This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation (1 of 4) with Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Intro to Mindfulness Meditation (1 of 4) ~ Breath - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 25, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Intro to Mindfulness Meditation (1 of 4) ~ Breath

Introduction

Okay, so I think we'll get started. Welcome, welcome everybody. Welcome to IMC. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Diana Clark. I teach here regularly on Monday nights, except sometimes I'm off teaching retreats. I just got back yesterday from teaching a beautiful retreat down at IRC, it's our sister center. We have a retreat center down in Santa Cruz, and it's a beautiful thing to be able to offer. It was a seven-day silent residential retreat.

Maybe I'll just say a few words about me. I found meditation at a time in my life when, from the outside, you would look at my life and think, "Oh, she has everything that she needs." I felt like I had everything I needed, but somehow I didn't feel happy. I felt like there's got to be something more. As it happens, I had a certain amount of professional success; I have a PhD in Biochemistry and had achieved all these things, and somehow felt like my life was missing something. I was disconnected from my life in some way, and disconnected from the people that I was close to. I just felt like somehow I had followed all the rules, but yet my life wasn't turning out the way that I expected or wanted. It wasn't like I actually intended to become a meditator; it just grew out of a yoga class and a casual comment by somebody I knew.

I've done a lot of retreat practice. I have spent cumulatively a couple of years on retreat, silently meditating all day long, and it's changed my life completely. It's changed my life in such a beautiful way, and I'm very happy to be here to be sharing with you some of what I've discovered, what I've learned from others, and to provide an opportunity for you to practice a little and to ask some questions.

Maybe I'll just say a little bit about meditation. Here, we're doing mindfulness meditation. We're the Insight Meditation Center. Insight Meditation is often associated with mindfulness meditation, sometimes similar to MBSR. Jon Kabat-Zinn¹, who started MBSR, actually trained at some of the same places I trained, and where Gil Fronsdal², the founder of this center, trained. So you'll find a lot of overlap, and a little bit of difference, of course.

I do want to just say that this practice comes out of Buddhism, more specifically Theravāda Buddhism³. But I'm not going to talk about Buddhism here. I have zero interest in converting anybody to Buddhism. You're perfectly welcome to follow whatever spiritual path you have that's meaningful for you. I'll also say that Theravāda Buddhism and Insight Meditation—mindfulness meditation—are distinct from Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. I'm not going to go into exactly how; I could give a whole Dharma talk on that, but we're here to learn how to meditate.

To bring some clarity, what is it that we're doing here? To say explicitly what it is, I would say, more generally, we're just taking this natural human capacity to pay attention. We all have this. It's not anything that is new. We're just directing it a certain way and cultivating it. So it's something that we're developing. In this context that we teach it and practice it here, cultivating this capacity to pay attention not only leads in general to greater understanding—understanding ourselves—but in some ways, I would say, certainly for myself, as I started to understand myself more, I started to see, "Oh, that's why everybody else does this thing too." I just started to have greater understanding of everybody else. The more I started to understand myself, I could recognize people's behaviors or things that they would say. I feel like I understand the human condition much better now.

But not only does it create this more self-understanding, it also helps create the conditions for more stability. Without knowing it before, I was pushed around by my emotions a lot and felt a little bit at the mercy of my moods. If I had a bad day, I just felt bad, or if one of my co-workers said something... I spent some time in Corporate America in management positions and there's a lot of stress. I'm sure many of you know this. But I discovered that I could just get pushed around a little bit by feeling bad or feeling good or just feeling disconnected. This noticing practice is a way that helps us have some stability and some uprightness no matter what is happening. This turns out to be such a great gift. It just makes one's life unfold with so much more ease and openness, and I would even say joy and happiness. And maybe I could even add love and peace. All this starts to become more and more available as the body and the mind start to settle down. We don't have to make love and peace arise; that's just what arises when settling down happens. It's just a natural consequence that occurs, and I invite you to discover that for yourself. You don't have to believe me about this.

