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Guided Meditation: Shifting the Senses; Dharmette: Sensory Doorways to Freedom: (2 of 5) Relating Skillfully to Emotions - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 23, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning. Warm greetings, warm greetings. Welcome, everyone, Global Online Saṅgha. Delighted, delighted to be with you again today. Happy to see all the greetings from all over the world in the chat, lots of familiar names, and a special welcome to those of you who are here for the first time. Happy to be with you.

So friends, very good to see you and see your names and your greetings. We are going to take about half an hour to sit in meditation, a lightly guided meditation, and then I will offer some teachings. The invitation, when you're ready, when you've had a chance to greet each other, is to begin to take your attention inwards.

Guided Meditation: Shifting the Senses

From the sense door of your eyes, in reading or responding, into the sensations of your body. Maybe if your eyes are still open, you might look around the room, orient yourself, notice the details of light or shadow of whatever time of day you're in, and then soften your eyes as if the world is coming to you, a great horizon in the distance. And then when you're ready, closing them.

Noticing the sensations of warmth or cool or moisture or dryness on your skin, maybe clothing or a shawl or a blanket in contact with your body. Noticing the weight of this body on the chair or cushion, bed, whatever supports you. And tuning into that sense of support.

And then checking out the interoception, the internal sense, all the different sensations in this body. Scanning through and noticing areas of tension, holding, as well as areas of lightness, warmth, and relaxation. It's all okay, it's all included.

Noticing especially the sensation of this body breathing. Maybe movement at the abdomen or belly, chest and rib cage, or the subtle sensations of breath in and out of the nostrils, or playing over the top of your lip. The invitation is to include the whole body of the breath, from the beginning of the inhale all the way through to the top of the inhale, the fullness, and then that delicious moment of release of the exhale. Noticing all of the little sensations as the breath transforms to air.

Perhaps after two or three more intentional, slow breaths, allowing the breath to be natural, however it is today. If you like, tuning into the vibrancy, the energy throughout the whole body, the transpiration of every cell, which might be felt as a gentle sense of energy, aliveness, vibrancy.

Settling in. Noticing a long breath as a long breath, a short breath as a short breath. Inhale as inhale, exhale as exhale. Making the determination to have mindful awareness, presence, at the forefront, and allowing thoughts of there and then to fade to the periphery, the background.

The instruction is that if a sound or sensation, something, anything, pulls the attention away, to turn with kindness completely towards the arising of whatever that is in the moment: bird song, moose munching, twinge, memory as such, and acknowledge it. Then returning the attention back to this moment, whatever your primary anchor of attention is.

Laying in contact with the sensory experience of now. Noticing any simple pleasures that arise with appreciation, savoring but not clinging. And noticing any challenges that arise with love, compassion, not getting too involved, but allowing, receiving, and returning to the sensory experience of the moment.

We'll meditate mostly in silence for the next 20 minutes. I'll add a few little nudges, suggestions here and there. Trust your practice.

If a sensation or internal experience begins to flood or become overwhelming, the suggestion is to intentionally shift focus to one of your senses that is not troubling you. For example, from the mind, the heart, to hearing. Experimenting, allowing the attention to shift temporarily when necessary. To hearing, seeing, smelling. And then if anything overwhelming is there, has subsided, returning the attention to your primary anchor. Staying, standing in whatever present moment experience connects you most peacefully, simply, happily to the moment.

From time to time, refreshing the mindful awareness, presence of this moment. And if there was distraction, rather than self-blame or feeling badly, the invitation is to appreciate the reemergence of awareness. Invite it like a friend, welcoming present moment experience.

In the last remaining moments of our meditation together, the invitation is to turn your mind, your heart, back over these moments of formal practice with an appreciative gaze. Noticing, gathering up any moments of patience, efforts towards mindfulness, emergence of awareness, or clarity, courage, staying with, and appreciate them, savor them, take them in.

And from that place of being nourished, to include any challenges experienced with an attitude of compassion, care. Nothing needs to be left out. And then turning that compassionate, appreciative gaze, inner gaze, outwards to the others in your life. Making the determination, may this practice have a beneficial ripple effect on all people, all beings this life touches. May others, as well as ourselves, be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and free.

Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Sensory Doorways to Freedom: (2 of 5) Relating Skillfully to Emotions

Thank you, dear Global Online Saṅgha. It's just such a delight to be with you. I started sitting this sit the very first day it started after COVID sheltering in place and have stayed in touch intermittently ever since. I feel like I know many of you from the chat, and many of you I've met on Zoom or sometimes in person, so it's good to be here.

Today, I'm going to continue the conversation, the exploration I started yesterday on the Buddha's teachings on the senses, the sense doorways, bases, fields. As I mentioned yesterday, this is a practice that's very accessible to you if you're totally a beginner, and it stretches all the way through to those advanced beginners and those who are deeply experienced and grounded in the Dharma, in the Dharma stream.

So today, we're going to look more deeply at how to work with the senses to support a healthy emotional life and the Buddha's instructions on emotions and the senses as a way of deepening spiritual development. It's a lot to cover, so this is kind of a taster. I'll just mention that this exploration is actually a series I did a couple of years ago. This one talk is unpacked from a much longer talk for the Tuesday Morning Zoom sit at IMC. So you can look back—I'll try to remember to put the link in at the very end if you're interested in a deeper exploration of this.

First, ways we can relate to our senses can support a healthy emotional life, or they can make things much worse. What do I mean? Well, let's start with how we make things worse. Overwhelm, sadness, anxiety, depression, emotional flooding of all kinds is strongly associated with getting stuck in, preoccupied by, stories and thought loops. This also involves closing off the senses, all of the senses except for the Buddha's concept of the mind and heart doorway field being a sense door. So when all of the other senses shut down, stories of suffering take over.

