https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SkQW3e0SOu8
Welcome to meditating with John Vervecky. So I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I study mindfulness and related phenomena like insight, flow, mystical experience, and wisdom. I have been practicing Vipassana meditation, Meta-contemplation, and Tai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung for 29 years and I’ve been teaching Meta and Vipassana and Tai Chi professionally for almost 20 years. So this is a progressive course. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re welcome to stay. I’m going to be teaching today and this is going to be the sort of the fourth basic principle I’m teaching. So if you want to catch up, you can go back and look at day one, day two, last Monday’s lesson to find the other teaching lessons. Normally what we’ll do is we’ve been doing teaching sessions on Mondays and Thursdays but the schedule is now going to change. So this is how what the schedule is now going to become. Teaching will only be on Mondays, so Monday will be the Dharma day. I will teach on Monday and then we will just sit together, do review, and answer questions Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. We will be meeting every morning 930 EST, every weekday morning, Monday to Friday, 930 EST. So this is a progressive course. Again, you’re welcome to stay but in order to catch up and so you know what everybody else is doing, go see the previous instruction videos and then you’ll be welcome to continue the course and you’ll have an understanding of what I’m referring to, what the other people are practicing together. So one more time just to be clear for everybody because we’re trying, all of our schedules influx and so I’m adding a little bit of redundancy so this is remembered. We’re switching to a new schedule. We’re only meeting weekday mornings, Monday to Friday, 930 EST, and we’re having one teaching class per week now, Mondays. All right so today we are doing a teaching class. This is our last Thursday teaching class and what I want to teach you today is the fourth of the core four you find in order to properly set up your mindfulness practice and this is finding your focus. Now as soon as I say finding your focus, as I mentioned when I taught you centering, people immediately think of concentration and think of the metaphor concentrate. So it’s concentric, right? I am drawing my attention and I’m making a tunnel and then I’m trying to stick it and hold it on something and the way you were previously taught to concentrate was basically people yelling at you, pay attention, concentrate. So you’ve developed this very, we all have, have developed this very habitual automatic sense of what it is to concentrate. You’re slightly under threat and you’ve got to bring your mind in, you’ve got to hold it, you got to stick it and hold it on something and it’s kind of this enduring act of will. Now when you take a look at the Buddha’s teaching, he talks about the Eightfold Path and one of them is right concentration. Two things to note about that, because he tells us there’s right concentration that clearly indicates that there’s wrong concentration, concentration that’s actually not conducive to the transformation and wisdom he was seeking to teach people. So that immediately comes to mind, what is right concentration? But before we can answer that we have to understand what the word right means. We have to hear it correctly because we tend to hear right and we tend to hear it in terms of righteousness and like it’s a moral thing, like doing good. That’s not the kind of right that is meant. It’s closer to right-handedness. It means dexterous, it means skillful. So we have to have the appropriately skilled kind of concentration. Now a good way of understanding what this is, is to take a look at some of the work done by Ellen Langer. She was one of the first people to work on mindfulness in the West. She wrote a book in the 80s actually called mindfulness and to also look at the research about what kinds of attention are actually conducive to insight and enhanced self-regulation because that’s actually what we’re after. Now it turns out that that sort of hard fixed focus, what’s called a hard focus the way Ellen Langer does, isn’t really good for insight and self-regulation. Let’s bring up a contrast. She contrasts between hard focus and soft vigilance. So I’m going to do something here. Let’s do it, let’s do the old way first. I’m going to hold up my finger, concentrate, concentrate on my finger, concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. Now as you notice that is both challenging and boring at the same time and it’s not doing very much. I yelled too loudly. So hard focus, not good. Let’s replace it with something else. Okay now look at my finger again. Notice that my finger is slightly bent, that there are three sections to it and it’s actually not white, that there is you know a sort of pinkish tinge in some areas. You might even see if you’re looking closer there’s some hairs toward the base of my finger and my finger’s position is sort of slightly shifting around because my hand can’t be completely stable. Now notice the difference there. Notice how you were able to stay with my finger. You were able to stay involved with my finger. This is called soft vigilance, soft vigilance. Please remember the word vigilance. We’re going to talk about it again. So we’re doing two things at once here. We’re teaching you how to appropriately concentrate but I’m also introducing you to this idea of vigilance or watchfulness and we’re going to come back to that when we talk about the five factors of inquiry and mindfulness. So soft vigilance is this exploratory thing. What you’re trying to do is constantly renew your interest in what you’re paying attention to. Rather than just a hard fixation you’re trying to constantly renew your interest in what you’re paying attention to. That’s why it’s a soft flowing vigilance. In Tai Chi Chuan we talk about having tiger eyes. These are eyes that are doing that soft vigilance constantly flowing over your opponent when you’re sparring with them. Typically in fact what people do in conflict situations, self-defense situations, is they hard fix. They fix on the person’s face. You shouldn’t by the way fix on people’s face. You should be paying attention to their shoulders or when people talk to victims who’ve been held up by a gunpoint. The victims can describe the gun really well and they can’t describe the face of the assailant. We don’t want hard fixation. We want tiger eyes of the mind. We want a soft flowing vigilance because this is actually conducive to insight. This is conducive to self-regulation. This is conducive to self-transformation. Think about renewing your interest. Think about what the word interest means. It comes from two Latin words inter-essay. It means to be within something. Inter-essay to be within. So what you’re constantly trying to do is renew your interest. Constantly find something new about it. Explore it. Look around. Think