being -- particularly of the samādhi -- is that it cushions. It makes it easy to look at what might be not easy to look at in another state of mind. That's actually massively important. I see, particularly when people do very deep, long retreats, etc., that the capacity to really be okay and feel really okay when the mind opens up to unfamiliar territory is really, really helped by the samādhi. Samādhi also has warmth in it. It has love in it. Again, if we just think in terms of microscopic focus of concentration, just thinking about that, it doesn't leave much space for a sense of the heart's warmth and love.
And actually, the full quality of samādhi -- when we go into it, it actually feels very soft. The texture of experience, the texture of body, the texture of heart is more and more (and again, it's continuous) permeated by a kind of warmth and love. As we said last night, that's also very, very important as the insight deepens. This well-being that comes with samādhi is extremely important. It's not there all the time. It comes and goes. But having enough access, enough dipping into some sense of well-being, helps us enormously. And I would say it's as important as the focusing aspect -- particularly, as I said, because, for many people, and I don't know -- well, no, it's not just our culture, but for many people, just the word 'emptiness' seems to suggest a kind of nihilism. Now, it's really not that, and we'll talk a lot about why it's not that, and how it's not that. But when -- if -- there's even a fear of that kind of nihilism around, then this well-being really, really helps. It really, really cushions it.
So all of that provides a kind of climate for the citta (citta, in Pali and Sanskrit, means 'heart' and 'mind' together), a climate of the heart and mind that's the best possible climate for investigation. All of those qualities together create an inner environment that is prime for being able to investigate deeply. So very often, when we talk about samādhi or concentration in a retreat, or first day of a week retreat, when we talk about being with the breath, it's very easy to take the sense: "Ah, I am supposed to focus on the breath," or on whatever it is, whatever else. And very easily, the sense of the practice shrinks. The sense of what we're doing shrinks, and it becomes just about focusing. And then very quickly with that, the measuring mind comes in: "How am I doing in terms of my focusing?" And if my focusing is going well, then I feel okay, and when it doesn't go well, which of course it won't at times, I feel bad. I feel like the whole thing is going badly. So prioritizing focusing, and then the measuring mind, and measuring ourselves, coming very quickly in, and the whole thing just sinks, and the emotional well-being and the emotional relationship with the practice just starts to sink.
So, very important, even for -- in fact, especially for beginner meditators, but also for everyone in here, to see a much bigger picture right from the beginning, to stretch our sense of what we're doing when we're developing samādhi. In other words, watch out for the mind that has just gone into: "I'm trying to focus. I should be. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm focusing," and then measuring that. What else is going on? There's always much more going on than that. I try to focus (if that's part of the samādhi, and it is) on the breath, on the mettā, on whatever, on the heart centre. The mind goes off -- natural, normal. That's what minds do. That moment of going off, when I realize it's off, is actually a moment of mindfulness. It's a moment of wakefulness. At that moment, I know where the mind is. So actually it's a moment of, you could say, triumph, of success. The mindfulness is part of the bigger picture of the samādhi, and it's important to see that.
When I then see that and I bring the mind back, and then it goes again, and I bring the mind back, and it goes again, and I bring the mind back, and it goes again, I bring the mind back, eventually ... [laughter] Imagine there is a big muscle here. That pulling back is actually part of the samādhi, and it gives muscle, literally, power to the mind. That power of the mind is part of samādhi. It's part of what we're developing. So just the fact of seeing the mind is off and bringing it back is actually -- again, it's a very positive thing. It's something we can rejoice in. If that seems like all we're doing for a while, great! Building that muscle. When the mind is off somewhere else, getting distracted -- past, future, worry, whatever it is, daydream -- that moment of realizing it, how quickly the judging mind comes in, judging oneself. And again, that moment then is an opportunity.
So what I'm saying here is, rather than seeing it as "It's only working when I'm focused on the breath, or on the mettā," or whatever, seeing the whole thing, and the times when I'm not on the breath, as actually all part of it, and all part of a bigger picture of what's being developed. Because that moment -- if I notice the judging mind come in, maybe I can let go of that a little bit. Maybe I can just not get so sucked into it. And then, what else is happening? Not only am I developing my focusing, my capacity, not only am I developing my mindfulness, not only am I developing this muscle, but I am also letting go, slowly, slowly, of the power of the judging mind. I need to see that as part of the bigger picture. Impatience -- again, I see that the mind is off. There's impatience there. Again, can I not get so hooked into impatience, and actually just see it as a chance to cultivate patience, slowly, slowly, and to let go of impatience? So I'm seeing a much bigger picture here.
