https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vV0lxsAWp0c
Five, four, three. Welcome to Meditating with John Rovecki. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I scientifically study the phenomena of meditation, mindfulness related phenomena like flow, insight, mystical experience and wisdom. I’ve been practicing Vipassana, meditation, meta-contemplation and Tai Chi Chuan for 29 years. And I’ve been teaching professionally for over 20 years. Oh, sorry, for close to 20 years. So this is a course, if you’re just joining us for the first time, you’re welcome to stay with us, but this is not just a drop in sit, this is a progressive course. There are instructions for new principles and skills every Mondays and Thursdays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, we just sit together and I also do a Q&A at the end. I do a Q&A at the end of everything. So if you’d like, you could go back and watch day one. And I believe it’s day three. And you’ll get the two things I’ve taught already, how to find your center, how to find your route, how to follow your breath, how to center your attitude. So that’s all there. And it’s recorded, it’s on my channel, on my playlist, Meditating with Viveki. So today, what we’re gonna do is the following. I’ll just mention that my Moneers is still acting up and I appreciate all the support you guys sent me yesterday. So I’m a little bit wobbly. So I might at some point need to just reach down and touch just to stabilize again, but I’ll try and be as quiet as possible. Shouldn’t have to disrupt things as much as I did last time. So just a quick reminder, take some time. Find your center, front to back. Find your center side to side and your head. Go to each one of the four centers and front, center, and back to find your route. Each place you’re looking, you’re making contact with any sense of tension, tightness, emotional tone. And then you’re listening, you’re really sensitizing yourself to it. And you’re loosening, you’re relaxing to enhance the sensitivity while having a sense of stability. Letting it flow, which means you’re trying to just let it fill your awareness. Like expand out so that there’s nothing else in your mind. You’re sort of diving as deeply into it as you possibly can and then letting it go, not getting enmeshed or attached to it and then opening and melting your drain and draining your attention and awareness down. So we do that face, heart, dantian, contact area in the front, back of the skull, between the shoulders, opposite the solar plexus, contact point in the back, center the skull, center the chest, center the abdomen, center the contact point. And then each time sinking three feet into the earth like the root of a tree, it’s giving us a sense of enhanced stability, a sense of enhanced connectedness and groundedness. All right, so we’re gonna set the timer for 15 minutes. Make sure you’re comfortable and ready. And let’s now begin. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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. So what’s it feel like to be centered and rooted? What does it feel like to be present in your mind like this? Open your eyes and see if you can see the light coming through your eyes. And if you can see the light coming through your eyes, you can see the light coming through your eyes. Open your eyes and see if you can continue that. Don’t force it. It’ll fade, but let it fade gently. At least it’ll be in the background. So I hope that was a good sip for you. It’s a challenging sip for me. My manners are still locking up, but we’ll keep going together because we’re all in this together and I wanna be there and offer you the best I can no matter what my health challenges are right now. Let’s turn and answer some of the questions that have been asked. I’m gonna get off my bench just so I can reorient a little. What’s the name of the tradition you were taught in? So the tradition I was taught in is called, the meditation tradition is called Vipassana. Shortly, I will teach you a contemplative practice called Metta. And I was also taught a moving Chi Kung Tai Chi Chuan set of practices that are also engaged mindfulness, but within movement with your eyes open, interacting with your environment. And that’s why I emphasize trying to make sure that you’re integrating what you’re cultivating with your eyes closed and recited practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition. Because the point is to be able to bring mindfulness into a dynamic interaction with your environment. So Vipassana, Metta, M-T-T-A and Tai Chi Chuan. Could you explain the difference between looking and listening again? So the difference between looking and listening. Looking is you’re just trying to make contact. And you’re also trying to setting up the right frame. So let’s say I’m doing my eye area. I wanna make contact with any tightness, tension, any emotional tone, any sense of like imminent information that wants to express itself. So, and I’m not trying to make it better. I’m not trying to make things pleasant. So I’m trying to make that contact with those elements and then come into the right framing of them. When I’m listening, then what I’m trying to do is like really sensitize my attention. Like really focus my attention, sensitize my awareness so that that is like dominating on my awareness. And then when I move into letting flow, because there’s another question about that. What I’m doing when I’m letting flow is I’m trying to, I’m trying to go from it maybe being like this area to sort of filling the whole of my awareness. There’s nothing in my awareness but that. I let it unfold. I give it the full theater of my mind in order to try and give it as much space as possible to express itself. If I want to deepen my meditation practice, should I meditate longer or more