Body like a mountain

This is the first part of a three-part guided meditation: Body like a mountain, breath like the sea, mind like the sky.

Body like a mountain (from MSS: Mountain, Sea, Sky 0:13:08.00 - 0:19:30.00)

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Body like a mountain. Feel your body, there maybe all kinds of sensations in your body. Maybe some pains, maybe some tensions, maybe feelings of warmth and relaxation. Whatever you experience, be aware of your whole body, and include whatever sensations, comfortable, or uncomfortable, in that awareness of the whole body. So your body just sits, perfectly at ease, like a mountain.

[Silence]

Your body naturally moves with the breath, so don’t try to hold the body still. Let the body move with the breath, however it wants, and you may find, that it becomes still on its own.

I also talked about depth in the body. So feel your body as deeply as you can.

[Silence]

You opening to your body, and your body opening to you.

[Silence]

And if you get distracted, involved in a bunch of thoughts, remember, this is practice. When you become aware of that, relax, and just come back to the sensation of your body, and rest there. So rather than trying to hold yourself still, just return, and be still. You may only be still for a few moments, and that’s fine. This is practice. And whenever you recognize, that you become agitated or distracted, relax, and return.

[Silence]

Don’t try to make things one way or another. A mountain doesn’t care whether the sky is cloudy or clear, whether there’s wind or not. Just whatever is there, experience it. It’s a different way of experiencing life. Not wanting it to be this way or that. Just experiencing it, however it is.

[Silence]

Body like a mountain.

[Silence]

[Bell]


Note: Thanks to Tracy Ormond for the transcribing.

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)

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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.