20-min Guided Practices
Methods of Following the Breath
What is Happening Right Now?
One way of thinking about the purpose of meditation is that it helps develop and strengthen the ABILITY and the WILLINGNESS to experience things AS THEY ARE.
One way to do this in practice is to consistently INVESTIGATE PERCEPTION with a CURIOUS ATTITUDE from a DECENTERED PERSPECTIVE.
In this practice, use mental labels to acknowledge what is happening moment by moment (use whatever label makes sense to you in that moment). You can rest or balance your attention on the rising and falling of the stomach as you breathe in and out to maintain some stability (label that too: “Rising” and “Falling”).
Breath-Focused Concentration Practice
Settling the Mind in Stillness
Mindfulness practice could be thought of as:
1) a growing ABILITY to experience things just as they are (sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings, etc); and
2) a growing WILLINGNESS to experience all these things just as they are (whether comfortable or uncomfortable)
I will be practicing tomorrow from 12:15-12:50EST (as I do each Wednesday: Zoom link below) for anyone who wants to join. If you can’t make it but want to practice, try out these somewhat-simple (and not always easy) instructions on your own:
— settle the body: be still (restful and alert, relaxed and awake)
— settle the breath: let the body breathe for you at its natural pace
— settle the mind: notice whatever arises (senses, thoughts, feelings, etc) without clinging to or rejecting anything [and hold a loving patience for yourself as you constantly cling to and reject everything]
Focus on Rest
What most people think of when they hear the word “meditation” is calm, tranquility, and relaxation. Although there is a great deal more that practicing mediation can allow us to develop, finding/creating/focusing on the softer/subtler/silent side of our conscious experience (underneath all the activity) is also “trainable”. During the mid-day meditation drop in today (12:15-12:50ET), I will be practicing RESTING in thought, feeling, and sensation (engaging with “stillness amidst the stirrings”). I will try to record the guidance and share later for anyone interested; and, of course, anyone able to attend can just follow the Zoom link below.
Taking-Sending
One way to think about the function of meditation (namely, the Shinzen Young way) is that it trains our attention to do 3 things:
— Appreciate self and world (experience the senses with radical fullness)
— Transcend self and world (contact something beyond the senses)
— Improve self and world (cultivate positive emotions, rational thoughts, and skillful behaviors)
Tomorrow from 12:15-12:50EST at my Mid-Day Meditation Drop-In (Zoom link below), I will be sharing an “Improve” technique called “Taking-Sending” (“Tonglen” in Tibetan) that is designed to help us nurture positive emotions of compassion, kindness, and love. I will try to record the practice for anyone to access after the group sit.
Opening the Hand of Thought
“Opening the hand of thought” is one way of describing how to sit in meditation. Zen meditators call this “just-sitting” or “shikantaza” (“shikan-“: just, only, or simply; and “-taza”: sitting down). Others call it “do-nothing”. There’s really nothing to it (despite how difficult it can feel). In a way, it is both focusing on everything that comes up and nothing in particular; letting what happens happen; giving focused attention the time and space to come to rest under its own weight; releasing the grasping hand of mind without any goal or expectation.
The simplest meditation possible... simply sit.
I will be practicing “opening the hand of thought” and offering a 20min virtual guidance (although, there’s nothing much to guide!) tomorrow from 12:15-12:50pmEST for anyone interested in participating in a collective effort to be still, be silent, and be settled — Zoom link below; I’ll try to record/post for later use.
Call Off the Search
I’ve heard it put that meditation practice could be described as a process of “Emancipation-Actualization”: gradually realizing-and-becoming a freedom that is already and always fully and deeply present.
Normally, we are like a bird searching for the sky or a fish searching for the ocean: perpetually chasing an endless horizon (increasingly exhausted, never satisfied). But to more truly discover the sky or ocean, the bird and fish must call off the search and find where they are — then they will have discovered the whole sky and the whole ocean.
Tomorrow from 12:15-12:50pmEST, I will be practicing “finding more truly where I am” (Zoom link below). Anyone interested in spending 20min practicing “dropping the search and discovering the goal” can feel free to tune in.
Intro to “Speed-Noting”
Tomorrow from 12:15-12:50pmEST (Zoom link below), I will be guiding a 20-min meditation focused on “Noting” sensations as they arise and pass away. This practice will move from a comfortable pace to something like “speed-noting”: trying to track things at a rate of several times per second (to really flex the muscles of our attentional detection skills!)
“Noting” is a technique used in meditation to track and deeply know the details of fleeting experience as it comes and goes.