This is a four-week course. It has been taught as a five-week course and as a six-week course, but right now it's going to be four weeks. Today, I'm going to focus on teaching mindfulness of the breath and a little bit about posture. It turns out these are foundational, fundamental meditation practices upon which all the others build. This is the basics, which actually could be enough to just take you wherever you wanted to go with meditation practice, but it can be helpful to learn more. Today will be the breath, next week will be the body, the third week will be about emotions, and the fourth week will be about thoughts and thinking. They all build on the preceding week, so it's sequential. The order in which I'm teaching this is very intentional. It doesn't have to be in this order; it could be taught in other ways, but I'm choosing to do this in this way and in this timeframe.

Something else that I'll say is that I'll be talking about formal sitting meditation, but so much about what we learn in sitting meditation will apply to our daily life as well. Meditating while waiting at the bank this afternoon, as I did while I went from one person who told me I had to go talk to a second person, who then told me I had to go talk to a third person, and the third person wasn't available... I found myself just sitting there. Rather than getting irritated by how long I was having to wait at the bank for something I thought was pretty straightforward, I decided to just sit there and calmly do standing meditation. I could feel a little bit of irritation arising and realize I don't actually have to go there, and just kind of get settled again. Life unfolds differently if you recognize you have that capacity.

I'll say a few words about IMC. Everything is offered freely here. IMC runs on generosity. People feel inspired and appreciate what they discover here, and they may choose to make a donation. It's not required; it's all appreciated, but not required. There's a donation box near the door and there's a little kiosk right around the corner here if you want to use your credit card.

Guided Meditation

I could talk nonstop for hours about meditation, but you didn't come here for that. Let's just do a very quick little meditation. Get in any posture that feels comfortable enough for you; this is just going to be for five minutes.

And we'll just feel into this moment's experience. In particular, feel the pressure of the chair or the cushion against your body. Feel the contact with the sitting surface. If you're sitting in a chair, using the backrest, maybe feel the contact with the buttocks, the backside of the legs, the feet.

We are here in this location, specifically your chair, your cushion. It's now. Nothing in particular needs to be happening. We're just noticing the pressure against the body.

And then we can open up the meditation and hear sounds. Letting go of the pressure in the body and now turning towards sounds. My voice, the fan, that little rattling noise that shows up when the fan is going, the traffic.

Discussion

So, just a brief exercise of intentionally placing our attention on an experience—feeling the pressure against the body—and then intentionally moving from that experience and opening up to sounds, just being able to receive whatever sounds are there. I'd love to hear from some of you. How was that? Was it like, "Yeah, I know how to do this," or was it, "Hmm, seems too simple?" Was there anything that you noticed? Was it easy? Or did it turn out not to be so easy to keep the mind just on the pressure of the body or the sounds? Did you find yourself making comments? Anybody have something they'd like to share?

(Jim): Hi there. What I found is that when you were talking about the body and the pressure on my legs and my seat, then when you said give that up and go with the sounds, I kept finding that I was back on that all the time. It kept pulling me back, so it was hard to move on to something else.

(Diana): And was that pleasant or was it unpleasant, both the pressure against the body and this thought of, "Oh, I'm supposed to be on the sounds, but I'm here instead"?

(Jim): Just trying to be on the sounds but really quickly jumping right back to the body every second. So I just noticed that.

(Diana): Great, great. This is a noticing practice. You noticed. I love it. Thank you. Anybody else have a comment?

Posture for Meditation

Okay, I'm going to spend a little time on posture, because when you're uncomfortable in meditation, that's often the only thing that happens—this "When is the bell going to ring?" kind of experience. So I'll talk about sitting on a cushion, on a chair, and on a bench.

When I'm sitting on a cushion, I have one leg in front of the other, as that is often the most comfortable, as opposed to quarter lotus or half lotus. If you know that, then go ahead and do that, of course. But this way, it feels very stable to have two knees and the buttocks on the ground; it's like this very stable tripod. The first time I meditated, I could do this maybe for 30 seconds. I remember going to a meditation center and just being amazed that people could sit there for 30 minutes or 45 minutes. I didn't even know it was humanly possible. This is definitely something that most of us will have to practice with if we choose to sit on a cushion.

