Dissolving the Core of Tension
Streamed live on Nov 14, 2024
I just want to invite you to come into the guided meditation, but also be clear that you don’t have to—you can just sit and enjoy the group meditation space and do your own sit, if you have something you like doing better. The only rules are that it’s silent and still. It’s not like you’re going to get up and dance or whatever in your meditation. Okay, so as long as you can be quiet and still, whatever you want in the privacy of your own mind. And then, there’s a third option, which a lot of people actually use, which is, you kind of follow the guided sit until I go someplace that you don’t want to go, or that you can’t go. Or you’re liking what’s happening already, so just stay there. So you stay on the bus halfway, and then get off and you do your thing there. Okay, so is that enough freedom for you? Good. So let’s start from there, and we’re going to just do a little bit of light stretching together, pre-meditation stretching. You make this work for your body, you don’t have to follow what I’m doing, of course, you know your body best.
Okay, then just sit and breathe for a moment, nice and deep. Breathe from your belly, whatever way it feels good. Meditation is not a thing you do with your mind, it’s mainly a thing you’re doing with awareness, but also it’s very embodied. Having your body involved really helps.
Okay, you guys know that I like alternate nostril breathing, so if you know how to do that, go for it. If you don’t remember, the instructions are: put your hand like this, your right arm is up, using your thumb, close your right nostril. Breathe in the left nostril, then you’re going to breathe out the other one. Close this side, and breathe out the right, and breathe in the right. Close it, breathe out the left. Now you want to sit up straight, don’t be hunching over. This is energy work, so you want your body to be nice and right. We’re going to do this together for like three minutes, so just settle in.
What I want you to do is, let’s just use the seed syllable hreem, and just focus at your third eye center as you’re doing this. So you’re not just kind of sitting there thinking about the new Kate Blanchet movie or something, you are breathing, alternating your nostrils, concentrating your energy at your third eye, while intoning the hreem syllable. This is a nice concentration exercise, but it’s mainly energy balancing, and it will tend to really, really slow down the speedy mind.
We started with a left nostril in-breath, so, for balance, when you end, end on a left nostril out-breath. Then just breathe normally for a moment. Now we’ll do just a little bit of seed syllable chanting, and we’ll just stick with hreem. Remember how we do this, just keep chanting, and you take a breath whenever you want. You can do it at any pitch you want, because I’m doing a pitch that’s nice for my voice, but you use a pitch that’s nice for your voice. Keep noticing the energy at your third eye, even though you’re chanting. You’re just relaxed, you’re open, and you’re letting that hreem energy really energize your third eye.
Good. Now, riding on the energy of the pranayama and the seed syllable, simply rest in the openness. Just allow yourself to set the entire machinery of your thinking mind aside, just like you’re putting down a power drill. Just unplugging it, and you’re just going to set it on the table, and you’re not going to use it right now. Unlike a power drill, it might sit there humming for a while. It might still be thinking, but we’re just not going to notice, we’re not going to engage with that at all. We’re just going to let it be, and, instead, where all the awareness is going is just into simple presence. Just into simple openness. When you’re not in the machinery of thought, the mind is very open, and it’s very, very, simple. It’s high res, but it’s simple.
So, letting yourself be very naturally, very simply, open. And, if you notice you’ve got kind of a twitch, like, I just can’t stop picking up my mind. Just keep setting it back down. It’s okay, you don’t have to fight with it, but, in a very relaxed, super mellow way, set it back down, and come back to the utter simplicity and naturalness of open awareness.
Now, if that’s a little too formless, it’s okay to use the breath as a home base. You’re not focusing on the breath or trying to follow it or something. You’re just letting it be kind of the anchor for this openness, something that you can lightly sit with while you’re just being awake, in the skylike, relaxed, bright, clear, fresh, open, outside of mind, completely outside of thinking.
I’m going to be quiet for a while. We’re just gonna sit and do that. And, again, each time you pick up, if you pick back up the mind, just set it back down. It’s like, sometimes if you put down your phone, you keep nervously picking it back up. Eventually, you’re like, leave that thing on the table, and just feel that breath wave, easily rising and falling on its own accord.
