2021-10-11-Breathing (1 of 5) Intro to Mindfulness Instruction Series

2:55PM Oct 11, 2021

Speakers:

Gil Fronsdal

Keywords:

breathing

awareness

mindfulness

breath

week

beginner

meditation

imc

body

practice

theme

aware

relax

talk

thoughts

sense

instructions

give

difficult

arrive

Hello, everyone, and here we are Monday. And for this week's theme, and for the next actually, maybe four or five weeks, I would like to go progressively through the basic instructions that we give here at IMC, for mindfulness meditation, we normally will do a five week introduction to meditation course, some of you have probably done it with us. And it's available the course on audio dharma. And it follows a sequence where it's five weeks, and one evening a week. The first week we talk about just introduction to mindfulness and then mindfulness of breathing. And then next week, we talk about mindfulness of the body. As people settle into meditation, that the body often becomes very loud or clear may often because it gets uncomfortable if you're not used to meditating. And then the next week, we talk about mindfulness of emotions. And then mindfulness of thinking. The fifth week, there's a range of things that are talked about. And that sequence is meant to kind of slowly lay their, their steadily make lay the groundwork to a time when all of the all of those ways of practicing, all those areas are integrated together into a hole, where we're practicing mindfulness, where depending on what is compelling, what is predominant, what's happening the most, we might be aware of breathing, the body, the emotions, thoughts and other experiences of our life. And this ability to develop them awareness that's available, mindfulness is available to the full range of human experiences the goal of mindfulness practice. And that's valuable for many reasons. One reason is valuable is then we have a heightened attention to so many areas of our life, things don't become remade, things don't remain unconscious, things don't remain and known or kind of sidelined everything, sooner or later comes through the, the view the the knowing of awareness and seeing clearly. Also, as we do this, practice, over time, we start appreciating more and more, what it is to be aware what it is to be mindful. And its particular, noticing all the extra baggage we bring along in this, that we'd put on top of the simplicity of awareness, the expectations, we have the idea that we have to do a lot of things, the idea of the being an agent that I have to prove myself, or I shouldn't fail. And this is you know, that it's all up to me, me, myself and mine to do it. We might come with fears around being aware, and being aware of what's coming along might be more of this kind of things we bring along with it, we might have, you know, really big goals like you know, ambitions around meditation that we bring along. And as we become more and more aware of all this extra stuff we bring along, we can start to kind of shedding them and discovering the simplicity of awareness itself. And part of that simplicity, eventually, is that awareness exists can be present without us doing it. And an awareness becomes kind of autonomous. From our doing it, our role is to allow for it, to stay close to it. And it's a magical time or special time to feel that awareness is just kind of the nature of who we are. And we don't have to insert the self and agency and doing into it. And there's a shift in mindfulness. That for someone who's a raw beginner, the practice does involve doing we're engaging in something that changing the direction changing the course of our our life is going from just letting ourselves wander off in thoughts and desires and aversions and just kind of be caught up in things to waking up to

not being lost in the world. But being present in the middle of our experience. They're really present really centered here. And, and there's a doing coming back and so we're applying ourselves to the breathing applying ourselves to the body to these different areas that we pay attention to There's a sense of app like applying myself and doing it. And partly, that's because it's a, it's an alternative to being lost. As that builds over time, this sense of autonomous awareness, independent awareness becomes stronger and stronger. And then awareness is more like receives experience, things arrive and awareness. Awareness is not something we have to do. It's more something we allow. And there can be extensive things just to arrive, or arise within awareness. And awareness, becomes freer and freer, of even the sense of me being a Dewar to do or the agent. In a sense, awareness becomes independent of, of the usual ways in which we identify who we are Me, Myself and mine. And the and so the awareness. And so the mindfulness instructions that we give, have two sides to it, it can have the side of something we do. And so it's prescriptive, this is what we do. And that's often the case for, for certainly for beginners, but at different phases of life, different levels of what's happening, or life. It's even, it's always coming and going these different ways of practicing depending what's needed at a time. They first were experienced practitioners really frazzled and agitated, they might get better off plying themselves in the meditation. But as prescriptively. The other way that mindfulness works, it's the instructions work. It's more like the non instructions, what to do, but instructions what to notice. So it's descriptive of what arrives in awareness. When awareness is established, awareness established that gathers together, our allows to arrive, the experience of breathing, the experience of the body, the experience of emotions, experience of thoughts. And there's a radical shift from being a doer to being an allow our. And that allowing allows for a different way of participating in the world. That's still very effective, but very different than, you know, being all up to me, myself and myself to do and be all this stuff. So in these next days, I'm going to talk more about breathing. And what I want to do for each of these try to do each of these five days of each week of the series, I want to repeat the same kind of theme around each of them. So that these become a little bit more familiar regular, available to you, at different times to really understand different facets of this practice. So on Mondays, I'm not going to do much time now but Monday's, the theme is going to be relaxation. Tuesdays that theme will be recognition. Wednesday's theme will be respect. With Thursday, that theme will be restoring. And Friday will be release. So we'll look at each of these things hopefully and, and look at these different aspects of the practice in relationship to breath, body, the emotions and thoughts and then whatever we do the following weeks. And, and so, relaxation with the breathing, we did that little bit in the guided meditation, part of the function of coming back to the breath over and over and over again. The mind wanders off and we come back is that

if we return to the breathing, is the breathing that is the anchor for having awareness established. And, and we relax, it isn't so much that we force ourselves back to the breath. But it's more like we welcome ourselves back to the breath over and over and over again. So the breathing the regularity of breathing takes the energy away from the other. From ways we're tense 10 surrender thoughts 10 surrender emotions, caught up in things. And the more preoccupied we are in thinking, the more tension there is in the system, we're force and pressure there is this gentle, returning to the breathing, returning to be aware of the breathing, begins to take away some of that energy that goes in keeping the mind and the heart in the body tense from our concerns. And then in addition, the regularity of breathing helps us to relax the rhythm of breathing for many of us. And so you can even help that by allowing yourself to relax on the exhale. Relax gently openly. For some People, this focus of breathing is difficult. Sometimes that's, that's normal enough. And it's just a process to work through that and be gentle and patient and, and not make a problem out of how difficult it might be that tension or the holding patterns or the breathing or controlling the breath or something. And it's well worth kind of spending time to see if you can kind of work through it. For some people, if they're there to the breathing is not really the appropriate object for attention. And I have known people, for example, have had maybe a near death experience with drowning or something else that there other than it was very difficult for them where breath was really a challenge. And so that the memory of that or the impact of that is such that breathing never really becomes a good place to meditate. And so for them, sometimes body, just being rooted in the body, kind of being grounded here in the body, in some open way, is much better, through other options as well. But, but it's really nice to work through some of the difficulty if possible, around breathing. and relaxing is a big part of it, learning to relax with the breath. So that's the plan for this next period of time. And I'm hoping that this instructions and teaching I give will work both for people who are beginners or new. But also there'll be support for the people who are quite experienced in practice as well. The beginning practice is the practice. In certain circumstances, the more mature people become in this practice. The difference between a beginner and a mature person is that a mature person is a better beginner, more thorough beginner. And finally, I gave kind of said some of this but also a little bit more yesterday morning for the Sunday morning talker at IMC a talk that was kind of done as an introduction to the series that we're doing here now. So some of you haven't, if you haven't heard that you might go and listen to that half an hour and it also sets the stage a little bit for what we're doing. So thank you for today and I'm looking forward to sharing something that is so something I love quite a bit. So thank you