Contemporary science actually confirms this with neuroimaging and scans. It also confirms that our capacity to switch attention to the other five senses and be present increases a healthy distance from and wisdom discernment about unhelpful thoughts, unhelpful emotions, and unhelpful thought patterns. This stepping into the senses increases resiliency, satisfaction, and a healthy simplicity, a life-giving alternative. And it's available both in formal meditation and walking around in the world. Extremely portable.

This life-giving alternative is something that has been core to the Buddha's teachings for millennia. Perhaps it's part of why the Buddha and his followers were known as "the happy ones," having nothing but robe, bowl, and a few simple requisites to support them. They were likened to birds, free, and their visages were glowing, according to accounts from other religious traditions back 2,600 years ago.

So I'm going to offer two practices. These practices are both for the experiences of unhelpful emotion or overwhelm and can be used to deepen development and presence in life. The first I call "taking a stand at the sense doors." This involves intentionally placing your attention on one sense door, not a troubling one. For example, I used to teach in pain clinics for many years. While the normal instruction in Vipassanā¹ is to turn your attention to discomfort or pain as it is, simply, without adding anything, and allow it to pass or break down or dissolve—and that's a good instruction—however, if pain is overwhelming or tends to cascade through the whole system, the instruction changes. Then it's to shift to a different area of attention, often sound or even seeing.

For emotional pain, there are ways that you can also switch attention. Those two switches, to sound or seeing, work, but others do as well. For example, one of my root teachers, Sayadaw U Tejaniya², for many years, even though he was a serious meditator, lived kind of a wild life and then was burdened by many obligations and prone to depression. He discovered that using a menthol stick like this would bring him back to the present moment, cut through dissatisfaction, and keep him present. So scent, intentionally used, can also bring us back and cut through even very difficult experiences.

One of my mentor teachers, Andrea Fella, uses a practice and then teaches a practice of what she calls "useless gazing." I actually don't think it's useless at all. The practice is to look around—you can do this if you want to at home—at junctions or corners in a room, or if you're outside, at where tree limbs meet. Just do it for 30 seconds, a minute, and it will often begin to settle the system down. So those are particular kind of little practices within the main one I'm offering here, which is to take a stand in a particular sense door that's not whatever is troubling you.

The second practice is, if there's a persistent, ongoing story in the mind, unhelpful, unfolding in our hearts, to intentionally rotate through, flip through, the different sense doors: sight, sound, tasting, smelling, bodily sensations, kind of methodically rotating through. That attentional shifting tends to bring us more into the present moment. This does not have to be just for overwhelm; it can be for simple distraction or getting caught up in the mind's default mode network. Instead, that brings us to the senses. Then the opportunity for being present allows for occasionally then checking the attitude or quality, the mood of our heart and mind itself, as one of the six total senses.

Movement can be helpful in this. There's a research study that was done some years ago, I don't remember any citations for it, but they talked about the increased satisfaction and simple presence of people—I believe they were Dutch people—who went for a walk every day. There was something about the movement and the act of appreciating the walk together that increased a sense of satisfaction and connection, especially if they went with another person, even if that other person is on the phone.

So those are some kind of simple practices that you can explore. The Buddha also taught how to cultivate wisdom regarding emotions by noticing them at each sense door. There are three primary emotions he covered: joy or happiness, sadness or distress, and equanimity. His instruction is to notice when any one of those comes up in response to input at a sense door and notice, is it hooking the mind and making things worse? Or is this an onward-leading emotion, a burst of joy or satisfaction without clinging, that can be onward-leading to development, maturity, deepening on the path?

The word the Buddha used for "hooked" (my word) is "household." He means identified with, lured in, obsessing over. So there's nothing at all wrong with simple happiness or unhappiness, even, as long as we don't get lured and stalled, diverted, spun out.

I'll give an example that kind of encapsulates these in these last couple of minutes. Recently, I was with a group of friends, and we were on this beautiful ridge with a stunning view in one direction of a majestic mountain. We were like 15 or 20 of us. Some of the people there were dead set on seeing that view. I mean, it was a spectacular view. So that's joy at the eye door, just a sense of happiness and satisfaction and pleasure. In their rush and interest in having the view, they actually kind of squeezed me out of my spot in order to see the view.

So I went and I sat somewhere else. There was a choice point there. I could have obsessed or grumpily kind of thought about, "Oh, look at what they did," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "like this means that about them, and this means this about me," and so on, or just, "Dang it, I didn't get the view." But instead, I recognized, "Oh, pleasure at the sense door of sight is driving this behavior. Why don't I just let go, let them have it, be generous." I went to a sort of side where I had a view of trees and a few friends and ended up having a wonderful conversation. About an hour into this excursion, I looked around and noticed that even the people that had been so obsessed with having the spot with the view weren't looking at the view at all. They were looking at each other, completely engaged in friendly conversation. And the happiest people in that group appeared to be those who had given up their spot for others, practiced generosity, letting go.

The basic difference the Buddha is talking about here is, are we addressing, relating to our senses like a clenched fist, grabbing on to what makes me feel good, or even worse, what makes me feel bad? Or is there an open hand, open-handed experience, appreciation of what arises at the senses, or allowing of the difficulties that arise without getting entangled, hanging on, or making things worse?

Thank you. Thank you for listening to these teachings today. I really appreciate it. I don't take it for granted that you all are here for your own deepening of practice and development and community. If you want to hear more on this topic, it's a full 45-minute talk on audiodharma.org. If you look up my name and then go to October 18th of 2022, you will find the full talk. Thank you for your practice, and see you tomorrow. Be well.