Notice what it’s like to sit without engaging the thought process. You’re wide awake, you’re fully present, and there’s a real sense of openness and ease that you’re not generating, or somehow trying to make happen. It’s just there because you’re not picking up the thought machine. If you are continuously re-engaging with thought, then, again, don’t fight it. Don’t get in a war with it, but what I would recommend is, every time, at the end of an out-breath, just let go again. Check each out-breath, oh, yep, I’m engaged, just let go, like just, ahhh. So at least you’re not continuously engaged. It’s very interesting, if you can sit there unengaged with thought for a while, just how rich and lovely open experience is. It’s not special, it’s not trippy or something, but it’s just this normal moment, but experienced with tremendous presence. Very nice, so let’s continue this for a while.
Good. Now, continuing to just sit in simple presence, notice if there’s any tension in the core of your mind. Tension in the core of your mind is what keeps you grabbing onto thoughts, or grabbing onto ideas, or trying to figure stuff out, or trying to plan. It’s like there’s a fist in the core of your head, and it keeps grabbing on to stuff. Even though, of course, there’s no fist in the core of your head, it feels like muscle tension almost. So, if you can notice that, the thing to do is relax that.
Open the fist of the mind, so to speak. Let that core tension right in the very center of your brain relax. Just as if you were opening your hand. And you’ll feel it try to grab on again, tighten down on something—which is okay—again, we’re not fighting it. That just adds more tension. Instead, we’re gently allowing it to open, and to find enough trust, and enough confidence, and self-care, to allow it to just stay relaxed.
So, it’s a lot less like trying to stay focused, it’s more like helping a child get to sleep or something, just very soothing, very sweet, allowing it to relax. Not pushy or demanding, just soothing it open. Just let that thing—each time it tightens up—just let it relax. And, when it’s relaxed like that, it can’t hold on to any thoughts. They’ll be there—they’re moving through—but you’re not fixating on them, and that’s the point. So, relax the core of your mind. Sit in simple presence.
It can be really helpful at the end of each out-breath, to allow that core of the mind to just dissolve entirely. The end of each out-breath, just let it vanish, so it becomes more and more relaxed, more and more open. But notice, it’s not taking you into some kind of dream, or some kind of altered state. You’re actually arriving in presence more and more completely, coming out of the virtual world of the mind, into actual being.
Now, assuming you’re staying pretty relaxed, notice the natural openness that’s available. The experience of the room and the body, and so on, is very open, unbounded, tremendously spacious and wide. It’s not that you’re making it spacious, or trying to force it open, or something. It’s that, when you’re not continuously down inside the machinery of thought, the senses are wide open in all directions. It’s easy to feel your body, easy to hear the room around. If your eyes are open, kind of taking in the whole scene. It’s the opposite of that tight, crystallized sense of being kind of locked-in we get from being down inside our thoughts. This is like being up on top of a mountain on a clear day, just openness in all directions.
Now, you may have been working with verbal thoughts. There’s also visual thoughts, one of which is something like, if you really put it in words, it’s an idea of, I am inside my body, and you keep kind of flashing on the image of your body as sort of a container. That’s another thing we’re letting go of. We’re not engaging with visual thinking like that either. If you don’t grab onto those body images, you start to notice that sense of being awake, and aware, and present, is not somehow located in the thermos bottle of your body. It’s more like it’s just an open field of awareness, a vibrating field of sensation that doesn’t really have a boundary—it’s just open. The body can start to feel a lot more like a cloud of buzzy, tingly, pixels, more than some kind of potato.
So, it’s open, spacious, and roomy. So we’re not just relaxing away from verbal thinking, we’re relaxing away from visual thinking also, which can be a lot more unconscious. But, to whatever extent you’re aware that it’s happening, just let that go, and that’s when the body will just open up. Because your mind is busy putting the body in a sort of box all the time. When you just don’t engage with that box image, the body just feels the way it feels on its own, which is like a spacious cloud of vibration.
Over and over again, releasing the fist of thought. Letting any gripping in the mind relax—at least on the end of the out-breath, just let it go. Do not follow a train of thought over and over again. Let it go. Even the thought of the body.
And there’s another one you can let go of, which is any sense of time. Time is just a thought, it’s an idea. So, if that idea comes up, just don’t engage it. Notice, if you don’t engage the time thought, then you’re in timelessness—which is not some trippy, giant infinity loop or something—it’s just presence outside of time. Time is like a cop in your head that you keep. It keeps checking on you all the time. You can just let it go, not engage it, and then, immediately, we’re in a kind of beautiful, simple, presence, as if we are children again.