Our attention can dart from one thing to another pretty quickly (and this can cause a lot of mental exhaustion), so learning and practicing to be clearly aware of the contents of moment-to-moment experience may be very helpful in preventing ourselves from being overwhelmed — and we may even learn something important about the nature of our experiences.
Not Needing Things to be Different
One important (even central) purpose of meditative practice may be said to be to lessen or minimize suffering. “Suffering” can mean a lot of different things — Shinzen Young puts it this way: “pain/discomfort X resistance = suffering”...
So, one way of directing contemplative intention toward the alleviation of suffering is to release the “resistance” in the above formula whenever it shows up. This is a way of practicing “not needing anything to be different”, and it is simple but difficult.
Tomorrow from 12:15-12:50pmEST, I will be sitting for 20 min with the intention to notice and let go of both resistance to discomfort and of the desire for things to be different than they are. Feel free to join if interested.
Feel Gone
One interesting thing to explore during meditation is the “coming-and-going” of all things: the impermanence or dynamic change of all that can be noticed. In the Unified Mindfulness system, one special “flavor” of impermanence is the recognized in the moment of vanishing. When a sound falls silent, when a sensation drops off, when mental talk comes to a pause — these vanishing points can be tracked as moments of “Gone”. It can be very fascinating to commit to a period of time of following all of sense experience to its end: to its vanishing point. This is more than the thought, “all things must pass”... it is a taste of, “all things ARE PASSING” (constantly and always).
Resting, Listening
During Lent, our pastor, Hudson Neely and I will be co-leading a mid-week-mid-day Contemplative Prayer sit on Wednesdays starting at 12:15pmEST. There will be just a few opening minutes of welcome and instruction followed by a 20-min guided meditation. The theme of this first meeting will be “Prayers for Resting” based on Luke 10:38-42 (Mary & Martha) — “...few things are needed—or indeed only one.”
We will be practicing finding Absolute Rest in the “one needed thing” by lovingly gazing into God’s Love gazing into us. (What can be seen, heard, felt, thought, imagined, or known is not the Infinite Fullness of God. Let go of all these things as they arise, and rest in the “Unknowing” of God’s Mystery.)
Feel free to join us during that time (Zoom link below), and we will be recording the sit for anyone wishing to practice later.
Being Found Following the Vanishings
Our pastor, Hudson Neely and I will be continuing our Mid-Day, Mid-Week Contemplative Prayer sessions tomorrow at 12:15pm EST (Zoom link below) for any interested. Both the full sessions and the guidance periods are being recorded for you to listen to and practice along with here: http://soundcloud.com/tygerriver/sets/contemplative-prayer.
Tomorrow's session will have the theme of "Prayers for Returning" (Luke 15:1-32), and the guided 20-min meditation will be to practice abiding in our Shared Awareness-in-God: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” [from Meister Eckhart's "Sermons"]
Abiding in “I Am”
Pastor Hudson Neely and I will be leading our last Contemplative Prayer meeting tomorrow at 12:15pmEST (short instructions, 20-min guided practice, and short optional discussion). Zoom link below (in addition to recordings of all of the previous sessions), all are welcome.
I will be continuing my normal weekly meditation offerings Wednesday 3/14/21 at 12:15pmEST.
“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!; Peace in heaven and glory in the highest”
— Luke 19:38
Stillness of an Attention Unmoved
An essential mechanism of many forms of meditation is the special way in which attention is offered to the many things that are noticed in our experience. Other approaches, however, do almost the exact opposite by actually retracting attention (in a sense) back into itself.
Tomorrow, I will resume my weekly meditation drop-in, and the 20-minute meditation guidance will be a practice of making ourselves more and more susceptible to falling into and resting in the singular stillness of an attention unmoved. This is a tall order, and (like all forms of meditation and many things in life), it requires practice.
Feel free to drop in to practice with me at 12:15pmEST. Zoom link below [soon to include a new (and hopefully more convenient) drop-in time], and the recorded guidance will be posted soon for anyone interested.
What is “Who”?
What is "who"? When sitting still and silent, it can be interesting to wonder what it is that is noticing sitting still and silent. Examining that sense of "who" (without expectation and without chasing after or away thoughts of various sorts), one can gradually rest in the unfindability of any sensory "what" that makes up that "who".
Tomorrow, I will continue my weekly mid-day meditation drop-ins at 12:15pm EST (Zoom link below) – please feel free to join (no prior experience required) or listen back to the recorded guidance after the fact.