Good evening, depending on where you are. Just a quick clarification, I don't do the meditation every Friday. I'm going to be doing it this Friday and then probably off for the month of August.
It's very similar to what I teach here. If you're enjoy that, please come and join
I will let me open up the chat and see if anyone has any questions about meditation practice. I was on the session last Monday when Heidi diverse I thought it was very interesting the practice of rejoicing and others good fortune, which is challenging at times, and the opposite is envy or jealousy. I don't remember if she told the story. There was a story of the the Buddha and very often when he would have a gathering of his followers. There would be a patron, a wealthy patron who would provide meals for everyone. And it was very well known that providing such meals feeding the Sangha was one of the greatest sources of merit. Meaning we talked about merit, it's kind of accumulating good karma and that that notion but but in a deeper way of accumulating merit means accumulating a foundation for developing wisdom and compassion. So the the patron came up and bowed before the Buddha and the Buddha said, you know, you've gained great merit by feeding all of this Sangha and it's almost the greatest merit of anybody here. And the patient was shocked because he had donated so much and he said, he said, What do you mean it's almost What do you mean almost? I thought it was going to be the you know, no, but who else has given? I provided all the meals and the Buddha said, Yes, you did, which is just wonderful. But you see that little lady sitting over there. She's rejoicing in all the merit you're going to get from donating all of these meals and therefore her merit is even greater because she's rejoicing in how much your merit is going to get. And that's it it's a one of my favorite stories. The the opposite side I've been doing some sitting in tonglen practice with a group that includes people from Ukraine, and it's actually tonglen for Ukraine. tonglen being the compassion, compassion and loving kindness, practice of wanting to take away their suffering and give them happiness. And so, they were talking about how difficult things were and how some people just just wanted to make life miserable for everybody else. And there was a a story and this is the opposite of rejoicing and others good fortune from the Soviet era, Russia. It was a little village. Everyone had been parceled out the exact same size piece of land and had the exact same little prefab hut or, you know, cabin on the on their land, and the exact same little sized garden plot, so everybody was equally impoverished. In this village. And there were two friends Ivan and Boris that hung out together and and Boris was the only one in the village who had a goat. Now, one day Ivan was working on his little slot in the garden. And a genie suddenly appeared and said, You can have one wish, anything you want. And he thought for a little bit. And then he said I wish that Boris's goat should die. That that attitude. It was a story because that attitude was kind of pervasive. I'd rather someone else lose what they have than me even gain,
which is the exact opposite of rejoicing in the good fortune of others. And it shows how there's an inclination towards jealousy and envy on people's parts and wanting everybody else to be brought down to their level. And so I thought Heidi's presentation was very profound in that approach of focusing on that, that practice of rejoicing in the good fortune of others and, and what an important practice that is to counter our jealousy. It's something that we can use in our tonglen practice. In the same way that patients is the counter to anger. Generosity is the antidote to greed and so on and so forth.
So if, if no one has any questions about meditation practice that they want to address ahead of time. We can we can begin. I think I'll start with a bit of an overview. Oh, I know what I wanted to do. doesn't quite fit in the overall meditation practice, but in case I forget, for after the session, I want to introduce it now. It is a kind of mindfulness practice that you can do. And one that you can teach your kids I have a lot of students who are juniors and I teach this to them. It's something they can do. It's something you can do with them. And it's something that you can do not it's not a regular sitting meditation. You can do it when you're doing your sitting meditation, but you can also do it anytime that the quality of impatience might come up and you want to do some mindfulness practice, but they're still distractions around. And this is called hand mindfulness. I think I might have introduced this in a previous session, but we can do this together. What you do is you take either hand and put it out in front of you about throat or chest Hi. And I'm going to tilt my computer. There we go. Okay. And then you take your index finger and pointed away from you and lay it the middle of your index finger against the middle joint of your index finger against the outside of your wrist. Now, what you're going to do is as you inhale, you're going to go up, pause a second, and then slowly exhale. And what we want to do is we want to have our exhalation slower than our inhalation and as much as you can do all of it through your nose. Breathing out a little through your mouth is okay. But mainly, but always in through your nose. So, we'll do that do this together. And we're gonna go both directions for one hand, okay? So get a good get your good readiness, and have your finger there and inhale up. Pause slowly exhale down as you go down the inside of your little finger. Pause. Inhale up. Pause slowly down the other side of your ring finger inhale up. Pause slowly down yet outside of your middle finger. Close inhale. Exhale, slowly inhale on your thumb. And slowly exhale down the outside of your thumb again to your wrist, pause and the other direction. Inhale on the outside of your thumb. slowly exhale, down to the giant. Inhale.
