Ease and Spaciousness in Body and Mind
Welcome everybody. I’m Michael Taft, as usual, we’ll do an hour-long sit. If you’re not used to sitting on the floor for an hour, you might want to quickly get a chair, instead, because sometimes that can be uncomfortable if you’re not used to it. Other than that, I will lead a guided meditation, which means I’ll be talking, and you do not have to follow the guided meditation—do whatever you want, as long as you just sit still and quiet, you can have whatever meditation experience, or any other kind of experience, you would like to have inside the privacy of your own mind, assuming our minds are private. So, with that, let’s get going.
The first thing I want you to do, is to just flex your wrists, you can do it any way you want, I’m kind of into circles, but it’s not exercise. Just relax, flex your wrists, and then do your elbows however you want, there’s no real way to do it, and then your shoulders, and your wrists, elbows, and shoulders all at once.
Very good. Then do some of these—it’s a little hard when you’re seated, but let it feel good, let it be relaxed. Your body’s really loose, really open, really free. Good, and then do your head a little bit, your neck, and then we’ll do spine rotations—whatever that is for you. Here I’m kind of doing the pelvic rotation, but eventually, you let your pelvis stay still, and then just your head turns in a circle at the end of your spine, and then, just start feeling that circle getting smaller and smaller, smaller and smaller, smaller and slower, and smaller, and, eventually I want you to get to the place where you can’t tell if you’re making a circle or not. You might still be making one, but you might not—I can’t tell—is it just the idea of a circle that you’re feeling, or is there still a circle happening? And, right there, just rest.
Then look inward, ask yourself, what’s it like to be me right now? And then, look. Don’t assume you know the answer. Check in. How does it feel? Notice the thinking, notice the emotions, notice the body sensations, notice the stories. And whatever’s arising, just let that be perfect, even if you feel like you’re gonna puke and faint or something, let that be fine. Even if you feel enraged, let that be. Whatever is coming up, however you feel—I am really bored and skeptical and hate this. Okay, let that be okay. Just accept whatever is going on, completely. Just like the weather, let the weather be the weather.
Very good. Now, let’s do some very, very gentle ujjayi breathing. If you know how to do that, just start doing it. Not the alternate nostril breathing, just ujjayi. Just very lightly tensing your throat, as if you’re going to whisper, very very lightly on the out-breath. You breathe in normally, and then, on the out-breath—I’m going to do it really loud, but you shouldn’t be doing it loud, you just, from a slight tension in the back of your throat, it should almost be inaudible. If it’s so loud you can hear it, that’s too much tension. We just want very slight tension, slowly breathe in, and then, on the out-breath, it gives you the capacity to regulate the speed of the out-breath. You want it to be really, really, really, long and uniformly smooth. It’s a long, smooth out-breath. If you want to, you can do a mantra with these. On the in-breath you do om, on the out-breath, do hum—not actually saying it, just thinking it. All this breathing is through your nose, always through your nose. Notice, already, even doing just a little bit, it’s very regulating, it’s very soothing, that long smooth out breath, with just that tiny, tiny bit of very minute bit of tension in the throat—quite settling.
Good. And now, as many of you anticipated, let’s do just a little bit of alternate nostril breathing, remembering to start on the left. If you haven’t done it before, close your right nostril with your right thumb, breathe in through the left nostril. Once you have a full in-breath, you close the left nostril with your two middle fingers, then open the right nostril. Breathe out all the way through the right nostril. Switch nostrils breathe in through the right, then out the left. Very slow, very smooth, very gentle, but all the way up. Let’s do this together for a couple minutes. Again, on the in-breath om, or you could do many, whatever you want. On the out-breath, hum, hum, and we’re going to do it differently than we did it last week. On the in-breath, feel that in your root chakra, and on the out-breath, feel it at the third eye.
So, keep going. Just some hints here. You don’t have to scrunch up your face—no tension at all. Really, really, really, relaxed, and however long you’re doing the in and the out-breath, let it be comfortable, let it be easeful, don’t strain. It’s best if you’re sitting up as straight as possible.
If you’ve done this before and you’re comfortable, make the out-breath quite a bit longer than the in-breath. If you’re not used to that, don’t do it. This is very soothing, and regulating. It’s kind of bihemispheric stimulation—left, right, left, right—and at the same time, besides being soothing, you’ll notice that it’s energizing. Start to feel both more relaxed, and more alert at the same time. In the traditional texts, from a couple thousand years ago, this cures every disease known to humankind, if you do it like eight hours a day. But it will certainly make you more relaxed and more alert because we started breathing in the left nostril and breathing out the left nostril. Then just sit quietly with that. If you want to you, can continue to do the mantra with the breath hum, or just be with the breathing. Either way, we’re not tightly focusing. Allow the mind to be relaxed, wide open, completely relaxed, completely without strain. The mind is open like the sky, and the breath is simply coming and going like wind in the sky, and just be with that.
