But vipassana is a really important part of meditation. And so in this meditation, what we’re going to do is, first of all, we will settle our body. We will relax. We will unwind and then we will turn our attention to the five physical senses. And then we will start to investigate any feelings of pleasure, displeasure, indifference that arise in conjunction to those, and see what insights we can find.  

So for this meditation, it is suggested that you be seated upright, but of course, if that’s uncomfortable for you, you can be lying down, and for part of this meditation you will have your eyes open. So to begin with, you can close your eyes and then I will ask you to open them at least just a little bit to let some light in so that you can attend to the visual field. So please find a comfortable position and let’s go straight into our meditation. 

Bell Rings

And so we begin by settling the body in its natural state and that begins by bringing our awareness into the body, becoming aware of the sensations of the body. And in a mode of simply witnessing, not thinking about the body or adding any thoughts. Conceptualization, just witness what it is like to have this body. And as you attend to the body, relax and release any tightness or tension you find, perhaps in the shoulders, the back, and allow yourself to come to rest, to relax, in stillness, right here in the present moment. Allowing the muscles of the face to feel soft especially around the forehead, the eyebrows, the eyes and the jaw. Perhaps you allow the shoulders to drop and make sure that you are sat upright, with your spine naturally straight. If you are seated on a chair it can help to have your feet flat on the floor. If you’re on a cushion, making sure that cushion is high enough that your knees are naturally curved downwards touching the floor, the spine naturally straight and settle the respiration in its natural rhythm. Making sure we’re not sitting in a way that we’re holding the breath in any way. Let the belly be soft, let that breath flow in and out without constriction and whether it’s long or short just let it be. Then make that intention to the best of your ability to remain still for this meditation, that helps us maintain continuity of attention, and settle your mind at ease, inner stillness. Let go of any concerns or worries about the past, the future. You can pick them up on the way out. There’s nothing that needs your attention right now. And to help stabilise our attention a little bit, settled the mind, settle the body, we’re going to count to 14 breaths. And it’s a cycle of respiration, so one whole in breath and one whole out breath. Just in your own time, attend to the sensations of the flow of the breath wherever you feel the most in the body. Count 14 cycles of respiration.  

And now let your eyes be at least partially open with your awareness open, specifically to the five sense fields, to the visual, the auditory, the olfactory, the gustatory and the tactile sensations in the body. So open yourself to the physical world by way of these five sense doors. For the time being, set aside everything in the domain of the mind and focus entirely on physical sensory perception. So resting in bare attention, just mindfully attentive to whatever stimuli, whatever appearances arise from moment to moment. Just let your awareness move freely within the five physical sense fields, but always in the present moment. Don’t drift off into thinking about the past or the future. Don’t entertain any thoughts about the present. Remaining face to face with, and mindfully attentive of, whatever is arising here and now, so if you are drawn to a sound, a visual impression, or a tactile sensation that arises in the moment, be wholly present with it. It is important here that we do remain in stillness of body, maintain good posture, keep relaxed. And so we’re not trying to entertain any thoughts about what we find, but in your best approximation of bare attention, just being mindfully aware of whatever arises, whether it is the sound or smell, visual impression, tactile sensation. When we experience a sensory impression, whether it’s a sound, a smell, a taste, something we feel in the body, the sensation itself is not the only thing that seems to arise. So now, begin to closely examine any feelings of pleasure, pain, or indifference, that appear in conjunction with these sensations. Feelings that arise in response to visual impressions, smells, tastes. In meditation, they’re often fairly neutral, difficult to engage with, but sounds and tactile sensations are more likely to generate feelings. So for this meditation, deliberately focus your attention on the feelings that arise in relation to sounds in your environment, and tactile sensations in the body. What feelings of pleasure, displeasure or indifference arise, in relation to these sensations? if you feel any inclination to move while attending to the tactile field in the body, it is crucial that you don’t act automatically on first impulse, instead, notice the feeling that arouses the desire to move. It’s almost certainly an unpleasant feeling, so simply observe this feeling letting your body remain still as a mountain. Feelings may arise in response to various sensations in the body. Some areas might feel comfortable, giving rise to a mild sense of pleasure. Some regions might arouse a sense of indifference, but in other regions of the body, a sense of discomfort. Even physical pain might arise. Carefully inspect these feelings instead of habitually identifying with the pain and reacting by moving. Now as we start to become familiar with these feelings; positive, negative, neutral, start to closely observe the very nature of the feeling itself. Does it seem to be identical to the tactile sensation, to the sound? Or is it a way of experiencing and responding to the sensation? Examine that relationship between the sensory appearance and the associated feeling.  

Are they the same? 

Are they different? 

And as feelings arise in relationship to any of the five physical sense doors, observe how they arise as the Buddha would say, what is the process of origination, and once a feeling is present observe carefully how it abides. Are these feelings about which we care so much stable? Or are they fluctuating? If we’re drawn away to another sensory impression does that feeling stay? Does it become less prevalent? Does the feeling change evolve over time? And our final question, is there anything in the nature of the feelings? To indicate that they are by nature, I or mine, or are they simply events arising within the fields of tactile, auditory, visual experience, that we have a privileged access to? And for the remaining minutes of the meditation, you can, if you wish, continue with this investigation, or you can return to experiencing the sensations of the breath in the body. Just witnessing the breathing moment to moment. 

