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Guided Meditation: Pausing; Dharmette: Practice Skills (2 of 5) The Alchemy of Pausing - Ying Chen, 陈颖

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

Guided Meditation: Pausing

Greetings, everyone. Happy to be here with you all again, and it is very sweet to see the greetings in the chat box. Here we are again at 7:00 in Pacific time. We'll begin our meditation with the sound of a bell.

Pausing. Pausing to begin our meditation together this morning for this day. Being very generous with this process of pausing. What is happening right now with pausing? There may be a momentary mindfulness coming in. Maybe a momentary kind of stopping. Maybe there is a sense of a kind of flow in the mind. Thoughts get interrupted momentarily, staying with pausing.

Pausing to arrive at here and now. Maybe we can finally take a few long, deep breaths. Maybe the sound can move through us. Maybe the sensations in the body or the movements of the breath are bubbling up to the foreground.

Pausing to step out of the unconscious flow of thoughts, planning, project managing, fantasizing. Pausing to arrive at a here and now, embodied, heartfelt. The beginning moments of the meditation may feel a little jerky or bouncy because of the momentum of the flow of unconsciousness. Mindfulness is flickering in and out. No problem. We are simply, patiently, gently staying with this process of pausing to arrive.

Letting go of actively feeding into the thinking, and resting more and more in a mindful awareness. Embodied, heartfelt. What's the felt sense of your experience right now? Maybe the rapid movements, the momentum at the beginning of the meditation, is settling down ever so slightly. Or maybe not. Resting in the present, resting with mindfulness.

Patiently, with a sense of commitment, sati¹ may become more continuous. We have a sense that we finally arrived at presence.

Can you notice some small ways or big ways of inner shift from unconscious flow to becoming consciously aware? Do you feel availability right here? Being available to the felt sense in the body. Being available to the aliveness that's present right here through the movements of the breath, vibrations in the body.

Pausing is an alchemical process. What's the felt sense right now? Arriving. Arrived and available. You feel the heart opening, easing up. The body softening, relaxing.

From this open, receptive, available field, aligning and orienting our whole being—inner, outer—with our deepest intentions, our aspirations, without having to use the thinking mind to align. Can you feel the aligning in the body with the heart?

Aligning with our aspirations feels like this in the immediacy of your experience. Sometimes images may come. You may have a certain kind of recognition arising. For me, sometimes this spontaneous image of sitting upright like the Buddha would arise. Staying with the felt sense.

Being aligned and available feels like this in your own experience. You may have a kind of a grounding flavor. Maybe the heart, the mind, and the body can feel safe, protected.

From this aligned and available field, you can choose to turn the attention onto the familiar meditation object, if you choose to do that: body, breath. Or you can simply rest here, being present, aligned, and available.

If the mind wandered away, remember, remember pausing. Allow pausing to interrupt the currents² of our mind. Pausing to allow mindfulness, sati, to come forth.

In the last moments of our meditation together, maybe resting and settling on the ground of being available and aligned. Aligned with our values, aspirations. Allow this to be a wholesome ground that we can stand in as we step into the day.

Announcements

Thank you for practicing together. I'd like to take a moment to do something that folks suggested yesterday in the chat. That is, maybe collectively we send mettā³ to Nikki, who was supposed to be here this week but was feeling unwell and wasn't able to be here with you all. So let's just take a moment to send mettā to Nikki, wishing her well-being and a speedy recovery from whatever may be bothering her body and heart.

Dharmette: Practice Skills (2 of 5) The Alchemy of Pausing

Today, I brought with me a second practice skill that I'd like to share, and this is what I call the alchemy of pausing. Pausing is probably not that unfamiliar to most of us who have been practicing with mindfulness and insight meditation. A lot of teachers would have pointed out that we can pause as a part of our practice. What may be unfamiliar is that often we may not have paid close attention to this alchemical process of pausing.

I want to drop in an evocative phrase or sentence here: the practice of pausing has the potential to mature into a radical transformation here and now. Maybe that's a little radical. It was pointed out to me recently that the word "radical" can mean extreme, but it also has a meaning of relating to or proceeding from a root or foundation. I love that. There is this sense that the simple practice of pausing has the potential to create an inner shift and an inner transformation that happens at the foundational level of our being.

We can see if that's possible, but I'd like to unpack this alchemical process a bit today. I introduced a little bit of this in the guided meditation today at the beginning, and a little bit at the end also. As we practice with pausing, what happens when we first start pausing? Maybe you can say that our mindfulness practice begins with a momentary pause.

