Letting Go of All Contraction
Guided Nondual Meditation by Michael Taft
What I want you to do is set your thinking mind aside for now. We’re just not going to engage with it. You can think as much as you want. You can have all the thoughts in the world. We’re not trying to suppress it, deny it, control it. But neither are we engaging with it. So, we’re just setting the thinking mind aside and coming into simple relaxed openness. Just presence. Presence. It’s what’s happening automatically when we’re not lost in thought. If we are not engaged with thought, suddenly, magically, miraculously, we are present without any effort, without any technique. We’re just present.
I’d like to chant the Mani mantra for a couple minutes.
[chanting Om Mani Padme Hum]
Very good. So remaining disengaged from thought, just sit in simple presence, feeling the energy of that chant, the energy of universal love and compassion, just in the room. It’s not something you have to feel emotionally necessarily, but the energy is here. And just rest in simple openness, natural presence.
Very good. Now remaining nice and present, relaxed and open. Open yourself up to sensory experience, the feelings in your body, the sights and sounds of the room around you, and so on. Just this kind of everything that’s happening in the five senses openness. We’re not concentrating on it. We’re just staying real open to it, allowing it to be there and remaining uninvolved with thought. So let’s do that together for a while here.
This is the meaning of presence in one sense—we are open to all sensory experience that’s arising. Stay open, relaxed, easy. There’s no big technique here. We’re just paying attention to all of experience at once. And if you notice that you’re getting caught in any particular experience, just relax and open up again. Just relax and let go, and come back to openness, to everything that’s arising.
Anytime you find yourself engaged with thinking, when the mind has narrowed down on a thought and grabbed onto it, just relax again. It’s you that’s grabbing on, and so you just let go, and the thought will just run off of its own accord. You don’t have to do anything to it. But if you find yourself grabbing onto any particular sensory experience, also relax, open that fist of attention, and just come back to being present with everything. If you’re tired, sit up straight. Open your eyes.
Good. Now, if that’s working for you, you can keep doing that. And if you want to move to the next thing, remaining relaxed, open, present, tune into emotions, moods, likes, dislikes, wants, not wants, that sort of stuff arising internally. It can include the thought activity, but you’re not engaging with any thought activity. You’re just open to what’s happening. Open to the mind activity, the emotional activity, that sort of thing. This is slightly harder because we tend to get more caught up in it. But it’s really a very similar practice. We remain in easy natural presence. Just noticing all these internal events, emotions, thoughts, feelings, moods, wants, not wants, all that sort of stuff that’s happening. And just not engaging with any of it, and yet aware of all of it.
We’re just allowing emotions to come and go without really worrying about why they’re there. Even if they’re really unpleasant or even if they’re really pleasant. Sometimes those are even harder to work with. Or maybe we’re having a lot of emotional neutrality. Whatever is going on, let it do its thing without interrupting it in any way. But neither are we sitting and watching it. It’s not like a cool fish tank with tropical fish swimming around in it that we’re just observing. We’re open to it. We’re allowing ourselves to actually be it without getting lost.
Very good. Now you can continue to work with that, or if you’d like, you can move into the next phase of this, which is deceptively simple. And that is, I just want you to open your heart to experience—that’s it. Open your heart to experience. Now, invariably, someone will say, “How do I open my heart?” And so I’ll just say imagine that you saw at the store this mother with her two-year-old child who’s just an absolute muppet—just adorable—with one of those hats with ears, just toddling along. And whatever that does to your heart, that mood, just open your heart towards whatever is arising, all this body sensation that’s there, the sights and sounds and feelings—both within and without, the emotions, the mental content, all that. Just open your heart towards all of it.
And again, if you notice yourself getting kind of narrowed down on one thing or another, just relax, let go, come back to the wider field of everything that’s presenting right now. Anytime you find yourself caught on anything in particular, just relax and come back to being open and awake and present with all of it. Anytime you find yourself caught, just let go. Come back to just presence.
Okay, good. Feel free to continue working there if you want to stay there. Or we can come into being open to the experience of awareness itself. Open to the experience of awareness itself. If you wonder how to do that, probably the easiest way for most people is if I ask you the question, what’s aware of this experience right now? And you just try to find it, and then rest in that place of awakeness. Most people at first only rest in that place of awakeness for like a quarter of a second before they start filling it in with thoughts and ideas and trying to grab onto it. The minute you try to grab onto it, is that it? You’re lost, because it’s not something you can look at. It’s what’s looking.
