Fronsdal_Intro1_transcribed_Oct07.pdf

Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation: Mindfulness of Breath (1 of 6)

Transcribed from a talk by Gil Fronsdal 10/3/07

Welcome to the Insight Meditation Center. My name is Gil Fronsdal and I’m the primary teacher here. This is

going to be a 6 week course in mindfulness practice. During the course we’ll focus on mindfulness meditation,

but most of the things I’m going to be talking about apply in daily life as well. This is a very important thing to

understand, that the line between meditation and daily life is an arbitrary line. And sooner or later people who

meditate realize how arbitrary that line is and become interested in how to live in daily life with a kind of

integrity, a kind of intimacy, and the kind of freedom there can be in meditation. Why should it only be in

meditation that we feel free? Why should it only be in meditation that you feel peaceful or happy or feel like

you have a high degree of integrity? The challenge is in how to take the wonderful benefits and conditions that

come with meditation and begin to live with that in your life. Not that you have to look like a zombie. Some

people associate meditators with being really calm, and the unfortunate thing is that people think I’m kind of

calm, so I’m not a good spokesperson for a passionate meditator. So don’t use me as the last word on what it

looks like to be a lifetime meditator, it’s just who I am. The point is not to be, in Buddhism certainly, but also

in this practice here, the point is not to become somebody but rather the point is to become free. And to become

free means you actually become freer to be who you are. You become free of what’s extra. And what we’re

most concerned about in Buddhism is the extras that add stuff that cause you to suffer or causes your behavior

to bring suffering to others. So as you meditate with mindfulness meditation, the causes and conditions for

suffering tend to shed and fall off, and what’s left is not nothing, what’s left is happiness, peace and calm.

What’s left is greater insight and understanding and wisdom in this life that we are living.

Mindfulness can exist quite well without Buddhism. Buddhism cannot live without mindfulness. Mindfulness

is certainly very key to the whole Buddhist enterprise, and it’s an interesting fact that that’s the case, because

what’s required in Buddhism is not a doctrine nor a belief, but rather an enhanced capacity to pay attention.

When I was small, my mother would regularly tell me: “Gil, pay attention. Pay attention.” And mostly I didn’t

listen to her, which kids are supposed to do, right? So it’s my karma as an adult, to be in this tradition where

the thing we do is pay attention. In the next 6 weeks, I’ll teach you some of the basic elements of mindfulness

meditation, of using your attention in an enhanced way, in a way that is hopefully useful in your life. The way

it’s done is systematically, it doesn’t have to be done this way, but we do it systematically. Today I’ll lay out

the basics of the practice, including the very center of it, breath meditation. Mindful attention to your breathing.

Next week we’ll talk about mindfulness of the body. It turns out that Buddhist spirituality puts a tremendous

importance on being an embodied being, on being connected to your body. You wouldn’t believe that if you

read a lot of the books about Buddhism. They tend to be kind of intellectual. But if you go hang out in practice

centers, you find out that the body is really important; getting into your body and being in your body. The third

week I’ll talk about emotions. Emotions are a big part of our life. We’re not expected to leave our emotions

behind, but rather to learn how to include them in the field of attention in a wise way. Then the fourth week the

subject will be thinking, and thinking is a big issue for meditators and some people think you’re not supposed to

think when you meditate. But rather than having that idea, the idea is to learn in a wise way how to pay

attention to thinking, so that thinking doesn’t get in the way, doesn’t cause suffering – doesn’t become an

obstacle to becoming more peaceful and insightful. The fifth week we are going to talk about the mind. The

mind being something separate from thinking. It’s a very important week. The last week will be a lot about

practicing in daily life. Taking this whole meditation practice to a whole different level to beyond what the

instruction has been to that point. So those are the 6 weeks. Most of those weeks there’s a handout that we’ll

put out. It reviews some of the things I say in the class and it also gives you some exercises you can do at home

during the week that can enhance this experience here.

