How to Meditate (11 page)

FINDING THE FEELING

This exercise involves giving your friendly attention to the experience or the felt sense of an emotion. We’re trying to get at a nonverbal experience. Set your timer for twenty minutes. For a few minutes, sit and get in touch with your breathing. Just settle and breathe. Feel your breath going in and out, and try to get a sense of spaciousness in your breath.

When it feels like five minutes have passed, allow yourself to bring up a memory that carries with it a strong emotion. Perhaps a strong emotion that feels more immediate has already surfaced. If so, work with the first strong emotion that shows up for you. Perhaps it isn’t a so-called negative emotion; perhaps it is joy.

First, what does the emotion feel like? Find its texture and its color. Feel where it is located in your body. Is it sharp, is it dull? Is it in your heart or in your belly? You’re looking for a felt answer. It’s like saying, “What does a toothache feel like?” You don’t have to describe it to yourself in words, but you want to know that feeling.

If thoughts come up and distract you, just note that and come back to experiencing. Come back to just finding the feeling.

After a few minutes, what does the felt sense of the emotion feel like? It’s said that all experiences arise and subside. Is that your experience? Thoughts can cause the energy of emotions to freeze or dwell for a long time. If we let go of the thoughts, the energy can move. Is that your experience?

If you’re describing your felt sense of the emotion with a word, what does “pleasant” or “unpleasant” or “painful” or “tight” feel like? What does this word you’ve used to describe the emotion feel like? Maybe you’re even using a word like “tingling” or “tense.” What does that feel like?

Breathe in and out. Feeling it. Experiencing it. Resting in the experience.

If you’re experiencing a strong emotion, you might want to breathe more deeply so that a sense of space and openness and friendliness can come in and support you. If you’re feeling absolutely nothing at all, just a blank neutral state, breathe in and out and simply note: What does blank and neutral feel like? What does numb feel like?

If you’re feeling resistance to doing this at all, experience that. You can keep asking yourself the question: What is this? Whether it’s boredom, resistance, overwhelm, pain, pleasure, or drowsiness, try to get at the experience by asking yourself, “What is this?” You’re not looking for a verbal answer, you’re looking for an experience. What is this?

Now, really try to locate the strong emotion in your body. A way to use emotions as a support, as a friend, as a helper on the path of awakening, is by using the way that the emotion is affecting your body as your object of meditation. Rather than using your whole body as the object, the easiest thing is to just zero in on one part, to find the feeling in the body. For instance, your body temperature is rising, you’re sweating, your palms are moist, your stomach is in a knot, your brow is furrowed. Choose one of those things. Mingyur Rinpoche was once working with a student who had severe depression, and he asked her what it felt like. She said, “It feels like molten lava throughout my whole body.” He said, “OK, we’re going to use that feeling as the support, as the friend for your awareness. Instead of focusing on the whole body, just focus on your big toe.” So if you have an all-over feeling of some kind, focus on that feeling in one part of your body, if that’s easier for you.

Sit with the feeling until your timer goes off. When it rings, rest in the experience of whatever came up for you. Sit in the home base of your being, the vast spaciousness of your mind, the open dimension of you.

After you practice with finding the feeling, it’s very common that the rumblings of the unpleasantness—the clenched stomach or the sharpness in the heart—are still there. The timer going off doesn’t mean that the feeling will go away. But there can be the feeling of having a lot of space around the emotion. We might feel less smothered by the emotion.

In this meditation exercise, we’re training for real life. Strong emotions will come in our life, and through meditation we learn to give these emotions space so that we can feel more settled when they do arise.

Part Four

W
ORKING WITH
S
ENSE
P
ERCEPTIONS

Buddha realized that true freedom lay not in withdrawal from life but in a deeper and more conscious engagement in its processes.

—
MINGYUR RINPOCHE

19

THE SENSE PERCEPTIONS

Y
ou can use anything as an object of meditation. You can use anything that’s happening to you, whether it’s the arising of thoughts or strong emotions or sense perceptions. Your object can be sheer delight for you, or it can be sheer misery. It’s your choice.

For example, if you focus on a smell during your meditation, you might find yourself thinking, “That’s a terrible smell! We shouldn’t use that kind of incense” or “Oh, they’re burning the oatmeal, and when I eat burned oatmeal I get terrible indigestion and I don’t feel well for days.” Once again you’re off, and you’re angry at the cook and you’re packing your bags and you’re leaving the meditation retreat. And it was all because of a smell!

Meditating on our sense perceptions—hearing, sight, feeling, tasting, and smelling—helps us to see that even the littlest thing can turn us toward full-blown internal warfare. Or a sense perception can just run us around in circles and keep us living in a fantasy world. They can show us how, basically, we cause our own suffering because we allow the most simple sense to bring back a memory that can then escalate difficult emotions. On the other hand, they also are opportunities for us to enter pleasure, delight, and joy. The senses are so alive, and they can bring us right to the center of the present moment.

