Relax into Mental Flow – Deconstructing Yourself
Introduction
We’re going to meditate for an hour, and I’m going to be talking for that whole hour. I’ll be guiding the meditation, with the hope that you follow the guidance, but if you don’t want to, don’t. The agreement in the room is that you stay very, very, very, still and quiet, regardless of which experience you’re having internally. So you’re free to have your own internal experience, other than that let’s just do it.
Meditation
Find a meditation posture that’s got this feeling of openness, maybe some continuous fluidity and ease. This theme of openness, fluidity, and ease is maintained throughout. So, to whatever extent possible, I want you to take your thinking mind and just throw it to the bottom of hell, and let it burn there until it’s gone. Meanwhile, you are just resting in an openness. There can be an infinite amount of thoughts happening, that’s no problem, but you are simply resting in openness and ease. So what that means is, no matter how much thought is happening, you’re not engaging with it–but neither are you doing some kind of tightly focused absorption. You’re just sitting in openness.
I haven’t done this in a long time, but tonight we’re just going to relax quite a bit to begin with, because relaxation, ease, openness, and generally feeling good in your body really matters to meditation. We often think meditation is a matter of buckling down, and tightening up, and getting my focus like a laser beam, and that’s just completely the wrong direction. We want to breathe easy and feel open and let go. So let’s begin, as usual, by asking ourselves the question, what’s it like to be me right now? And then, look. Don’t assume you know the answer–actually look. What is it like to be you right now?
Notice all the spinning thoughts, wherever that’s happening–at the bottom of Hell. Notice all the emotional waves, mini waves, wavelets, and tsunamis–or whatever is going on–notice the various sorts of body sensations that are arising, and take stock, take a weather report. What does it feel like? What’s it like to be you in this moment?
Then part two: whatever is going on right now, I invite you, for the next hour, to just let it be that way. Not trying to improve yourself, or change yourself, or control it, or force it down, or suppress it, or deny it, or twist it into shape, or make it do the tricks you want it to do, but, rather, drop all that, and let yourself be exactly the way you are. This is just fundamental kindness towards others being expressed towards yourself. Fundamental kindness towards yourself. You’re letting go of the continuous project of being different than you actually are, and just for the next hour, just letting yourself be you.
Have you ever just said to another person, will you just let me be for a minute? Normally they’re doing one 100th of what we do to ourselves, so, here, we’re saying to ourselves, I’m just going to let myself be for a little while. Notice the good part of that–which is a lot of ease coming into the system, a lot of releasing and letting go. The difficult part is that then you have to feel how you actually are, instead of getting involved in a fantasy of being different.
So, just feel how you are for now. To invite in more ease into the body, see if you can just allow a little more relaxation in your scalp and face, just by simply relaxing your scalp and face. You don’t have to do anything like exercises or something, just allow it. If there’s voluntary tension there, just let go of it a little bit, even if it’s just 3%. Let your face release any kind of pinched, or tight, or fixed, expression, and come into a more easy, open, repose. Allow your jaw to relax, simply by separating your upper and lower teeth slightly, so they’re not clenched–feeling the relaxation and ease that comes from allowing a little bit of release there.
See if you can invite your shoulder, arms, wrists, and hands to be as limp as wet noodles, so that if you were suddenly called to take action, it would actually take a second or two to re-engage them. We typically keep our arms and hands ready to go, but I want you to release them in the way that you would release them if you were about to fall asleep, where they are just really not ready to go, but rather, utterly limp, with no sort of idling engine in the background. It’s the thing you do when you go from a higher tone of voice to a lower tone of voice, there’s a kind of relaxation there in your throat. Just let that relaxation happen, and allow your shoulders to release. If nothing else, just let them float down just a tiny bit, just enough that you feel slightly more letting go happening there.
Now, notice from your head and your face, all the way through your throat and shoulders, all the way down to your hands, that it’s much more at peace, much more at rest, much more at ease, than it was a few moments ago. Then, just to whatever extent it’s possible to do this by intention alone, just intend that your belly region, both in front, on the sides, in back, and all the way inside, just release a little bit. Let go of some of the tension or tightness there, and it just sort of relaxes into a much more open, much more at-rest posture than it was before.
If you know how to do this, you can relax your diaphragm. That turns out to be not that easy for lots of folks, but, if you can, just let your diaphragm open up. Then, lastly, do the same move with your legs and feet, allow your legs, your upper legs, your knees, your lower legs, your ankles, your feet, to come out of ready-mode into complete noodle-mode–they’re very, very, very, relaxed.