So we all can pay attention to some degree, and if you pay a little bit of attention to how you pay attention, what

you’ll probably discover is that you’ll pay attention for a short period of time. At some point you’ll either get

distracted from what you are paying attention to and go off into future thinking, past thinking, into fantasy, or if

you stay connected to what you are paying attention, you’ll somehow start thinking about it. And you’ll think

about it in such a way that the thinking pulls you away from the experience. For example, if I’m talking and I

say something brilliant or something horrible, you might start thinking about what I’ve said and not notice that I

was continuing to talk. Because you are retrospectively thinking about what I just said, in a sense, you got

hung up with the experience. You pay attention, something happened, somehow you got hooked, got caught,

got involved in that experience, so you couldn’t pay careful attention to the next thing that happened in the

moment. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, because that place where we get hung up, get distracted, get

pulled away is a very important key to understanding what motivates us, what our values are, what our fears are,

what our clingings are -- our hooks our buttons, everything.

So one of the things we are trying to do here, is learn to pay attention to seeing what complicates our attention,

where we get caught, what makes it difficult. Because the place we get caught is also the place where we are

going to feel stress. And as many of you know, this practice that I’m teaching here, mindfulness practice, has

been adopted in many clinical settings in this country for stress-reduction and pain and stress management.

When people who go to Kaiser, Sequoia, El Camino Hospital, Stanford Hospital, take these Mindfulness-Based

Stress Reduction classes, they don’t use the ”B” word, and a lot of people who go there have no clue that the

practice they are being taught comes from Buddhism. And that’s good.

The place we get hung up is often a very important window into understanding how we are most likely to

suffer, or how we are more likely to cause problems in our life. So we start paying attention, which we all have

the capacity to do. But we get interested in this practice, how is it that our ability to stay calmly connected to

the present moment gets somehow disrupted. People who meditate will sometimes think that the disruption is

the problem. Disruption sounds like a bad word: “I got disrupted.” I got caught. When we do this meditation

practice, we try to not judge anything as being bad or inappropriate. Rather we try to fold everything back into

the attention. In other words, to notice this. Pay attention. What’s going on. Notice this, notice this. “Ah, I

just got caught. I heard someone cough, and it reminded me that my friend was sick, and I wondered if I should

visit my friend in the hospital, and I wonder how late Kaiser is open, and then I notice, “I’m teaching a

class…oh!” So, it’s an example of getting pulled in. It was an innocent example, but it could also not be so

innocent. And so what we do is rather than saying that shouldn’t have happened, I shouldn’t have had that train

of thought, what we try to do is to fold everything back into the attention. “Oh. look at that, that’s what a

disruption is like. That’s what it’s like for the mind to get hooked, get carried away. That’s what it’s like.

That’s what it’s like.”

Do you understand that principle? It is a really important one. Sometimes, people who have been meditating for

10 years haven’t learned this one yet. Haven’t learned that there’s nothing that doesn’t need to happen. There’s

nothing you should say “that shouldn’t happen”. Rather, it’s one more thing to learn to pay attention to. And if

you learn to pay attention well, there is freedom to be found in attention. This is one of those things that I hope

you get a key taste for – at least an intuitive idea for it in the course of these 6 weeks. In paying attention, there

is a way of paying attention where you are not caught, trapped, oppressed, influenced, or driven by what’s going

on, inside or outside yourself. And that gives you a tremendous power to go about your life. If you have the

ability not to be pushed around by your inner compulsions or the pressures from the outside. We learn this by

learning how to use the attention in a new way. I hope this is one of the things we’ll learn as we go along here.

We begin the mindfulness meditation with paying attention to two things, our posture and our breathing. With

the idea that it’s really helpful to have a good stable posture and also a posture that also expresses an attentive

state. It’s really great to see, like a little kid, a little toddler, they are in their diapers, you see their naked torso,

they’ve gotten really interested in something, they sit with this erect back, they are so attentive and upright. It’s

so beautiful to see this energy awake and present. And sometimes you see it in adults. But you sometimes see

it really clearly in uncontracted children’s bodies.

