https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=47qUsNwqR5k
Welcome to Meditating with John Verbeke. I’m a psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto where I academically teach and scientifically study and research phenomena like mindfulness and related phenomena such as insight, flow, mystical experience, transformative experience, higher states of consciousness, cultivation of wisdom and the aspiration to enlightenment. I’ve been practicing the past the meditation, meta contemplation, Tai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung for over 29 years and teaching them professionally for close to 20 years. Welcome. If you’re joining us for the first time you should know that this is a course. In fact introductory course is done. What you can do is you can go into the link, the notes for this video, you’ll find links to previous lessons. I recommend doing a new lesson every Saturday or Sunday and that way you can slowly catch up as you continue to participate in this Sangha. Every other Monday is a Dharma day in which I teach principles and practices, more advanced principles and practices that build on the previous principles and practices. Every day we sit from 9.30 to 10. At the end of every day there is a Q&A. Please keep your Q&As at that time to questions concerning the psychology practices this course. If you have more encompassing questions please come to the live stream on YouTube monthly Q&A every third Friday of the month. That will be June 19th of this month and it’s at 3 p.m. Eastern time. Please like this video stream to raise its visibility in the YouTube algorithm so I can help as many people as possible with this course. I think that’s everything we need to do with respect to announcements. This upcoming Monday will be a Dharma day and I’m going to start teaching you a bit of practices drawn more from the Taoist tradition, so much more embodied practices to help supplement and develop what we’re already doing. We want to build a rich, vibrant, dynamic ecology of practices. All right, so get yourself in your basic posture, set your phones on do not disturb and we will begin when I say begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. 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Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin.Ma. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Medium. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Okay, so we have some time for some questions. A question from Manuel Post. I’ve been having issues labeling thoughts and counting. The act of making myself conscious verbally of the action is taking too much of my focus. So I’m not quite sure what you mean by too much of your focus. Do you mean that the act of speaking is sort of taking you out of the meditative focus that you’re in? Perhaps that’s what you mean. If you can step back and note your distractions as a process, if you can step back and note them from the standpoint of the five factors of inquiring mindfulness, and if you can do all of that without inner speech, then let go of the inner speech. The inner speech is a coach that eventually you let go of. You don’t need it anymore. So if you can do all of what we’ve been training without having to do the actual inner verbalization, because you find that perhaps jarring you out of the mindfulness state, then don’t do it. But if what’s happening is, what you’re saying is, well, when I label, it sort of brings me sort of, puts a demand on me. So the hesitancy there I have, if there’s another thing you might be talking about, which is you’re sort of getting into a lulled state. That’s, I don’t know if this is the case. You’re getting into a very lulled state and the act of sort of labeling your distraction wakes you up a bit, alerts. That is something that you should try and step away from. And you should then embrace the act of the labeling because it’s actually bringing the alertness to your mind. So I suspect that it’s probably the first that I mentioned that you’re getting to a place where verbalization is actually disruptive of the mindfulness that you can bring to bear, inquiring mindfulness you can bring to bear on your distractions. And if that’s the case, let the verbalization go. It is just a raft. It is just a coach. But as I said, if what’s happening is you’re getting into a very lulled, dulled state and it’s feeling sort of warm and fuzzy and cozy and you don’t like to do the verbal distraction, the verbal labeling of your distractions because it’s sort of waking you up and jarring you, then you should be doing the labeling. So whichever one of those it’s most appropriate. In one, give up the verbalization. In the other, you may need to embrace it more. As I said, I suspect for you it’s probably the former. Mark LeFevre. Hi, Mark. What do I do if I can hear and feel my heart beating? Are there special ways to deal with this condition? It’s not particularly quickly, just hyper aware. OK, so this is going to happen to many people along this journey and it’s going to happen to also different parts of your body at different stages. So as we practice insula, especially sorry, as we practice our introspective behaviors, like becoming more aware of our body, we’re activating the insula. This is a part of our brain. And the insula is always also active when we’re picking up on other people’s mental states. So it’s very powerfully engaged in mindfulness. Dan Siegel argues, and I think he’s correct, that what we’re doing with mindfulness is we’re taking the ability we use picking up on other people’s mental states and we’re internalizing it. We’re turning it on ourselves. So what’s going to happen as we do this practice is we’re going to this is why people also get synesthetic. Some people when they’re practicing, your insula is going to. Significantly increase. So, for example, one of the measures we make of how well people can pick up on other people’s mental states and therefore how much they might be. And the lack thereof is predictive of them being psychopathic as we do the pulse test. Sit here without touching yourself, like I mean, touching your pulse. Count your