The Individual and the Collective: A Meditation on Our Porous Nature

I was teaching a retreat a few years ago when a mother shared a really moving story with me. She said that right before the retreat, she was tucking her daughter in for sleep when she had a sense that her daughter was thinking something. So she asked her what she was thinking and her daughter described a really vivid image — the exact same image, it turns out, that had just gone through her mind before she asked her daughter what she was thinking.

It was one of those moments where the common sense of separation totally dissolved. 

We usually think that our thoughts are our thoughts. And in this moment it was really clear to the mother that it wasn't entirely her thought. It was just a thought that was thinking both of them at the same time, so to speak. 

This experience really stuck with me because this particular retreat started off really moody. We had a big group of people at the retreat center, and the weather was dark and the energy of the group felt a little bit sluggish, a little bit weighed down. I felt it just as much as anybody. 

We're all working through this content. We're all feeling so much. And there are moments in life where we recognize that we're actually porous, that we're deeply affected by others, by the environment, and by the entire world. 

Just feel that for a moment. Notice these boundaries that we call the self — maybe the physical borders of our body, or the more subtle borders of our minds. We imagine that we're totally unique and autonomous and even isolated in these boundaries. And yet there are moments in life where it's clear that there's something else going on.

This has some interesting implications. On the one hand, it's amazing that we don't have to be alone — that because we're porous we're not just living our own individual life, but we're living out a life in a collective. We're participating in the life of the world's soul, you might say. But what can be a little scary about that is there's a lot of vulnerability involved. To be porous is to be touchable, reachable, and influenced. 

Notice that for a moment as you breathe. As you feel, you can just notice in this moment what side of the spectrum you seem to be favoring. Do you feel more individual in your experience? Independent? Or do you feel more communal, more merged? 

It's not that feeling independent is undesirable and that feeling communal is desirable. If anything, what's powerful is to just notice this spectrum that's playing out moment to moment. There are times when we feel incredibly self-conscious and closed in on ourselves. And in those moments we can feel very isolated. And there are other moments where we feel totally relaxed and at ease, and our sense of self just expands out, seemingly forever.

The invitation, then, is to bring more attention to your porous nature, so you can notice both of these features. You very much are a unique self with unique gifts to offer those people in your lives, to offer to the entire world. And you're also very porous. You're always a self in relationship to other, in relationship to the whole. And on that level, you're very porous. You're very permeable, you're vulnerable, and yet the vulnerability is what makes possible intimacy and the deepest love. When we return we're going to do a little bit of an awareness practice around these qualities of our experience.

Here’s a meditation you can follow to experience this for yourself.

Start 

Take a moment to allow yourself to just settle in, to arrive more fully in this moment. Notice the shape, the posture of the physical body in this moment, whether in stillness or in motion. Just notice the impact the posture has on this moment, the way the posture of the body colors your experience. 

And you can bring awareness to the emotions. Just notice how you're feeling emotionally in this moment. The quality of emotion in the body. How intense emotion is — maybe very intense, maybe very felt. Maybe very dim. Imperceptible. And you can notice where in the body you're sensing emotion. What volume of space the emotional energy takes up. How it's moving, how it's shifting moment to moment. How do you feel? Just allow yourself to investigate this directly through your awareness.

You can also notice thoughts in the mind. You don't have to get lost in the content of the thoughts, but you can just notice the flow of thought. Whether there are many thoughts, few thoughts, no thoughts. and notice how this colors your experience in this moment as well. Feel the body. Feel the mind. Sense in to the personality the unique person that you are. Just notice what it feels like to be you in this moment.

And then allow awareness to expand, to become more permeable, more porous. Starting with your surroundings. Notice where you are in this moment. And notice the energy, the quality, the essence of the room where you are, or if you're outside somewhere, just allow yourself to soften and be aware of the influence that your immediate environment has on you. Notice the influence you're receiving from your environment.

Now bring awareness to your closest relationships: family, friends. And notice if any of those people are struggling right now. Notice if those struggles weigh on you. You're concerned for them. You're hoping they'll prevail in these challenges. And notice if any of them are on a roll, so to speak. Things are amazing in their lives and you feel a contact high from their success — a vicarious joy.

Open up your awareness to the mood of your nation. Whatever country you come from, whatever country you currently reside in, just see if you can sense into the mood of the nation as a whole. Feel the way you participate in that mood. You affect it and you are affected by it. You give and you receive influence. 

