Mindfulness is not some mystical magical quality

From: Five Elements Five Dakinis 9

Full transcript
Audioclip

Now as I said a few moments ago one is never actually in balance. Instead what happens is you become more and more adept at detecting imbalances, and are able to address them earlier and earlier. So there’s more continuity and less huge fluctuation. And it feels like you’re doing very little, but a great deal is being accomplished. 

So we rely on awareness for the detection of imbalance. In particular, meditation, we have two components of attention. The first, and here I’m using the Mahayana definitions which are different from the Theravadan definitions. Two components of attention are mindfulness and awareness. Not the big awareness, the direct awareness, just awareness. 

Mindfulness here is defined as being present with the object of attention. So if that’s your breath you’re present with your breath. If it’s a book your attention is resting on the book. If it’s nature of mind you’re experiencing nature of mind. 

Mindfulness is the quality that you always start with. And basically you establish a connection with mindfulness when you are able to rest on the breath for three or more breaths in a row. You have then experienced mindfulness. So it’s not some mystical magical quality. Very ordinary quality, just a certain steadiness in attention.

Detecting imbalance

From: Five Elements Five Dakinis 9

Full transcript

Audioclip

Now as I said a few moments ago one is never actually in balance. Instead what happens is you become more and more adept at detecting imbalances, and are able to address them earlier and earlier. So there’s more continuity and less huge fluctuation. And it feels like you’re doing very little, but a great deal is being accomplished. 

So we rely on awareness for the detection of imbalance. In particular, meditation, we have two components of attention. The first, and here I’m using the Mahayana definitions which are different from the Theravadan definitions. Two components of attention are: mindfulness and awareness. Not the big awareness, the direct awareness, just awareness. 

Mindfulness here is defined as being present with the object of attention. So if that’s your breath you’re present with your breath. If it’s a book your attention is resting on the book. If it’s nature of mind you’re experiencing nature of mind. 

Mindfulness is the quality that you always start with. And basically you establish a connection with mindfulness when you are able to rest on the breath for three or more breaths in a row. You have then experienced mindfulness. So it’s not some mystical magical quality. Very ordinary quality just a certain steadiness in attention.

Audioclip 

The second quality, awareness, is defined as knowing what’s going on. And all of you have experienced this in your meditation. Attention becomes steady and there you are resting say with the breath. At the same time you are aware of all that other stuff which is very useful, because it is in that broader awareness that you’re able to detect whether things are in balance or not. “Am I going to sleep. Am I thinking?” etc.

In our practice we get more and more adept at detecting when we’re moving away from clear stable attention. We can move away in one direction, lapsing into dullness; in the other directions lapsing into busyness.

The five elements allow us to bring a higher level of attention to the whole matter of balance. So here the steadiness of attention would be like the earth element. Clarity is the water element. Knowing is the fire element. The dynamic quality is the air element. And the indefinable open quality is the void element.

Now it’s not particularly helpful to sit while you meditate analyzing the quality of your attention like crazy. It takes you out of the practice basically. A lot of us have this problem. We sit there and we have this running commentary on how we’re doing. Anybody else know that one? “You’re doing fine now, just keep going, yep, good [laughter]. Not! You’re getting a little dull, yep. No, don’t follow that thought. That’s it! Good!” [Laughter]. It’s just thought.

We can do the same thing in all areas of our lives. In our relationships the support of nurturing quality is earth. The flow of emotional energy back and forth: water. The passion interest, etc: fire. The ideals that you aspire to: air. And the space in which all this takes place: void.

Right recollection, right mindfulness

From: Money and Value 4
Full Transcript
Audioclip

Right recollection, right mindfulness. We're going to have to retire the word mindfulness. It's been hopelessly corrupted in English. Its fundamental meaning is to remember. To remember where you are and what you are doing. That's what mindfulness means. The word in Tibetan, Sanskrit and Pali means to remember. So I'm not sure where mindfulness came from English-wise. But it did. 

It's constructive and helpful to remember. And there are certain things that is not constructive and not helpful to remember. Wallowing in the memory of things still done and done to others harm and things that were done to you is not particularly constructive. It reinforces a whole bunch of tendencies etc. So there's a way of practicing mindfulness or recollection which is beneficial. That's what right mindfulness is.

