https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YxBZbzIXNTg
Welcome, welcome to Meditating with John Verbeke. This is a course, it’s a progressive course, in which I will teach you a set of skills that will build on each other over time. On Monday and Thursdays at 9.30 will be the teaching days. That’s when I’ll teach you a new skill, we’ll go through an exercise together. Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays, and this is one of those days, we will meet together. I will do a quick review of the most recent principle I’ve taught, and then we will sit together and there will be a question and answer period at the end. In fact, after every sitting, there will be about a 10-minute Q&A period. So as I said, I’m John Verbeke. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I study mindfulness and related phenomena like flow and mystical science academically, scientifically. I run experiments, etc. But I’m also a practitioner. I’ve been practicing Vipassana and Metta in Tai Chi Chuan for 29 years and teaching it professionally for close to 20 years. So I first of all want to remember to thank you all for joining me. And I also want to thank my tech support, Amar, who will be handling questions. You might be asking throughout. And I’m always deeply grateful for his support. And my beloved son, Jason, is also helping me out on a daily basis. So I want to say thanks to both of them. Okay, so what we’ve talked about last time is we talked about finding your centre. And we talked about three aspects of it. If you are joining us for the first time, I recommend you go back to the previous video where I instruct more in detail how to find your centre. And then you could watch this video a little bit later. And that way you can get in the proper progressive sequence. So I want to do a quick review for all of us. We find our centre posturally. Remember back and forth, side to side, the head. We sink into our centre by relaxing all of our muscles, right? Opening our chest muscles, our abdomen muscles, stomach muscles. We savour our centre by creating a felt memory of what it’s like so that we can find our way back. We centre our attention by stepping back and looking at our sensations and automatically looking through the patterns and processes in our mind. We label, when we’re distracted, we label the distracting process. We don’t get involved with the content. We label the distracting process with an ing word. Excuse me, thinking, imagining, wondering, listening, etc. And then we return our attention to the breath. And that’s where we train our attitude. We’re centring our attitude. We’re not either fighting nor feeding our monkey mind because throughout all of this we are attempting to befriend ourselves. So we’re going to sit again in a couple of minutes. Make sure you’ve got some comfortable clothing on. Make sure you’ve got, as we talked about last time, you have your loft. See, I’m sitting on a pillow because I want to get my knees level or if possible below my hips. Some of you may find it easier to sit on the edge of your pillow cross-legged because this is a little bit more demanding on the legs. If you can do this though, and this is good because it tends to keep the pelvis less lateralized. Remember also that although you should experiment with your posture, you’re not going to find a perfect posture that makes you free of all discomfort. Your legs might fall asleep. You might get some achiness in your legs, things like that. However, you shouldn’t have a stabbing or burning pain in your back. If that is happening for you, go through the centering exercise if you’re in a chair and then lean back to get that little bit of support from the back of the chair. Or what some people do in my meditation classes is they sit right next to a wall. They go through the centering exercise and then they lean a little bit back onto a wall. You’re going to take some pressure off your back. All right. So like I said, I will be taking some questions at the end after we’ve sat for a bit. And we have some questions also held over from yesterday. I’ll address those ones first and then any of the new questions coming in. All right. So please prepare yourself and we will start to sit together. Please begin to meditate. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Slowly begin to come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition. Meditation is not vacation. It’s an education for transformation. So let’s take some questions here. We have a question from Prima. Should we be focusing on our breath, either the tip of the nose or the belly? Yes, you’re definitely focusing on your breath. I would recommend focusing on there are traditions that focus on breath at the tip of the nose. But the tradition I’m teaching, a tradition that integrates for Pasana and Metta and Tai Chi Chuan, is one that puts an emphasis on the Dantian, also known as the Hora. So following your breath in your abdomen. The reason why I recommend this, you can do both, pick one and stick with it though, is that by focusing on the breath and in the abdomen, it tends to keep your breathing closer to your center of gravity and it adds to your sense of stability and groundedness. This tends to keep our focus more up in the head area and this is a little bit more heady, a little bit more geocentric. This is more earth-centric grounding and it’s actually closer to your center of gravity. So I recommend following your breath in your Dantian. Can you talk about detailed posture? What kind of pillow is this? Any easy substitute? So this is called a Zafu, easy substitute or hard. But Jason, could you pass me also the meditation bench, please? So you can order these. This is a meditation