Hindrances and the multi-hindrance attack...

We have devoted some time to the hindrance of aversion listening to Joseph Goldstein’s talk on the subject.  We also listened to his teaching on the hindrance of sloth and torpor which was quite rigorous and quite Joseph.  I was reminded of an article written by a black woman called something like “Napping Buddha” about the deep rest needed by those who have endured the sustained stress of racial prejudiced and poverty.  I would add the various weird illnesses we have come to know that leave us with debilitating fatigue.  So sloth and torpor as a hindrance needs to discerned from genuine fatigue and the need for rest. 

For an interesting discussion of sloth and torpor and the need for sleep, I have included this conversation among meditators and monastics on the Buddha’s instructions on sleep and warnings against the hindrance of sloth and torpor.  

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/whats-up-with-the-recommendations-for-little-sleep/30979

There are three hindrances we have not talked about - a reminder that a hindrance is that which interferes with our meditation and our mindfulness.  The three we have not touched on are greed or craving or just wanting, restless and remorse - worry and agitation are also included, and doubt.

It might be helpful to illustrate these hindrances through the common experience of a multi-hindrance attack.  It may begin with restlessness, some agitation in the body.  This is considered one of the last hindrances to go in the meditative life - perhaps because it has its root in our existential fear, the constant present of death in life.  It can take the form of anxiety, of nameless fears, of late night worrying, of physical itchiness that makes us move around.  In meditation we may have already discovered that our greatest desire is for peace, for calm, for tranquillity.  Restless and remorse, agitation and anxiety are anything but that.

So it makes us dissatisfied.  We want to be peaceful and tranquil and instead we may experience tension, or flashes of excitation in the body, especially the tummy but also the arms, chest, legs, the mind jumping around.  Without mindfulness (and even with mindfulness), we might look around for a cause outside of ourselves.  And usually there is something in our lives to be dissatisfied with and our minds might latch on to that something as the “cause” of all our worries and anxieties - or bodily agitation.  So we may focus on the “cause” with aversion and distaste.  So now we have restlessness and remorse, wanting to feel some other way, and aversion to our perceived “cause” for feeling this way all showing up all at once.  

This may lead to a fourth hindrance - doubt.  We may also decide that all of our misery at not getting what we want, not being able to find peace in our meditation is caused by the meditation itself - with the wrong practice, or maybe the wrong teachings or teacher, or maybe we’re just no good at this meditation business.  We just can’t do it.  Doubt has now joined the other hindrances.  It is good to be discerning about our practice but wisdom feels clear and alert.  Doubt is cloudy, murky, resentful, accusatory, and self-judgmental.  We may feel so down that we get sleepy so now our multi-hindrance attack is complete with all five hindrances in a tangle.

This is one example of a multi-hindrance attack.  Sometimes just bringing awareness to it, turning towards it, seeing the empty nature of these thoughts and suppositions, and remembering that this too shall pass - impermanence - is sufficient to begin to dissipate these energies.  Sometimes relaxing into the suffering and saying,”This is just the way it is” can be freeing. 

Being content with what is is a powerful antidote to the hindrances.  Content to just sit, content to investigate, content to know that meditation has its ups and downs and grasping onto the highs is no more useful than pushing away the lows.  If we practice - whether sitting, standing, walking, or lying down - we are moving forward on the path.  It is not for us to understand how our practice is unfolding.  Sometimes it seems like nothing is happening and other times we can see decided movement and change.

I was recently reminded of the story of the little boy who planted carrot seeds.  Every day he went out to check if the carrots had sprouted.  Finally, one day, there they were, little wispy shoots emerging above the ground.  But the little boy was impatient and wanted to know if they were carrots yet.  So he pulled up the tender shoots.  Of course they weren’t and the story doesn’t tell us if there were enough sprouts left to develop into carrots.  In meditation, as long as we persist, there will be.    

So why is it important to know about the hindrances?  We all encounter obstacles to our meditation along the way.  They are part of the path - see Jack Kornfield’s article below.*  There are a few reasons - one is that these energies appear in our daily lives, not just during our meditation periods.  If we experience a lot of agitation in our lives, it will surface when we quiet our minds.  If we slide and glide through life, always putting off, making excuses, taking naps, this energy will also be present during meditation.  Jack Kornfield surprised me into wakefulness during one sleepy meditation period by asking, “What is it you don’t want to feel?”  Sometimes sleepiness is our way of avoiding feelings that are difficult to experience.  And as much as these energies hinder us in our daily lives, they will appear in our meditations and invite us to see them, work with them, understand them, and eventually be free of them.  In the here and now, our understanding of the hindrances can help us learn to hold them in abeyance to go deeper into our meditations.  * https://jackkornfield.com/making-the-hindrances-part-of-the-path/

And that leads to the other reason to be aware of the hindrances.  There are antidotes to the hindrances that will help us disentangle from them, measures we can employ that will help us gain insight into the hindrance and find release from its constricting energy.  Mindfulness is key.  It can help us see the energy for what it is, investigate it further, find connections, and free ourselves.  Loving kindness can counter aversion and can soften our hearts toward ourselves and others.

The Buddha had a set of similes for considering the energies of the hindrances:  The teachings compare a person enslaved by covetousness (greed, wanting) as being in debt, a person caught by ill will or aversion as sick, gravely ill, a person entrapped by sloth and torpor as being imprisoned in jail, a person caught in restlessness and remorse as a slave, and a person enthrall to doubt as a person traveling a perilous journey across a desert with nothing to eat.  Freedom from the hindrances is like getting out of debt, recovering from illness, being released from prison, being freed from slavery, and arriving to safety.  This freedom from the hindrances is the ground for awakening.

When the path gets rocky... working with the five hindrances

Meditation always sounds so easy.  All you have to do is sit down and follow your breath - the inhalations and the exhalations.  Simple, right?  And sometimes it is.  And for a brief time it is.  But then something happens.

Suddenly the meditator becomes aware that they have not been following the breath but instead have been fantasizing about getting a cup of coffee or having a conversation with someone or tackling their to-do list.  

What happened?

What happened is that the meditator sat down to meditate and expected to meditate - which translates into "expected the mind to do what was asked of it.”  And the mind most certainly did not do that.  

So what’s the problem?

The problem is not with the mind. The mind is the mind.  Everyone has one.  They behave in somewhat similar ways and also with infinite variety.  

The problem was with the expectation.  The conversation with the mind might go something like this: "I want to be peaceful.  Being peaceful looks so nice.  Meditation helps you be peaceful.  OK, I’ll meditate.  Meditation is sitting and paying attention to your breath.  I’ll do that and then I’ll become peaceful.”

So the first insight is that the mind doesn’t stay put.  Seeing the monkey mind is considered an achievement in meditation circles.  So we learn that meditation is a training as well as a practice and that repetition is key to training the mind.  We learn patience as we bring the mind back to the breath - over and over again.

A year passes or five or more.  And we understand better this aspect of bringing the awareness back to the breath - over and over again.  And over and over again.  And over and over again.

Sometimes the mind calms down and stays with the breath for a while.  And sometimes the mind bounces off the breath like a drop of water on a hot skillet.  What’s going on?  Why is the mind so settled one moment and so squirrelly the next?

And it seems like it’s always changing.  One time we forgot to have tea before meditating and all we can think about is the tea.  Another time the body just won’t settle down, won’t cooperate.  The pain in the knee, back, side, neck, gets in the way of the meditation and we’re squirming.  Or a really unpleasant situation in our lives keeps intruding during our meditation and we can’t make it stop.  Sometimes we're jumpy and irritable and others we're falling asleep - repeatedly.  And then we think this is no good, my mind is not like other people’s minds, the meditation book, teacher, app is wrong, this meditation thing is just not for me.

And yet every once in a while, we sit down and drop in - sitting for 15 minutes or half an hour is bliss with the mind calm and the body still and aligned. 

How do we deal with all these different situations?  How do we get more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff?

The Buddha was a very smart man.  He learned through his own practice what supports meditation and what gets in the way of meditation.  And he made a list of five of the most common things that interfere with meditation.

And he also understood that underlying all of them was the basic fallacy that our happiness depends on our getting more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff.  To be fair, it is certainly more pleasant to be comfortable, peaceful, serene, content than to be uncomfortable, agitated, anxious and irritated.  And sometimes we drop into some beautiful blissful states in our meditation.

But sometimes we don’t. Then what?  

What the Buddha knew was that the attachment to being comfortable, peaceful, serene was going to be one of the major impediments to our being comfortable, peaceful, serene.  And what he learned and taught was that lusting after pleasures of the senses was a hindrance to meditating.  The term lusting is one useful term.  Greed or craving are other ways of describing the mind state dominated by wanting things to be other than what they are. The word wanting or phrase the wanting mind have turned out to be good descriptors for our modern minds that evoke the sense of the state with perhaps less judgment than greed, lust, craving.

The Buddha realized there are five such mind states that interfere with meditation.  The first is the wanting mind.  The opposite of that is the mind filled with hate or disgust or revulsion.  In short, aversion to anything - pain or discomfort, people, bad smells, memories of unpleasant events or conversations - distorts the mind and makes it difficult to concentrate or to sit peacefully.  Restlessness and agitation is another mind state that interferes with meditation, as does sleepiness and torpor or sluggishness.  The last one is perhaps the most insidious of all - doubt.  When we begin to doubt our own capacity for mindfulness or perhaps doubt the teacher or the book or app we’ve been following or even doubt the wisdom of the teachings, mindfulness and meditation become almost impossible.

Meditation teacher Leigh Brassington who likes to bring both humor and brevity into the Buddha’s language shortens the list to this:  wanting, not wanting, too much energy, too little energy, and doubt.  These are the five hindrances and they occupy first place in the list of Mindfulness of Dharmas.  The five hindrances are the five mind states that hinder mindfulness.  

Here is what the Spirit Rock Meditation Center* has to say about them:

At most Spirit Rock retreats, usually on the second or third day, one of the teachers will give a “hindrance talk.” It is a standard feature for a reason—everyone encounters these difficult visitors at some point in their practice, and it’s imperative that we recognize them and have tools for working with them. The word “hindrance” suggests that they are blocking our path, but it can be more helpful to think of them as the landscape the path inevitably passes through, which is sometimes smooth and pleasant and other times difficult and uncomfortable. The hindrances are the painful but natural expressions of the heart and mind when it is suffering, and working with them is how we deepen on the path.

One traditional way to think about the hindrances is as obstacles to deepening in both mindfulness and meditative concentration, or samādhi. The concentrated mind is focused and relaxed, and the cultivation of samādhi depends more on being able to let go into calm, easeful presence than focusing the attention relentlessly on one thing. The hindrances obstruct concentration because they all are active in a way that’s not helpful for calm and clarity. They are signs that the body, heart, and mind are stirred up...

The first task of the meditator is to recognize these mind states when they are present.  Sometimes the thrill of recognition can free the mind from that state temporarily.  Basically, mindfulness is one possible antidote for these hindering mind states.  

The Spirit Rock article goes on to say…

"The instructions for bringing mindfulness to the hindrances start with recognizing when a hindrance is present and when it is not. These are habitual energies, and can be so familiar that they feel like part of our personality, but in our practice we begin to see that they are sometimes present and sometimes not, depending on the conditions we find ourselves in. We are then encouraged to actively set up the conditions for the hindrances to diminish.

They understand how [the hindrance] arises; how, when it’s already arisen, it’s given up; and how, once it’s given up, it doesn’t arise again in the future. (MN 10)

Our practice asks us to be skillful in how we work with these energies so that instead of succumbing to their seductive power we learn to contain them, understand what is causing them, and set up the conditions for them to weaken and arise less and less.

