“You’re Not Doing It Right”: Encountering Your Threshold Guardians in Meditative Practice

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

***

Years ago I was at a ten-day meditation retreat when I became consumed by a voice inside my head. The voice was like a drill sergeant barking at me, telling me that I was doing the meditation wrong — that if I were doing it right, I would be more comfortable, more relaxed, and happier. 

Given how unhappy and how uncomfortable I was, the voice started to make a lot of sense. I thought, “Gosh, he certainly has a point. I'm pretty miserable. I'm seven days into this retreat, and I'm supposed to be blissed out — enlightened, levitating with the ascended masters beyond space and time — but instead I'm just suffering. My back hurts, my knees are stabbing, and my mind is racing. I want a good, proper meal, and I want to stop waking up at 4 A.M to meditate.” 

That's the situation I was in.

Yet something in me just sat through it. And after days of enduring this voice in my head, suddenly, like a soap bubble bursting and vanishing, this voice just disappeared. It was gone. I was stunned because moments before it had vanished, it was real. It was solid, it was substantive. I could hear it clearly saying, “Quit meditating. Go home, you total hack!” And then moments later I was blissed out. I didn't feel any pain, there wasn’t a single thought in my head, and I could have just sat there forever.

My hope in sharing this story is to facilitate people across this common threshold. 

Threshold Guardians

In Jungian psychology, there’s talk of threshold guardians — challenges that show up when we're about to get somewhere significant in our life. These challenges can be personified in mythology as demons and beasts and villains, or we can just interpret them to be our own emotional barriers. 

If you decide you want to develop mindful awareness in a way that’s constantly benefitting and uplifting you moment to moment in life, you will most certainly encounter these threshold guardians. What should you do when this happens?

There are a lot of different ways to answer such a question, but in today’s short lesson I want to focus on the skill of recognizing inner chatter — the inner voice, the inner talk in your head that has an opinion about virtually everything. I want to sensitize you to what can happen. 

You have two options:

1. You hear the voice, and then you tuck your tail and run. That’s what I was contending with when I heard the voice on that retreat. 

2. You stay with the voice. You get really precise about what's happening. What's the voice saying? What's the emotion associated with that voice? You just allow the voice to arise.

So on the one hand, we buy into the voice, which ends up limiting us. On the other hand, if we stay with it, if we stay present and we stay open, we will witness the moment where this limiting thought passes and opens up into a whole new realm, a whole new territory. The truth is that sooner or later, every single thing you encounter passes. It just passes. And what was your reality, what defined your world moments ago, breaks open into utter freedom. 

That's my hope for humanity — that rather than tucking tail and running, we meet these boundaries, that we come into contact with them in a gentle and even tender way. That we wait, abide, soften, and breathe. 

Let’s see what this looks like in practice.

Practice

Find a place where you can stretch and settle in. Feel the ground beneath you, supporting you. See if you can relax your weight into it more fully, trusting the ground, softening. Feel the softness of the belly, allowing it to be round, expanding, contracting with the breath.

Feel the straightness of the spine. Notice the natural wakefulness, the natural alertness that comes from just being upright. Or if you're lying down, the wakefulness that comes with having a straight spine.

Bring your awareness to the space where this inner talk — this running commentary — tends to arise in your awareness. For many people this is somewhere inside the head, or maybe around the ears. Bring your awareness to this general area and notice when a thought arises in the form of talk. [Long pause.]

Good. Stay with it. Keep your awareness in the space where you perceive this mental talk to arise. You don't have to do anything about the mental talk. You don't have to prevent it from activating, and you don't have to dive into the stream, getting washed away with the content of the talk. You can just notice it rising, notice the profound stillness as it passes.

Sometimes it’s like a cat watching a mouse hole. The mouse won't poke its head out, knowing the cat is lurking outside. Often times when we park our awareness in this part of experience, mental talk suddenly quiets down, which is just fine with us. If you notice no thought in particular arising, good. You can just be with the inner silence. And if you notice thoughts activating, good. You can just let them activate, while not getting pulled into them, while not elaborating on the content of the thoughts.

