https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BMqbW0M6VUw
Welcome to Meditating with John Breveke. We do this live stream every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. with Mondays alternating between New Lesson Dharma Day and review of the whole ecology of practices, Paya Day. Due to a scheduling issue, there will be no live stream next Tuesday. If you’re joining us for the first time, welcome. Please continue to meet with us. But what I recommend you do is go to the description for this video and you’ll find links to previous lessons and sits. Do Lesson 1 immediately and then every week do one or two more lessons and soon you’ll be integrated with us. I would ask you all to please like this stream to increase its visibility on the YouTube algorithm. At the end of every session, there is a Q&A. Please limit your questions to anything from the whole entire ecology of practices. For more encompassing questions, please join us on the live stream on YouTube. A general question, general Q&A, 3 p.m. Eastern every third Friday of the month. In addition to your questions, I please encourage everybody to share their observations and their comments. This helps all of us to the practice. So I think that’s everything right now. So we’re doing part three of the walking meditation. I’ll just do a quick review of the basics and then today I’m going to put time into reviewing especially the turning. So we start right foot goes 45 degrees hip width, we step 70% of our weight forward knee over the center of our foot not past our toes. We’re not leaning, we’re not leaning back, we’re keeping a bend in both knees. Weight goes forward, we exhale, weight goes up, I’ll put my hands here so you can see my hips. Go back, pivot 45, align the knee, turn even more, no weight, no weight on my right foot, bring my right foot up and then turn my hips as they come forward and then back, turn out 45 degrees, align the knee, turn and then come forward. Okay so and as you remember we’re exhaling as like here, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling. We’re meditating on the flow of the breath because it is the metronome for the walking meditation, but we’re also meditating on maintaining an active presence of being centered and rooted. Okay so the turning, I’ll do it both directions. So let’s say we’re here, okay so you see my foot, so my weight, I’m going to bring my weight back and I’m going to come up. So whenever I walk, when I’m going forward, it’s remember it’s tiger paw, heel to toe as my weight goes down, I go heel to toe. So I go back, I come up onto the heel, I pivot as far as I can, my weight is still all on my back leg. I don’t put this foot down because I can pivot it more if I shift my weight. See as I’m shifting my weight I can pivot it even more. So as I shift my weight from my back to my front leg I can pivot even more, then I shift my weight onto this leg and I bring this leg up and over, get that hip width and now back, now back. So what does it look like on this side? So I’m here, right, my weight goes back and I pivot as much as I can. You can draw your weight, see, see how the weight and the foot are turning as much as I can but I don’t put that foot down because as I shift my weight from my back leg to my front leg I can pivot even more. I can let this, my front foot begin to pivot to take the strain off this hip and then it comes up and over and back. Okay so back, pivoting, then shifting and pivoting more, up and over. You can push this heel back a little bit to get the proper alignment if you need to, the back heel. So back, back and drawing and shifting. So I’m going to pivot as much as I can back and drawing and shifting and turning even more, up and over here. Back foot comes up, I pivot, don’t put the foot down, drawing all the way to this side, then pivoting even more as I shift my weight and then up and over. So again, back, okay back, shift. Like I said, let this foot slide a bit if you need to, don’t put too much pressure on your knee or your hip and then up and over, see how I actually lift it off the ground, get it into position and then forward and push this heel back a little bit if I need to so I get it back to the 45 degrees. Okay, I’ll do it two more times. I’m going to do it two more times on each side and then we will move to this practice. Back, pivoting over, back, pivoting over. Okay, I hope that’s helpful review and eventually we’re going to add in the arms and I’ll show you what that looks like, not because I expect you to practice it because just get the footwork down is really important. So how we actually start in the practice is we start with this foot at the 45 degrees to the right and just on the ball of the foot behind the toes here and we turn to our right, this hand comes in front, this hand comes up and forward like this, back, align, shift, back, right, align here and then a turn here. Okay, it’s called brush knees and when you add in the arms this becomes a fully embodied, very engaging, very absorbing form of mindful movement and so we’ll work next week, we’ll work towards adding the arms in and then you’ll have a very significant moving practice that you can do and then you will do always do the moving practice first then come into the standing chi kong then go into the sitting chi kong, do the chanting and then going go into the the silent sit. Okay, I’m just going to go off camera for a sec to get my mat. Okay. That’s good. Thank you, Jason. All right. So I encourage you all to keep practicing with the walking meditation. Eventually we’ll get you to full blown brush knees. It takes time because you’re learning a practice that has been