Then, feeling how good your face feels from relaxing a little bit, and your arms and legs feel from relaxing a little bit, and your belly feels from relaxing a little bit, just tune in for a little while here, not a long while, but a little while, into just letting go, and releasing. On the in-breath, you’re feeling peace and ease coming into the body, and on the out-breath, you’re breathing out tension, breathing out tightness, breathing out constriction. So that with each breath, you’re letting go more and more. There’s no race, and we’re not trying to become literal puddles on the floor, just allow whatever ease is present to be good enough, and really enjoy that for a few minutes here.
We’re doing this from the sort of frame of being wide open, almost like the sky, just releasing, releasing into the sky, nothing constricted, nothing crunched down, everything open, everything spacious. If you find yourself growing sleepy, sit up straight, open your eyes, staying nice and relaxed, but also alert.
Okay, good. Now I want you to find a feeling of kindness and caring, and beam that towards yourself right now. Do some self-metta, or self Tonglen, just wishing that you for yourself, that you be at ease, that you feel peace, that you feel healthy, and happy, and whole. Forgiving yourself for all the things you might need to be forgiven for, and feel gratitude in a really positive way–not guilty gratitude, but true gratitude, for stuff that you do feel gratitude for. Let’s do this self-metta or self Tonglen, letting yourself off the hook, really loving yourself up a little bit. Let’s do this for a few minutes together.
This is really important–that we open our hearts towards ourselves. If you know how to do Tonglen, you can even open up the other part of it, where you’re actually allowing the sky-like nature of mind to take on all your suffering, and then to beam back kindness, peace, joy, health, courage, gratitude, back to yourself. It doesn’t have to be big emotions–the main thing is simply that your heart gets a little melty, a little more open, a little less closed down, more wide open, and soft, and warm, and kind. Even if it’s just a tiny amount, really notice that kindness, and warmth, and openness, and sweetness that is there in your heart.
Good. Now, do it for the others in your life–the people who you’re close to, the people you interact with. Feel your heart open, and soften, and become kinder, even just a tiny bit, but maybe a little bit more than that, towards the people in your life. If you want to, you can add the Tonglen, and wish that you take on all their suffering, while you beam this love and kindness towards them. We’re all alike in a certain way–we all just want to be happy, we’re going about it in different ways, but we can wish that each other be happy, be free from suffering, be free from pain, can earnestly wish that. We can really understand that about anybody.
Good. Now, because, when we sit together in this room, we’re a community of people meditating together, let’s do the same thing for each and everyone in the room. Explicitly wishing that everyone here feel safe, feel happy, feel healthy, feel joy, feel peace. Notice how your heart responds.
Okay, good. Now, let go of that, and come back to simply resting as sky-like awareness, wide open, wide awake, not focusing on anything in particular, just being present, simple presence. The one thing I want you to be with, and I’m saying being with–not focus on, but just be with, is the flow of thought activity. So, even though we threw our thinking minds to the bottom of hell, we can still notice the flow of thought activity happening, without narrowly focusing. Just because awareness is aware, we’re noticing the flow of thought activity. It’s almost as if we’re a sky and a landscape, and in that landscape, there’s a flowing river. The sky is aware of the river, but the sky isn’t focusing on it, it’s not separate from it, it’s just aware of this flow. Of course, if you get caught in the content, then the river freezes up into ice. If you notice that happening, just relax again, come back to being the sky. You can let go of the river for a minute, and then gradually become aware of its activity again.
What we want is to notice that unfixated, totally flowing, fluid, continuously changing, stream of thought activity, which we’re aware of because the sky of awareness is aware, but not grabbing on to or gripping down on–or even focusing on at all. If that’s too hard, if the thoughts just keep gripping–that’s what too hard looks like then, you can just set them aside again completely, not engaging with them, and notice the flow of breath in the body again–not focusing on, awareness is simply aware of the flow of breathing. That’s usually quite a bit easier. But if you can stay with this flow of unfixed thought activity, we’re going to do that together for a while here.