We’re very alert, very aware, but not concentrated. You’re not tightening attention onto an object, rather the opposite. You’re allowing attention to be so loose that it’s equivalent with awareness, just wide open. And that awareness just happens to notice the breath rising and falling, rising and falling. Notice that, unlike attention, awareness is tremendously stable of its own accord. It’s always aware, so if, rather than trying to direct attention with a bunch of control and tightness, we instead, relax into just the awareness that’s already there, stability is already present, very stable, very relaxed, extremely natural, and wide awake.
Sometimes the mind might be muddy, or sleepy, or distracted, but the mind is something that awareness does, it’s something that just appears in awareness. Awareness itself is never dull or muddy or tired. Awareness is bright, wide awake, clear. So, you may have the paradoxical experience of resting as this bright, clear, wide open, awareness, noticing the mind being muddy, or tired, or distracted, but that’s fine, because awareness is completely aware of that, simply noticing the breath rising and falling, coming and going like wind in an open sky. We’re not doing the thing of trying to drill down and find the micro-movements of every molecule, we’re doing almost the opposite. Just in a very relaxed way, the sky is aware of the wind coming and going. That’s it. The sky itself, the wide open, boundless awareness, vast spacious awareness, is utterly relaxed, and utterly awake.
Be the awakeness itself. Rest outside the machinery of the mind so there can be a lot of thinking happening and that’s completely fine. That’s what minds do—we’re not trying to stop that or make it go away, but neither are we engaging with it, we’re resting outside that. Be the awakeness, not the machinery of thought. At first, they might seem like the same thing, but eventually, you’ll notice that you can rest as awakeness, and the thought, the thinking, just happens, and it’s not really distracting in any way. It’s just happening in the background. You’re not really ignoring it, but you’re not really down inside it, either.
Now, let your face relax, let your being relax, as the wind of thought, or the wind of the breathing, is just rising and falling in the sky of awareness, allow the body to become tremendously spacious, so that it’s not just the mind that’s spacious and sky-like. The body becomes like the sky, too. Notice that spaciousness in body sensations. You’re not making an imaginary mental image of a sky-like body, you’re feeling all the spaciousness in the body, feeling how open, and at ease, and non-compressed the body is. Notice that sense of nebulosity of the boundaries of the body, until the body itself is just more sky. Still with body sensation, we’re not numbing any sensation, it’s all there, but it’s all a kind of spaciousness that’s happening in spaciousness. It’s not constricted, or constrained, or confined, it’s wide open.
Feel that wide openness of the body and mind, relaxed and at ease, the sky of the body feels the wind of the breath moving through it. The wind of the breath reminding the body of its sky-like nature, each breath allowing the body to open more and more totally. As vast as the sky, as unbounded as the heavens.
Now, allow the thinking mind—what I was calling the machinery of thought—allow the thinking mind to become tremendously spacious. This is not something you’re doing to it, you’re just noticing its already existing spaciousness, boundlessness, vastness. The wind of the breath is moving through the sky of the thinking mind, reminding the sky of the thinking mind of its vast nature. Again, we’re not engaging with thought, but we’re just noticing the thinking mind’s already existing boundlessness, openness, and it’s not just boundless left to right, front and back, and up and down—it’s boundless in every direction. Allow the thinking mind to demonstrate its inconceivable boundlessness from the wind of the breath moving through the sky of the mind and the thinking and the body. It’s just this vast wide awake awareness that is noticing breath moving in space. Rest as that. Be that. You’re not watching it, you are it. The inconceivable vastness of the thinking mind, spaciousness of the body.
Notice how often you try to put the body in a body-sized box in your mind, and just stop doing that. The body is in a space-sized, boundlessness—it has no boundaries. Notice how often you try to put the thinking mind in a head-sized box—stop doing that. It exists as tremendous spaciousness and ease, something that’s happening in vast spaciousness.
Now, notice the idea of yourself, the story of you, well I’m here in this room meditating,
doing this and that, and allow that to become infinitely spacious as well, still there, but it’s just utterly, tremendously sky-like, wide open, like the body, like the thinking mind,
like awareness itself, vast and spacious in all directions. The whole idea of yourself doing something is just nebulous, boundless, timeless, in all directions, as the wind of the breath moves through this space of awareness.