Notice that however active the thinking mind is in a given moment, however much mental chatter you're aware of, you can always detect space in-between the words, in-between the sound. Notice that at the heart of it, this is a practice of coming from and returning to silence. 

Take a final moment to just notice the space you're in. Notice where this practice period has left you. And before you move back in to the business of the day, you can form an intention to leave this door open, free to return to silence at will.

***

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Reverence for Life: A Meditation, With Script

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

Hear this episode to follow along.

Start 

Take a moment to let the body settle into a posture that allows you to be both relaxed and alert. And as the body settles in, you can just open up awareness to all of sensation, everything you're feeling throughout the entire physical body in this moment. Feel the stretch in awareness as you do that.

And from here you can narrow your attention to just the torso for the moment, feeling the in-breath and the out-breath — expansion, contraction. Breathing in, feeling clearly the sensations of expansion through the torso. Breathing out, feeling clearly the sensation of contraction through the torso. 

Just stay with this for a moment. Feeling the in-breath, expansion. Feeling the out-breath, contraction. 

If at any point you get pulled into a thought or are distracted by something in the environment, just notice that, let go, and come back to breathing. Expansion, contraction. Feel the sensation as it fluxes, as it cascades from in-breath to out-breath.

Pay attention especially to the out-breath. Notice that a subtle wave of relaxation tends to spread with each out-breath as the muscles associated with breathing relax. Let go. So with each out-breath, you can allow yourself to be carried by this wave into deeper and deeper relaxation. And if you become aware of intense sensation, intense emotion or discomfort as you do this, you can just stay soft as best you can and allow those sensations to well up, to be felt, and to eventually pass. Don't worry if you don't feel as settled as you think you should be. Don't worry if you're not as relaxed as you imagine a better meditator would be by now. You don't have to worry about any of that. You can just trust — deeply trust — your body’s own natural rhythm of settling in, of letting go, of surfacing, releasing anything that needs to be felt and shed.

And you can do the same thing with emotion: bringing your awareness now to the more subtle body, noticing how you feel in this moment: Your mood, your emotional tone. Just let it be so. If you're the happiest person on earth in this moment, then be so happy that it hurts. If you're the saddest person or the angriest person on the planet in this moment, just be that. Just be what you are.

Let thought, likewise, just flow through awareness. You're not trying to think more or think less, or not think at all. Let thought just be part of the experience when it's part of the experience. The brain secretes thoughts like the mouth secretes saliva. When we see a piece of food, it just happens. It's not a problem unless we make it a problem.

And notice, in this moment, that you're already aware. Sometimes we practice meditation because we want to get enlightened and we want to wake up, but really if we look closely at that, it's just more struggle. It's trying to be something other than what we are right now. So just be awake right now. What you'll find is that you actually can't not be awake. Even if you try. You're always aware.

And if at any point you notice awareness getting clogged up with thoughts in the mind, sensations in the body, sounds in the room — whatever it is — you can just notice and let go again. Empty out again back into clear, pure, open awareness. This awareness, this presence, also is your own body with virtually no borders. Just an endless expanse of wakeful space.

Staying open, staying soft. Awareness is naturally spacious and expansive. You are naturally spacious and expansive. And from this expanse you can focus your attention again on this quality of vitality: life itself that courses through you, that animates you, enlivens you. Notice that you're not just awake in this moment, but you're alive. Just feel this aliveness. We don't know what it is, where it comes from, this life. We have words to explain it, ideas and different stories, but at the end of the day, this gift of life — this vitality — is a mystery. We never fully comprehend the mystery but we can experience it directly.  When we do so, when we open up to this mystery, this gift of life, we find the natural quality of reverence. Reverence for this beauty. Reverence for this gift. When we really receive this gift fully, we naturally want to tread lightly. To be gentle with ourselves, to be gentle with others, gentle with all of life.

