DSC Books: Seven Days: A Journey Into Awareness - Days One to Three

Day Two continued (Section 18)

Barbara: We’re going to meditate but I’m going to talk a little bit about sleepiness first. Working with any of the difficult mind and body states we encounter in meditation, with restlessness, sleepiness, boredom, strong desire or strong states of negativity and aversion, physical pain-the first thing to remember is that they are not problems. You don’t have to get into a war with them. If that particular state of mind or body is there, it’s there. We’ve got to be honest with our experience.

You see me sitting here with my legs stretched out. This is not how one traditionally sits when one teaches, but I have arthritis in one foot and if I keep it bent under me for a long time, it swells a lot. The doctors say that it’s dangerous to allow that. So, I’ve got to stretch my feet out sometimes, then can fold them back in. I have to be honest with my body.

If you are sleepy, you are sleepy. Sleepiness is hard, because you can’t really meditate when you’re asleep. You’ve got to be awake. There are different ways to work with the sleepiness without getting into a war with it. First of all, if you’re feeling sleepy and it’s eleven o’clock at night and it’s been a long day, you’re sleepy. Go to bed. If you’re sleepy early in the day, you can ask yourself, “Is this resistance? Am I pulling back from meditating, using sleepiness to avoid meditating?” If there’s not really a logical reason for your sleepiness, you just got a good night’s sleep and it’s eight o’clock in the morning but as soon as you sit, you fall asleep, that may be resistance.

You can work on that in some of the ways Aaron talked about this morning, observing fear, for example. On a very practical level, if you’re falling asleep, simply stand up. Just right here where you’re sitting, stand up. It’s very hard to fall asleep when you’re standing up. You can open your eyes. That will help. You can go outside or put some cold water on your face.

We do a walking meditation. That can be helpful when there’s sleepiness. There are over seventy of us here in a small space, so, we’re not going to practice formal walking meditation today, but I’ll describe it. Tomorrow we’ll go outside and do it. It’s similar to the standing meditation we’ve already done.

Walking meditation can be fast or slow. Instead of the breath being the primary object, the feeling of the weight on your feet, being in your body, and feeling yourself standing becomes the primary object. Instead of noting the inhalation and the exhalation, you simply note stepping, stepping, stepping, staying with each step and the touch of feet on ground. As you take each step, you know you’re taking a step.

Then, you can slow it down. Concentrate on the feet, lifting, moving, placing, shifting my weight, lifting, moving, placing. And then weight shifts again, shifting. You start with a faster walk, step, step, step, step, and then you can start to let it slow down. Walk just a short distance, maybe twenty feet, back and forth, and back and forth. This is not a walk to see the scenery. This is literally walking meditation. Stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping, and then, as it slows down, you might slow just to lifting, placing, lifting, placing, and then even slower. Lifting, moving, placing, shift, lifting, move, place, shift.

(Barbara demonstrates this.)

You can do that in place of sitting meditation. It’s wonderful when you’re sleepy. It’s also helpful when you’re restless. Sometimes when there’s so much anxiety or tension that you really can’t sit, walking meditation is very helpful. Walking meditation is not just a replacement for sitting meditation when you’re sleepy or when you’re restless. It’s a practice in it’s own right. It’s very easy to stay focused because your feet are moving. There’s something very specific, like the breath coming in and out, but even more specific.

If a thought arises as you’re walking, note “thinking, thinking.” Be aware. Here is “remembering, remembering” or “planing, planning.” If something captures a physical sense, such as seeing a bird in your path, note “seeing, seeing,” then as whatever has arisen changes or dissolves you resume the walking.

Here in this room we can’t do walking. We need more space, but if you’re sleepy, you can stand up.

From Thailand comes the story of an Asian teacher who taught in a monastery that had a well. When his students complained about sleepiness, he would tell them to meditate on the edge of the well so they wouldn’t fall asleep! We don’t have wells in our homes, but we can sit at the top of the stairs. Get off your comfortable chair and go sit on the top step. It will keep you awake. So, there are different techniques that we can use with sleepiness that help dispel it. The important thing is not to get into a war with it.