Maybe I'll say a few things about this. I'm sitting on the very edge of the cushion, maybe the first quarter of it. So three-quarters of the cushion is behind me, and I'm just on the edge. Part of the reason is so that my hips are higher than my knees. This makes a big difference. Higher than or the same level as. If the knees end up being higher than the hips, then our femur kind of goes down into the hip joint. It can be comfortable enough for a few minutes, but for extended times, it's not so comfortable. So it can be really helpful to have your hips higher than your knees. But then you might say, "But my knee... I'm not that flexible. I can't do it." And so often what we would do is use these cushions to support the knees. We don't want the knees to be just dangling; we want to have a sense of stability. If your flexibility only allows your knees to be up high, then I would get a second zafu⁴ and get up higher, or do something like this under the knees so that you really have this contact with the ground. We want to feel stable.

An alternative is to sit on a bench. Sitting in a chair is perfectly legitimate. Just because I'm not so tall, actually, chairs are not that comfortable for me, so I always sit like this when I'm teaching or meditating. This anatomy prefers to sit on the floor, but that's not true for everybody, of course. These benches can be a way, if you don't have the flexibility to do something like this, you can put this behind you. My knees aren't bent like this, so my hips don't have to be as flexible, and the spine can be straight up, just as it can elsewhere. This can be really comfortable. When I was first beginning, I would alternate between the cushion, this, and a chair.

The same principle holds with the chair about hips being higher than or at the same level as the knees. If you have really long legs, this might mean you want to put a cushion on the chair and sit on that. If you're like me and your legs are not very long, then you put a cushion underneath your feet, so as to bring the ground up. You want to have both feet firmly on the ground. The body and the mind are so connected, much more than we might realize. When there's a sense of stability in the body, it really helps with having a sense of stability in the mind.

As for what you do with your hands, you can do whatever you like, but we recommend that you have some symmetry, so whatever is happening on one hand is the same with the other. I tend to put my hands here on my legs because I like to have a neutral wrist, but some people will put them here with a little bit of a bend. The only thing to notice is whether your hands are pulling on the shoulders, because then there's this rounding of the shoulders. Instead, what we want is a straight spine with the arms just hanging from it.

Think about having the ears over the shoulders. Maybe the chin goes back just a little bit, a tiny bit, to make sure that we're not leaning forward. These days with computers or cellphones, there's this way in which the head is not over the shoulders very often.

If some of you would like to get up and go get some cushions or a bench, you're welcome to do that. No requirement, of course. We'll do another meditation here in a few minutes.

Maybe there's one more thing I could say about hands. Sometimes it's helpful to have a cushion like this in your hands because it takes the pressure off of the shoulder, which takes the pressure off of the spine. So it can be helpful to just have a cushion here. A lot of people practice this way. Again, there's absolutely no requirement to be on the floor. I once taught a retreat where there were six of us meditation teachers, and I was the only one on the cushion. Five of them were in a chair. So it's perfectly fine to be in a chair. But unless you grew up sitting on the floor, it will be uncomfortable at the beginning. It's not uncomfortable for me now. It's just something that the more you do it, the easier it gets, just like everything else.

[Laughter]

Beautiful. Yan Li and Lydia will be giving instructions soon. Great. Does anybody have any questions about posture?

The Practice of Noticing

Mindfulness practice is a noticing practice. If we set up this idea that this meditation practice is to get rid of our thoughts or to bliss out or to discover the truth of some question we have, that's a different goal than noticing. It doesn't mean those things don't happen, but we really are orienting towards just wanting to notice what's happening. So it doesn't require that we're in complete comfort or that the mind is completely settled. We're just noticing what happens. And if you notice that your mind wanders, then you're practicing in the right way. So often in our days, our mind is just wandering and we have no idea it's wandering. It's just doing what minds do.

It's pretty common that with meditation, if we set an object—I'll guide us in a moment with the breath—it's kind of like this: not so long ago, I was out hiking and there was some water, and I wasn't sure if it was just a swampy area or a very slow-moving creek. It wasn't clear. So you take a stick and you put the stick in the water, and then you can see a very little wake next to the stick. And you think, "Oh yeah, okay, this is a creek and it's moving in this direction." In the exact same way, we choose to put our mind on one thing, and then we notice how much it's not on that one thing. And that's part of what this practice is. We start to notice what takes us away, what our patterns of mind are, what our habits are, what the mind likes to do. We would never notice that unless we were trying to put it here on the object.

And then, of course, the more we do it, the more we keep it on the object—the anchor, the breath—the easier it becomes. But in the beginning, we're here on the breath, and then the mind goes, "Gee, I have to remember to stop at the grocery store when I get home. What time does that place close? And it's so nice that the light is..." blah, blah, blah. Then, "Oh, right, I'm supposed to do that meditation thing," and then come back. And then off you'll go again: "I can't believe my boss said that to me today. What should I have..." These are just the things that happen. And then you'll wake up out of it and just come back.

When you find yourself realizing, "Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be meditating, I was off planning, worrying, fantasizing, remembering," doing all these things—we don't have to make it be a problem. We don't have to create a narrative such as, "My mind wandered. I'm a terrible meditator. I can't do it. Everybody else can do it. Look at them, they're sitting still." We often will build this little story on top of realizing we're no longer on the breath. You just notice, "Oh yeah, the mind was thinking," and come back to the breath. We don't have to make a value judgment out of this. It's very often that people will have this goal, or they think that there should be no thinking or that they should be completely relaxed. This does happen, but it doesn't happen at the very beginning of a meditation practice.

Guided Meditation

Okay, so let's take a posture. Have some uprightness in the posture that expresses your intention to meditate, maybe a sense of nobility, and some ease. This might take a little time to get the hang of.

We'll start the same way we started the other meditation: just feeling the pressure against the body, feeling the contact with the sitting surface. Again, it might be the back if you're in a chair, the buttocks, the back of the legs, the feet. Feeling what the feet are touching, feeling grounded, connected. We're here.

Maybe you can just scan your body, see if there's some obvious places of tension or holding. Common places are around the eyes, the jaw, the shoulders. Letting the shoulder blades slide down the back, away from the ears.

And then rest the attention on the experience of breathing. That might be the belly moving in and out, it might be the chest or rib cage expanding and contracting, or it might be the feeling of air going in and out of the nose. Whichever one of those three areas feels the most comfortable, most accessible, just rest your attention there.

Feeling from the inside, so to speak, what does it feel like to have an in-breath? Feeling the stretch or the movement.

Feeling the experience of an exhale. How does that feel?

And when the mind wanders, as it's apt to do, we just very simply, gently begin again with the sensations of breathing.

Nothing in particular needs to be happening. We're just noticing the sensations of breathing. It doesn't need to be any words, just feeling. But if there were words, they would be more like adjectives.

There's nothing to figure out. We're just noticing the sensations of breathing.

It doesn't matter how many times you have to begin again. Just when we wake up out of thinking, just very simply begin again with the sensations of breathing.

Can you give yourself over to the sensations of breathing? Letting the thoughts go, they can take care of themselves.

If you find yourself really tired, dozing off, you can straighten up your posture. That often can make a difference.

Just tuning in, being sensitive to the experience of breathing, feeling the rhythm.

If you notice that you're thinking, can you choose to be with the sensations of breathing? Letting the thinking just be in the background, with the experience of breathing in the foreground.

Maybe you can run a little experiment here and just see if you can notice what is happening, whatever is happening, in a nonjudgmental, a very ordinary way. Just notice what's happening in your experience.

What's it like to have non-judgmental noticing? "Oh, it's like this right now. It's just like this." We don't have to add anything extra.

Q&A and Discussion

When I was first learning to meditate, I would be like, "Ring the bell, ring the bell, ring the bell. When are you going to ring the bell?" Maybe some of you had that experience too.