I found this Spirit Rock article so clear and comprehensive that I have included it in its entirety below.  If you go to the article itself, there will be recommended talks on the hindrances which are accessible for those who want a deeper dive.  

*https://www.spiritrock.org/practice-guides/the-five-hindrances

It’s interesting that they and I both began our articles with the idea that meditation is easy.  And perhaps that’s the beauty of it.  Would we have embarked on this journey if we truly understood how difficult it could be?  I voiced this realization to one of my teachers once who simply pointed out the obvious - yes, but knowing what I know now, would I go back? This toothpaste will never go back into the toothpaste tube.  Or put another way, human development moves toward knowledge and awareness and away from ignorance - present circumstances notwithstanding.    

Four Foundations of Mindfulness - Overview and Review

We have been exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (the Sattipatthana Sutta) for the past few months.  This teaching was one of the two fundamental teachings the Buddha gave on mindfulness.  The other was the teaching on Mindfulness of Breathing (the Anapannasati Sutta) - the sixteen steps from contemplating the breath to enlightenment.  And they both are mirrored in each other.

To review, the first foundation is Mindfulness of the Body which includes the breath.  We first become mindful through paying attention to bodily sensations and processes.  We access the world through our bodies.  And our minds.

The second foundation is Mindfulness of Feeling Tone - the positive, negative, or neutral feeling we instantly have about any experience that we have.  This feeling tone tells us to jump back when we step off a curb and a car honks its horn or to duck when we hear a crash above us.  It tells us delicious bread is baking somewhere or to turn our heads toward a wonderful heady scent because flowers are nearby.  Feeling tone is a critical connection between the body and the mind.  

The third foundation is Mindfulness of the Mind - becoming aware of thoughts and feelings, emotions and mind states, our mood at any given moment, fantasies, plans, memories.  And mindfulness helps us learn what is in our minds at any given moment.  Are we happy?  Content?  Irritated?  Annoyed?  Sad?  Depressed?  Further, mindfulness of mind helps us discern when our meditation is off, what is distracting us?  Are we pulled to get up from our meditation early because we want something or we want to avoid something?  Do we short circuit our practice at home because our mind is too busy and we say to ourselves "I can’t meditate right now”?  Mindfulness of what is going on in our minds can help us realize, “Oh, restlessness is here,” or “Aversion to this discomfort is present.”    Mindfulness gives us a choice.  If we believe the thought that our minds are too restless, we try to avoid the restless feeling by distracting ourselves with other activities.  Or we can acknowledge that restlessness is present and tolerate it long enough to investigate.

Now we have moved into the territory of the fourth foundation - Mindfulness of Dharma or "the way things are".  Dharma means both the teachings and the way things are.  Here the emphasis is on the latter.  At first glance, this fourth foundation looks like a grab bag of all the teachings the Buddha couldn’t fit in anywhere else.  And to a certain extent it is.

Included in the Fourth Foundation are the Five Hindrances, a list of the five mind states that interfere with our meditations.  Then there are the Five Aggregates - one of the Buddha’s important models for how we experience the world.  This model is so central to our experience that the Buddha included it in the First Noble Truth - the truth of suffering, as this passage from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center website shows:

"Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

It goes on to explain, “The five aggregates is a list that includes all the aspects of experience we tend to cling to…”  

The third list included in the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness is the six senses doors or bases, sometimes referred to as the six sense spheres.  The six sense doors include our five senses and the mind and are doorways between the world and our experience.  Investigation of the our experience through these sense bases is critical because suffering begins when sense experience leads to attachment, aversion, or delusion.  Again from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center: 

“The most common list is of six “sense bases” or “sense fields” which include the five physical senses and a cognitive sense that processes the complex emotional and mental content that creates our story and sense of self.  Understanding the sense bases is central to understanding liberation because suffering arises directly from sensory contact, and it is in sensory contact that we can let go of clinging.

“In the fourth foundation, we bring the awareness of body, feelings, and mind states cultivated in the first three foundations to investigate important qualities of present moment experience. Investigating the six senses deepens our inquiry into how suffering arises through our relationship to embodied life, and how equanimity can grow in its place. “

~~https://www.spiritrock.org/practice-guides/the-six-sense-bases

 These first three lists included in Mindfulness of Dharma or “ the way things are” help us explore what hinders our meditation, how our clinging causes us suffering, and how attachment, aversion, or delusion arise directly through our senses.  

The fourth list - the seven factors of awakening - helps alert us to and explore the positive, wholesome qualities that arise when the hindrances are at bay, when clinging and aversion are not present, when our suffering has ceased.   The first three investigations have prepared us to recognize and rejoice when the one of the seven factors of enlightenment appears.  And part of that preparation is to know what qualities are not present as well as what qualities are. 

The final list is the most important of all and in some sense encompasses all the other lists and that is the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering, the causes of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path out of suffering.  The path out of suffering - the noble eightfold path -  is taught separately.

This is just a brief (!) over view of the riches contained in this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.  This is the foundation that the first three foundations have been preparing us to engage with - namely how our bodies, feelings, and mind lead the ordinary human into suffering and how with wisdom, understanding, and compassion, those same aspects of experience can be harnessed to lead us to freedom.

Mindfulness of mind revisited...

We’ve spent a few weeks considering the vastness of mind - how the mind is intrinsically empty or spacious, luminous or knowing, and ceaselessly compassionate.  We’ve begun to explore how the mind and the objects of mind are not the same phenomena, how we can get caught up by the endless flow of thoughts, remembered or imagined conversations, moods, mind states and not remember that there is a mind through which these ephemera pass.  

Now with that perspective in hand, we turn back to investigate what is actually flowing through the mind, when it is present, and when it is absent.  But to do this, contrary to my intentions of last week, we need to dwell a little longer on the third foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of mind.

Below is the complete text of this foundation - as found in the Sutta known as the Satipatthana Sutta or the Four Foundations (or Establishments) of Mindfulness translated by Venerable Analayo.  As you can see below, the text in this sutra doesn’t mention vastness or emptiness or cognizance or even compassion.  

[MIND] 

“And how, monks, does he in regard to the mind abide contemplating the mind? 

“Here he knows a lustful mind to be ‘lustful’, and a mind without lust to be ‘without lust’; he knows an angry mind to be ‘angry’, and a mind without anger to be ‘without anger’; he knows a deluded mind to be ‘deluded’, and a mind without delusion to be ‘without delusion’; 5 5 he knows a contracted mind to be ‘contracted’, and a distracted mind to be ‘distracted’; he knows a great mind to be ‘great’, and a narrow mind to be ‘narrow’; he knows a surpassable mind to be ‘surpassable’, and an unsurpassable mind to be ‘unsurpassable’; he knows a concentrated mind to be ‘concentrated’, and an unconcentrated mind to be ‘unconcentrated’; he knows a liberated mind to be ‘liberated’, and an unliberated mind to be ‘unliberated.’

 [REFRAIN]

 “In this way, in regard to the mind he abides contemplating the mind internally … externally … internally and externally. He abides contemplating the nature of arising … of passing away … of both arising and passing away in regard to the mind. Mindfulness that ‘there is a mind’ is established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindful- ness. And he abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world. 

“That is how in regard to the mind he abides contemplating the mind.”     ~~ translation by Analayo

It asks us to consider whether the mind is “lustful” - or grasping, wanting, craving - or “without lust.”  Is the mind “angry” or "without anger?”  Is the mind “deluded” or “without delusion?”   Is it “contracted” and “distracted?”  As our practice becomes more subtle, so do the qualities we can become more mindful of.   

The Buddha is asked us in this third foundation of mindfulness to look into our minds and know what is present and what is absent.  And the easiest of the list mentioned are greed, hatred, or delusion - their presence and their absence.  

So our investigation of the vastness of the mind has given us a little preparation for distinguishing these qualities or movements of mind as temporary occupiers of our minds, passers through, one might say, that are not the same as the mind that knows them.  And once we get familiar with how the mind is with greed or wanting present, we can become familiar with the mind that is free of greed or wanting.  

These mind states of greed, hatred and delusion with all their refinements and variations will be very familiar to us.  Knowing that these states are present or absent may not be.

This is a key turning point on the path.  To be able to distinguish wanting in the mind from its absence is to begin to understand when we are identified with our mind states and when we are not, when we are free of the bondage of identification.  And an interesting thing to note is what happens to the craving or wanting when we see it, “Ah, craving or wanting is present.”  

An example of this can occur right in the middle of meditation.  How often do we sit to meditate and say, I need a sip of tea, I need to get a sweater, I need to get up to open/close a window, before I can settle down.  Ah, craving or wanting is present.  Do we reach for the tea?  Get up for the sweater?  What happens when we simply stay with the wanting?

How often do we say I can’t sit still, I’m too restless, my mind won’t calm down.  Ah, aversion or not wanting are present.  Do we get up and do something else?  If we do this often enough, we practice responding to aversion during meditation by getting up.  What happens if we simple stay with the aversion a little longer?  Does it become interesting to know wanting or aversion when they are present?  To watch them grow and then fade away?

Here is scholar and founder of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies Andrew Olendski’s take on mindfulness of mind from their newsletter in 2004:

"With the third foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the mind, it becomes a little more evaluative. We are asked to notice, when there is attachment present in the mind, that the mind is attached. When that attachment—also known as greed or want­ing—is not there, we notice that the mind is not attached. The same thing happens with aversion, also called hatred or resistance. If it is arising in the mind, then we can notice that the mind is beset by aversion. If it is not there, then we notice that the mind is with­out aversion. The idea is not, as I understand it, to compare the two states of presense and absence. But one cannot help, on an intui­tive, almost cellular level, to begin to discern the difference between what it feels like: what you know about yourself in the world when the mind is beset by attachment or aversion, and when it is not. [My italics] The same pro­cess is outlined for confusion or delusion.”

We’ll listen to a guided meditation by Analayo as he takes us through this investigation.  This was a guided meditation we have heard before but the repetition with the above emphasis will help us pinpoint the experience of the mind when greed, aversion, or delusion are present.  And/or when they are absent.  As with all his guided meditations on the Satipatthana Sutta, he guides us first through scans of the body parts, the four elements, and feeling tone before centering the investigation on mindfulness of mind.

Spacious, knowing, compassionate...the nature of mind

One more post on the nature of mind.  And then we’ll move on to the fourth foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of the dharmas which translates to mindfulness of the way things are.  After all, the path is not just understanding nature of mind.  It’s knowing what to do with it, working with it to free ourselves of our delusions about ourselves and the world and the ways things really are.  And, as well, it can be an enormous help to have a little understanding of what the mind is like when we experience it.  We are so distracted by things and experiences all the time that when we get a chance to drop in between the gaps in experience, we might allow ourselves to continue dropping and not look for the next experience to take us to the surface again.  Distractions and experiences will show up on their own but we might have a glimpse of non-duality/our minds/the ultimate and then because of our understanding and contemplation of nature of mind, we might know the glimpse of mind for what it is.

Our ultimate purpose on the path is not a thing or an achievement but a state of increasing freedom and increasing kindness.  Ven. Analayo says, when measuring our progress along the path, it’s helpful to ask am I kinder to myself and to others.  The nature of mind is intrinsically kind.  Our practice helps us access what is already there - waiting for us to embrace it.

So, below is an excerpt from a book The Heroic Heart: Awakening Unbound Compassion by Jetsunma Tenzin Palma, the British woman turned Tibetan Buddhist Master who spent 12 years in a cave in the Himalayas.  She talks and writes often about the nature of mind.  

...The mind is empty by nature.  What does that mean?  The classical description is that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, which means that we cannot find anything existing independently and say that this is the thing itself, whether a table or the mind or anything else.  We can never find the actual thing itself.  Everything is made up of bits and pieces put together and labeled. 