designed over centuries to really engage the cerebellum cortex loop, really enhance your centering and rooting and your balance both physical and mental and give you a practice that will induce flow and absorption and also get your brain very used to doing mindfulness within a very involved and engrossing movement action. You can actually fight with that move in self-defense. Okay, so that helps to bridge between your seated practice and your everyday life. All right, so let’s get into position. Let’s set our phones on do not disturb. We will begin when I say begin and we will start with chanting. Begin. Om Om One Om One Om One Om One Om One Om Om One Om One Om One Begin your silence. So So You slowly come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness, cognition, character, and communities, perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself. Let’s take some questions. They’re always welcome. So first is from Mark. Always great to have you here, Mark. Can you say more about the inner sage as it relates to my struggle with these psychological narratives I mentioned previously? How is the inner sage to be used to help? So in the deepest sense, the inner sage helps you by getting you to reorient your process of identity formation. So if you’ll allow me to use some spatial metaphors, and this will come out especially, And of course, we need to do this because we have to pursue long-term goals. We’re in a developmental trajectory, et cetera. The inner sage reminds you that you are not to be finally identified with the inner sage. That beyond the autobiographical self, there is the ontological self. The inner sage directs you off of the autobiography and onto the owner’s manual, if I can put it that way, and not as just an act of self-identification. The inner sage is the person who is the person who is the person who is the person who is the person who is the person who is being brought into this world. So, this is what this practice is doing. It’s getting you to become aware of all the levels, all the layers of who and what you are. you emerge out of the environment and your body and your mind and your spirit. By that I mean your capacity for self-transcendence. I don’t mean anything supernatural. Bringing those all into an aligned awareness, which of course means aligning the four kinds of knowing so that they are actively mutually affording each other, creates a different sense of identification that gives us a space of freedom from the narratives, not to despise them or dispense with them, but to no longer be confused with them, so that they lose some of the way they can cut us and catch us. And that’s when the inner sage comes into your awareness. The inner sage is offering you a new way of being. As I said, rather than just the autobiographical self, we’re now talking about the ontological self. And this is the self that the Stoics will argue is ultimately how we respond to the sufferings of life. The Stoics will argue that this, we have to do our best and morally, and as much as we can, and as much as we can in unfolding this. But ultimately, our ability to alter the world is very small compared to our ability to transform what we are ontologically. We have very little control over the length of this. We can do things to improve our health and improve our longevity and all kinds of things, but we are ultimately not gods. We are finally deeply finite beings. But we can find, and so there’s a sense in which this cannot come to a completion. If we identify with it, we will always ultimately be frustrated. But we can find a depth of being that is completely satisfying. That’s ataraxia. Such that we can live with the finitude and the fate of our mortal existence. So that’s an answer to your question. I hope it’s helpful. And we will get into more of this when we do wisdom of hypation. Rainer Lutvig, hi Rainer. It’s good to have you here. During meditative questing, I always go down to a rabbit hole, a few negative experiences, which I would rather like to forget. Any ideas on how to approach regretful, painful memories? Well, first of all, you keep remembering them because they have not been fully processed. This is sort of a standard, almost cliche, but I think it is a valuable psychodynamic trope. There are more processing needs to be done, that material. It needs to go from being always relived to remembered when needed. And so part of what we can do, remember when I talked about encoding specificity, that we tend to not only remember the event or the facts, and this also relates to what I just said about stoicism, by the way, we also remember deeply the state of being we are in when we are remembering this fact or that event. And that’s why in stoicism, paying more attention to the state of being is ultimately where you have the most, as Avectita says, the most control. But back to Rainer’s point, so often the way we try to learn from a situation that’s painful is we learn it using some very primitive forms of processing, very automatic, reactive, emotional processing. And then how we try to learn our lesson is we learn it with pain and with guilt, and guilt is a kind of psychological pain we inflict on ourselves. We basically are punishing ourselves to try and direct our behavior. Now, there’s a sense in which learning has to start at that level, because we’re not initially linguistic beings, we’re not initially rationally reflective beings, etc. But what this tradition proposes is can you bring up the painful situation, perhaps by being in a stance of meta towards it, and then instead of trying to avoid the guilt, can you transmute it? Can you let the guilt come up, and then instead of