https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AdL9Yd0lB_k
Welcome. Welcome to Meditating with John Vervecki. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I’m also the author of the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series on YouTube. I study mindfulness scientifically. I study related phenomena like flow, altered states of consciousness, mystical experiences, and wisdom. In addition to that scientific study of mindfulness related phenomena, I also have been practicing Vipassana, Metta, Tai Chi Chuan, and Chi Kung for 29 years. I’ve been teaching a course on meta-contemplation, Vipassana meditation, and also a course on Tai Chi Chuan for the multi-faith center at the University of Toronto for the past 15 years. So I’m going to be teaching you what I was taught. I was taught an ecology of practices. I was taught the Vipassana meditation and meta-contemplation and Tai Chi Chuan, some Chi Kung. And I’m also going to be integrating that with what I’ve learned about mindfulness from my scientific investigation. So normally what will happen is there’ll be a teaching class on Mondays and a teaching class on Thursdays. Today’s an exception. We’re repeating the first video from Monday because we had some technical difficulties with the sound. So for those of you who sat with me yesterday, I apologize for the repetition, but many of you requested better sound. So we’re going to redo yesterday and today. So please get in a comfortable position. Hopefully you have some comfortable clothing on. Please put your phones on silent mode. A couple of brief announcements. There’ll be a Q&A section at the end of this. Please limit your questions to questions around this practice and what I’m going to be teaching you in this course. If you have more general I refer you to the monthly Q&A we do every third Friday. Unfortunately for this month, the monthly Q&A is canceled due to the disruption caused by the virus. We should be able to pick it up in a purely virtual manner next month. All right. So I’d like to begin with you now. And I’d like to begin with a central metaphor for doing this practice. It’s a metaphor that comes from Sattartha Gautama. I’m not trying to convert you to Buddhism and I’ve already indicated I am doing an ecology of practices, some of which are drawn from the Buddhist tradition, some from the Taoist tradition, and some from a secular scientific framework. But nevertheless, the Buddha is a very valuable resource that we should make use of. The Buddha pointed out that the attitude you should take in a meditative practice is you’re trying to befriend yourself. You’re trying to learn how to take the relationship to yourself that you would take to somebody that you are cultivating a deep friendship with. So I’m going to teach you how to come into, how to begin to come into that proper relationship to yourself. And I’m going to teach you what I call the core four for coming into that proper relationship of befriending yourself. Finding your center, finding your root, finding your flow, and finding your focus. So that’s what we’re going to work on first. So as I said, normally Mondays and Thursdays we’ll have a teaching class. Those are on 40 minutes. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays you can meet me here again at 9.30. But those will only be half an hour and those will be just sitting. I’ll do a brief reminder of what we’ve learned. We’ll sit and then there’ll be a Q&A. So befriending yourself by finding your center. So what does that mean? One of the oldest meditation manuals we have is in fact translated as centering. And people often say they want to find their center. But we need to move beyond sort of a cliché. We need to get into the depths of what this can mean for us. And so one of the things you can think about is the relationship between mind and body. One of the ways we can befriend ourselves is to get a proper relationship between mind and body. Now often they’re not communicating properly and they may even have an antagonistic relationship. So your body is tired and hungry and that makes it hard to think. Or you’re really stressed out and anxious and that puts all kinds of tension in your body. So one of the things we do first, there’s three aspects to finding your center. It’s going to be centering your posture, centering your tension, centering your attitude. And we center our posture by going through a particular exercise. I want to explain to you what the purpose of centering your posture is and what this exercise is. So if I sit just normally without this is called a zafu, a meditation pillow, underneath my butt, what happens is because of evolution I have an S curve in my spine and I don’t want to hold myself tense. And so if I relax, you see what happens? I get a curve in my spine, my chest closes in, my stomach closes in. And so what I get is shallow chest breathing. And the problem with shallow chest breathing is it is very deeply associated in your brain with anxiety, with tension, with distress. So you don’t want that. So you need what’s called your loft. And what that is is you’re trying to enact a basic postural principle. The basic postural principle is you want your knees level or at possible below your hips. So you need something under your butt. Now you can sit two