Where is the tableness of a table?  It cannot be found.  After all, anything can be used as a table if it is slightly flat.  We use another object as a table and say, “Now this is a table.”  Yesterday maybe it was a box, but today it is a table.

Even though that is a simplistic explanation of a profound understanding, it is an important one, because we do label everything and then believe our label instead of recognizing that this is just a label, just a convenience.

The Buddha said, ”I too, use conceptual language, but I am not fooled by it.”

            And that’s the difference:  we are fooled by it, and we think that if we give something a name, it exists as a separate, independent entity.

            But here we are dealing specifically with the mind, not tables, and so the point is, what is the mind?  Why is the mind empty?

            First of all, the mind is empty because our thoughts are flowing endlessly, like bubbles swept along in a stream.  We cannot pick one up and say, “This is the mind” or even “This is a thought” because the moment we identify it, it is gone.  Anyone who has tried looking at the mind can see that when we say, “thinking,” we can never find the thought itself.  It is like the frames of a movies moving across the projector so fast that they seem to project out this whole drama.  Each individual frame is moving too fast to be identified.  By the time, we’ve notice it, it is gone.

            The mind’s emptiness also connotes its spacious quality.  The mind is empty but also luminous or cognizant.  Mind is not something graspable – it is something vast and open, luminous, clear, and knowing.  The nature of the mind is compared to the sky.  If we look at our mind, we realize that there are two processes going on:  There are the thoughts coming up and disappearing, moment to moment, just flowing past.  Then there’s awareness – the mindfulness that observe the thoughts.  Now that observation is already a step forward.  Normally we are just engulfed in the flow of thinking and swept along by our thoughts.  But now we are stepping back and observing the thoughts, so there is a space between the observer and the thoughts.

            However, that is still a dualistic situation, because there is the observer and the observed.  This observing mind is called “mindfulness.”  We are now conscious of our mind and in being more conscious, we are no longer so completely enslaved.  We can begin to see that all these feelings, these thoughts, these ideas, these beliefs, these memories, prejudices, judgments, and clinging are just thoughts.  Merely thoughts.

            So here we are, observing the mind.  Watching the thoughts as they go past, recognizing that thought moments come and go.  In the beginning the stream of thoughts is like a waterfall cascading down.  Then it becomes like a fast-flowing river, gradually moving more slowly as the mind quiets down until, eventually it enter the ocean of samadhi.

            This is the conventional mind. That mindfulness that watches is also the conventional mind.  Think of the clouds in the sky during a rainstorm.  The sky is completely covered by clouds; only clouds are visible.  Likewise, the nature of the mind is covered by all our conceptual thinking and, therefore, when we look at the mind, all we see are the clouds of conceptual thought.

            But those clouds could not exist if it were not for the sky.  The clouds come from the sky, and they vanish back into the sky again.  But we usually identify with the clouds.  When the clouds part, we see the sky.  It is rather like flying in a plane through thick clouds until suddenly the plane ascends, and we are above the clouds and there’s this vast blue expanse with the clouds below.  Clouds float within this open spaciousness, which is empty.  It is empty insofar as we cannot grasp it, it cannot be seen.  Yet without space nothing would exist.  Space is everywhere.  Where is space not?

            If we are asked to describe a room, then we will refer to the furniture, decorations, and any people present.  But what is really there is space.  But we usually don’t notice that.  Yet without the space there could be not furnishings, there could be no people.  Furnishings and people can only exist because there’s space.

            Also the people and the furniture themselves are ultimately space.  Every cell in our body is space.  If the physical body is reduced infinitely, there are perhaps just vibrations of light.  We are all space.  There is nowhere that space is not.  It is all-encompassing.

            Therefore, the nature of the mind is compared to space and is likened to the sky.  Mindfulness is a good step in advance of being completely engulfed in our thinking, yet even our mindfulness is based on the sense of my mindfulness.  It has not transcended the subject and object duality.  There’s mindfulness and something to be mindful of.  But the ultimate nature of the mind is like the sky because it cannot be divided.  There’s no center, there’s no end.

            When we talk about Buddha-nature it could sound like everybody’s got a little Buddha sitting inside them.  “This is my Buddha.”  “Keep your Buddha to yourself.”  “Actually, my Buddha is rather a special Buddha compared to an ordinary person’s Buddha!”  It is not like that.  It is not like everybody has a little Buddha-nature sitting inside them.  That would just be another ego projection.

            Buddha-nature is empty.  Buddha-nature is like space.  We can’t grasp space.  We can fight over our particular seat in a room, but we cannot argue about the air.  We are all sitting here, breathing in and breathing out the same air.  I cannot say, “Excuse me, I don’t want you breathing my air!”  Even if we were the bitterest enemies, fighting and shouting at each other, we are actually intimately connected because we are breathing in and breathing out the same air, which descends deep into our lungs.

            We cannot own air.  Air is something shared by all the beings on this planet, not just human beings.  Animals, too, and the trees and the plants are also breathing in and breathing out, helping us to live on this planet.  Space has no center, and it has no boundaries; it just is – vast empty space like the true nature of our mind.  But, unlike the sky, which is just empty, the nature of the mind is also cognizant.  It knows.

            The Tibetan word often used to describe one aspect of the true nature of the mind is sal, which is a hard word to translate into English.  Sal means “clear” and also “bright,” “luminous.”  It also has the connotation of being cognizant.  The mind is empty – meaning it is spacious, open, unimpeded, and ungraspable – and at the same time the mind is clear and luminous.  The mind is naturally cognizant. 

            If it weren’t, we could not know anything, we could not be aware – but we all know.  The Tibetan term rigpa (or the Sanskrit term vidya) means “to know,” but it is usually translated as “pure awareness” or “primordial awareness.”  It is the fact that we know and that knowing is unimpeded, spacious, clear, and luminous – and it is who we are.

            But that knowing quality of the mind, which we all possess and is right here all the time, is beyond duality, meaning when we are in a state of rigpa there no sense of “me” and “others.”  Such duality just does not exist.  It is not that we are spaced out; it is more like we are waking up.  The word buddha is from the root buddh, which means “to awaken.”  And it is just like that – we suddenly wake up.

            We are able to see and hear things because we have awareness.  But when we see or hear something, we immediately superimpose on it our ideas and judgments, so that the underlying clarity is obscured.  The luminous clarity is always present, but we cover it up with all our dualistic thinking. We don’t allow our mind to remain in its naked awareness, which is its natural state before we cloth it in all our concepts. 

            Without this underlying awareness we couldn’t exist.  But we are so busy thinking, comparing, conceiving, judging, and talking to ourselves that we don’t recognize it. 

The aim is to recognize this fundamental quality of the mind.   (pp.139-143)

We have all had hints that the fundamental nature of our minds is empty, spacious.  We drop into a deeper meditation and our mind stills into a vast silence.  We also know logically and intuitively that it is the nature of our mind to know, to be cognizant.  Empty and knowing, spacious and cognizant.  Out of these qualities arises a third quality - compassion.  Our minds are empty, knowing, and naturally compassionate.  The fruits of our labors can be measured in our kindness to ourselves and others.

Yet, it is impossible to describe the indescribable.  So let these words roll off or sink in.  And simply return to the practice of paying attention to the breath or whatever meditation object is chosen.

April is the cruelest month...

April is a month of renewal, rebirth.  I always thought Carl Sandburg also called it the cruelest month as the Union soldiers, moving up through Maryland to Gettysburg, left their jackets and blankets on fenceposts to escape the sweltering heat only to shiver in the freezing temperatures a few nights later. I was mistaken.  Instead AI tells me the following:  "April is called the "cruelest month” the opening line of T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem, The Wasteland. It is considered cruel because it breaks the "numbness" of winter, forcing life and growth out of the dead land, which brings painful memories and desires back to a world that feels deadened and shattered.”  Except for the repetition of “deadened”, not a bad description of the renewal of life after the ‘deadening' blast of winter.

The brilliance of daffodils has graced our landscapes, borders, and garden corners surviving freezing temperatures far better than those poor soldiers in the Civil War (even though the poem was not written about them, Carl Sandburg did describe their suffering in some poem somewhere.)  And a bounty of flowers - emboldened by the daffodils - have come leaping out of the ground, buds opening full on bushes and trees alike.  Blinding yellow displays of forsythia, colorful displays of tulips, bleeding hearts.  Nature’s life force bursting forth in spring as birds nest, animals prepare for their young.

And this immediacy of grace - the fundamental creativity of reality - can lift our spirits, remind us of the stability of nature in the midst of such horrendous happenings around the country and the world.  We might remember that the Buddha encouraged placing our awareness on the body before the mind as the body was slower to change.  The lightening speed of our changing thoughts, feelings, moods leaves us with no footing.  And the news keeps those changes churning.  The body comes to rest as we breath in and breath out and our rest deepens and the breath slows and we can take refuge in those slower rhythms.  We can use that refuge to calm and restore, to replenish from the spring of our own deepest well, to touch into the equanimity that lets us know we can’t control everything and neither can anyone else - neither can anyone else, that allows us to flow gently with the unfolding of our experience, to understand the earth can absorb the willfulness of mankind and will continue its revolutions around the sun unabated by the worst humanity has to throw at it.

Remembering the beautiful verse I shared a week or so ago from the The Dhammapada, translation* by Gil Fronsdal:

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a peaceful mind,
And happiness follows
Like a never departing shadow.

Mindfulness of mind...

Deep gratitude to the group for holding the space for mindful practice for each other during my absence. Mindfulness groups like this are strengthened by the generosity, commitment, and practice of its participants.  Mindfulness and meditation are not spectator sports!!!

Retreats are always different and sometimes odd and this was no exception.  But the process works regardless and the learnings were a profound as ever.  Thus, I am still in a somewhat wordless state of mind after 10 days of silence.  Nevertheless, the world of words has returned, clamoring for my attention.  So this email will be necessarily short.

 We’ll delve into mindfulness of mind in the coming weeks.  I’ll just lift up Ajahn Chah’s beautiful teaching on the still flowing mind here - the mind that is vast and still while experiences flow through it.  Leigh Brasington, one of my teachers on this retreat, teaches us to look at our experiences not as discrete events happening one after another but as processes continuously unfolding.  Ajahn Amaro whom I am reading now (and for a long time) points out that the mind is not in the body - rather our bodies and all our experiences are actually in our minds.  Rodney Smith, well known insight teacher in Seattle, says the process is hermetically sealed - everything we think we know, think we perceive, think we conceive are simply processes of our minds unfolding.  There is no there out there except for the mind’s unfolding.   

And finally, the beautiful first verse of The Dhammapada, translation* by Gil Fronsdal.

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a peaceful mind,
And happiness follows
Like a never departing shadow.

*Thanissaro Bhikkhu in his translation uses the word “heart” instead of “mind” in his translation.  They are both correct and actually better together than separately as the Pali word they are attempting to convey is citta which, in Buddhism, is our heart-mind center.

Mindfulness of mind...

This week we move on to the mind-blowing mindfulness of mind.  As we began to take a closer look at feeling tone, identifying a positive feeling tone, a negative feeling tone, a neutral feeling tone, we might have given some thought to feeling tones that originate in the mind.  Remembering a phone call with a sibling might bring up a pleasant feeling tone in the chest and belly.  Or thinking about a doctor’s appointment might be accompanied by a little anxious tremor in the stomach or throat.  As we experienced with body scans, we might reflect that we directed our attention to a certain part of the body - our foot or our leg - and, lo and behold, there was a sensation in that part of the body with perhaps a neutral feeling tone.  

What knows sensations?  What knows feeling tone?  