You can be a meditator and be a couch potato. It’s possible. However, your whole meditation experience is

improved if you let your body be a support for your attention. So it isn’t just a mental thing that you’re trying to

mentally attend to, but you put yourself in a posture where your body is more likely to be attentive. So, I’ll talk

about that a little more in a moment.

Then we use the breathing, and the breathing has a wonderful quality of being continuous. Pretty much we’re

always breathing, so there is always something to connect to. There is a rhythm to breathing. It flows in and

out. It comes and goes. It’s actually easier for the mind to pay careful attention to something that is changing

in a very subtle and quiet way. If you fixate your eyes and don’t let your eyes move very well, you can’t see

very well. In order for the eyes to see well, the eyes have to actually move a little bit. They are actually

constantly shifting and moving. There is something really wonderful that happens when you follow the

breathing that has a nice rhythm to it. You are watching, following the change that goes on with the breath.

The breathing is also closely tied to our emotional life and our psychological life and our energetic life, and so

much of how we live is affected by and affects our breathing. For example, if you get afraid, your breathing can

sometimes get constricted and tight. If you are really relaxed and happy, it gets to be more relaxed and fluid. If

you’re nervous about something you might breathe faster. If you relax, you might breath more slowly. There

are all these different ways that the breathing shifts. Partly to give you more or less oxygen, depending on what

you need. If you are attacked by a lion, you need a lot of oxygen, so the breathing knows what to do. So if you

are running a lot, you are hyperventilating a little bit. As a person connects to the breathing with their attention

and to follow the breath, one breath after the other, there is a reciprocal relation with our attention and the

breath, and it tends to create a calming effect on us. It’s not always the case, but it tends to have a calming

effect. Most people who follow the breathing and get into it will find that they become much more calm and

peaceful than they were before.

It’s very nice and helpful to become calm and peaceful, but in mindfulness meditation, we don’t hold that up as

the great goal to become peaceful. The goal is to pay attention. So, if you get more agitated as you meditate,

which sometimes happens, remember the goal is “let me pay attention to this, let me fold this back into the

meditation. Let me do mindfulness of agitation.” It might be really helpful sometimes, for example, there might

be something you haven’t ever looked at very carefully in your life, that you’ve been holding at a distance, and

as you sit trying to relax in meditation, you lower your guard. So some of you don’t want to lower your guard

in meditation. You lower your guard, and when you lower your guard, this thing bubbles up. And then “Oh no,

now I have to look at it.” And then you get agitated. “But I’m meditating, I want to be calm”. And then you’re

more agitated because you’re judging yourself. Just fold it in. “Oh, now I get to pay attention to what it’s like

to get agitated.”

The breath is calming, and also, because it’s continuous, going back and forth, it’s a wonderful place to train

yourself to be in the present moment. The trick for this mindfulness meditation is how to keep yourself in the

present. And you will all find out pretty soon when we meditate, how difficult it is to stay in the present

moment. The mind has a mind of its own. It will take you away. We are trying to train the mind to stay in the

present so we can offer careful attention to what is going on in the present. And from a Buddhist point of view,

all the wisdom, all the insight, all the enlightenment that you need to have in your life, will be found, will only

be found, when you are able to stay in the present. If you’re not in the present, you’re not going to find it. It’s

not going to be there. So the breath is a place you train yourself to calm down enough to settle the mind, to

concentrate the mind enough, so that the mind can begin to stay present in the present moment. So breath

meditation has a lot of functions. It’s very beneficial. I consider it to be the foundation, and from that

foundation, then we expand the attention beyond that, eventually to include all of our life. So we’ll start very

narrowly, just the breathing, this week. Then next week, the body, then emotions, kind of like we’re expanding

out and out, and by the end of the course I hope you have some sense on how to bring this wonderful capacity

of attention, this clear non-reactive non-judgmental attention to all aspects of your life. That’s the goal.