slowly exhale
inhale. Slow hello in slowly out and slowly out and down to the wrist. Good. Now, you can reflect on this what I have found, and I would ask you, but we can't really do a group discussion. Here you can put it in the chat if you want. At what point in the sequence of 10 breaths did was there was there any point where you felt a shift to kind of dropping down into a little bit of extra relaxation? Was there any particular point? If there wasn't there wasn't if there was, can you identify about where it was? Anybody want to put that in? The chat? It seemed early from Barbara. That's because you're an experienced meditator around the fifth finger, Mm hmm. That's Linda. middle middle finger on the way back are on the way through is the question because when I introduced this, yes, on the way through almost many, many people, especially the beginners is still there still. Up until you know through the first one and then on the way back, somewhere around there after seven between six and eight breaths. Ah, there's a drop down. Are you Oh, what just happened? Interesting. And then it's quiet down to the end. And so this is something that you can do anytime. It's very handy, especially if you're waiting and 10 breaths takes less than two minutes. Barbara's comment the sensitive the skin? Yes. And isn't that interesting? What this engage it's so engaging because I then I asked my my juniors who they're thinking all the time, and I said how many thoughts did you have during that they went? None. As if I can't believe it, but we have our eyes are engaged watching our finger. Our mind is engaged. You know, being aware of, of the movement and aware of our breathing one hand is engaged in feeling the other hand go over it. And then one hand is engaged in actually moving and feeling the sensitivity as it goes. So it's it's tremendously engaging practice. So I thought it was really, really interesting. So sweet comment, Barbara, why holding hands with fingers interwoven is so sweet. The skin between the fingers super high, we don't touch there often. And that's what this is all of. So that's a very good observation. Thank you. So it's a on the go kind of practice. And at any point, you can just take a 10 breath timeout. Now of course, if you want to do a little longer, switch to the other hand and do the opposite. Go from the again the outside to the inside. To the thumb and then back again. And you have four, five breath modules that you can use something that you can take with you and I've heard it extremely helpful, extremely effective, even for experienced meditators when there's a lot of other stuff going on and you kind of want to really absorb. This is the opposite of open awareness. This is absorbing and just calming and quieting. So I thought I thought it'd be good to introduce the other thing that I just read and this is from Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan teachers of all time, and and what this said, I think you see if I can find it, I can read it to you hang on a second here.
Okay. Now I've got to find the right one, Hang on one second. Sorry about this.
All right, well, what he said was in doing the mindfulness practice, for people who have a mala, right. You can actually use that to count breaths. So again, it engages your hand and your your fingers and you can set you know find the spot where there's 21 beads, and then just sit and count each out breath. Breathe in out, and one beat on the mall and out another beat on the mall, and then you don't have to do that mental gymnastic of counting mental the mental counting which which is one of the practices that that's done in basic geometry. shamatha are tranquility meditation. The translation of Shama ties, calm abiding or dwelling in peace. So we count our breaths. It's not something that develops insight, but it's something that develops tranquility. And it's for teaching from the time of the Buddha, that you can't develop insight in the midst of turmoil. You when when I work with with people in performance of various kinds, I explained, Insight doesn't arise in the midst of emotional upheaval. In the same way you can't see the bottom of the stream where the rapids are. You can only see it when it's called a calm, abiding pond. So that's the purpose of that kind of meditation that has a lot of different varieties. And if you've ever done the counting variety, this was interesting to discover the use of a mala. So you don't have to think the numbers. But you can have awareness of your breathing and count at the same time. So just wondering, introduce those, those things. And what I'll go through today are a sequence of practices, working with the breathing both the inner and the outbreath. And first we'll do the kind of grounding practice the body scan and getting settled and grounded. And then we can then we'll work with the breath and then working with the outbreath, which is a practice from the Maha Mudra tradition of that a transition between tranquility and insight practice. And that as you breathe out, you go out with the breath and then as the breath dissolves into space, you your self consciousness dissolves into space, and there simply presents a non dual kind of presence and a gap in breath comes in by itself and then you go out with it. Again. And then we'll do a little exploration of awareness of sense perceptions and have a little time to do short period of tonglen. So take your good posture. It's helpful to have an upright but not rigid posture
and what we want to do is
feel like we're extending gently from the back of the top of our head up and letting our sit bones and tailbone really sink into the cushion that we're on, whether it's a chair cushion on the floor if you're on a floor cushion, your legs are loosely crossed in a chair. If your knees are lower than your hips, then you can have your feet flat on the floor about hip width apart. But if if you're if you have long legs and the knees are higher, then you can gently cross your feet at the ankles in front of you. And that should lower your new sufficiently let your arms hang straight from your sides and leave your elbows at your sides and just swivel your hands up. palm down on each thigh. There'll be a little bit above your knees on your thighs. If they're all the way to your knees, you're probably reaching out a little too much which rounds your shoulders