This is crucial, because almost everyone -- at times, the way we see practice shrinks. It shrinks into a much smaller picture that's just about me and my focusing, and measuring that, and "How am I doing?" And very quickly, the whole practice will shrivel up, become dry, and actually become pretty miserable. If I see the bigger picture, and I reinforce that when I sit down, and I keep reminding myself of that, there's going to be a lot more sense of the whole thing being positive, creative, useful.
When we talk about samādhi -- I don't want to go too much into nuts and bolts, but I will a little bit this morning, and then there will be a chance for questions and stuff tomorrow, and of course the interviews. Most of the time, when people talk about samādhi, it's with one object. In other words, you take the breath, or you take the mettā or something, and you just try and really stay with that object, and go deeper and deeper with that thing. Some of you, though, may already feel there's another way of going about this. There's another way of arriving at a state of unification and well-being, deeper and deeper into that. And that's actually being much more open with the attention -- not focusing on one object, but actually opening the attention quite wide to the totality of experience, and in a way, just letting go (we'll talk much more about this as the retreat goes on), just letting go in relationship to phenomena as they arise, and keeping a very open awareness. And in that open awareness, one notices that the same sense of well-being, steadiness, unification begins to come in.
So as far as this retreat is concerned, I actually don't mind too much. But I will say, if you're going to do that 'open' way, make sure that you feel a sense of samādhi coming out of it. In other words, if you're open, and it actually doesn't feel like that sense of unification and well-being is taking root and deepening a little bit, then come back to a one-pointed practice. All of this, the deepening in samādhi, is just a skill. In a way, it's really not -- I mean, it is a big deal, and in a way, it's not that big of a deal. We have learnt a lot of skills in our life. Just think about learning to tie our shoelaces or, actually, even going to the toilet. This is a kind of skill. Or reading or writing. We don't acknowledge this. Or if you know a musical instrument or music or something, or learning to walk -- all of that is skill. It's developing a skill, and samādhi is just like that. It just takes patience and interest and working at it.
The thing is, what's our relationship with learning skills? And that's, again, so much about relationship and attitude that ends up being really, really crucial in terms of practice. Because if my relationship with learning skills becomes about self-judgment and frustration, again, it's very difficult to develop anything. What's my relationship with goals? So if I say, "Oh, it's a state of unification" -- even if I say it's a spectrum and not a definite arriving point, very easily the mind comes in with a sense of a goal, and very easily tightens around that. So what do I do with the whole notion of somewhere that I'm headed? I could throw out a whole notion of somewhere I'm headed, but maybe that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Somehow, I have to find a really okay and healthy and happy relationship, a mature relationship, with the idea of going somewhere in my practice, of developing something in my practice.
When the Buddha said, "What does samādhi depend on?", he said, "It depends on happiness" -- which is curious, because samādhi brings happiness, but he said it depends on happiness.[3] This touches on what I was talking about last night: appreciation, gratitude, nourishing those qualities. But also, it's very difficult to have a sense of trying to develop something if there isn't some degree of happiness, some degree of kindness. Those qualities are crucial, in the atmosphere with which we approach practice, for a sense of being okay with feeling like we're going somewhere, and we're trying to go somewhere. And what I talked about last night, again: playfulness. When we learn skills, it's playing, experimenting, and having a kind of light-heartedness with it. I try this, I try that: "Oh, that's interesting when I do that." And that quality of light-hearted playfulness goes a really, really long way. I would say it's indispensable. There's really that light, playful quality in practice, experimentative quality in practice.
Okay, now, most of you -- in fact, all of you -- will be familiar with what's called the 'hindrances.' So when we try and settle down in meditation, what we encounter is five hindrances: (1) sense desire or greed, (2) aversion in different forms, (3) sloth and torpor, dullness, sleepiness, (4) restlessness, and (5) doubt. These are visitors to us until we're actually fully awakened. So they're going to be around for a while. It's very important when we're developing practice, and particularly developing samādhi, that our relationship with these hindrances, again, is we're setting off on the right foot with this. We need to expect them. I need to expect in my practice the waves. I cannot expect four weeks of calm sea and steady ascent into the glorious, heavenly abodes -- maybe, but it's generally not the way that consciousness develops. Expect these waves. They're part of the deal.