ways. I recommend for people who are initially sitting, you might want to sit this way, cross-legged in front with your knees down. So sit towards the edge of your pillow and your knees down like this. This is usually easier for beginners. It’s not all finally the best posture. If you can and you need to experiment with your posture and we’ll come back to this towards the end of today’s session. But if you can, this is actually a preferred posture for sitting. Kneeling like this, right? Because what happens when people sit cross-legged is their hips are usually slightly lateralized and that puts a bit of a kink in your hip. So if you can sit this way, please do. If you have back problems, you can sit in a chair and just keep your, do the exercise with me and then at the very end of the exercise you can lean back slightly to take the pressure off your back. Or what some people do in my classes is they go through the centering exercise and then once they’re centered they lean back slightly against the wall to take the pressure off your back. All right, so what I want to do is show you now that I’m sitting this way, what happens is my stomach is open, my chest is open and my shoulders are down and that allows what’s called baby breathing. Now this is a very important principle. Unless I give you specific instructions, let your breathing be as natural as possible. That’s how babies breathe. How do babies breathe? They do belly breathing. They expand their abdomen. You can put your hands on your abdomen. You can feel your abdomen expanding when you inhale and exhaling, contracting when you exhale. Try not to breathe by lifting and dropping your shoulders, okay? Because that’s also anger, aggression, tension. You want to do baby breathing because it puts you into a natural relaxed state but it doesn’t make you sleepy because you’re using most of your lungs in your abdomen and you’re getting lots and lots of oxygen in your blood. So you want to do baby breathing. This area is called your dentin. Let your breathing drop as low as possible. Don’t force it. Don’t force it into your abdomen and try to engage in the baby breathing. And then you want your chest open, your shoulders down. And you place your hands on your legs in a way that will do the following. It’ll keep your shoulders open, right? Your chest open, your shoulders down and it will add to your sense of stability. You can place your hands like this. Some people put their hands in their lap like this. One thing you do, and this is something I prefer to do, my hands sort of are slightly aside like this. That works for me. You may find directly palm up works for you. But you can do the chin mudra. You can lightly touch your thumb. You don’t have to do this. You can lightly touch your thumbs to your index finger and you can feel the pulse there. Why that’s important is because we’re trying to train two ways of looking inward. You have two eyes sort of looking inward. One is introspection. You’re very familiar with that, which is looking into your mind. Like when I ask you what are you thinking about right now or to imagine a sailboat, that’s introspection. But you also want interiorception, introspection. That’s your feeling into your body. Like if you feel like there’s something’s wrong with my stomach or, you know, it doesn’t feel quite right here in my chest. That’s introspection. When you do the chin mudra and you pick up on that pulse, you can actually enhance your introspection. And we’re going to talk in the course while you want to be enhancing both your introspection and your interiorception. Okay. Introspection. Okay. So you can place your hands, how they’re going to be, that gives you that stability, perhaps using the chin mudra. And then we want to avoid a postural problem with our head, which is people tend to let their head roll forward, especially if they’re novices. Don’t do that because this is sending the signal to your brain that you want to fall asleep. And we’re trying to get between two things that your brain wants to do when you close your eyes and you look inward. When you close your eyes and look inward, your brain goes, oh, I know what you want to do. You’re daydreaming. And it’ll start to all the daydreaming. And we want to get out of that. And then when you get out of that, your brain goes, oh, I know what you want to do. You want to fall asleep. And you want to get out of that. You’re trying to steer between those two. So you want to keep your head level. All right. So what I want to do now, don’t do it yet. I’m going to talk you through it. So just listen through the instructions first, please. And then I’ll talk you through it. We’re going to do an exercise in order to find your center. I don’t want you to use visual cues and Cartesian graph fashion to calculate your center. I want you to find your center. And this is what we’re going to do. Again, don’t do it yet. Please watch and listen. And then I’ll talk you through it. We’re going to close our eyes. And it’s very important to close your eyes for this exercise or else you’ll rely on visual cues. Okay. You can close your eyes. You’re going to use your middle ears vestibular function. It’s 400 million years old. It will send all kinds of reliable signals to you about your balance. Okay. And you’re going to roll forward and