and if you want you can have your if you'd prefer you can have your hands in the other traditional posture. This is this is a traditional posture by the way, one hand on each thigh, palm down and the other is palm up. One hand on top of the other thumbs very lightly touching, kind of resting in your lap. Your thumbs will be around the level of your navel that way
because we we very often have we're in the western world we're, we're so used to working on computers we get a little hunched over and our shoulders may be rounded forward. For them to be straight. You may feel it just a slight slight pulling back of your shoulders. Not too much and trying to pinch your shoulder blades together. Just slight pulling back so that they're not curled, curved and rounded in front of you. And this should make your your upper back a little straighter. If you feel like the back of your head is just gently extending upward sometimes they say you know if you're being pulled up gently by your cowlick which is at the back of the top of your head if you still have hair. And what happens is your chin comes in naturally. Because if we're sitting like this, and our chin goes up and we get kind of spaced out, and if we're sitting like this, we get kind of sleepy and dull. So here we space out or filled with wild thoughts. Like a lot of thoughts are here. Just a dull kind of and we might think oh we're at peace but we're really just a little sleepy.
So with that good posture. You can feel your body and you can feel like your mind is kind of they say that just taking that posture is part way towards wakefulness and taking that posture. The mind naturally stabilizes and centers
feel that posture, really feel your legs, your torso, your arms and shoulders, your neck and your head just really feel like you are fully embodying fully inhabiting your whole body and that it is wakeful awake.
You can easily have your eyes open or gently close them. Just kind of scan your body from the top of your head. And when your awareness find some unnecessary tension, just let it melt down and out of you without losing your posture. We want to feel like our spine is a temple and the rest of our body is just hanging from it like a canvas like the canvas before the tent is pulled out
you might have a little tension of pulling your shoulders just slightly back but not holding them up. clenching your jaw let it soften. Your lips can either be just slightly parted or just lightly touching.
Your jaw your neck, your shoulders. Without losing your posture. Let the tension melt upper arms, chest and upper back ribcage all around. Lower back and deep belly
sometimes if we just let the tension go out of our deep belly it actually slumps our posture a little bit so find that balance between just enough tension to hold your posture. But all the rest that you're holding deep in your belly or lower back, melts and flows down and out of you hips and pelvis size forearms and hands knees calves. shins, ankles and feet come back up and tune in to where you feel like your mind is. For most of us, it feels like it's in our head somewhere. Maybe behind our eyes are behind our forehead. Have a feeling of letting your mind fall back and down. Back and drift slowly down. Kind of the back of your throat back of your chest behind your heart down behind your solar plexus. Just let your awareness sink down like a leaf gently settling to the bottom of a clear pond. Settling and resting there deep in the core of your torso is a natural resting place a couple of inches below your navel just in front of your spine
let your awareness rest they're dropping down when you do all the practices you don't have to hold your mind there. Just let it fall there for now. So that we're more in our body and out of our head
just imagine that you've you're sinking down and merging with the earth part of the earth fully grounded. Not perching but really letting the earth support you. Your torso extending upward in your good posture. Majestic like a mountain let the breath come and go like the wind being an observer and not a director let your mind relax and expand and be open
let your mind be like the sky. Clouds birds planes can fly across but instead of grasping on to the clouds birds or planes, identify your mind with the sky. The sky in which thoughts feelings emotions appear, dwell and move across and move along and disappear. Like birds, thoughts fly across the mind and don't need to leave a trace. body like a mountain breath like the wind. Mind like the sky
if your eyes were closed, let them gently open about halfway looking downward, not at an object. So soften your gaze but with awareness of your body and the space that you're sitting in
awareness of the your body and the space that you're sitting in.
Be aware of the feeling of the breath coming in and out really the only movement of your body the breath coming in now.
With awareness of your posture, the object of your mindfulness be the sensation of filling as the breath comes in. And emptying is the breath goes out. feeling empty little like the ocean coming up on the shore and receding back into the ocean. wave coming up on the shore receding back into the ocean
and if your mind is captured by a thought or a sensation or a perception that leads to another thought another and another into a daydream when the moment you wake up from that Daydream you're already back your mind and body are always synchronized in the present moment. So there's no need to come back to the present. You're already back but notice and say that was wandering. Mentally just go daydream or wandering and then reconnect with posture and breathing. upright. Filling empty so do that for a couple of minutes.