Just give yourself a moment to really receive this gift of life. None of us know how much longer we'll enjoy this gift. But in this moment, in this very breath, we know we are unspeakably wealthy. 

As you're ready, you can start to open your eyes, letting the visual world back in to experience. Staying soft, staying close to yourself, remaining aware of this gift that is the foundation of our human life.

End

Why Meditate in Community?

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

***

Readers in Salt Lake City might know of our mindfulness community, named Lower Lights Sangha. We meet at least once a month to practice mindfulness and explore human development.

You might wonder why we do this. Isn’t meditation something you do on a cushion in a quiet room all alone? The answer is that it can be, but it can also be a community practice. 

Ancient Buddhists recognized the power of community early on. They even named the sangha — which is a Sanskrit word for “community” — as one of what they call the three gems of Buddhism. They valued the sangha so highly because they recognized that we all sometimes get stuck in the mud so to speak in our individual practice. They knew that when we come together to practice in community we’re buoyed up by the spirit, vitality, and consciousness of each other. When we come together in practice we meet others who we admire, who we want to emulate. We see those who are farther down the path than we are — and there's always somebody farther down the path than we are.

Community is particularly powerful when we’re struggling. And that’s where the concept of our namesake, “lower lights,” comes from. It’s a beautiful metaphor that has inspired me over the years. In pre-modern times, sailors would navigate the open seas by way of what they called the "upper lights": the sun, the moon, and the stars. These sailors could go a long distance just by the upper lights alone. But by the time they got to shore, there were a lot of dangers involved, particularly if it was stormy, dark, or rocky. In such circumstances, sailors were in danger of being dashed on the rocks, their ships crushed, sinking to a watery grave. 

They needed light to guide them in to safe harbor, and they came to call the lights from the town and lighthouses along the shore the “lower lights.” The lower lights were critical, especially in challenging times. When it was stormy out and visibility was limited, sailors desperately needed these lower lights to guide them those last few hundred meters to shore. 

What this says to me is that as we're practicing mindfulness and as we're developing as human beings, we simply can't fully succeed without one another. Admittedly, we can get very far with the upper lights — by meditating on our own and receiving the light about us. But if we want to get safely into harbor, we need one another. 

That makes us all, by analogy, the lower lights. That makes it our responsibility to burn more brightly, to show up for one another more fully. And that's what the name of our mindfulness community suggests: The Lower Lights Sangha.

Countless mindfulness communities and sanghas throughout the world right now are coming together in wakeful community. Individuals coming together collectively to burn more brightly and guide one another mutually along this glorious path of awakening. 

Let the lower lights be burning.

***

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Still Point Meditation: The Practice of Practices

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

Episodes 29 & 30

***

As we’ve explored on this blog and on Mindfulness+, there are many ways to practice mindfulness. But there’s one practice in particular that I might call the practice of practices, and that’s still point meditation.

In order to understand the still point it's helpful to first say a word about polarities. When I say polarities I mean a pair of interdependent opposites — opposites that rely on one another to express the fulness of their qualities. A classic polarity, for instance, is masculine-feminine, and if you think of the Yin Yang symbol from Taoism, you can get a feel for the way that masculine and feminine are in this eternal interwoven dance. The quality of the masculine is in the feminine, and the quality of the feminine is in the masculine.

We all tend to favor one side of a pole over another. When it comes to the polarity of masculine and feminine, for instance, think about your own life, your own self, your own mode of expression. Think if you tend to exhibit more masculine qualities in a given moment or more feminine qualities. The masculine is associated with more hardness, more directness, more agency, more assertion, more structure, more hierarchy, for example. The feminine associated with softness, with yielding, with receptivity, more relational than hierarchical. You can just notice where you find yourself in a given moment in a given day. Maybe more one or the other. Maybe more a balance of both, maybe you're not sure — it depends on the moment and situation. The point is that we all have certain habits. We all show up in the world in a certain way, and reflecting on polarities can help us see which side we favor and which qualities we're neglecting, or not manifesting as fully as we could.

