https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=A_3p0cMsSn0
Good morning. Welcome to Meditating with John Breveke. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I scientifically and academically study phenomena like mindfulness and related phenomena like insight, flow, mystical experiences, higher states of consciousness, awakening experiences, the cultivation of wisdom. I’ve also been practicing the pasta meditation, meta-contemplation, and Tai Chi Chuan for over 29 years, and I’ve been teaching them professionally for close to 20 years. Welcome. This is actually a course. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re welcome, but I’ll be teaching today. Every Monday is a Dharma day, and this will be the seventh lesson that I’m teaching. If you want to, you can go to the notes in this video, and you’ll find links to the previous sits and the previous lessons. Tuesday through Friday, we meet together again at 9.30. We sit. Sometimes I review the principle and the practices that I did discuss on Dharma day, and then there’s Q&A at the end. In fact, on every day through Monday, Monday through Friday, there’s a Q&A period at the end. For that Q&A period, please limit your questions to this practice. If you have more general questions about perhaps how this relates to other wisdom traditions or about my videos or my series Awakening from the Meeting Crisis or Voices with Reveke, once a month we have a general livestream Q&A that you’d be welcome to join us on. So I think that’s everything that I need to announce for now. I hope you’re all doing well. We’re getting into the part now where we’re having to… It’s gone from the sprint to the marathon. This is where having cultivated deeper inner resources and a capacity to resiliently get into the right relationship with ourselves, with each other, and being… Will stand us in good stead throughout this. All right. So please get yourself in a comfortable position, because I’m going to do a fairly long lesson, and then we’ll sit. Okay. So we’ve been doing the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. Those are vigilance, which is the core one, and then the other one’s modified. Acuity, sorry, sensitivity, acuity, noticing, and reminding. So we’ve been doing the meditative questing, hopefully, to get a sense of what vigilance is. It’s that watchfulness. It’s that exploratory observation. It’s trying to get below the surface of the pond for deep insight, vipassana. So we can enhance that by bringing the other factors into play. How do we bring them into play, and how do we practice them? Well, this is where we’re going to be taking another step forward, because what you’re now going to do is you’re going to go beyond labeling your distractions to actually meditating on your distractions. Okay. So first of all, a very important principle for this. It’s very tempting when I teach people this, that they start looking for their distractions, which means they make themselves more distracted. It’s like they give their monkey mind some meth or something. So don’t go looking for distractions. I know it’s tempting, and don’t beat yourself up, but this is the important principle. You’re not practicing this by trying to provoke distractions. It’s very important that you allow them to arise spontaneously if they even do it all, and you really keep your focus on befriending yourself and following your breath. But when a distraction arises, we apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. Well, let’s go through them. And I’ll do it for three kinds of distractions, physical distractions, emotional distractions, and mental distractions. Okay. So let’s say there’s a physical distraction. So one that people, of course, commonly have, and I’ll relate an anecdote to that about this. You often get some kind of pain in your legs. So let’s go through it. I got a pain in my leg. So what do I do? Well, first of all, I don’t stop the labeling. I always label. I step back and label it. The NING word, painting. Okay. Normally you would just hear return to your breath. But here’s the idea. You can actually befriend your distractions. They’re an important arena in which you can train mindfulness because your distractions often represent very automatic and ingrained patterns of behavior. So what I’ll do is, after I’ve labeled it, I then do vigilance. What does that mean? I take an attitude towards it that I really don’t know what this is completely. I don’t accept the familiarity as being a complete revelation of the phenomena. I do not expect, I do not interpret, I should say, that familiarity. I do not frame it as the familiarity is equivalent to me having an expertise or a complete understanding of this phenomena, complete awareness of it. It has not been fully disclosed to me just because I find it familiar. So this is that sort of enacted humility. That’s about trying to get below the familiar face of your experience. You apply vigilance, that exploratory observation into the painting. And you’re going to say, I’m not going to like that. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. But what you can see is that not liking isn’t as devastating as it might have been habituated in you. So I start to, I take that attitude of watchfulness, of exploration, of wanting to see more, wanting to learn more, not wanting to feel good or feel better, but to learn more, to learn more. OK, so then I move to sensitivity. Sensitivity is turn all of the nouns in your mind into verbs. This isn’t pain. It’s painting. It’s a constantly shifting, unfolding process. So sensitivity says, go from taking a snapshot of your experience that you know and you put into your memory, ah, I know that. It’s unfamiliar leveled there. Yes. Go from that to an exploratory movie where it’s unfolding and you’re seeing how it’s going to progress. Next. Flowing. Acuity. Acuity. So when I take my glasses off, I lose acuity. Right. Everything fuses together. It’s perceptual confusion, fusing together, confused. Right. Everything is confused together. And in order to have a more intelligible understanding of things, I have to be able to discern and discriminate. That’s acuity. That’s visual acuity. You want to bring it here. So you’ve probably got this blob of an experience. It’s all fused together. Acuity is pull it apart. And you’ve been practicing this. You’ve got the preliminary skill for this because you’ve been learning how to find your flow. So try to notice all the different kinds of sensations. So you’ll notice, wait, what I was lumping together is pain. Some of that is just tension. And then some of that, right, some of that is tightness. And some of that is maybe a sort of tingling. And then there’s this sort of felt nastiness, but it’s not as big as I sort of thought it was. And it’s really hard to put my mind on that. And there’s a lot of stuff happening there. There’s a lot of different kinds of sensations, acuity, and how a lot of things are all fused together as pain. Right. But once you make it paining and let it unfold, you can then notice all the different things. And this is how you start to bring clarity to your awareness. You start to unfuse them. You start to get discernment and discrimination. OK. Noticing. So vigilance. Take that exploratory attitude, that humility. Sensitivity. Turn it into a flowing verb, not a snapshot now. Acuity. Diffuse it. Pull it all apart. Right. Notice all the different kinds of sensations and the way they’re layered and shifting and moving around. Then noticing. Noticing is to try to pay attention to the three kinds of reactions you’re having. What’s your physical reaction? How is the rest of your body, your energetic, felt body reacting to this? Is it tightening? Do you feel it trying to pull away? Do you feel a part of it, though, that’s kind of like, ooh, I don’t know. But what is your energetic, right, your lived body doing with respect to this? Your emotional reaction. What’s your emotional reaction to this? I hate it. I’m angry at it. It’s unjust. Maybe. But maybe also, yeah, I kind of like it a bit, too, because it sort of gives me a sense of urgency or connectedness. Maybe. I don’t know. And I’m not accusing anybody of being a masochist. I’m trying to tell you by that example is you might be you might be sort of surprised. Well, there is a lot of complex emotional reaction going on to this. I’d sort of all fuse it and treat it all at once as I don’t like it. But actually, it’s a really complex set of physiological, energetic and emotional reactions. Finally, mental reaction. What’s your mind doing? Is your mind trying to I want to get away from this. I want to get. No, I want to make this go away with the raw power of my will. Oh, I’m going to set this as the villain. And I mean, what is your mind doing? How is it reacting to it? Moving away, moving towards it, grasping it, trying to shred it, trying to make it go away, trying to attach to it. What is your mind doing? Vigilance. That exploratory observation that you’ve been trained the core of it. Sensitivity. Unfolding it as a movie. Acuity. Pulling it apart into all the different kinds of sensations. Noticing, noticing the three reactions, the bodily reaction, the emotional reaction, the mental reaction. Fifth one, reminding. What’s reminding? That’s the core sati. Stay in mindfulness. Stay in mindfulness. Stay in mindfulness. Because as you unpack this, you want to make inferences, you want to make justifications, you want to make explanations, you want to tell them stories. Keep going back to. Vigilance, sensitivity, acuity, noticing. That’s what reminding is. OK, now let’s say you’re doing this. So let’s go back to my anecdotal example. When I was first taught this, I thought, oh, this is great. Because when I was sitting, when I was learning, we were sitting for an hour. And for a novice, that’s a long time. And so it was really burning in my legs. And it was really a big challenge. And when I thought about this, I thought, oh, this is great. Because, you know, I was as a novice, I’m struggling between monkey mind and, you know, this burning in my legs. And it’s like, ah, this will give me a focus. I’m not a masochist either. But the idea that this pain is such a compelling, it’s such a Darwinian primitive primordial thing. That’ll keep my attention for sure. That’ll keep my attention for sure. So, of course, I tried to follow the instructions. I didn’t look for my distraction. But eventually it did come up because I was sitting so long. And I was like, ah, and I just turned. And I started to apply the five factors of employing mindfulness. And I thought, oh, I’m going to be like a laser concentration. Surely this will hook my mind and hold my attention. And within about 20 seconds, I was off into monkey mind. And this wasn’t minor pain I’m talking about. It was off. And I remember it was such a shocking experience. Oh my gosh, even this, my monkey mind, what way? So here’s the first principle. If while you’re meditating on your distraction, you’re distracted from it, you go back to your breath. You