An Introduction to Vipassana Meditation: The Art of Seeing Separately

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

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When you taste a piece of chocolate with a connoisseur who has a discerning and mature pallet, you get a completely different experience than you otherwise would. The connoisseur might point out that the cocoa beans in a particular piece of chocolate are from a place in Madagascar where juices from citrus fruits have leached into the soil and flavored the bean. The moment you hear this, you may actually start to taste that citrus fruit. You become aware of the complexity of the taste you're experiencing.

It’s a simple example of vipassana, the Pali word for mindfulness, which literally means “seeing separately.” That is, when you taste chocolate under the guidance of a connoisseur, you start to pick up on the different strands, the different notes, the different nuances of your experience. Those nuances might show up in a fruity, smokey, or salty piece of chocolate.

Another way to understand vipassana might be to think about a time when you noticed you were kind of cranky. Maybe you were in conflict with somebody — your spouse, partner, a friend, a colleague at work. At some point in the conflict you may have noticed, "Hey, wait a minute, I think I'm just hungry.” Or maybe if not hungry, then maybe you notice you just didn't sleep very well and so you're irritable. In either case, you have a moment of clarity where you realize you’re not actually bothered with the person you’re speaking to so much as your body just needs some rest or a sandwich.

The point is that when we don't bring clarity and precision to our experience, it all ends up getting lumped together. We’re grumpy but we have no idea why. But then when we bring a microscope of awareness to our experience, we get clear on the different elements that are coalescing to produce that experience. We realize, "Okay, I'm a little bit hungry and that's causing me to be cranky. My colleague just asked for this project a few days earlier than it was originally intended, and that set me off. Let me take an early lunch break, and let’s talk about the best way to solve this situation after lunch." It's as simple as that.

And as I described with the example of eating chocolate, vipassana (or mindfulness) also elevates our fulfillment. When we bring greater clarity to our experiences, we enjoy them more, even if the experiences are already intrinsically rewarding. Our sensory experience becomes richer and more rewarding.

Vipassana Practice

In some meditations it's desirable to find a quiet place where you won't be interrupted — a place where you can really settle in. But mindfulness practice can be done anywhere at any time. So I'm going to invite you to continue doing exactly what you're doing, whatever that is. You might be sitting still in a quiet room or a crowded room. Either way works for this particular practice.

I want you to start by just noticing the way you feel in the body. Noticing physical sensation. Often times when we notice physical sensation we spontaneously move in to a posture that allows for more alertness and freedom. So if you're moved to adjust your posture, go ahead and do that but just notice how the body's feeling in the moment. Notice physical sensation. Where is sensation the brightest? Where is it the most obvious? Allow this sensation to flow and be as it is, to be felt. Notice where sensation is more dim and quiet. Notice the parts of your body that you can't contact as readily and just bring more awareness to these places. Not trying to change anything or create sensation but just breathing and noticing.

Now notice the quality of your emotions in this moment: your mood, how you feel. If you're aware of emotion in the body, where do you feel it? What quality does it have? Is it intense emotion or is it more subtle. Notice what space the emotional energy takes up in the body. Notice its shape: is it changing? Is it wanting to spread? Is it wanting to get smaller? Does the emotion extend beyond the borders of the physical body? Does it radiate out into space? Or is it more inward? Just notice.

Go ahead and let that go and bring your awareness to hearing. Just marvel for a moment that you can hear at all. Notice what you can detect in front of you, behind you, to your left and right, below and above you. And notice that it's not just sound that you hear but also silence. As sounds come and go, they arise from silence and back to silence. And so you can appreciate not just the sound around you, whatever it is, but you can also appreciate the silence to which all sound returns.

Letting that go, you can notice what you see. Again, you can marvel that you have eyes to see at all. This world of objects, a spectrum of colors, play of light and shadow. Notice that the eyes automatically discern shape and color. And as you shift your head one degree or turn your eyes one degree this way or that, the whole visual world shifts into a new scene, a new sight, a new moment. Notice how the world changes moment to moment even if it's only your perspective changing. Your eyes shifting slightly. And you can put them all together now.

Finally, notice the entire feeling body. Ears that hear. Eyes that see. Track these different components clearly in this moment. In this moment an experience coalesces. Whatever your experience in this moment, let it be that.

