So this morning I'm going to introduce the suta and just remind us about what mindfulness is because we're here at so much that kind of forget I think. And then get us going on the practice that we'll do in the shrine room. This might be a little bit longer than most morning sessions just because we're trying to get oriented to the whole thing. So if it's a little bit longer, don't worry, we're not going to spend loads of time in this kind of talky format on this retreat. Yeah. So we'll just get everything set up today. So the anapana sati suta that we'll be using means mindfulness while breathing in and out. And everyone here has been introduced to the mindfulness of breathing and the four stage practice. And we can think of what we're doing on this retreat with this practice as expanding from that base of that practice. So you don't need to throw that out at all. It's just going to help you take that relationship with the breath you've got for this lifetime that you can remember anyway. Maybe some of you remember the breath from previous lifetime, but just work with that a little bit more in different ways maybe that are helpful. The Thai teacher Pudadasu Bikhu who wrote that book mindfulness with breathing says that actually the meaning of anapana sati is quite broad. To recall anything with sati or mindfulness while breathing in and breathing out. So to recall anything, to be aware of anything as we're breathing in and out. And for this life, we're breathing in and out all the time, right? And then one day that'll be it. We'll be one out breath and we'll see what happens after that. So the suta, the anapana sati suta is a record of the teaching on the mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness while breathing in and out on a certain occasion. It seems as if he'd already taught this practice before this occasion because in the way the suta's set up, some people are already doing the practice. He's with what we can estimate to be about 400 of his disciples on a rainy season retreat for three months. Yeah, so that might make this retreat seem quite small actually. It's with 400 people. And it's really quite moving. We'll hear the whole setup tonight in the shrine room, but they've been meditating for three months and he's so moved by the sincerity of their practice. He tells them how sincere their practice is and how stunning that is really, that he just decides to stay an extra month. It's worth it to stay with these people next month and give them more teachings. And more people come because he's staying this extra month and they come from all around the country for this extra month of teaching. And on that extra month of teaching, he decides to give them this teaching on working with the breath. And at this point, we can imagine there's about a thousand people have come to hear this fourth month teaching. So that's the context. I think what's really lovely about it is that he's teaching this particular suta at night. Sometimes he would teach at night if the moon was bright enough, so they're all under the moonlight. A thousand people just getting this instruction. It's a really beautiful scene. Yeah. And often in Buddhism, there's this evocation that we're under the same moon. It's like that teaching is that close to us that just like we're under the moon now, not that far away, these teachings were given under a moon 2500 years ago, not that far away. There's trees that are older than that. So in a way, we can find the closeness of this teaching. So that's why we've got Shaky Muni quite prominent as an element of the retreat. It's not to forget these are words of an enlightened being, just trying to convey to people. It's a very direct teaching, trying to convey to them how they can liberate their mind and get access to that state that he's been able to find access to. And he's just trying to sit quite directly to them in what boils down to sixteen instructions from the Buddha. And what amazes me is that when I practice this, is that we can practice it just as if we were right there with them, receiving that instruction. I had a little glimpse of this, there's a cultural evening, and someone was playing a piece. I forgot who it was, it might have been Schubert, I can't remember. And someone was flipping the sheet music for him, so he was using the sheet music a little bit. And it's amazing, he's creating this whole world, he's accessing this world of experience, which is not maybe the exact same experience as a composer had, but the composer was eluding to some realm of experience. And then hundreds of years later, through these notes, he's entering into that experience, yeah, through the sheet music, so I think it's kind of similar with at least sixteen instructions. And it's not just these dry dots on a paper, it's actually what it's trying to point us to. Okay, so the thing he says before he gives the instruction is, mindfulness of in and out breathing when developed and pursued is of great fruit, of great benefit. Mindfulness of in and out breathing when developed and pursued brings the four foundations of mindfulness to perfection. The four foundations of mindfulness when developed and pursued bring the seven factors of awakening to their culmination. The seven factors of awakening when developed and pursued, perfect, clear insight and liberation. So all that means, practicing in sixteen steps gets this whole thing rolling. I've had quite a strong feeling with us here particularly, people have already been practicing, there's already something rolling in all of you, there's already quite strong momentum in your practice of the Dharma. And these sixteen contemplations just join that, there's some momentum here, quite strong, I think, rolling towards liberation or open-heartedness or whatever, you would call it, I mean traditionally enlightenment, right, but whatever, however we relate to that. So basically this means that practicing, nana-pana-sati is a means to complete enlightenment. And as such, it's both a calming or sama-ta practice and what could be called an insight or vapasana-bhavana practice, yeah, that help us to develop wisdom. Okay, so the heart of the sita contains the actual step-by-step instructions, so sort of beforehand we have a whole scene that I've been describing and then we get down to the pith teaching in the middle. And the sixteen contemplations are a structure for Dharma of a child, which is one of these seven factors of awakening. We know that there's the possibility of doing some investigative work in meditation or vapasana-bhavana work, but sometimes it's not that clear how to do it, you know, so we go trying to investigate our experience and nature of reality and we can feel a bit lost in what we're doing, I think, sometimes it can feel like I'm not quite sure how to approach this. So the sixteen steps just give us things we can actually do, quite specific instructions, so then we can relax about what we should be doing or could be doing and just kind of enjoy what we're learning from it. So they're practical, actionable meditation instructions very directly, which is kind of unusual in the polycan in the original record of the Buddha's life, we get a lot more about the story, we don't get that many places where it's just like a direct set of instructions for meditation that you could just do, but in this utah we have that. And there's also a description of a process by which the awareness of the breath sets in motion is kind of unfolding, moving towards liberation, clarity, kindness, those kinds of ways of being. The instructions are organized by the four foundations of mindfulness or sati patanas, which are the body, sometimes translated as kaya, sometimes as rupa, feelings, vedana, mind, chitta, and this fourth category, dhammas, which is mostly translated as mental objects, but I've always found that really unsaved factory, and in Analiya's new book, he goes into that actually. It's a little bit more like mental objects, meaning ways you can look at your experience to investigate the nature of reality, so it's like the nature of reality behind or that's actually happening all the time, as everything we experience is going on. And these four foundations are emphasized because they're always there, they're just one way, it's not the only absolute category, a way that we could kind of look at our experience, so that we could get a little bit more of a handle on it, but they're just happening all the time, we could say they make up our experience, you know, as such, for those of you that know a lot about different Buddhist categories, and