The Magic of Appropriateness: An Underrated Benefit of Meditation

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

***

One of my many teachers, John Kesler, has used a certain word a lot over the years, and from the first time I heard it to the last time I heard it, it has sounded kind of lackluster and tasteless in my mouth: appropriateness. 

“We’re going to become masters of mindfulness meditation so that we can be more appropriate.” Yeah, not as hot, sexy, and flashy as other claims that the practice will make. 

But when you look beneath the frumpy surface of this word, appropriateness, it’s quite profound. 

When a human being actually shows up “appropriately,” it’s breathtaking. In the context of awareness practice, appropriateness means something like bringing a totally fresh and open beginner’s mind to every moment and responding to the moment with what the situation asks for. 

The challenge here is that human beings, we’re learning machines, and we have a lot of experience. Having a lot of experience, we have a lot of programs — you could say “learnings” — from the past, things that have worked in past situations, and we bring them to the

present moment. And when we’re not totally present and open, we don’t act spontaneously but rather we act in a rote, habituated way. So, if our unconscious programming could talk, it would say something like, “Well this worked in the past, so I’m going to do this now” or “Last time something like this happened, I got really angry, so I’m going to get really angry at this person now.” That’s kind of the definition of inappropriateness. 

John really instilled this into me over the years and as I let this subtlety of the practice and even the term, this concept, really percolate deep down into me, I started to really turn on to the magic of this word, appropriateness.

For another perspective, a teacher we’ve heard from before on this podcast, Kabir Helminski from the Sufi tradition, he defines appropriateness as the child of love and humbleness. So, from a Zen perspective, you could think of a beginner's mind coming into a situation freshly, acting spontaneously.

From Helminski’s perspective representing the Sufi tradition, it’s the child of love and humbleness. And allow these qualities to wash over you right now, a quality of love, deep embracing love and humility, willingness to do what needs to be done, and we start to feel a certain resonance between these different approaches to the definition, the practice of appropriateness.

Another story: I was traveling with another teacher of mine named Terri O’Fallon almost 3 years ago now. We flew into Seattle, met up there, we were on our way to a retreat center and we were catching a shuttle together. 

We were waiting for the shuttle. She and I needed to use the restroom as we were waiting to embark, and I popped out before her. I walked across just a bustling hallway, this is at SEA-TAC, where the ceiling if I remember is 100 feet high, glass walls, quite a breathtaking room at the far end of the airport and just packed, just shoulder to shoulder, just so much foot traffic, people coming and going, crisscrossing, going up escalators, walking to check into their flights from all over the world. It’s really a bustling airport, and I’m at the door, and Terri makes her way out of the bathroom and she starts to cut through the crowd and at a certain point, I saw her look up and she saw me holding the door for her. And I’ll never forget, it’s like her entire body, her whole being, became luminous. She lit up with an immaculate smile and it was so energetic, this smile, this whole-body smile! It reached across the busy hallway and physically impacted me. I felt just filled with delight when I saw her response to me holding the door. It was like no one had ever held the door for her in her whole life and she thanked me, we got in the shuttle, we made our way to the retreat.

Months afterward I asked her, “Terri, do you remember that time at SEA-TAC when I held the door for you?” And she said, “Oh, how could I forget?” I said, “You know, I just have to check in with you. You seemed disproportionately delighted when you saw me open the door for you!” 

And she said, “Oh, yes, you know in my family growing up, we always held the door for each other, it was so important, it was a sign of love, it was a sign of respect, it was a sign of patience.” She had all these associations with it. It meant so much to her and she was just delighted by the fact that I, some ruffian almost Millennial had you know still preserved some modicum of etiquette. 

That’s my story. But the point being I was right, like holding the door for her, she was totally delighted by it, almost whisked away in delight. And another person in another moment, it might have just been, “Oh thank you.” But in that moment when I held the door for my colleague, my teacher, my friend I felt as if the whole world were smiling, there was just no beginning or end to her delight. And it was really a lesson for me because to me it was a teaching of appropriateness, what if we were so present in the moment that we received every aspect of the moment with that depth of gratitude, if we really allowed ourselves to receive the generosity of the universe that is forthcoming?

