Sunday Morning Meditation, February 8th

David Oromith

Good morning everyone. A joy to see all of your faces today. So thank you all for joining. I hope the week’s been kind to you. I know I saw some of you yesterday for our book launch talk, which went very well, I think.

So, yes, wonderful to be together. So we’ll follow usual format: twenty minute meditation, talk, then our discussion. So please do find a comfortable posture for practice and we can begin.

Meditation

And so as we get comfortable and prepare ourselves for practice, just bringing to mind our most meaningful motivation- intention for the practice.

And with each inbreath sitting up just a little bit taller, and with each outbreath just softening into a posture that is comfortable.

In the same way that is familiar to many of you here. Let us begin the process of settling our body, speech and mind in their natural state by lowering the awareness now down into the body, bringing the attention right down to the sensations where our body is in contact with our seat, the floor.

And then, like switching on a light in a dark room, letting your awareness expand and fill the entire space of the body. Becoming aware of the body from the inside out.

And the many sensations that are arising and passing with each and every moment. Aware of them, watching them.

And as you maintain this full body awareness, invite your body to soften and relax to release any obvious points of tension around the face, the neck, the shoulders.

And if you have a clenching of the jaws, any tightening around the chest or the belly. Just utterly releasing, softening.

And already giving permission for your immediate experience to be as it is.

If the mind feels a bit more busy right now or a bit more dull. If your environment, if it’s a bit more loud or chaotic, or if it’s quiet, whatever it is, it’s exactly as it should be.

And if there is a level of agitation, tension, energy then to help us settle even further we can take three very slow, deep breaths: breathing in through the nose, into the belly, into the chest, and releasing out through the mouth. Taking a few more breaths nice and slow, extending the exhale as much as you comfortably can with that sense of ease and softness.

Really allowing yourself to set aside any distractions, any worries or fears or plans, anything that’s rummaging round the mind. Permission to set that aside for now, knowing you can pick it back up later if you need it.

But for now, there’s no need for it to occupy our attention. You can release it with a sense of confidence.

Then among the many sensations that we could choose to focus on for this morning’s practice, as an aid to training our attention, calming the mind, let us draw our attention upwards to the very tips of the nostrils: finding that subtle, finer point where you most distinctly sense the passage of air as you breathe.

Once you’ve found that subtle point, placing your attention there, single pointedly as you can. Which means without distraction, without forgetfulness.

But although this is a finer point of focus, don’t let there be this sense of tightening your mind or squeezing your attention; this will only further agitate the mind, create tension.

So we want there to be a sense of relaxation, a sense of ease, sense of openness, just channeling the energies of our mind to this one point.

And it’s likely that, for your mind, this won’t be entertainment enough. And it will try and occupy itself with other thoughts and ideas and memories and plans. That’s okay, that’s to be expected.

But each time you notice that is happening, with the next outbreath allow yourself to release the distraction, release the noise as if you were blowing it away with the outbreath, and then guide your attention back to the sensations of the breath on the nostrils.

Breathing in. Knowing that you’re breathing in. Knowing those sensations. Breathing out. Knowing you’re breathing out, knowing the sensations.

You may find it helpful from time to time to experiment with counting these breaths as a way to keep you focussed and to occupy a little bit more of that space in which we’re getting distracted. And so you might do a succinct mental count at the end of every in breath. Or you might like to count one through the in breath, one through the outbreath, then two, two. So your choice – you experiment, see what seems to work for you, allows you a sense of continuity.

And remember to counteract any level of distraction, agitation, business tension, we relax, we soften. So let that be the focus in the practice. Relaxing.

If you notice that if instead you notice a level of dullness, sleepiness, your meditation feels vague, or you’re spaced out, then this means a little bit more effort, applying greater attention, more sharpness, and we find a balance between the two. Alert yet relaxed.

Keep coming back. Whether the mind becomes dull or whether it’s distracted, keep coming back to find that balance. Like the cat watching the mouse hole. If the cat is too alert, too agitated or tense, and we’ll be jumping around. Scare the mouse. But if the cat is too relaxed, then might fall asleep, might become dull, not really notice when the mouse leaves the hole. So the cat must be alert, poised, sharp, ready, yet sufficiently at ease.

So train your attention like this. Alert – noticing the entire duration of the inbreath and the outbreath- yet not so alert and tense that you are then very agitated, distracted.

Teachings

There’s something I would like to talk about this morning. I thought we could talk about distraction – and not just distraction in meditation, which is where we’re normally talking about it, but, we’re actually an increasingly distracted and restless society overall, aren’t we?