I’m going to talk a little about meditation posture. For sitting meditation there are basically two primary

postures that people tend to use. One is sitting on the floor, in a so-called cross-legged position, and the other is

in a chair. You are welcome to sit in either one. There are some small advantages to sitting on the floor, but

it’s fine to sit in a chair. In the iconography of Buddhism they have this idea that far in the future there’s going

to be the next Buddha, and they have statues of this next Buddha, and he’s always sitting in a chair. So it’s

really fine to sit in a chair.

Now we’ll talk a little about both, sitting on a chair and on the floor. The most important thing about posture is

to have an alert spine. Sit in a way that your spine is alert, upright. You don’t want to be so upright that you’re

tense, but you want to sit upright so that there’s a sense of alertness. And also in such a way that you’re not

going to cause long term problems. If you stoop over a lot, meditating this way, most people, especially those

who have a sedentary life, will find that their back will go out at some point. It’s really good to train yourself to

sit with a good upright back posture, both for the chair and for the floor. One of the ways we do that on the

floor, is classically we sit on a round cushion, it’s called in Japanese a “zafu”, and the idea is to sit on the front

third of it, so you are sitting on the forward edge, so you let your pelvis tilt forward. With your pelvis forward,

it helps the knees come down, and it creates a little curve in the lower part of your back. You don’t want to

overarch – maybe slightly more than the natural curve. A little sense of strength there in the lower back, and

what you want to do is to try ideally to have both knees on the floor, and your butt on the cushion. It’s easier to

get your knees down if you are elevated. If your hips are really tight, then sitting really high helps. You can get

two cushions or build up a whole throne, in order to get your knees down. If you can’t get your knees down for

any reason, then you can also prop it up with a cushion or sweater under your knee. And if you have that nice

tripod of the three points, your knees and your butt, it creates a nice stable base for holding the rest of your torso

upright. It’s nice to have that low center of gravity and that wide base for sitting. You don’t tend to have that in

a chair, that’s one of the advantages of sitting this way.

I recommend for sitting on the floor that you don’t sit cross-legged, technically you don’t cross your legs, but

rather, it’s called “tailor fashion” or “Burmese fashion”, so that your legs are sitting one in front of the other, so

they are not actually crossed. It’s more comfortable. It can be more comfortable for people to sit full lotus or

half-lotus. There are some advantages to sitting in the lotuses, but for most people it’s not realistic, because

their hips and knees are not flexible enough. Most people who are not used to this, it takes a while for the body

to stretch out, to get comfortable with it. It’s well worth doing.

If you’re sitting on a chair, the recommendation is that you definitely don’t cross your legs. Both feet flat on the

ground parallel to each other, so both the soles of the feet are firmly planted on the ground or a cushion if you

need the support. The trick is to not have your knees higher than your hips, because then it tends to push out the

lower part of your back and you get a strain there. Ideally your knees would be a little lower than your hips. Or

maybe parallel to your hips. Some people do like to have their legs out sideways because it tends to give them a

wider base and more support. You are welcome to do that as well.

If you are sitting on the floor, there are some alternative ways of sitting which are nice. One way of sitting is

using a bench. There are wooden benches you can slip under your thighs and slip your legs underneath, so it’s

like sitting on your knees. Another way of sitting is to take a round cushion, but place it upright and put it

between your ankles. It gives you a low center of gravity. Some people can’t sit cross-legged, this may work

for them.

Having the back straight is really important. One way to help do that, both on the floor and the chair, is to take

your hands on either side of your hips and push yourself up off the chair or cushion as hard as you can, and as

you let go of your arms, let your shoulders roll a bit back. You probably find yourself sitting straighter now.