Two things are really, really important in relationship to the hindrances, really crucial. I'm not going into each one at all specifically, but two really important factors.
(1) One is not to take them personally. In other words, they are factors of human consciousness that will arise, as I said, until we are completely awakened. So if a hindrance comes -- if there's aversion, if there's sleepiness, if there's restlessness -- and I start taking it to mean something about me and my practice: "I'm not good enough, I'm not developed enough, da-da-da-da-da-da, I'm not getting anywhere, etc." -- I'm taking it personally, and I have totally poured gasoline on the fire. I've shot myself in the foot. To really have the sense as we feel them: these are not things to take personally. These are just waves in the ocean of our consciousness as a human being. That's the first thing.
(2) The second thing is -- not always, but generally, when a hindrance comes along, it has a story that goes with it. If there's aversion, "It really is this person who's causing me a problem. It really is that there's something wrong with them, and we need to do something, and perhaps ask them to leave the retreat," or whatever it is. Or if it's sense desire, greed: "No, I really need something," and the mind goes off. It convinces itself of something about the external world, often. It's almost as if hindrances are like little seeds, and the consciousness is throwing up these seeds all the time -- all the time, actually; almost all the time. And these little seeds have hooks in them. These hooks are looking for something, some issue, some situation to sink that hook into, sink their teeth into, and then start rattling it and shaking it. And then, the next thing we know is we've got an issue on our hands, and it seems to be 'out there.' The consciousness is throwing up these seeds with hooks all the time. And what is important is what we do with that. It takes quite a lot of practice to actually see that that's what's going on most of the time -- not all of the time, most of the time -- and not the outer world so much. So to be patient with this, and patient with samādhi, because it's a lifetime practice. It's really a lifetime practice.
These hindrances, like everything else, have a spectrum of subtlety. They can be very, very gross, and I'm sure we all know what it is to be in a really gross hindrance of restlessness or dullness, or whatever, sleepiness. But they can also be actually quite subtle. Sometimes people talk about 'sinking' and 'drifting' as subtle manifestations, sinking as a subtle manifestation of dullness. It's not that there is the nodding; it's not that we're falling asleep. It's just that things are starting to get just a little bit, kind of -- they're losing their edge. They're a little bit kind of foggy. The consciousness actually feels like it's a little bit sinking, not in a way that feels bright and energized.
Or there's what we call 'drifting,' which is a subtle form of restlessness. It's not that the mind is wanting to jump out of the meditation room or whirling round with lots of thought. It's more that we're actually fairly concentrated, but the tendency is for quite a lot of thoughts and images to come up, and the mind to follow a lot of them, and just get pulled off them, and drift off in them -- this subtle manifestation of restlessness. So these are very common, especially as we start to deepen a little bit. It's interesting: sometimes, when the mind is sinking, we need to re-energize and perhaps become more intimate with what we're paying attention to -- the breath or the mettā or whatever. Find a way to re-energize the whole process.
Sometimes, what it actually needs is more space. The mind is getting a little too contracted, and we need to actually open the consciousness out and be a bit more spacious with awareness. And that tends to brighten things. Those two approaches, funnily enough, apply also to the opposite situation, when there's drifting. Sometimes it needs a reconnecting with what's going on, a bit more closeness with what's going on. Sometimes it needs a bit more spaciousness, a bit more looseness coming in. And it's almost as if, when we put too much pressure on the mind to pay attention, it actually has a tendency to slip off more. It's like squeezing something too tightly. It will slip off more into thoughts. So we can think, "I'm drifting off. I need to be a bit more tight with the object," and actually, I need to be a bit more loose -- interesting.
Most people trying to develop samādhi, the biggest obstacle that they will feel is tightness: a sense, as we're trying to do this, it all just starts to get too tight with the efforting or whatever. It's the biggest hurdle for most people. Again, it's going to probably come up at times, a sense of tightness. So part of the art of meditation is being aware of that, expecting it. And then, how am I relating to it? If (within my samādhi, however I'm going about it) I keep at least one portion of my awareness on the whole body, the sense of the whole body, then my sensitivity to the body will reflect when the mind is getting too tight in relationship to the practice. That tightness will be reflected in the body either grossly (the shoulders start hunching), or just subtly -- some kind of subtle contraction in the musculature or just the sense of the body. So really using the body to tell us when we're getting too tight, and just relaxing -- expecting that, and relaxing.
