Transcription
Okay, so a little bit of review, and just expanding on some of the things we've touched on already with the mettā. These three baskets or three arrangements of the sailing ship -- they're all good. So whichever one we're in, it's good. You can' t go wrong here. [laughs] You can't be doing it wrong, or thinking "I'm not doing it." If it's going well, and the wind is in your sail, and it's harmonizing like that, great. If you're just holding your line with the mettā, but there's some difficulty, great. And if you've just let the mettā go, and you're trying to bring kind awareness to the difficulty, to meeting the difficulty, that's also great. It's all good. In all that is the expression of this flexibility, this responsiveness that we keep talking about. And it's really just a range of emphases, of what one is emphasizing at different times. They're all the expression of loving-kindness. They're all aspects of loving-kindness. So whatever way we're leaning with that, they're all helpful, and they'll all be healing. There's healing in each of those baskets, of those approaches. And they all have a kind of beauty to them.
And for our purposes now, here, for this retreat -- in the big picture, they're completely, completely equal -- but for our purposes on this retreat, if one feels like in any moment one is able to choose a little bit between those three baskets, or lean a certain way, for our purposes now, at this moment of the retreat, we would, if you have the choice, if you feel you have a choice, you lean more into the first basket. In other words, if there's a possibility of simply harmonizing the body field and the intention and the mettā, and things getting simple, and there's a bit of well-being in the body and a bit of comfort there, etc., opening up and softening, then that's what we're choosing of the three. But they're all good. They're absolutely all good. So there's no mistake here, but we're just leaning that way when we can.
And in that way, we're actually nurturing well-being, and we're nurturing well-being through the body with this bodily tone, when it's available. Like I said, that's without demand. We're not pressuring anything. We may do a little experiment later on, but sometimes it's a matter, as I said, of just acknowledging a tone that's already subtly there in the body. One's just acknowledging, rather than creating it or forcing it or demanding it. And one can begin kind of just gently coaxing that out.
So if possible, or sometimes, you may want to -- and see how you want to work; I mentioned all this before -- but you may want to kind of open up to the body first, and just hang out with that light, delicate attention, and actually realize, "Oh, that tone's already there." And you're kind of establishing it, finding it, actually; you're finding it there. And you find, for instance, a softness that's pervading the body. It's like a frequency in the bodily vibration, in that space of the body, or a warmth, or an openness, or just a kind of quiet hum, or maybe something stronger -- don't know. And you're finding that, if you like, in the body, in the energy field, and using it. You begin using it as mettā. You kind of interpret it as mettā. Here's this hum, and I'm just going to see it as mettā. That's what I'll begin bathing myself in and radiating.
Okay, so you can kind of go both ways. You could just be with the body, open to the body, put the phrases in, put the intentions in, the light, etc., and maybe something comes. You know, sometimes it will come, sometimes not. Or the other way around: you just hang out in the body and it's, "Oh, actually, there's something here." And let that be the mettā. That's what you wrap yourself in and you give away.
And as we talked yesterday, the resonances to the phrases -- you begin, slowly, over time, this sensitivity develops to the particular words, and you can feel that rippling through the body or expressing itself in the body in certain ways. As one acknowledges that that's maybe more present than one might have thought -- that bodily well-being or whatever -- begins to come some confidence, a little bit of confidence comes, slowly, slowly, and it comes out of this light, delicate attention, this sensitivity to nuance. And it doesn't have to be remarkable, necessarily. It probably won't be. But it also may be. It may be that occasionally, or regularly for some people or whatever, maybe on this retreat, maybe on another retreat, it's actually quite strong bliss coming. You know, great.
Then a person thinks, "What should I do with this now? It's so strong." It's possible, again, in the context of this retreat right now, it's possible that you can just kind of sit in that bliss and rub your nose in it and soak it up [laughter] and bathe in it and just enjoy it. Just enjoy it. Prioritize enjoying it. Focus on it, burrow into it, go into it, open to it. Or you can kind of give it away. It's like, "Well I've got this nice feeling. You have some. You have some." It's like that becomes the expression of the mettā. That is the mettā. It's the flavour of the mettā at that point.