bench. I’m letting my son use it. And it’s very portable. And then you sit on this. There’s various meditation benches you can order. Of course, in our current situation, ordering things is difficult. You might want to get something that’s got a fairly substantial solidity to it and then put a pillow over top of it, a regular pillow, in order to get some of the stability. The problem with regular pillows is they tend to crush with time and that tends to uproot people, sort of disturb their meditation posture. So if you can put something like a small box or a small stool and then put a pillow over that, that might work as a transitional thing. When you get a chance, and I understand our current circumstances, but getting a Zafu, which is a specific meditation pillow, or a portable or non-portable meditation bench is actually optimal. Is this Vipassana? Yes, it’s a kind of Vipassana. It is a form of Vipassana that has come through in one. So there’s sort of a set of influences. There’s Vipassana, Theravadin Vipassana, that was brought to North America by Goldstein and Kornfield and others. That’s had an influence. And then I was taught this in conjunction with Metta and with Tai Chi Chuan and some Qigong in a highly interpenetrating manner. I also learned a mindfulness healing art. I’ve got professional training and I practiced for about a decade as a shiatsu therapist. So all of that is going into it. And then also a huge important influence is all the work I’ve done on mindfulness, insight, flow, etc. That’s also informing how I’m teaching you. What do you do with the thought, insight question? Oh, I’m sorry. I should have mentioned that the second question about the pillow was from Harine Agustin. Thank you. The third question was also from Kermina. And this is from Saga 20. What to do with the thought, which is the insight question to the teacher, that you want to remember. Better to write it away, write it right away, or get back to the breath and let it come back continuously. I recommend not breaking your meditation to write it down. I recommend labeling it as thinking and returning to your breath and be willing to let your insight go and have faith and trust. The spontaneous aspects of your mind will give you your insight or question back to you once you come out. With time, that will become very, very regular for you. You’ll have an insight or thought in the meditation. You’ll let it go completely. You’ll be able to return to the breath. You’ll think it’s forgotten. You’ll come back. You’ll say, oh, I had some sort of insight. And then it comes back. This especially you can train yourself to say if you put a book near you and say, during the meditation, I’m not going to. I’m not going to try to hold on to my insights, but as soon as I come out of the meditation, I will try to remember them. And so I recommend that as a strategy. Who’s behind me this way? Jason is behind me that way. My son. And there’s nothing going behind me right now. Is it OK to re-center the body during a meditation session if I feel like I’m slouching over? Yes, it’s a good idea to slightly readjust. Do those micro adjustments to recover your center. That is completely fine to do. I find it difficult to constantly do. That was from Lars Carl. Max Ramsoho. I’ll get better. Remember to mention your names. Please forgive me. Asked who’s behind me. Anastasia Tartikova is asking, I find it difficult to constantly do baby breath and find myself having to take a really deep breath through my chest. Is this just from being unaccustomed to belly breathing? Yes, it is. And I recommend that if don’t force the baby breathing at all, just let it go. If your breathing is up here, then follow it there. Try to keep your chest open and your shoulders down. Follow your breathing here. And then, you know, see if you can very gently coax it a little bit, little tiny bit each time, but not force it. Especially don’t get into the habit of taking lots of deep breaths or you’re going to hyperventilate. So the baby breathing for some people, because we’ve got long bits of chest breathing, it takes time. And so the baby breathing is a goal you are gradually, very, very gradually working your way towards. OK, follow your breath where it naturally is, even if it’s very high. And then keep it in mind that you’re going to try and open up and let it sort of melt and dissolve and drain down. And over time, it’ll drop into your belly. You’ll be able to do more baby breathing. This is from Mr. Clear. Do you exhale from the belly first or the upper lungs? So I generally exhale from the belly first and then the upper lungs. I tend if I’m exhaling here, that tends to sort of choke it off from the exhale. So here and then exhale here and then you follow the breath coming up. And there’s Qigong exercises and Panayama exercises. In fact, where you’re following the breath in just that manner. Are there any more questions that we need to address? I think that’s it. And so we’re also at the end of our time. And it’s been wonderful to sit with you. I want to remind you that I will be here again tomorrow at 30. I will go a little bit longer tomorrow. Usually we’ll go 40 minutes because there’s these teaching class. And tomorrow I’m going to teach you how to find the second thing of your core four. I’m going to teach you how to find your route. Remember, continuity of practice is more important than quantity. Try to sit for at least 15 minutes. But if you can honestly only sit for five, please sit for five. Thank you very much. Keep up with your practice. And if I didn’t get to your questions, I promise we’ll get to them tomorrow. Take good care, everyone. Thank you for your time and attention. And thank you again to Amar and to Jason.