Imagine in this moment as you draw your next breath and you bring this quality of appropriateness to it and just allow yourself to feel completely delighted by this gift of breath, by this gift of light.

Meditation

Let’s move into some practice. Just be open, be loving, be humble, be a beginner’s mind. What is this moment asking from you? What is called for? Don’t go searching in thought for that answer; don’t try to work it out in the mind. Relax, be open, be loving, be present, be willing. 

Perhaps in this moment it’s appropriate to just be totally still and soft and open, receiving the gift of life.

Or maybe you’re aware of a need, a demand, an urgency, something in your environment that calls you to move. The practice here is to let any movement come from a deeper place than the restless personality, the seeking mind that’s always seeking, always in motion, always at a certain level discontent. Here the practice is to become so still, so simple that something deeper than you moves you.

When your habits from the past, your learnings from the past are running your life in this moment, when you just stand naked in this moment so to speak, what’s true, what’s so?

Just stay with this a little longer, be curious, be soft. Let this moment be utterly new, an utterly new moment, calling for an utterly novel response.

***

As you take this practice into your day, into your life, you can just pause maybe in those moments where you’re feeling intense boredom, ennui, restlessness, maybe sadness, despair or joy and optimism, whatever you’re feeling in a given moment, notice those moments where you remember, come back to this quality: love, humbleness, and see if you can’t surprise yourself by what you do next.

The Great Gesture: A Dharma Teaching

The dharma is all about second chances. 

Traditionally, dharma means the teachings of the Buddha, but it may be even more universally a sense of universal truths that guide our lives and invite us into more and more expansion and awakening. 

So, the dharma is all about second chances. What does that mean?  

Well, in this very moment we have sensory experience. And notice how peculiar it is, whatever experience it is that you’re having — seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling, thoughts, and feelings. All of the activity within you and without you, everything that you’re aware of, constitutes sensory experience. 

The crux of Buddhist practice is this question: “How are we relating to sensory experience?” When we relate to the fullness of sensory experience with presence, with open-heartedness, and with equanimity, we experience life completely. There is no push or pull. There is a profound taste of freedom, liberation, and I would say love. When we really just completely experience the moment there is an overwhelming sense of freedom and love. 

And when we experience the present moment with less than full presence, with less than a fully open heart, with less than total openness and equanimity, then we generate craving — push and pull. We get pulled into thoughts such as, “I don’t like this moment especially. Let me see if I can struggle a little bit and create a better moment.” And then, “Oops, I’m still struggling. Let me try to create an even better moment. Oops, that’s too much of what I wanted, let me push away from that.” 

And the ego is born, that function in us that seeks incessantly and knows no peace and knows no stillness, the part of us that only knows seeking. The ego can’t quite be content with what’s arising right now and so we struggle. Someone has suggested that the ego is nothing more than the activity of struggle. 

But here’s the good news:  No matter what you did in the last moment, the world gives of itself fully in this moment right now. The meditation teacher Dan Brown translates this in the Tibetan tradition as “the great gesture,” the Mahamudra. It’s as if ultimate reality is deeply compassionate. And so if we missed it in the last moment because we were struggling and seeking, then it will give it to us again and again, and it will even offer us the signal of suffering to tell us, “Maybe don’t do that. That’s going to cause more suffering. What does it feel like when you don’t struggle?” And in a series of trial and error, in a series of millions of moments we learn and we wise up, and the more awake we become the more sensitive we become to when we’re open and when we’re not seeking. We become aware of when we’re not struggling and we’re just filled with the inherent love and freedom of the moment. We receive the great gesture of creation and we give ourselves fully to this great gesture, and in so doing we become the great gesture. 

Now, not seeking does not amount to not doing anything in life. Giving up seeking does not mean we don’t get out of bed and sit like a puddle and wait around to die because we are so blissed out and detached from the activity of the world. It’s a matter of motivation. The great gesture is when our motivation comes from a place not of lack where we are seeking to try and get full and therefore every gesture we offer in life is an expression of our own sense of lack like, “Something’s wrong, I need to struggle to make things right.” 