At the most basic level you can sense into your own aliveness in this moment. Just feel that you're alive: breathing, sensing, awake. And you're not the one doing this. In a sense, life is being done to us. It's this gift we continue to receive with each in-breath, with each out-breath. You can open up your awareness to all of life. the vitality in us and through us all that quickens us, that animates us.

Feel the way, in this moment, that you deeply participate in the life of the whole — all life on the planet and all life beyond. Feel how deeply connected you are, and how profoundly unique you are, all at once.

Mantra Meditation — With Audio and Script

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

Get the audio version of this mantra meditation.

***

As we get started, I'll invite you to find a place where you can get comfortable, settle in, not be interrupted, and we will begin.

Beginning Bell

Take a moment to just ground in the physical body. Really allow your awareness to totally fill the entire physical body. Like a sponge that's totally soaked through with water, your awareness soaks through the entire body.

As you do this, you can notice any hot spots, any places with tension in the body where you're tight or holding on. And you can just keep breathing. Letting yourself soften. Letting go.

Feel the support of the ground beneath you. Whether you're standing, lying, sitting, just feel your relationship to the ground and as you do that, you can trust your weight even more to the ground. Letting go, softening.

And for a moment I want you to just bring your awareness to the expansion and contraction of the torso. As you breathe in and out. And as we do this today, we're going to work with a mantra — a syllable or word that we repeat to help us pay attention, to help us concentrate.

I'll recommend you use a word that's simple and meaningful to you. You can use "peace," "love," maybe "patience." Just pick a simple word that has a positive meaning and feeling for you. Don't stress over it, any word will do.

Once you've settled on a word, I want you to say it to yourself in your mind as you breathe in and repeat it each time you breathe out.

Just stay with it. If you get distracted that's okay. Just come back to your syllable, your word, repeat it as you breathe in. Repeat it as you breathe out. You don't have to speak it out loud, you can just think it, softly as you breathe — as the breath breathes you.

For any given period of meditation, it can take a little while to settle in. So as you notice discomfort in the body and thoughts in the mind, just recognize that that's content that the body and mind are in the process of letting go of. They're not problems. You're just releasing.

[silence]

Stay with the breath. On the in-breath saying this word in your mind. And on the out-breath, repeating the same word. Just allowing your attention to be rapt. Allowing yourself to become curious, fascinated by this experience.

As thoughts come up in awareness you can just let them come up in the background of awareness. Not making a problem of them, just staying with your focus. Letting the breath breathe you. Letting the syllable, letting the mantra just flow. 

The longer we practice, the deeper we practice. Just give yourself time to settle in.

[silence]

Good. Stay with it. Go ahead and let that go and just allow yourself to do nothing. If awareness wants to expand you can let it expand. If awareness becomes focused on this or that, you can just allow it to focus. Awareness opens and focuses is natural as the movement of the in-breath and the out-breath. You don't have to exert any control or any effort. Just do nothing for another moment. Whatever happens happens. If you catch yourself trying to do something you can just let it go. 

Ending Bell

Give yourself a moment to start to open your eyes. You can give your fingers and toes a little wiggle, opening up your awareness to the space around you and enjoying this moment of plainness, of ordinariness — immersing yourself in this awareness, the light of mind that is always available.

***

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

Photo by Petr Sevcovic on Unsplash

How Mindfulness Can Counteract Negativity Bias

Imagine you’re living millions of years ago out on the plains of Africa. It's a dangerous place. The weather is hazardous. There are predators lurking about, slinking through the grass, waiting to pounce on you. Your nervous system needs to be on high alert to warn you of danger so you’re constantly attuned to the possibility of negative outcomes.

By contrast, let's say somebody from your band, your tribe flashes a smile at you. You smile back, and that's it. 

Why is that? Why would something positive not be as powerful in the body as something negative? 

Well, if somebody smiles at you and you smile back, it's nice for a moment. But if there’s a little rustle in the grass and your nervous system doesn't register it as a predator that's stalking you, you're dead. You're a lion’s next meal.

How does this relate to mindfulness?

There's a neuropsychologist by the name of Rick Hanson whose work I really enjoy because he explores how practicing mindfulness can shape our brains in a way that counteracts this negativity bias. And we should counteract it. After all, we’re no longer living in situations that constantly put us in mortal danger like our ancestors did. 