Note:  More on mindfulness in: A Trackless Path II, 5 Eightfold Path 2, 

Five-Step Practice (Seeing from the Inside)

In teaching people, I give them this meditation whenever they're encountering something that prevents them from resting. If one can rest, then one rests and lets the resting deepen on its own. When one encounters something difficult, then more specific effort and attention, as in this practice, can help.--Ken McLeod

Five-step mindfulness practice:

1.
Breathing in I feel this emotion/pain/problem
Breathing out I feel this emotion
(detailed guidance) 

2.
Breathing in I feel the reactions to this emotion
Breathing out I feel the reactions to this emotion
(detailed guidance) 

3.
Breathing in I feel calm in this emotion
Breathing out I feel calm in this emotion
(detailed guidance) 

4.
Breathing in I feel at ease in this emotion
Breathing out I feel at ease in this emotion
(detailed guidance) 

5.
Breathing in I understand/know how this emotion arises
Breathing out I understand how this arises
(detailed guidance)

Related Material:
Working with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.
Fom A Trackless Path II, a clip on how the five steps evolve.

Ken often calls the five-step practice Seeing from the Inside.

To Get Out Of Debt

How to get out of debt? Bring attention to your spending!

I'm really enjoying the Eightfold Path (8FP) podcast and it relates very much to a lovely quote from the very end of TAN14:

So people sometimes think they have to exert great efforts to change. No. Most of the time you just have to change one little bit there, and an awful lot of other things will just follow from that. The difficulty may be in finding that one little bit to change, but we'll talk about as we go forward.

So continuing in this vein, in the first session of 8FP Ken talks about the confusion that results when people try to practice the 8FP as it is usually presented, with the large number of injunctions related to each of the eight branches. The very complex elaboration of this actually makes it impossible to practice. He suggests that a more fruitful approach to practicing the 8FP might be to bring attention to how we are viewing things, our intentions, how we speak, how we behave, earn our living and so on. And he points out that what people often do is take what is actually a description of the results of practice as the method of practice (see pg 58-60 of Wake Up To Your Life for more about this).

Ken then goes on to give a number of examples about bringing attention to how one views things and to one's intentions. One of these examples is about the experience of couple of people who came to him for advice about how to apply mindfulness as an approach to getting out of debt. Here's the clip and transcript of that example.

To Get Out Of Debt (from 8FP01: Eightfold Path (class) 00:25:50.00 - 00:28:46.00)

(download into iTunes)

Now when we start bringing our attention to our intention in each moment that we live, very interesting things are going to happen. Several years ago I had two people who came to me because they had built up sizeable debt and they wanted to get out of debt using mindfulness. Okay. Well, I'm not a debt counsellor but it's not rocket science either. The first thing you do is you start tracking expenses, tracking everything that you buy. That's the very first thing you do if you want to get out of debt. And one person just started to do that right away. The other person, it took them hmmm, four months of constant encouragement and reinforcement and me threatening to quit until they started tracking. They just started bringing attention to the action of shopping. And as soon as they did, their shopping patterns changed because they started to get in touch with the intention that was operating. And they would go, "Oh, I don't really need this right now." And just tracking what they were expending stuff on reduced the amount that they were spending to the point that they were pretty well breaking even. That wasn't getting them out of debt but it was stopping them getting further into debt, which is good. We'll get to those efforts later.

Now the next thing, the next effort was to push that intention even further, or that attention further, so they started to look at what were their priorities in their life as evidenced by what they were buying. And when they started to look at that again, their patterns changed. And they found whole areas that they didn't need to spend money on anymore and that moved them to the point of being able to generate a surplus and hence moving out of debt. And both of them successfully moved out of debt, completely out of debt, in about a year and a half, two years.

Then they had a real problem. They suddenly had much more money and they didn't know what to do with it. But that's another story.

Releasing Emotional Reactions 5

RER Phase Five (from RER 02: Releasing Emotional Reactions (retreat) 00:39:40.00 - 00:43:16.30)

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The fifth phase happens naturally, one could say, spontaneously, and it happens when you actually join with the feeling. That is, there's no longer any separation, between the knowing and the experience. Or to put it another way, the illusion of being separate from the experience crumbles. And what happens there is that an understanding naturally arises. You understand the feeling. You understand what it is, how it arises, and you can be fully in the experience of the feeling and there is no confusion. So the fifth step is, "Breathing in, I understand this feeling. Breathing out, I understand this feeling."

