https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5ZJhSsXF1fg
I’m Dr. John Vervecky from the University of Toronto. I teach in the Cognitive Psychology Department, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Buddhism Psychology and Mental Health Program. I teach a course on the science of mindfulness meditation. I teach a course on cultivating consciousness where I teach meditation and contemplative practices. And I also teach extracurricular courses here on meditation, on contemplation, and on Tai Chi Chuan. I’d like to introduce you to the basics of mindfulness meditation, especially from the Vipassana tradition. And the core of mindfulness meditation is finding your center. And that’s a sort of, it’s become a cliché thing to say. And what I want to do is make that a little bit more precise and powerful and useful for you by talking about three centers you’re going to find. The first center you’re going to find is the relationship between mind and body. So this is the Buddhist, the central Buddhist metaphor that in mindfulness practice we’re learning to befriend ourselves. We’re trying to take the relationship towards a friend, right, but take that relationship towards ourselves. And one of the ways we do that is we try to get the body and mind working together, using the mind to train the body and the body to train the mind. And one of the ways we can do that is by adopting some basic principles of posture. So what I want to do in my posture is I want to find my center. I don’t want to sort of just calculate, because I don’t want to hold myself rigid. Because if I hold myself rigid, that makes me tense, and that triggers the wrong kinds of mental states. But if I let myself go limp, then I’m cutting off a lot of my oxygen, I’m not breathing properly, I got this sort of shallow chest breathing, and that also is associated with anxiety, restlessness of mind. So what I want is I want to move off the back of my chair, and what I’m going to do is take you through this exercise you do. So you close your eyes, and you’re going to pay attention to your sensations of balance. You’re going to move forward and feel off balance, move backwards and feel off balance, and then slowly changing each one, home in to where you feel centered on this axis, front to back. Then you’re going to repeat it. You’re going to go side to side, again paying attention to the sensations of being off balance, slowly homing in to where you feel centered that way. Then it’s important to do the head independently, because one of the most common mistakes in novice meditators is they let their head roll forward when they’re meditating. This is bad for a few reasons. First it upsets your center of balance, and it will put a strain on your neck, which will tend to cause headaches. Secondly, it tends to restrict your air, again so you’re doing the shallow breathing, again which tends to trigger restlessness. And finally, you’re sort of signaling to your brain that you’re falling asleep, which is not what we want in meditation. In meditation we’re trying to get in between a restless mind, a mind running around, but a mind that’s going foggy and falling asleep. We want a calm, but very clear mind. So we want to do the exercise also with the head back to front, side to side. Once you’ve found your center, once you’ve sensed your center, sink into it. Relax your structure as much as you can. Open your stomach muscles, open your chest, place your hands where they’re conducive to adding to the stability. What you want to do is trust your structure as much as you can. You want to sink into your center, and then once you’re sinking into your center, you want to savor your center. What does it feel like in your mind and body to be centered? You’re trying to create a felt memory so you can get back to this place again and again, more and more readily. What you’re going to do first is you’re going to sit, you’re going to find your center, you’re going to sense your center, you’re going to sink into your center, then you’re going to savor your center. The next thing you’re going to do is you’re going to center your attention. Many of you know that meditation involves sort of focusing your attention, but there’s more to that in meditation. We’re not just focusing our attention. What we’re going to do is we’re going to learn to step back and look at our mind rather than looking through it. In our day-to-day lives, we don’t pay much attention to our minds. We pay a lot of attention through our minds to the world. I’m going to use an analogy for that. Most of the time, I’m looking through my glasses. I’m not actually looking at them. But periodically, especially if there’s something distorting my vision, I need to step back and look at my glasses. That’s what I want to practice doing in mindfulness. I want to practice stepping back and looking at the mind rather than automatically looking through it. The way we do this is to look at how we normally reach out to the world with our mind, through our sensations. Normally we don’t pay attention to our sensations. We pay attention through them. This area is called our dentienne. We’re going to focus to the sensations that are being created by our breathing. Be careful. Don’t force your breathing. Just let your breathing remain natural. What you want to do is as you’re breathing in, you’re going to pay attention to the sensations of your abdomen expanding. You’re going to silently say to yourself, in, and feel all the sensations here that are being generated. Then as you’re naturally breathing out, you’re going to silently be saying to yourself, out, pay attention to all the sensations that are being generated. What will happen is that automatic tendency that your mind has to start looking at the world will take over and you’ll be distracted. You’ll start thinking about your laundry. You’ll be listening to somebody in the hallway. You’ll be imagining some scene. What we want to do is again step back and look at rather than looking through it. What do I mean by that? What I mean is I’m not going to get involved with what I’m thinking about. Instead, I’m going to step back and label the process, the process going on in my mind with an ing word like thinking, imagining, listening. Then I’m going to return my attention back to the breath, following the breath at the dantien. That brings me to the third thing I’m going to center. I’m going to center my attitude, the attitude I’m taking towards this practice. Now, Jack Kornfield has a wonderful analogy for this. He says it’s like training your puppy dog to stay. He says, imagine you’re training your puppy dog to stay and you put your puppy dog down here and the puppy dog inevitably is going to move. First thing you have to do is note where it goes, but your attitude is also important. If I bring the puppy dog, stay, and I have this really punitive attitude and I’m judging and I’m harsh and I’m punishing, I’m training the puppy dog to resist me, to fear me, to fight me. I’m not befriending myself anymore. Now I’m training the mind to be closed off to me and I’m doing exactly the opposite I want. If I do the opposite and I just, oh, there goes the puppy dog and I don’t, oh, well, how wonderful. If I’m just lackadaisical and easy, the puppy dog also won’t be trained. What I need to do is to be persistent, stay, stay, but I need to not be punitive. This part of your mind that jumps around in the Buddhist literature, it’s called your monkey mind because it’s like a monkey leaping and chattering as it leaps around the trees. A way of thinking about this is we don’t want to feed our monkey mind. We don’t want to just indulge it and let it run wild, but on the other hand, we don’t want to fight our monkey mind. We’re not trying to punish it and be harsh to it. We’re trying to center our attitude between fighting and feeding our monkey mind. So you’re sitting, you’re going to sit to meditate. You’re going to do the three centers. You’re going to sense the center between mind and body and savor it, right? Sink into it. You’re going to then center your mind by stepping back and looking at your sensations rather than looking through them, stepping back and labeling the distracting process rather than looking through it at what it’s pointing your attention towards. And you’re also going to center your attitude by how you return to the breath. But not punitive, neither like feeding or fighting your monkey mind. And that’s how you begin to do mindfulness meditation.