Good. The idea here is not that we’re standing on the banks of a river looking at it. We’re not separate from it. If that’s the only way you can do it, that’s fine, but remember, the idea here that the open space of awareness is just simply aware of the flow of thought, it’s not somehow separate from it, looking at it. It is it. So, if you notice that you’re building this positionality, sort of looking at it, just relax that and see how you’re aware of the flow of thought activity, whether you are making this mental picture of standing outside it, looking at it, or not. Of course, building a mental picture of standing outside it, looking at it, is a kind of fixated thought, so we just let go of that. Let that melt, and just be swept away with the flow of thought activity. There’s no need to somehow stand outside it. Just let the unfixated thoughts flow.
Good. As you’re doing this, you may notice that very, very weird thoughts come up–dream type thoughts, nonsense type thoughts, maybe really nightmarish or disturbing thoughts, especially if you do this for a long time, because you’re not filtering the content like you normally do. You’re letting the thought activity flow in an unfixed way, so the unmediated unconscious will start pouring into conscious awareness. That’s fine, that’s supposed to happen. The very important instruction there is to not worry about it. Don’t worry at all about the content, no matter how weird, or disturbing, or graphic, or intense, or exciting, or boring. We’re concerned with the flow the unfixed flow, not with the content, so just expect that sometimes it will be not the normal type of thinking, and that’s okay. The less you react to it, the more that your deep unconscious mind works out its knots and tight spots.
In this vast, open, spacious awareness, the flow of thought activity is actually just a very, very, tiny part of it. That’s why we’re not really narrowly focusing on that–it’s just one of the things happening in this wide open space, and all we’re doing is not getting caught in our everyday thought. When we are tightly focused down on that flow of thought and really concerned with the content, it’s as if there’s a giant wide open sky, and we’re sitting out in our garden, and we’ve got our stamp collection, and we’re focused down on the stamp collection, and we never notice the sky, even though it’s there the whole time. We’re just really involved with this 1932 Argentinian stamp. We’re way down in there, and we forget this sky–so we’re doing the opposite here. We’re just being the sky and the “stamp collection” is there, too, it’s just one of the many things that’s happening, we’re not ignoring it, we’re noticing now–switching the metaphor, that it has some activity happening there. We’re allowing it to move and change in an unfixed way.
If it freezes up, or fixates, just relax. Let it go. Come back to just being the wide open sky. Don’t collapse down into checking out the stamp collection.
Good. Now, simply let go of even following the flow of thought, and just come back to just being the sky itself, just the open awareness, without paying particular attention to anything. The flow of thought is still there, the flow of the breath is still there, and even the flow of activity called being a person is still there. Just stuff arising in the sky of awareness–but we tend to focus on that flow of activity called being a person, and identify with it. Those thoughts and feelings are me, and here we’re just letting them be part of what’s arising in this vast openness. They’re not somehow not the vast openness–it’s not that you’re not that, but that’s just a tiny little subset, tiny little speck, in this vast, awake, open, clarity that is always there. Rest as that.
The wide open, wide awakeness is the one thing that’s not changing or moving–it’s just completely stable. You will imagine that you’re a person made of thoughts and feelings who’s trying to look at the stability, but that’s completely backwards. This wide awake openness that is so stable is the so-called screen upon which the thoughts and feelings are arising. The person doesn’t look at that, the person is simply an exquisitely beautiful expression of that–the art of God.
So, simply let the wide open awakeness be aware of itself, and all the moving expressions within itself–all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the sights, all the sounds, everything that’s continuously moving and changing, in a kaleidoscopic expression of that awakeness. Remaining utterly unfixed, everything just flows, and awareness is just aware of itself and the flow, effortlessly, without tightening, or constricting, or scrunching down, or collapsing. It’s just open flow.
Good. Now, we did metta, or Tonglen for ourselves, and we did it for those near and dear to us, and we did it for everyone in this room, but now let’s do it for the rest of the world–everyone, everywhere. May everyone, everywhere, be at peace, happy, and free from suffering, healthy, beloved, and at ease. Just feel that radiating out in all directions. If you want to do the Tonglen version, you also take on all the suffering and difficulty of the world into this space of open awareness, which is large enough to handle it. Either way, breathing out, beaming out, radiating out, love, kindness, peace, gratitude, joy, health, safety, to the whole universe. Make an earnest wish that everyone, everywhere be safe; everyone, everywhere be at peace; everyone, everywhere be healthy; everyone, everywhere feel joy.
Let’s end that there. Feel free to move and stretch.