As the retreat goes on, we're offering many insight practices and emptiness practices, and we can also use those to loosen. Because they bring letting go, it loosens the whole thing. You can have a sense of using the insight practice to loosen in relationship to the samādhi. Let's say you choose the breath to be aware of. Attention is interesting: we can focus on something very one-pointedly, and that has its place. So I could be aware of the breath here at the nostrils. I could be aware down in the abdomen. And the mind has a capacity of kind of penetrating, of probing something -- very, very useful at times. I can sometimes feel like it might need more probing to get the energies back in alignment if I'm sinking a little bit or whatever.
It might be, though, that I need to go into more of a receptive mode. It's almost like the awareness receives the breath rather than probing it. It's receiving. It's like, metaphorically, leaning back, and the breath is coming. It's touching the awareness, and I'm receiving it. There are different ways we can play with the way that the attention is engaging with the object. So sometimes, we can have one point that we're paying attention to, one spatial point here or here. For many people -- actually firstly, what I want to say: everyone is different with this. Everyone is different. We need to find, as I said last night, what works for us. So it might be that working with a narrow focus is great. Many people (not everyone) actually are more helped with a wider sense. It's that actually including the whole body, right from the beginning, in their relationship with samādhi -- either just as a way of monitoring whether it's too tight or not, or actually relating from the beginning to the whole body and nourishing, finding a way of nurturing the well-being in the whole body, finding a way of breathing or doing the mettā that the whole body is involved right from the beginning, and the whole body is breathing, and feels like it's breathing. The breath comes in -- you can feel the whole body breathing there, and actually nourishing that well-being in the whole body with the breath or with the mettā. Again, we tend to think, mettā at the heart centre -- and it is, of course. But actually, mettā can be the whole body. Finding a way of breathing, finding a way of doing the mettā that the whole body is involved, and a way that the whole body feels good, feels like there's a sense of well-being. You're actually nurturing that well-being through the breath, or through the mettā.
Just a reminder: last night I said, probably good for everyone, almost everyone, to do at least one mettā practice a day. Just a small point about the mettā: if you are doing mettā -- and it would be a lovely balance to do mettā and emptiness, if you're not keen on breath as a focus practice. When you're doing mettā, when we're doing mettā, we want to, as I said, keep the body involved. The Buddha says: "Sensitive to the whole body."[4] That's actually quite a central piece in the mettā practice, and I would say, actually, in breath practice too. "Sensitive to the whole body." A lot is reflected in the body, and we use the body to deepen. With the mettā, it might sound a little complicated then, because (1) you might have the phrases of mettā: "May I be well. May you be well. May you be happy," whatever it is. You have the phrases. (2) You might have an image or sense of the other person. And (3) you have the body. And so it feels like you've got three things, which can sound like a lot. Actually, it's not a lot. Let it be centred and anchored in the body, and revolve around the body.
Okay, so I'm going to say a bit more about the body because it's so important. It's fundamental for a long, long, long, long time in the way that the samādhi deepens. And again, sometimes it's not obvious at first, so samādhi can often be a non-body experience, and one's trying to just pay attention here, and it's like the body isn't involved. So, body needs to be involved, and can be this whole body, like we've just talked about, in different ways -- either that you're using it to be sensitive to the tightness and letting go, tightness, letting go, relaxing, or that we're getting the whole body involved from the start and actually opening and nourishing that whole body sense.
As the samādhi deepens and the mind gathers itself in one-pointedness (and remember, by one-pointedness, I don't necessarily mean a small point; I mean in a steadiness), what begins to happen, to some degree or other, is the felt sense of the body, the perception of the body, begins to change. Now, some of you, I know, are aware of this, but it's actually quite important. The body starts to open up, starts to have a sense of well-being, starts to feel softer in some ways -- less defined, perhaps. All kinds of things are possible. But the body sense as samādhi deepens is actually quite important. We're actually encouraging that body sense. I deepen in samādhi. The body, the felt sense of the body, starts to be felt differently, perceived differently, sensed differently. Because of that, and because it's usually some softness and well-being, the mind actually settles down in that and with that more easily, and it's that that brings the deeper sense of unification and well-being.
But a funny thing happens, in that after a while with this, a practitioner starts to get familiar with how the body feels when the mind gets deeper. It gets familiar with that sense of well-being, or softness, or openness, or whatever it is, and actually, in time, gradually, begins to be able to recall it -- the bodily sense -- to actually remember that, recall that sense of well-being, and then go deeper with that, and that leads to the samādhi. But either way, this sense of how the body feels is actually quite integral to samādhi deepening.