heartbeats the next 10 seconds. The better you are at that, the more accurate you are at that. Is how it’s predictive of how well you can pick up on other people’s mental states, how sensitive also you’ll be coming to your own mental states. So you’re going to get these along the way, you’re going to get these. Will seem like hypersensitization hyper enhancement of interceptive awareness. You’ll also get the reverse. You’ll get you suddenly the other people’s emotions will suddenly be more present to you. And that can also also be unpleasant. So the thing to do is, first of all, to note that this isn’t I mean, I’m not a doctor. And as long as, you know, there’s nothing else pathological going on, I mean, physiologically pathological. Right. So I take that into consideration. Probably not the case. But right. But. Frame this as this is a normal part of the path. Also, in a sense, welcome it, because it’s like it’s like you’ve been blind. And now you can see and it’s going to be startling and distracting. It’s going to be super salient to you. But if you normalize it, if you incorporate it, what will happen is it will start to background. You can’t make it background. Imagine if you didn’t have sight and I gave you color vision, you couldn’t sort of I won’t see. You have to let it normalize itself. You have to you have to let it be incorporated and internalized into your new way of being. This is a way in which we grow our Buddha. So. Try to frame it as a welcoming sign of an emerging sensitivity and emerging sensibility. Do your practice and let it naturalize itself for you. Kira Kroger, good to hear from you again, Kira. Does the ecology of practices that you’ll be teaching include any kind of forgiveness practice? Typically, I don’t have a forgiveness practice for people because this is a difficult one for me because I’ve thought a lot about this. But I see. And I understand why people would disagree with me on this, but I see the way I’m trying to teach meta as reciprocal opening as forgiving. So what I mean by that is when I do proper meta, I give right. I give before I forgive the possibility, the real active, engaged power for a new identity for you and me and for us in our relationship. And I take that to be what Jesus of Nazareth originally meant by forgiving to give before to forgive for to forgive. And therefore, I think meta is in that deep sense of forgiving practice. You probably mean the more standard, especially post-Protestant notion, Christian notion of forgiveness. And I don’t specifically have any practices like that for the reason that in our particular cultural context, that and what I’m trying to teach with meta get confused. And they undermine each other in that confusion, in that equivocation. Especially for people who are starting out a lot of these practices. However, if you can keep them apart and set them into proper relationship with each other, there are forgiving practices. You can go into the Christian meditation tradition, especially the centering prayers and the prayer of the heart. And then they have attendant supplementary forgiving practices. And you may be able to integrate that with what I’m teaching you. I hope that was helpful. Yotaro Nakamura, I found meditation called body scan. What do you think about it? The body scan is derived from John Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR, a mindless based stress reduction. And when I’m teaching you to find your flow, that’s basically the same thing during a body scan. I tend to emphasize the cultivation of flow and not just the scanning awareness. And so it integrates aspect of the body scan with the task of actually helping to cultivate the flow state and thereby enhance absorption. So I think the two are deeply integrated in what I’m teaching you. These are really good questions. I mean, you teach the best when you’re learning, right? And I want to thank everybody. These questions, they make me reflect. They help me to explicate. They do. They draw out from me. So thank you very much. And I want to always be responsive and responsible to them. It’s really important to me. It’s really important to me. So I think we’re taking a look to see if there’s any more questions. Amar is behind the scenes seeing if there’s any more. So I’m going to just wait for a second and see if there’s any more. Looks like we’re done for today. That’s great. Remember that Monday will be a Dharma day. I want to thank everybody for joining. As I said, this is my Sangha too. I really appreciate it. So thanks to my dear friend and Techmumage Amar, who is always behind the scenes making so many things happen. Thank you to my beloved son, Jason, who’s always here pinch hitting as needed. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified the next video. On my channel, you’ll find the lecture series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, Voices with Rebekahs, which is a discussion series. And you’ll find all of this and much more developed in depth, more comprehensively and a more integrated fashion. Invite others, please, who might benefit from this series to join. There’s all of the resources that are there for them to catch up at their own pace. So please help me to help as many people as possible. Brett is here. Pleasure of doubt. Discord server, just fantastic. I know Guy Sendstock was on recently talking about circling up depth. It’s just amazing. And I know that there’s a group of people that meet on the Discord server, joining the Sangha. They talk about the practice. They do some lecture. The community there is vibrant and vital. Please, please, if you can, partake of it, participate in it. It will nourish you. There’s a link to that Discord server in the description for this video. Please remember that we’re doing this every weekday morning, 930 Eastern time. Please also remember that continuity of practice is more important than quantity of practice. There is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. There is no friend, no ally, no true companion on the way, better than your own mind and body. Be lamps unto yourself. I’ll see you on Monday for Dharma Day. Take good care of everyone.