Dharma Talk
As I was saying, it’s like we’ve just learned to pay attention to one little, tiny corner of experience. The metaphor is: you’re outside in a beautiful garden with distant mountains, and this huge, gorgeous, sky. You’ve got tea, and something to eat, and there are people around, and nice animals, and flowers, and trees. All of this is happening, and you’ve just got this one little book of stamps, and you’re just always focused on it, and just keep focusing on it. Not exactly ignoring, but just you’re just so focused on that, that the rest of it is just–yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, is happening. I’m here with my book of stamps. That’s the pathological, philatelic, version of meditation. All I can do is think about my thoughts, I’m just focused on my thinking, focused on my thinking, and everything is my thinking. Even though I know there’s a sky out there, I just remember there’s a sky, so it’s a thought, and I know there are trees, and animals, and food, and tea–but I’m just remembering it, so it’s a thought. I forget to just look up, or to listen, or to taste it.
Of course, we can do an interesting thing with absorption-type meditation or focus-type meditation–of saying, instead of focusing on your stamp collection, focus on this flower. That has the effect of getting you to stop being so focused on your stamps, and so it starts to open you up. A lot of absorption-type meditation is about that, just refocusing on anything else, and that’s very helpful.
We’re doing something different, which is, hey just look up just for a minute. Let go of that, if you can, and just look, listen. You don’t have to narrowly focus on something else, just look up, just relax for a minute. That’s a really tight, constricted kind of focus you’ve got going there. Can you just look up, and notice all the other stuff that’s going on? When you do that, especially if you do it over and over again, that turns out to be pretty amazing, because there’s a lot of other stuff going on. Furthermore, it’s relaxed–that neurotic tension on the thinking is released, so all of a sudden, there’s experience. Instead of thinking about all the stuff that you remember is around you, you are experiencing it. It turns out that thoughts about things are pretty dead, but the experience of things is vibrant and alive—it’s wide awake. So, the simple trick here is, can we let go of that narrow focus?
What happens is–I’ll say over and over again–I want you to do this, and then people try to do it with their thinking, try to refocus in this new way by thinking about it, because that allows them to continuously keep looking at the stamps. Okay, I’m looking at the sky now–it doesn’t work that way. So you just release–but it goes deeper than that, or gets weirder, because you recognize that the person is just more stuff arising in that space–and that’s cool! The stuff arising in the space is gorgeous, beautiful, exquisite, effulgent expression, but it’s just some of the many beautiful things that are being expressed right then. So that, even the feelings of the body, and the thoughts, and the emotions, are just more flowers, birds, trees, plants, mountains, clouds, planets, etc., arising in the field.
You get to the point where you are the field, you’re the awake, open, spacious part—not anything in particular that’s arising. As I’m fond of saying, you are not in the world, the world is in you. You just start to notice that more and more, and that there’s no need to fixate. The fixation is the thing that hurts. Fixation is the thing that is causing all the [grrr]. You think you’ll be unsafe if you relax the fixation, but it’s the opposite. When you relax the fixation, then some real life can start to happen.
So, I can talk in these ways forever–I feel like I’m being really clear, but it might not be so clear. So, if you have questions, or comments, or reports about your experience, raise your hand.
Q&A
Questioner 1: If I had better concentration, would I be able to stop looking at the stamps for longer periods of time? And, is it wrong to think of open spacious awareness as a kind of meditation object?
Michael: Yes, don’t think of it that way. It’s not a thing you’re focusing on, it’s what’s focusing. It can’t really take itself as an object. It can, because it’s aware, it can be aware of itself, but you’re trying to make it an object within awareness, and it is the awareness, so it’s like, can a mirror reflect itself? It doesn’t really work. What happens is, we try to be a person looking at awareness–that’s a totally reasonable thing, based on the rest of our lives. I can tell you to look at anything, focus on something, and you focus on it. But this is not like that, so the more that you try to do it from a position, the less you’re doing it.
Instead, you just stop focusing at all. There’s no focus there, it’s just–what’s left if there’s no focus. What’s left if there’s no focus? What is it that gets focused in the first place? Awareness is the thing that’s being focused, and if you stop focusing, what’s left is just the awareness itself.
So, imagine you’ve got this tablecloth of awareness, and the focus is crimping, crimping, crimping–trying to get it all in one spot. All I’m asking you to do is–not somehow move the crimping around, but just let go. Then you’re left with the whole tablecloth, but that’s not a thing you can focus on like an object. There’s some kind of effort if I have a habit of just looking at the stamp. We’re just relaxing that habit, that’s why we started out with physical relaxation, and then letting the mind just flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, and allowing things to de-crunch a little bit, so that the habit relaxes, relaxes, relaxes.