Instead, when we are content, when we meet the great gesture open-heartedly, we are naturally filled with a sense of fullness, with contentment, with a non-seeking mind. There are a lot of terms to describe it. But at this point we move from fullness to fullness. The motivation is not to try to heal some lack of wholeness. The motivation is to “runneth over.” Our cups runneth over and everything we do becomes an expression of abundance. Things start to go well, you could say. This is the great gesture, oh and now, no matter what happened one second ago, here it is again: the great gesture. Your experience exactly as it is. How are you meeting it?  How do you relate to it?

I noticed that today I feel heartache, and it’s painful and it’s uncomfortable. And yet there is a part of me that can just open up to it. It’s not a signal that something’s wrong. It’s a signal we could say, that I’m alive and that I’m sensitive and I’m embodied and it doesn’t have to mean anything. I can just deeply feel it and let it inform me. That’s what happens in those moments where I’m willing to receive the great gesture.

There’s a line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a great novelist who wrote this of the protagonist in Love in the Time of Cholera: “He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”  

This, if there ever was one, this is a Dharma teaching. Feel the way life obliges you to be born over and over and over again, to give birth to yourself, to give birth to yourself over and over and over again. 

And now in this moment, what are you aware of? Can you just say a deep “yes” to it at the level of sensory experience, at the level of not being in denial, like, “Yes, this is actually happening right now. I am feeling this, I am thinking this.” It’s the deep yes to inner experience. And from this deep yes, we create our lives. 

Let’s go ahead and drop down a little bit more. 

Meditation

Notice this moment. Notice the fullness of sensory experience in this moment. Allow awareness to illuminate the field of physical sensation. Feel the tingling, buzzing transparency throughout the field of physical sensation. Let go of any names you have for anything. Let go of any stories for the moment about what experience means. As if you were just born, just given birth to a new self, a self so new you know nothing of a body, body’s just a concept. You know nothing of past, of future. You don’t even know about present. Present is just another mental label we put on this unbroken stream of sensory experience, flowing through awareness. 

Notice where sensory experience lights up, tingles, vibrates, buzzes. Every moment rising, every moment passes, nothing remains, nothing remains the same. As soon as the buzzing, the tingling arises, it’s already passing. And in this moment, and in this moment, sensory experience fluctuates. It changes its impermanence and attending to the change of things, you also come into contact with the changeless, naked awareness, luminous presence, the space wide open space through which experience passes. Whoever you thought you were a moment ago is already gone, and now a new arising. The great gesture presents itself as the fullness of reality in this moment, and you are none other than this fullness, none other than this great gesture. It all just keeps flowing like a river, the creative movement of the Source, bringing entire worlds into being, gathering them back up. 

Notice what was here just one moment ago leaves no trace, is already gone, already making room for a new arising. Notice you don’t manage the change, you don’t make the change happen at all, it all just happens, it is all just happening. And you, this timeless, spaceless awareness are just totally present to it all, watching it all take shape, becoming, unbecoming, drawn back up, back into the void, from nothing to nothing. And in this moment to the great gesture, a new gesture, a new birth.

Subtle Infection: A Guided Meditation for Craving and Avoidance

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

See an introduction and guided meditation below.

***

In the late 17th century, a scientist named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek constructed a microscope powerful enough to observe living cells at the microscopic level. It was only a matter of time before other scientists elaborated on the insights based on Leeuwenhoek’s detailed observations of bacteria and realized that it wasn't the imbalance of the humors in the body that led us to getting sick.

A lot of that pre-modern understanding was out the window after this discovery. We developed germ theory, which accounted for a tremendous number of illnesses and also allowed us to come up with a cure after diagnosing the cause of illness properly. Centuries later, we have developed profound technology around healing infections. 