Now we’ve entered into the realm of mindfulness of mind.  Feeling tones have been connecting our minds with our bodies all along.  Our mind has been the knowing component of knowing positive, knowing negative, knowing neutral feeling tones.  

We are asked to turn our awareness to that which knows - to our minds.  And the first question we ask is this:  Is mindfulness present in the mind?

Are we mindful right now?  If we’re paying attention, the answer is yes.  But we will learn (or already know) that mindfulness can be stronger or weaker.  How does our mind feel right now when mindfulness is present?  Is it alert?  Soft?  Open?  Awake? Spacious?  Easily distracted or concentrated?  What is the quality of our minds when mindfulness is present?

I find it helpful to attempt to describe the mind when mindfulness is present.  It helps orient me to the quality and texture of the mind that is mindful. It also helps in discerning a bit earlier when mindfulness is lost.  

Our next task is to discern major mind movements in the mind of craving or wanting, aversion or not wanting, delusion or mind wandering searching for something pleasant or trying to get rid of something unpleasant.  Just being able to note, Oh, craving is in the mind! is an amazing discovery.  We’ve heard so much about craving and aversion.  But to experience its flavor, its pull or push, its quality of leaning forward or away, this is truly to see the little man behind the curtain in Oz.

There is an additional bonus when mindfulness is present in the mind.  Not only are we alert and awake, aware and discerning, but we might become aware that this state of mindfulness in the mind is a pleasant state.  This is an unworldly pleasant feeling tone.  We might even become aware that the pleasant feeling in the midst of our presence in the present moment is joy.  Sometimes this joy is very subtle - nothing more than a generally pleasant feeling of being alert and awake.  But sometimes the joy is a bit more concentrated and can be experienced more clearly as joy or happiness.  You may already have had this experience but perhaps not put words to it.

It’s probably not too productive to go searching for the happiness and joy right away as the desire for joy can cause the joy to evaporate.  The desire can easily become craving and then striving for a result to arise.  But if we stay steady with our mindfulness and just notice with a light sense of detachment, we might notice the presence of joy as well.

Looking into our own minds can sometimes feel like we are attempting to see our own eyes.  But if we remember, that whenever we know a feeling or sensation, our minds are present, doing the knowing.  We can know the feeling or know the sensation and then sit back and know the knowing.  

The general arc of practice is from mindfulness of the larger, more easily experienced elements of our world to smaller, lighter, wispier, more subtle elements of experience.  We can experience stubbing our toe as a large “ouch” feeling.  We can experience our leg resting on the sofa.  We can experience our breath when we’ve been running, then when we’ve been relaxing, or sleeping, and then after a half an hour of meditation.  The sensation of breath can be a grosser, larger experience or a more subtle experience.  When we’ve been meditating a while, the breath can become so subtle it almost disappears.  So the arc of our practice is to become more and more sensitive to the currents of our experience, to the increasingly subtle sensations.  Becoming aware of our minds takes us into the realm of the quite subtle.  Our minds will have a tendency to catch the next thought train out of there because the experience of mind is so subtle.  

Ajahn Chah often asked newcomers if they’d experienced still water.  They would reply, yes.  Then he would ask, have you experienced flowing water?  Yes, they would respond.  Then a gleam would appear in his eye as he asked, but have you ever experienced still flowing water?  There would be silence, confused looks, uncertainty.  Finally when he had tormented them enough with his riddle, he would explain.  The mind is empty and in the emptiness is still.  Thoughts, memories, experiences of sensations, sights, sounds flow through the mind and be known by the mind but are not intrinsic to the mind.  The mind is intrinsically empty, intrinsically still.  Still flowing water, he would pronounce triumphantly.

As we investigate mindfulness of mind, we turn toward all of it.  The stream of experiences flowing through the mind will attract us first.  But as we look from the experience to the knowing of the experience, we begin to sense directly into the stillness of the mind that knows.

And as we keep investigating our minds in this way, we will see that as changeable as our physical experiences are from moment to moment, by comparison, the mind is like quick silver in its changeable nature.  This is one reason why the Buddha put so much emphasis on mindfulness of body.  Even though experiences from both mind and body are changeable, the body changes more slowly giving the impression of greater stability.  There is a greater chance for the mind to come to rest when mindfulness is embodied.  It’s the difference between sitting solidly on the ground and being flung around and around in a ferris wheel.  

A word of reassurance.  Do not become discouraged that the mind wanders more frequently when investigating the mind.  It’s immensely helpful to begin with grounding practices to establish mindfulness of the body before moving into mindfulness of feeling tone and mindfulness of mind.

Last week we talked about feeling tones a little and had a more open-ended practice.  This week we will listen to Mark Williams’s guided meditation on feeling tones which may help further orient us to the universe of feeling impulses that shape our actions.  

The Buddha considered these feelings tones to be the ideal place to discern the beginnings of craving and thus to abandoning the craving before it can develop into clinging and attachment.  Mark Williams (bio given below) developed a full 8 week course on feeling tones in the format of MBSR which demonstrates the importance of these early signals to modern researchers on meditation as well. 

It bears repeating that these feeling tones have an ethical dimension to them.  We can discern worldly versus unworldly feelings tones by whether they lead to thoughts and actions that lead us forward on the path or lead us into craving, aversion, or delusion on the level of bodily sensations.  

One key to distinguishing unworldly feeling tones is whether they arise out of some renunciation - turning away from a sensual pleasure or pain or a lessening of attachment to sensual pleasures.  A rather clear and not terribly subtle example might be renouncing a food not on one’s diet and feeling a temporary freedom from the temptation of that food.  This could also apply to checking texts, news feeds, etc on one’s cell phone.  

The temporary freedom from a compelling sensual desire is key.  It embodies a sense of no longer being in thrall to such temptations - at least for a time.    

I’ve included a quote from from the website of the course again this week. The course is called “Deeper Mindfulness:  Exploring Feeling Tone Frame-by-Frame:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Mark Williams’s short bio is here:  

Mark Williams is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford. He co-developed Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for prevention of depression. His books include The Mindful Way Through Depression (with John Teasdale, Zindel Segal & Jon Kabat-Zinn); Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World (2011) and Deeper Mindfulness: The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World (2023, with Dr Danny Penman) which shows how feeling tone can be a new gateway to mindfulness.

Some of you may want to hear Mark Williams’s wonderful reading of the poem “Hokusai says” by Roger Keyes.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkTvAi9UdLw

There are a few other things to say about feeling tones.  

First, it may help to remember that feeling tones are not emotions like anger, joy, fear, grief.  Those emotions are not specifically singled out in Buddhism but fall under the heading of the Third Foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.  Feelings tones are simply the valance of feeling - the immediate positive, negative, or neutral tone that arises in response to a contact.

Last week we talked about feeling tones that arise from input from the body in the form of the five senses - sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations.  

In addition, feelings tones can have as their contact events that originate in the mind.  Here feeling tones link us to the third foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.  An example of a feeling tone that arises from a mind event would be when we suddenly have an unpleasant memory, or thought or imagining.  Or conversely, if we imagine how good chocolate cake would taste right now or how pleasant it would be to visit with family.  

These feelings tones are mind only events - starting with some arising in the mind that prompts a feeling tone.  These feeling tones can lead to more thoughts about the contact proliferating and expanding and taking us into more arisings that can each engender their own feeling tones, cascading one upon the next in a profusion of feeling tones each building or adding to the one before.  

These mind-induced feelings tones can be felt in the body as when the memory of an unpleasant event to come or just past is felt as an ominous feeling in the pit of the stomach.  Or the memory of the wedding of a loved one brings tears of happiness to the eyes.  

So feeling tones (vedana) link body and mind by responding to either bodily sensations through the five senses or mind events like memories, thoughts, fantasies, planning.  Whether from contacts with body or with mind, feeling tones are positive, negative, or neutral.  They arise in immediately response to an initial contact and are not under our control.  They may be influenced by situations which are under our control, but the feeling tone itself is not.  

The Buddha makes a further important distinction in our vedana/feeling tone experiences - the distinction between those which are worldly and those that are unworldly.  The basic distinction here is whether this contact and its ensuing feeling tone will lead us forward on the path - such as the pleasant feeling of deep meditation or will not lead us forward on the path such as a pleasant feeling that leads to craving chocolate.  Unpleasant unworldly feelings might include a sadness when it becomes clear to us that we are not awakened yet or perhaps when we did something unskillful we regret.  These feelings lead us forward in our practice.  Neutral unworldly feelings might be wisdom or equanimity - clear seeing and balanced view versus worldly neutral feelings of delusion or mind wandering.

So feeling tones (vedana) have an ethical component to them.  They help us know at any moment whether our thoughts and speech and actions are leading us forward on the path or not leading us forward.  It is reassuring to know that we have an ethical weather vane so close at hand.

This week we’ll listen to a different feeling tone meditation, this one created by Mark Williams, scholar, professor, researcher who co-developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and the new course "Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring feeling tone frame-by-frame”, an 8 week course similar in structure to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and MBCT which I mentioned last week.  

I’ve included a quote from from the website of the course again this week:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Freedom from suffering lies within us in every present moment and it begins with feeling tone.

Feeling Tone...bridge between mind and body

This week we move to the critically important second foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of feeling tone or Vedana in Pali.  

Feeling tone is our very first response/reaction to a contact through our 6 sense doors.  Remember the Buddha considered the mind the sixth sense door.  So through any of these portals, we can receive a contact - a sight, a sound, a physical touch, smell, taste or some mind event - a thought or memory or mind state.  We immediately get feedback through these feelings tones about that contact.  A large percent of these contacts are registered as neutral which for most of us is nothing at all.  Others register as pleasant - the scent of flowers, a gentle breeze on the face, deep blue water, a spring bird call.  And still others register as unpleasant - a loud screech of brakes, too bright light as we emerge from darkness, a sewer smell, hitting our funny bone. This initial feeling tone is most often a conditioned response - except for the more elemental ones such as loud noises or maybe funny bones.  And it is followed by other reactions.

Feeling tone occupies a unique position in our inner world - linking the information, the input from the outer world which is felt by the senses in the body (and mind) with our mind’s ability to receive and know the positive, negative, or neutral reaction that arises in response.  I call it a reaction because it is immediate - occurring in the first micro seconds of contact - and without moderation. When our minds register feeling tone, they kick into gear.  If the feeling tone is pleasant, the mind wants more and instructs the body to get it.  When the feeling tone is negative, the mind doesn’t want and, depending on the strength of the negative feeling tone, moves the body away faster or more slowly.  When the feeling tone is neutral, the mind registers it as nothing much and looks for happiness elsewhere.  

The important aspect of the reactions and responses laid out above is that the feeling tone, while a conditioned response, is automatic.  The response that follows - even as immediate as it is - is a choice. The choice is largely based on habitual patterns of attempting to satisfy our wants and cravings with immediate actions to obtain something, avoiding unpleasant contacts with evasion or direct opposition, or becoming distracted when it is unclear with mind wandering, fantasizing, searching for something pleasant - delusion.  

Mindfulness gives us a different choice.  

When we experience a pleasant bird call sound, we also experience and respond to the pleasant feeling tone that arises.  Then we begin to want, to crave, to take action to get more of the bird call and that pleasant feeling.  We stop and listen, cup our ears, hold our breath, and sometimes follow the sound deeper into the forest.  What we often fail to do is to turn inward and investigate that pleasant feeling.  Where is it arising the body?  How does it feel?  Expansive?  Soft?  Happy?  We may fail to notice the pleasant feeling turning into craving, even greed for more.  

Once that pleasant feeling has turned into wanting, the enjoyment has become anticipatory and in the future.  The pleasant feeling we initially had in the present moment of the sound has been transformed into a subtle suffering. 

