https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mDnHfuEK4vg
Good morning. Welcome to Meditating with John Vervecky. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where I teach and do scientific research on mindfulness and related topics like insight, flow, mystical experience, transformative experience, higher states of consciousness, the cultivation of wisdom, and the aspiration to enlightenment. I’ve also been practicing Vipassana meditation, Metta contemplation, Tai Chi Chuan, and Chi Kung for over 29 years and teaching them professionally for almost 20 years. Welcome. If you’re joining us for the first time, this is a progressive course. Every other Monday is a Dharma Day and I teach practices and principles that build on the previous Dharma Days. So you go to links in the description, you can find links to previous lessons and you can catch up. The rest of the week, we meet together and sit and for every day, Monday through Friday, on the weekdays, there’s Q&A at the end. So we’re always meeting Monday through Fridays at 930 a.m. Eastern time. There’s Q&A at the end of all of the sessions, including the Dharma Days. Please make sure that any questions you have here are directed towards the course, the ecology of practices I’m teaching you. If you have broader questions, more philosophical, more comprehensive, more existential or sapiential, please direct those to the live Q&A stream. I do every third Friday, 3 p.m. Eastern time on YouTube. In order to help me help as many people with this as possible, please like this video stream. That will raise its visibility on the YouTube algorithm. Please remember that on the 25th, which is the next Monday we’re going to encounter, it’s going to be a Dharma Day and we are going to start learning how to practice Alexia Divina. It’s very important that you find some sacred poetry, some sacred prose. If you don’t know what that means, please look at the instructions I gave in yesterday’s video and also the video before where I sort of outline what I mean by those things and what I mean by sacred so that you’ll be ready to practice. I’ll use my texts, the two Mitchell anthologies, on Monday, but you’ll want to have your own texts ready to go so that you can start practicing on your own. I think that’s everything I need to announce right now. It’s really wonderful to be here with all of you. I’m really, really pleased, like I said, how the sangha is forming and the quality of the questions that I’m being given. I’m very grateful for that, so thank you. All right, I think we’re ready, so please get your basic posture. Please set your phones to do not disturb and we will begin when I say begin. Begin. Slowly come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition, perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself. How does this course compare with my meditation app by Sam Harris? Can I do both or do they conflict? I don’t know. I know that Sam is doing work on mindfulness and he’s trying to do it from a completely sacred perspective, so I think there’s some convergence with my work. I don’t know the app specifically. If it’s a guided meditation practice, I would recommend trying not to use the app very much because things are encoding specificity. You want to get to the point where you might, like I said, it’s not about what you’re doing in your meditation, in your sitting, in your contemplation. It’s what you’re doing in your life that resonates with what you’re doing in your sitting. If it’s an app that’s helping you to remember to meditate or to practice some principles, perhaps it will be convergent. Apps that claim to sort of read brainwaves and tell you when you’re doing mindfulness, as a scientist, I’m deeply suspicious of those. I think they’re likely not doing what they’re claiming to do. I’ve been on the inside when one of these was being developed and I was very disappointed what I saw. I don’t know which kind of app it is. If you think it’s convergent with the core four, with both meditation and contemplation, then it’s probably useful or helpful. Like I said, I’m speaking out of ignorance and I’ve said if it’s this, that’s what I’d be concerned about. If it’s this, that’s what I’d be concerned about. I hope that’s a helpful answer to you. Andre Ferrier, hello Andre. In recent weeks I’ve developed a gastric neurosis due to stress from university work. I’m very sorry to hear that. And the end of a long-term relationship. Oh, you’re in grief. There’s nothing harder. There’s nothing, nothing harder for humans than grief. Disappointment and grief, like when they’re in the same family, these are the hardest things. The wisest person I met in person in my life said to me that there’s nothing harder. He wasn’t trying to trivialize or dismiss. He also said there’s nothing that takes us to the depths of the humanity. He said to me, he said, don’t get into a serious relationship. He didn’t mean romantic. He meant anything, friendship, with somebody who has not experienced deep grief because there’s a humanizing aspect to that. So there was a woman who came to the Buddha and her son had died. And you know, like many people, she assumed the Buddha had miraculous powers and she kept pestering him. She wanted him to heal and resurrect her son, heal and resurrect her son. He kept, and she kept doing that. And then she said, okay, I will help you with your problem. I will heal your son on one condition. I need you to go into town and I need you to find a house and go to each house and knock and ask if they have a mustard seed. She said, I can do that. He said, wait, wait, wait. You can only get a mustard seed from a house that has not tasted grief, not experienced death. She said, okay. And she went and knocked on the door. Please, the Buddha has offered to heal my son. Do you have any mustard seeds? Oh, yes, yes. Is this house free of grief? Has it never encountered death or loss? Oh, no. I lost my grief. I lost my grief. I lost my grief. I lost my grief. Oh, no. I lost my grandmother. Oh, no. My wife. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. She went from house to house to house to house. And then eventually she went, oh, and then she went back to the Buddha and she said, thank you. Thank you for helping me. See, there’s nothing that binds us. There’s nothing that binds us at that depth. So I’m not trying to paint a silver lining for what’s happening to you. Not at all. Instead, I’m trying to explain to you why I have reverence for what you’re going through and that I’m expressing as much as I can, you know, the connectedness we share in that we have both experienced deep loss. Now, onto your more practical question, but I thought the existential issue needed to be at least recognized and addressed, because very often what we need in these deepest times, nobody can give us advice. What we need is to, we need to experience that we’re seen and heard. I now find it very painful and difficult to meditate on these things, but still think it’s necessary in order to get rid of the gastric neurosis. Since it’s caused by mental state rather than a physical problem, could you suggest any mantra or specific lessons that could help? So the difficulty is the stress, I think, right? I think meditating on the gastric neurosis to try and make it go away is a little bit wrong way to frame it. That’s where you’re trying to get the meditation to become like a magical cure for you. I think instead, if you really concentrate on the core four, really getting into your body in a different way. So instead of trying to, you know, get rid of this, try to get into a different way in your body in which it is not focally present. Really deeply, like don’t do anything beyond, just really deeply do the core four, really, really, really deeply. And don’t, again, and just know and don’t even maybe even do the five factors of acquiring mindfulness on it right now. Just note the pain or note the stress, just come back and really try to remember Sati what it’s like to deeply inhabit your body in a place in which these things are not focal. So instead of trying to make it go away, I’m trying to get you to do a really, really fundamentally embodied reframing of how you’re relating to it. About the grief and the chances are these two things are being deeply integrated, maybe not helpfully by your brain because they’re both conditions of threat and loss. They’re both trickling amygdala and they’re both sort of playing with your reconstructed memory in powerful ways. Maybe it’s good to talk to somebody regularly. The advice that this person gave me about grief, as he said, is that the only way through grief, you have to grow into a different person. And so the thing to do about that is, like I say, you might consider some therapeutic interventions. I don’t know your particular situation. It sounds very distressing. I would increase the Dharma, learning much more, affording your aspiration to growth is the best way to try and slowly, slowly, slowly, because that’s the only way it will happen, start to move forward. So in both ways, what I’m saying is try to inhabit your body or inhabit your life differently than you are rather than trying to make these things go away and try to continually remember that you have gone through this before. Loss, stress, and other people have. And again, not a hallmark card of I can do it, but I acknowledge it and acknowledgement and reverence for the fact that you have resources within you that transcend your ego and grasp. So I hope that’s helpful to you. I really do. I really do. Rainer Ludwig, for deep the past night experience, one thought after the other with no noticeable silent gaps. I’m not sure if it’s possible to not think anything from an active mind. Any advice? It is possible. It just takes a long time. What about the other way in which you might be able to get into it? When you meditate on, when you apply the five factors to inquiring and mindfulness, do you get the distraction going away? Do you get a moment of where you’re not in thought and then try to savor that and try to notice that more often as your way of trying to become more aware of the space between your thoughts. Secondly, you need to do things that get you into the flow state. The flow state is a universal powerful way of being. And in that state, you will not have that thought. You will be so focused and coupled to the task and the environment and absorbed into it that that will go away. And it’s a wonderful state to be in. It’s an optimal experience and optimal performance. Getting into the flow state more reliably, find activities and there’s activities you can do in your dwelling. You can take up a martial art. You can do Tai Chi. There’s just lots of things. There’s books on how to find flow, how to cultivate flow, how to enhance flow. Because if you can get that, then you can start to create a felt consciousness, a felt memory of what it’s