like the five scandas, it's just like another scheme like that, really, and there's ways that they map onto each other. So they're happening all the time, it's our lack of understanding of this experience that leads to our suffering, our reactive suffering. Cho can truly used to say we're a nuisance in the world, sounds a little bit less dire, but we're not wise in them, we haven't gotten friendly enough with that experience to really understand what's going on for us and to be wise with it and kind with it. So because they're right there, they're emphasized very much in Buddhism, and it's a rich field to work with them, yes, through working with them that we can undo all those tight knots of confusion and contraction and disfilling, that desatisfactoriness, dukkha. So for each of the four foundations, there are four instructions, yes, so four on the body, four on feeling, four on the mind, and four on how to investigate this deeper nature of reality, so that gives us 16, and there's one very technical term, each group of four is a tetrad, so I'll use that one, it's not a very poetic word, but it's a tetrad, body tetrad, feeling tetrad, and so on. Of all the 16 instructions, only the first two are exclusively on the breath, and then the rest, then we start to open out into our broader experience. But the breath is always there, it's not like we're going to stop breathing to do the other 14 contemplations, you wouldn't get very far. So it's just there as a help to anchor us, and to the degree we've used, the mindfulness of breathing as a somatop practice, I think we have that experience of the breath just being there as an aid to being present, when we can remember. So just a general note about each of these 16 contemplations. The word contemplation, just to understand that a little more, I'm going to use a lot of polywords, just because I think it helps to get back to the original word, and I'm not a poly scholar, so you're going to get not only an American accent, but a New Jersey American accent on all this poly, right? So if you're concerned about that, you probably should go see someone who can tell you how to actually pronounce it correctly. That's my caveat, turn around. So contemplation is anupasana, which is the poly, and it means looking at viewing, contemplating, consideration, or realization. So I think the important thing here is it's not pondering in this kind of very heady way that's cut off from your experience, yeah, it's actually experiencing the contemplating that comes from experiencing. It's not intellectually theorizing about things in lieu of experiencing what's happening now. So it doesn't happen outside of what's actually happening right now, so it's not like, wow, if I could just get rid of these thoughts, then I could do this practice. And in a way it's very important, I'll say a little bit more about the attitude towards practice, but it is what's happening now. It's not what I think should be happening, so that I could be doing this right. Very important. And the contemplations are a way of learning from our experience. And an honest, which probably means fearless, non-equisitive, motivation to just learn is the key to practicing a suta. So you don't need to leave with a notebook sheet of the things you've realized. Suzuki Roshi had a great from Zen Center in San Francisco at a great teaching. You know, beginners mind. He said, "In the expert's mind, there are a few possibilities, and in the beginner's mind, there are many." I hate to tell you. I think we're all pretty deluded right now, considering that if we want to learn something new, we've got to let go of all those deluded frameworks. Sometimes I translate contemplations more as instructions. I like that a little bit more because it connects me back to the Buddha, just sort of saying, "Try this. Try this. It might help." And they're all very process-oriented. They're not goal-oriented. It's really interesting. If you look at the language, Tich Nhat Hanh points out that nowhere does it talk in terms of getting into any particular state, like now entering into this tiana, it doesn't say that at all. At the same time, the things we give attention to help us stabilize the mind so that we can look at our experience a bit more. But there's no goal of saying, "Well, not until you're in this particular state. Can you do anything?" It's very process-oriented. And that process is how to come into more and more directly what's happening. So if you study the sati patana sita, there's total consistency between these. They're not at odds, but the anapana satis are a way to practice the sati patana teaching, which is quite broad. It's not necessarily given as one set of meditation instructions. And there's many ways you can practice with sati patana, so this is just one of them. But I find its specificity very elegant and doable. So we will work through the sixteen contemplations over the course of the retreat. And if you read them at face value, they're not seen that exciting, or they might seem a little bit opaque. Like they're there and it's kind of hard to see what's through them. But we'll explore and unpack each one, we'll go into each one together. So hopefully something of what the Buddha was trying to point to will start to come alive for us. And each contemplation, it's just really bottomless in terms of how far it goes. So it's not like you'll do the first one on this retreat, then that'll be it for one. And you'll never do one again. Figured out one. We can just keep learning and learn from it. And that's something I've just really, I've been in awe of actually, I think, because now my long solitary has passed several years, been using this as the main framework. Also, just with other people, I think that's one of the things I was saying about this doing our meditation review process in a group, just what other people are touching into. Sometimes that's just been like this whole new world of the nature of being human just opens up from what someone else is discovering. So they're just really limitless. The succession of instructions do describe a sequence of cause and effect. There's a pattern of conditionality in there. Yeah, a certain strand, kind of a nirvana pattern. Yeah. A liberative pattern. And so practicing each paves the way for the next, it almost come just grows out of, it's like branches kind of growing out of each other. And then you get the beauty of the whole tree. So the show a path by which wisdom will arise. And while the instructions are quite specific, it's more like as a whole it shows a pattern. So it may not happen. It's always organic, so we could not have these instructions and if we really just came on to what was happening. We'd have something like the Sudha. It's just kind of a description of what would happen if we just really came into awareness of the breath and what was happening with our body, with feelings, with the mind, the whole of our experience. In practicing it, we don't need to perfect one instruction before moving on to the next. And in a way, each of you would probably go at a certain pace with it, right? So we've got a bunch of us and we each need to find our own pace in a sense, but I'm just going to give the teaching so that you have them. I can imagine the Buddha just gave it all in one night. And then people have the rest of their lives to kind of work it out. So we'll talk a little bit midway about how to work at your own pace. It's starting to feel like you've had enough, you want to go deeper with what you've got already. Yes, we'll talk about that. But over the course of the retreat, we'll do all 16 and then there'll be chances to practice kind of at your own pace that are unleaded and work more with what you feel like there's benefit with. Over the years, like on one retreat, I'll work up to all 16 and then the next solter, I'll start right with one again and it kind of forms another pattern. The more familiar I get with it, the more in my daily practice it's easy to do. As a whole, the whole thing deepens, but in a way, we might just see what we get from the 16th now and a few years might be something different. We also don't need to practice all 16 like that in a way that's principal, having the breath there, becoming present and then just opening up to what's happening. We won't always be going one by one. And there's what's called a condensed method that will introduce at some point, which is a simplification of the 16th or the general principle behind them. I think a retreat setting is a good opportunity to practice all of them. It's probably the best way to