Another classic polarity is agency and communion. Some people really like to feel their own agency, their own autonomy, their own individuality. I personally relate to this one. I feel like often times I'm kind of a lone wolf hanging out in my meditation cave, writing books, avoiding contacting the world. When I get into a rut, I can really get into the agency side of things. On the other side of the street, however, there's communion. This is the side that is relational, that knows itself through community, through relationship, through being in service, through being accountable to others. 

One more classic polarity I could name is control and submission. Maybe you feel more comfortable when you're in control and you can steer the outcome of your situation, or maybe you have a personality where you like to align with a strong leader — somebody or something you can trust and just submit to that. Some of us tend more towards control, some of us tend more towards submission. 

At the deepest level, we need all of these qualities. None of them are better than the other. It's the masculine that animates the feminine and brings it more fully to life and vice versa. Without communion there's not meaningful agency, we're just in isolation. And if all I do is control, I become a control freak. I'm a tyrant. But if all I do is submit, then I'm a groveler. I'm spineless.

In other words, the poles represent extreme qualities that when left to their own devices become pathological, they become problematic. 

So, how do we avoid spilling over into pathology?

That’s where the still point practice comes in. When we're in the still point — when we're resting in a quality of open spaciousness, pure potential — our lives become intuitive. We can be receptive to exactly what the moment calls for. For example I have a tendency towards agency, towards wanting to express my individuality. But If I'm perfectly centered, if I'm at the still point in this meditative space, I might be present enough to recognize that what the situation really calls for is communion. Maybe at the level of personality and habit I want to just be alone and spend the afternoon reading and writing, but when I open up my awareness and I move into the still point I recognize that my brother needs my help, that he needs someone to be present with him, to listen to him. And so it draws the communion out of me. 

What does this process look like in practice?

Let’s explore. As you read the meditation below, to yourself or with a group, you can intuit which qualities could be of most benefit to you in raising the quality of your life, improving the quality of your presence, and showing up in increasingly skillful and appropriate ways in the world. Like a chocolate connoisseur could point out the different flavors — the different subtle notes of fruitiness or a smoky quality in the chocolate — I’ll point out different qualities in your awareness. These qualities are already there, so you don't have to try and imagine them or stretch for them. You can just relax and enjoy who you already are at the deepest level.

Still Point Meditation Script

Take a moment to settle in, letting the body organize in a way that feels effortless, allowing you to relax, but also to be alert and present.

You can start by bringing awareness to the entire physical body, noticing the shape of the body, the posture. And you can bring awareness to the breath, noticing the in-breath and the out-breath, noticing particularly on the out-breath the way the body softens, lets go. With each out-breath the shoulders fall, the chest sinks, the belly softens.

And notice in this moment that you can notice. Notice that you're aware. You may be aware of many things, but the fact is that at the heart of this moment and this experience, you're aware. Moment to moment the objects of your awareness will change. One moment aware of a thought, the next moment aware of sensation in the body, then a sound. But notice that while the objects of awareness will change, the prior fact of awareness does not. You're always aware and you can be aware that you're aware. Just take a moment to rest in this quality of presence.

When you're concentrated, your awareness is focused. When your mind wanders, your awareness opens up and expands. But in any event, you're still just aware. You're always present to something. Presence is at the heart of who you are.

And the mind can endlessly evaluate how things are going in this moment. How my life is going, am I doing well, how this meditation is going, am I doing it right? Notice that beneath the level of these distinctions, these appraisals that the thinking mind makes, there’s a quality of profound trust in our experience. You can trust yourself. You can trust the very ground of being in this moment. Trust that whatever's happening in life in this very moment that you can meet the moment just as you need to. Notice any resistance to this quality of trust. This can be a more challenging aspect of the still point to access. Notice any tightness, any distrust, any mistrust, any fear — and you can trust all of that, too. Trust all of that response is exactly what needs to come up in this moment and to be felt, to be experienced.