Your chest will be more open, shoulders perhaps hanging a little more. That’s a good probably more erect and

alert posture than you had before. If you are sitting in a chair, the recommendation is, that if you can, don’t use

the back-rest. People have all kinds of conditions in the back that require them to use a backrest, and it’s fine to

do that. But there is a variety of reasons for that. One is that you are more likely when you use a backrest to

lean into it and relax too much and fall asleep. Another reason is a little more subtle. In Buddhism we are

trying to develop a certain type of ability to be self reliant, and there is a connection between our physical body

and our emotional life. It’s easier to discover how to be self-reliant emotionally and psychologically if you’re

self-reliant physically. If you are relying on something when you are meditating, it’s a small thing, a subtle

thing, but it can be a little harder to discover the self-reliance you are looking for. If you need to use a back

rest, what’s preferred is to use the support as low down as your back will allow. So have the pillow really low

down so your low back is supported and so the upper back is free –– as low as you can with your back. Some

people have to use the whole back, and that’s fine.

One of the people who teaches at our center, did meditation mostly lying down, due to various injuries they

have had. So it’s fine to do it lying down on your back as well. There are just more challenges with falling

asleep that goes on there.

So, sit up straight and put the hands anywhere where both hands are doing the same thing and they are

comfortable. The classic Buddhist meditation posture for hands is together in front of you just below the belly

button, floating, not resting on anything, but floating, with the thumb tips touching lightly. That’s a classic way

of doing it. Many people will do it with their hands on their knees or thighs. I usually meditate like this now.

The hands pointing up or down, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that sometimes, if you have your hands

resting on your ankles, all the way down, or you have your hands too far forward on your thighs or your knees,

it sometimes pulls the shoulders forward and can actually over time create a strain. It also pulls you down,

people tend to slouch more easily. So it’s possible to get a cushion (or towel, or sweater) and put it on top of

your ankles, so your hands are held up higher. Or simply you can pull your hands in from your knee.

The ancient texts and meditation manuals all talk about how important it is to have your head squarely on top of

your shoulders. Where else would it be? However, it’s very easy for people, for their heads to pull forward,

their chins to stick up, or sometimes it tips to the side. The idea is to keep it straight. The ancients talked about

lining up your ears with your shoulders. That’s how it should be. Not forward. Also, there is the idea in

Buddhism , that if your chin goes up, it’s usually a sign that you are lost in thought, and if you pull your chin

down a bit, it actually controls the wandering mind a little bit.

So there is also this idea that it’s good to tuck your chin back and down a little bit when you meditate. You can

get the same effect, by opening up space between your top vertebrae and the skull. I actually like that open

space rather than pulled down. It puts the head in the same position.

In our tradition here, we instruct people to meditate with their eyes closed. It’s not necessary to have the eyes

closed. There are teachers in our tradition who do sometimes teach to meditate with the eyes open, and often

when people are really sleepy we tell them to meditate with their eyes open. But we recommend the eyes

closed.

But if you’ve done other meditation practices before that involve the eyes open, and you’re more comfortable

that way, please do that.

The mouth is kept closed. It is said that it is helpful to have the tongue resting lightly against the palate at the

top of the mouth. That’s the basic elements of posture.

Questions:

Student 1 : I heard that it makes a difference for men and women which hand is on top, having to do with the

Ying and Yang.

Gil : You’re welcome to do that. Classically in India, the left hand was on the bottom, and in Zen they switched

it so the left hand is on top. I think it’s one hand is supposed to be compassion, the other wisdom – a theory like

that. I learned in the Zen tradition to have the left hand on top, but there was never any differentiation in Zen

between men and women. But if you find a difference, you’re welcome.

Student 2 : Do you meditate with the lights on or keep them off?

Gil : Both ways are fine. If you’re really sleepy, sometimes sitting in front of a light can be really helpful even

with your eyes closed. Having a lot of light coming in can stimulate and keep you awake. If it’s really dark, it

may be easier to fall asleep. You can experiment and see what works best for you. There’s no hard and fast

rule.

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