In meditation, we can sit and notice the pleasant feeling of listening to the bird call and see how it turns into leaning forward into the silence for the next bird call and the feeling of disappointment when it doesn’t come right away.  With mindfulness we can enjoy the pleasant feeling, notice the beginning of the leaning in, release it and linger longer with the pleasant feeling.  We can be with the silence without the leaning forward for something to happen.  If the bird call returns, we can enjoy it.  If the silence remains, we can be content with silence and let it deepen.  

If the craving has progressed a little farther, we can notice the wanting and striving for more, the leaning forward, the tightening in the chest and we can let go right there.  Mindfulness can track these initial movements from expansion and softness to tightening and constriction and then mindfulness can investigate, learn how the suffering arose, then sit back, relax, and let go.    

Mindfulness can be introduced at any point in our experience.  But no where else are the forces of greed and aversion and delusion as weak as when they are first arising.  It is here at the feeling tone arising, the first breath of vedana, that mindfulness can be most effective, can interrupt the automatic habit patterns of suffering.

When I learned this on retreat at IMS many years ago, Guy Armstrong explained that vedana or feeling tone was a critical choice point in the chain of  reactions that lead to suffering.  Recently, its importance has grown in the field of psychology and mindfulness study to the point where Mark Williams, well known meditation teacher, researcher, and co-founder of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for prevention of depression, has created a new course which puts vedana squarely at the center of our investigations into the causes of suffering.  The course is called "Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring feeling tone frame-by-frame”, an 8 week course similar in structure to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and MBCT.   

This paragraph from the website of the course helps illuminate the quality and importance of feeling tone:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Tonight we will listen to Ven. Analayo’s guided meditation on feeling tone*.  This meditation deepens and widens with repeated listenings.  Once the meditator has become familiar with the guided meditation, it is beneficial to go through the meditation without the guidance taking time where time may be needed to explore more deeply the different arenas of feeling tone in the body.  

Freedom from suffering lies within us in every present moment and it begins with feeling tone.

*The mediation on Feeling Tone can be found on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website under Resources>Bhikkhu Analayo Resources.

Why mindfulness of death matters....

Was it only a week ago that a blizzard shut down the East Coast?  And now our fearless leaders have involved us in a war in the Middle East.

We’ve been exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a teaching we looked at last fall and now have returned to for a deeper look.  Why is this teaching so important?

When the young Siddartha Gautama who became the Buddha discovered the existence of aging, sickness, and death, he changed his life.  He gave up the comforts of life in the castle - security, beauty, sensual pleasures, position, career as head of his clan, even family, and went in search of a better response to what he had learned.  

What he discovered was awakening.  First he basked in the happiness of his enlightenment and reviewed how it had come about.  When he was persuaded that some people might understand, he went in search of his fellow travelers.  As he was walking along the road, he was met by a traveler who, noting his radiant countenance, asked him about his radiance.  The Buddha replied, I am awake.  The traveler hurried off without looking back perhaps fearing that this person was not only a nutcase but possibly dangerous to boot.   

But the new Buddha’s reply conveyed the essence of the fruits of the practice - why we all practice to this day.  To wake up.  To be awake, alert, clearly seeing, mind not ajumble with half-perceived thoughts and emotions, clouded by doubts and dark thoughts, endlessly pulled around by our desires and aversions.  He was awake, calm, peaceful, centered.  And thoughtful.  He realized he needed to be more subtle than to proclaim he was awake and expect people to immediately follow him.  He also realized that everyone he ever hoped to share the teachings with had to come to it from the same direction he had - from understanding suffering and wanting the end of suffering.  Thus, one of his first teachings was the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering and how realizing that truth deeply leads to the path out of suffering, leads to understanding the causes for suffering, that suffering can end, and the way out of suffering - the 8-Fold Path.

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness was the how of practice - how we practice to become free of suffering.  

The first foundation mindfulness is mindfulness of the body culminating in practices that bring us into direct contemplation of the fact of our own mortality, that this body is made up of interconnecting parts, of all the same qualities as all matter, and that this body is impermanent, will sicken, age, and die and when it dies, it will decay, crumble and return to earth.

Why is it so important to realize or understand the fact of death and dissolution of this human body?  

The answer lies in the fact that not being fully awake to our own mortality is largely responsible for our lack of clarity, our dark, jumbled half understood inner world.  We only need to have a near miss on the highway, or stumble on a set of steep steps or get a piece pf food caught in our throats to experience the spike of fear that tells us how we feel about dying.  Our settled stable life can be set a-jangle with a direct experience that threatens our lives.  Depending on a number of factors, our reactions can range from momentary upset to PTSD. 

But being awake is not about being in a state of terror.  To some extent, we already are there.  There is a field called Terror Management Theory.  On the one hand it sounds preposterous and on the other, it seems about time.  Existential terror is alive for everyone at some point in their lives - for some it can be held at bay until it can’t.  For others, it is more pervasive, closer to hand.

But one of the studies which is especially relevant today is that unacknowledged terror can have some extremely negative consequences.  This I learned from the course on Sattipathana I am taking with Venerable Analayo and can be found in his book The Sattispatthana Sutta: A Practice Guide.  Subjects were divided into two groups.  One group was driven by a graveyard everyday.  No mention was made of the graveyard, no attention was drawn to it.  They just drove by it every day.  The other group existed in identical circumstances except no drive by the graveyard.  In subsequent testing which involved questions of how much punishment or leniency fictitious offenders should be given, the group that drove by the graveyard recommended tougher sentences and less leniency than the group that didn’t get any graveyard exposure.  The implication seemed to be that the low level of exposure to death every day without any processing of what they saw or felt made the subjects less compassionate, perhaps more callous to the suffering of those being sentenced.

I’ve been a resister of AI from the beginning but I want to share what AI had to say when I looked up Terror Management Theory:

Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a social psychological framework proposing that human behavior is largely motivated by an unconscious fear of death. Developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski in the 1980s, it posits that people manage this existential terror by adopting cultural worldviews that provide meaning, and by building self-esteem.

Psychology Today +2

Key Aspects of TMT:

• The Problem: Humans are biologically driven toward survival but possess the cognitive ability to realize their death is inevitable, creating potential, constant terror.

• The Solution (Anxiety Buffers):

This overview may help us make a little sense of what we are living through right now.  In the past five years, the world has been confronted with a global pandemic larger than we have ever seen, a breaking point in global warming that suddenly made it clear to everyone through heat waves and huge wild fires on the one hand, and monster storms and droughts on the other that our world had lost the balance we took for granted for so long, and a shift in world view toward authoritarianism and intolerance. 

It has made me wonder how the world received the shocks of the Pandemic of 1917-8 and two world wars.  The McCarthy era, while bad, was probably one minor element of the aftermath.

It also made me wonder - and this is not scientific but intuitive - if, when the world is confronted with enough death and destruction, the reality of death and the vulnerability of all beings is finally realized by enough people that the arising of compassion and kindness overtakes the aversion and judgement and harshness that the unprocessed terror supports.  Maybe that’s more hope than intuition.  

Martin Luther King, Jr. said the arc of moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

But where does this leave us as meditators?  

Perhaps this.  The Buddha meditated as if his life depended on it.  Then he taught as if the lives of others depended on it.  Nothing less is at stake here. We have one precious life, one precious opportunity to wake up.  We’ve all allowed ourselves to go with the flow and to be lulled by the twin defense of “Not Me!” and “Not Now!”  And we’ve all had moments of clarity - this life is all we have.  This opportunity to wake up, to be awake is finite.  

And…and we have all had experiences of being awake, fully awake in this moment.  Perhaps what we lack is the confidence and the knowledge that it is possible for us too to be awake in more moments, to see clearly.  When we’ve had those moments, we understand those are the moments when we feel fully alive, with an energy and a love of life and of other beings that surpasses other more worldly pleasures.  When we are fully awake in this moment, we have a temporary experience of what the Buddha realized when he was enlightened.  

One of the words the Buddha used to describe enlightenment is “the deathless”.  Ven. Analayo has written about this deathlessness.  The realization of deathlessness is to attain a release from the fear of death, to no longer be held in its basilisk gaze, frozen to the spot.  

This is what is possible for us.  And the Buddha assures us this is so because he is a human, not a god, and that being awake is possible for all human beings.

Thus, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  The next critical step through this process of awakening goes through the second foundation which is feeling tone. The Pali word is Vedana.  It is the initial spark of positive, negative, or neutral feeling that registers upon contact with a sight, sound, sensation, taste, smell or mental input such as a thought, memory, mood.  

We will delve into this important topic of feeling tone and how it connects body and mind next. 

With an eye toward balance in practice...

People come to meditation and the Buddha’s teachings for a number of reasons.  Many of them involve suffering. A recent death, some disruption,  illness - one’s own or that of a close family member or friend.  And the overarching desire is for peace, for a sense of calm and ease, to be free of the clamorous voices of need, of want, or inadequacy when we can’t satisfy those needs or wants for ourselves or for others, when we can’t prevent the inevitable, when we can’t stop the suffering.  

Breath awareness practice is often the first practice we learn - the gentle awareness of breath entering the body, breath leaving the body.  Bringing the mind back from its wanderings to rest on this moment’s breath, this experience of breathing in and breathing out.  And we might learn to add a single word to keep our minds focused.  In. Out.  Rising.  Falling.  Budd—ho.  We might learn to sense how we breathe in new life on the in breath, let go a little more on the out breath.  We begin to feel this rhythm - breathing in air, life, energy, and breathing out tension, holding, suffering, just letting go, relaxing, allowing, letting be.  

And our bodies relax, our minds begin to let go, the misery and suffering begins to seep out of us.  We begin to feel peaceful, tranquil, serene.  

These past few weeks we have been exploring the first of the four foundations of mindfulness as taught in the Sattipathana Sutta.  And Indeed, mindfulness of breathing was the very first practice.  In conjunction with that, the Buddha taught mindfulness of the body in all the postures - sitting, standing, walking and lying down, and in all activities throughout the day - getting up from a chair, washing the dishes, dressing, walking to the car, driving.  Any activity we engage is can be mindfully held in awareness.

The next three practices in that foundational teaching of the Buddha have been a bit more challenging - mindfulness of the anatomical parts with an eye to their lack of beauty so that we don’t idealize the body and get lost in our own fantasies about it, mindfulness of the elements which helps us see how our bodies are made of matter symbolized by earth, water, fire, and wind just like all matter everywhere with the reminder that each of these qualities of matter is empty of a solid self directing the body and mind, is impersonal and is not entirely under our control.  The third practice which we will take up later is mindfulness of the body in death - the process of disintegration after death and a practice which reminds us that our bodies are impermanent, death is inevitable for all living beings.

These, especially the last, are challenging as noted above.  The Buddha wanted to wake up his students to the realization of the impermanence of life and how it applies to all of us.  He knew that we shield ourselves from our own inevitable ending with two main ideas - not me and not yet.  Both are powerful defenses against what we intellectually know to be true.  But the Buddha also wanted these contemplations to be done from the serenity of the mindfulness of breathing practice.  With this serenity as the base, the meditator would be able to loosen the bindings of desire and aversion, ownership and appropriation, and gain freedom from the weight of those delusions.

Nevertheless, those contemplations can be disturbing.  A sudden insight into the body as made up of skin, flesh and bones can be disorienting until we get more acclimated to seeing the body as it is.  Clear seeing.  We might lose our sense of calm and composure for a time, however, feeling unsettled or restless.  This is a normal part of the process.  

The practice is never straight-forward, unfolding in a straight line.  Tranquillity found is not to be owned or kept.  It is impermanent like the breath - coming and going.  We might have periods of calm where insights and revelations unfold.  Those may be followed by periods of confusion and suffering, doubt about ourselves, our teachers, and our practice.  I’ve heard it said that the periods of calm are islands of purity which prepare us to dive a little deeper into the sources of ignorance within us, to swim in the depths, and eventually come to the surface a little lighter and freer for having done so.