And yet it's been shown that negative experiences still tend to have a more profound impact on our nervous system than positive experiences. What’s worse, it’s been shown that we transfer negative experiences to our long-term memory more readily than positive experiences. 

This is where I think Rick Hanson’s work is so useful to us as mindfulness practitioners. Hanson says the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Think about that. You have a negative experience — perhaps you wake up in the morning and you were really hoping to have a couple eggs for breakfast, but there's only one egg in the fridge. (That actually happened to me this morning. It was devastating! I'm still recovering.) Or maybe you recall a bully on the playground when you were five years old. Whatever it is, your nervous system records these experiences. Something bad happens, and the amygdala in our brain fires. It transfers the negative experience to the memory center, and we remember that moment maybe the rest of our lives. 

Rick Hanson's antidote is to work with this bias. He suggests that you let positive experiences soak in to the mind — let it soak into your neural circuitry for at least 12 seconds.

Do that for a moment now. 

Think of one nice thing that has happened today — ideally something trivial. And just sit with it for at least 12 seconds.

…

We can use our mindfulness practice to amplify the countless positive things that happen in a day. We might have an amazing day, and then a single phone call completely dominates our awareness since it came in with the bad news. We run it through our minds again, and again, and again, in hopes that we might avoid something like this happening in the future. 

So instead of letting this negativity bias run away with our lives and rob us of the inherent happiness that we have as human beings who are alive and awake, we can soak in the positive no matter the circumstances. That's one of the takeaways of a mindfulness practice. If you are aware in this moment and breathing, you are more wealthy than the wealthiest of kings and queens.

So let’s do a little bit of neuro-sculpting. We're going to focus in on a positive experience that easily could have slipped right off of our teflon brains. We're going to take a moment to just allow some positivity to fill our awareness. 

Over time as we make a practice of this, as we hold an intention to do this in our mindfulness practice, we have quicker, more ready access to positive experience. It makes us happier.

Begin Practice

Whatever you're doing at the moment, just notice that you're doing it. Bring your awareness to sensation. Just the feeling of feeling. The feeling of physical embodiment, of sensation. 

And as you do this, you can breathe. Just allow yourself to breathe and imagine that the breath is like a billows, fanning the flames of a fire. Only now it's the breath fanning the flames of sensation. Just allow yourself to enjoy in embodiment. And if you have chronic pain or significant pain in your experience in this moment that's totally okay. You can bring awareness fully to any part of your embodied experience that isn't painful. So, if you have a splitting headache, you can focus on the quality of having relaxed muscles throughout the body. If you have back pain, you can notice how good it feels as the lungs expand and contract and the breath nourishes the body with oxygen. Do this for a few moments.

And now I want you to look back on your day. Or if you just barely rolled out of bed you can look back to yesterday. I want you to just call up one thing that happened that was nice. It doesn't have to be amazing. It can be very subtle. But subtle is significant. Call up just one thing and really let it soak in. You can even allow a subtle smile to spread across your face as you do this.

And after looking back now at something pleasant that happened, I want you to look forward. Let your awareness be drawn to one thing you're looking forward to, today or tomorrow.  Something you're excited about. Doesn't have to be big. Might just be going home and reading the paper because you enjoy reading the news after work. Might be going on a little walk after dinner. Just let your awareness be drawn to one thing. And just tune into the feeling of anticipation. Forget how things turn out, forget how things you're looking forward to actually unfold. But just feel the feeling of anticipation, and enjoy that. Let that be its own reward. 

Where do you feel positive sensations associated with anticipation in your body? Just let it soak. What a gift.

Conclude

You can relax, let go of any effort, and just pulling back. 

I would invite you to make this a part of your mindfulness practice. You can do this anywhere. You can do it on the fly. You can do it in sixty seconds. And if you soak a little bit longer you can do it in two minutes. 

Just noticing all the good things happening that we tend to look past because positive experience slips off us like teflon; negative experience sticks to us like Velcro. As you bring you mindful awareness to positive experience, you realize there is so much positive experience happening in reality moment to moment that we fail to see. You realize that life is much more blessed than we have previously imagined. 

As we do this practice, attending to positivity with intention, we come to do what the Taoists instructed us to do thousands of years ago, which is to learn to dwell in reality.

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.