get a chance to look at them more systematically and then in a daily life practice where maybe something simpler might be more beneficial, at least it can be informed by the opportunity to maybe go into each little bit more. And then there are plenty of ways to practice on a panofati. There's just so many commentaries on working with the breath and awareness in the Buddhist can. And there are different approaches we could take. The two main books I've used are the practice commentaries by Larry Rosenberg and Budadasa Bikku that we've already mentioned. And also I've found the new book by Analia on Sati Patana, very helpful actually. It's good reference, not really so poetic, but it's good reference. If you're going to go back and do some exploration, I'd recommend starting with Rosenberg just because I think he really gets the spirit of the practice. So great for skillful effort. So many of us, maybe the longer we've been meditating, the more we need to really work on undoing bad habits there, you know, of making an enemy of our mind and our experience. It's just so good at making friends with your experience and working from there. Budadasa, it's more in the Theravon tradition where there's a little bit more of a disciplined way of working which has a lot of benefit in it, but I would really recommend that you get grounded in a friendly attitude because if you have any bad habits that way, you might just reinforce controlling your experience so you don't actually experience everything because some things you find difficult, which isn't, I'd say the skillful way to understand what he's teaching, but it just kind of latches onto our habits that way. So I'd recommend starting with Rosenberg and then Budadasa is a good technical reference. And while the suit is from the polycan in the Theravon tradition, we can bring an Ekayana approach, an approach informed by the Mahayana spirit and informed by the Vajrayana spirit, which is very much how I practice. Those of you that really love the Theravon purity, you'll have to just bear with me. Mahayana and Vajrayana that's going to come in. It's going to leak him. So all these different approaches are just skillful means, they're just upaia to try to get at what's underneath all that packaging. And what's great about the F2BO is fantastic. We have that broad approach, it's one of our great opportunities I've been to this tradition. I mean, all these different approaches, I think you'd explore them over years. I mean, you don't need to get them all here. So I'll try to give you a sense of the breadth with the D, the broad win, which we can work with the suit down a little bit, yeah, but I'm not going to try to do it all really. Okay, so we'll work through the 16 contemplations gradually in the periods of formal meditation through sitting, walking, even lying down, we'll experiment with the different postures of mindfulness. The mindfulness can be practiced throughout our day. On my recent solitary, I just had an emphasis of keeping a flow of awareness. I was actually probably the main practice and just doing one thing at a time to help that. One thing I encourage you to do is just a spirit of continual practice here. Trying to do just one thing at a time and there's basically nothing we can't be aware of. And if that seems a bit strenuous, just remember there's not something we're trying to fabricate. It's not like we're trying to do our life and then build something on top of it. We're just being aware to what's actually happening and the way it's just being a bit more alive as we do whatever it is we're doing. So during meals, we can be mindful of the texture of the food, the taste of the food, temperature of the food, that kind of thing. Be mindful of people that prepared it for us, where the food came from, someone we don't even know. Packaged that food or the sun, who gave it light and the rain watered it or whatever. You know, who knows? Who knows what? Maybe the water came from a sprinkler. Maybe we noticed disliking. The idea that the water came from a sprinkler, not from the natural rain, whatever it is. We just noticed eating. And when we're doing work periods, that's part of the retreat too. So it's not like we have to do a job and do it quickly and hastily and what a bother so I can get back to the retreat. So when you're slicing a carrot, noticing the weight of the carrot, noticing the texture of the skin, noticing it's a sharp knife, noticing the pleasure of a sharp knife, slicing. It's a dull knife, noticing the dukkah of a dull knife. So whatever we're doing, the Buddha often exhorted his disciples to include all their activities in their practice of mindfulness and I always love how he includes defecating and urinating. Because if we have any idea of something being spiritual and other things being not spiritual, that kind of breaks that, doesn't it? It's not that there's spiritual things we need to be aware of. It's really just anything we can be aware of. In the Thai forest tradition, when they're teaching people to talk about, "Oh, so did you wake up on an in-breath or an out-breath?" And so just being mindful of the possibility of doing this in a skillful way that isn't forced or strained or willful. So if you feel like you're getting kind of tight and willful, then just relax and just throw it all out the window and just maybe go for a walk or something. Just try to loosen up a bit and then just try to enter into relationship with yourself again. Just keep hammering away in this tight, painful way. So you're just doing your best and it might really be a very skillful thing just to let go of any idea of trying to do anything for a while, you know, just to relax. So the practice starts with having gone to the forest, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building. So it's purposefully going somewhere to practice, yeah? So I guess other than those of you that happen to live here, a lot of you have to quite purposefully come here. You've intentionally come. And so just remembering that we're kind of here by choice and, yeah, that we're practicing. And then it says setting mindfulness to the forest. I'll just say a few words about mindfulness. So it's sati, mindfulness is sati. That's the main aspect we'll be emphasizing. There's some other aspects which I'll talk about later on in retreat, but this is where we're entering in. And this is a present moment awareness that simply notices what's happening without in any way interfering or adding or subtracting or correcting, controlling, so just letting what's happening come into awareness. And things will change if they're on a chord. We don't need to actually orchestrate all that. So maybe it's helpful to think, well, what's mindfulness by knowing what it's not? So when we're not mindful, we're lost in everything. It's just happening kind of to us. We're lost in it. We're not really aware of what's happening. So things are happening or just aware, this is what's happening with broader awareness. So anything can happen within this hell of an awareness, you could say, hell very loosely in awareness. Awareness is just part of our experience. It's actually natural to us. It's not something we have to fabricate. It's more that we've got so many habits that are warding it off. We're not quite prepared to be aware and all that entails. We do all sorts of things to distract us from what's happening. It's just more like letting go of we don't have to do all those things. We could be a little less anxious and busily covering everything up and just let those things become known to us. So in a way it's very restful just to let that happen. Let what's happening be what's happening and the Buddha often spoke about relaxing the exhaustion of running around, running away from what's happening. So sometimes it said mindfulness is like a mirror in that it just simply reflects what's happening. The only thing I'd say about that is that could be a little bit of a cold image. So I think if we add to that, that it's also kind and it's emotionally engaged. So I think it's other key quality is meta or kindness is what's happening and there's just kind of a basic friendliness to what's happening. It doesn't mean we didn't have a sense of things that might be more or less helpful to us in the content. So some things you might just sort of try to relax and not fuel so much and that will come in later. So it's not like it's completely non-discriminating in a way but the basic attitude towards everything is that we're willing to experience it, we're willing to experience anything. When people speak of feeling