like to be absorbed and involved, awake and alert, but without thought running through your head. Karima, is it possible to do this meditation in a busy, noisy environment? I cannot keep the focus inside my body, but let go of the tension and all the sound takes me inside much like a singing bowl. Yeah, Karima, it’s good to talk to you again. Yeah, you can do that. Eventually when you get, when you’ve been practicing a long time, it’s very much like that. All the sounds are more, I have something very similar as a metaphor. It’s like my mind is like water and the sounds and all I do is just a rippling through. But it gets very similar to your ringing of the bowl. And if you’ve been practicing for a long time and you are reliably getting deeply into this practice, then what you describe, I think, is something that I myself have found to be possible within this practice. So it seems very plausible to me. It seems very plausible to me. Dimitar, what do you think about doing meta on snippets or sequences of memories that come up? Is it possible to do meta on snippets or sequences of memories that come up? Is it like doing meta on yourself since your experiences have shaped you into being in some way? What role can memories in general serve within a mindfulness practice? Yes, yes. In fact, very often like what you’re doing, the meditative questing, what will come up are snippets of memory. And yes, yeah, and then you treat them as a portal. Yes. But what, you know, where did that come from? What is behind that? And if you take something like what you’re doing in the meditative questioning into your meta with those memories, I think you’ll find that it gets you very deeply into the practice. Kira Kroger, since I asked the question about breathing and raising my shoulders, my attention seems hyper focused on my breath and bringing up even more anxiety of not getting a full breath. Any suggestions? Yes. So this is a spiral that some people get into. So stop following your breath. Okay, just stop following your breath. So instead what I want you to do is I want you to do your rooting and I want you to pay attention to the sense of contact where you’re touching the cushion. And what I want you to do when you’re there is I want you to just, right, just keep coming back to that sensation of contact and rootedness and stability. Just coming back. Forget your breath. Forget your breath for now. Come back and focus on the contact and the rooting and the stability and the rooting. And when you’re distracted, come back, refine the rooting, refine that sense of contact of reaching into the earth, of stabilizing yourself and doing that over and over and over and over and over again. Make that your meditative focus for now. Then once that stabilizes, then we can probably shift back. You may just go directly to deepen, deep the pasta and just leave your breathing where it is for now. So we have to break out of here. This is parasitic processing. It’s spinning on itself. And so the thing to do is just let it go for now. Shift the focus, as I suggested, and work with that for now. So I hope the answers were helpful to everyone. Thank you for joining. As I said, the saying and the way people are contributing to it and participating in it and supporting each other is more than I could have hoped for. And it’s a wonderful thing when reality exceeds our hopes. I want to, as always, thank my dear friend and techno major, Mar. He’s always there and I can rely on him. And of course, my beloved son, Jason, who’s again always here for me, always helping. It’s good to have him around because he always reminds me who I really am. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video on the channel. You’ll find links to the lecture series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the discussion series, Voices with Hrabiki, where these topics are discussed in more depth and connected to a more encompassing response to the meaning crisis and cultivation of wisdom and a way of life. Please invite others who might benefit to this course to watching the videos. So pleasure of doubt, Brett is here often in the Senga and he is running the Discord server. You can go there, you can find a community, people who are practicing this and discussing it and also discussing Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Voices with Hrabiki, all of what’s happening right now. And some of you have already gone there and found that this is just a wonderful community to belong to. I think this kind of platform, the kind of community that are forming around it is where a new culture is starting to bubble up. You know, the actual revolution wasn’t a political revolution, it was a cultural revolution in which people adopted new psychotechnologies and then new emerging practices and then new communities and then a new culture and a new worldview, a whole new way of being human emerged. I think something like that is possible for us right now and the Discord servers are a place in which I think this is starting to show itself. A reminder that we are doing this every weekday morning at 9 30 Eastern Time. Finally, remember that continuity of practice is more important than quantity of practice. There is no enemy worse than your own mind and body, but no ally, no true friend greater than your own mind and body. Take care and I’ll see you on Monday. Remember to get your sacred poetry and your sacred prose for Alexio Divina. Bye-bye everyone.