Now, when that understanding arises, often it will take some cognitive form. You say, "Oh, it's this and this and this. I've had this insight etc." Don't hang onto the insight. When you go to the insight, you actually fall into distraction. It arises, rest in the understanding, not the formulation. The understanding or the knowing is like a quality of knowing there. Rest in that. It will feel, most of the time, like you have no reference. But that knowing is the union of experience. Now you are no longer separate from what you experience.

So this technique uses the breath as a way of coming into the union of knowing in experience. Go through these five steps, or five phrases. Let them unfold naturally. Thich Nhat Hahn uses the image of holding a flower, but the flower hasn't opened, and your attention is like the sun. And just being in the breathing, letting your attention be with this flower, then the flower, in it's own time, opens in the warmth of your attention.

Releasing Emotional Reactions 4

RER Phase Four (from RER 02: Releasing Emotional Reactions (retreat) 00:34:39.40 - 00:39:37.70)

(download into iTunes)

The fourth phase begins with the discovery that in that calm, we can actually relax. We discover, sometimes to our surprise, a sense of ease. So here's this difficult feeling which we are experiencing. But our experience now has a basis of calmness and we begin to relax into the feeling. And this is the beginning of a very important point in practice. Resting in the experience. By this point in this process we have a pretty full experience of the feeling and everything that's going on in it. And we have discovered the calm and now we begin to rest in the experience, with that sense of ease or relaxation. As Gunaratana says, "When your mind joins with the object of attention, the body and the mind both relax."

So we just do this for a few moments together, but go back to that sense of calm and then just rest in the calm. Letting the feeling and all of the reactions be there. But resting in the calm at the same time. "Breathing in I experience ease in the feeling. Breathing out, I experience ease in the feeling."

Now you may find, that when you start relaxing, you suddenly experience the feeling more completely, and you tense up again. Push it away. So this takes you back to phase one, but now you're working at a deeper level. And the way this particular practice works, there is a constant cycling going through phase one, phase two, sometimes back to phase one, right there. Phase three, phase four, you begin to relax, you experience more of the feeling, and now you are able to bring the feeling closer to you, and everything becomes more vivid, more awake, and so you work again with phase one. So there is a constant cycling back. But each time you cycle back, you are moving into a deeper and deeper experience of the feeling. You are moving closer to the feeling and experience the feeling itself. And that process goes on and on.

Depending on the nature of the feeling, the degree of conditioning, how it's arising, that process can take anywhere from five seconds to five decades. So there's no specific time frame. You may find at certain points, when you begin to relax, that feeling disolves and just seems to vanish and there's something else there. And if that's the case, then you begin working with that. Because you see that the original feeling was actually a layer which is obscuring something else underneath. Now you start working with what's underneath. Either of these ways you are moving deeper and deeper into your own experience.

Clip and transcription by Tracy Ormond.

Releasing Emotional Reactions 3

RER Phase Three (from RER 02: Releasing Emotional Reactions (retreat) 00:31:27.10 - 00:33:23.90)

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Phase three begins with a discovery that even though we're in the presence of a uncomfortable or difficult pain or feeling, we can actually be in that experience and quiet, calm. That is, we can be experiencing the pain and all of the reactions to the pain, and that can all be going on and yet there is a capacity to have a sense of calm in all of that. So the third phase is, "Breathing in I experience calm with this pain. Breathing out I experience calm with this pain."

Now, I'm doing this, taking you through this, you may or may not be there with your particular pain, but the possibility is there. And if you have it at an appropriate distance from you, and just working with the right fraction of it, then you can experience "Oh, yes, I can experience this and be calm. I don't have to be fighting against it." So let's just do this for a minute. "Breathing in I experience calm with the feeling. Breathing out I experience calm with the feeling."

Clip and transcription by Tracy Ormond.

Releasing Emotional Reactions 2

RER Phase Two (from RER 02: Releasing Emotional Reactions (retreat) 00:26:13.80 - 00:30:22.70)

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Now as you do that, phase two starts almost immediately.