And -- and this is so important, I'm going to repeat it again: if, or rather when there's no bodily feeling, this is very normal, and it will go in and out of that many times. We trust the phrases, and we trust this intention to plant the seeds, through the phrases, through the visualizations. So it's really normal for there to be no feeling at times. Maybe that's quite a lot of times, maybe it's intermittently, whatever. Completely normal. We trust the process of planting the seeds of intention.
So there's this word, samādhi. I think I threw it out at one point; I can't remember. It's a Pali and a Sanskrit word, samādhi. Usually it gets translated as concentration, which is an okay translation. I prefer words that I've thrown out already: a kind of harmonizing of body and mind, a unification of body and mind, inner sense of well-being, to whatever degree. And kind of unified and harmonized -- the body, the mind -- with the intention of the mettā. So that kind of bubble that we're talking about, and this well-being in the body, that's part of what's engendering the samādhi. It's part of the samādhi.
That's, if you like, quite a spacious state. That's why -- this bubble, it's like the whole body. The whole body sense is kind of unified. You feel this sail of the ship. It's like you feel that. Rather than 'concentration' -- sometimes it can seem to imply something very small and narrow and kind of tightly focused, and I don't think that's at all what the Buddha meant, actually. There's no passage that I know of at all in the suttas where he explains concentration that way, as something small, tight. It's relatively expansive, this unification.
So let's explore this quality. It's also, you could say it's an energized calmness. In other words, it has these two qualities: energy in it, but also calmness. If I have energy without the calmness, I'm feeling agitated, I'm perhaps restless, and sometimes of course the meditation gets out of balance that way. If I have the calmness without the energy, well, you know what happens then! [mimes falling asleep] But when the two are in balance, that's part of samādhi. That's part of this deepening into this unification and this harmonization, of the body, the body energies, and the mind.
And in that state of energized calmness, and because of the collectedness there, the unification, the mind is not dissipating energy. Usually, when we're thinking this, worrying about this, the past, the future, "What does she think? Da-da-da-da-da," we're frittering away energy all day long. And then it gets to whatever time in the evening, and we're crawling into bed because we've just frittered away the energy all day. With the collecting of the energy like that, and the energized calmness, there's healing in that. It's like the whole system is kind of harmonizing its energy and collecting its energy and it's working on the whole system.
To the degree that's there, all this harmonization, there's also a kind of steadiness, and obviously that's part of samādhi, of concentration, like that. Why we're going about it this way, emphasizing the body is -- well, for a lot of reasons, but partly, when the body starts to feel relatively nice, or some degree of comfort or ease or well-being (as I say, it might not be remarkable), the mind wants to stay there more. Certainly if [the body] feels uncomfortable, but if it also doesn't feel anything in particular, we try bringing the phrases, the phrases, the phrases, or the breath if you're trying to be with the breath, but there's nothing particularly that's attractive to the mind to stay there. When you're opening up a little bit of pleasantness in the body, the mind wants to stay there. It will still go off, for sure, but it wants to stay there more.
So steadiness comes, which is very important. And power comes, power of mind. And the ability then to see deeply, which is hugely important for insight. Actually, what's happening with this quality deepening, this samādhi deepening, one of the most significant things that is happening, is -- how could we say? -- the consciousness is refining. It's getting more subtle. I don't know; does it make sense if I say that? Refinement, yeah? Good, okay.
This quality of samādhi, it also acts as a kind of cushion. In a sense, for some degree of people, when they go to the emptiness practices, it's sometimes -- and we'll talk about this when we get there -- can sometimes bring up fear, etc., and the samādhi functions as a kind of cushion. It makes it okay to see deeply. It colours the whole space of insight with this well-being, with this sense of safety and kind of comfort. And that's actually very important for insight to deepen well. And like I said, I think yesterday in response to Mei-Wah's question, with this well-being and the samādhi, a resource comes deeply into the heart, into the cells. Resource and well-being, which enable us to let go in life. We can let go when we have enough.
So having said all that, not to make a thing out of samādhi. It's very easy: "Have I got it? Or have I not got it?" And it's so easy, that we get into this black-and-white thinking with success and failure in practice. Samādhi, like everything else, is a spectrum. It's a continuum. We have more or less, at any moment of the day. Even right now, I have more or less unification of the consciousness. It's not a big deal. I'm just, all day long, one's going in and out of more or less unification. And we're just saying, "Okay, well, can we just nudge it this way a bit more?", rather than, "I've got it. I haven't got it. I'm a failure. I'm a success" or whatever. We're more or less harmonized.