you’re going to feel the sensations of being off center forward and then backwards. And you’re going to do that a little less each time slowly by tracking the sensations, slowly tracking it on where you feel centered back to front. And then you’re going to do the same thing side to side. Okay. And then in order to make sure we got our head properly in place, given what I just said a few minutes ago, we do our head back to front and side to side. Once we are centered in that way, we’re going to sink into our center. What that means is we’re going to try and open our leg and abdomen and chest muscles and our neck muscles as much as possible. We’re not going limp. We’re doing it as much so that we can reliably feel steady because you’re probably holding a lot of unnecessary tension in all of those muscles. Once you sink into your center, I’ll say, savor your center. What you’re trying to do here is really like almost like you’re like somebody put some food in your mouth and you want to really heighten the sensation, the awareness. Oh, I want to remember what this is like. In the same way, you want to try to create a felt memory of what it’s like to be centered. Okay. So everybody start getting into your basic posture and then close your eyes. I’m going to now talk you through this exercise. So your eyes are closed. You’re going to move forward. You’re feeling off center and then slowly backwards. Feel those sensations off center and then back and forth a little less each time, slowly honing in until you feel centered front to back. Then side to side. Now your head front to back. Side to side. Make any minor adjustments so head and body feel centered together. Now sink into your center. Open your stomach muscles, your leg muscles, chest muscles, neck muscles. See if you can find naturally, unforced, find your breathing, your baby breathing in your abdomen. Now savor your center. Now open your stomach muscles, your neck muscles, your belly muscles, your chest muscles, your belly muscles. Now center. Really savor it. Try to create a felt memory so you can find your way back here again and again. What are the effects on the mind and body of being centered? Really taste it deeply with your mind and body. Okay, slowly open your eyes please. So whenever we sit, we’re going to find your center. Now I’ve been doing this for years so I don’t have to do that exercise. I can just sit and find my center. But for quite a long time, you want to go through the exercise until you can find your center. So that’s centering your posture. Now centering your attention. Obviously it means to focus your attention but it means much more. I’m going to use an analogy. First of all, let me explain one part of the analogy. Think about my glasses right now. How they frame my experience and I’m seeing through them in both senses of the word. I’m seeing by means of them and beyond them. But I’m actually not aware of my glasses. I’m aware through them. But sometimes my glasses distort my awareness. So what I have to do is I have to step back and not look through them, step back and look at them. Step back and look at them. Normally we’re not looking at the process and patterns within our mind and body. We’re looking through them at the world. And so what we want to do is we want to practice stepping back and looking at our mental framing rather than automatically and unconsciously looking through it. So how do we do that? Well, the primary way in which we are aware of the world is through our sensations. I’m touching the floor right now. So what I want to do is instead of being aware through my sensations, I want to be aware of my sensations. And the way that I do that as I pick sensations that are easy to track because they’re sensations that are more touch. Vision is too fast to start with. So I want to start with sensations of touch, sort of bodily awareness and something that’s always with me, which is the sensations being generated in my abdomen by my breathing. So as I breathe in, I feel those sensations and I mentally say to myself, the mental word that I’m silently saying to myself is only a lens. I don’t concentrate on the word. I use it to focus my attention on those sensations. And I say in and then out, in and then out, tracking the change and flow of the sensations. Now what will happen is I’ll get distracted. It’s called your monkey mind. It’s like a monkey that leaps around and chatters because you’ll go into thinking about or sensing the world. So you won’t be looking at your mind. You’ll be looking through your mind. You’ll be thinking about the laundry you have to do, remembering the conversation you had, worrying about a problem in your life, maybe listening to what’s happening in your room or outside. So when that happens, you’re going to step back and look at the distraction. You’re not going to get involved with the content. Let’s say you have a thought. Don’t get involved with what your thought’s about. Step back and label the process. Remember we’re trying to focus on the process and patterns. Label the process with an ing word like thinking, imagining, wondering, complaining, listening. Don’t worry about being super precise in your labeling. Just get what intuitively comes up first is more than sufficient. So you label your distraction with an ing word and then