So it’s important to think about balance in our practice.  If we have engaged in the elements practice and are feeling out of sorts, disturbed, it might be useful to return to the mindfulness of breathing practice for a period.  Or we might engage in a compassionate body scan such as that of Christopher Germer’s body scan. https://chrisgermer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Compassionate-Body-Scan-Germer.m4a   Perhaps some loving kindness practice or hand over the heart compassion practice would soothe our minds and spirits.  

Tonight we’ll explore balance in practice - how do we recognize we are out of balance, can we allow that out of balance-ness to be?  Do we try to push away the disturbing thoughts and feelings or can we turn towards them?  What practice will help restore our balance without judging ourselves for being out of balance in the first place?  

These disturbances themselves are not in our control. We may feel responsible for them and as if we failed as a meditator for being out of balance at all, but it is helpful to know that these disturbances themselves are empty of a solid sense of self.  We did not will the disturbances into being and we can’t will them into not being.  But we can gently incline the mind towards peaceful practices of mindfulness and compassion.

Today I am drawing on Thich Nath Hanh for re-inspiration around breath awareness and mindfulness of breathing.  In my early days, I practiced exclusively with his gatas - verses of mindfulnesses especially the one he writes about below:   

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment!

I found remembering that practice and hearing his words on mindful breathing brought me back to the serenity of breath awareness practice.  The peacefulness in his heart comes through in these passages below and may remind us of the peacefulness we all wish for ourselves and each other.  

Mindful Breathing

Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. In Plum Village, mindfulness practice begins with mindfulness of our breath and our steps. It is very simple, but very deep.

As we breathe in, we simply become aware that we are breathing in, and as we breathe out, we become aware that we are breathing out. It can be very relaxing and pleasant to follow our breathing flow naturally in and out of our body. We may choose to follow our breathing at our belly or at our nostrils. As the air enters our body, we can feel it refreshing every cell. And as the air leaves our body, we can gently relax any tension we find.

Following our in-breath and out-breath brings us back to the present moment. We arrive in our body in the here and the now.

Our breathing is a stable solid ground that is always there for us to take refuge in. Whenever we are carried away by regret about something that has happened, or swept away in our fears or anxiety in the future, we can return to our breathing, and re-establish ourselves in the present moment.

We don’t need to control the breath in any way. We simply encounter it, just as it is. It may be long or short, deep or shallow. With the gentle energy of mindfulness it will naturally become slower and deeper.

Conscious Breathing

There are a number of breathing techniques you can use to make life vivid and more enjoyable. The first exercise is very simple. As you breathe in, you say to yourself, “Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.” And as you breathe out, say, “Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.” Just that. You recognize your in-breath as an in-breath and your out-breath as an out-breath. You don’t even need to recite the whole sentence; you can use just two words: “In” and “Out.” This technique can help you keep your mind on your breath. As you practice, your breath will become peaceful and gentle, and your mind and body will also become peaceful and gentle. This is not a difficult exercise. In just a few minutes you can realize the fruit of meditation.

Breathing in and out is very important, and it is enjoyable. Our breathing is the link between our body and our mind. Sometimes our mind is thinking of one thing and our body is doing another, and mind and body are not unified. By concentrating on our breathing, “In” and “Out,” we bring body and mind back together, and become whole again. Conscious breathing is an important bridge.

To me, breathing is a joy that I cannot miss. Every day, I practice conscious breathing, and in my small meditation room, I have calligraphed this sentence: “Breathe, you are alive!” Just breathing and smiling can make us very happy, because when we breathe consciously we recover ourselves completely and encounter life in the present moment.

Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

In our busy society, it is a great fortune to breathe consciously from time to time. We can practice conscious breathing not only while sitting in a meditation room, but also while working at the office or at home, while driving our car, or sitting on a bus, wherever we are, at any time throughout the day. There are so many exercises we can do to help us breathe consciously. Besides the simple “In-Out” exercise, we can recite these four lines silently as we breathe in and out:

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment!

“Breathing in, I calm my body.” Reciting this line is like drinking a glass of cool lemonade on a hot day—you can feel the coolness permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel my breath calming my body and mind.

“Breathing out, I smile.” You know a smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face. Wearing a smile on your face is a sign that you are master of yourself.

“Dwelling in the present moment.” While I sit here, I don’t think of anything else. I sit here, and I know exactly where I am.

“I know this is a wonderful moment.” It is a joy to sit, stable and at ease, and return to our breathing, our smiling, our true nature. Our appointment with life is in the present moment. If we do not have peace and joy right now, when will we have peace and joy—tomorrow, or after tomorrow? What is preventing us from being happy right now? As we follow our breathing, we can say, simply, “Calming, Smiling, Present moment, Wonderful moment.”

This exercise is not just for beginners. Many of us who have practiced meditation and conscious breathing for forty or fifty years continue to practice in this same way, because this kind of exercise is so important and so easy.

Hanh, T. N. (1995). Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. Random House. (pp. 8-9)

The body as earth, water, fire, wind....

In this first foundational teaching of the Buddha called The Four Foundations or Establishments of Mindfulness, the first of these is Mindfulness of the Body.  The body’s centrality in our meditation practice is evidenced by mindfulness of breathing which is almost universally taught in Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions alike.  Mindfulness of breathing is of course centered in the body and a number of variations of that practice off shoot from that - mindfulness of hands and feet or touch points or various body scans.  Some of these practices have the purpose of calming and healing, stabilizing, stilling the mind and body.  Some have a different purpose which is to wake us up to the realities of our bodies - that they will age, that they are vulnerable and bound to suffer sickness, and that they will ultimately die, are not permanent.  Along the way we learn that the body is in the process of constant change.  If there is a state we like, we can be sure that will eventually disappear.  If there is a state we don’t like, we can be sure that will eventually disappear.

Last week we investigated the first of three practices designed to calm our reactions to the body - the anatomy of the body - especially skin, flesh, and bones.  The purpose of the meditation was to loosen any idealization of the body, to contemplate the body as made up of anatomical parts and therefore get a little perspective on our bodies.  All human bodies have skin, have flesh, have bones.  We are united with other human bodies in these similarities.  To reflect on this body with dispassion, with calm contemplation, allows us to see the body more objectively - with less idealization and also less denigration.  The body is just the body.  Some parts may be appealing but that is temporary.  Some parts may be disgusting but that is an emotional reaction beyond the practical function of those parts.  The body is just doing its job of keeping us alive and not all of it is pretty.  This meditation allows us to let go of our fierce attachment to the body being a certain way and also let go of our aversion to the body being just the way it is.

The second investigation which we’ll do this week called "The Reflection on the Material Elements” looks at the body as made of elements - earth, water, fire, and wind.  These terms may seem outdated and esoteric but are very useful ways of looking at the qualities that make up our bodies and seeing how these qualities are common to all matter.  Our bodies are matter just like trees, earth, rocks, oceans, other animals.  The earth element represents the qualities of hardness, that which is unyielding or tough.  The bones of the body are the prime example but tough connective tissue comes to mind as well.  The water element represents qualities of wetness but also qualities of cohesion.  Nothing sticks together without water.  The third contemplation is the fire element - qualities of temperature, of heat and cold in the body which we mostly feel through our skins.  The fourth element is the wind element - the breath in the body but also movement.  

This meditation helps us reflect on these qualities inside the body and outside the body - in other bodies and in all matter.  The hardness of tree trunks.  Wetness and water in streams and lakes, cohesion in mud.  The fire element can be found in all warm-bodies animals, in rocks in the sun, but also the coldness of snow and icicles.  And the wind element surrounds us in every breeze, but also the movement of grasses, birds, clouds, branches. We can begin to see our kinship as matter to all matter.  We are a part of nature, of the universe.  

We can also see how nature/other objects of matter outside our bodies enter our bodies and become part of them - food, water, heat, air.  In fact, our dependence on these other objects of matter is complete.  Without food, water, air, warmth, we would perish.  

This meditation also helps us see more realistically how much control we have over our bodies.  Less than we think is the answer.  We have control over certain aspects of our movement and our activities but our bodies carry on the process of digestion, circulation, repair, elimination without our help.  In addition, there is a whole grey area of automaticity where we think we have control but a mechanism of habitual behavior has actually taken a lot of the doing out of our hands - like walking and tying our shoes, brushing our teeth, walking up and down stairs.  If we have to think about these activities and direct our bodies to do them, we’d still be telling each body part how to move in order to get dressed in the morning.

Such reflections can help us begin to see that our identification with the body as me is perhaps overstating the case.  It’s not that it is anybody else’s body.  It’s just that a lot of the body does itself.  We aren’t directing our breathing (99.999% of the time), digestion, blood flow and oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange, etc.  And when we look a little deeper, we realize we are not even directing our thoughts.  Speech flies out of our mouths and we realize we didn’t actually intend to say that.  We make a plan to go get the mail and end up cleaning out a closet instead. We might wonder just who is in charge around here?  

This contemplation can be challenging.  Reflecting on our own impermanence goes against the way most humans live.  Or animals for that matter.  So self-compassion is a helpful practice to remember when we feel resistance to letting go of the body (even in thought) or lessening our identification with it.  These practices are meant to be done over time and incrementally.  When we feel ourselves approaching a wall in our own ability to let go, we need to turn to self-care and more soothing practices, breath awareness, loving kindness and compassion, body scans which center on the experience of body in this present moment, sensations of pressure, temperature, vibration.  

Forcing ourselves to look at our own impermanence can stiffen our resistance to it.  

Some aspects are easier and more pleasant to contemplate such as our relationship to nature and to others.  When we see that all humans have similar bodies, it can help us connect to others, to have empathy for their struggles, to be in community.  And such connections can feed and energize us, can fill us with the abundance of love and kinship for all.  And compassion for our own vulnerable bodies, our own pain and suffering can spill over our boundaries and radiate out to others opening us to the shared endeavor of being human with other humans.

What the Buddha discovered for himself is that attachment to and identification with the body are impediments to freedom from suffering encountered on the path. These practices are skillful means to investigate and loosen these bonds

Ground Hog's Day...and the Body Scan

Today is Ground Hog’s Day.  And maybe the proverbial ground hog came out and saw his shadow.  He or she could.  It’s certainly sunny enough.  The question is whether his or her burrow is still buried under mountains of snow.  

An NPR discussion likened it to a modern day illustration of samsara.  A man wakes up and bumbles through a day and then has to spend eternity repeating that day to get it right before he can move on to another day.  The original script called for 1000 nights (Arabian?) narrowed down to 40 for Hollywood.  Nevertheless, a fairly lengthy undertaking reminiscent of many of our own struggles for real change in our lives.  

Those who took MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) know that body scan is the first practice introduced. The instructions are to lie on the ground or sit in a chair, to close or lower our eyes and begin to pay attention to our bodies starting with the left big toe, then the next toe and the next, moving our attention from body part to body part from toe to head paying attention to what can be sensed in each part - pressure- hard or soft, sensations and textures - rough or smooth, rigid or pliable, temperature - warm, cool,  vibrations, resonances, air moving on skin.  If there is no sensation, simply noticing that and moving on.  The practice was experiential and over the three weeks of practice, students became more sensitized to the variety of sensation that might be present in the leg or the upper arm or the belly or even inside the head.  Sometimes the experiences were thoughts or feelings, memories, fears, old injuries, grief about what was missing.  Certainly many of the thoughts were about body image, not liking this, liking that.  