So if it’s available to you, maintaining this openhearted love towards all that’s arising, just come into openness to the experience of awakeness itself, and it will come and go. Just know that if you try to hang on to it, it’s already gone. Just start over. If you try to look at it or somehow grasp it, it’s already gone. Just start over. And if that’s too frustrating, then just come back to what we were doing before.
The essence here is to just what rest as awakeness, as openness, as awareness, without grabbing on to anything at all. The minute you grab on, just relax and let go. Each time you find yourself hanging on to something. You’ve grabbed it, just let go. You may have to do that a million times. But eventually, you’ll notice that the essence here is not a technique. The important thing here is not doing something. The important thing here is allowing that doing to rest. You just set it down and instead sit in absolutely natural awakeness. Natural means it’s not a technique. It’s not something you’re figuring out. It’s just there already—natural awakeness. It’s not artificial. You’re not generating it. It’s already there. It’s always been there. This pristine awakeness whenever we’re not grabbed onto anything. That’s what’s there. It’s very open. So, just rest there.
It’s not rest like falling asleep or taking a nap. It’s rest like—relax. Take it easy. What’s even having this experience? Look, and then just rest as what’s looking—not anything that’s found. If you find yourself caught up, you know what to do. If you’re doing this awakeness part, and you just keep getting caught up and it’s frustrating, again, just back up. You can go all the way to the beginning and just notice sensory experience. Or you can go to the second one and start noticing emotions and thoughts, and being open to those without engaging with the content. Or you can sit in the third one, just having your heart open to experience. That is an amazing feeling.
Remember, the essence of this practice is to return and rest. Return and rest. Return means if you’ve gotten taken away by something that you grabbed onto, you just let go of it and then you naturally just settle back into absolutely natural effortless presence. You can’t hang on to it. It’s there when you let go.
Good. Now, continuing to rest in this openness, let’s go ahead and chant again the Om mani padme mantra. In a way, space itself is chanting it. Awakeness itself is chanting it. It doesn’t really take any kind of effort. So let’s do that together now.
[chanting]
I don’t want it to end, but let’s bring the meditation slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly to an end. But notice that you don’t have to just go, “Oh, thank God.” and collapse and then rush back into being completely involved with your obsessions. You can instead notice that even when the formal sitting time is over, awakeness doesn’t go away. This openness, this relaxedness, this ease, this sense of spaciousness and boundary-lessness and timelessness. It’s right there. It’s right there. Anytime you’re not involved in your fixation, it’s right there. It’s not a special state that we arrived at through meditation. All we did with the meditation is remember to be that.
Nevertheless, we can bring the formal meditation time to a close—and if you want to, you can become totally involved with your obsessions again, as long as they’re publicly acceptable.
So, in one sense this is nondual meditation. We’re not focusing on something. We’re not trying to focus on something. That’s a different kind of meditation, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that. But here, we’re not trying to focus on something, especially in the fourth stage. but even in the first stage, be open to sensory experience. But notice what I said—we’re not grabbing on to sensory experience and then hanging on to it, instead, relax, be open, notice all of sensory experience. So we’re not doing that thing.
Same thing with the thoughts and feelings, the emotions, all that. It’s not like, okay, keep going and grabbing on to those and sticking with them or anything like that. Just be open to them coming and going. Notice them coming in a very relaxed, open way. But we’re not just witnessing them either. It’s not like we’re sitting on the bank of a river, and we’re watching the river go by. That’s witnessing—then we’re apart from it. And even if we’re staying wide, we’re still focusing attention from over here on a thing over there. Instead, we’re just open to it. We’re open to it—even our heart is open. Okay.
Everything happens, and we’re just aware of it. When we open our heart to it, it will really start to melt the sense that I’m over here and the things over there. We’re very good at that kind of distancing and separation. Instead, what we’re doing is opening our heart, which removes separation and removes distance—or at least lessens it.
And then, in the third stage, we’re really getting ready to do the fourth stage, which is rest is the awakeness in which everything’s arising. And notice that that takes zero effort. There’s no way to, on purpose, become the awakeness in which everything’s arising, spreading your attention with a lot of effort so it’s big and wide. None of that is it. You’re already aware, everything is already happening, so you just relax and be awakeness.