Now, there was a kind of proto-scientist who came along thousands of years before Leeuwenhoek. And in a different way, this scientist observed another kind of infection at, we could say figuratively, the microscopic level. This proto-scientist I speak of was Prince Siddhartha — the Buddha. And what the Buddha recognized when he brought the figurative microscope of awareness to the microscopic level of his sensory experience was another kind of infection. He also gave a name to it, he called it taṇhā, and this meant in his language thirst or sometimes translated as craving. What the Buddha recognized was that most of the time, most often in human experience, when we look really closely at what's happening moment to moment, there's a kind of craving, there's a kind of thirst for not feeling the way we're actually feeling right now in this moment.

This craving is a kind of attitude or a disposition towards moment to moment experience that says, “I don't like what's happening now. I want something else to be happening.” The Buddha realized that this thirst, this craving was the root of all suffering and that if we could uproot this fundamental thirst that we would have the experience of being Buddhas — we would be joyful, we would be free, we would be full and content at the deepest level of our being, realizing directly that nothing is lacking. 

So, this infection in human life and human experience comes in pairs. What I mean by that is taṇhā takes two different forms. The one we could name seeking, and if seeking could speak, it would say something moment to moment in human life like, “What I'm experiencing right now is not enough. There's something else. I could be feeling something better if I just knew how to feel it, so I'm going to strive and struggle and do everything I can to feel that thing.” I imagine that seeking's evil twin is avoiding and if avoiding could speak, avoiding would say something like, “What I'm experiencing in this moment is not okay. It's not okay that I'm feeling what I'm feeling right now. I need to do something. I need to do anything to not be feeling this.”

In the grips of these infections we live out our human lives. And when we engage in a contemplative or mindfulness practice, we bring the microscope of awareness to the minute detail of our sensory experience and see it with fuller resolution. We see these twins of seeking and avoiding clearly, and we end up seeing through them. It's as if shining the light of awareness on these particular bacteria were like beaming a high intensity ultraviolet light into them, thereby nuking them, zapping them. It's that quality where the intensity of our awareness bakes out these bacteria that infect human life, these bacteria that rob us of our innate sense of freedom and joy. It's really powerful. 

We all have high-powered UV lights. We just were born with them. We are that. We are awareness, and we can bring this awareness to bear on our experience. We can go deep into sensory experience and see where the infection is, see where the resistance, the struggle, the seeking, the avoiding, and the craving are. And as we do that more and more, moment to moment when we get real about what we're avoiding, what we're craving, what we're struggling against, a deeper part of us, deeper than the personality, deeper than the thinking mind, deeper than the physical body. A profound quality of presence and stillness just sets in. And when we taste this stillness and this presence, we get insight into what true health feels like. The diagnosis, the prescription, the regimen of the great physician has made us whole. 

At the heart of the meditative and contemplative traditions is a realization that whatever happens to us — whatever the content of our experience may be — our response and relationship to our experience is what's paramount. We can't control the content of experience in a significant way. The brain will just think of the next thought, and then we'll be aware of that thought and have an opportunity to have a certain relationship with that thought. Experiencing is flowing, is happening all the time, and therefore we have an opportunity every single moment to be in the right relationship with our experience.

So let's work with it. Let's do this. Let's practice. Let's zap. 

Meditation Practice

Take a moment to settle into a place and a posture that is comfortable, and relax. Soften. No need to rush this process. You can just set up the right conditions for yourself and allow the body to unwind in its own time, according to its own rhythms.

Gather awareness in the field of physical sensation that is flowing, that is cascading, that is changing moment to moment, and turn on your high-powered beams as you do this, bring the fullness and clarity of awareness to the field of physical sensation. And notice anywhere you detect any strain, any belief that you need to feel something that you’re not feeling right now — that you need to seek, you need to strive.

And similarly, notice any belief or deep-seated attitude that what you’re feeling in this moment is not okay, that something you’re feeling right now is not okay and you need to escape it. 

And as you detect different layers of struggle in the body, you can see clearly that these metaphorical infections are in fact human experience. You can just see them for what they are. Shine all of the light, the heat of your awareness on these two qualities and imagine the heat and light of awareness just baking them out at a microscopic level of cells and tissue — bones, organs, joints — until you are simply left with a naked quality of stillness. No seeking, no pushing, no pulling, just this experience and all of its fullness and its pain and its pleasure is complete. 