You can have a habit of, every time I go into a certain work situation, I get tense, but if you, on purpose, relax every single time you do it, over time, you’re not going to get tense there anymore. So that rubber band that keeps snapping you back into this micro focus releases. It just takes a lot of relaxing over and over.
Questioner 1: Thanks.
Michael: Yeah, just remember, it is already, itself, wide open–so you don’t have to make it wide open, you just stop tensing.
Questioner 2: Hi. You were talking about flow, and I tend to think of it as a stream. A stream just flows, and things happen, like if a rock falls into the stream, it’s just happening, and the stream flows around it. What I was noticing was the difference between what I’ll call awareness and mind. Awareness is like if someone coughs awareness is that which flows immediately in that direction, without being told to focus.
Michael: That’s attention, what goes in that direction. Awareness is just aware.
Questioner 2: Okay, so attention. So, when someone coughs or something happens that
arises in awareness, then mind is, in my experience, that which then names it, and then maybe has an opinion about it. The things that I have a harder time resting as awareness in, is physical–like thoughts, they’re fine, it’s just when it’s sensation, especially unpleasant sensation, that feels more personal. Is there a way in which you can work with that physical discomfort, to be as open to it as with the environmental stuff?
Michael: Yeah, in fact, I would say lots of people have the opposite experience, where they’ve worked enough with their body that it feels real flowing, open, and permeable, whereas the external world is more real. So, yes, it’s very achievable to notice that. You may have privileged access to that–other people might not feel your body sensation, but it’s still simply present as an experience, and just like any other experience, you can begin to notice its lack of definability. You can’t ever really nail it down, and because you can’t ever really nail it down it’s…
Questioner 2: I try thinking, what is the shape of it? What are the qualities of it? Investigating it.
Michael: Yeah, that’s the phenomenological level of vipashyana, which is great, but if you do that with a lot of concentration, what do you notice about each of those variables–the
size, or simply that they’re moving all the time. If every variable in a so-called object is continuously changing. How is something the same thing if every part of it is different moment to moment? It’s the same thing only because there’s a box in your mind calling it a thing, and so that’s the fixation. Let go of that box. It’s the exact thing that a programmer defines as an object. Let go of that, and then the variables vary, it’s just flowing.
Questioner 2: Okay.
Questioner 3: Hi. I notice when I go more deeply into meditation, there’s this realization where there’s awareness that looks outward, like awareness that’s aware of perception, and then I notice when I retract, that I turn away from my senses, it feels like awareness almost collapses in on itself, or turns in on itself, and turns more into awareness just being. Then in that place of awareness being, it feels like there’s an even subtler, almost indescribable dimension that almost feels like it’s only knowable in contrast to awareness being. People talk about a level of awareness that is sort of awareness being, and then beyond that, the absolute, and they talk about knowing that in contrast to awareness being. Like awareness being is almost this deepest inner level of awareness and then there’s a state of recognizing that even the beingness of awareness is an emergent phenomenon. Does that resonate with your experience?
Michael: That’s only half of what’s important. Sure, there’s a void, there’s stillness, there’s awakeness, but, as I was saying in the meditation, all of this is not nothing. It’s not a dream, it’s not meaningless, it’s not somehow delusion, it’s not a fantasy. This is the exquisite birth from that thing you’re describing in every moment. Then, what’s important to notice is that they’re never separate–they’re not two different things, they’re just different sides of the same thing. That’s what’s important. So you can go down that hole forever, but I don’t recommend it. That’s a dead end. You’re just continuously trying to transcend the world, and trying to transcend life, and go into this Brahman void of purity. But that purity is in everything, so that’s the important part. That’s the part of my experience that I want to make sure you’re grokking.
Questioner 3: Yeah. What’s interesting is that it feels like we tend to grokk the physical
world very easily by grokking that deeper part. In maintaining some sort of connection to that extremely deep depth while we’re interacting with the physical is what is very challenging, because even if we treat thoughts as the stamp–the metaphor that you were describing, you can even then describe the beingness of awareness as a stamp as well.
Michael: Who’s looking at?
Questioner 3: It feels like the awareness itself is an emergent, like a meta-stamp within the beyondness.
Michael: Well, just keep investigating that. You’re talking Advaita Vedanta, and Advaita Vedanta is broken. It’s only halfway there. They erase the world, and so I’m saying there’s more to do. When you ask me what my experience is, that’s what’s important.
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