There’s the inquiry method, where you ask yourself, what is having this experience? What is open to all experience? What is that? Look. When you try to find it, you can’t find it. But in the attempt to find it, you notice you can rest as awakeness itself. The minute the awakeness becomes something you can point attention at, you’re not doing it anymore. Now what you’re really doing is pointing attention at an idea of awakeness.
That’s what makes it nondual meditation. We’re not on purpose pointing our attention at anything. Furthermore, we’re not going from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing, which is just pointing our attention at various things in order. Rather, we’re letting go of doing that. Every time you grab onto something, you just relax. So, instead of crimping attention on something, we uncrimp—uncrimping is not an action. It’s letting go of doing.
So, everybody with me, bring your fist up. Make a fist. Now, this is important. Bring your fist up. Squeeze it. Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze. That’s what you’re doing when you’re grabbing onto something. It’s called grasping. For a reason. Now, just stop doing that. You don’t have to go like that [throws it away]. You just stop grabbing—feel the difference. So grasping feels like that. And then just relax.
It’s a very particular feeling, and you can feel it even in your mind with attention. Attention tightens, and then relaxing is just letting that go. And so in this way of sitting, over and over and over and over and over again, every time the mind goes zrrt [tightens], you just relax. And what’s funny is if you try to hold on to the relaxation, that’s another grabbing. That’s why you can’t hold on to it. The minute you do that, you’re already grabbing again. So it’s a funny thing. It’s got a balance element, where you’re just relaxing and letting go.
And in the relaxing and letting go, over time what happens is you notice that the awakeness itself is tremendously stable. The attention can move around but the awakeness that is like the light of the attention, is always there. That’s why we don’t go with the attention. We’re not trying to do that kind of focusing because that move that comes and goes. That’s a thing that comes and goes. If you spend the whole retreat building that up so it’s nice and man, you can really pay attention like that. Three days after the retreat is over, it’s gone. Oops. Went away again. That’s cool. That’s powerful.
It’s fun. It’s interesting. But you have to either live on a retreat so you can stay focused, or you have to notice that that’s not what we’re really trying to do in this sort of meditation. Rather, what we’re noticing is that the light of awakeness, the awakeness itself is always stable. And when we rest as that. Notice the word rest. When we rest as awakeness, we’re resting in tremendous stability. And then the coming and going of all experience is fine. Anyway, give it a shot.
Now, as promised, if you have something you’d like to share, or a question you’d like to ask, raise your hand.
Q: I always feel like in meditation I have this unfortunate split of whatever I feel like is the mind examining the body, and that there’s some part that I’m feeling is me, that’s really investigating and analyzing. It has this hyper-vigilance. Okay, what is that sensation? What is that in the body? When I realized that I had that type of me versus the body mindset, I’ve been trying to get out of that perspective. What recommendations do you have about how to lessen that dynamic that I’m realizing I have?
MT: Who is this person that’s looking at the body? Think about the question. Who is the person that’s looking at the body?
Q: It feels like a fiction.
MT: How do you even know it’s there? What phenomenological qualities does it have that make you think there’s a thing looking at the body? Because you’re describing an experience—and we all have it. So it’s not nothing. So what is it? Even if it’s imaginary, it’s made of some imaginable pieces. Like what?
Q: Yeah. It feels like those sensations, there’s some part that’s trying to make sense of that, put narration to that, that is very hard to calm down.
MT: Okay, and the way you know it’s there is because you probably—I’m going to put words in your mouth—probably you think it’s in your head, right? Not somewhere else in your body that you’re looking from. Probably somewhere more or less behind your eyes. So there’s some body sensations that you’re ascribing to this so-called looker. And then there’s the sense that you’re a lighthouse beaming a light down on the sensations in the body somewhere. That’s a total hallucination. That’s completely imaginary. That spot behind your eyes is not doing anything. And certainly, it’s not that you have to feel your body by beaming a spotlight of awareness down into it. That’s literally a kind of imaginary framework that we’re putting around our experience. Everybody does it—but it’s insane. I’m over here looking at my body—that’s not how that works.
And so the way around it is, first of all, really recognize that it’s a total construction, and then, the words I was using specifically to just open to the experience of your body. Try it right now. Just open to the experience—you don’t have to close your eyes. Open to the experience of your body. Do you need to look at it in your mind’s eye to feel it?
Q: No.