At the level of pure presence and awareness, you can just totally be this experience, this arising. Open up the scope of your focus to the flow of feeling, of emotion, of thinking. And just notice what you detect. If there's any resistance, any struggle, any subtle belief that what you’re feeling right now emotionally is not okay, that you need to escape from it. Or there's some way that you should be feeling that you’re not feeling right now, and you need to strive for it and go find that. 

And when you identify these subtle strains of struggle, you can just fall into the stillness, fall into a sense of transparency, recognizing that these beliefs, these forms of resistance are insubstantial, not ultimately true. 

Pervasive in human experience is the subtle belief that what I'm experiencing in this moment isn't okay. I need to go seeking for something more, something better. I need to avoid the unpleasantness that's already here. Don't believe it. Melt through it, bake through it. Include even the sense of struggle and then the even deeper sense of radical okayness.

Stay with it. If you notice the mind active and busy, that's often a clue that there's something uncomfortable in the body that we're avoiding. Stay deep in sensation, deep in feeling, and be willing to bring the heat to the intensity of awareness, to sensation, and see clearly that there is absolutely nothing arising in this moment. 

If your fundamental relationship to experience in this moment is one of honesty, one of openness, one of freedom, what you will find is this attitude will give birth to freedom and openness in the next moment and the next moment and the next moment. Touch into the freedom you are in this moment and you will touch into a freedom with no beginning and no end.

***

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

Divinity School: A Meditation on Hardship

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

***

“Most negative states are the result of frustration — the frustration of desire, expectation, and love.” — Kabir Edmund Helminski

Scan your body, your heart, your mind, your world. What negative states are you aware of? If you're like me, you're probably aware of a lot of negative states. It's a challenging time, one replete with frustration. 

So just look around for a moment. Ask yourself what has been frustrated? What is being frustrated? Maybe you'd like to be working more than you're currently working and that's frustrating. Maybe you were expecting to accomplish things in this promising new decade that will prove challenging with the current global health crisis. Maybe you find relationships challenged in this time either starved for attention because it's difficult to get FaceTime with somebody if not impossible, or maybe it's too much FaceTime, too much proximity, and that's its own kind of challenge.

At any rate, notice any negative states present in you and treat that as frustration. Negative states arise because our desires are frustrated, our expectations are frustrated, love is frustrated. 

Take another moment with that. I'm not going to tell you to perform some magical mindful operation on your frustration, on your negative states, other than to just pour some spaciousness into the state. If you're feeling angry, resentful, cynical, hopeless, any negative state at all, allow yourself to totally feel it, but with some spaciousness in it and around it. You might say, “Okay, I'm going to embody this a little bit more and get to know it. I'm not going to turn from it, but turn toward it. Move into it.” 

The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was said to have spoken these words: “Every prophet is a shepherd once, for God would not bestow the divine mantle on one unschooled in hardship. A long while I was a shepherd that I might gather calmness and fortitude.” 

So here we are, all of the human race, in the school of hardship. And no doubt we are faced with frustration, feeling challenged — negative states arising and in the words of a prophet, God intends to bestow the divine mantle on us. But first we must be schooled in hardship. 

So, what life is bringing to you right now and what qualities will you gather in this school of hardship? Really drop into this for a moment and feel this question resonate throughout your being. In order to receive the divine mantle, in order to become what you're meant to become, what virtues, what qualities will you gather? Feel in your heart, trust your inner knowing and intuition. These challenging times are smelting out the dross and you transmuting your lead and the gold. What qualities are already present, not somewhere in the distant future, but right now? Calmness, fortitude, humor, patients, forgiveness, faith. 