Some people thrived on this practice - becoming more relaxed and more attuned to the body with each passing day, learning what the word embodiment meant from the inside out.  One teacher was famous for putting whole swaths of the class to sleep during his guided body scans. Others struggled to feel comfortable in their own bodies. 

This was the body scan developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 for MBSR.  The body scan predated JKZ, however, developed probably in Myanmar with the lineage of S.N. Goenka and taught in living memory by Goenka himself.  A more general body contemplation from which it was derived has roots in the Buddha’s teachings as in the Sattipathana Sutta in this way:

 4. The Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body

And further, monks, a monk reflects on this very body enveloped by the skin and full of manifold impurity, from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down, thinking thus: "There are in this body hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney, heart, liver, midriff, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, saliva, nasal mucus, synovial fluid, urine.”

Here “from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down" is thought to mean a comprehensive contemplation rather than a systematic scan developed by the masters of Myanmar and later by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  The experience of contemplating skin, flesh, and bones is more conceptual rather than experiential investigation of sensations but the purpose of rooting mindfulness in the body is the same.

Venerable Analayo introduced the topic of the origins of the body scan in this way:

This article explores the historical background to the body scan practiced in MBSR by tracing it back via vipassanā meditation taught in Myanmar to a particular interpretation of the third step in the canonical instructions on mindfulness of breathing. Although the body scan as such would presumably have been unknown in early Buddhism, its practice does appear to have developed from an aspect of perhaps the most popular meditation practice in ancient and modern Buddhist traditions: mindfulness of breathing.*

I have practiced the anatomical parts contemplation a number of times.  But it wasn’t until taking this Sattispatthana course with and as developed by Venerable Analayo that I more fully comprehended how different the practice was in MBSR from what the Buddha instructed in this teaching.  In the Sattipathana Sutta, the contemplation of the anatomical parts is less about the experience of different sensations in the body and more about bringing mindfulness to the different parts of the anatomy, mostly unseen and unfelt, and holding these parts - the pleasant, the unpleasant, the neither pleasant nor unpleasant in calm non-reactive awareness.  The Buddha called this section “Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body.”  The practice was intended to balance or offset the sense of desire the body evoked in the young monks - to bring a balanced view of the body to the celibate monks and to enable them to root their mindfulness in their bodies without getting carried away by desire.  

The idea of the practice for modern day practitioners is to gain a more balanced view of the body - tempering any aversion we may have to our bodies, how they look, how society judges them and calming any sensual cravings inspired by our bodies and the bodies of others.  In this practice we are invited to view our bodies much the way a farmer would view a bag of grains that he plans to sow: 

 Just as if there were a double-mouthed provision bag full of various kinds of grain such as hill paddy, paddy, green gram, cow-peas, sesamum, and husked rice, and a man with sound eyes, having opened that bag, were to take stock of the contents thus: "This is hill paddy, this is paddy, this is green gram, this is cow-pea, this is sesamum, this is husked rice." Just so, monks, a monk reflects on this very body enveloped by the skin and full of manifold impurity, from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down…”

Tonight we’ll practice the body scan in this style as developed by Venerable Analayo and found on his resources page on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.  Ven. Analayo simplifies the scan to three general body parts - skin, flesh, and bones.  A practitioner can expand upon these three general categories or not as suits their practice.

This practice and the two that follow - The Reflection on the Material Elements and The Nine Cemetery Contemplations (Reflection on Mortality) - are not generally taught in the west in Vipassana or Insight courses as they are powerful practices and can be uncomfortable and unbalancing without the firm establishment of mindfulness to monitor the impact of the practice and its effects.  Many  practitioners are better served gaining a basis of mindfulness of the body rooted in breath awareness or in experiential or sensory investigations of the body first.

We will follow this practice with other more nurturing body scan practices before moving to the next practice in the teaching. 

*Anālayo, B. Buddhist Antecedents to the Body Scan Meditation. Mindfulness 11, 194–202 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-019-01259-8

Mindfulness of the Body, the Anatomy...

Mindfulness as we have learned and discussed is the quality of being aware, of knowing our experience in this present moment.  It is not the same as consciousness as we can be conscious but not really paying attention to what we are experiencing.  So awakening to our present moment experience is our goal in practice.  In Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Jon Kabat-Zinn added that there is a quality of non-judgement to mindfulness.  Joseph Goldstein, esteemed meditation teacher and one of three founders of Insight Meditation Society (IMS) goes even further to say that mindfulness has a compassionate quality to it.  And mindfulness is about seeing things clearly, as they really are.  A judging mind is distorting that seeing.  

So the first foundation or Satipatthana to be explored is mindfulness of the body.  The mind can find stability and a sense of calm in mindfulness of the body.  When we cultivate mindfulness of the body and integrate it into our daily lives, we inhabit our whole bodies with awareness and can find a refuge and also a more intimate connection with what our present moment experience is - moment by moment.

And the very first practice the Buddha taught was mindfulness of breathing.  From Access to Insight, the English translation of the relevant passage in the "Sattipatthana Sutta:  The Foundation of Mindfulness":

And how does a monk live contemplating the body in the body?

Herein, monks, a monk, having gone to the forest, to the foot of a tree or to an empty place, sits down with his legs crossed, keeps his body erect and his mindfulness alert.[3]

Ever mindful he breathes in, mindful he breathes out. Breathing in a long breath, he knows, "I am breathing in a long breath"; breathing out a long breath, he knows, "I am breathing out a long breath"; breathing in a short breath, he knows, "I am breathing in a short breath"; breathing out a short breath, he knows, "I am breathing out a short breath."

"Experiencing the whole (breath-) body, I shall breathe in," thus he trains himself. "Experiencing the whole (breath-) body, I shall breathe out," thus he trains himself. "Calming the activity of the (breath-) body, I shall breathe in," thus he trains himself. "Calming the activity of the (breath-) body, I shall breathe out," thus he trains himself.*

The Buddha advised practicing this breath awareness practice internally and externally, arising and passing away, with a clear mindfulness that there is a body "to the extent necessary for knowledge and mindfulness,” and without clinging to anything in the world.  So the purpose of this meditation is to bring awareness to our internal experience of breathing, our awareness of the experiences of others breathing (external), the impermanent aspect of the breath (arising and passing away), with bare awareness of the experience of the breath (without add ons) and with detachment toward the breath and the experience of the breath.  The breath arises.  The breath passes away.  Without judging or desire for a certain kind of breath, the breath arises.  Without clinging, the breath passes away.  

The Buddha then urged mindfulness in all the four postures - sitting, standing, walking, and lying down - meant to cover all the postures of the body.  And he urged mindfulness in all activities - eating, resting, caring for the body, moving around, lifting an arm, talking with others.  

Then the Buddha introduced practices that would address various attitudes we all have or develop toward the body.  Perhaps the most pressing for teaching young monks was a practice to counter sensual desire.  Sensual desire is like a flame that pulls the meditator away from practice and into a fantasy world of the mind.  If only this, then I would be happy.  The fantasy is that true happiness can be found through sensual desire.  

So the Buddha taught the practice of meditation on the anatomy.  This is called The Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body.

This meditation on the anatomy has the purpose of countering the fantasies one might have about the beauty of the body when in the grip of sensual desire.  The anatomy is broken down into 32 body parts. Venerable Analayo simplified this practice into a body scan of three major body parts - skin, flesh, and bones - from which the rest can be added or not.  The body scan is familiar to MBSR grads as the first three weeks are spent engaging in a scan of the body part by part from toe to head or head to toe. 

The purpose of the body meditations contained in the Sattipatthana Sutta is several fold.  The mind can become trained to focus on first one area of the body and then the next improving the ability to stay present.  The mind contemplates different areas of the body and becomes more sensitive to sensations that are experienced there.  And the mind can experience the different experiences of liking or disliking, approving, judging, fantasizing about, elevating the body within the context of this meditation.  One might become aware of aversion to one’s own body.  Mindfulness can help us see these judgements as distortions added by messages from the outside world - media especially.  Or conversely one might become enamored of the body of self or another.  This meditation brings a more balanced view of beauty and repulsiveness to our view of the body so that we can become more detached, not clinging to anything in this world, not clinging to the beauty of our own bodies or the beauty in the bodies of others.  But also not gripped with revulsion toward the ordinary, messy processes that keep this body alive even into aging and sickness.  We can learn to let go of these judgments and simply see the body as this functioning foundation of our existence, similar to other bodies in that regard.  Comparisons to other bodies begin to fall away.  The body is simply a body.  

Ven. Analayo quotes the Buddha as urging us to see our bodies as dispassionately as one might study a collection of grains in a bag, simply, There is a shoulder, there is an arm…there is a body just as one might say, there is a grain of rice, there is a grain of wheat, there is a grain of millet.  

Tonight we’ll listen to the first guided meditation on the body - the anatomy of the body - offered by Ven. Analayo on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website.

Initially, the add-ons, the judgements, opinions, wishes, frustrations, desires we have about our bodies may surface in an active 

way.  But with repetition, our minds settle, extraneous thoughts become less frequent and we begin to see the body as just a body, the skin as just skin, flesh as just flesh, bones as just bones.  The experience will tend to become more neutral and perhaps more interesting as we open to what is actually there in this examination of the skin of the foot or the leg rather than the distortions of beauty ideals.  

We may become more aware of sensations in different parts of the body that are pleasant or unpleasant or neutral.  We can become more accepting of these differences - there is discomfort here, there is a pleasant sensation there, there is no sensation or only slight sensation in a third location.  We become more accepting that our feet might not be model perfect but they are feet and they get the job done.  Or if we are missing a body part, we can become more compassionate to the suffering of the body, more accepting of the loss and grateful for our continued existence.  We will also surely become more aware of the impermanence, the vulnerable nature of the body, and learn to be more accepting of that too.

And with the repeated practice of mindfulness of the body, we will learn to inhabit our bodies more fully throughout our days, in touch with our experiences through the sensations of touch, feeling, emotion, moods that come through the body. This embodiment helps us stay grounded and not so easily pulled, enticed, cast down by the quick silver passing of thoughts in our minds. 

For some, the body scan may be more problematic if, for instance, there is considerable pain or injury in one area or if there has been trauma in the body that activates when the body scan is practiced.  Here it is important to use our mindfulness to tell us how we are doing with the practice and, rather than blindly soldiering on if it becomes difficult, to discern difficulties and make a compassionate assessment about whether the practice is beneficial or not. The practice can modified or omitted in favor of one of the other body-centered practices if meditation on anatomy is triggering.  

*https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.010.nysa.html

MIndfulness in daily life?????

In many ways this has been a tumultuous time and part of what I having been doing is to engage in vigils, in visibility campaigns, and in actually organizing an event to protest ICE on our streets and to remember the many people, many fellow human beings who have been killed, died in custody, and been disappeared by this unjust, violent, undisciplined, and misguided group in our federal government.

These recent events and others like them throughout the year lead us to wonder how we can be dedicated practitioners of the Buddha’s teachings and relate in wholesome ways to the difficult times we live in.

I am currently listening to the teachings on the Satipatthana Sutta given by renowned Buddhist scholar, teacher, practitioner, Venerable Analayo.  This is familiar territory for me as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness is the basis of most of the retreats I have ever sat.  These teachings are famliar to many others as well as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness formed the backbone of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course.  In that context, the teachings had been adapted to omit the Buddhist references as it was believed (and was true in 1979) that Buddhist references would “scare off” folks.  In this past year we have visited these teachings again in these pages from the Buddha’s point of view referring to the text of the Satipatthana Sutta as found in the Pali Canon. 

So, much of what the Satipatthana Sutta is familiar to me.  However…

First, this is a deep teaching and with every pass something new can be learned, some new understanding of the path from suffering to freedom can be gained, some deepening of practice into more of what we already know.  Venerable Analayo has spent considerable time and three books learning and investigating this teaching and has come to a new understanding on how to integrate this teaching into a path of practice. 