Actually, in terms of the bodily -- what shall we call this thing? The energy body, like we've been talking about. The energy body of a human being goes in and out of harmony, in and out of opening all day long, and most of the night. In other words, our energy centres and all that, they're coming into alignment, they're going out of alignment, we feel constricted, we feel more open. That's just going on all the time. It's not a big deal. It's going on all the time. Sometimes we have this constriction, and we think, "Oh, I'm so constricted, and I've got this thing," and actually it's just all the time it's going in and out. And we're just learning, over the weeks here (because we'll approach it from different angles), we're learning to understand that process, and how to kind of finesse and coax the whole system into alignment, into openness, into well-being.
Later in particular, when we get on to the insight practices, looking through the lenses of emptiness, etc., that kind of insight, it brings letting go. Letting go opens out the energy body. It loosens the constrictions in the energy body. When the energy body opens out and the constrictions are loosened, the system goes into samādhi, the harmonization happens. So people tend to think samādhi goes to insight, but it also works the other way around: insight brings samādhi.
So obviously there's a great range in this well-being. Like I said, we're not necessarily looking for anything remarkable. Sometimes it's just a little sense of comfort or okayness somewhere in the body, ease -- maybe in the belly; it could be anywhere. Sometimes, of course, the body feels uncomfortable. A very normal and natural part of a human being, and certainly a natural part of meditating, so much sitting, walking, sitting, walking. So I want to run through some options when the body feels uncomfortable.
(1) The first one is move. Move the body, be kind to yourself. We're not forcing anything here. So just gently, you know -- respect your body and what it needs, and gently, quietly, move the body into a more easeful posture, as an expression of loving-kindness.
(2) And the second one (and again, some of this I've mentioned before): when there is pain, the mind tends to get sucked into it and contracts around the pain. The consciousness, the space of consciousness gets small around the difficulty. This also happens emotionally as well. So you've got a couple of options there. One is: see that it's getting sucked in. I think this was in response to one of Julia's questions one time. See that it's getting sucked in, and just see if you can kind of draw the mind out of that difficult place and sit it somewhere else, where it feels okay in the body. So you might have a pain in the knee, and the attention keeps getting, like a magnet, it goes there. You see, "Okay," and is it possible to draw the attention out there, and just maybe the belly feels okay? There's just a kind of warmth and okayness, a comfort in the belly. I'll just centre my attention there, rest it there, not get so sucked in. Maybe it goes again, and I bring it back. And it may be that that opens things up and allows them to settle more.
(3) It might be also because of the contraction that one wants to go to a much bigger space, maybe reopening that whole body space, because it will contract around the pain. So you're just stretching that bubble again, stretching that balloon, opening it up. And then, if you like, the pain is just one part of that bigger space, and it won't take up all of it and make it so prominent.
(4) What is that? Fourth possibility. This is quite a lot, but hopefully it'll be helpful. You can let the mettā go if you like, and go right to the pain, and just be right there with the unpleasantness of it, but with the focus being on allowing it to be unpleasant. So not so much on the clarity, and how, you know, I can see this really clear. It's more like just holding the pain -- if you can see my hands [making cupping gesture] -- just holding it, cupping it in a kind of warm attention, and allowing it: "This moment can be unpleasant. This moment can be unpleasant." Just this moment, the emphasis is on allowing. We'll return to this later in the retreat. But that allowing is also a kind of kindness.
(5) Sometimes, especially if there's a little bit of mettā going already and you can feel just maybe the echoes or the resonances of some warmth in the system, you can kind of put the warmth around the difficulty. This also applies to emotional difficulty as well. You can kind of just let some warmth be around what is difficult. That makes a big difference. You're holding it then in a different context. It is unfolding, this difficulty, in a different context. I don't know how much we'll get on to it on this retreat, but context is everything. It has everything to do with emptiness, because it's about the relationship with things. Things don't exist independent of our relationship to them. That's for later.