In practicing vipassana we’re not trying to produce a special experience but rather become more clear and more open to this very moment, open to this ordinary experience that is given to us.

Forbidden Fruit: The Cross-Pollinating of Buddhism and Mormonism

By Thomas McConkie,
Author of Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis & Founder of Lower Lights School of Wisdom

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Most people know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in downtown Salt Lake City. What many people don't know is that during the late 1990s the largest order of Zen Buddhism in the world outside of Japan was also headquartered here, on a street called South Temple.

Both traditions have had a profound influence on my life.

I was brought up in an LDS family, but around the age of 13 I developed an allergy to the local culture: the strict dress code, the endless rule-making and rule-following, the dour adulting masquerading as true happiness.

I didn’t expect after leaving that I would ever come back to worship with the Mormon community. But 20 years later, here I am. And I’ve begun to notice something surprising, something I didn’t expect to see or feel.

But first, a little background.

After leaving my religious community behind, I needed something to fill the aching spiritual void. With a little help from my Zen friends on South Temple I became a devoted meditator. I felt like I’d won the spiritual lottery. Though meditation was challenging for me from day one, the fruits of the practice were immediately evident.

Gradually, like dripping water over stone, I gained insight into what Zen Master Dogen Zenji meant when he wrote, “to study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self…” In other words, through the systematic training of meditation over many years of dedicated practice, I learned, in true Buddhist form, to see through the illusion of the separate self.

Maybe that sounds like so much mystical mumbo-jumbo to you. But I assure you it’s a very ordinary experience. In fact, it seems to me now that it’s an experience that we are all meant to have as human beings, a part of our developmental potential and collective future together as a species. Rather than living as isolated, alienated individuals in constant fear of being squashed like a bug, we can come to realize how profoundly we belong to and express Creation through our every breath, thought and deed.

Without realizing it right at first, I found myself looking at Mormonism over the years through this new Buddhist perspective. I saw Mormonism through a lens of deficit. The thinking that kept bubbling up in my mind went something like this: “If we don’t learn to see through the illusion of separation, religious practice will only exacerbate human suffering. We’ll use it to reinforce our sense of separation and wear our religiosity around like an ego ornament.” The famous Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, insightfully called this phenomenon “spiritual materialism.” However, what I couldn’t see at the time was that this perspective of mine was at very best only half true.

After many years of practice, I began to appreciate that as I saw through my felt sense of separation—or fallenness in Christianity—my sense of compassion for all things steadily increased. I realized that to love our neighbor as our self, as Jesus admonishes us to do, we have to first realize that we and our neighbor are in a very real sense one and the same Being.

As an accidental Buddhist practitioner, I was struck from a young age at how supportive meditation was at helping me be a better Christian and to better fulfill the great commandments. Simplistically, I wondered, “why on earth are there not more Christian meditators?!” I must admit I carried that prejudice with me for many years.

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Here’s where things get interesting. As a classically trained Buddhist, I’ve gained life-changing insight into the illusion of separation and how to see through it (to “see through” is the root meaning of the word vipassana, translated in modern English as “mindfulness”). And yet, as a re-activated Latter-day Saint, it remains quite difficult for me to wake up on a Saturday morning and to want to go and shovel my neighbor’s walks after a fresh snowfall.

A friend of mine in the ward (an LDS congregation), a guy I admire and love, recently got divorced. I feel friendship with him, a desire to support him in these difficult emotional times, but still, I struggle to pick up the phone. I’m not saying I won’t pick up the phone. What I’m saying is that I’m painfully aware of my struggle to get up and simply do something selflessly, even after I supposedly realized that the whole world is my “self.”

Enter the Mormons.

These people really do. Having been actively involved in an LDS community in Salt Lake City for the last 7 years, it’s really dawning on me that virtually everything the Mormons do is about doing. Those who will accept a service calling are given a specific task that they are to carry out voluntarily, without compensation, for the rest of their ward. It can range from keeping the meetinghouse clean, to preparing Sunday School lessons for Gospel instruction, to outreach efforts in the neighborhood for members of the faith and those of other faith traditions.

To me, watching Mormons serve in a ward family inspires a bit of the same emotion in me that I get when I watch a highly conditioned athlete at peak performance. Their movements are powerful, graceful, and seemingly effortless. Through years of dedication and training, they have honed their bodies into a living expression of their sport.