The most valuable technique I’ve learned for sleepiness is, just as with anger or any other mind or body state, to go into it. You start to observe the sleepiness. “How does sleepiness feel in my body? Is it pleasant? Is it unpleasant? What happens in my body? Is there a relaxation or increasing tension with the sleepiness? What’s really happening?”

You start to get interested in the sleepiness. The interest wakes you up. When sleepiness is not a form of resistance, part of the sleepiness is simply the feeling, “There’s nothing happening. I’m tired.” We want some entertainment! If a band came marching through playing music, I’d wake up. “That’s interesting. There go some elephants, lions and tigers. Wow! That’s interesting. I’m not sleepy anymore. They’re gone. There’s nothing there but a wall, nothing to watch, nothing to do. I’m sleepy.” Sleepiness can be its own marching band with lions and tigers. It can be fascinating. Watch it and then you’re not sleepy anymore.

If none of that works, simply go and take a nap. Be kind to yourself. After you take your nap, come back and meditate, and if you start to fall asleep again, then you know it’s resistance. Then, shift to walking meditation or something that will keep you awake while you meditate until the resistance opens a bit.

We’re going to sit now for a half hour. Afterwards I’ll answer more of your questions about sleepiness and talk more about working with other difficult mind states. If you feel sleepy, feel free to open your eyes. Simply look down at the floor in front of you or look at the wall. Or stand up, simply shifting to the standing practice.

There are basically four positions in which we can meditate, sitting, standing, walking and lying down. So, if you’re standing, you’re still meditating. No difference. If you’re still nodding off and that drowsiness is there even when you’re standing, go into it. Look for any judgment. Just be there with sleepiness. What is sleepiness? Investigate it.

(Meditation practice.)

May all beings be happy. (Bell)
May all beings find the healing that they seek. (Bell)
May all beings everywhere find perfect peace. (Bell)

(Stretch)

Question: When I try to meditate, I find myself trying to find another state of mind. I compare it to trying to view an optical illusion. I feel like I’m trying to get into somewhere that I’m not in. I don’t know whether you really need to enter another state of mind when you meditate or if this is just what I’m doing.

Barbara: To meditate is just to be present with what is, whatever arises in mind and body experience. The meditative state of mind is a mind that doesn’t have to get entangled with what has arisen. It’s spacious. It isn’t something you have to seek. In fact you can’t create it. But it is there naturally and with practice you open to it.

There are many altered states you may experience in meditation but these are not a goal of meditation. If you experience such a state it may be very blissful. It’s not helpful to get lost in that bliss and attached to it, any more than it’s helpful to get lost in difficult states and wage war with them.

I do move into a subtly different mind state but I’m not grasping at it because it seems prettier or more peaceful or holier. It’s that spacious mind I just mentioned. I can’t get into it if I’m grabbing at it. Like the other view in the optical illusion is always there even if we don’t see it, this spacious mind is always there. I allow myself to open to it. The difficulty is because there’s dissatisfaction in our lives, we want to get into this spacious mind state which is peaceful, but the more that we grab at it the more we create a duality that says “this is ugly or unpleasant, that is beautiful.” The more tension we create for ourselves, the further we find ourselves from that peace.

Where I find that peace is when I really enter into the experience of, in Aaron’s terminology, “Nothing is other than.” This view arises out of attention to conditioned arising, that everything in the phenomenal world arises because conditions are present for it to arise and ceases when those conditions cease. Nothing exists independently. Everything is just passing by and there is no need to cling to anything. The rose dies and rots into the soil out of which the new rose grows. So why cling to the rose?

I start to see everything becoming something else. For example, looking out the window now, there’s blue sky and there are clouds. If I said to myself, “The sky’s got to be blue. I’ve got to just have an experience of blue sky,” I’m going to be miserable, because it could be ninety-nine percent blue, but if one cloud comes through, then I’m angry and tense. But if I can just focus on that one little patch of blue and let the clouds come and go as they like, then I enter a very peaceful state of mind. It is a different state of mind. Mind quiets down and stops getting in a dialogue with the clouds. Does that answer your question?

Question: Is levitation, flying, connected to meditation? I would like to know your point of view about this.

