This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Sensory Doorways to Freedom 1of5: Sensing In; Stepping Into Our Senses. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Sensing In; Dharmette: Sensory Doorways (1 of 5): Stepping Into Our Senses - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Sangha. I'm doing a sound check; happy to be with you. My name is Dawn Neal. Some of us have been together before on this YouTube chat, and right now I'm waiting for the lag. Great, thank you. Sound is good. Wonderful.

So happy to be with you today. I'm broadcasting from Santa Cruz, California, and it's great to see all the different locations, the greetings, and the compassion popping up on the chat. I'm really delighted to be with you today. Oh, I am right on time and maybe a little bit late, so I'm just going to introduce us to the meditation for the day and invite you to settle in.

Just settle in, be here. And maybe before we start with the meditation, I want to invite you to orient. Either orient to the chat, say hello to your friends, your global YouTube Sangha, and perhaps also orient to the room or your space. As I'm doing now, look around, notice where you are, check out any objects in the distance, softening your eyes.

Guided Meditation: Sensing In

Whenever you're ready, closing your eyes, perhaps imagining and being open and receptive as if you're taking in a broad vista, a mountain range, or an ocean. And then allowing your face to relax, maybe a smile on your lips.

Noticing for a moment, hearing any ambient sounds in your room or the space that you're in. Taking a breath or two, turning off any devices that might want to distract you during this time, as I just did.

And then noticing too the weight of your body in the cushion or chair or whatever surface you're resting on. Grounding in the sensations of this body. Grounding in a sense of place. Noticing any warmth or cool, moisture or dryness, maybe cloth on your skin.

And then tuning into the internal sensations of your body, allowing, inviting whatever is there just as it is this morning or this day, this evening for you. It can be helpful to intentionally invite in two or three deeper, slower, longer breaths. And then tuning into the movement of the breath in the belly or the diaphragm, the chest. These deeper breaths signal that it's time to practice. And then allowing the breathing to be natural, however it is today.

Continuing to attune to the felt sensations of each breath, a rising of each sound, each sensation. Knowing an in-breath as an in-breath, an out-breath as an out-breath. Rather than it being a checklist of in-breath and out-breath, abiding in, resting on all of the details—the beginning, middle, and end of an inhale, then the release at the exhale. Noticing a long breath as a long breath, a short breath as a short breath. Staying in contact, staying close, attentive to your experience.

If you find your attention called by a sensation, a sound, thought, emotion, it's fine. Attending to it as something emerging in this moment. And then when it's not so predominant, so strong, returning the attention to your primary anchor or object: breathing, body, this here, now. Allowing "then and there" to fade to the periphery, the background.

We'll practice mostly in silence, with a few comments here and there until half after the hour.

If you find yourself distracted, the invitation is to appreciate the return of awareness. Noticing distraction is a moment of mindfulness. Returning the attention to the sensory experience of now. This breath, this sensation, this moment.

From time to time, rededicating yourself, refreshing the attention on this moment, this breath, this sensation, this sound, allowing yourself to be immersed in present moment experience.

And in the final moment or two of this meditation, the invitation is to turn your attention to your emotional center, your heart, your core. Take a moment to appreciate any efforts, any moments of mindfulness, awareness, presence, love, or compassion, ease. Gather them up, savor them. From that place, holding any moments of challenge or difficulty with care. Nothing left out, everything included.

And then turning your internal gaze outwards to the others your life touches. And if it feels right, forming the wish that they may benefit too from this practice. May all beings everywhere benefit from our practice here together. Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Sensory Doorways (1 of 5): Stepping Into Our Senses

A warm welcome to those of you who tiptoed into the YouTube sit a little bit late, and a warm welcome to those of you who came early, who've been here all along. So happy to be with you today. For those of you who missed my brief introduction, my name is Dawn Neal, and from time to time I help to cover this sit when Gil is away. He's off hiking with his wife this week, so mudita¹ for him, and he will return next week.

This week I'm going to introduce and explore some teachings of the Buddha that are helpful both for total beginners, experienced beginners, and for those with a lot of depth in meditation; those who've thoroughly immersed themselves in the stream of the Dharma. These practices are simple, and they work well in daily life, and they work well in formal meditation. The invitation is to step into your senses this week and hang out there. They can be doorways to greater ease, clarity, vibrancy, vitality, freedom, and wisdom.