As the sound of the gang fades raise your gaze look straight ahead without letting your chin float up. So if it's more comfortable, you can look just slightly below horizontal. Again, soften your gaze and open up your peripheral vision to the space in the room and as the breath goes out, you don't have to push it out. Just let it God naturally remember, you're an observer of the breath rather than a director. Observe as the breath goes out, let your mind join with it. And feel like you are going out. Mind is the sense of me. Bodies the sense of breath, mind and body go out together as the breath naturally dissolves into the atmosphere that you're seeing sense of self consciousness dissolve and rest in openness. Rest in that gap while the breath comes in by itself. I promise it will you don't have to make sure it comes in or pull it in. And as it goes out again join mind and breath going out. Breath dissolves into space mind mixes with space
if at some point you're just resting in that space and you don't pick up on the next out breath, that's okay. Just rest there. And at some point, the inclination will be either to pick up on another breath. Or again if a thought captures your mind when you realize it, just make the mental note wandering. Come back to your posture and wait to go out and be one with the next step press one with the breath going out. Dissolve arrest we'll do that for a few Minutes.
Think we? We want to the sense perceptions today. I want to transition into tonglen the compassion and kindness practice we're going to use an expensive awareness practice to begin that we were taught by Trump Rinpoche to have a flash of openness of just that just open space out of which the practice happens because the ability to exchange oneself for others relies on not not solidifying them as a separate entity over there. Me as a separate solid entity over here. And some action happening between the two. But the the lack of fixation on them as a particular thing on ourselves as a particular thing on the action as a particular thing. So this openness is a flash of freedom from fixation of any kind.
You may prefer to do a gradual introduction to that and that's what I want to introduce. So we'll do an expand spending awareness. And then then we do the practice now. What is sending it's the translation is sending and taking the Tibetan word tongue then and what we're doing is we want to take from others their suffering and absorb it. To really do so we have to feel it. But again, to do it properly, there can't be a thing, an entity here that it accumulates in. It's just a feeling tone that we experience. But as vividly as we can experience that's what arouses our compassion. The actual feeling with the other person empathy, being able to feel what they're feeling as best you can and take that in because usually we want to fend off those feelings of pain, discomfort, irritation, negative emotions included. And then we send out goodness and happiness which usually we want to hold on to, but we're freeing ourselves from fixation. So send out to them the opposite of what you took in. If it's pain, you send out relief from pain. If it's fear, you send out relief from fear peace of mind. If it's jealousy, take away the pain of jealousy and send out the ability to rejoice in others good fortune. You do this to yourself to begin with. Gather as you breathe in gather all your negative feelings. If it helps to gather them into some kind of light in your heart center that represents your true nature of wisdom and compassion. That's what transforms it can absorb. The negativity and radiate out limitless positive energy. Breathe in the negative feeling of blame. For example, breathe out forgiveness. Breathe in frustration. Breathe out patients. Breathe in irritation, breathe out acceptance to yourself. Breathe in your unhappiness and breathe out to yourself. You can feel yourself with happiness, not an external happiness. That you get from something else. But the happiness of tuning into your true nature. wisdom, compassion, life energy. Then you reach out to others and compassion is the wish that others be free from suffering so you take their suffering from them. Loving Kindness is the wish that others have happiness that you and others have happiness. We say May all beings enjoy. be free from suffering and the roots of suffering. May all beings enjoy happiness and the roots of happiness. So extend that out to others. Take their suffering, send them happiness. Let go of yours. Give it to them
then you come to a deeper equanimity. So we'll do that practice Allegiant for the open awareness, and then we'll do the tonglen practice. So take a good posture, look straight ahead, at or above the horizon slightly
as the gong fades, let your awareness expand and imagine that your mind your awareness extends out beyond the horizon, out to the sky, in all directions and above you. Mind like the sky, mind as big as the sky. Breathe out and imagine that your mind extends out beyond awareness your awareness extends out. out to all of space out among the stars in all directions above and below and all around as biggest space itself. And breathe out and imagine that your awareness extends out beyond the farthest star in all directions rest in that infinite openness
and from that state of non fixation breathe in and go gather all your own negativity into your heart center. Breathe out and radiate out to yourself the cool moonlight of kindness breathe in feeling with a feeling of compassion feel the pain transform and radiate out filling your being with kindness.