trying to get away from it or trying to instantly resolve it, open up the processing and try to replace the guilt with what’s transmuted, don’t replace it, sorry, that was a mistake on my part. You want to transmute it into what’s called intelligent regret. If you were trying to correct the behavior of a good friend, you wouldn’t hurt them to correct their behavior, or you try to minimize the hurt. You wouldn’t inflict pain or even guilt on them, other than the minimal force desired to bring about recognition and response. The minimal force required to bring about recognition and response. So the guilt is there to help get you recognizing and responding, but that’s not enough. To finish the process, you bring in intelligent regret. What do you do with your friend? You try to open up their thinking, you try to explicate, you know, how does this sit in the larger context? What you try to do is replace a very primitive and childish state of being that is your recognition and response of the event that is painful with an adult recognition and response to the event that is painful. So you need to process these, and the kind of processing isn’t just processing the facts, it’s processing you. We all need to do this. You have to grow up, mature in how you are recognizing and responding. Yes, the pain and the guilt get you into the initial recognition and response, but then move into intelligent regret. Talk to yourself, talk to yourself as you would to a beloved friend. This is kind of what’s going on in what’s called internal family systems therapy, and what you do is you basically are growing up the person that is recognizing and responding to the pain. You’re not trying to acknowledge it, you’re not sorry, you’re acknowledging, you’re not trying to ignore it and get away from it, but you’re not just staying locked into who you are. This is why this is ultimately an extension of meta. You unlock who you are by growing up, maturing, how you are recognizing and responding to the event. So I hope that’s helpful to you. Kira, welcome Kira, and thank you for some of the encouraging things you’ve been saying in your comments. They are very much appreciated. I’ve never got a lot from meditative questing. A member of the Sangha talked about how they have been questing on who I am in relationship to. I have found that very rich. Thoughts, that’s great, that’s excellent. So what you’re doing here, and this is to compliment you, you’re integrating meditative questing, which is a way of deepening Vipassana with aspects of meta, and that’s natural. You see what’s happening here? What’s happening is this is your inner teacher, your inner sage trying to draw you towards prajna, bringing the two more and more into an integrated processing. Keep doing that. That is a good, important thing. Integrated processing. Keep doing that. That is a good intuition to follow upon. Stian, I’ve had to speak to you a couple times at August Over Video. I hope you’re doing well. Just wanted to say this walking meditation is probably exactly what I need to well get forward. I’m too much in my head, in and from and for the intellect, so thanks. You’re welcome. That’s exactly the intent of it. It is to sati, deeply remember that we are deeply embodied, embedded beings. Okay, so yeah, and try for the, and be really gentle on yourself, but also try to hear what I’m going to say. A lot of the resistance you might have to this is it’s just hard. It’s hard, and I get that, and that’s why I keep encouraging you. I keep reviewing. I keep responding to questions and concerns about it, but on the other part of it is trying to note if at any point, and I don’t want to get too probative because you’re all just learning, but there’s also an aspect. I found this in myself. At least when I was learning, there’s a resistance to this precisely because it gets me out of my head, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to get out of my head because I like being in my head because John is so smart, right? And look at all the things John can do, and look at how he can, you know, make people smile at him, and he’s so clever. And getting out of that, especially into, oh, John’s kind of clumsy as he’s moving in his body, but that’s really where he’s at. That’s really the depths of his being. I didn’t like that, but it was ultimately so good for me, so good for me. So good for me. Okay, I want to thank you all for joining. I want to, of course, thank my dear friend and technomajor, Mar, and my beloved son, Jason, who’s behind the scenes making everything work with the camera. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. You’ll find links to the lecture series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, and to the Dialogo series of Voices with Verbeke, where these themes and related themes are explored in depth and situated and homed within a more encompassing way of life. Invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. Please join the Discord server to chat with others, to practice with others. There’s links in the description. I encourage you next Tuesday to meet as a Sangha on the Discord server. Please remember, it’s just a wonderful, growing, vital community. We do this every weekday morning at 9.30 Eastern time. There’s no stream on Tuesday due to scheduling. Please remember that continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity of practice. There is no enemy, no obstacle worse than your own minded body. But there’s no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path better than your own minded body. Be lamps unto yourselves and to each other. I’ll see you all on Monday for Upayade. Take good care, everyone.