There are many ways of conceiving of what happens as the samādhi deepens, and people like different approaches, etc. So what I've just said, it's like the body perception, the body sense changes, and that allows more well-being, and then we can go into that more. That's one way of conceiving it. Another way -- and sometimes people find this helpful, and sometimes they don't like it, but another way is that what's happening in samādhi or in mettā practice, we're actually working with what we might call the 'subtle body,' meaning the energetic sense of the body; not just bones and nails and the rest of it, but the energetic field of the body. And one way of looking at it is, what we're doing in samādhi is, you're working with that subtle body energy, that subtle field of subtle energy, and playing with it, and coaxing it gently into a state of more openness and alignment and well-being. The same is true with breath, same with mettā.
This subtle energy body -- some people don't like this, and it's fine if you don't go for it -- but in a way, we have that all the time as human beings. It's there. Sometimes we're aware of it, sometimes not. Sometimes, what we call the 'energy,' the way the body feels, the energy body, feels very harmonious. Everything feels open and aligned, and it feels good. Oftentimes, as human beings, quite often, it doesn't feel that way. Something feels blocked, something feels stuck or contracted in the body, in the energy field of the body. That's very normal. So, many times a day, we go in and out of this, in and out, in and out. What happens, one of the things that can happen when one begins using the emptiness and the insight practices is, because they're 'letting go' practices, they actually begin to unblock the contractions and the blocks in the subtle energy body. And because of that, the energy body becomes more open, more harmonious, more aligned. And when it's aligned, there is naturally a state of samādhi.
So, what we'll be getting into a lot on this retreat, or one thing that's possible, is using the emptiness approaches as lenses. I'll explain much more as we get in, but they're ways of viewing our experience. And they're even ways of viewing a block. So sitting in meditation, you feel all this tightness in the throat, for instance. The subtle energy body is blocked. Some of the practices we'll be introducing are a way of looking at that experience of the block, and it's a way that actually unbinds it. It dissolves it. It loosens our relationship to it, and so it opens -- all experience, but very much difficult experience. Can be very useful. So usually, when people hear about samādhi, they tend to think: "First you do your samādhi, first you do your concentration bit, and then you do your insight bit." And if you've come on insight meditation retreats, that's generally the way we talk: "First you get some samādhi, and then you do your insight." But actually, it's totally equally the case that, as I just said, insight brings samādhi. To the degree that I can see deeply into things, it will bring samādhi. So they feed each other. And as I said, for this retreat, what we want is this kind of parallel complementariness of the two practices, because they will be feeding and complementing each other. Samādhi feeds the insight. The insight feeds the samādhi.
We're looking for a balance there. Sometimes -- it's rare, but sometimes -- people just want to hang out in a state of samādhi, a state of well-being and gatheredness, and they don't want to contemplate and analyse and look in terms of insight. That is the story we hear about samādhi. It is actually quite rare, in my experience. It does happen -- it most definitely does happen, but it's more rare than the opposite, which is not taking enough care with the samādhi, and not balancing it enough with the insight. There's too little samādhi, and then what we bring to insight, or what comes out of the insight is a kind of agitation, a kind of excitement or scatteredness of the energies and the mental energies, and not enough well-being. So, on the whole, in terms of maybe our tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, that seems to be, for most people, there's an imbalance of too much insight and not enough samādhi. Occasionally, you meet the opposite.
We tend to think samādhi comes through concentration: "I'll stick with something, and this comes." But actually, when we really go into it and do a lot of samādhi practice, you actually realize samādhi comes from letting go. And again, that's not something that's obvious at first at all. To the degree that we let go, samādhi comes. Samādhi comes in letting go. When we are actually focused on an object, what's happening is we're letting go of a lot of other stuff, and so the mind and the body energies can align themselves. Because insight brings letting go, or should bring letting go, insight therefore leads to samādhi.
Sometimes (I'm saying this now; again, I hope it's the sort of thing that you can remember over the weeks; I'll say it again, I'm sure), one is practising with a certain insight practice, a certain emptiness practice. And actually, one feels the samādhi deepening, or one feels that in the field of experience, there is a sense of well-being, or there's a sense of stillness or something, and it's almost like you can rest in that. So at that point you're kind of moving fluidly from the insight practice to a samādhi practice. You just kind of rest in that bodily sense, in the well-being. Sometimes you can almost filter it out from what's happening, this sense of stillness or well-being or settledness. Actually filter those qualities out, and just rest there. I'm very aware that people in this room have different histories in relationship to samādhi. Some people have done, will go samādhi first, then insight, and other people the other way round. It's all fine.