(6) Okay, I've lost count. I think this is -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 -- this is number six. Sometimes what happens in practice is, things start to open, either emotionally or just energetically in the system, and sometimes that opening is painful. Sometimes also energies just get blocked. They get blocked in the system. Sometimes physical pain, in energetic terms, is just a block in the flow of energy. Don't be afraid to use your imagination here.
So let's say I have a block in the throat, and it feels like, "Oh, this feels so tight in the throat, and really uncomfortable. I'm trying to sit with it, walk with it, and there's this thing." What if I just imagine the energy flowing through it? Maybe it's visual. Maybe it's a kinaesthetic imagination. I just imagine it going through that place. I don't even have to make a big deal of it kind of exploding through the block. I just imagine that it's flowing through. Maybe it wants to flow through and out the top of my head and back down like a fountain, maybe. Who knows? But playing with it. Or maybe it wants to flow the other way, or out that way, or this way. You can play with the imagination of the way the energy moves.
And funnily enough, sometimes the places that feel the most blocked end up feeling the most open. So let's say, again, I have something in my throat. I could imagine the energy going through. I could also imagine that that becomes the centre of the mettā. Even though it feels really blocked, I just imagine radiating the mettā out from there. See what that does. So imagination is completely fine. In terms of emptiness, the boundary between imagination and reality gets very blurred, to say the least, as one goes deeper into this.
(7) Last possibility. You're sitting, and there's some discomfort, there's some pain, maybe physical, maybe even emotional. And it's kind of going into a whole different attitude: "It doesn't matter how I feel." Give the mettā to someone else. "This mettā is for you, it doesn't matter how I feel." A little bit of bodhisattva energy coming in. "It doesn't matter -- I feel uncomfortable; it's not important that I feel uncomfortable. This mettā is for you. It's for you. It matters how you feel." You're changing, again, we're changing the relationship. So it's like giving oneself away, that kind of spirit coming in.
At the times when the energy body kind of harmonizes and opens like that, it actually starts to feel, or the body is perceived, in a less defined way. Don't know -- maybe some of you have noticed this already. It begins to kind of lose its edges a little bit and be less sharply defined -- you know, where all the fingers are and all that. It's more vague, less boundaried. Does that make sense if I say that? Yeah? Okay. It also appears less solid. The whole thing is getting more subtle. You could say we're in touch with, some people call it the subtle body or whatever. The whole sense, though, is more subtle.
Then it's not, as I was saying with the throat thing, it's not necessary that the mettā comes from here, from the heart. It could come from the belly, belly mettā. It could come from the big toe, big toe mettā. It could come from your back. It could come from your nose. It doesn't matter. Actually, what we're moving to eventually is the whole body. The whole body, in this harmonization, becomes a field of mettā. And you're radiating. It's all radiating out and in and all that. So we're moving towards -- at whatever pace, and in a non-linear way -- the whole body involvement.
It may be too early to say this, but ... I should have said this earlier, I'm sorry: I'm saying stuff today you may feel, "I don't really relate. I don't really know what you're talking about." I'm just planting seeds. Some of you have been here a long time already on retreat, for weeks and months already. Maybe I'm just planting seeds of some stuff to look out for in the future. So, you know, don't get concerned about that. I just want you to have this stuff to be able to work with.
One of the beautiful things that can happen -- and obviously there are many, and it's not all to do with the body either -- but one of the things is this sense of mettā in and through the hands. So I wonder -- certainly as this energy body opens one can begin to feel that more, but it might be even today that you want to start experimenting a little bit with your hands. And we have the phrases and the visualization, but what is it to put one hand on the other hand, on the back of the hand, and touch yourself with tenderness, and let the mettā be expressed through the touch? You know, there's something incredibly potentially beautiful and powerful. Or put it on the heart centre, or the leg, or whatever it is, and actually let the mettā be expressed through touch.
Sometimes it's actually easier to feel it without the touch. It's actually just opening the palms, and a sense of even just imagining the energy stream out from there. If that seems like it might be a bit embarrassing, you know, do it in your room. Everyone's got a single room. [laughs] You can play with this. But there's something very lovely in the sensitivity that can open here, and we can express that to ourselves. How often do we touch ourselves with tenderness? And then obviously that's available for others, too, whether we touch them or not.