I'd like to first introduce them with something we don't do very often in this 7 a.m. sit, which is a bit of a guided visualization. And don't worry if you don't visualize; just imagine that you do and kind of follow along. So you can close your eyes if you like, it's helpful. Imagine that you're in a beautiful forest on a warm, comfortable day, safe and dry under an overhang on a hill, with a bit of a vista. As you're there, a gentle rain starts to sweep through the forest. You can hear it off in the distance. It comes closer. The moisture in the air changes. Notice what you feel on your skin as the air is heavy with moisture and water emerges.

Notice what is seen, maybe the vibrancy of verdant greens, the movement of leaves, the pureness of water. Noticing not just hearing, perhaps, the wide swath of the rain coming in, how the individual drops might sound on leaf or ground or branch. Noticing any smells. And then stepping out, if you wish, from the overhang to feel the gentle drops of rain on your face, maybe on your tongue. How it feels, maybe tastes. Noticing any emotions present—pleasantness or unpleasantness. And noticing the knowing, the awareness of it all.

So letting go of that, coming back to the present moment and noticing too that all of what just occurred, however it occurred for you, happened in the mind. Our phenomenal capacity to imagine, to think, to conceptualize, perhaps visualize.

I mention this because the Buddha found the mind so powerful in its influence on our experience that he actually considered it a sense doorway, a sense in its own right. In the Buddhist teachings, there are six senses, not five, and the mind is the sixth. It informs, shapes, and often distracts from the other five classic ones we all know: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and body sensations. Collectively, all six of these are known as the six sense doors or doorways, gates, bases, fields—I'm using different translations of the Pali. They're all together part of mindfulness of the body.

So rather than spending a day on each sense this week, I'm going to offer different access points through them to greater presence, ease, and freedom. This is a simple practice. In fact, at the moment you may be experiencing the sense of hearing the garbage truck in front of my apartment, noticing the effect of sound. Through each sense is kind of an access point or a portal to a greater sense of being present, being free from the habitual responses, stories, and chatter of our minds. They are portals away from the virtual reality that so often happens within, and ways of being in the world, inhabiting the world in a more profound, simple, satisfying way.

Neurologists call the ability to step away from the mind "decentering," which means not being centered in our own stories, not being centered in the default network that's often chatter and self-judgment or other-judgment—stories that tend to take us away from being happy, simple, content, present. So they're a powerful ally in mindfulness practice and in presence in life.

Today, now that I've given this little overview, I'd like to just talk about stepping into the senses, immersing yourself, which is, as I said, very simple. It involves choosing to attend to, to ground in sensory experience, one of the bodily senses. We'll start with seeing. If you have your eyes closed, that's fine. You can leave them closed and notice the variation of light and texture on your eyelids, the darks and lights that are already present there. That already is shifting into the sense of seeing. Many of you have your eyes open and can notice the environment, perhaps the screen, but rather than tuning into the objects on the screen or in your environment, notice color, form, shape. Tune into the texture of the moment. Artists, visual creatives of all kinds, do this all the time. It doesn't have to be anything special.

It's also possible to attend to what's called the visual field itself—the receptive way of seeing rather than looking at. It's a process of letting the world come to you. I first noticed this many years before I started meditating. I was an avid scuba diver and snorkeler, and being in the water, immersed in the water, there was something about that that felt almost like being in this receptive, broad way of seeing and allowed this vibrancy of color, shape, form, this feeling of presence with the world to be there. But we can also be immersed in daily life, walking around the block, taking a hike, gardening, whatever it is, even cleaning the house. Allowing the sense of sight to be receptive, almost like we're a submarine walking through life.

There's a way of doing this I learned many years ago in Tai Chi, which is to invite this receptivity of the visual field. You can start with your hands together and you're seeing your hands but also seeing the area around them. I'm modeling this as best I can on the screen. Moving them apart, you can start wiggling your fingers a little and go broader and broader and broader, out back towards your ears, noticing where you're no longer able to see the movement in your peripheral vision. And then allowing the eyes to remain soft like that, rather than looking at any one thing, noticing, seeing in a receptive, gentle way.

This can happen with hearing, noticing the sound of my voice or ambient sounds. Smell or taste are not always accessible; you may notice the smell of something baking or cooking or brewing in the distance. And then there's body sensation, which many of the guided meditations in this now multi-year series cover. All of these are invitations to immersion in the moment.

So this week, today, grounding in your senses. And if you would like to do some homework between now and tomorrow morning, the invitation is to, in your daily life, take a few sensory immersion breaks and just notice seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, sensing as such. It's easy to do, it's portable. You can do it while walking around daily life activities. And if you like, notice which senses bring you here and present in an easeful way, and which do you tend to ignore.

So, the invitation to sensory immersion. I look forward to hearing what you notice tomorrow, and we'll see you then. Be well, stay present, and enjoy your practice.