alienated, that's a clue that we're holding back from some aspect of our experience. So there's a tension, some trace of tension in there, yeah? So we can create kind of false peace by blocking off a bit of it. I had an experience with this in our cultural evening on the chairs meeting, there was a certain piece of music which involved three people, two which were sounding rather pleasant to me and one of which was sounding like nails on a chalkboard, it was awful, the third instrument, I won't say what it was. So I did realize, well I can listen to two thirds of this, like I'm capable of actually completely blocking off that third, not only listening to two thirds of this piece of music and enjoying it, you know? So we can do that, we can sort of block off things and I think the danger is not even knowing we're doing it, actually it's a tension to do that so it's very important to be willing to experience. And I think that's one of the efficacies of great things about the Anapanasati is that by being based in the breath, in a way it keeps us honest to some degree because we're grounded in the body and an actual experience, so somewhere at least there's something quite direct happening. So I'll just say a couple more things, but just emphasizing that this non-judgmental attitude is just very, very important in meditation and in a way we can take an opportunity to purify our practice of craving, the craving that we bring to the practice itself, that can just make meditation another source of suffering, a way in which we strengthen our habits of suffering. So just let yourself have a break from that, the best you can and if you just know how hard that is then just be kind towards that. And in a way, you might be used to a manner of meditating in which we're a little bit more directive and controlling about our experience, if something comes up that's classified as unskillful, then we jump in there and we substitute the wholesome for the unwholesome. And actually there's value to that, but I think one thing we have to be careful about this, I think we come in this culture with a lot of background conditioning that has some dangers to that. So where we're going to practice here is we're not going to be doing this substituting thing, we're not going to be intervening in that way. The main way we're going to work with our experience is to be willing to experience the main thing. So if you're meditating in what you call hindrance arises or a distraction arises, we're going to do the simplest thing which is just notice that's happening and to acknowledge it's happening and kindly find the breath again. Sometimes we talk about this in terms of working with a sky like mine kind of attitude where we don't create more solidity by getting horrified by what's happening and reacting to it. Sort of whatever's happening, it's like clouds moving through the sky, everything changes, it will change actually, we can't stop it from changing. It is changing and just try to have a sense of a broader mind in which things can come and go. So by doing that, I think we'll have an experience of that broader mind and it will increasingly be able to trust that. So first we might just experiment with that on faith. So we're going to get started on the body to track, just because we're focusing on the body won't mean that other aspects of our experience aren't happening. So you know, feelings will be happening and the mind will be doing its thing. It's not that we're going to try to cut out this other experience, it's just that in the whole stream of our experience as it's flowing, we're going to pay attention to a particular strand of it that's related to all the rest and it's the breath. So we're just going to come in on the breath. Okay, so in this morning's practice period, we're going to practice the first two contemplations of the body group. Breathing in long, one nose, I breathe in long. Breathing out long, one nose, I breathe out long. Breathing in short, one nose, I breathe in short. Breathing out short, one nose, I breathe out short. So what these two instructions are getting at, in a way he's already said, setting the mindfulness for, always mindful, the meditator breathes in, the meditator breathes out. So before we even get to these two instructions, he sort of said, "Come onto the breath, just notice the breath." And then more specifically he's saying, "Breathing in long, I know I breathe in long, breathing out long." So really what we're doing here is just becoming aware of the breath. So we're establishing the practice in the breath. And what we're going to do this morning is just help us reawaken and aware or have a bit fresher awareness of the breath. So it can become a little bit habitual how we're aware of the breath. And I think it's quite true to say we all know how to breathe, you know, it's not something where you're going to have to learn how to breathe here, but no way we want to do is get away from such a habitual relationship to the breath that we don't actually experience it as it's happening. So we have this idea I'm breathing and we don't even experience the breath in the body. Sati Patana Sita says, "We experience the body in the body," which means we are aware of the physical experience and what's happening with our body. At least that is there, there might be thoughts that cognize what's happening, but we can't not have the part where we're actually aware of the body when we practice the body tetra. So there's going to be three things we can look at just to help us. There's the location where in the body is the breath and there's different ways to approach that, the duration. So is it relatively long or short and then the quality, which is the characteristics, the flavor of the breath, is it rough, smooth, silky, that kind of thing, easy or feels difficult tight. Yeah, and again, all this without thinking there's something that's supposed to be happening, yeah, and then rejecting what is happening because it's not what you think is a spiritual breath or all those funny things that we get up to. So we're just going to have a little bit of an exercise where for a few minutes you'll specifically notice the location of the breath. There's different ways to approach location. What we're going to do is just notice where we feel the breath most prominently and that might move. So it's kind of like where in the body is the breath now. So as you're breathing you might notice it first around the nostrils and then you might notice something happening in the throat and then you may not notice anything until down in the belly and it might seem like you don't notice anything at all for a while until the next in breath. It's whatever you actually notice. You might notice it's your back moving or you might feel it's your foot in which you notice it in. So it's not so much about human anatomy. We're not doing a human anatomy scientific investigation. It's more just where the breath presents itself to your body as it does. And then I'll prompt you to just notice the duration of the breath. We'll just sense it. It doesn't feel long or short. Again, there's no universal answer. It's not like the metric system where there is somewhere. There's a definition of what a long and a short breath is and you need to get your ruler out. It's just a way to notice what's happening. So the answer doesn't matter whether you classify as long or short. Just a sense, does it feel sort of longish or shortish? And there's no right answer really. And actually from sit to sit the breath's going to change from moment to moment's going to change. And then the last for a few minutes then we'll notice the quality. And I'll give you some options for that, of course, rough, energetic, sleepy, those kinds of things. And then we'll go ahead and just do a full sit with one stage on location, one stage on duration and one stage on quality. While breathing in long, one nose, I breathe in long. While breathing out long, one nose, I breathe out long. While breathing in short, one nose, I breathe in short. While breathing out short, one nose, I breathe out short. I wanted to just make a point about with the quality when we notice the quality of the breath. We can notice directly. So we don't need words, we don't need to label everything. So in terms of noticing the quality of the breath, we're using the sense of touch within the body. And there's just that direct experience, yeah, so it's kind of interesting thing while what's just the texture of roughness or smoothness. That pre-exists words, really, it's just a direct experience. So we can