Just for the sake of argument right now, imagine that the sum total of your life — everything you feel — everything in your awareness in your whole being in this moment is not random, but it's a kind of divinity school, one of profound sorrow, but one of equally equally profound joy. And I imagine it took intensive preparation to be accepted into the school, and it's like a dream come true to be here and you're just full of an energy of discovery and gratitude for this opportunity to have been admitted into this elite school. And of course you're going to be on time to every class. And of course you're going to give every single assignment, every task, every experience of the school, your entire being, all of your attention, all of your heart, because you recognize how important the learning is, how important the opportunity is, what qualities where you cultivate and refine in this school. It's okay if you don't get an answer right away. Allow yourself to just grow in the dark and wait and trust. And if you do pick up on a golden thread and you do sense a quality already coming through, already rising within you, just feel the goodness of it. 

Feel how transcendent and sublime equality it is and see clearly that if you could have all of the fame, all of the fortune, all of the power and pleasure of the entire world, that all of those material comforts would pale in comparison to the wealth of just fully embodying the divine qualities already manifesting through you. Faith, humility, gentleness, peace, whatever it is that comes through you uniquely just trust it and then give this quality good soil to grow in.

Don't rush to reorganize your normal busy-ness. Just stay open, stay porous in this practice. Intention always guides and gives shape to attention. Whatever qualities you intend to cultivate, to gather in the school of hardship, your awareness will naturally be primed, will naturally see new opportunities to cultivate these very qualities. So in the good guidance of Kabir Helminski, the prophet Muhammad, and all of the innumerable mothers and fathers, the spiritual giants and mentors and guides who support us and fold us in their arms at this time, we move forward in faith and in practice. 

***

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

Awareness Deficit Disorder

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

***

Imagine you're at your favorite cafe. You order your favorite drink, perhaps a latte or a chai tea or a kombucha open tap, and you have to carry it across the room to an open table. You don't want to spill it. 

Just imagine yourself in this scenario, and notice in this scenario how attention is working. It's doing two things simultaneously. That is, we don't want to spill the beverage so we’re focused on it, but simultaneously and often unconsciously, our peripheral awareness is also scanning the environment for potential obstacles. 

The way modern neuroscience breaks down our attentional system is into what I call simply focused awareness and open awareness. One aspect of your attention is paying attention to something — presumably these words on this page. In the meantime, your peripheral awareness is aware at some level of the environment around you. It can be quite an unconscious affair until suddenly you hear a car screeching outside and your attention breaks from this page and you're wondering if there's something you need to check on outside.

When you're carrying your beverage across the room in a cafe, you're paying close attention to the drink, not wanting to spill. And in your peripheral awareness you're scanning the environment for obstacles. Is there oncoming traffic? Is the floor uneven, uneven? Do I have to walk around to plant or weave through some chairs to get to my little nook in the corner where I can pull out my novel or my laptop? That kind of thing. 

So why am I talking about attention and peripheral awareness? Well, when we don't pay attention to how we pay attention, when we don't consciously cultivate these two sides of the same coin, we end up with a condition that John Yates, a great mindfulness teacher, calls awareness deficit disorder. We all know about attention deficit disorder. This quality of mind where our attention just won't stay put on the same object. It's bouncing around, bouncing around. We feel hyperactive and can't just settle in. 

But Yates points out that really many of us have a kind of undiagnosed awareness deficit disorder, meaning we don't make full use of our peripheral awareness or open awareness. And why is that worth being aware of? Well, let's stick with the simple cafe example. If I get really good at using my peripheral awareness and I'm able to scan the environment for any potential problems, any obstacles that could get between me and my destination, rather than those problems, surprise-attacking me in my focused awareness where I'm just trained on my coffee cup, I'll actually see those problems coming. I can anticipate them and I can skillfully work around them. And this is how life works and this is how meditation works. If we really engage our peripheral awareness, if we learn how to keep our awareness really open and spacious, even as we're focusing intently on our object of meditation, then we're less surprised by the distractions that creep in.

We can take care of the distractions before they become problems. In other words, and this is according to Yates, a good functional definition of mindful awareness is the optimal functioning of attention and peripheral awareness, simultaneous focused awareness and open awareness. 