Sometimes we try to find some samādhi, and it just won't happen. The energies are blocked, etc., and what it needs is a bit of insight. Or there's something that's preoccupying us. What it needs is a bit of insight, a bit of cutting through, using the emptiness practices. And when there's the insight, then we're able to let go, and then the samādhi is available. Other times, we're trying to contemplate something, and actually, we don't have enough samādhi, and we need to bring that in. So, a sense of balancing it creatively.
I am aware that many of you will be familiar with the word jhāna or dhyāna, the states of deep absorption, deep samādhi and concentration, but I don't think I'm going to use that word much on this retreat. I mean, it's certainly -- what to say? Yeah, just to say I'm not going to use it much. I'm talking more about samādhi as an open field and a spectrum. We move on that spectrum. We're interested in deepening. That's all. Sometimes with that word, jhāna or dhyāna, people get too hung up. They make too much of big deal out of it. So on other retreats, I will talk about it, but this retreat, I'm not really going to talk about it. What's really important is that the comparing mind, it doesn't get too much of a foothold here in relationship to samādhi. We're just seeing it as taking care of ourselves. We're developing something out of kindness for ourselves, and ultimately out of kindness for all beings. There's that sense, rather than the comparing, measuring mind coming in, which it can do so easily.
The very last, tiny thing -- which I'm actually not going to go into today, and I'm not sure if we'll get to it this retreat. But there's actually a much deeper relationship between samādhi and emptiness, again, which is not at all obvious, and very, very rarely talked about -- as far as I can see, anywhere, but [including] in our tradition. I don't know if we'll get time on this retreat, but I just want to say something much simpler: sometimes, with samādhi practice, we feel like, "Keep coming back to the breath or back to the mettā." A person can feel, "Well, maybe I'm ignoring something that needs attention. Maybe there's some emotion there, or something that actually needs my attention, and I'm suppressing it and repressing, etc." Now, that comes out of a lot of integrity and a lot of willingness, and it's an important question. And it can be that that is going on sometimes. It can be that we're kind of suppressing something or hiding from something though the breath or through the mettā or whatever.
But actually, oftentimes, that's not the case. It's not quite that simple. It has to do a little bit with what I said before: sometimes, what happens is a hindrance, this hook has come up and got its teeth into something, and then it seems like a real thing that I need to engage with in the world. And sometimes it is, but oftentimes it's actually not. We talk about emptiness: actually, the thing is empty. It's empty of being what it seems. It's empty of being the problem that it seems. The mind has made it that. The hook has made it that. It takes a lot of samādhi, as I said before, to begin seeing that. Some of the things that seem to us, at first -- "This is so important that I bring my mindfulness to this, so important that I open to this" -- sometimes it is, and you know, sometimes it just isn't. It just really isn't. It's the mind throwing up mud and creating mud, and then kind of wallowing in it. But this is a very delicate question. I'm saying something that I should take much more time to say. I'm just putting it out there right now.
As we go deeper into samādhi, there's something about this, we could say: when these hooks put their teeth into something, the mind is actually building something. It's fabricating something, and then falling for that as a reality. When we're practising samādhi, as the mind deepens in samādhi, what's actually happening is we're building less, we're fabricating less, we're making less of an issue, or a big deal, or a this or a that. We're actually making less of a self. We're building less of a self, and we're building less of world. I should really talk a lot. I don't know how much I am going to get to this in relationship to samādhi this retreat. But that's one way of looking at what's happening in the samādhi: we're building less. This has everything, everything, everything to do with the deep understanding of emptiness. So again, one of the real gifts of samādhi, as we go deeper into it, is that we're getting accustomed to letting go of the self, not having the self be so built up and so loud and so prominent, and not having the world be so built up, and the world of things and issues be so built up and so prominent. And we're just learning to let go of that and really sense that it can really be okay. It can feel very nice when we do that.
So although samādhi is not directly contemplating emptiness, there's a parallel movement here which, if we understand that, if we really contemplate it, is totally integral and important to understanding emptiness. And even if we don't understand it, we're getting used to letting go of the things that we usually take to be real, and the things that usually take up all the space inside us. And that's a huge gift of samādhi. Enough talking.