have that kind of very direct sensing and that might be enough. And it might be that sometimes a simple label might just help us be a little bit more conscious about what's happening as well. So it might be that just noticing, oh, smooth or sleepy in terms of the quality of the breath will help. But I guess the thing is it's not necessary. It just might help as an expedient, yeah, so it is possible to just sense the quality of the breath without having to label it. But it might be that a simple noticing with a word will help. And that's just because that's where our mind works. We notice things a lot through a thought. A lot of things become conscious. We use thought that way. When we're becoming aware of our experience then, just trying to notice more of the experience and then maybe if we note it in any way. But that's just helping us come more on to the experience rather than us getting lost in the process of labeling, yeah, so whether finding the exact right word starts to become a preoccupation, yeah. In parts of the tradition, the nature of reality is sometimes described as signless, which means beyond deepest experience, really, is beyond words. So it may be, we experience it, but it's kind of ineffable or it's not that there's a word right there and we don't need to then get stuck in, you know, searching, searching for a word. We just experience changing, just going with the change if that makes sense. You could completely ignore everything I say. I think that's fair enough. So if you feel like you kind of have your own thing you want to do in terms of noticing the characteristics of the breath, which is what these two instructions are, you could just kind of go ahead and do it and ignore everything I'm saying, it's fine. And I will give you some things to try just again to help you notice a little more freshly what's happening. So kind of breaking out of our habit when maybe we have some habits and we say, okay, become aware of the breath and we just kind of zone into this kind of not too aware thing that we do all the time and so in a way, by trying something fresh, it's just loosening it all up a bit. So in the first sit then, we'll spend a little time just noticing the breath as it is and then we'll just notice the duration using the counting. So if that wasn't clear, we're just counting out a steady pace, regular pace, fairly regular. Don't get too worried about that either. And as you're counting, so you're breathing in and counting one, two, maybe that's it. Or maybe one, two, three, however long the inhale lasts and then on the exhale starting again, one, two, three, four, one, it doesn't matter where you get to, it's just sort of a way to notice the length. So that's it. The counting's very subtle, it's more of the breath, it's just a way to help us get in touch with the changing length of the breath. Then we'll just start to explore a little bit, just the interrelationship between the breath and the body. So that's the body and the breath are mutually dancing together in a way and also the mind's in that dance. So the quality of the breath, the body and the mind are all affecting each other. And it's something that's quite simple and we don't need to make it complicated, we can just notice what's happening. Then for a few moments, we'll just try to do as little as possible in terms of not pushing the breath, hurrying it or trying to make it a particular way. So just noticing that, letting it be, and then we're really just going to end with letting everything be. Okay, so in the first two contemplations, we're really just bringing our attention, aiming it towards the breath and experiencing the breath. And when the mind wanders off, which it will, we just kindly notice that, and we're really happy that we've noticed that. There's a possibility to be really happy that we've noticed that, it's a moment of mindfulness. One of my favorite teachings I got, practicing with Lama Suri Das, is this attitude of celebrate every moment of awakening. So for that moment, we realize, I'm not aware of the breath at all. I'm going to celebrate that moment, wow. I recognize that. I just want the friendly way, just fantastic, the breath is always there, yeah? So just coming back into that, we don't have to create it, it's just there. And so aiming the mind again and noticing its quality. One other thing I'll say about that is, the more absorbed we get in the breath, the more subtle it gets. It's the nature of that. So actually, we could be really engaged with the breath. And because of that, we lose it in a way, because it shifts its quality. And then we just don't quite manage to catch it shifting and becoming more subtle. So just to notice that too, you know, you finally totally lost it, and the way it might be a little more subtle than just adjusting our attention. So that's likened to traditionally to the sound of a gong just fading away, having to follow that really. And it's very easy when we listen to the gong, we just listen to it get subtler. So over the course of the retreat then, when we start with the instructions, breathing in long, one nose, I breathe in long, breathing out long, one nose, I breathe out long, breathing in short. One nose, I breathe in short, breathing out short, one nose, I breathe out short. You can kind of come in on that experience through noticing these details. So we need a combination of some precision in our attention. I think we all know what that state is, where there's no precision and it just feels kind of dull and almost painfully dull, yeah. So we need enough precision that there's awareness. And then we need a kind of appreciative awareness, you know, a kind of interest and curiosity about what's happening. Even if it's quite difficult, I know some of you are coughing and breath will have that flavor on it. But that's what's happening in a way so we can be kind with it. Yeah, so you can try different ways to kind of stay engaged and you don't need to have like an entire artillery out to do it, you know, it's in a way, it's just a simple thing like, oh, where is the breath now? So it's kind of sensing in a way we've broken it down in a way that might help you be more specific, have that element of precision, but in a way, it's just appreciative sensing. Just one more way of working with location, which we're all familiar with, which is just what's traditionally called guarding a point, you know, but just leaving the awareness at one point, right? So like in the fourth stage that we traditionally do, the mindfulness of breathing, where we just leave the awareness at one place. Sometimes it can be quite good to really follow, you know, your nose, chest or navel and abdomen and back out again in breath and out breath, because it's a good way to not miss a moment in a way, so it sort of helps us become present, but after a while you might find that a bit tiring, like still too much action, at which point it can be helpful just to rest the awareness at one place. Maybe not, maybe it feels really useful to just keep doing that or just keep following it not so orderly, but wherever it appears, right, more organically where it's most prominent in the body. That might keep working for you, but if it gets tiring, then you can just rest the awareness at one point, and if you feel quite heady, you could choose a point lower in the body, the belly, if you feel quite dull, you might choose a point higher, you know, like around the nostrils, that kind of thing. While breathing in long, one nose, I breathe in long. While breathing out long, one nose, I breathe out long. While breathing in short, one nose, I breathe in short. While breathing out short, one nose, I breathe out short. When trains oneself, sensitive to the whole body, I breathe in, sensitive to the whole body, I breathe out. When trains oneself, calming the whole body, I breathe in, calming the whole body, I breathe out. When you keep reading the contemplations to you, I think it's quite nice to hear them in a way. I can tell you it makes a big difference when you memorize them, when they're just there for you, because then you can just more organically practice, but just kind of arise when they need to. Keep hearing them over the retreat. Okay, so we're in the body, I hope, everyone know where your bum is. We're in the body group, and we're just taking some time, I think time well spent to really get established in the body. So the first tetrad, so this is that word tetrad, which means a group of four instructions, yeah. So the body tetrad, the first four instructions are initially helping us get established