MT: And so that won’t cure it because it’s a habit. But every time you find yourself doing it, just come back. Notice there’s no distance at all when you just open to the experience of feeling your body. Feels pretty different. Yeah. Or no?
Q: It does, and I am seeing this as this fiction, but I also realize how locked I am into it.
MT: Well, I’m showing you how to unlock from it. You can’t stop it, so don’t even try. Instead, just open to the experience of feeling your body and step outside the whole thing that’s going on. Okay? And instead, just feel your body from your body, not from your head. Can you do that?
Q: It happens at times.
MT: Okay, that’s what’s really happening. You’re feeling your body. The rest of it is like a MadMax Thunderdome. There’s that huge giant guy, and he’s got a little guy on his shoulder. It’s like you’ve got a little guy on your shoulder. You don’t need that. You don’t need to grasp that whole extra guy on there that’s looking, because you can just feel your body with your body.
Q: Okay.
MT: So that’s what I mean by open to the experience. So try that out.
Q: Okay. Thank you.
MT: Yeah. And thanks for describing that, because basically everybody does that. It’s really the worst movie ever made, but you must see it now because of Tina Turner.
Q: Hi. So, sometimes when I’m doing other sorts of sits and I’m…
MT: You do other sorts of sits? No. [laughter]
Q: Am I still allowed to ask a question?
MT: Yes.
Q: Sometimes I’ll be attending to different tension points in the body and seeing the degree to which I have optionality around them. Is it possible for me to let the fist go and allow attention to relax? There are points in my body where it feels like that’s very simple—like it really just feels like letting go. And other times, where I don’t feel like whatever the neurons are firing, where I can just let it go. And in those moments, I just sort of let it be as it is.
MT: Sure.
Q: So sometimes I find myself having a similar experience with the activity in the mind. There are certain mental tensions that feel like I have the ability to easily ungrasp, and other ones that feel a lot stickier. My question would be, upon encountering a mental tension that I’m not quite sure how to ungrasp from, what to do?
MT: Yeah, that’s a very well-formulated question. So thank you for that. I appreciate a well-formulated question every once in a while. It almost never happens. [laughter] No shame.
Don’t get in a fight with it. Imagine, and some people are doing this also. I can’t relax that, so I better start stretching right in the middle of my meditation—essentially doing yoga. No, during the meditation, whatever you can’t relax, just let it be tight. Same thing with your mind. If there’s stuff that’s so sticky, you can’t let go of it. You don’t want to get in a big fight because that’s just even stickier. So, just to the best of your ability, you kind of go like, you do you—I’m gonna meditate over here. Okay.
Q: Yeah. Yep. Thanks.
Q: Hello.
MT: Hello. Welcome.
Q: Yes. So, It was a good sit. I had a bunch of dullness come up.
MT: Yeah. You were falling asleep back there.
Q: So, I wasn’t falling asleep, [laughter] but I was very dull, so dull that it seemed like I was falling asleep—but I did feel very awake through it. But so, when you do this, you’re [laughter] you’re just getting dull. When that’s happening, I think I was aware of it. There were definitely pockets where I just was not aware of it happening. But for a lot of the time, I was aware that it was happening. I was like, “Okay, okay. Can I just relax on it? Can I relax? Can I relax?” And at some point, I thought, “Actually, I think it might be better if I just attend to my breath.” Yeah. I thought I’m going to see if I can just—for this whole sit—just try to relax. And I think it probably let the dullness go on for longer than it needed to, than if I just attended to my breath. But I’m wondering what your take is for any given sit on that.
MT: I mean both are interesting in their own way. You’re right that you probably, you know, coming back to the breath and just doing a tight meditation on it probably would wake you up a little bit. What’s the number one failure mode of this kind of super openness meditation? There’s really only one, and that is you can get really dull. And if you notice that happening, you want to wake up, wake up, wake up. You think you’re not grabbing on to anything, but really you’re just drifting into dullness, which is not helpful at that point. Take a nap, you know. But we want our sits to be bright and clear.
And so, you get to decide. And it really comes down to it’s hard to meditate on dullness, right? That’s not an easy meditation object. So, how much fuel you have to sit with that in the moment would be the deciding factor. It’s worth doing. Kind of the deepest deepest level of that is just unconsciousness, which is the ultimate klesha. There’s supposed to be three kleshas: grabbing on, resisting, and dullness. But really, dullness, ignorance, unconsciousness is the deep one. The other two come out of it. So, you’re kind of at that point meditating on fundamental ignorance. Fundamental unconsciousness. So, it’s hard, but it’s also over time very worth doing. So, it’s up to you.