And with that, with this opening up of the bodily sensitivities, slow down. Begin to slow down now. We've been here a few days, and what would it be to really slow down? And let, allow, gentleness to start pervading your movements, and your body, and the way you touch things. So here's the plate for lunch, or the doorknob that one's opening the door, and what is it just to slow down and let yourself actually experience sometimes the gentleness? It's like the expression of mettā through the touch, even to inanimate objects. Or when one's walking, either in the meditation or down the corridor, because there's a slowness and gentleness, it's like, the foot on the earth outside, or on the floor, there's a tender[ness], a kiss there. All this can be expressed and felt, if you want to play with it.
Okay, I'm going to stop there, and I'll just throw in one thing about the categories. So the idea with the categories, like we said, the aspiration with the mettā is that it's boundless. It includes everyone without exception, which is a tall order, you know? So we move towards that in stepping-stones. We start where it's easiest. And for some people, self is not easiest. Start with the easiest person, and then friend is easy person, easy friend. If it's a friend and you realize, "Oh, there's all this difficulty," well, they get relegated to the difficult category. They go down a couple of divisions. [laughter] And that happens in friendship. It happens. There are complications, etc. But for now, we want that to be easy, relatively easy. And we can work where there's difficulty. We're not saying, "This person is a difficult person." We're saying just that there's some difficulty right now in the relationship with them. That's all. We're not labelling the person. And then, you know, that could heal, etc. No problem. Okay? Yeah? Okay.
[29:35, guided meditation begins]
Let's do a sitting together. Just want to start with a tiny bit of an experiment. So just feeling the sensations of sitting, the sensations of contact, the cushion and the floor. And then feeling the whole body. Opening out this balloon, this bubble of attention, of awareness. And stretching it, like a sail, like a sheet, stretched out like a white sheet, stretched out over the whole space of the body. So you're feeling that openness of the attention and that openness of the body. Just sensitive to however that feels in the space. Just tuning into the experience of the field of texture of the body.
Now, is it possible to connect with the sense of uprightness in the body? But not so much by adjusting your spine or forcing yourself to be upright, but just imagining, either visually -- it doesn't have to be clear -- or imagining in the bodily sense, a ray of light, or a ray of energy, moving or shining from the belly, low in the belly, up the body, up the centre of the body. Just seeing how it feels in this space of the body, just to imagine that. Perhaps it's white or yellow or golden. Clarity is not so important. So maybe you're seeing it, maybe you're sensing it, feeling it, maybe it's a mixture. This ray of light, perhaps it even goes out the top of the crown of the head. Not forcing anything, but just sensing with that how the uprightness of the body feels with that. How does the belly feel now?
So letting the awareness be open and sensitive, light, delicate. There's the belly and this ray of light, of energy. And how about the heart centre, or the centre of the chest? So just noticing how that feels with this ray of light. And is it possible to also stay in contact with the belly, so you have the belly and the heart centre connected with this ray of light, this beam of energy? Keeping the whole body involved. So the legs, too, in the space of attentiveness, of sensitivity. The legs, the belly, the heart centre, this ray of light. Perhaps you can also feel the lateral opening of the body across the chest. You're not forcing anything. May be very subtle, not at all remarkable. And how does the throat area feel? This light, running up the vertical axis of the body, if you like, supporting the body. Belly, chest centre, throat -- connected. The face and the head.
So if it feels very gently or subtly like the body is opening, let it open. Feel that, and feel the awareness pervade that whole space, so the awareness is opening to that whole space, filling. You can let go of that ray of light, of energy. Just let this sheet of awareness, the bodily texture, just let it stretch with sensitivity over the whole space.
[40:50] Whenever you like, beginning the mettā practice in whichever way feels most helpful for you, and beginning wherever feels most helpful for you right now.
Just over and over, planting seeds, the intention of kindness.
So this awareness will shrink many times, and just keep stretching it out again, no problem. Just pervading the body with this light, delicate attentiveness, and being patient with the mettā, and letting yourself play. Be light and playful and find what works for you now.
Letting lightness and gentleness pervade your effort, the very way we're going about the practice. Let that, too, be light, be gentle, be kind, connected.
[53:54, guided meditation ends]