Barbara: In meditation, we start to really understand the connection between mind and body. When we understand the nature of matter and how matter responds to mind, we come to control our minds more and find that we can do many things that we didn’t think we could do. They are tricks. Levitation would be an example of that. So it’s possible but it’s not why we’re meditating. Meditation can lead us into many supernatural kinds of skills, but they’re simply by-products of meditation and they’re not something that I would ever want anybody to focus on, to meditate only with the desire to learn how to do this or that trick.

Questions? I would especially like to hear questions about meditation and meditation process, and also some of the things we’ve touched upon, such as work with heavy emotions, unworthiness, dealing with restlessness or sleepiness.

Question: About meditation, if you have to focus on respiration then how do you get to the problems you have if you can’t think about them?

Barbara: We don’t focus on our problems in the way that we do with the conceptual mind that’s always thinking. Discursive mind latches onto problems with a “Let’s fix it” mentality. When we’re sitting here, not meditating, we can think about something and try to figure it out. This is a very different process.

When we’re focused on our breath, what arises naturally in us will come to the fore. We all have certain tendencies. For example, some people have a tendency to be very controlling. They find that when they focus on their breath, they want to control their breath. When a thought arises, they want to control the thought. What they start to see is the whole nature of being controlling. As they look deeply into control they start to understand that that tendency arose out of fear and they see how the tendency to control has contracted their life. Slowly, there is increasing freedom from the need to be controlling as we test it in meditation and say, “Maybe I could just let go, just a little bit, and a little bit more, and a little bit more.”

Another kind of tendency is judgment. Some people are very judgmental of everything. The neighbor they’re sitting next to keeps scratching. “Why is she doing that?” It gets quiet again. “Ahhh.” And then somebody on the other side shifts their chair and it squeaks. “Why are they moving?” We start to notice that judgment is arising. We see how with each contact, “hearing,” judgment follows. We may feel the fear that nourishes judgment.

We work with what we call choiceless awareness. By that I mean that we let ourselves be aware of whatever is present without any preference that says, “I’ll be aware of this one, but not that one. That’s a bad one.” We just allow ourselves to be fully present, so we can watch a tendency like control or judgment, and slowly, we take it outside the sitting. We start to see, in our lives, how judgmental we are and how narrow and tight that feels, how uncomfortable it is to be that judgmental.

We’re not trying to get rid of being judgmental. We’re not attacking it. We just have a new insight about how judgmental we are and maybe how it relates to control and to feeling helpless. The thought may arise, “If she’s moving and it’s making noise and disturbing me, I feel helpless. I feel invaded.” So, then we might start to watch that more in our daily life, how reactive we are when we don’t feel safe. Without trying to change anything, we just notice more and more what it feels like not to feel safe. Who doesn’t feel safe? We can ask ourselves when we’re not feeling safe, “In this moment, am I really not safe or is this old? Is this just some conditioned habit from childhood?” And again, we let go of it a little bit more, and a little bit more. But there is no force involved, no judgment that says “I should do this or that.”

So, it’s not a thinking process at all. There are insights and then we get quiet again and we’re just there, just with our breath, with what we hear, with what we feel, with what we think, and so on. Does that answer your question?

Question: I find myself perplexed with the labeling. I got a thought and then I spent a long time trying to label it. I say, “It’s this. No, it must be this.” And then, “Oh my God, I have to stop; I can’t be thinking all this.” So, then I go back to my breath and forget all about it, so how can I use it?

Barbara: Can you just look, then, at what it is that needs to be so precise? So many of us are perfectionists. We’ve got to get it just right. “Perfectionist, perfectionist.” Smile at yourself and say, “Now, here’s this tendency that I’ve got to be just right. What’s pushing that? What if I don’t get it just right? Are people going to judge me? Who’s going to judge me? Are my parents going to judge me? Am I going to judge me? Where does that need to be perfect come from? Is it okay if I’m not perfect? Can I give myself permission not to be so precise?” Whatever comes up, work with it.

With the labeling itself, it is not necessary to be precise. You do know what the experience is. The label is just a tool to help you be present with the experience.