Notice the vastness and nebulosity and spaciousness of the sense of self, the wind of the breath is rising and falling in the spaciousness of the sense of self. The wide openness, the ease and alertness, utterly, utterly, relaxed, utterly alert and clear, tremendously wide open.
Now, from here, I want you to look very carefully, and see if you can find where this skylike spacious awareness of everything is coming from. Where is it coming from? And I want you to look carefully, right now, in your experience. Don’t think about it, don’t try to find the right answer, don’t look for a memory or something you learned. I want you to look, right now, in experience. Where is all this awareness centered? Where is it coming from? Look. Keep looking. Find it. Where’s the center location? And, if you think you found one, look at that location carefully. Is awareness really coming from there? If so, what’s looking at it from outside it?
It’s easy to mix up sensory experience with awareness. I’m asking, where is awareness coming from, and I want you to look. Just thinking and answering doesn’t help at all, you have to look. Where is the center of this boundless sky? I’ll give you a hint: if it’s boundless, it’s going to be pretty hard to find a center. But it’s not enough to know that, you have to look, and keep not finding it.
Very good. Now, another thing I want you to look into, is awareness just aware in one location? If so, then that’s the previous question—find that location. But if it’s not, it’s aware in more than one location, then where is it aware? Is it just in the body? Well, the body is as vast as space. Just in thinking? Well, the thinking is as vast as space.
Find a place that isn’t awareness. Anything in the room, anything in the world outside, anything that’s not awareness. Find it, look and find it. This is not a mental exercise, this is looking, it’s not thinking. Just look. Find a place that’s not aware.
This is usually quite a bit more powerful with your eyes open. You don’t have to, but I invite you to open your eyes. What in the room is not aware—or, I should say, not awareness. Is this absolute riot of color, and form, and shape, and pattern, and texture, and light and dark, not exploding in awareness? What part of it isn’t aware? Look. Tell me, what part isn’t aware?
Listen. What part of the sounds is not aware? As we said from almost the beginning, this awareness is boundless, so it’s everywhere. There’s nothing that we can be aware of that isn’t aware, that’s how we’re aware of it. Look. Listen. Feel the body—what part of the body is not aware, not awareness itself? There’s nothing that’s not awareness. It has no boundaries, it’s not centered anywhere, it’s not coming from anywhere, it’s not going anywhere, it’s simply there. Simply here.
Now, I want you to notice that all this awareness in every direction, in all the sense
gates, is utterly sacred—whatever that word means—it’s utterly sacred. It’s a miracle,
it’s shining with the light of purity and infinity. Notice that. Notice it’s a miracle.
Good. Now notice, it’s also, this awareness in all directions, that comes from nowhere,
that has never been born, that will never die, that is not going anywhere, that is utterly
boundless and centerless, is also everything within it, is also utterly fallen, profane,
sinful, dark, sick, and wrong, mundane, quotidian, forgetful, useless, broken, crap,
disgusting, foul. That it’s both of those things at once, and that, in fact there’s no difference between those two things. It’s a sacred, shining miracle of infinite beauty, and an utterly fallen, and decayed hell realm—at the same time. Notice that clearly in your own experience, and notice the urge to try to force it to be one or the other. What if it’s neither of those things, or both of those things, or what?
Simply rest as fast spacious wakefulness, allowing everything to be just the way it is, exactly the way it is, a shining miracle of purity and joy, and a foul cesspool of filth. Notice the resistance, or the urge to have it be one or the other completely, or to get rid of one half of that, or to grab on to the other half, and just relax. Notice the spaciousness of the body, spaciousness of the self-story, spaciousness of thinking, spaciousness of awareness itself. Notice that every single thing that is happening in experience is nothing other than awakeness itself, while at the same time, also being experienced. It’s not just wakefulness itself, there are properties to notice—that awareness itself, wakefulness itself, has no center and no edge, and no in between. Notice that now.
Very good. Let’s end the meditation there. Feel free to move and stretch.
Who has some questions for me, or comments? Yes, here’s the microphone.
Questioner 1: Thanks for the meditation. I really didn’t get into “every object is aware.”
Michael: How do you know there’s an object that’s not aware?
Questioner 1: I wanted to know, what does it mean for a candle to be aware? Is it conscious?
Michael: How do you know there’s a candle?
Questioner 1: Oh, I see you…
Michael: You see it, so you’re aware of a candle?
Questioner 1: But is the candle aware? I don’t know. That’s my question.