Meditating with the sense perceptions allows us to directly connect with the immediacy of our experience, which is our gateway to limitless experience, the vastness of this world. Again, these very same sense perceptions can keep you locked in. A sound can trigger a memory from a decade ago. A smell might make you think of how you need to clean out your refrigerator.

When we meditate with our sense perceptions, we interrupt the momentum of thoughts and come back to the sound, or the smell, or the feeling, or whatever sense you’ve chosen to place your attention on. If you can start to practice this way with every little thing throughout your day, you’ll find that when challenges arise, you have tools for practice. You’re used to interrupting the momentum of a trail of thoughts, such as “There’s something wrong here that I have to solve,” or “I’m a failure,” or whatever the familiar story is. Through meditation, you’re training in interrupting the momentum of the wandering mind and going right to the experience itself, which I have been calling the “felt sense” of the experience.

If you interrupt the momentum and abide with the felt experience of the moment, you find a doorway into the full possibility of awakening in this life. When we come into the immediacy of our experience, it is a nondualistic experience. In other words, by using our sense perceptions in meditation, we are coming into oneness with the sound or smell or whatever we are focusing on, rather than dividing ourselves in half.

For most people, the most accessible way to have a direct experience is to feel it physically. You feel it in your body, but there’s also an atmosphere to the experience of a smell or a sound or a sight. Outside of the sensation, there’s also an awareness of the sensation. Your ability to experience the atmosphere of a sensation will unfold over time, and slowly you can allow yourself to expand into that feeling as your object of meditation.

SOUND AS THE OBJECT OF MEDITATION

Often people cannot really have a direct sense perception of sound, because the sound invokes something in them that clouds their perception. It’s the same with sight. You see something, and rather than being able to use it as an object of meditation, this particular sight has so many emotional associations that you become lost, and you can’t really see. But you can keep coming back. You can just keep coming back. But this requires acknowledging that we bring a lot of baggage and conditioning along with this practice, which often causes us to get lost, and then we just have to keep coming back to the direct perception.

I have a story about an inmate in prison that communicates the complexity of our sense perceptions. I have heard the sounds in prison—it is deafening because people are in their cells, and the way they communicate with people on other sides and all the way up the tiers, is they yell. And they have developed the capacity to have a conversation with someone three tiers up, and they can actually hear each other going back and forth because they just tune out everything else and they just hear that. But for the untrained ear, it is just deafening because there are hundreds of these conversations going on, plus television sets, and a lot of noise, and a lot of just yelling—real yelling, very heated conversations.

So this man was sent a tape and it was a tape of the ocean sound. Someone found out he was doing some yoga, and they sent him this relaxation tape. He wore headphones to listen to it. He found it so relaxing—just listening to the ocean. He thought, I’m going to do these guys a favor. I’m going to broadcast the sounds of the ocean, and then everyone on the whole tier is going to chill out and relax.”

He rigged up his tape so that everyone could hear the sounds of the ocean, and this simple action started a major panic attack. Someone said, “You hear that? What
is
that?” The prison was on the water, and so a few people heard the tape as the sound of the ocean rising. They started to panic, and then everyone was in a total panic. People were yelling things like, “I can see the water coming in, it’s beginning to rise!” They were screaming at the guards, “Unlock our cells! Get us out of here! There’s a flood coming!” So the sound had a totally different effect than the man expected!

I thought this story was so interesting. Maybe even a few of you panicked when you read about this man’s experience, because at some point in your life you were in a flood, or the ocean rose and swept away your home when you were a little kid. For most people, the sound of the ocean is very soothing. But there was also this whole other meaning that was imputed on the sound; people attached a story to it, and it started a riot that escalated until literally everyone was involved in it.

This is a perfect example of what you’re up against when you practice direct perception—the direct, unfiltered experience of anything. Our perceptions come with a lot of baggage. So that’s why gently acknowledging that you’re lost, and gently coming back, is important. And if your experience of a direct perception has triggered a deep-trauma reaction or panic, then be gentle with yourself and stop the practice altogether. Return to your practice when you feel ready to begin again.

exercise

SOUND AS THE OBJECT

When you sit for this practice, begin by checking your posture and getting as comfortable as you can. For this practice, try not to move. The intention behind not moving isn’t to be harsh; it’s meant to heighten your awareness so you don’t spend the whole time wiggling around trying to get comfortable.

For a moment, sit and relax into your body, and notice whatever is going on with your body and your state of mind. No judgment. Just relax and notice your mood, the quality of your mind, the way your body is feeling.

Next, notice the sounds around you. Let sounds be the object of your meditation. You’re doing shamatha practice here, where you take an object of meditation and you let that be. Give all your attention to that sound. When your attention wanders, simply come back to the sound.

First, listen to distant sounds. You might hear closer sounds, just a little rustling or something nearby. Listen to distant sounds, and then if there are closer sounds, listen to those, too.