about concentration as what you’re trying to do is get one moment of noticing to stitch together, to engender, to lead you into another moment of noticing which leads you into another moment of noticing. Not just passive holding but this active exploratory ongoing noticing. So what you want to do is you want to think of concentration as creating a momentum of mindfulness with that one moment of not just being attached to the thing but in it, present through and with it. Not just present to it but present through and with it. So what you want to do is create that continuity. You see what I keep doing with my hands because the metaphor, the metaphor that’s used, right, is to become like a self-rolling wheel. Instead of concentration being like this, right, hold my mind from the outside and push my way through. Can you? And it takes time to shift. So I’m describing this easily. I’m learning that habit and learning what I’m talking to you about takes time, requires patience, requires befending yourself. But you want to shift from and pushing to wait I can get interested in this and that takes me deeper and deeper and deeper. And the fact that you’ve already learned how to flow helps this, helps this. There’s actually a continuity between finding your flow and finding your focus. Okay, so what’s an exercise for getting this sense of concentration? Again, let’s frame this correctly. You’re not going to instantly go bang into this. You’ve had a whole lifetime of concentrate. Now you’re trying to enter the stream as the Buddhist metaphor is. You’re trying to find this current that renews itself and flow with it. It will take time and practice and diligence to shift over to soft vigilance. So what we do as an exercise is the following. We do everything we need to do. We find our center. We find our route. We find our flow. We start just a basic meditation. Basic papasana in out in up. Then we move to the exercise. The exercise is the following. It’s called counting your breath. Now some other trisons use counting your breath as the main meditative focus. There’s versions of Zen that do that. That’s not quite what we’re doing here. And secondly, you can’t frame this and the way we’re automatically framing it is, oh no, right? If I try to count my breath, I won’t be able to count it for very long. I’ll get distracted. And we’re using the wrong sense, the wrong sense of right concentration. We’re using that sort of moral judgment sense. What we’re after is instead, no, no, no, I’m trying to develop an increasingly evolving, refined skill. So what we do is we do the following. In and out and we count one. Now what does the counting look like? I can’t be in your head. I’m sure you’re grateful for that as am I. So if the majority of your attention, center stage, the mic of your mind, is on your breath, keep counting. There can be stuff going on around here, murmuring in the background and things flitting. But if the majority of your attention is center stage, on your breath, keep counting. But when you’re genuinely monkey mind and the center of your attention moves elsewhere, then you reduce the count back to zero and start again. And this is where people go, oh no, oh no, oh no, I can’t do this. I’ll only get to one or two. That’s not the point of this. The point of the counting is not to try and push yourself to a longer count. That’s why I spent that time to really try and distinguish. The point is just try and as much as you can, fall into the kind of flowing attention you’re doing when you’re doing the pass enough. But here’s the difference. Try to continually renew your interest in your breath and finding your flow helps that. What’s changing? What’s different? What haven’t I noticed about my sensations? And when you notice that the count has made it past two or three, you’ll lose it. And then you’ll have to reset and that’s fine. That is fine. But then when you catch yourself about to leave your breath, try to remember as quickly as you can. Okay, what did that feel like? What did it feel like to be in the stream? That’s the whole point of the counting. The point of the counting is to give you a moment of remembering. Sati means to remind. That’s the Pali word, the Sanskrit word for mindfulness. It ultimately means to remind, to remember. So remind yourself. Remember, what was it like to be in the stream? What was it like when I was sort of flowing with my breath rather than pushing myself along? Okay, now again, you’re gonna have to be making an effort and it’s gonna take time to shift from the automatic, habituated style of concentration. But this is what the exercise is designed to do. It’s designed to give you, oh that’s what it feels like. Oh that’s what it feels like. Oh that’s what it feels like. Oh that’s, and you’re gonna have to do this a thousand times. That’s what it feels like. Oh that’s what it feels like. That’s what it feels like. Okay, now I can’t talk you through this exercise because I can’t be in your head. So what we’ll do is the following. We’ll do the following. There’ll be silence for a very long time because you’re going to be centering, rooting, flowing. Okay, and then at some point to remind you, because sometimes people forget when I’ve taught this in the past, right, I’ll say, okay, count your breath. We’ll do that for a bit. Count your breath. So two things. Follow your breath in that renewing interest. When you’re distracted, first do two, before you even note the distraction, note. Oh, right, when you realize, oh I’m distracted, try to remember, what did it feel like to be in the stream? Note the distraction, and then when you return to your breath, don’t just return, fixing, return renewing your interest, trying to inhabit your breath, involve yourself in it, not just present to it, but present through it and with it and in it. And then after a while I’ll say, okay, stop counting your breath and just follow your breath. Go back to basic Vipassana. If you need to, you might need to sort of reconnect with your sense of flow or maybe even a quick check on your center, your root, your flow, then try and follow your breath. Follow your breath trying with that, you know, focal and peripheral. Don’t lose your flow. Here’s your focal and your field awareness, right, but where it’s focal, try to constantly renew your interest. When you’re distracted, label your distraction with an ing word, and then when you return your breath, return in a sense of trying to renew. Try to engage in a process of more active exploratory noticing. Okay, so that’s what we’re going to do. One more time, don’t get into judgment about the counting. That is not its point. This is not about righteousness. This is about that gentle correction in befriending yourself when you’re trying to acquire a skill you don’t yet have. Okay, we will begin when I say begin. Remember to find the core, remember to find your center, your root, and your flow first. Begin. Okay. So so so so so begin counting your breath. So you … . Now return to following your breath in Vipassana… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …