Video: Exploring Meditation with Kimberley Snow pt. 1
Meditation means “to become familiar with,” so we are always meditating on something. Breakfast. Our clothes. This guy. That girl. Often we’re fixating on the negative: What someone at work did wrong. How our mother/daughter/father/son/wife/husband fails to understand us, does not support our needs, is generally lacking. These can often be lengthy meditations indeed. So the question is whether our meditation is doing anything for us or just working to deepen unfortunate patterns. By taking up traditional meditation, we develop an intention of where our attention is being placed and an awareness of our motivation for doing so. In this way, we align ourselves with positive changes.
To meditate is easy. You just breathe. Become aware of the fact that you are breathing: in, out, in out. If a beginner, it may help to count your breaths, inhale: count one two three four five; exhaleing: six, seven eight nine ten. Start over at one and count to ten again. And again. The numbers aren’t as important as keeping your mind on your breathing. Thoughts will come and go but don’t follow them. See them as leaves floating downriver.
Start slow: don’t meditate but a few minutes at first. Just until you get the hang of it.
After a few days or when you start feeling like counting is getting in the way, drop the counting and just pay attention to your in and out breath. “Breathing in I know I am breathing in, breathing out I know I am breathing out.”
This is called Calm Abiding or Shamatha Meditation. It conditions the mind to pay attention, to become conscious of bodily sensations such as breathing, and to be comfortable staying in the present. This doesn’t happen right away but over a period of time if practiced consistently. Neuroscience says that if we do something for 15 minutes a day for three weeks, it becomes a habit.
BODY AWARENESS
In any meditation, we need to slow down. In today’s speedy world we are often going over our own speed limit. It helps to sit up straight so that the air flows freely through body. First just sit. Don’t try to do anything. Just sit. Next comes relaxation: become aware of the muscle groups in the face, the forehead, around the eyes, the cheeks, the jaw. Let your attention lightly scan this area just as a brush lightly touches a canvas. As you scan, relax the muscles so that your face is as soft and open as that of a sleeping baby. Continue to scan down the body, noting where there are knots of tension and releasing them as you go. Become aware of the sensations of the body, just noting them. Center on the sensation of the breath as it flows in and out. When thoughts arise, and they will, don’t fight against them but try not to get carried away by them either. Just return your attention to your breath, in and out, in and out.
Stability comes with holding your body still and your mind quiet. Clarity brings a sense of brightness or aliveness to the process and is related to being aware of what you are doing. The ability to focus your attention with more ease and clarity is an added bonus of meditation. The greatest value will eventually come from becoming aware of your inner world and gaining some control over your own mind and actions.
GOING DEEPER
Another practice in traditional meditation, variously called introspection or contemplation or insight, begins to shed light into how the human mind works. It can be quite profound and life changing and lead to a paradigm shift in ways that following the breath cannot. If you only follow the breath, it is like pausing a tape, but when you get up from the cushion, you’re right back at the same point before you paused. Nothing has really changed in terms of overcoming negative patterns although your stress may be reduced. Wisdom teachings and contemplation need to be added to relaxation meditation for deep changes to take place. These may arise spontaneously during meditation and also afterwards. What happens during a meditation session is often not as important as how we think and behave off the cushion.
There are a number of different ways of talking about the various aspects of the mind, but a very basic model, suggested by Tsoknyi Rinpoche in Fully Being, focuses on four different modes of the mind: knowing, the moving mind, awareness, and clarity. Although these work together in practice, we’ll discuss them one by one, focusing on the moving mind and awareness.
First, as we look out to perceive the world, there is knowing, we know a bird is a bird, a flower is a flower, we don’t need to be told. It’s just there automatically.
Thinking, the next mode, is part of the moving mind. It can involve some reflection or analysis or judgment of the object we “know.” For example, we may wonder about the name of the flower, or remember a garden with similar flowers we played in as a child. Or worry that our roses are getting aphids. It goes on and on.
In the West, this mode of the moving mind is dominant and has accomplished tremendous things: cities, medical advances, and the arts to name just a few. Little of the advanced material world we live in would be possible without our moving minds. On the other hand, neither would guns, roadside bombs, nor wars.
On a personal level, our moving mind is always reacting, making decisions, planning, judging. We need it to do all of these things, but it also can become fixated and self-identified, leading to the creation of a sort of false self or “mini-me.” This self-enclosed consciousness defends what it sees as “me” or “mine” and builds walls to keep out an awareness of what is “not-me.” This is bolstered by an inner narrative voice spinning out “fake news” about ourselves to ourselves. In this sense, we can become a figment of our own imagination.
Happily, there is a way out of living inside this self-imposed bubble. It begins by learning how to shift from the moving mind into other modes of consciousness, specifically to awareness.
Awareness, like knowing, is naturally there. When we work with the mind in meditation, we are working through awareness or combining awareness with the moving mind. It can and should be trained, developed and strengthened. First, we have to become conscious of it since it is quiet and our normally speedy, moving mind tends to be pretty loud. It is through awareness that we develop our natural capacity to watch our minds, to reflect and to become self-aware. The capacity to do so is innately there, we just have to activate it.
We do so by first experiencing it. We turn our consciousness backwards rather than looking out. “Turn your eyes and look at the back of your skull,” is a typical suggestion among Tibetans when giving nature of mind teachings. Then, ask yourself: “Who’s there?” “Who is asking this question?” Or we can just be very quiet and let it emerge on its own. If the moving mind’s dialogue – that tendency to narrate our lives as we’re trying to live it – tries to dominate, there are a number of work-arounds we can try.
Achieved awareness is a little like a video camera: it is always in the present, has no opinions but is neutral, and sees things as they are. Mindfulness meditation is largely based on understanding and utilizing this aspect of the mind.
There are, of course, many other kinds of meditation that focus on a specific subject such as gratitude, compassion, and loving kindness. These fit well within the calm abiding framework.
Those who choose meditation as a spiritual path work with a teacher in a step-by-step program which involves a number of different stages and techniques.
For more see: How the Mind Works and What We Can Do About It.