Remember, this is not some kind of idea to imagine, this is the opposite of that. We’re just letting go of imagining anything, without struggling with that, because continuously relaxing isn’t a struggle. You might have to remember over and over to relax, but it’s still calming, and soothing, to just, ah, ah. So, it’s not a fight. Don’t get in any kind of fight. Returning over and over again to simple, open, presence, which takes no doing of any kind. It’s what’s there all the time when you’re not doing.
Very good. Now let’s experiment with letting go of an even deeper thought, a much more fundamental one: I am doing this. That’s just an idea, but a very persistent one. I am doing this. It’s not something to go find and fight with. Again, just notice if you have the feeling, I am doing this, then you just relax that, and just come back to sitting in simple presence, outside of time, outside of the mind, outside of the solidity of the body. Spacious, open, relaxed, wide awake, bright, clear, fresh, simple. Spacious, open, ease.
Okay, very good. Now just for a moment, without using your thinking process at all, look for who is even present. Who is it that’s present? Don’t think about it, it’s not that kind of an answer. It’s a looking. Who is it that’s present? Just find it. Notice, you can’t actually find anything but presence. There’s not a who, there is just presence, just spacious, clear, open, freshness.
Good. Let’s do three long oms together, just radiating the sound of this clear, open, presence. Nice and loud.
Feel the energy of those oms radiating out in the boundless, timeless halls of awakeness, bright and clear.
Okay, very good.
So, the interesting thing here is that we’re not trying to cultivate some kind of special awakeness. It is something you can do with altered states, but that’s not necessary. Even those altered states are still just simply a reflection of what’s always there. What’s always there is this simple, wide awake, wide open, boundless clarity, simplicity, brightness, that’s actually kind and loving as well. It’s always there, it’s always there. What happens is we just have learned to focus on something else.
So, we’re spending a lot of time focusing on body sensations, or the idea of the body, I am my body, and I’m in the body. We’re focusing on that. Even that is probably a little too embodied and present for most people these days. We’re more focusing on my Twitter feed and a bunch of ideas and algorithms for acing job interviews or something. You’re just so into this virtual world in the mind—which is fine, I mean that’s a powerful thing to use, it’s a useful tool, but we’re kind of glommed onto it in a neurotic, fixated, way. You may have noticed when I said relax the fist of thought, or let the core of your mind relax, that it just kept doing that. Not for everyone, but for lots of people, that will just keep grabbing. That’s what I mean. It’s a habit of being focused on that, like that’s what’s really going on is that sort of mental experience.
Again, nothing wrong with mental experience, but isn’t it odd that you’re totally glommed onto it. One of the difficulties of being just stuck on it like that is that you don’t notice this other thing, the main thing, which is this tremendous clear, open, awake, presence within, which this experience of the mind is just this tiny virtuality. I’m sure all of us have had the experience of being somewhere like Yellowstone National Park, and you or one of your friends is stuck on their phone, reading some social media. There’s this great word in Hungarian—I’ll pronounce it wrong, egérszínház, which means mouse theater.
You’re stuck on your mouse theater, and here’s this whole world happening. Someone’s just missing the entire experience because they’re stuck in their mouse theater. That’s just such an obvious version of this, but the non-obvious version is that the rest of us are doing the same damn thing, just in the mouse theater in your head. Just stuck onto whatever loops are going on. Again, all of which is fine, it’s just funny, because you don’t have to do that. That’s just a choice, and after a while, it’s almost more of a habit. And maybe after a while, even more of an addiction.
It’s that little thing, I just prefer to watch the mouse theater in my head all day. That’s the only thing at all—it’s that simple—keeping you from experiencing vast halls of freedom, and love, and presence, which are there immediately when you aren’t focused on that. Immediately. It’s there the whole time, you’re just not paying attention to it.
One of my main teachers used to say, you’ve got this giant banquet being prepared for you every day. This gorgeous, sumptuous banquet, and you just forget to eat it—every single day—because you don’t notice that it’s there. The food is on the table, dig in, and you’re just like, I’m busy with the mouse theater. You’re just not engaging.