Second, the course material asked us to consider how our practice is integrated into our daily lives.  Practice on the cushion, or walking meditation, or any other form of formal practice is practice dedicated to the cultivation of mindfulness beyond all else.  Daily life is what happens as soon as we get up off the cushion or bench, leave our meditation spot and go make our coffee or whatever else we do.  

And as much as meditation teachers can urge us to maintain continuity of awareness, off our awareness goes as we slip back into the tasks we have before us.  

Venerable Analayo urges us to remember that this forgetting to be mindful is not under our control.  Does that sound familiar?  Most of us have heard this in MBSR or in almost any retreat on mindfulness.  Mind wandering is not under our control.  And you might remember its corollary that waking up to the wandering mind is also not under our control.  But what happens when we do finally wake up is very much our decision to make.  Do we stay mindful?  Or allow our minds to slide back into the slipstream of living life while not paying attention?

If we are to integrate our practice into our daily lives, which many of us have attempted and been somewhat successful at from time to time, how do we go about being mindful more of the time?  Forget being mindful all of the time.  That just isn’t going to happen.  Some of the time, like when we stumble on the curb, have one of those near misses on the highway, watch a mother snatch her child away from its beeline toward the street, mindfulness is no problem.  It’s there – fully and completely, with pounding heart and wide-eyed breathlessness.

How do we nurture our mindfulness so that it arises more often in normal, non-emergent, daily life - when we’re walking through our homes, shopping, paying bills, cooking, showering and taking care of our bodies?  And even more difficult, how do we stay present and mindful when we’re talking on the phone, texting, having lunch with friends, returning emails, having a disagreement with a family member?

To step back a bit, do we know what this mindfulness will look like?  And do we fully understand that being more mindful can help reduce our stress and suffering?

This week I confronted the question about integrating practice with daily life.  How much was practice integrated into my daily life now?  How would I increase it?

I found my first answer to the questions was I don’t know.  It really is outside my control. I know I am mindful at times throughout my day.  If I have an emotional reaction of fear or irritation or anger or even joy, I am usually mindful. So how come I’m not clearer about the moments I’m mindful and the moments I’m not?

This morning an insight came to me. 

It was simply because while I might be mindful of seeing a sight, hearing a sound, feeling a sensation, even thinking a thought, the moments or experiences I best remember as mindful moments are the times when I am not just aware of an object, but I am also aware of being aware.  Awareness turned inward.  Aware of the experience of awareness itself.  

The Pali word sati is about remembering.  When we are aware and alert, when we pay attention, we are more fully experiencing that present moment – uncolored by thoughts and opinions, memories or expectations (or we are also aware of all these distorting internal inputs).  When we more fully experience the present moment, we see more clearly.  We understand more fully what actually is and what we are adding to it.  And because of our heightened attention, we have a clearer, more accurate experience of that moment suffused with kindness and compassion and retained as a clearer, kinder memory.  This clear seeing and clear, compassionate remembering allows us to make wiser choices in our current and future actions.

We will explore the many ways we can strengthen the presence of mindfulness in our every day lives in the coming weeks.

I am deeply grateful to all of you for your support of my ability to share the Buddha’s teachings.  It has been a joy to share these teachings and to know that many of your lives have been profoundly changed by learning and practicing what the Buddha taught.  That I could be a part of the dissemination of the teachings at this place and time in history has been a precious gift to me. 

My life has changed around me, has moved into a new phase. This happens.  You may recognize it.  One of my closest friends, an anchor for me and many others, is no longer in my life.  She has left a huge hole in the lives of her community of friends and we are all adjusting.  The waters flow toward the sea.  The truth of impermanence has temporarily stunned with its brilliance and clarity.  And I for one need to spend some time updating my understanding of my days that I can flow more easily on these waters.  

Just as the seasons of the year are suspended in the shortest days, the darkest nights before the light returns, just as each breath is suspended at the end of the out-breath in a stillness born of boundless space before the next in-breath begins, the seasons of our lives come to the briefest of standstills, the end of something, the beginning of something else.  Can we feel it?  Enter into it?  Suspend all thought, effort, struggle?  Listening, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado says, on the rim of vast silence?

Has My Heart Gone to Sleep?

Has my heart gone to sleep?
Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped work, the waterwheels
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?

No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming - 
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of vast silence.

~~ Antonio Machado

Silent night...

The holiday season is now upon with all its divergent energies.  The winter solstice has arrived and the season is suspended in a balance.  Nothing is actually reversing in the physical world.  The earth is still on its 23 degree axis, spinning more or less around its own magnetic poles.  It still moves through space on its elliptical journey around the sun.  All amazing facts we've learned about our world.  Other planets in our solar system continue to do the same at their own rates, on their own tilts, each one reaching out with its gravitation pull to affect each of the others.  And yet the effect here on earth is that the days get shorter and shorter, finally reaching a nadir, a point of stillness for a pause of some days (which isn’t really a pause, just that the increments of change are less than a minute), until slowly, almost imperceptibly, the length of days begins to increase again - first by a minute, then two, three, four.  Our experience of it is quite dramatic, that the days get shorter and shorter and then reverse and get longer and longer.  Yet the movement of the planets continues forward in an elliptical pattern.  

And into the still point in the seasons, all over the world our various cultures and religions have plunked down the pagan Solstice, the Christian Christmas (even though Jesus was apparently born in what we know of as July), the Jewish Hanukkah, and the African American kwanzaa, all brightening the darkness with light and celebration that serve to distract us from the night.  I sometimes feel the frantic activity around the holiday season is akin to primitive peoples going out with drums and noise-makers, fires and sacrifices, to reach into the inky darkness and will the light to return by desperate wanting and sheer volume.

These movements of the planets that change our days and nights remind us how vast are the forces of nature that create the conditions for our lives.  

The effect of all these celebrations is a great coming together of friends, of families, of communities.  Gift giving binds us together with generosity and gratitude.  Cooking and breaking bread together, creating complex meals with sumptuous Yule logs or pecan pies or decorated Christmas cookies please the senses and create an atmosphere of plenty and contentment.

While we can easily see how all the celebrations get thrown out of balance by the need to make profits at Christmas and the greed that can overwhelm the nobler forces of the holidays, it’s perhaps helpful to come back to what we love about the holidays and keep the twin wholesome qualities of generosity and gratitude in mind.  

We are grateful for many things - our families, our friends, our communities, our pets, our homes, our safety, our earth, air, water, food, for the gifts, for the celebrations, for moments together.  We offer those we care about presents, celebrations, song, colored lights, invitations.  We make donations to organizations in order to help brighten the lives of beings around the world, to ease the suffering, to comfort and help sustain.  Our caring in this season and throughout the year is why this world works as well as it does.  And it does work as well as it does.  

It is up to each of us to offer our hearts and compassion and generosity and caring to the world - near to us and far away.  The beautiful thing is that we want to do that.  Our hearts are tender and responsive and can be moved by the plight of our friends and neighbors and also by those on the far side of this round earth tilting on its 23 degree axis, spinning around its magnetic poles, and flinging itself through space on an elliptical journey around the sun.  Millions and millions of people are giving and sharing, comforting and caring, raising our voices in song, cooking meals, decorating cookies and homes, giving clothes and money, greetings and love to as many beings as we can during the stillness of this season and then later throughout the year-long mystery of movement.  It is the best of us.  And we can feel that quality of love and good will spilling forth from us.  We can feel it especially strongly in this suspension, this stillness, this emptiness, this vast space of being.  

That emptiness allows us to open to spaciousness, to include more and more beings in our widening hearts, to contemplate the idea of good will to all.

For nestled in the heart of all religions, all celebrations, all contemplative practice is the strange and beautiful, uplifting and transformative notion of good will to all and peace on earth.

I wish you all a beautiful holiday of connection - first with yourself and then in ever widening circles, with all beings.

Beginning again..

In January through the beginning of March, I myself will be taking Venerable Analayo’s 8-week course on the Sattipathana Sutta - or the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  These four foundations are Mindfulness of the Body, Mindfulness of Feelings, Mindfulness of the Mind, and Mindfulness of the Dharma (or the way things are).  We explored this teaching last year and earlier this year.  I always intended to go through it with you again because it is a life long teaching which deepens as our practice and understanding deepens.  So this will be a wonderful iopportunity for all of us to delve into the Four Foundations of Mindfulness again - with the understanding of one of our great teachers, scholars, and practitioners in the background.  

The opportunity and the invitation here both for those of you who are familiar with this teaching and those who may have missed all or part of the previous teachings is to start over, to begin again at the beginning and go all the way through exploring the very foundations of mindfulness - both in the teaching itself and in our own experience of mindfulness - as Andrew Olendzki wrote last week -  “investigated moment by investigated moment.”  

T.S. Eliot’s famous lines from “Little Gidding” also come to mind:  

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."

Many of you who took MBSR first learned of mindfulness of the body, of feelings and of the mind during that course.  Mindfulness of Dharmas was not called that in MBSR, of course.  Nevertheless, mindfulness of hindrances, of the enlightenment factors, and of the four Noble Truths also were part of the MBSR experience. 

This Sattipatthana teaching is fundamentally a teaching about how to practice mindfulness, how to bring mindfulness to every aspect of our experience.  The field is vast and the task can be daunting but the experience is rich and the practice fruitful.  And this Sattipatthana Sutta is the clearest, most complete teaching in the entire Pali canon (body of teachings) on how to understand and enlarge our practice of mindfulness.  This deepening of mindfulness goes to the very core of our practice and of our being as Andrew Olendzki made clear in the last week’s teaching.

And so we are cloaked in igno­rance and tied to craving; and we are also incapable of discerning a beginning or an end to the flowing-on known as saṃsāra (Samsara). Taken as a whole, this passage is laying out the nature of the human condition and the limitations of our ability to see the impermanence of our own ex­perience. It shows how, from one mo­ment to the next..., we are compelled to move on and on and on, continuing to construct and inhabit our world. And both the be­ginning and end of the entire process are entirely beyond the capacity of our minds to conceive...

So this passage sets the stage for us…No story is going to help us much in figuring out what we’re doing here. All we have is what is right in front of us, and that is obscured by the ignorance and craving we continue to manifest.

But this is by no means an insignificant starting point. The beginning and end of the process might be unknow­able, but we can know what is present to our immediate experience. Since there is no point in wasting energy on speculation about origins or destinies, our attention is best placed on investi­gating the present and unpacking the forces that keep it all flowing onward. This is really where Buddhism starts and where it thrives—in the present moment. We have no idea how many moments have gone before or how many will yet unfold—either cosmically or individually—but each mo­ment that lies before our gaze is, poten­tially, infinitely deep.

The critical factor is the quality of our attention. If a moment goes by unnoticed, then it is so short it might not even have occurred. But if we can attend very carefully to its passage, then we can be­gin to see its nature. The closer we look, the more we see. The more mindful we can be, the more depth reality holds for us.

The Buddhist tradition points out some of the dynamics of the present moment—its arising and passing away, its interrelatedness to other moments, its constructed qualities, the interde­pendence of its factors—and then we have to work with it from there. The only place to start is the only place to finish—in this very moment. And that of course is why the experiential di­mension to Buddhism—the practice of mindful awareness—is so crucial. You can’t think your way out of this. You just have to be with the arising and passing of experience, and gain as much understanding from the unfold­ing of the moments as you can.

Step by step, investigated moment by investigated moment, the illusions that obscure things and the desires that distort things will recede as they yield to the advance of insight and understanding. In this direction lies greater clarity and freedom.

**"The Context of Impermanence" (Insight Journal, Fall 1999) https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/the-context-of-impermanence/.