you return your attention to the sensations in your breath. This is where we bring in the third thing we’re training. We train our attitude. I want to use an excellent analogy from Jack Kornfield, one of the people who brought the past to North America in the 70s, I believe. He talks about you’re training your monkey mind the way you’re training a puppy dog to stay. So if I have a puppy dog in front of me and I’m trying to make it stay, you know, and it goes off and, oh, oh, oh, hey, come on. If I do that, I will train the puppy dog to fight and fear me. And instead of befriending my mind, I will make it my worst enemy. The Dama Pada talks about there is no enemy worse than your own mind and there is no ally greater than your own mind. You don’t want to fight your puppy dog. Should I just feed it in the sense of just letting it do whatever it wants? Right? Oh, there, oh, well, oh, well, oh, well, no. That won’t work either. If you just indulge the puppy dog, you won’t train it. To befriend the puppy dog, you have to take that attitude of, you know, the attitude you would take towards a puppy dog. A loving, befriending, patient. Oh, where’d you go? Oh, there you are. Oh, okay, there you are. Oh, there you are. Oh, there you are. And what you have to remember is you have spent a lifetime building up habits of mind and body and you’re putting very, very little time and attention against it in this practice. It’s amazing that it actually works. It’s like a gentle rain that can erode the tallest mountain, but it takes time. It takes time. Now, that brings me to a way in which people frequently misframe meditation and use it as a justification for not undertaking the practice. They say to them, or to me, I can’t meditate. My mind just goes off. And what they’re saying is I’m not meditating unless my mind is wide open and empty like some sort of Canadian tundra. That is to radically misframe. So there’s a metaphor that’s used in tradition. Like the person who says I can’t get the glass of water clean. The glass of water has got sort of mud in it and they keep sticking a fork in and they’re trying to force the mud down and it just won’t go clean. I can’t do this. And that, of course, they’re doing the wrong thing. They’re taking the wrong attitude. What you have to realize is you have to set conditions up so that your mind will settle clear. And that takes a long time, as I’ve just said. The way to frame this is to realize whenever you’re catching yourself in a distraction, that’s a moment of wake up. Buddha means the awakened one. That’s a moment of waking up and being able to return to your center. You should not, you should think of those moments of return as like doing reps in weight training. You’re actually building the muscle of mindfulness. Then you are really meditating. So take a moment or two, adjust your posture any way you would like. And then what we’re going to do is the following. We’re going to go into a 15 minute sit and what we need to do is we’re going to close our eyes and there’s going to be a few minutes where you take time to go to the centering exercise. You’re going to center your posture. Then you’re going to center your mind on the sensations in your dantien. Remember, don’t push your breathing, but find where your sensations are naturally falling and then follow them naturally. When you’re seated, label the distraction process with an ing word and then return to your breath, centering your attitude and framing this as all of those returns are wonderful. That means you are building the muscle of mindfulness. All right, let’s now begin. Enjoy your sitting. 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. 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. Please remember, meditation is not an occasion. It’s an education that you want to bring into the whole of your life. Now, let’s talk about some general rules of thumb for practice. Continuity of practice is more important than quantity. Ideally, you want to be sitting 15 to 20 minutes every day using a timer. Don’t just sit for as long as you feel comfortable sitting. Sit with the timer. Put yourself in a bit of challenge. If you honestly can only sit for five minutes, don’t say to yourself, well, I can’t sit for 50 minutes, so I won’t sit at all. Sit for the five minutes. When you sit, go through the centering exercise and then go into the Vipassana meditation. Don’t meditate right after eating. Just listen to your stomach digesting. Right after listening to music, just play it like a tape in your head. Right after watching a TV show, just keep playing it. Right after you’ve had an emotionally challenging or intense conversation with somebody, positive or negative, because you’ll just keep playing it in your head. You want to sit in a quiet, softly relaxed state. That brings up a couple of important points. While you’re sitting, it’s often the case for many people, they’ll get very odd experiences. You’ll feel like an electric shock go through you. You’ll feel very hot or you’ll feel very cold. You’ll feel like you may be floating or sinking. Although you know you’re sitting, normally you’ll feel contorted. This does not mean you’re going insane. It also does not mean you’re about to experience enlightenment and become a Buddha. It means neither of those. It just means