We all know that it’s a good thing to do nice things for people. But do our bodies know it? Have we trained the very sinews and bones of our physical bodies to get up and serve? If I had to rate my performance in this category, I’d sheepishly opt for “needs improvement.”

Yet, for all the praise I can heap on Latter-day Saints and their practice of service, I also see a dark side to this path:

In Buddhist terms, when service (and any religious duty) is carried out from the identity of the small self, it tends to be a recipe for perfectionism and eventual burnout.

This is an insight that I imagine would have eluded me were it not for my years of formation in the Buddhist tradition. The small self, the ego, is relentless at claiming glory for itself, constantly announcing its presence, and deeply desiring to be worshipped. When Satan asks Christ to bow down and worship him during Christ’s 40 days of fasting in the desert, it is a reflection of our very ego speaking. It is the part in all of us that believes it is greater than even God.

Until we’ve really confronted this part of ourselves, until we’ve really acknowledged that the ego exists and that there’s nothing we do in life for which the ego doesn’t want credit, it will continue to run the show.

We can train ourselves to serve: walks get shoveled, friends are supported, widows consoled. And don’t get me wrong–no small amount of goodness comes from these acts. And still, there remains an existential knot right at the heart of our being that cannot be undone. The freedom we long to feel—the boundless, selfless Love that is Christ, that is (in Zen Buddhist terms) Kanzeon Bodhisattva, that is too big and holy to ultimately name—eludes us. Precisely because we remain stuck in an identity that will always be too small, too threatened to withstand the sheer awesomeness of this Cosmic flow and power.

I see the people around me serving. I am clear that I have a great deal of room to grow in this area of my personal development. And I am concerned at how compulsively people offer service in order to be good. Whereas the service might flow as an expression of non-egoic generosity and giving, more often I have seen it flow as an “I should do this. We are commanded to do this. I will feel guilty if I don’t do this.” Like a poor beast carrying a burden on its back that it cannot understand, we lug around our identification with the small self. The more we serve, the more inadequate we sometimes feel.

We cannot relax the contraction of the ego (what Latter-day Saints tend to call the “natural man”) through service alone. Perversely, the ego will often use the service it renders as proof of its goodness and worthiness of being loved, only further exacerbating the shame and unworthiness spiral.

Enter the Buddhists.

Over the past two decades, I have been awestruck in quite a different way with my brothers and sisters in sangha (a term for Buddhist community). My friend, Musho Roshi, puts it thus: “you can sit, but you can’t hide.” In other words, if you are faithful to the practice of meditation, it will consistently drive out the ego from its hiding places. It will depose the would-be Monarch and free up the throne for the only rightful Ruler: Big Heart. Boundless, Infinite and Eternal Love. The very Power that gives rise to the Universe itself.

Anything less than this, any identity smaller than this, paradoxically, would be sub-human. We humans, from a certain perspective, are all Buddhas. We are illumined. Our true bodies are the Cosmos itself. We were born to live without limits, even as we voluntarily take on human birth and all the limitations that come with that.

I learned this language, but more importantly, I learned this experience through Buddhism. Through Buddhist practice, I learned to be Big again.

But without training and creating very concrete habits of serving those around me, this “Bigness” doesn’t end up expressing its full potential in a meaningful way:

When meditation and transcendent practice is carried out without a firm grounding in community and service, it tends to be a recipe for spiritual narcissism and escapism.

I would have never suspected this in all my meditative pride. I needed both of these spiritual dimensions in my life. We can call them the way of transcendence and service, Wisdom and Compassion. Whatever we call them, they are two complementary “styles” of spiritual practice, always at risk of flying apart and becoming pathological if not held together in a single embrace.

Of course I understand that there are Buddhists who do really fine service in the world and there are Mormons who’ve done no small amount of disidentifying from their egos. I’m writing in a bit of a diagrammatic way to illustrate a point. Namely, each wisdom tradition tends to emphasize, even specialize in cultivating unique spiritual gifts. Moreover, we live in a day and age where we are more aware of a plurality of traditions than ever before. In this divine milieu, why wouldn’t we exchange more deeply with one another across traditional boundaries of identity? In this way, our weaknesses can truly become strengths, and through our strengths we can help to strengthen others. Together, we can bear new fruit.  