Notice at a subtle level in this moment a tendency to want to control how the meditation is going, to steer it to arrive in a certain place. And notice a part of you that's willing to submit to exactly what's happening, a part of you that doesn't need to steer, doesn't need to exert. And at the still point between control and submission you can sense a quality of deep peace. Profound peace. A peace beyond any description, a peace that passes understanding.

And notice a quality of rest that naturally comes forward. What I like to say about the still point is that it's not something we're reaching for. It's not something artificial to us that we're grafting on, but rather the still point is who we are at the deepest level. In this case you can notice the quality of rest. You can allow the physical body to rest and to be soft. Allow the mind to rest. You can allow thoughts to flow in a calm stream. 

Whatever the conditions of the body in this moment, whether you're incredibly comfortable or incredibly uncomfortable, whatever the conditions of the mind, whether your mind is empty and peaceful or full of different thoughts and agitated, or a little of both, notice the quality of stillness, of spaciousness, beyond push and pull, beyond what's pleasant and unpleasant. Notice at the deepest level of who you are in this moment, there's a natural quality of contentment. You can just rest in this moment and allow yourself to be deeply satisfied, calling off the search. No seeking.

And notice that the more deeply you touch into this quality of rest, the more able you are to just accept this moment and all of its rewards and gifts, all of its challenges. This quality of acceptance, the ability to just be present, naturally arises. Just take a moment here. Totally at rest, fully present, to everything this moment is, exactly as it is. 

Allow yourself a final moment to experience all of these flavors together, like a fine banquet. A quality of presence. A quality of rest, profound rest. Contentment independent of any conditions. A deep sense of contentment, of "everything is okay.” Transcendent trust. Whatever the conditions of life in this immediate moment and beyond, you can trust yourself to respond. Trust the ground of being. Trust your own basic goodness and the basic goodness of life. Notice how new these qualities feel in the moment, endlessly refreshing themselves, and at the same time notice how familiar they are. Feel how in a sense they've always been with you, always been right here at the heart of all experience.

 ***

As we close the meditation you can leave a door open for yourself to come back to this place, to access these qualities in the still point as often as you need to, as often as you remember to. 

To learn to really embody and express these qualities is infinitely subtle. It requires our steady intention to come back to it again and again and again.

See, Feel, Hear Meditation: How to Escape the Matrix

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

***

The Matrix came out in 1999 and rocked the cinematic world with its metaphysical implications. There’s a famous scene in the movie, where Morpheus, a mentor character of sorts, sits down with the main protagonist, Neo, and describes the false reality called the Matrix. Morpheus tells Neo that you feel the Matrix when you go to work. You feel it when you go to church. You feel it when you pay your taxes. In other words, it's everywhere. It's all around us but we don't see it. We don't realize that we're always in this Matrix, which is obscuring reality from us.

At that point, Morpheus offers Neo a red pill or a blue pill. The blue pill will lead him back to sleep — back in to the Matrix where ignorance is bliss. The red pill will reveal to Neo the true nature of reality.

It’s an iconic moment in Hollywood. But for me as a mindfulness practitioner it points to a profound truth: namely that all of us live in a matrix.

Now, I’m not going down the road of saying that there is some nefarious alien race that’s using human beings as batteries to power their civilization. Where I’m going is much cheerier than that.

What I want to suggest to you is that the matrix we live in as human beings is invisible to us if we don't have the ears to hear it or the eyes to see it.

This matrix we could call, simply, see, hear, and feel.

What do I mean by see, hear, and feel? Well, notice in this moment your experience. Notice that your experience will be some combination of seeing (what's in the visual world around you), hearing (what you can hear in your environment), and also feeling (how you're feeling in the physical body).