If the cafe metaphor is not rich enough for you, I've got one more. My friend Sally is a physical trainer who is really good at what she does. She pointed out to me that she has a lot of clients who want washboard abs, but they, even though they work their abs a lot, don't quite get that finished look. They're so focused on the crunch, they don't realize that elongating the muscle is equally important for toning the abs. So when we want to build muscle we think, “Okay, heavy weights, lots of reps, crunch, crunch, crunch.” But we don't think necessarily about fully extending and relaxing the muscle, maximizing the range over which it's doing work.

It's a similar principle. We want to get good concentration, we want to build mindfulness, and we don't realize that a crucial skill in mindfulness is to learn to let awareness relax and get really big and spacious. When we do this, when we get good at this skill, when we really exercise the attentional system in the way it was designed to work, we find that we're able to focus really intently on what we need to in a given moment and our peripheral awareness is keying us in on maybe the next thing coming and what we'll need to pay attention to next. So we have the experience in life of being in a flow state and knowing what to pay attention to moment to moment and knowing when to let go and being able to respond optimally to each situation. That's powerful and that's mindfulness practice. 

We're going to do this right now. We're going to practice paying attention in a focused way and simultaneously being aware of the open quality of awareness. Go ahead and get comfortable.

Start Meditation

Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a big breath. Take a couple of big breaths and just let out, just extending that exhale signals the body to relax, letting us drop in. 

Find a posture where you can be comfortable and soft yet also alert. Whether you're sitting, standing, walking, see to it that you have an upright spine. An upright spine increases alertness in your system. 

And as we get underway here, I'm just going to invite you to attend to the entire physical environment, the entire world around you right now, and this includes physical sensations within the body, emotions, thought forms, all of it. Just let your awareness be wide open, not focusing on any one thing. Taking it all in. Feeling how spacious awareness is. 

Then any moment if you catch yourself kind of clinging to something or paying attention to it, you can just notice that and let go, coming back to open awareness sounds around you. Smells, textures, maybe your bare feet barefoot in the grass right now and you're aware of the touch of clothes on your skin, the temperature of the air, the sounds of nature, sounds of your house or your apartment wherever you live. 

Just be open to the environment, wide open. And now I want to invite you to let the environment fade into the background of awareness just a little bit while you start to focus on physical sensation. 

When we practice this way, you're not supposed to feel a certain way. Nothing in the world needs to start happening or stop. Everything is just in the background. While in the foreground you're paying attention to the flow of sensation like a river flowing between two banks, sensations of the body, just flow and flow, endlessly flow. 

If at any point any event in peripheral awareness starts to move into your field of focus, kind of replacing the focus of physical sensation, you can just notice it. Notice distractions creeping in and just relaxing, resetting your intention to flow with the sensations of the body, letting everything else be in the background and we can tighten up our attention even more now from the entire physical body to just the torso. Really attending to the expansion and contraction of breath through the torso, letting everything else in all of the world and all of experience just be in the background. You don't have to stop it. You don't have to do anything to it. Just let it happen. In the background of awareness and the foreground, you're just feeling this flow of breath rolling through you like a wave.

Feel the sensations of breathing in and how they're distinct from the sensations of breathing out. Let awareness be open. You're not just trying to be aware of the breath. You're focusing on the expansion and contraction of the breath while staying totally open to all of life, all of the world. Just appreciate this dynamic equilibrium. When awareness is open and relaxed, events can just flow and it supports our paying closer attention to what we choose to focus on.

And when we anchor our attention on a particular object like the breath, it supports the opening up of our peripheral awareness. These two systems support each other. They're two sides of the same coin. So often when we practice mindfulness, we just struggle with ourselves. We have this idea that we shouldn't have thoughts in our mind. We should be feeling something different than our breath. Oftentimes the problem is an awareness deficit disorder. We're not relaxing enough in awareness and just letting things happen.

Take just another moment to let everything flow. Let your awareness be wide open as the sky letting everything just arise and pass as it does as you stay trained on the expansion and contraction of the breath. So the steadiness of this focus for the pleasure of being embodied and breathing. Feel the constant unbroken awareness moment to moment. I appreciate that. Whether awareness, focus or open or both. And it's always both. It doesn't take any effort to be aware. You're already aware. Awareness is simply what you are. 

***

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