This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Settling In; Directed Awareness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Settling In; Dharmette: Directed Awareness - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 15, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Settling In

Good morning. Good morning, YouTube, Sangha, international, and IMC meditators. Really lovely to see you today. Well, see your chats anyway. Happy to be with you; it's a real privilege to be here this week. I enjoy this sit. I'm doing a sound check, and there's a couple minutes delay, so I'm going to be waiting for some of you to respond. Really great to see all the chats coming in. Okay, great. Thank you, folks, glad that you can hear me. Nice to see some familiar names, either from in-person interactions or having been part of this community over the last several years. So a warm welcome. Warm welcome to you this day, whatever time it is for you, and delighted to be here with you. I'm about to start the recording. Here we go.

So, the invitation this morning is to settle into meditation. I'll do a very short review of the context of this week. I'm covering essential elements or core elements of mindfulness that aren't part of the normal IMC intro to mindfulness series Gil has been doing over the last number of weeks. This week, that's been on vedanā¹ or feeling tone. Attitudes of mind on Tuesday and Wednesday, and today I'll be talking about the capacity our minds have for directed attention.

So with that, the invitation is to settle into a posture that's a good balance of relaxation and alertness. Whatever that means for you, it can be helpful, if you're sitting or lying down, to have your head aligned with your spine, balanced over your shoulders front and back and side to side. Check and make sure that you're balanced left and right over your hip points. Sometimes people like to sway a little bit forward and back, side to side, and just check in. Make sure you're grounded.

Then, taking a couple of longer, slower, deeper breaths as an invitation to come into your body. Touch into your embodiment, releasing any excess tension on the outbreath. Then, allowing the breathing to return to normal. If you haven't already, softening the eyes or closing them.

As we've done this week, scanning through your body, noticing any feelings of pleasant or unpleasant and just acknowledging them. No need to hang out there, but just feeling any tension or relaxation. Any other kinds of pleasant or unpleasant that want to reveal themselves.

And then more globally, perhaps just checking in: How am I today? What's the overall mood? We've been talking about the frame of mind or attitude. Today, starting this meditation, allowing and acknowledging whatever that is with as much kindness and graciousness as possible.

And then settling in. Settling into whatever object of attention makes most sense for your mind, heart, and body this morning. I'll give instructions on the breath today, and the invitation is, if the breath doesn't work for you for whatever reason, to adapt those instructions to a more global sense of your body sensations or to hearing.

So again, tuning into your body. Noticing any sense of motion or stillness, especially attuning to the motion, the sensations of your life's breath. Noticing any soothing or pleasurable sensations of the breath, and acknowledging if the breath isn't that way right now. It's just neutral, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Allowing any kind of sensation of breathing to be okay.

Resting on the rhythmic in and out of your body breathing. Tuning in to wherever the breath feels most noticeable and obvious for you. Perhaps the chest, the subtle up and down, or the nostrils, the difference between the exhale and the inhale. Or what for many people is most relaxing: the gentle rise and fall, wave-like motion of breathing in the belly, diaphragmatic breathing. Noticing the subtle differences between the beginning of the inhale, the middle of the inhale, and the top, the fullness of the inhale.

And then noticing, tuning into that moment the exhale begins. Allowing the exhale perhaps to be a little bit longer. Noticing the middle of the exhale, and perhaps that tiny pause at the end of the exhale. Resting in that. Allowing the breathing to be natural. Becoming a dedicated observer, a companion with all of the tiny sensations in each breath.

If other sounds, sensations, or arisings pull the attention from the breath or your primary object of focus, the invitation is to gently acknowledge whatever has arisen. Be with it for as long as it's predominant as an event, and then, when possible, returning to the primary attention on the object of breathing. This breath, each breath like no other. What's this breath like?

In the final moments of this meditation, the invitation is to open the lens, the scope of mindful awareness, to include everything arising in this moment. Noticing in particular the overall sense, the mood. What's the overall feeling tone? Resting with that, acknowledging any moment in this meditation that was challenging with as much kindness and graciousness as possible. And soaking in, steeping in, any moments of peace, subtleness, mindfulness, and your own good intentions coming to this period of practice.

And from that place, turning your internal gaze outwards to all the others this life touches, known and unknown, seen and unseen, close and distant, and wishing them well. Perhaps making the determination that in some way, small or large, our practice here together can benefit them as well. May all beings everywhere be safe, peaceful, and free. Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Directed Awareness

Oh, good morning again everyone. A warm welcome wherever and whenever you are. I'm feeling so settled I almost don't want to talk, but I promised to talk, so here I am.