And on a more subtle level, irrespective of what's going on in the external environment, you can notice that you can see, hear, and feel things from an internal perspective as well. Namely, with the thinking mind, your thoughts come up as internal images, which is a mode of seeing. Internal sound is often mental chatter, which is a form of internal hearing. And we could say that emotion is a kind of subjective feeling. It's a feeling in to our unique personal experience.

It's remarkable, but the entire spectrum of human experience (external and internal) can be broken down into these three sensory categories: see, hear, feel. We take for granted what is so natural to us. To have this breathing, feeling, moving human body, to see and to hear, to think and to dream and to anticipate the future and reflect on the past. These are things we do so innately that we don't think about them as special. And we certainly don't think about seeing, hearing, feeling in a given moment as a matrix that holds us captive.

But what’s so potent about a mindfulness practice is that when we actually witness all of this happening — when we bring our awareness to seeing, hearing, and feeling on an external and internal level — we start to realize that these things constitute the building blocks of our human experience. And what’s more, when we're aware of them we bring them into our awareness as objects of awareness and then experience a degree of freedom from this matrix.

We're not just what we see, hear, and feel. Most significantly, and here is the kicker for you mindfulness practitioners, when we are aware of seeing, hearing, and feeling as awareness, we are free from this matrix.

This can be difficult to comprehend at the level of the mind. So let’s practice and extract ourselves from this matrix in order to taste the freedom that a mindfulness practice can uniquely offer to us.

For this meditation you don't have to be doing anything special. You can sit in silence, of course, but you can also keep doing exactly what you're doing throughout your day. Whether you're driving a car, out on a walk or cooking a meal, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because this matrix of see, hear, feel is always present.

Let’s bring our attention to it.

Meditation Practice

Go ahead and take a couple of big breaths. You can let them out with an audible sigh if that helps you relax, if that helps you feel more deeply in to your body.

Start by bringing awareness to the feeling body. Notice how all of the physical body is feeling in this moment. Just allow awareness to evenly cover all of your physical being. As you attend to this feeling component of experience, you can note to yourself in your mind: feeling is happening. Feeling is happening. And just let it happen. Be aware that feeling is happening and just allow that feeling to happen the same way you allow clouds to form and dissipate in the sky above. In other words, you don't have to interfere with it. You can just let it happen.

You can notice where sensation is the brightest, the loudest. Notice where sensation is the dimmest, the quietest. But simply, be aware that feeling is happening. And from here you can shift your awareness to hearing. Hearing all the sounds about you in the world. Even hearing the silence if there's no sound apparent. On a more subtle level you might hear thoughts in the mind like internal talk, chatter, commentating. Just notice. Hearing is happening. And you can just let it happen, resting as the awareness that witnesses the hearing, witnesses the feeling. Are sounds in front of you, behind you, to the left, to the right, above, below, inside, all around you? Note to yourself: hearing is happening and you can just let it happen.

And you can bring awareness to seeing. All of the visual world all around you. Notice what you can see out in the world. Perhaps your eyes are closed and you're aware of mental images flashing across the mind's eye. In any event, seeing is happening. And notice that you don't have to do the seeing. The seeing just happens, and you can let it happen. And you can continue this way, monitoring with your awareness — see, hear, feel. In a given moment are you more aware of seeing or hearing? More aware of hearing or feeling? And you can just note to yourself: seeing is happening. Hearing is happening.

***

This concludes our brief tour through the matrix today, everybody. If you find yourself feeling wound tight like Neo, and you're needing to unplug, this is a great and simple exercise that you can do on the go, any time, anywhere. Notice as you deconstruct your experience — as you go from being imbedded in this matrix of sensory experience to taking the position of awareness, of the witness, seeing is happening, hearing is happening, and feeling is happening. And what is it that's aware of seeing, hearing, and feeling? As you do this, you'll realize that awareness is aware and awareness is already free.