in samata or tranquility or calm, but later on, we will purposefully revisit them from more of a vipassana, bhavana, development of wisdom, intention, or you could say dharma vachaya, poking around and checking it out in a very kind way, a little more of an investigative in terms of what's the nature of having a body, what's this being embodied, little more. But even in the initial bare attention of the body, there is some wisdom about being embodied that just starts coming through, I think, I think it can very much. So some of that may be arising, and I want you to say what that is, you can see what happens. It's really helpful to set up the conditions for concentration by bringing us to what's actually happening in our breath and body. And because they're tangible, it's much harder to get lost in a story. I mean, it will happen, but in a way, there's something tangible there to come back to. There's something a little bit more findable, you could say, than the mind, which is quite slippery and elusive in a way. So we're starting out with something that's a little easier to find, I'm not to say that it is easy to find, but at least there's a tangible element that we can come on to. And sometimes it can be very hard, you know, someone tells you something like, just be aware of your foot and it can just seem like, well, what the hell does that mean, or how do I do that? You know, it can seem very abstract, but I think just over time, just keep at it, the body will become better known to you, we'll be a little bit of friends with it. We had a guy in San Francisco, who's quite new to meditation, decide just to go on one of these two month retreats at Spirit Rock, which is the tradition Jack Cornfield, and people at Sharon Salzburg are in. So he went on this two month in Tansu, quite new to meditation, and he came back and he said, well, how'd it go, you know, glad to see him still alive. And he said, well, after the first month, okay, that's kind of a meditating all day for a month, he said, I felt my collar on my neck, and I said, that's what they're talking about in terms of being aware of a bodily sensation, it was just so, it was great, you know, like real breakthrough moments for him. And it just, he felt his collar against his neck, you know, so we're just working from where we're starting from, and what's a breakthrough is just whatever opens up things for us. So it can take a while to get proficient at just being able to check in with the body, but after time, if you stick with it, I think it's something that will become possible for you. I came up and who is myself, a book, who is myself, which is an excellent companion to kind of work we will be doing on this retreat. She writes about the advantages of practicing mindfulness of the body, and there's three that she names. The first is that while we practice mindfulness of the body, we are keeping the mind in its place, not allowing it to roam discursively, so it gives the mind a home, yeah. The second advantage is that mindfulness purifies. So if we're actually watching, what we are doing, this is, these are direct quotes from her, we cannot in that moment be upset, angry or greedy. The Buddha counsels us over and over to use the body as a mindfulness object. In the first place, we can feel the body and touch it. We do not have to search for its presence. If we practice in this way, we will realize in a very short time, the peacefulness that arises, the absence of all mental turmoil, for how can we be aggravated or desirous or disliking while we are watching what is actually happening? That last question is great. How can we be aggravated or desirous or disliking while we are watching what is actually happening? I don't know what the answer to that is, you can just figure that out today. Thirdly, body mindfulness keeps us in the present moment and eventually we may learn that there is no other moment. Body mindfulness keeps us in the present moment and eventually we may learn that there is no other moment. Tenzin Palmo, who spent a long time in a cave, one of the things she says now is that we have nothing else in this present moment, yeah, and that's something that we can explore while we are here. We already got going on the first two instructions which was to aim the mind so that we can find the breath coming to the breath and then just staying with that experience, just experiencing the breath and then when the mind slips away as it will, we just re-aim or re-find that breath which is always there, always still alive in this life and experience it again as best we can. Yeah, just do that over and over. The traditional image is, it's like a bee that comes to a flower and when it rests and it's gathering the pollen and just tasting the flower, yeah, so the aiming coming to, here we've got this mind that's buzzing around and it lands on the flower and then it just stays there and enjoys that experience. So there's a quality of enjoyment I think in there and it's something to begin to learn to enjoy whatever's happening even if the content isn't pleasant in a way. It is possible because of the authenticity of being awake, the satisfaction of just being awake and alive to our life, it's possible to have a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment no matter what the content is and that's something to work with. So we're evoking the factors that help build stability of mind or samatab, sometimes called the dhyana factors but once we say dhyana then everyone starts getting grasping, despondence so there's just things that help us stabilize the mind and that's Vataka which was on your sheet yesterday, Aiming the Mind and Vachara which is the Experiencing. I love one thing in Buddha Dasabaku's book, he says the poly and tie word for this, taking in the experience is literally to drink the work of drink so it's like drinking the experience of the moment, tasting its flavor. So as we're doing this just to remember it's not a task, I feel like a task at the moment but the opportunity is it's an exploration or discovery or waking up to and with all the instructions we go into we have to be careful about just slipping into an attitude that something's supposed to be happening, something quite specific is supposed to be happening and getting very rigid with it. So just enjoying each instruction as an opportunity to notice, become more awake and alive to our life and one thing I know is people here don't tend to bow much after a sit, I mean you bow when you leave the room, maybe this is my Zen influence being in the Bay Area but I highly recommend bowing to whatever just happened. So when I'm done sitting I bow, I actually do three things, I say may all beings be well, may all beings be free from suffering and may we learn to live in peace. So that's a short transference of merit you could say, yeah it's a short, not getting tight about whether I'm collecting good fits for my trophy shell. So whatever just happened I just give it away and then I bow and the bow is more bowing to the sit. So it's being humble, it's like our calculating ego cannot really judge whether it's good or bad anyway, we're such bad judges, we really have no idea, if you just start out just facing it that we're all completely deleted, then it's pretty easy to just have fun with your meditation. Just start out, just facing up to it, just face the facts and then go from there really. And again this evokes at attitudes, Zuki Roshi's attitude and the expert's mind there are a few possibilities and in the beginner's mind there are many. So it might be a quite nice thing for you to try just about to whatever just happened, even if you have no idea what it was, completely what, you know sometimes about race and you think, well what was that all about, you know, it's like you come to after being in a coma or something, don't underestimate, go underestimate. It's all just one process, you know, that's part of your life, right there, so. And in general with the body tetrad, there's kind of a middle way as with everything in Buddhism, right? So it's the middle way between the two extremes of negating the body, so we see that in the Buddhist life where he was doing extreme, ascetic practices, right, nearly dying because of it and thinking well, this isn't going to, this isn't working. And the other extreme is just completely identifying with everything, you know, that could get us into a state of horrified anxiety and in a way on retreat, we cut down a lot of what we can worry about and in some ways I notice, you know, like whether the heat's right and whether our food's right