In phase two, we become aware of our reactions to that pain. Basically there are three kinds of reactions that arise. There are reactions in the body, in some cases we may flinch or tense against the pain. A defensive posture or something. Or maybe there's a feeling of nausea or discomforts in parts of our body. But there are actually physical reactions to the pain or the feeling. And secondly, there are emotional reactions, with the pain or the feeling. When you start holding it, you may feel some fear or some anxiety. Or maybe there's some anger or sadness. Maybe jealousy comes in, or grief, or wanting. There are all of these different possibilities, and those are the emotional reactions. And then there are the stories and associations: "Oh this is always happening to me. I always get into this kind of mess" or "This has never happened to me before. I don't understand how this has possibly happened." Or "This is all my fault" or "This is terrible what people did to me, how could they treat me like that!" There are all of these different stories. So the second phase is "Breathing in I experience the reactions to the pain, breathing out, I experience the reactions to the pain."

And start with the physical, and when you can be in the physical reactions, then include the emotional. And when you can be in the physical and the emotional, then include stories and associations and the cognitive reactions. And as you do this you'll find yourself moving into the full experience of the pain or feeling itself.

So phase two builds on phase one and actually enriches it. So let's do that for a minute together. "Breathing in I feel the reactions to the pain, breathing out I feel the reactions to the pain." And just as you hold the initial pain or feeling, tenderly, so also hold all of the reactions, the reactions in the body, the emotional reactions and the stories, tenderly in attention. Don't try to make them one way or the other, don't try to get rid of the physical discomforts. Just hold them tenderly in attention and let them be experienced.

Clip and transcription by Tracy Ormond.

Releasing Emotional Reactions 1

This clip was selected and transcribed by Tracy Ormond!

This is the first step of a Five-Step Mindfulness Practice.

RER Phase One (from RER 02: Releasing Emotional Reactions (retreat) 00:22:49.60 - 00:26:00.10)

(download into iTunes)

So the first phase is, "Breathing in I experience this," and I am going to use the word feeling, but it could be emotion, it could be pain, it could be problems, and you just fill in the blank. So let's just do that.

You take this and you say, "Breathing in I feel this pain." Breathe in. "Breathing out I feel this pain." With each breath, "Breathing in I feel this pain, breathing out I feel this pain."

Now, in the beginning, depending what you have chosen, that may be a bit like a hot potato. So there are two methods I've found that can at least get us in touch with it to some extend. The first is: "Okay, that's too hot, too difficult, too much for my capacity of attention at this point." So experience one tenth of it, or one hundredth, or one thousandth. And that approach works for some people. For other people, they find it more helpful to think, "Well that's too close, if I put it on the other side of the room, well, maybe on the other side of town." So it's a safe distance away, but still in one's awareness.

So the first step is just to bring it into awareness, either a small piece of it or at a proximity that you can handle. And that's for you to determine in your own practice. So set it up that way, whatever is appropriate for you, we go back to phase one. "Breathing in, I experience this pain, breathing out..." and imagine holding the pain tenderly in your attention. Which means that you're not going to do anything to it. And you're not trying to get anything from it. You're just holding it, and you are holding it very, very gently.

Some background info--the following is a comment made by Ken in response to a question asked by Michael, who was working on translating this practice into German:

"The crucial point is in Michael's last comment: 'To use these meditation instructions it is not necessary to feel pain. It can be an emotion or a problem which may be experienced as a kind of imbalance for example, rather than pain. And even an imbalance can make patterns run.'

This meditation is for working with reactions, those seemingly automatic processes that just run and throw us into confusion and lead us to do things we wouldn't do if we were clearer and more responsive. Reactions can be blissful or painful, though usually the latter. Think of falling in love (a blissful reaction, frequently) or the anger that arises when love is not returned.

The aim is to experience what is arising as completely as possible. In English, to give an idea of the range of experiences, I use "reaction, pain, problem, issue, difficulty, etc.". Basically, it covers anything that we can't experience for any reason."
...
In teaching people, I give them this meditation whenever people are encountering something that prevents them from resting. If one can rest, then one rests and lets the resting deepen on its own. When one encounters something difficult, then more specific effort and attention, as in this practice, can help.