just go back to basic capacity. Or meta if you’re doing meta at the time. Okay? So the first principle is if you go away, you return to the breath. If you go away, you return to the breath. And then you say, well, then my distraction might get me again. My pain in my leg. Yep, and then you do this. And if you go away, you return to your breath. Okay, but that takes me to the next two principles, okay? Here’s the second one. This also happened to me. Pain came up. I was able to stay with it longer as I practiced. And then it went away as I meditated on it. And this is the more tempting thing. Cuz it’s like, oh, I could make everything unpleasant go away with the power that this is giving me, this meditative power. I could make all my unpleasant sensations go away. I could dissolve away any unpleasant memories. You have to turn away from that. Metanoia, turning away from it. The temptation to pursue magic must be abandoned because it is the greatest fraudulent surrogate for the cultivation of wisdom. So if it goes away, leave this. Let go of what’s happening and return to your breath. Return to your breath, befriending and being centered again. Let go of that temptation to inflation. So you go away, return to the breath. If it goes away, return to your breath, paying very careful attention to re-center your attitude. What’s the third? The third is, it doesn’t go away, you don’t go away. Or it doesn’t go away and you keep coming back to it again and again and again. So this is the principle I’ve been teaching you throughout. This always is education. If it becomes mere endurance, stop. So if you don’t go away and it doesn’t go away, you just like that. Or it’s like, okay, stop. Right? First of all, try to mindfully do this. Make whatever adjustment or movement you need to do to alleviate the distraction. This is the most tempting one of all in some ways. I mean, the second one is tempting existentially. This is sort of immediately tempting because you have to be really honest with yourself. It’s like, no, no, I really am. It’s just overwhelming me. It’s overwhelming the practice. I’m merely enduring. Then, right, make the adjustments you need to try to alleviate the distraction. And then start your meditation all over again. Centering, rooting, faster if you can because you’re closer to the meditative state. Okay, so let’s review everything and then I’ll talk about emotional and mental. Okay, so it comes up and what do I do? I apply the, I label it as always. That never stops. Then I apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. Vigilance, looking into it. Sensitivity, letting it flow. Acuity, diffusing it. Noticing my three kinds of reactions. Right? Lived body, emotional, mental. Reminding, staying in the practice. Three things, three principles. If I go away, I return to the breath. If it goes away, I return to the breath. Paying very careful attention to my attitude. If neither one of us goes away or just keeps hooking me again and again and again and again and again, I’m just into raw endurance. There’s no education happening. Then I come out of it. I make the adjustments. I break it. I do what I need to try to alleviate it. And then I go back into my meditation. So that’s, right? That’s physical distractions. Emotions. So some of you mentioned very powerful emotions come up. First, step back and label the emotion. Then, what? Vigilance. And here’s the thing about vigilance, right? Vigilance is designed to get you from just, how can I put this, passively undergoing your emotions to actively exploring them. It’s its shift. And it’s sort of subtle until you get it. But once you get it, it’s a big shift. OK? Normally, we are sort of looking through our emotions. Like, when I’m angry, I’m sort of looking angrily. I’m only dimly aware of my anger. And what I want to do is instead, I want to become very aware of my anger and look into it deeply or by sadness. Sensitivity. Emotion. Emotion. It’s moving. It’s unfolding. Follow it. Let it flow. Right? Acuity. Notice expanding your awareness, enriching your awareness. See how everything is now? Right? You keep gathering back what you’ve already learned. Unfolding it, exploring it, defusing it, pulling it, all the kinds of things. And what you’ll notice frequently is you’re not having a single emotion. This is at the core of what’s called emotion-focused therapy. One of the very good evidence-based forms of therapy. That underneath the sadness might be anger. And underneath the anger might be some fear. Or underneath the fear might be the desire for being special. I don’t know what it is. This is not any kind of necessary sequence I’m giving you. But what you can find very often is that there is a tremendous layering. And then try to distinguish between the raw feeling of the emotion. And then what it seems to be wanting to impel you to do. There’s sort of the raw feel, like the tingly sensations of sadness. Where is it in your chest? Really feel it. Really, really, right? Get into the feeling. But then also, what is it trying to say to you? What is it trying to impel you to do? Okay? Noticing. So what’s your body? Where is it in your body? How is your body reaction? So in this way, let’s flip the order a little bit. Body, what’s the mind doing to the emotion? Oh, I love this emotion. You’ll have this reflective mental judgment and evaluation of your emotion. Try to just notice that. Notice it. And then you say, but how, what’s, right? And sometimes you’ll have emotions about your emotions. But what you can do for