That would be kind of sad on some level, but it’s so much worse than that, because the virtual world is basically just awful, right? And I don’t mean the Internet, but I mean, you’re inside the thoughts. It’s pretty much a terrible place to be, right? It’s just tight, and judgy, and fixated on all kinds of pain and suffering. And yet we’re choosing, on purpose, to connect with it continuously, continuously, continuously, continuously, continuously—who knows why? Just because we aren’t normally trained to not do that.
In fact we are normally trained to do that. So, it’s not just that you’re missing the banquet, it’s like, you’re eating glass and barbed wire, on purpose. And so, you might want to not do that. Maybe. It’s funny, because if I invite people to not do that, they will fight, and fight, and fight, to do it—and me, too, for a long time. But there’s this image that I learned somewhere in India that’s just a super intense image, that was very compelling, and that is, being stuck on that is like being a dog—this is a terrible image, I’m sorry, it’s a horrible image—a dog that’s eating broken glass and thinks it’s so delicious, because it tastes like blood. It’s just like, oh. That’s what that engagement with this thing—that is only painful—is like. We think we need it, and that it’s important, and we must. No, it’s just hurting you.
So, I invite you to begin to extinguish that habit, extinguish that training, extinguish that super tense fist in the core of your head that you’re doing all the time. Don’t fight it, because that’s just another super tense fist. Just keep relaxing that thing, because if you’re not making it tight on purpose all the time, it will relax. It will relax, because naturally it’s open, naturally it’s present, naturally it’s wide awake. It’s not even that hard, it’s just that we have a long habit of not relaxing it.
You know, if you’ve kept a muscle tense for a long time, sometimes it just wants to stay tense, and needs some very gentle, very kind, very compassionate soothing—kind of coaxing—to open back up. And that might even at first be a little painful, because it’s not used to range of motion. So you’ve got to be really gentle about it. If you try to jam it open, that just hurts. And again, just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with thinking. That’s perfectly obvious, that we need to do that. That’s very powerful, helpful, useful as a tool that we use, but not as something that we stuck inside. Imagine your car, really useful to have, but imagine if you then thought, I am my car, and you just never get out. You imagine that you’re somehow skin welded to the seat. Then you just can’t get out now, it’s a prison. You just start to suffer. So this is an invitation to recognize that you’re already free of that. You aren’t stuck in it.
Questioner 1: Is freshness of appearances a result of not being distracted the way you were talking about, and the intense presence?
Michael: That’s part of it. You’re not distracted, so you’re taking in more, but it’s more that the thought of a thing is quite different than the thing. For most people, most of the time, we’re stuck in the thought of a thing, even if we’re present with it. Right now, I mean, if it’s there in the room with us, still more of our experience is our idea about the thing. It’s just a tag cloud of concepts about this thing, and that’s really dead, and dull, and repetitive, and uninteresting. Whereas, the actual embodied sensory experience of that thing is very alive, and very vibrant, and juicy, and vivid. And so, in other words, it’s being stuck in the thinking part that kind of deadens our whole world.
Questioner 1: And then, how was it experienced? I think maybe one result of that would be having new insights, because it’s being seen as a fresh thing this time, rather than that thing. The other is enjoyment, because it’s juicy, like you say. Is that how it’s experienced?
Michael: Yeah, although the insights come, but, again a lot of times those aren’t a train of thought, you just start having these ahas. But on top of that, just the plain enjoyment of experience, the enjoyment of other people, the enjoyment of animal beings, the enjoyment of our world, goes way way way way way up.
Questioner 1: And then, to maximize the freshness, or the moments of freshness, is it like glimpses of freshness? That, meaning, the path to experiencing it more and more, is in glimpses and like increasing the frequency of experiencing that way?
Michael: That’s certainly a good way to do it. Another way is to spend time doing meditation like this. You do an hour of this, and then, at least for a while afterwards, you’re less in the dead machinery of thought, and more in presence. So, by meditating, you get more and more acclimated. And, yeah, doing the glimpses is a good way in, although I will say that, over time, those glimpses get longer and longer. We start to, because that’s what’s really there, so to speak. The rest is just the veils coming in between us and it.
Questioner 1: Thank you.
Michael: Very good. Other stuff, reports, things coming up, questions?
Questioner 2: Hello. The last couple of sits I’ve had in here, I’ve had a lot of gross dullness and sleepiness.
Michael: Are you getting enough sleep?
