>> This is a great way to get into the second practice set --
we're going to do which is mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness
which is really the practice of being more aware of what's going on in our experience.
Mindfulness is the kind of fashionable word for it right now but call it awareness,
call it objectivity, call it -- it's there in every tradition and every --
lots of human beings and cultures talk about it in their own ways.
It's just being aware of what's going on in your experience.
And it turns out that there's layers and layers of stuff going on
and that we're often ping-ponging around automatically with stuff.
So patterns are being activated, and we don't really realize it.
We're kind of walking around in a bad mood, or we're walking around [inaudible]
on something, going around and around.
And when we're inside these loops, these loops of behaving and acting
and responding, what does it feel like?
It can feel like fate.
It feels like we're always going to be here.
We've always been here.
It feels -- it's so sticky, it's hard to kind of get out of it.
And there is truth -- the reason it's sticky is because you're deepening a pattern
or a groove that you go in a lot.
You're like training your body and mind to continue on in that kind of a pattern.
So that's the sobering part.
Mindfulness practice is really a beautiful practice for kind of working with that,
understanding, and noticing how that works.
That is the work of a practice so that's it.
The work of a practice is you have an idea that you want us [inaudible] and meditate and focus
on your breath but you have a life and your being triggered in your life
and you have shit that's going on and stuff that's happening at work
and in your relationship and in your family and you're thinking and worrying about it
because you're trying to sort it out and that's totally fine.
So the first thing is to say this is completely natural that I have this pattern
that I'm inside, that this is just how it goes.
So you first except that you're having that experience
so that the concentration we have working with that is just to go back to the breath
and let it -- and do your best to let it be in the background.
Eventually you get pulled up with it again but you notice it happens.
You go back to the breath.
Eventually the breath starts to become richer and fuller.
The real estate of the breath gets larger than the real estate of that sticky pattern.
And you can sort of shift ratios that way.
But the mindfulness way of working about it is to say okay.
Well, actually I'm going to look at this pattern.
I'm going to actually go into it.
Instead of just being automatically inside it, I'm going to start to explore it.
So I'm going to -- when I'm in this thing -- and you can explore it different ways.
You can -- one of the most constructive ways is just to kind of see what it's made of.
Like generally you'll find it's made of body sensation, so emotional feelings and tugs
like anger in the jaw or like heartache through the chest
or vibrating agitation or whatever it is.
Like the body sensations are really providing the juice of a lot
of our emotion and thinking patterns.
So you can just stay with the feelings in the body.
And we'll kind of do one like that in a moment, a practice like that.
You can also work with the head part of it, the thinking part.
You can go in and go okay.
Can I actually just notice what images are coming up right now?
Instead of just being in the images, can I kind of have this objective witnessing thing?
Can I disembed from this trance and just notice the images,
the face of your disappointed mother or whatever it is?
Or can you notice the talk?
So that's another component.
The voice in your head, the narrative you're telling yourself, the criticism, the --
you know the voice of the other person, whatever it is just -- and you kind of tried to --
it's this weird move of just like the act of noticing it means you're no longer inside it.
So this is the single most important thing a human being needs
to know in their life, I think.
You know, probably there will be a few so it's not
that the single most important but it's an important one.
That is that you -- you're not fated to repeat these patterns.
If you can notice the thing is happening, the active noticing it means you're not inside it.
You're now outside it because the crazy punch line in the contemplative world,
in the Buddhist world, in the Hindu world, in the Taoist world, and even in --
talked about in different ways in the Abrahamic traditions, the crazy punch line is
that you aren't -- like that's part of you.
That's the process of your personality but the act of being aware it self,
the knower is the same knower in everybody else.
It's empty.
It has no material.
The act of knowing is this act -- it's this expression of your freedom.
So it's different than -- knowing is different than thinking.
This is what people don't really realize.
It's like you're thinking about something.
Thinking is tractable.
It's images.
It's talk.
It's a little bit of tension in the face.
It's all this stuff.
The knowing is just the knowing but we think knowing and thinking are the same things.
But a mindfulness practice basically lets you disembed from the thinking so you can know it.
So the knower is here and then that thinking is happening here.
Does that make sense?
Okay. Because it's kind of a weird thing to get around but that is the experience.
The experience is that you can pop out and start to observe the thing from outside.
And then guess what?
It turns out that process just keeps going on and on
and on because the place you're noticing from, which at first seems like oh, yeah,
I'm noticing it as this empty knower then gets slowly coagulated
into being another thinking process.
And then you've got to pop out of that.
So you've got to -- and then you've got to pop out of that.
And there's always another layer to pop out of.
It just is like turtles all the way down basically.
But that's okay because it's like it's about getting free incrementally or continually moving
into a more spacious perspective and then getting caught up again
and then more spacious perspective but over time
that perspective becomes the place you take a stand in.
So I'm going to make that more tangible for you guys.
Let's actually try that as a practice now.
In a very uncomplicated way, it's just being aware of what's going on in your experience.
And as we start to look, it starts out kind of crude like we can't really detect it.
It's sort of murky but the longer and more patiently we are -- that we spend investigating,
the more subtler qualities begin to get teased out.
So there is this detection and this quality that emerges, this quality of clarity,
and it's like we start to become more and more transparent to ourselves.
And you can think of it as -- it's like the conscious mind is starting to seep
down into the unconscious or the subconscious,
these sort of subterranean levels were all the turbines are and all the machinery.
It's like it can start to get down in there and like, you know, walk around on the floor
of the factory and, you know, take a look around.
So hopefully that metaphor won't be -- it will be helpful and not disturbing so let's try it.