Bell Rings 

And you can relax your concentration. Bring your meditation to an end. 

So that meditation, they said was a vipassana meditation, it’s called mindfulness of feelings and it’s the second of the Buddhist four close applications of mindfulness, which forms the sort of bedrock of the vipassana practice, so if you wanted to do that practise in your own time or explore the other four immeasurables, four close applications and mindfulness, that’s what they’re called. 

Now for the talk part. Before we go into our discussion, last week we were talking about worry and anxiety and we came to a conclusion that we tend to worry mostly about those sort of day-to-day things that we can’t control and we talked about letting go of that notion of control. So the question naturally came up, I think it was, Rob who asked this question, to steer our conversation this week and it was, you know, why is it then that we feel the need to control things so strongly in the first place? Where does that need for control come from and so I’ll share some of my thoughts on that this week and then I’m looking forward really, to seeing what insights others have to share. 

So firstly, I think if we go right back to the basics of human nature, the monkey brain, the survival brain at one point in our evolutionary history, our ability to manipulate our external environment was very closely related to our chances of survival and procreation, insofar as you were able to keep your tribe sweet, your home safe, secure, have access to supplies of food and water, then you are good. And if any of those were out of balance then you were in trouble, and so worry, uncertainty anxiety, these are natural psychological physiological responses and they’re very healthy insofar as they push us in the direction of action, doing something, sorting out, whatever that that thing is. So they’re good when there is something that needs to be done, something that needs to be changed. You know it serves us, it gives us a little push to do that, but nowadays monkey brain can be activated for all sorts of reasons that are not quite helpful because our survival is not hanging in the balance, but we worry as if it is, you know, we have a habit of over-analyzing any feelings of worry, any feelings of anxiety or over-analyzing situations, perpetuating things, embellishing that worry into something big that ends up taking over a whole day, a whole week, a whole lifetime.  

That brings me to the second thing that comes up for me that we see from Buddhist psychology and that is if you don’t have control of your external world then anything can go wrong and if anything can go wrong, then you’re left open to experiencing anxiety, frustration, disappointment, stress, uncertainty, distress of all kinds. And as we know, no sentient being wants to experience those things, that’s our most basic nature, right? We’ve talked about this, that we all want to be free of that, free of any type of distress. No distress for me, Thank you. I don’t want to take part in any of that. And because we, somewhere at our core, we really do believe that distress is caused by the external world only, then when we’re faced with a world that is so changing and so turbulent, then grasping arises. A desire to control arises, a desire to hold on to what we have, to fear change, to avoid any difficulty, all of this sort of grasping arises. It’s a bit of an internalised fear, you know of that which we can’t control, and it manifests as a need and a desire to control. And so because of that, we worry, because we don’t want to experience distress, you know, but chronic worrying is a form of distress in itself. And so this belief that I must have perfect external circumstances to be happy, that if I experience the things I don’t want to experience, I’ll be unhappy, that belief that if I don’t have control over my external world, then I’ll be unhappy, I’ll be open to all sorts, that’s a belief that we need to challenge again and again and again. If we cultivate genuine well being, inner peace, inner contentment, inner fulfilment, then we that can carry us through when things go wrong and then from there we can cultivate newer ways of thinking, approaching things that do go wrong. New perspectives which are a bit more based in reality and have a healthier, bit more construct. Because the truth is we have the inner resilience, don’t we, to get through difficulties, we’ve gotten through every difficulty in our life so far. We feel like difficulties are permanent, big scary, suffering and distress are an inherent part of them, like their not an optional part of of something going wrong but in reality, they’re changing, they’re fleeting, and they’re completely up to our subjective interpretation of them. 

They can be seen as big and scary, something we can’t handle and that makes them bigger and scarier and more difficult, or if we’re more in touch with our true calm inner nature, they can be seen as something else, perhaps it’s an opportunity to practise patience and forbearance. It’s an opportunity to increase my resilience so that I can deal with bigger difficulties in life, or it’s not that big a deal because it’s fleeting, it’s a brushstroke on the painting of my day, an even smaller brushstroke on the painting of my life. I think it was Anna, I don’t think she’s here this week, but she was saying last week, we can take the bigger picture, the wider view will this problem matter in one week. Will it matter in a month, in a year, in five years? So the heart and the mind can hold it all, we are stronger than we think. And so those are my thoughts about why we seem to have this need, desire to control everything and to be at unease if we’re not in control, remembering that we can’t control the external world, we can’t even control our partners and things like that. As Anna was saying last week, we might have the choice to get up and make a cup of tea, but there’s nothing that means that when I get down there, the kettle isn’t broken, my power hasn’t gone off and I don’t have water.

Transcript by: MK