And so we know it’s quite common, quite well known nowadays that attention problems are becoming increasingly the norm. And we are quite distractable, whether it is ADHD or whether it’s the so called ‘normal’ levels of attention. It seems that humans have always had that potentiality, and modern life certainly seems to exacerbate that. In certain cases – for example social media – exploit the fact that we have that potentiality for distraction.

So it almost seems, in many ways, to be the background condition of modern life. I think that, many, if not most of us find it uncomfortable to be without any kind of stimulation for even a few seconds or even a few moments. You know, people are waiting in a queue, or they’re just sitting on the sofa waiting for the next thing to happen. There’s a pause in the conversation- whatever it is, even just a few moments where there’s a pause and nothing to do – almost automatically the hand reaches for the phone or some other kind of distraction: TV, music or maybe it’s work. It’s some way to occupy or busy ourselves, right? Something to do. The phone is one, you know; it’s a big one for most people nowadays. But I know not everybody is like that. It could be other things that we busy ourselves with, and we don’t necessarily reach out because we need it, but because we don’t quite know how to be with nothing happening. What do I do in that space where nothing is happening?

We’re living in an environment that is constantly pulling at our attention; there are things vying for our attention all the time. It’s a constant cacophony- I like that word – of noise, stimulus, tasks, things to remember, places to be, maybe other members of the family to organise, things to remember. Everyone is so busy.

We’re often feeding the mind with so many different things, so many stimuli, often at the same time. As I’ve often reflected – I have seen it many times – where someone will be watching TV, eating their dinner, and have their phone in the hand all at the same time, whilst maybe loosely maintaining a conversation with the person next to them- it’s as if one thing is not enough.

And then we sit down in meditation and we wonder why the mind won’t shut up. Well, it’s used to at least four or five things happening at the same time and now you’re trying to starve it of all of that.

From a psychological point of view, part of the reason that we rely on things like phones so much is every time that we check our phone and find something (you find a message; you find a new post; you find a funny video or a quick game, whatever it is), the brain gets that little hit of dopamine, right? It gets that little reward.

So if we notice in our life that we feel constantly pulled to check the phone or something like that, it’s a sign of our nervous system having been trained to expect little rewards all the time without much effort behind it. It’s a kind of an easy, quick win, quick reward; something that just makes you feel a little bit better. If we look at the underlying issue here from a Buddhist or a contemplative perspective, distraction is actually a strategy for us to avoid discomfort.

That’s what distraction is. We’re trying to avoid some kind of discomfort, some kind of unease. If you’re always distracted or occupied by something, then you’re protected from boredom, you’re protected from restlessness, you’re protected from loneliness, you’re protected from uncertainty, you’re protected from all of that. You’re protected from being alone with your mind, from feeling your own feelings.

This is what happens, isn’t it? When all this stimulation, this noise, this busyness, when all of that stops, for many people, what shows up is a sense of unease or a sense of agitation or a kind of vague dissatisfaction.

And this is exactly what the Buddha identified as the main issue for sentient beings two thousand years ago. He said that we must know what dukkha is- this term that we often translate as suffering- but dukkha has a closer meaning of unsatisfactoriness. It’s that underlying sense of unease, that kind of subtle friction in life, of ‘it’s not quite right’, something’s not quite enough. It’s caused by the craving for pleasant experiences or the craving to not have unpleasant experiences. Basically, the craving for something to be happening to me.

And so we’ve become addicted, I think many of us, to this kind of escape. And in meditation, this becomes obvious very quickly; the moment that there’s no external input, the mind looks for something, anything that it can latch onto. And so I’ll start thinking about this, I’ll start planning that, I’ll start remembering this thing. I’ll start fantasising about something. All of that has become the new ‘phone’. All of that distraction in your meditation is replacing the distraction that we normally are able to reach out to.

And so they become your distraction. They become the thing to keep you occupied so that there is not just the sense of stillness or space. And so, when we try to meditate with a mind that is used to switching up every few seconds and it is used to being occupied all the time, it’s no surprise that it feels uncomfortable at first when we practice, because we’re asking the mind to do something that it’s not really trained to do: stay with one thing and just that thing and for that to be enough. The mind’s not really used to that.

So from a contemplative perspective, then we could say that the issue is not necessarily distraction itself, as if that’s something kind of evil in and of itself. It’s our relationship to stillness and simplicity, right? We have a very uncomfortable relationship with that. And that’s why distraction is so appealing. And so the solution then, of course, we need to retrain our attention.

And there are things that we can do, even outside of meditation as a starting point, because I’m sure most of us here, you know, we’re familiar with meditation. We’ve just done one. Maybe you have a regular practice, maybe you have a not so regular practice. But you do engage in practices of where you’re sitting alone with the mind. And yet there may still be this constant distractibility. So what can we do, even outside of practice?