Through personal experience, I’ve come to think we’d do well as Christians to take a page from the Buddhists and really confront our deep-seated tendency to want to prove our goodness, to want to strong-arm God to let us into heaven by the sheer force of our good works.

I can also see clearly now that I would have done well over the years to spend as much time focusing on the very concrete practice of serving my neighbors as I did focusing on how to deconstruct the ego in meditation practice.

Having been a part of both traditions for many years, I notice the tendency in Mormon culture for people to work really, really hard at being good, all while harboring deep insecurities about never being good enough. On the other hand, I notice a tendency in the Western Buddhist movement to privatize the spiritual journey. My meditation practice. My stress-reduction. My enlightenment.

Twenty years after an initial taste, those fruits borne on South Temple continue to sustain me. I am falling more in love each day with the Buddha’s path of self-transcendence, while also learning to embody the path of compassion and healing through Christ. I am slowly putting words to the curriculum that life seems to be revealing:

The path of service (and religious devotion) without genuine realization of the higher self is a path of burnout and perfectionism. The path of transcendence without an attending practice of service is a path of spiritual narcissism.

For most of my adult life, I’ve tended to be more muscle-bound in the transcendence category and rather wimpy in the category of service. It feels as though life is asking me to cross-train; to learn to express the higher self through simple acts of service in community.

I can’t help but wonder what Mormon communities would begin to look like if we injected a small dose of meditative awareness, of ego-transcendence into an already vibrant culture of service.

Perhaps this is one of evolution’s next feats, one of Christ’s next miracles to perform through all of us.

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Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

A Meditation for Insomnia and Anxiety: The Positive Feedback Loop of Shamatha

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

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Imagine a wildebeest out in the savannah, eating grass. Everything is calm and peaceful — and then the wildebeest suddenly thinks it hears a snake rustling in the grass. So it gets spooked and starts to run, and the wildebeests around it get spooked and start to run. And the more those wildebeests run, the more the whole herd gets spooked, and before you know it you've got a stampede.

This is a classic example of a positive feedback loop.

Notice that the word positive here does not imply that the results you get from the feedback loop are desirable. Depending on who you are and where you are, a stampede may or may not be a good thing.

Here’s another example — one that’s more relevant to mindfulness. It's about a positive feedback loop that really changed my life early on in my practice. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was originally driven to practice mindfulness because of insomnia. On the rare occasion that I could fall asleep back then, I generally wasn't able to stay asleep through the night. The next day I'd feel like a zombie. But before I knew it, night rolled around again and I felt even more anxious about falling asleep. I was facing a positive feedback loop with very negative consequences for me.    

When I started a mindfulness practice, I noticed something spontaneous happen: my breath dropped. I went from experiencing anxious, shortened breathing up in the chest to feeling my breath migrate deep into my abdomen. And the more I breathed from my abdomen the more relaxed my body became. And the more relaxed my body became, the easier it was to keep breathing from my belly.

In both instances, I experienced a positive feedback loop. However, the results were far more desirable after I started practicing mindfulness. I felt so much more relaxed throughout the day, more so than I ever had in my life. I couldn't believe it. I'd discovered this thing that seemed to be a cure all for everything that ailed me. I approached the night with a totally different attitude: breathing from the belly, soft in the body, relaxed. Over time I would actually look forward to going to bed.

I'm not here to claim that mindfulness is going to take care of your insomnia or any other problem. It may or may not. What I have found, though, is that mindfulness helps everything work better. Whatever issues you're struggling with in life and whatever challenges, mindfulness generally helps us meet those challenges more optimally.

So, how can we practice with a positive feedback loop? How can we use this natural mechanism to develop our mindfulness practice?

Here's one way that people have been doing it for literally thousands of years — because they’ve found it to be incredibly effective. It goes like this: we sit still and focus on restful states in the body.

When we focus on restful states in the body, our attention amplifies the pleasant sensation. The stillness and restfulness in the body actually becomes more pleasant the more we focus on it. The more pleasant it feels the easier it is to focus. The easier it is to focus the more we’re able to focus on the pleasant sensations. The pleasant sensations then become more pleasant, and we enter nature’s feedback loop.

In the Buddhist tradition this kind of meditation is called Shamatha. Shamatha often gets translated as "calm, abiding meditation.” But the word also has connotations of high concentration because as we're in this feedback loop we become more and more concentrated. The more blissful we feel, the more rewarded we are to continue concentrating more and more. That is the basic theory.