when you’re trying to get is try to take a meta stance towards your emotion. Try to befriend your emotion. Try to do meta towards it. Try to take that attitude that you’re going to unlock towards it and let it unlock towards you. Try to befriend the emotion. But, and it’s very difficult with emotion, the fifth factor, reminding, stay in the practice. Stay in the practice. Stay in the practice. Same three principles. You go away, return to the breath. It goes away, return to your breath. Pay attention to your attitude, right? And if you’re merely enduring, open your eyes, shake it out, let it go. Reengage with the practice, basic vipassana or basic meta. Okay. Third thing, mental distraction. Talking to yourself or running pictures. Okay, this is the hardest. Thinking is a paper tiger. If you can meditate on it, one or two things will happen. And getting the space between them is the initial difficult task. One of the things is you’ll turn to meditate on your thinking and it’ll disappear. It’s gone. Try to notice what that feels like. What is it like when thinking is absent? Or you’ll turn to try and meditate on it and you’ll find yourself thinking. Then you’re just in the distraction and then don’t do anything else other than return to your breath. Label that thinking, go back to your breath. But if the first time thinking comes up, step back. There’s two primary ways of thinking, right? And they often come together, but you can separate them. At least initially in practice. Okay, the first one is inner speech. Here’s the thing to do with inner speech. You’re talking to yourself, okay? Don’t pay attention to what is being said. Pay attention to qualities of the voice that is saying it. First of all, is it your voice? I taught this practice. I have this very clear memory of teaching this practice to somebody. And he was sort of going along and he wasn’t getting much out of it. Then I taught him this and then he came back the next week and he was deeply enthusiastic. I realized that my monkey mind was speaking often in my father’s voice, not my voice. Whose voice is it? Whose voice is it? And if it’s your voice, where? Your voice now as an adult, your voice as a teenager, your voice as a child, your voice when you’re older? Is it a wise sounding voice, a foolish sounding voice? Does it try to pretend that it has authority or does it just seem to naturally have authority over it? Is it talking quickly? Is there an emotional tone to it? Imagine you were sitting on a bus next to somebody speaking a language you don’t understand. So you don’t know what they’re talking about, but you could pick up all of this kind of information. Do that with the voice. This is a way of and when you do that, what will happening is very soon, the thinking will disappear. And note that. What’s it like when my mind is empty of thought and then return to the breath? What about scenes, pictures? Behave as if you’re an art critic in a museum. Look at this painting. Look at these colors. Look at the colors. Look at where they are. Look at the texture. Look at how rapidly or slowly things are changing. Notice that when you are imagining something, you’re not actually seeing the whole thing. Oh, there’s a tiger. Is it a whole tiger? Is it just sort of part of a tiger’s face? Right. Again, you’re trying to step back and look at the medium rather than the meaning of it. So this and again, the three principles, it goes away. When it goes away, though, first notice that what’s it like? You go away. I get it. If you’re distracted from your distraction, you just return to the breath. Right. This one, you don’t really get the endurance. You might if you’re getting sort of into deep rumination. And then that’s something where I recommend you don’t do this practice too. If you’re caught up in like a really powerful ruminative cycle or like just do the basic following the breath. OK. One more thing. So that’s how you work with distractions. Distractions are things that come up in the practice. I did say this would be a long lesson. This is a really important lesson. This is a transitional lesson. We’re moving into a whole other stage. You also need to deal with hindrances. Hindrances are the things that are sort of preventing you from doing the practice. OK, there’s two kinds of hindrance. There is sort of an active one. You want to sit and you’re doing this. No, no, no. If that’s because of trauma or you’re in therapy, then please talk to your therapist about that. But for many of us, that’s just that’s just all of the, you know, the strength of ego, familiarity, not wanting to change. Here’s the thing to do. You’re already meditating. This is the trick. What do you mean? When the resistance comes up, you’re already meditating. How? Apply the five factors of acquiring mindfulness to it. And it’ll either just dissipate and you’ll go breath. Right. You’ll go away, which you return to the breath and you start meditating or you start enduring. And then you can just at some point, OK, I’m just going to stay with it and I’m going to more gently. Right. See if I can turn it into I’m not enduring. I’m just learning from it. I keep applying the five factors of acquiring mindfulness. Almost always you’ll find that you can then just get into the practice. That’s active resistance. Passive resistance is like this. You go to meditate, you go, yeah, I should meditate. Yeah, I should meditate. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I’ll have some tea. It’s your your motivation just sort of dissipates away. And this is a this is a more insidious kind of hindrance. How do we deal with that? So here’s where we take what are called the three refuges, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. The Buddha doesn’t mean the historical Buddha, although learning about the historical Buddha can be helpful in this. It might be might be for you taking refuge in the Christ. It might be taking refuge in Socrates, if you’re a stoic. OK, might be taking refuge in, right. Love, say, right. If you’re Dallas. Basically taking refuge in your sage. What does that mean? Taking refuge in the Buddha means throughout your day, keep a journal. Note moments of when you have been mindful. Note moments of when you have seen through illusion. Note moments when you have let go of a habitual pattern. This is called watering your Buddha. Note those moments and keep them right. So building up a journal of that builds up your inner teacher, your inner sage. And as your inner sage starts to grow in you, it becomes a palpable presence that helps motivate you and keep you going. It’s basically your future self that is you’re giving birth to. The Dharma. This is Dharma when I teach you. So for those of you who are interested, I’m working on revising or you can have the older draft of a meditation and contemplation journal I’ve written. And there’s books at the end that you can read and I can recommend some books. So wait a little bit longer, not because I’m trying to censor you, but it’s good to not get confused. But then you want to start reading books about mindfulness. Perhaps you’re interested in the more philosophical setting of this. Maybe you want to set it into a Buddhist setting. Maybe you want to set it. There’s lots of great Christian meditation. If you’re a Christian, if you’re a stoic and I’m going to later I’ll be teaching you. What would it be like to engage in stoic or neoplatonic practices? So Buddha, the Dharma, learning, learning the Sangha. This is Sangha meeting with other people, meeting with other people. So you regularly coming here really helps you to keep meditating. And we’ll try to keep this. I mean, this is a 10 week course. And Amara and I are talking about what we’re going to do to keep the like some way of affording the Sangha keep going after this. We’ll see. OK. But you need to meet. What you can do is make arrangements. Maybe some of the people you’re meeting in the chat to meet together regularly. The Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. OK. We’re going to do a shorter sit today because that was a very long lesson. We’re only going to sit for 10 minutes today. We’re only going to sit for 10 minutes because I still also want to answer some questions. I’m going to review one more time. Don’t look for your distractions. But when they come up, as always, label them with an I.E.N.G. work. Notice how that prepares you for sensitivity right away. Then I apply vigilance. Then sensitivity. Then acuity. Then noticing the three kinds of reaction and all throughout. Fifth factor, reminding, staying in the vigilance, staying in the vigilance, staying in the practice. I go away, return to the breath. If it goes away, I return to the breath, paying attention to my attitude very carefully. Just endurance. I return to the breath. When I’m doing this on thinking and my thinking goes away, I take a moment to notice what it’s like when I have no thought. All right, everyone. That’s a very long lesson. But this is a very important practice. You’re learning how to discover a lot about yourself by befriending your distractions. OK, so readjust your posture. Probably you need to readjust. Get your legs a little bit loosened up. Let’s drop the mode a bit. Right. Put your phones on. Do not disturb. Get comfortable. We’re going to begin when I say begin. Begin. 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. Coming out of your sit is part of the practice. So. Some questions here will address some of them. These are from also they were left over from the live Q&A we had on Friday. This is from a wat. I wonder if you recommend some kind of emergency meditation in difficult moments during the day. Yes, the emergency meditation is to very quickly. We’ll be able to do it comprehensively. Try to this is why you’re cultivating so in depth and carefully and slowly in your set. Try and find your center. Try to find your route. Try to feel the flow. Right. And then try to bring that kind of inquiring mindfulness and presence of mind to the situation that you’re in. So. Find the core form. And then try to integrate that into the situation you’re in, especially with the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. You won’t get into it deeply. That’s not the point. You won’t get into it deeply. That’s not the point. The point is you’ve trained all of this transfer your training. Just do the triggering that will transfer the training, the triggering that will transfer the training, the triggering that will transfer the training, centering, rooting, flowing, focusing, inquiring mindfulness. Back to the first one, as I mentioned, if you’re distracted from your distraction, it’s like the TS Eliot line. Distraction from distracted from our distractions by distractions. If you’re distracted from your distraction, you’ve gone away from the original distraction, returned to your breath. You let the whole you let the whole process of meditating on your distractions go and you just return to your breath. Right. Always return to your breath and then continue on with the papastha or go