areas of the brain are starting to talk to each other that have not been normally talking to each other. Label those as a distraction and return to your breath. Now, if you’ve experienced trauma or are in therapy, it’s very important that you talk to therapists and let them know you’re doing this mindfulness practice. If you’ve experienced deep trauma and you’re not in therapy, I would recommend you consider not undertaking this practice right now until you get into a stable therapeutic relationship. For those of you for which that is not the situation, again, please treat any of those unusually experienced distractions and return to your breath. But if you meditate in darkness, it’ll tend to exacerbate those odd experiences for you. It’s a good idea, if you can, to practice twice a day. But again, if you can only practice once, then practice once a day. You’ll be doing that when you join me in the sittings every morning, except for Sunday. There won’t be any sittings together on Sunday, but I suggest you still sit on your own on Sunday. So I now want to turn to some questions that were asked last time. In the video that had the technical problems, and I want to address some of those questions because they’re really good ones before I move on to some of the novel questions we might get from today. One question was from Blessed Now. Is it okay that my legs get strained when I meditate on my knees? Well, first of all, as I said, experiment with your posture. You might try cross-legged because that will reduce the tension. But it’s very important to frame that experimentation properly. Do not get it into your mind that you’re going to find the perfect posture that will remove you from all feelings of discomfort and that you will feel sort of wafts of sensations of pleasure moving through your body. That’s not going to happen. So experiment with your posture until you get to something that’s relatively good for you, but you’re going to get achiness in your legs. You’ll sometimes find achiness in different parts of your body. That is unavoidable. So don’t try and frame it that you’re going to make that go away. It’s very possible that your legs will fall asleep. I have never met anybody in the 29 years I’ve been doing this who’s practiced meditation and in any way damaged their legs by their legs falling asleep. Now, one thing you should do though is when you come out of your sit because your legs are going to be out of your sit, because your legs or your ankle or your feet might be asleep, get up very slowly and gently so you do not twist your ankle or perhaps fall unnecessarily. My posture also seems to be inhibiting my focus. Is it okay to lie down to meditate? This is from Jordan McIntyre. No, that’s not a good idea. If the problem is, as I say, back pain, then use the chair method that I’ve already described or use the wall method. The problem when you lay down is it can exacerbate those disorientation feelings and it can make the weirdness worse or if it doesn’t do that, there’s a good chance you will fall asleep. And as I mentioned, you’re trying to get between monkey mind and falling asleep. It’s a middle path and it’s very narrow. Right now you’re like on the edge of a wedge and it’s going to open as you move into it. It’s a good idea not to meditate right before you go into sleep because you might fall asleep and ruin your meditation or you might get fully awake and present and therefore reduce your capacity for going to sleep. If you want to meditate in the evening, I suggest like an hour after dinner or so. Another question from Spencer. If I get an insight while meditating, should I just label it like I would any other monkey mind moment? Yes, exactly. The scientific research shows that this kind of mindfulness practice engenders insight. But you don’t want to get caught up on it and you have to trust the fact that that sensitivity and proclivity towards insight is going to carry into your daily life. If you focus on it in your meditation, then you’re not going to transfer that insight ability where you really need it, which is into the world. What you can do and some people do is they keep a journal here and they tell themselves, when I come out of my meditation, I’ll write down any insights I might have. Don’t try and hold them in your mind for writing. Let them go and if you remember them, you do. And if you don’t, you don’t. But you might come back to them. It’s a good idea also to perhaps daily record how your meditation practice is going because it helps to build your awareness of your inner teacher. And the tradition is just called like watering your blue dot. So unfortunately, we are out of time for today. I have to get to an online virtual class. Normally the Tuesday classes won’t be this long because it’ll only be a sit. Tomorrow we will meet at 930 and we will do a quick review of what we did today. We will sit and then there will be more Q&A. So if I didn’t get to your question today, please save it for tomorrow. Please remember to hit the subscribe button and that way you can get notifications of anything pertaining to meditation. And you can also be put in touch with other relevant videos on my channel. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I’ll see you tomorrow at 930. Please continue with your practice. Thank you.