I think firstly, and maybe the point of discussing this, as maybe a theme this morning, is we need to recognise it and be aware of it.

And when I say recognise it, I mean recognise that immediate sense of boredom or dissatisfaction that then makes us want to reach out to something. You know, normally we’re not really aware of that. We’re not aware of that process. And yet again, we have the phone and we’re distracted by something. So it’s about -you say, ‘Okay, here’s a quiet moment. I’m noticing how the mind is urged to reach out. There’s that impulse to reach out for something, to reach for distraction’. That already can be a win in itself. And we can practice short moments of non stimulation, you know? So practice waiting for something or someone without the phone. So if you’re waiting in a queue or you’re waiting for something to happen or whatever it is… you’re waiting for things to buffer – I don’t know, whatever it is – allow yourself to just sit there with it, to just be still. Or putting a timer on the phone and sitting for a few minutes doing nothing. I notice with people this becoming a trend. People putting on ten minute timers or one hour timers.

Maybe we start small: by putting a timer on your phone and just sitting and doing nothing. And that literally means doing nothing and just allowing yourself to sit with that, or at least sit with the discomfort before acting on it.

You may still reach for the phone or reach for something, but let there be a moment in which you don’t. And you just kind of sit with it. And if you do this, you’re training, you’re building your tolerance for simplicity, right? Your tolerance for that moment.

And you find that it’s actually not so scary, you know, that you can find a a comfort and a peace in that. When we talk about inner peace and a sense of calm and tranquility, you’re not going to get that from constant noise and constant stimulation. Actually, that simplicity and that quiet can be very enjoyable. It can be very painful if you’re, like, itching for something, but it can be something that is very pleasant and calming and relaxing.

So we can train ourselves in daily life, outside of meditation. But then, of course, we do have meditation, like this morning’s practice: Shamatha meditation, which has been used for thousands of years. It literally is for training yourself in sustaining your focus of attention. It’s a direct antidote to the distractibility that is so common today. Because you learn to work with your distractions. You learn to get comfortable with that simplicity, that non stimulation. You get comfortable with that boredom; your mind learns that it’s safe, it’s okay to not be constantly kind of stimulated and distracted.

Boredom from a psychological angle is often just what happens when your mind, that is used to high stimulation, suddenly doesn’t get it. It’s a kind of withdrawal, right? Boredom is a withdrawal, and it feels uncomfortable, sometimes almost unbearable, but it’s not a sign that something is wrong and that it needs intervention. You don’t need to fix anything. Boredom is just your body and mind saying, ‘Where’s my usual hit? You’re starving me of that usual dopamine hit’.

However, from the contemplative side, that moment of boredom can actually be quite precious. If you don’t run away from it, your mind gets a chance to recalibrate a bit and you learn to be at ease without needing to constantly be entertained and constantly on the go. But of course, all of this takes time, takes training. But it’s incredibly meaningful because, if we just set aside all the downsides for of having attention difficulties, if you were to train your attention and train to get comfortable in this simplicity and so on it will mean you have better attention skills, right? It will mean that you will be able to actually focus on your work or on a conversation with someone without being distracted, or a hobby; whatever it is that you want to do. You’re able to attend to whatever it is you want to attend to, and that is not something to shy away from. That would be a huge gift in our life. You would have greater control over your mind in daily life.

In meditation, you’re literally training yourself. Here’s a distraction, here’s a thought, and you’re training your ability to leave that behind and focus on something else. So then when, in daily life, your mind is listening to all these perhaps uncomfortable stories about self contempt or, you know, guilt or shame and how we don’t like that person and so on, you’ve gained the ability to let go of such thoughts and choose to redirect your mind elsewhere. So you gain a greater control over your mind and you’re going to have less stress, less agitation. Shamata is very calming and soothing for the nervous system.

And I think one of the greatest benefits that maybe is not so often talked about is how you will reclaim your ability to enjoy the simple pleasures in life. When you are constantly distracted and entertained by all sorts of different things, your threshold for enjoyment becomes higher, and then you can only be having a good time if you’ve got the phone in your hand, or there’s something really exciting going on the TV or this and that, and everything else is boring. Then you’ve become more bored and restless in your life. But the more you learn to ease into the simplicity, the more you realise that you can actually enjoy just sitting on a park bench doing nothing.

You can enjoy, just a simple conversation with someone else and not need something else going on. You can enjoy your meal without needing the phone and the TV and the conversation going on at the same time.

Just that meal itself can be incredibly enjoyable.

End of Teachings