What I often notice in the moment of pausing is one or two things. One is noticing that there was a kind of ongoing flow of my mind that was happening—maybe thinking, planning, ruminating, wondering. That becomes available to me, kind of visible to me. This pausing has the effect of interrupting that flow, which usually is very unconscious; we are just going with that flow. So that's one effect: pausing to interrupt the unconscious flow.

The other effect with the momentary pausing is that mindfulness becomes available. Maybe sati is not immediately established, but it's momentary. It's flickering in and out because there is a momentum of this unconscious flow that may be operating. It's like we're going with a rapid current, flowing with it. At some point, this beginning of the pausing is like there's a sense of, "Oh, I want to step out of this unconscious flow." But we're not taking a foothold just yet on the riverbank, for example. We're still kind of being carried by it a little bit. However, we are interrupting that flow when we're not actively engaging in the unconscious flow itself by keeping feeding it with our thinking, thoughts, plans, doing, and project managing.

So the first effect of this process of pausing is it can interrupt that unconsciousness. Then, as we stay with the momentary mindfulness, little by little, what can happen in our felt sense is a pausing can lead to a felt sense of things slowing down. Our mindfulness can become more continuous. It may not be perfectly continuous, but you can feel you're more present. The rapid fire of the thoughts might thin out a bit because we're not so invested in it. The stories may feel a little more floaty; they're not gripping on us so much. Using that current analogy, this is kind of like we're now being able to have more foothold on the riverbank and not being so carried away by the unconscious flow.

This is what I'm calling a second phase of this alchemical shift and change of the pause. It starts with interrupting, and then moves into things slowing down. We can actually begin to hear some sounds, or we can feel that we can actually breathe. Sometimes when we're being carried by the unconscious flow, we're holding our breath and we don't even know it. So that can happen.

Then again, as we stay with this process more and more, the next phase that begins to emerge is that our mindfulness can become fuller. Now it feels like our foot can actually settle on the riverbank—maybe both feet are settling on the riverbank. There is a felt sense of being more rooted here and now, present. The momentum of going to places begins to settle down.

Sometimes for me, I would notice at the beginning of my mindfulness starting to come forth, it can have a momentum that's like the rapid-fire thinking mind because my mindfulness would be hopping around, jumping between the breath and the sound. But then, when our mindfulness becomes more established, that momentum of hopping around from one object to another begins to settle. We're not moving about so much; we're simply resting more and more in this field of awareness and knowing.

This is a phase where there can be a distinct shift that we can feel: "Oh, we're shifting from this momentum of unconscious doing to a kind of knowing." Resting in the knowing, we can observe and feel the flow, but we're not being carried away by it.

And then, with this mindfulness being more and more fully established, this begins to empower the unfolding of the next phase of pausing, which I'm calling "pausing to be transformed." As we begin to rest more fully in the fullness of awareness and knowing, what can happen is that we can begin to see the different patterns of our mind activities. We can see the activities and reactivities that can lead to dukkha⁴, or stress, and how we can be free from that stress, or dukkha.

One of the main patterns that gets revealed in this process by staying and resting in this field of awareness is that we can see our ongoing, self-centered project managing, reacting, and thrashing between wanting and not wanting. They're just tying ourselves in knots, right?

The Dhammapada⁵ has very vivid verses that describe this kind of thrashing that the unconscious mind can get ourselves involved in. It's like a fish out of water, thrashing about with this unconscious mind.

Resting in this field of awareness, we can begin to see the patterns very clearly, and seeing clearly has a powerful effect on us. When we see, when we know for ourselves, the grip on this kind of pattern—or the investment in trying to manage our way out—begins to soften itself, loosen itself. We are more and more at ease. We are settling into a kind of being that's available for us, being with the flow rather than being pulled or pushed by it.

There is a kind of through-line with this alchemical process of pausing that moves us from the unconscious doing and managing to a clear knowing and a profound sense of being. That's a radical transformation. It has that potential. It doesn't mean that it's always there, but it's a possibility. This form of being is not deadening, but rather it's alive. It has innate responsiveness within it, and it has a capacity to respond out of the depth of our being.

So my invitation for today is yes, open to the possibility of pausing. Pausing to interrupt. Pausing to slow down. Pausing to get to know the depth of our being, and pausing to see the possibility of being transformed by it. Thank you, everyone, for your attention. May you rejoice in the practice of pausing⁶.