In that meditation, I started by directing you to feel the pressure against the body. I like to do this as a way to start because it's a way to feel really connected with the location of where I am in the present moment. And then maybe to do a little general body scan just to see if there are some areas of the body which are really tense, and bringing awareness to them can allow a certain amount of softening. Not always, but sometimes. And then to rest the attention on the sensations of breathing.

Sometimes we can think about breathing and think that we're meditating on the breath. That's partly why I suggested feeling how an inhale is, to break up the breath into its parts and just notice the inhales and then the exhales. And then when you notice that you're lost in thought, just begin again on the breath. It can be that simple. I'm not saying this is super easy and you can get it right away. This is definitely a practice, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Part of its power, and I would say its transformative power, is the simplicity of it. The things that we let go of, that shed when we stay with the simplicity of the experience, just enables us to be in the simplicity of other experiences, instead of filling our minds with getting disconnected from our experience by planning or not listening to what somebody's telling us.

So I'd love to hear some comments or questions. How was that?

(Question): I noticed that as soon as I put my attention on my breathing, my breathing went from automatic to manual. As soon as I paid attention to it, I was like, "How do I breathe? Am I breathing too big?" It was more like I was doing it intentionally but kind of forgetting how I normally breathe.

(Diana): It's so common. It's very, very common that we feel like we're going to control the breath a little bit. It's part of noticing, and controlling can go together. It's perfectly okay. It's something that will just work itself out. Eventually, you won't feel so much like you have to control it. But then I will say that sometimes we feel like we need to control the controlling, and then we have to control the control of the controlling, and then we just get wrapped up. It can be helpful if you feel like you're kind of getting wrapped up in not wanting to control the breath—and you didn't say this, I'm just offering this for anybody else as well—it can be helpful sometimes to open up to sounds and then come back to the breath, to interrupt the momentum if we get into a little tussle with trying to control the breath. Was that helpful?

(Question): Thank you. Just two questions. If you're in the chair, should you not rest on the back? You should be actually forward?

(Diana): Thank you for asking that. The question is, should we use the backrest? If you can, if your back allows you, it turns out to be much easier to not use the backrest. But a lot of people do. Often what happens if you're just a beginner meditator, you don't have the strength to sit without a backrest. And so sometimes people will start without a backrest and then maybe lean back for a little bit and then come forward, but do it in an easy, gentle way. It can be really worthwhile to work up those muscles to be able to sit without a backrest.

(Question): And the second question is, when you're exhaling, should you open your mouth and exhale deeply?

(Diana): No, we're not doing any of that. The question was with the exhale, should you open your mouth and deeply exhale? No, we're keeping the breath completely natural for this practice. We're not doing anything intentional with it.

(Question): I'm just wondering, it was really hard for me to not focus on my body and how my knees were feeling. So any tips for, especially when your foot's falling asleep, how do we focus on the breath when our knees are killing us?

(Diana): I was waiting for somebody to ask this question because, of course, this happens. I'm assuming that the sensation in your knee was uncomfortable, is that right? Next week we'll talk a lot about the body and how to be with the body, but I'll say a few things here. One is that you can zoom in, in a way. What I mean by this is to bring some curiosity to it. "Okay, this is uncomfortable, but is it a stabbing or a tingling or a throbbing?" We're just resting our attention and bringing some curiosity to it. Then we can ask not only about the particulars of the sensation, but also about the location. Is it very specific or is it broad? Is it moving or is it in one place? The point is not to find the answer so much as it's to shift our relationship to it. Because we're probably like, "Dang it, I wish this wouldn't be happening." There's often this aversion, and sometimes it can turn into anger. But the truth is, there's a lot of discomfort in this human experience. So there's something about being able to build our capacity to be with discomfort. One way is to shift our relationship away from aversion towards curiosity.

A second way is maybe, as best you can, to go to something neutral. It might not be easy if it's really painful, but you can go to a neutral experience like pressure against the body. Just bring the mind back and back and back.

