56. Meditation 28

Review the fundamentals of mindfulness and notice what your mind is like.

Let’s do the most basic practice of mindfulness. Simply close your eyes and pay attention to the breath. Feel it wherever it’s most distinct. At the nose or the chest? Or the abdomen. Pick one spot. And let awareness settle there. And whatever else you notice. Other sensations. Or sound. Our thoughts. Let all of that go. And bring your attention back to the breath. The moment you notice your mind has been captured by thought. Look at the thorn itself. Where is it? What is it? How does it have any power at all? And then come back to the breath. See if you can make your attention even more precise. Don’t let anything about the character of the breath escape your notice. If you find yourself subtly anticipating the breath. Just drop back and receive it. Your job is not to be like a cat waiting for a mouse to emerge from its hole, just be like a mirror in which everything appears effortlessly. In the final minute of the session. Keep your attention on the breath. But let your mind expand to include all the sensation in your body. Just let consciousness reflect the full change in cloud. Of sensation. OK. Congratulations on finishing the introductory course. Whether you’re new to meditation or been practicing for years, the purpose of the introductory course was to give everyone the same tools. Of course, what you choose to do now, how you integrate this practice into your life, will determine what you ultimately get from it. As you continue down this path, remember, the goal of meditation is not to become a meditator. Not even a good one. The goal is to recognize how the mind always already is. And to experience the freedom that is inherent to the nature of consciousness. Freedom from fear and shame and envy and craven. Freedom from self. Now, perhaps you’ve tasted that at some point in the introductory course, and perhaps you haven’t yet. haven’t yet. In either case, you now have all the tools you need to keep exploring, and I can only encourage you to do that until there really is no distinction between your practice and your life. Some of you might want to use the waking up app every day, and going forward you’ll see a daily meditation appear on the home screen and you can select a 10 or 20 minute version of that. And this meditation will change each day. And if you want other meditations to do on any given day, you can always revisit the introductory course. And of course, you can do any of the other specific meditations that you’ll find in the practice section of the app. Some of you may practice less frequently or use the app in tandem with some other method. I’ll just say, in my experience, very few people outgrow the benefit of using guided meditations. I certainly haven’t. I mean, it seems silly, but even listening to my own meditations in the process of editing them is helpful to me. A guided meditation, even if you created it, functions like a mindfulness alarm that keeps you more focused than you would otherwise be. The waking, of course, has been designed with two principles in mind, there’s a theory section for you to learn and relearn the concepts and a practice section for you to deepen your direct experience of the nature of mind. It’s really through both theory and practice that I think each of us lives are more examined life. As you know, the content in the course continues to expand and change, I’m adding new lessons and continuing to have conversations with other teachers and scholars and scientists. Again, I’m doing the practice along with you and continually searching for new resources in other ways of thinking that are useful. So I really can’t tell you what the waking, of course, will look like in a year. All I can say is that whatever is here, whether it’s been created by me or someone else, it will be here because I think you’ll find value in it. However, waking up will never become a content farm. It’s not just about listening to each new lesson or conversation once and then waiting for the next one to appear. My hope is that the content in waking up will be useful to you as a tool which you can pick up again and again. Waking up is the place where I’m putting the most important things I’ve ever learned, and these are insights and experiences for which I feel immense gratitude. So please feel free to return to lessons and conversations you’ve already listened to. You might hear something new in them each time.