Questioner 2: Yeah, I’m getting seven, yeah okay I could get eight maybe, but still it’s a lot of dullness. I know there’s a bunch of body stuff you can do. I was doing tiny little wiggles. I would kind of take the two images of my eyes and zoom them back together, or I have a lot of little fiddles I can do that seem to really help, like sit up straight. I know there’s a lot of body stuff, but it feels like even with all that stuff, I just get to being on the very edge of not being sleepy, but nothing like cool ever really is going to happen during the sit. It’s kind of like fighting for the whole time. So, is there any other stuff, like ways to focus, or other kinds of techniques, or like energy stuff you could be doing that would be interesting?
Michael: It’s simple. It’s your mind that’s dull. That’s why I asked if you got enough sleep. If you got enough sleep, your body is fresh and awake. So, your mind is dull. And as long as you’re still engaging the mind, you’re dull. But if you step outside of the mind, the mind will be a dull object, but you’re in wide openness, and wide awake place. That’s advanced. It’s not easy to do, but it’s simple to recognize, oh, it’s my mind, that’s dull . My awakeness is wide awake. It’s always wide awake.
Questioner 2: I’ve had the thing where the body goes to sleep and you’re somehow…
Michael: It’s simple, just recognize that the dullness is not who you are. It’s just the mind is going to dullness. Okay, let it do that, and just watch it clearly.
Questioner 2: Okay, thank you.
Michael: It’s just that easy. Given that, you’re doing all the other physical stuff, that’s sort of the next, and you understood what I meant.
Questioner 2: Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Questioner 3: Hello. Somewhat related, as I can watch my thoughts, I can set them aside, and go into openness. I can feel, it almost feels like it’s going on the other side, and I can feel the background noise of my mind going into dream space, starting to tell stories that are not thoughts, but feel like thoughts. But it’s more on the dream side, it’s not quite sleepiness or dullness, but it seems related. It’s like falling over on the other side of a headstand.
Michael: Are you sure you’re wide awake?
Questioner 3: Yes.
Michael: Then don’t worry about it. One of the ways to check is if there’s suddenly a sound, do you [jerk]? If you do, then you’re not wide awake, you were falling asleep. But, if it’s just like bang, [no reaction], then you’re fine. The hypnagogic stuff is actually going on in your mind all the time, and when you’re meditating outside the mind, you’re wide awake, your mind will go into all that crazy stuff like that, and it doesn’t matter. It just is awake, so just let it do that. It’s actually tremendously healing for your mind to do that. It’s just being natural for once, instead of being some kind of machine that just went into being natural. Just don’t get caught up in any of that. It’s actually very healing. You’ll notice it feels real good. Now, of course, it feels real good to fall asleep, too, so this is a different kind of feeling good. It’s that the mind is free, okay?
Questioner 3: Great, thanks.
Questioner 4: Sometimes it feels like the way into relaxing that grasping muscle is less knowingness, and it’s less engaged. So it’s like, if you look at a hammer on a table, you don’t think I’m gonna pick that up, or if you are, instead of driving, you’re a passenger, and you see a road sign, you’re not interpreting it, you’re just kind of floating through it. It can feel dull, it can feel less engaged, weak, but it’s really calming.
Michael: It’s really calming, but notice that that’s still kind of an idea of the mind there. That the mind is somehow dull. The awakeness is really awake. Are you seeing that hammer clearly? Are you seeing the roadside clearly? Or are you going into some kind of checked-out dullness? Checked-out dullness is a mind state, so you’re still inside your thinking. Because when you’re not inside the thinking, it won’t be checked out. It’ll be fresh and clear, so that’s a symptom.
Questioner 4: I have to find another way in then, because that will slow the thoughts.
Michael: Sure, so will going to sleep. That slows your thoughts right down, doesn’t it? So you need a different way in, okay?
Questioner 4: Okay, yeah, thank you.
Questioner 5: Just adding on to the conversation. I can do long meditations in the morning, but this is like my first time trying meditation at night. I was coming straight from work, so I think maybe in terms of your mind being dull, I noticed that. I’m trying to find routines that help me come here, and make me feel like I can fully be present. I try to take a nap, but I still feel like I was going back and forth between being present and kind of dreaming a little bit. It’s after the meditation I feel like throughout the meditation I would make myself feel guilty for not being present.
Michael: That really helps. [laughter]
Questioner 5: But I noticed that right now, I feel really good, and I feel really present. It also really helped when you said your mind is being free. and my mind does feel free right now.
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