Q: Thank you.
MT: Yeah, it passes
Q: In a similar vein to the last question, what’s the unique utility of using a sense object like your breath or concentrating on the edge of your lips versus open awareness style meditation?
MT: Well, the main utility is that it’s a lot easier, and so you can get some relief of suffering, you can get some stability of mind—and that’s good. And you can get it faster. Some small percentage of people instantly get the open nondual style meditation—they just get it. But most for people, we’re programmed like little dressage horses, so we are always asking, what do I do next—it’s all we are ever asking. And so when there’s nothing to do next, it can be really uncomfortable, and people spin and spin and spin. So it can be helpful to have someone say, “I want you to focus on your breath really hard—because now you know what to do. You can do it. Then you can use that stability over time. And I’m not criticizing it. It’s actually very very useful. But over time it slows everything down enough, so that you might have enough openness to be like, “Oh, I can just rest.” So it leads us in. It’s a nice gateway drug into openness. On the other hand, you know, people can get so focused on it that it starts to build an almost defensive rind around just relaxing.
Q: Thanks.
MT: Yep. In general, you know most teachers these days most—I don’t know about most—many that I talk to, which might be a select few lunatics like me, notice that starting with focused meditation and leading up to open meditation is a nice one, two step. And so even here I just didn’t throw you in to do nothing. We were first feeling our body just in a more relaxed way, but still feeling our body, feeling our emotions, kind of walking our way into it.
Q: How about looking at all the senses at once as a field? So rather than just the breath, like stacking them until they burn out. Is that a thing?
MT: Well, you’re describing the very effortful way of doing it. What I was saying is just be open to everything in experience. It’s different—instead of that thing, which is a way of meditating—it will just make you crazy, but it is a way of meditating—you just notice that all of experience is already in experience. It’s already there. So what are you trying so hard to do? Is that making any sense? So again, we take this one step at a time.
It’s very, very useful to do breath meditation. It’s very, very useful to do these dualistic meditations. But it’s also useful to remember those are focus states. They’re transient. They come and go. You cannot rely on them. Whereas the awakeness you can rely on, that is there, it’s foundational.
Q: Okay. Hey, thank you.
Q: I kind of get a little stuck on this point about the illusion of mind.
MT: Who said anything about the illusion of mind?
Q: Maybe that’s not the words that you used earlier. This notion of looking for the mind and it not being behind the eyes. How is that different from the brain actually being behind the eyes?
MT: Yeah, it’s pretty different.
Q: Can you speak to that a little bit?
MT: Sure. Have you ever experienced your brain? I don’t think so. No, it’s just an idea. I mean, I’m positive there’s one in there, but you’re not experiencing it. So, that’s coming from pure concept. You have a concept. Oh, there’s this can of meat, and in there are some brains, and that’s supposed to be what’s experiencing everything. But all of that is just completely conceptual. That has nothing to do with your actual experience. Okay? So that’s what’s important. Am I experiencing my brain? No. I just have ideas about brains. You can experience someone else’s brain, especially if their head is open—there it is.
It’s important—and this is very hard for us in our society—to distinguish the idea of something from the experience of something. Those are super different. All I’m saying is look for what’s experiencing. In experience, you can’t find it; it is unfindable. That’s literally the definition. What’s experiencing is unfindable in experience. You don’t have to believe me. Keep searching and searching and searching. You can find ideas about brains, but those are just thoughts. What knows those thoughts? Look. Okay, that’s essential. You got it.
Q: Yeah, and on this point of openheartedness, you use this example of the child with the mother and was the idea there to tune into that feeling, then let the story go and then just kind of have that feeling that’s elicited by your heart opening?
MT: Yeah. Open your heart, and then whatever is arising, have an open heart. Yeah. I gave the example because you can feel what it feels like for your heart to open at least a little bit. Most people—and maybe a lot. Now have that towards everything.
Q: Yeah. I feel like I have some practicing to do in that one.
MT: Thank you. We all do. Yeah. Okay, we went way over, but there were good questions.
So, we are now going to sit silently, silent as the grave for a little while here—forty-five minutes. I want to do it every time. I’m never joking.
[silent meditation]
Okay, I will see you here next week. Thanks everybody.