The context for this week is that it's a series on essential elements of mindfulness that support the growth of our practice, and even the beginning of our practice. I'll do a quick review later, but for now I just want to jump into today's topic, which is directed attention. Rather than talk about what directed attention is, we'll start with a brief exercise.

Focus your attention on one of your hands. Not the image or the concept of your hand, but the felt experience of it from the inside out: tingling, pulsing, warmth, or cool aliveness. Allow your awareness to fill your hand perhaps the way water fills a sponge. Now shift your attention to your foot. Same way, inside out.

How hard was that? Really easy, right? So the capacity of placing our attention in a certain area of the body or even other aspects of our experience, that's directed attention. Sometimes a metaphor can be used like looking through a peephole or looking through a telescope versus looking out an open door or an open window. In reality, though, directed attention in meditation or in life is less like looking through a small cylindrical object and more a form of selective attention, which we as humans simply have, most of us, if we have our correct neurology and everything's working okay.

So an example here: if you are in a crowded plaza and looking for a friend, and you find your good friend and they are a long way away, you start walking towards them. You aren't totally unaware that there are other people around or other objects around, but the bulk of your attention is on tracking where that person is so that you can arrive to be with them. That is the kind of directed attention that helps many people settle into meditation. We're putting the bulk of our attention on one thing and allowing other things to kind of be in the periphery, right? It's a kind of filtering process, filtering out less salient information, and it's a natural and necessary part of human cognition.

For the purposes of mindfulness meditation, as I did this morning, we often use breathing as the object of attention. Sometimes body sensations work better for some people, or sound. In mettā² meditation, the object of directed attention is the intention of mettā, perhaps the phrases. This directed attention is a powerful capacity. It's essential for learning, for life, and for meditation. As many of you have already discovered, it helps many people settle faster, or settle at all in the meditation process, faster than just letting the mind kind of roam around and be and do whatever it wants, which often results in daydreaming, fantasy, and checking out.

So it can help coax our minds away from this wanting and not wanting, this greed and aversion that I've been talking about this week. Eventually, it can help attenuate those tendencies to glom on to whatever we like or don't like in a moment, by repeatedly, gently placing the attention somewhere normal, soothing, perhaps neutral-ish, though that can shift, as we've talked about.

Another feature of directed attention that's helpful to know about, that's not as often talked about, is that sometimes directed attention, that filtering, can allow other things that come up to shape experience without you noticing. So that's why it can be helpful to start or occasionally check in about whatever else is present. You may remember at the beginning of the meditation, I, as many meditation teachers do, encouraged you to just check out whatever the mood or general frame of mind was before directing your attention to the breathing. This is to acknowledge anything else that might be coming along with our attention into our experience.

It's really possible for these other dimensions of experience to kind of slip in and get cultivated along with stability of mind. If there's a general sense of unpleasant, for example, and I don't acknowledge it, that next layer after the vedanā, the feeling tone of unpleasant, could be a general feeling about meditation that day—a general not wanting or grumpiness. So this is part of the review of the last few days. Vedanā, feeling tone, was what we called it on Monday. If it's unseen, it can kind of filter or tint experience in a way that isn't so helpful. For example, if I'm having hip pain and I don't notice that it's just hip pain, or I do and the mindfulness isn't that strong, I might be averse to it and stay averse to it. I want to shift and make it go away. That's the unpleasant and the not wanting in the chain of events.

So that feeling tone can be very simple. If I just acknowledge "oh, pain," sometimes I can just stay with the unpleasantness. I don't have to build a story about it, like, "Oh, this is cancer... or I need to go back to the doctor." It doesn't have to take me away to this whole story, this whole house of cards. The acknowledgment of the simple feeling tone of what is can cut through even very elaborate, unhelpful stories projected outwards.

Then there's that next layer that happens for most of us: common reactions. In this case, it was the not wanting. These can become overall attitudes or frames of mind oriented to wanting or not wanting, otherwise known as greed or aversion—all forms of craving. It can be, for example, a habitual wanting of a nice experience, or a nice view, or a nice breath, and then I'm judging all of my experience through that filter of, "Well, it's supposed to be like this." That's also maybe not so helpful. And the beautiful thing about this is that shifting to mindful awareness of the attitude helps develop greater discernment and helps attenuate or move the attitude to be less informative or authoritative about my experience.