back into meta. Strunner. What about finding your flow in arms, legs and head? Part of me wants to be aware of the body sensation, the extremity, too. You can’t. You can’t. The reason why we leave them out is it’s often hard to notice them being moved by the breath. That’s one thing. And our arms and our legs seem to be not for everybody, but for many people, they seem to be particularly distracting, I guess, because arms and legs are so involved with a lot of our actions and our narratives and our projects and gestures. Right. So here’s the thing. Extend the flow into your arms and legs if you want. If right you if that is not causing a sudden upsurge in your monkey mind. OK. And if you can do if that if you if that happens, then I would say remain with the torso. But if you say no, no, it just enhances. I stay more present. Right. And I can feel the circulation. I can feel the effect of my breath in my legs, my arms and by all means, extend it that way. Like I said, I usually hold off with people, the novices, because it seems to be either on one end, it’s very difficult for people to pick up on the motions because their legs tend to be fixed. The arms tend to be much more stable. But if you can, that’s great. But also, you want to get in between. I can’t find it or I just go off in the monkey mind. If you can get that place, then by all means, do so. Lisa, Lisa Carlucci, when rooting the right side of a body isn’t included in the process. It’s like it’s in the dark. I have to consciously include it over and over again. What does that mean? Well, a lot of us will find it’s it’s it’s lateralized. It tends to indicate that we tend to be lateralized in our bodies in the in some way. This is probably part of that body armor I was talking about earlier. And interesting, the right side of the body has the left hemisphere. And that tends to be sort of it can be much more about a step by step, very formal, language based way of thinking. And that that can get us out of our body. So it’s very it’s very good to try and keep opening up the right side of your body. It will change with time. I I’ve been like the left side of my body has taken a very, very long time. To open up, because I think you’re I mean, we know that people are on a continuum in terms of sort of the degree to which they have left or right hemispheric dominance. See some of the work of Ian McGochrist or some of my lectures on this. Right. And so shifting that can take quite a bit of time. It’s taken me years and years to, you know, for the left side of my body to gradually wake up. So that is normal. I think that’s what’s happening. And I can encourage you from my own experience and the experience of others that you can definitely make progress on this. China list. I find when I’m distraction, as soon as I bring in the ing word, it naturally disappears. And my impulse is to go back to the breath. Exactly. Trying to bring the five factors of mindfulness feels like I’m grasping onto the distraction. Should I only do this practice when it’s really strong distraction? Yes. If that’s what I meant by being a paper tiger. If when you do the ing thing, it disappears and return to your breath. If you’re doing a if it’s a mental thing, like thinking, right. And it disappears. Notice what it’s like. Notice what that moment feels like. Taste like in your mind. And also, when doing that, pay very careful attention to your attitude. You’re not trying to build up a habit of becoming a magician that you’re going to get my mental powers. So that’s what you do in that situation. Raul Rua Diororis has asked another question. I tend to be very excited when the practice actually works. The next day, it becomes hard to do it again because of an underlying false belief that I’ve mastered it and can do it whenever I like. Help. OK, so that’s that’s what I mean. That’s where dealing with the the you know, this is a hindrance. This is where bringing in the three jewels, cultivating the lived sense of the presence of the mind. Cultivating the lived sense of the presence of the Buddha. Learn. One of the things about learning is it will really help you realize you’re not a master. Learn a lot more. Sangha meet and talk to other people. They both help you. These things all help us from getting discouraged because I can never do it and getting inflated because I always knew I was a Buddha. The three jewels, the three refuges keep us in that middle path between those two. OK, we have some questions that are left over. We’re going to deal with them tomorrow because I’ve already taken up a lot of your time. And so I want to thank you for joining. I want to thank my dear friend, the techno mage, Amar, my beloved son, Jason. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. Again, you can go to links in this video to find previous lessons and sets. You can also get links to my channel where you’ll find videos on all of these phenomena we’re talking about, like mindfulness and flow and insight and mystical experience, higher states of consciousness, transformative experience, the cultivation of wisdom, responding to the meaning crisis that’s at work in our culture at large. Please invite others to this practice who might benefit from it. You can help me extend how I’m helping others if you invite other people to it. Remember, we’re doing this every weekday. 930 EST. Monday is Dharma Day, Tuesday through Friday are sit days. Thank you very much, everybody, for your time and attention. Take care. Keep up the practice and I’ll see you all tomorrow.