As we get ready for practice, there are a couple of things that you can be on the lookout for.

First, know that the longer you practice, the deeper you practice. So if you'd like to really explore the depths of this Shamatha practice or the positive feedback loop practice, I'd invite you to extend the time a little bit. You might go from five minutes to ten and ten minutes to twenty and so on just to see where that takes you.

Second, know that just because we're focusing on pleasant sensation it doesn't mean for a moment that there aren't unpleasant sensations. The body may feel uncomfortable at times and the mind may be racing, and that's okay. None of those things have to go away, and none of those things have to be problems. When we do this kind of meditation we're simply focusing on the pleasant sensations and letting everything else be in the background of awareness.

Meditation Practice: Shamatha

Go ahead and find a comfortable place where you can sit still for a moment without being disturbed or interrupted.

Start by letting the body settle in to the posture — the posture that allows the spine to be naturally upright but without excessive effort. Take a moment to settle in to a posture that allows you to be both relaxed and alert. Feel the ground beneath you, supporting you and see if you're able to relax a little bit more. How can you sit in this moment with even greater ease.                         

At this point I'd like you to bring awareness to the breath, particularly the breath as it shows up through the torso, feeling the expansion and contraction of the torso and just joining your awareness with the flow of sensation. Breathing in, you can clearly sense the feeling of breathing in. Breathing out, you can be clear about the sensations of breathing out. And I want you to focus specifically now on the out-breath. Notice with each out-breath through the torso there's a natural wave of relaxation of letting go. All of the muscles that work so hard to create space for the breath to enter the lungs and enter the body, when you breath out they just soften and let go. and as you focus on this sensation of relaxation and letting go, you may notice that it wants to spread beyond the torso, out in to the limbs, through the head, through the entire body and if that's the case you can just let it do that. Let the relaxation spread. Or you may notice that this feeling of relaxation wants to remain local and concentrated in the torso. If that's the case, that's great, too. You can just stay with this area of focus in the torso sill focusing on the profound ease and restfulness, the letting go that comes with each out-breath.

Good. After doing this for a few moments you may start to notice even when you're not exhaling and letting go, there’s still a quality of softness and restfulness in the body that you can actually stay in constant contact with through your awareness. Even if the body is not one-hundred percent relaxed in this moment or the mind completely calm, you can let any discomfort, any unpleasantness in experience fade in to the background for the moment. While in the foreground you stay with this quality of rest and relaxation.

Notice that focusing on this calm and rest in the body is intrinsically rewarding. The more you focus, the more pleasant it becomes. The more pleasant it becomes, the easier it is to focus.

You can stay here as long as you would like, softening and surrendering to this natural feedback loop that is always here, always available to us.

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I hope this lesson benefits you, and I hope you were able to get a taste of Shamatha meditation: an abiding that involves deep concentration and blissful calm.

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Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Don’t Forget to Look Up: A Lesson in Mindful Awareness

If you’re local to Utah, you know about Zion National Park and a famous hike called the Narrows. It's a gorgeous slot canyon that people travel from all over the world to see.

I once got a permit with a friend of mine from Norway to hike this slot canyon. I'd heard about the dangers of flash flooding, and I went into the ranger’s station feeling nervous. I had all these questions running in my mind — Did I have the gear I needed? What if it rains? Do I need a helmet? — as I asked the ranger, "Do you have any final advice for me?”

I think the ranger could sense my nervousness, but she just smiled at me and said, "Yeah. Don't forget to look up."

I thought this was funny advice. It might have been the very last thing on my mind to actually remember to pay attention to the beautiful scenery for this hike that I had gone to great lengths to do and that people come from all over the world to do.

But sure enough the next morning when I got into the river with my friend, I noticed that the path was really uneven and the further down the canyon we got, the quicker the current got, the deeper the water in some points, and it was hard to keep my footing. At a lot of different points along the ten-hour hike I noticed myself staring down at my feet. And I remembered this ranger’s advice. Don't forget to look up.

It's occurred to me since then that this is very good advice for living a mindful life as well.

In a similar way as hiking the Narrows in Zion, there are different things going on in life moment to moment that can trip us up. Things that can absorb our attention and cause our attention to collapse. This is one of the great challenges in human life. We tend to collapse around a challenging event, and we lose the perspective of the whole, the entirety of what's going on around us.