A third thing I'll offer when there's discomfort is, instead of zooming in, zoom way out, as if you have a bird's-eye view. The way that plays out is, "Yes, this uncomfortable sensation is in my knee, and I feel the pressure in my body, and I feel the breath." So it's: "discomfort in the knee, pressure in the body, breath." When something's uncomfortable, we tend to collapse into it and it becomes our whole experience.

The fourth way is to shift your posture, but shift your posture while being mindful. It's like, "Oh, this knee is really uncomfortable. My foot is falling asleep. I'm going to die if this bell doesn't ring. I'm going to move my left leg." You would say this in your mind. "Okay, I'm going to move my left leg." And then we move the leg, feel how it is in this new posture, and then go back to the breath. So it's not like we stop meditating, shift, and then come back. We just fold the shifting of the posture into the meditation. Was that helpful?

(Question): You mentioned not leaning back on the chair so much. Is there like an energetic thing that's happening by not being supported by a chair?

(Diana): It just turns out that when the spine, when all the vertebrae are stacked one on the other and the arms are just able to hang, then you can sit like this for a very long time. Probably you don't notice this, but when you're sitting in a chair leaning back, you're adjusting your posture subtly all the time, frequently. So it's just a little more stable and steady to just be upright like this. As for an energetic thing, I don't know. This is something you can explore and just see how it is.

Developing a Practice

It can be really helpful to have a regular meditation practice. Just like playing the piano or learning to ride a bike, the more you do it, the easier it gets. It can be really helpful to actually experiment in the beginning to find when is the best time for you to meditate. For some people, it's best first thing in the morning because the mind isn't cluttered with all the other things that it happens to do. Some people will have a cup of coffee first and then meditate. I find myself meditating mid-morning, but my schedule allows that. I like to go outside for a walk first thing, and then a little bit later I'll meditate. Some people meditate at the end of the day; it helps to unwind. But it can be really helpful to just explore the difference between the end of the day, the morning, or lunchtime. I know somebody who goes and sits in their car during their lunch break for 10 minutes and meditates.

Then the question of how long often shows up. I think 20 minutes is fantastic. If you can do 10 minutes, that's great. If you can do five minutes, that's okay too. If you do nothing but just get into the meditation posture and take three breaths, that can be okay too. Often what happens is we have this sense like, "Oh, I should meditate, but I don't have time. I'll do it later," and then it just doesn't happen. Or, "I want to meditate, but it's painful in my knee, so I'm not going to do it." But there's something about, if nothing else, just taking the meditation posture and three breaths that reminds ourselves that it doesn't have to be a giant endeavor. Start where you are.

Something else about practicing at home is that meditation doesn't have to happen in a formal meditation posture. Something that can be really helpful is to choose an activity that you do every day that takes a short amount of time and just notice all the sensations associated with that. A common one is brushing one's teeth. Just notice, "How does the toothbrush feel in my hand? What's the weight of it? What does toothpaste really taste like?" Feel your feet on the ground, feel the water in your mouth as you rinse. Just be there completely with that experience. And as you find the mind wandering, just come back to brushing the teeth. That can be a real support.

(Question): Do you encounter people who sometimes avoid meditation because they are just afraid to be by themselves and confront their thoughts?

(Diana): Yes.

(Question): Okay, so what's the solution for that?

(Diana): I would say for now, just come back to the breath. We're going to do a whole week on thoughts. But it's tremendous... your question is, do people avoid meditation because of the thoughts that arise?

(Question): It's like being afraid of being by yourself because now you're going to confront all the random thoughts that come into your mind. Some are good and some are maybe not so good.

(Diana): Then maybe just be in a meditation posture and do three breaths. And then do three breaths when you're waiting at a stoplight. Do three breaths when you're waiting for the other person on the phone to pick up. Just sprinkle it throughout the day, and it starts to become easier and easier. But this is not uncommon, that people don't want to be with their thoughts. There's a lot of scary stuff that can happen in here.