often? I would recommend doing two sittings if you wanna deepen your practice first. One in the morning and then one in the early evening, not right before you wanna go to bed. But if that’s difficult for you for scheduling reasons, then it’s also a good idea to try sitting a little bit longer. Now don’t ramp it up a huge amount. If you’re sitting for 15 minutes right now and you’re finding that that’s not much of a challenge, add an extra five. So you always wanna get into that what’s called the zone of proximal development where you have to push yourself to stay in the practice. You have to push yourself, again, not that endurance like we talked about yesterday. You don’t want any endurance, but you wanna be able to sort of have to challenge yourself and challenge your skills. We’ll talk a lot more about challenging your skills on Monday when we talk about finding the flow. Holly from Hamilton says, I’m finding that during the rooting phase, there are emotional tones coming up given our current uprooted times. Are these distractions to label or sensations to let flow and to take up more space? So initially let them flow as sensations. That’s what I mean by emotional tone, right? While you’re doing the rooting practice. But when you get to the let go, then it’s like what you do with when you’re labeling your distractions. You’re letting it go, you’re stepping back from it and then you return it. And then what becomes the center of your awareness, your focus of your awareness is that opening and melting and draining as you’re going down. While you’re sitting, if emotional tone is coming up, emotions are coming up, yes. And we’ll talk about this several times in the course, but if emotions come up, step back and label, like is it fearing, worrying, hoping, wondering, and then return your attention to the breath. Andre, when I’m creating these tree roots, it’s four points or five as in head, chest, belly, point of contact and three feet under. Are the last supposed to be as one, as a line for example? Yes, so the points are here, where you do that whole pattern of looking, listening, loosening, letting it flow and letting it go. You do four points here. Once you’ve done the contact point, it just drains down into the earth and you’re not sort of looking and loosening and listening. It’s just that sense of it growing, right? Stabilizing, rooting, nourishing, okay? So you’re right, there’s actually sort of five points where you end up locating your awareness, but the fifth point doesn’t have that sort of loosening, letting go, opening and melting. It’s just the sinking, the rooting into the earth. If I get distracted in the middle of the rooting process, should I continue with that until I get through the whole thing in a focused way? This is from Sheena. Or just let it go and move onto focusing my breath? No, if you get distracted, label the distraction during the rooting process with an ing word, return to where you were in the rooting process, and then take it up again, okay? And that’s liable to happen to you. You’re here and you sort of get distracted, label the distraction with an ing word, return your attention to where you were in the rooting process, and then continue it on. If my head starts to tilt forward, should I adjust my posture back to root center? Yes, always rooting center. So for example, right now for me, my manures is constantly sort of uprooting me because my vestibular organ is being offset. So that’s why I’m constantly readjusting, right? Little micro adjustments, you should always, right? Now, the thing you have to be careful of, the thing you have to be careful of is again, getting into that sort of quest for the perfect center, right? You know when you’re off-center, you get a very clear thing. If you feel like you’ve lost your center, do the micro adjustments, slightly adjust your posture to get your center back, okay? But be very careful not to get into the endlessly questing, right? It could just be a bit better, maybe a bit better, right? Because that’s basically your monkey mind finding a place where it can chatter and constantly shake you away from taking up your practice. So that’s our time for today. I wanna thank you and I appreciate your patience for working with me as I try to teach you this. I’m gonna keep trying out various things because I wanna keep going on this because there’s a sense in which what I’m doing right now out of all my work is really the most pertinent to trying to give people online aid to help them really adaptively deal with what’s happening right now. I wanna thank Amar for all his wonderful help and I would also ask you to please subscribe to the channel to be notified of any videos and perhaps you can check out some of my related videos. There’s a lot of discussion on my channel with a lot of really, really brilliant and deep people about ways in which we can think about how to respond to this situation we’re in and what it can mean for us and what opportunities it affords. A reminder that we will not be doing this tomorrow morning because it’s Sunday and I try to do as little as I can on Sunday. We’ll take this up again on Monday and I’m looking forward to it because it’s gonna be a new lesson. We’re gonna be learning about how to find your flow. Jason couldn’t be with us today. He’s not available on Saturdays but he’ll join us again on Monday. So everybody remember continuity of practice, more important than quantity. If you can honestly only sit for five minutes, that’s what’s happening to me sometime right now because of my manures, I can only sit for five minutes and I sit for five minutes. Okay? But if you can sit longer, always try to sit just a few minutes beyond what feels comfortable and easy for you. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Keep meditating and I’ll see you on Monday. Take care. Shhh.