Another simple example of this is when you stub your toe. All is peachy and dandy, and then your attention absolutely collapses into the throbbing pain in your toe. It’s like there's nothing else happening in the world but this throbbing pain. Suddenly, anything you're aware of in previous moments is collapsed in to the problem.

At this point, I want to say that it's wonderful that we're actually wired to pay attention to problems, right? if we didn't, we wouldn't survive life in the city. We wouldn't pay any attention to the horn of a bus that's blaring and it would flatten us as we blithely walk out in to the street. So it's very functional and adaptive that our attention is wired to pay attention to problems.

The downside is that we can spend our whole lives attending to problems.

Moment to moment we can get caught in this state of collapse that's ongoing. And that's what I noticed vividly on my hike in Zion. If I didn't remember to slow down and take a breath — get my footing and look up — I would've missed the spectacular scenery that was the whole point of being there.

Similarly, as we practice mindfulness we can remember to slow down, take a breath, soften, and look up, so to speak. It doesn't mean that the ground isn't still uneven. It doesn't mean that there aren't still obstacles and challenges in our environment.

What it means is that when we're aware of ourselves looking down or in or collapsing in to the problem that comes up moment to moment, we can remember that ranger’s advice.

Look up. Relax. Let awareness start to sprawl. As we do that, the challenges of the moment are still here, but they're held in the context of the whole: all of life. The experience of the experience of the totality of this moment which if you allow your awareness to relax in to it, you'll find is inherently rewarding to pay attention to.

We are going to practice noticing the way that awareness collapses into a problem and we're going to notice the natural ability of awareness to open back up. To take in and more fully appreciate the whole. So I invite you to find a comfortable place to sit down and to settle in.

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Start by bringing awareness to the physical body, feeling sensation flowing through you.

Notice the rise and fall of the breath — and the sensation of breathing. Notice that on each out-breath the body just naturally softens and lets go, making way for the next breath.

Now, I want you to bring attention to the most challenging aspect of your experience in this moment. It might be discomfort in the body, it might be emotional discomfort, or it might be a thought in the mind about a condition in life that's challenging that you. Just allow your attention to be absorbed in whatever it is in this moment.

If your attention is drawn to a sensation in the body or an emotion, you can just observe it very closely, noticing its texture, quality, and shape. If it's a condition in your life that you find your mind returning to again and again, you can notice what impact that thought has on the body, what emotion it brings up and what response, fully allowing it to be present. Not pushing on it or struggling with it, but rather enveloping it in awareness in this moment.

And you can let the contracted muscle of awareness start to relax a little bit, start to let go. Feel the spaciousness of awareness even as the challenge may persist.

Notice the physical body in this moment. And you can be aware of emotional activity coming up in awareness in this moment. Letting it rise, linger, and pass — letting awareness fully envelop and surround and permeate all emotional activity.

And you can be aware of thoughts coming up in the moment, thoughts rising in awareness. You don't have to latch on to them or dive in to them or think about them any further. You can just notice thoughts rising in awareness. Awareness, like the wide open sky — letting it all be present.

Notice that the world itself is also rising in your awareness. Feel the vastness, openness, spaciousness of awareness itself and the way that experience naturally arises in the space of this awareness. There's room for it all and room for more.

Staying in contact with this spaciousness, you can notice again the challenge we started with. And notice that this challenge — this stone in a river — is just one element in an infinitely beautiful landscape full of other stones. The river flowing, trees hanging off the canyon walls, the scenery towering over us, all about us.

This moment and every moment is an invitation to look up, look in, to experience the fullness of this moment. We're reminded to open back up in to this spaciousness of awareness that is always already the case.

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Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity: Three Mindful Skills

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

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Why do we hear so much about the breath when we talk about mindfulness?

There's a good reason for it. The breath is with us all the time. In this moment wherever you are and whatever you're doing, you're doing it in a body, and that body is breathing. Because of this, virtually all meditative traditions make use of the breath. It's a ready-made object of meditation.

Focusing on the breath is also an intuitive way for us to contact our awareness. The breath moves slowly enough that most people are able to track it immediately, without years of practice. When we pay attention to the breath, we open up different opportunities in awareness. It can be a really powerful tool in developing mindfulness.