and all, it's just almost like that's what we have left to worry about, yeah. So somewhere there's awareness that transcends the extremes of contracting around it in these two ways, yeah, around pushing it away or around just holding on to the bodily experience. So we have a body, we're aware of it and we try to do it in this open way. Okay, so sensitive to the whole body, what does that instruction mean? So whole body, Sabakaya, I didn't give you that word, but I think it's S-A-B-B-A-K-A-Y-A. So one aspect of this is that the breath is no longer the exclusive object of focus as it was in the first two instructions, well even in the first two instructions we still want to have some broader awareness in the way we came right onto the breath and noticing the characteristics of the breath, that was the object of the meditation and now we're opening up to whole body and the breath is still there, it's not like we then try to not have a breath, I mean the breath is there helping us to concentrate but it's just like it's opening up a bit, yeah, it's gonna almost imagine like a lotus, it needs that feeling of something just opening up. I think something, another phrase that can be quite helpful is having a 360 degree awareness, that simple just setting that opening can really help people. I think it's kind of so visual, sight is such a, we're so biased to it, I know people that start losing their sight they realize all these other senses start really waking up, so I think that's why we're just so forward oriented, sometimes if I don't do this check of 360 degrees I realize I'm only kind of aware of the front half of my body in a way and all my attention is kind of going forward. I'm also quite future oriented, my thoughts almost never go to the past so that might be a T so somatically and in the body I'm kind of forward tilting, but no way I want to rest in the whole body, yeah, so we can have a sense of 360 degree above and below as well actually, sense of awareness opening up. And calming the whole body, well it's different ways to think about this, we can think of it as our awareness of the body calming, yeah, it's just our quality of attention or our awareness that comes and that comes from willing for the body to be as it is without reacting, yeah, so if we get a twitch or pain, we're quite calm about it in a way, well especially with chronic things, I mean it's kind of interesting, it's kind of always quite painful in a way and we just experience it without that edge of hysteria that can kind of come in here, we're not careful, so our awareness can calm but then also the actual experience of the body, the body itself can seem to calm down and become less distracting and what's happening there, it's like there's a unification of the body with an overall, much more spacious kind of mindfulness. So in a way it's like we're held in something a bit more spacious, bigger, as opposed to a sense of being quite contracted and tight, yeah, the sense of the difference of those two ways of being, I think there's two ways to look at working with the body or our whole experience and one way of working with ourselves is more of a control or discipline way and another can right away sound either appealing or we have an aversion to it but it's meant in quite a neutral way, it's a descriptive way of working, other times we use the word controlling maybe in a bit more of a discriminating way but this is just to describe a certain way of working and then the other one is release, so by control there may be a better word, I'll find a better word, the more I think about this but it's a wise use of discipline so there's a little bit more structure in there, it's not harsh or forced and if we use this path, we just need to watch out for when we kind of get it wrong which is getting quite alienated from our experience, yeah, so in that case we're staving off our experience, we're using control to keep it away, yeah and another way of working is release which is a way of just letting things be and being with things without changing them at all, the far enemy you could say of this is just vagueness and even laziness, again it's a way of not working with ourselves, we're not quite applying it as a skillful means, yeah and I have a little definition here from Alan Wallace in Buddhism with Attitude which is where I got this, I think this was a good articulation of our options, our strategy options and he says mindfulness is a state of stable attention that may be wide open and spacious or tightly focused as one desires, Buddhism offers many methods of training, attentional stability that can be categorized into two basic approaches, control and release, the control approach entails being able to focus and sustain attention on a chosen object at will, the goal of a control model is to become master of one's mind, the second approach to meditative stabilization is the release model, instead of applying specific antidotes to all the toxins in the mind, one simply tries to stop polluting one's mind stream with grasping onto afflictive thoughts and emotion, this can be done quite simply by maintaining one's awareness without distraction and without mental grasping, the technical term for the release model is settling the mind in its natural state, okay so the people getting a sense of the difference then, it's for one's a little bit more intervening and correcting, guiding, directive and the other that's the control and the release is a bit more, the whole way of working is not adding another layer of anxiety or tightness to whatever's happening, yeah, so we purify by relaxing and letting go of ego grasping, yeah, so in working with sensitive to the body and calming the body, the whole body, there are these two approaches and I have to say Buddha Dasa in his book, it's not a control freak, there's more of that control way of working and Larry Rosenberg's much more of the release way, I mean he has Zen background, so that's probably the Zen coming out, yeah, and anyway it's great, so we in the FWA drawing from the whole tradition, it's like we can be wise and using both as we need them, sometimes the best thing we can do is really just put energy into focusing on the breath and that way we did yesterday of really following it continuously, as it goes from the nose, right down to the chest, continuously down to the belly, which if the sensation goes down that far, it may not, and then continuously out again, that takes a lot of energy and it awaits a shorter release, yeah, but sometimes it's just so great, it's just what we need to do to calm the mind down, it's quite disciplined, in a way that lets everything relax, yeah, because the mind just stops, it's running all over the place, which is exhausting, and sometimes we just let it run, just let, just throw the leash away, we just let it run in a way, it just quiets itself, something else emerges, in a way that thinking might still be going on, but it's like another quality of awareness, it just emerges through that, yeah, so I'd say trying both is the best way to learn your kind of artist's palate, you know, it's kind of something you can dip into and use, in a way you just have to learn how to be skillful with yourself, and also don't assume the same way of doing something will work forever, so that's the nice thing about coming on retreat, you just try something different and realize, oh, I thought I was being really controlling, but actually, actually I have an incredibly lazy, oops, you know, sometimes it's just hard to know, what's telling me to mama to start about this dog I had to walk in, I offered to walk my friend's dog, and it was probably the most unpleasant experience I've ever done, this dog, they got it from the pound, so it was already very adult, and it had never really been trained, and it was very sweet, I mean very friendly, you had to love this dog, but it was so all over the place, you know, and they told me don't let it eat chicken bones, okay, because it can choke off, where I live is very urban, and I have just never realized how many chicken bones are lying around the street, I've never seen a single chicken bone on the street in my life, but they were like 50 of them all over the place, and this dog was just constantly just running all over the place and finding bones and finding every single one, and I had one of those leashes that retracts, you know, so awful, just constantly snapping back this dog, and it would be running and chirped back, and running just like half an hour of this, and it was awful, but it was pretty good, but it might sound familiar