Michael: Are you aware of the candle?
Questioner 1: Yep.
Michael: So, what’s not aware in that, you might have an idea of a candle in your mind as a thing that’s not aware, and so you’re projecting it as an object that’s dead over there, but, no, that’s all an idea. The experiences is: awareness of candle, “candle” is part of awareness. How is that not aware? That’s direct experience. It’s different than the idea of a dumb, unaware candle. That’s all a thought. That’s how it’s aware. So, notice, we’re doing that to everything all the time. There’s a room here, but society tells me that rooms are made of atoms and molecules, and atoms and molecules are meaningless objects that just collide in the dark. One long thought that leads to the idea of, there’s a bunch of dead out there somewhere, but it’s just a thought that you keep interposing on experience. Experience is—there’s this alive aware thing being painted with roomness right now. See that, really, see it directly. If you keep trying to think, there’s a dead room out there, but I’m going to make it aware by somehow giving it a consciousness, stop that.
Questioner 1: I guess I can see it as if I’m tripping on acid, and everything is connected, and the room is being, everything is being. That’s how I see it now.
Michael: Closer. It’s really hard to get the simplest thing there is, which is that you’ve got an idea about how everything is because you’re trained in that idea. The whole meditation is about dropping that idea, and then just noticing. That’s why I keep saying, just look, just notice what you’re actually experiencing, which is there’s this experience, the whole thing’s awake. Otherwise, you’re not aware of it, so everything that you’re aware of is aware, it’s just logical, right? It’s just an experience. Now, I’m not saying anything about the truth of reality, like maybe there are dead walls out there, but our experience is one of total aliveness, total awakeness, that’s all there is.
Questioner 1: So it is like, if everything that exists exists inside of my mind, because that’s the only thing I have direct experience of, then anything that I see exists is alive because it’s alive in my brain somehow?
Michael: Yes, but that is the whole, “I’m gonna tell a story about it using the model that
I’ve been trained-in” version, but, yeah, that’s correct. Now, just drop all that shit and notice that there’s just this total experience, and that all you’ve got is the aliveness
of the experience. I can spend a lot of time imputing and shoving this full of meaninglessness, and gears or chips, and just do that with my mind, but that’s not what I’m experiencing. You could say, well, awareness is coming from my brain, but again that’s a concept, you’re not experiencing it coming from anything. Try to find where it’s coming from, you can’t do it.
Questioner 1: Thank you.
Michael: Sure, thanks for your question. What else is going on out there?
Questioner 2: Hello. When my body expands, and the machinery of thought expands, I’m left with this overwhelming laughter inside, and I have this really huge urge to just start laughing hysterically. I can feel it inside of me, and it’s joyous, I think, but I’m not sure, but it’s happened to me before. When things get cast, I just have this urge of laughing and shaking. Is that something that happens often?
Michael: Often enough, and so I would just say, if you’re alone in a room, go for it, just laugh and shake.
Questioner 2: Yes, at home I just start howling with laughter, and I shake, too. This happens where I just shake, just like it’s shaking itself.
Michael: Right, just let it happen. Eventually, that will just be done.
Questioner 2: Oh, good, but I like it, though.
Michael: This is where there’s a potential problem—if you like it, and so you kind of keep it going on purpose. Don’t do that. As long as it’s just doing it, then that’s okay, and eventually, it’s like the tightness that it’s coming from—which is why it kind of feels bad, at the same time, it’s tightness that’s releasing—the releasing is what feels so great. Eventually, it’ll release all the way, and then it’s not there anymore.
Questioner 2: Thank you.
Michael: It can be the same thing with sobbing, with a lot of stuff.
Questioner 3: Hi, thank you for the meditation.
Michael: Thanks for coming.
Questioner 3: My question is, sometimes I feel like I’m experiencing what you’re pointing to for moments at a time, but it’s fleeting, and it’s like sometimes I can work up to it through these guided meditations. Or other times I experience it are when there’s something unbearable in my life, I almost drop out of that. and then I go into something more spacious. But, I’m curious about, maybe you can just speak to this from your own personal experience. What’s the process from going to these moments of openness, and connection to making that a more regular part of your experience?
Michael: What would you guess?
Questioner 3: Practice, or something.