As I talked about yesterday, the attitude of mind can also influence the feeling tone. So if I go into a room every day to meditate and it's pleasant—it's got sort of the perfect lighting and ambiance, maybe there's a pleasant scent in the background, a perfect place to sit—that conditions a certain kind of attitude. Once my attitude is set, I'll have a pleasant association with that place. Conversely, if it's a place... I'm not explaining this very well. Basically what I'm saying is our attitude about an experience can inform how pleasant or unpleasant it is.

Let me give another example I gave earlier in the class. If we feel the touch of someone's hand on our shoulder, it's a completely different experience if it's a good friend or a lover than if it's a presumptuous acquaintance who's a little bit obnoxious. So our attitude towards the situation, towards the experience, can actually shift the perception of it.

Finally, Wednesday we talked about wholesome or beneficial attitudes of mind for meditation: generosity of spirit, simple allowing, contentment, appreciative interest, inquiry, equanimity. All of those are onward-leading for the practice, and all of those can be practiced in relationship to anything else that's arising. If I have appreciative inquiry about my aversion, it can attenuate it or at least lead to greater discernment, greater wisdom about it. So mindfulness can transform even unpleasant experiences and predispositions into information, food for awakening.

So back to directed attention: all of this matters because if we're meditating on a specific object, it's really helpful to intentionally cultivate positive, openhearted interest, allowing, accepting, and non-contention. To allow experience to come in, the full range of experience to come into our mindfulness versus be left out of it and accidentally come along with it. So it's helpful with each meditation to maybe start by checking the attitude or frame of mind. Unseen predispositions, attitudes towards greed or aversion can be subdued by directed attention, attenuated by them, or sometimes they can tag along if our attention is developed elsewhere.

So the encouragement is to take a few moments in each meditation and notice. Notice whatever the frame of mind or mood or general inclination is, so it can be seen clearly and develop greater discernment.

Thank you for your practice. A delight to be with you today, and we have just a moment or two. I'll answer one or two questions and then be back with some of you tomorrow. May all beings benefit.

Q&A

Brian: Very bad tinnitus.

That is unpleasant. I'm sorry to hear that. I have heard two different schools of thought on this. I rarely experience it myself, so these are both from other people. One is to let your attention be much broader than just one object. To allow a broader wash of experiences so that the hearing is just one thread within it. So that's one. I know one person for whom it worked to completely merge with the hearing experience and found it to be a great concentration object. That may or may not work for you, so I would experiment with it with a little caution. And then finally, this kind of tai chi move that I've been talking about this week, which is to really notice your attitude towards it and focus more on that. Maybe sometimes there's aversion, maybe sometimes it's okay to take a step back. I hope that's helpful.

Greg: How do you distinguish between attention and awareness?

So Greg, I'm not sure if you were here at the very beginning of the talk, but I didn't frame it this way, but this is indeed what it was. So when I asked people to place their attention on their hand, that's the capacity of attention, especially if it moves from your hand to your foot. The fact that you're aware of the movement of your attention from your hand to your foot is the awareness. So the attention is what moves and the awareness is what sees the moving.

Peter: Can there be too much control of attention from the control tower of the mind?

Absolutely can. The real encouragement in this practice is to settle into the embodied experience rather than controlling the experience from the mind. So that filling of the hand with awareness like a sponge, that is a very different experience than imagining the hand and trying to control my experience at the hand. So you may experiment with rather than having the locus of attention be in the head, checking how it feels to feel from the belly or the body.

Just going to check here. I think that's a little bit about each of them. I'm also going to be offering some Q&A in my blog on my website at the end of the month, so I will do my best to capture the questions I haven't had time to answer and address them now. I'll put that link in tomorrow.

Mary L.: A troubling situation is very prevalent in the heart. How, in meditation, to keep attention on the anchor?

Sometimes you can't. If it's really up, then it can be helpful to turn the attention to your heart, the feelings under the situation. The feelings under the situation, so noticing the sadness or the anxiety or the resistance or whatever is there and attending to that with kindness, with awareness. It can be really helpful not to allow the thoughts just to proliferate, and instead come to the embodied part of the emotions, and give yourself breaks. Give yourself breaks.

So thank you everyone for your attention and I look forward to being with you tomorrow.