in terms of that's meditating, it was also kind of comical all the time, I was like look, I'm trying to do this for your own good, yeah, okay, so luckily for us, I don't think there's any, well are there chicken bones, we'll have to go and say yeah, and I kind of thought there's nothing that will kill us in meditation, there's nothing that's actually going to kill us, so well it might be useful just to let the leash go, just to see what happens, and we'll try a little bit of that, just to let it go, and then it might be useful just to see what is that rope of mindfulness that sometimes gets spoken about, that is an image that's used, tying our mind with the rope of mindfulness, but is there a way to do that, it isn't really just this awful jerking back, you know, snapping the neck back, is there a way to have that, that's a little bit more helpful, I don't know, we can see, or in the control approach then, maybe I'll just start calling it the wise discipline approach, I like that better, does that sound better, the wise discipline approach, let's use that, okay, the wise discipline approach, well, I think the wise discipline approach is always using petitchetsamipata in a way that's non-suffering, you know, in a way that causes more liberation, yeah, so here we learn that the breath and the body and the mind influence each other, I'm going to be asking us just to notice what's different along the way as we sit, you know, so we'll do a period of meditation, just to notice what's different, as we go sit, walk, sit, and we're just going to notice that, it will help us, so the breath conditions the body, the body also conditions the breath, the quality of mind conditions the breath conditions the body, the quality of breath and body conditions the mind, they're just in this mutual unfolding, so one way that the whole body comes is by the breath coming, we can do this outside of meditation, help this process along where we're not doing breath exercises, I think breath exercises actually can help the overall context for working in, so there's two ways to more actively intervene here and help things along, one is just strengthening our concentration on the breath, so as we get more concentrated the breath will change, awareness changes the quality of breath, so we make an effort to keep our attention with the breath moment by moment unwavering, yeah, it's like a doorway into something else, it's a doorway into a more spacious experience, a calmer experience, and another way this can be done is by allowing the breaths to lengthen, so this is the allowing the breath to lengthen, it's a very important way to put it, because if we forcibly lengthen the breath it just makes us tense, which doesn't calm things, so if we relax our holding, if we relax our tenseness then we can sort of just allow the breath to unfold and it might just be calmer, maybe a little bit longer, maybe a little bit lower, not so contracted, yeah, so it's more not doing than I'm doing, yeah, it's more doing as little as possible to breathe really, okay so then in the release approach, there's just letting the body be as it is in each moment, so be willing to experience whatever's going on, yeah, discomfort, actually I think the hindrances manifest in the body, you know, wanting, that state of wanting, craving, that manifest, it has a somatic or bodily equivalent to it, not wanting, kind of manifest in the body as well, doubting, not sure if your meditation is going to be worth anything, that kind of manifest is just the urge to leave the room, that feeling of just wanting to get up or pass that one or the other, so there's different ways we can, you can explore the hindrances manifest in the body and I talked about that way we're working with the hindrances, they're just simply acknowledging them and actually being willing to experience them, that they are happening, and then after that, then sort of coming back, yeah, as opposed to pushing away that something's even happening, the hindrances are even happening, so in the release mode we can just experience, just be willing for them to be sort of arising and in a way if we fully acknowledge these states that take us away from the present moment in the way we come back to the present moment, because that's what's happening, yeah, it's kind of a kiddo practice, we're tricking, tricking what's happening by being friendly with the energy, so having some curiosity or kindness and precision and appreciation there, anyway we can do it all mon analytically, so we don't need even to analyze hindrances in a way, so today why don't we just experience the body quite directly without needing the analytical bit, so we might just experience that there's some part of the body we're resisting, experiencing, and if that's the case, so it might very well be an emotion or a mental state manifest, but we just kind of work with it on a physical level, so this is my body, I don't seem to want to experience my kneecap, or my elbow, or my right nostril, whatever it is, and then just gently softening into whatever it is we're resisting so that we can be sensitive to the whole body, that instruction, the whole body, and the breath can help us here, we can just breathe with that part of the body, yeah, so in this method actually when we would calm the reactivity in the mind, it's interesting the breath tends to change in some way as well, it does tend to change the breath, calm it, yeah. So Larry Rosenberg on this clip, I think he's really good on this point, he's talking a little bit more about the first two instructions, but it brings us into the rest of the body. Sometimes the breath is very fine like silk or satin, it enters and exits freely, how wonderful just to be breathing, at other times it is coarse, more like burlap, it fights its way in and out, sometimes the breath is so deep and smooth that it affects the whole body, relaxing us profoundly, other times it's so short and pinched, hurried and agitated that our minds and bodies are like that, restless and uncomfortable, it's hard to know what comes first, whether the problem is in the breathing, the body, or the mind, each part conditions the others. As we practice longer, we come to see that these distinctions are false anyway, these supposed parts of us are really just one thing, but the breath is an extremely sensitive psychic barometer. One of the things you learn about this whole process, the conjunction of mind and body, both the breath, as a meeting place, is that awareness has an extremely powerful effect on it. This isn't a matter of controlling or attempting to change the breath, but as you pay attention, the quality of the breathing changes, perhaps because thinking is diminished. The breath becomes deeper, finer, silkier, more enjoyable, and the body starts to bear the fruits of that, to become more relaxed. This isn't something to try for, trying actually prevents it. It just reflects the power of mindfulness. You find yourself growing angry or worried, your heart starts to pound, your body to grow tense, but if you can just be with the breath for a while, not suppressing the emotion but breathing with it, all that changes, the mind grows calm. As the breath goes, so goes the body. Everything happens when mindfulness touches breathing. Its quality changes for the better, but it is important to emphasize in discussing the art of meditation and the practice as you continue it becomes an art with many subtle nuances, that you shouldn't start out with some idea of gaining. This is the deepest paradox in all of meditation. We want to get somewhere, we wouldn't have taken up the practice if we didn't, but the way to get there is to just be fully here. The way to get from point A to point B is to really be at A. When we follow the breathing in hope of becoming something better, we are compromising our connection to the present, which is all we ever have. If your breathing is shallow, your mind and body restless, let them be that way for as long as they need to, just watch them. The first law of Buddhism is that everything is constantly changing. No one is saying that the breath should be some particular way all the time. If you find yourself disappointed with your meditation, there's a good chance that some idea of gaining is present. See that and let it go. However your practice seems to you, cherish it just the way it is. You may think that you want it to change, but that act of acceptance is in itself a major change. It has a dynamic power to take your mind into stability and serenity, which are at the core of the first four contemplations.
