Mindfulness: A One-Degree Shift in Awareness

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

***

At the end of 2016, I decided to do a seven-day silent retreat. But instead of going away to a retreat center as I’d done before, I did this retreat in my home. Seven days of silence, sitting long hours, cooking meals, getting some good walking in, a little bit of exercise. It was a gorgeous week. 

Throughout the week, I dedicated about ten minutes a day on heart-opening exercises. Physically, this entailed movements that spread my chest, allowing it to expand while holding an upright posture. I also did some Feldenkrais movement, which consists of slow, focused, and deliberate motion. 

What I noticed is that by day five, something really struck me: it felt like my heart and my chest were wide open. It felt like my heart was an open nerve. It was an amazing thing. I felt really tender. The world felt really delicate and beautiful to me. 

As I reflected on it, I realized that this feeling was really just the result of a one degree shift in posture. I don't even know that you could tell by looking at my posture whether there was any difference, whether there was any detectable shift. But internally something opened up in me. 

I want to talk about this principle. This one degree shift.

I've noticed that since this meditation retreat my heart feels more available. It feels more tender. It's easier for me to let go of things that are bothersome, things that are spinning around in my mind and clogging up my heart. In this sense, the practice was like a waterfall, like a feeling of rushing water moving through me. If that sounds amazing, it's because it is. It's amazing and it's also really ordinary. 

It started with just a little bit of an intention to spend around ten minutes a day shifting my posture by one degree. My physical posture changed almost imperceptibly to the naked eye. But it changed my internal experience dramatically.

Mindfulness practice is like this. A one-degree shift in awareness can make a dramatic difference. 

You can experience it directly. In this very moment, you can just notice what you're noticing. Notice what you're aware of. Notice the content of your day. What's on you mind today? What are you working with in terms of tasks, things that need to get done? What are the greater challenges in life that are showing up today? 

Maybe the challenges seem unbearable. Maybe they're overwhelming to you. In any event, I just invite you to shift your awareness one degree. And as you shift your awareness one degree, notice what you notice. 

Instead of fixating on a problem like we're so wired to do, what if we shift our attention one degree and pay attention to everything that isn't a problem? Not in a cheesy way because we're optimists and we want to be sun-shiny, but because we're realists and we realize that we have this habit of just zooming in on a challenge so much so that a sense of oppression can totally dominate our awareness. 

Allow yourself to turn one degree. If you feel like you're in a big hurry and there's not enough time, open your awareness up. Shift your attention one degree to the infinite amount of time, the countless seasons that the mountains have weathered and witnessed. Consider most of the things you think have to be done today. Maybe the space-time continuum won't unravel completely if they get done tomorrow instead.

This reminder to shift one degree is to recognize that our awareness tends to fixate. We tend to get caught in our ideas, caught in our perspectives, and in a given moment, we can just shift our perspective. We can turn our attention one degree and see and enjoy everything else we've been missing as we're wearing our blinders through life. 

Let’s practice this directly.

Practice

Start by taking a couple of big, deep breaths, just to settle into the moment. Let yourself breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Take a big audible sigh if you're comfortable doing that. And notice that just giving yourself space to take a couple of deep breaths has shifted your awareness one degree. 

Notice the physical body. See if there's an opportunity somewhere to shift the body one degree. If you're sitting, see if you can sit in a way that allows even more ease. Even less effort. If you're standing, if you're lying down, whatever you're doing, bring your awareness to the body and see if there's a way you can invite even more freedom in to this experience in this moment, through the body. That might just be relaxing the face, moving the face. Maybe giving the jaw a little side to side wiggle, letting go of tension through the head. Maybe just letting go of the stomach. We hold on to our stomach so much: sucking it in, keeping it tight. Maybe you can just let that round out and let go. 

And once you've made any micro adjustments to the posture, any one degree shifts to invite more wakefulness, more ease, take a moment to just do nothing and enjoy it. Deeply receive the experience of this moment. Without trying to earn it, without striving for an even better moment, you can just deeply take in the very moment this is.

And finally I'll invite you to bring your awareness to a challenge in your life at this time, something that has been occupying your awareness, maybe dominating it. You find yourself coming back to it again, and again, and again. I'll invite you again to shift your awareness one degree so that you notice that this challenge is actually held in awareness. Your life isn't just this problem, just this challenge. This challenge is another ripple on the ocean of your being, your vastness, your awareness. And because you're so big, because you're so expansive, because you're so resilient and creative and compassionate, you can absolutely hold this challenge in your embrace. When you shift one degree, you shift from being totally dominated by this challenge to experiencing yourself as something much bigger, much further reaching.

Conclude Practice

Give yourself a moment to just linger for a moment, staying soft, staying open. 

Remember that when you get into trouble in life — and we all get into trouble — we can shift our attention one degree. We can take a new perspective, giving rise to a totally new experience, a new moment, a new life.

***

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

“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.

***

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

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.