In addition, breathing makes it easier for us to develop basic meditative skills.

My experience is that virtually every teacher talks about these skills in one way or another, and you see them in the ancient texts as well. But I've never come across a clearer framing of it than a framing from Shinzen Young — an American born teacher who has really influenced my practice. I feel a lot of gratitude for him.

Young talks about mindfulness as a skill set. He says any time we practice mindfulness we're practicing concentration, clarity, and equanimity.

Concentration is just what it sounds like. Most people intuitively understand that concentration means focusing on one thing while letting other things be in the background, out of focus. There are more details to cover, but for the time being we can leave it at that.

Clarity helps us notice what’s happening moment to moment. This is really important because when we're able to get clear on what's happening moment to moment, we become free from it. Rather than being totally buried and lost in an experience, we take a step back and witness it. We're able to see it clearly from a slight distance, and this allows us to come back in to experience with a certain level of spaciousness and freedom. Clarity improves our objective behavior in life.

Equanimity is about acceptance. It’s our ability to just accept what's happening moment to moment — to not interfere with the flow of experience. Often, the moment I introduce this concept, hands shoot up in the room and people say: "Woah, what if it's appropriate to interfere? What if something's going on that I don't want to see happen? What if there's injustice, violence, and my job is to act?" Those are great questions. The point here is that when we're deeply accepting, when we cultivate this quality of equanimity and awareness, it doesn't mean we're not still passionately engaged in the world. What it means is that we're not in denial of what's happening. We're open, present, and receptive. We allowing the fullness of experience moment to moment to inform us. Fully informed, we're able to act more appropriately and skillfully in life.

Now, let’s take a moment to practice these skills, using the breath as the foundation of our practice.

Wherever you are, I encourage you to find a little perch or somewhere where you can settle in. Allow yourself to come in to a posture where you can relax and also be alert.

For a moment you can just allow your awareness to fill the entire physical body. Like water soaking into a sponge, you can allow your awareness to totally soak through the physical body.

You can bring awareness to the torso: notice the expansion and contraction of the torso as you breath in and breathe out.

I'd invite you at this point to breathe in a little more fully than you usually do on the in-breath, filling your lungs with oxygen and feeling the stretch through the torso as you breathe in more fully. And likewise on the out-breath you can breathe out a little more fully than you normally would. Pushing the air out and feeling the collapse. The emptying of the lungs and torso. Feeling this contraction. Letting that go, you can come back to normal breathing.

Just letting the breath move through you naturally, not trying to control it in any way. Notice at this point the top of the in-breath. Breathing in as if you were a photographer on an expedition trying to take a photograph of a rare species. I want you to pay special attention to the top of the in-breath. See if you can notice the point at which the in-breath becomes the out-breath. The exotic creature rears its head, the out-breath.

You can do the same at the bottom of the out-breath: see if you can notice the very moment at which the in-breath appears. As if you were trying to capture a photograph of that very moment that the in-breath appears.

Notice that however closely you look, you'll never find an actual line or moment when the in-breath becomes the out-breath. In-breath and out-breath are just words and ideas. When we plunge into the actual territory, we experience that the in-breath and the out-breath are seamlessly intertwined.

So you can let go of in-breath and out-breath and let go in to simply breathing. Neither in-breath or out-breath; just the organic whole. The unbroken flow of breathing.

As you stay with breathing, you can allow the out-breath particularly to soften you even more. With each out-breath you feel the body let go even more, riding the breath like a wave into deeper and deeper relaxation.

As you soften in the body you'll notice a natural quality of acceptance arise, an ability to just allow the body to be as it is. Allow this entire moment to be as it is. The body might not be perfectly comfortable, and that's perfectly okay. There's a part of you that can just allow it to be exactly as it is.

Thoughts continue to flow through the mind, and there's no need to do anything about them. You can allow thought to flow through the mind as naturally as blood flows through the veins. Whatever's happening in the body and mind and the world around you, you can allow it. You can hold it with this quality of acceptance, with equanimity.

You can stay in contact with these flavors of awareness, having a natural settledness of focus and concentration in life. You can allow things to be as they are and deeply enjoy the flow of life that we're always immersed in as long as we're breathing.

***

Transcribed by Seth McConkie, edited by Jon Ogden

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