Michael: Well, or you just have a lot more of them. So you have a bunch of very short,
interrupted moments, but then you have more of those, and more of those, and they get a little deeper, and then they get a little longer, and deeper longer, and then they kind of start glomming together. So they get a lot longer and a lot deeper, and gradually what you’ll notice, over time it starts to just absorb the rest of everything. Which is interesting, because that’s what’s actually going on. It’s the opposite of how we describe it. It’s that the vast spacious awakeness is always there, and we’re just really in the habit of holding ourselves out of it really tightly. Then we relax for a minute, and then it’ll get tight again, relax for a minute, get tight again. But, eventually, your brain just learns, and you can just relax, and just stay there. But then I’ve got to tighten up, but, but, wait a minute, I could just stay there a little longer. Over time, it just learns to be open.
So the metaphor, because that’s what’s really there, it’s actually where we don’t recognize this
because it’s such a habit, but we’re doing a thing on purpose to not be in it. It’s just so habitual that we forgot that we’re doing it, and so you relax that habit. What’s on our side is that it wants to, not to just go back to its natural openness, because it takes a lot of effort to keep it tight like that. So, we just got trained over life to do that, and now it’s like, hey, you know what, you could just relax. So the metaphor I have is that it’s like a rolled up paper map that’s been in a tube a long time. Really, it’s a piece of paper that’s flat, but it’s been in a tube so much it’s just used to being curled up. So, you have to roll it out. If you take your hands off, it’ll go [zrrp], roll it out again. But if you do that enough, it goes back to its original flatness. It just remembers how to be flat, and then it’s just open all the time. Okay?
Questioner 3: Yeah, that’s hopeful, thank you.
Michael: Yeah, since that’s your original nature, it wants to return to that, so it’s gonna do it, no matter what, but we can help it along by just relaxing and opening and relaxing and opening. Usually, if you look closely, it’s a kind of fear that’s causing it to recollapse, and the one proven way to get over a phobia is exposure. It’s really hard to be afraid of something that doesn’t hurt you over and over and over again. So, as you drop into this expanded thing, you’re afraid and you collapse, and you’re afraid, and you collapse, but over a while, over a long time, it’s like—nothing bad is happening—so your brain learns. It’s really hard to be terrified every time nothing happens. So it just starts to relax, and just rests there. Okay?
Questioner 4: Could you speak to how much of the shamatha or settling practices you choose to include, and how much you might recommend to people in their home practice, before bringing in directed pointing out instructions, and things like that?
Michael: Every single person is different, so there’s really no right answer. That is the right answer. For some people, it’s much easier to never do any shamata, and just rest as open awareness, because that’s its own kind of shamata. For other people, our minds are real wound up, they’re used to being real tight, so you need to do a lot of shamatha practice to relax, relax, relax, and stabilize, stabilize, stabilize. Then there’s vipashyana in there, too, which is really hardcore unbinding of the tightness.
Really what it boils down to is finding spaciousness, in all that tightness. Even though, traditionally, you’re supposed to do the shamatha first and then the vipashyana after you’ve completed the shamatha, really, mixing them together is very, very, effective, because the stability of the shamatha helps the vipashyana. But also, it works the other way, the unbinding of the vipashyana helps the shamatha to seem more stable, because the distractions are unbound, they stop being tight. So, those two things help each other.
And then, there’s lots of other things we can bring in there, some of the energy and breathing work we did is typically associated with shamatha, but not completely. It’s just kind of direct, it’s reintroducing that relaxed spaciousness in the body, in the energy. So you kind of have to—and this is where it gets mystical or something—you have to, in a way, have a sense of where you’re coming from, and be a little bit frank with yourself, and maybe get some good guidance. But it’s like, oh, I actually have the kind of personality and mind that can sit there and do vipashyana for hours—that can be sort of a constricted, intense programmatic doership type of process. But you can use it to deconstruct tight programmatic deconstruction—it can undo itself, and so you want to use your best qualities against yourself, in a way.
If you’re already really good at going into deep stability, while staying awake, then do shamatha type stuff until that gets really, really deep, and then use it for either going directly into awake awareness, or noticing, recognizing awake awareness, if that’s available. Or, if it’s not, then using that stability to do vipashyana.
And there are whole other ways—what if you’re just gushy devotee who just loves God, you can use that—not even just not thinking about shamatha or vipashyana, but just opening and surrendering, and opening and surrendering, until all boundaries are dissolved by the total love of devotion, the devotion to this vast space. So there are lots and lots and lots of ways, because, in fact, everything is a way. Nothing is not it, so everything is it. So, literally every path could potentially be a way in. There’s the basket weaving way—might be your way, it just depends.
Questioner 4: Thank you.
Michael: Thank you. See you next week.
Join Michael’s mailing list and get notified of new offerings and courses.
Donate to help create more of these videos and more.