As best you can imagine in front of you, one or more of your loved ones dear friends and family you know the kind of suffering they might be going through. Take that in and take it away from them and feel it yourself and radiate out from your heart. The cool moonlight of kindness replaces their suffering with peace health. And happiness.
As best you can extend that out to other people you know, including those that there's a difficulty between you and that situation, freezing and gather the difficulty they're feeling and that you're feeling both textures. Really got relief and peace to both of you.
Breathing in holding stubbornly them to their point of view you to yours. Breathe out letting go to both of you let it go as best you can include all beings, especially those who are subjected to violence right now. Or recently. The pain that they've experienced
without to them relief.
And if you can, the perpetrators of the violence, the hatred and fear and greed the negative emotions that will ultimately cause them great suffering. Take those away from them and radiate out some gap in that some peace and kindness, some bit of wisdom that cuts their trip cuts the aggression. Let go of the imagination the visualization come back to tranquility tuning into your body. Feel your breath filling and emptying. Sink down and settle
quite body quiet mind we conclude the practice in the same way that we began the practice with the intention of doing this for more than just ourselves but so that we can be of more benefit to others. And we did the practice with others in mind. We want to end as the lady in the story of the Buddha was rejoicing in the merit the patron has accumulated we want to share our merit with others so we say May the practice I've just done
be of benefit to others
as well as myself and if you're inclined you can aspire that your practice become a more benefit even more benefit to others than to yourself. So thank you and if you have any questions or comments we can stay around for a few more minutes. Tim in the early meditation, it did seem like all thoughts disappeared. In Tong Len definitely thoughts present. Yes, Tolman is not a meditation. It's not a formless meditation in the same way that the breathing was Tanglin is actually more of a contemplation. You're using the breath as part of your contemplation, but you're actually generating intentional thoughts intentional images, intentional feelings, in order to undo the truth, the usual fixation of ego clinging and and preferring things good things to ourselves and sending away the bad things and if others if it lands on others too bad. That's that's kind of conventional world. And so this is reversing that kind of going against the grain of ego clinging and fixation take on and feel what others are feeling and compassion extend out. goodness and happiness to them. And so in. It's not one there's a better or higher just different as you said and I saw I saw Tim's thumb up so that's good. Any other comments or questions?
You notice use your mole in the left hand. Is it okay to use either hand that's interesting. I was taught left hand primarily, but certainly, if there's a situation where you're holding something else in your left hand, you can use your right hand. I don't know hard and fast that's just how I was taught. If anybody else knows, that'd be great. We could Google you know, I a friend of mine when I would ask him something he would say J FGI. So what does that say? Versus just effing google it? So so if you want it is that is it okay to use either hand? Let's google it. It's just how I was taught but thank you for asking Dennis.
You're all welcome. I know that I benefit as much or more from these sessions. So I aspire that that benefit goes to you all, and all beings. Thank you for the opportunity to share what my teacher shared with me. Anything that was helpful is to do all only to them. Any mistakes are only mine.
So if you'd like to unmute and Laura, thank you for your comment. Everybody's late sometimes and elicit this is recorded, right? Sure is. Yeah. So you can play at some time as if as if you showed up on time because everybody's muted, right? And I'm presenting and just pretend you know. You I love this. This one. Craig Ferguson used to be a late night talk show host and comedian and he said so we're coming to you here. Live. But of course, if this is recorded, greetings, Chinese Robot Masters. But if it is recorded, you can pretend it's live. You know, look it up. Think of all the events that we record. We watch him and we make sure we don't hear any news about him. I don't want to hear any news about anybody. So, or you can come and pretend you showed up on time. Okay. Good I always know Laura's here because hers is the only screen that's moving behind her. Okay. You want to everybody on mute and say good night. Good morning. You know we say good night. Good morning. I was just studying with ponlop Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan teachers, and he says good moment. Good moment everybody. Good moment everyone. Bye bye. recording stopped. Good night. Good night by us. It was that fun? It was perfect. Okay, great.
Well, we'll see you next time.
Okay. Hi, Karen. You're muted. You're muted. Alyssa, don't hang up on us, Karen. There. Oh, thank you for
you said we would have a little bit of deeper equanimity Yeah, I It feels like I can't like I got some of that.
Oh, good. I'm happy I can I have been we have less I don't say old friends anymore. I say longtime friends. We've known each other 72 I think that's when I came to Boulder in 1972.
Okay, wow. I was in New York City. I came in 74 Oh, so
not 50 years. 48. So nice to see you. So nice to see you. Thank you, everybody.