Relaxing the Mind

 What happens for you when your body or mind signals that it’s time to relax, and you pay attention to the signal? From a Netflix perspective, it might be just that: turn something on; turn off all the rest. That seems legit – I do it plenty.

From a mindfulness perspective, though, relaxation is different. It’s letting go. For me, it’s a few minutes in stillness, watching thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise, and lovingly letting them go. It’s a light touch, a commitment to go easy with each moment, each thought, this wandering mind, this being called “me.” 

Relaxing the mind is the “loving” element of loving awareness. It’s rejuvenating and regenerative. It's the pause that allows wisdom and compassion to naturally arise. Best of all, it’s a sweet way to live.

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 495. Greetings to the new people here, including some who I got to meet at last weeks’ Mindfulness in Law Society Conference. Wasn’t it wonderful? 

So I’ve missed you all again – been gone since July 3rd – and here we are on the last day of July, 2025. So much has happened just in the few weeks, and in general this year. It’s good to be together in this way, as a refuge from everything else.

Lately we’ve been looking at something called the Three Trainings. These are the three ways that mindfulness invites us to train our minds – our minds, of course, being this whole being – not only the mind that resides upstairs, but also the body, which doesn’t have a “mind of its own” per se but is just part of this one system. Sometimes we’re training based on what comes in, or the data we’re receiving, from our heads, but sometimes it’s from our hearts, or our guts – even our fingertips or toes. We’re training this whole being. 

The Three Trainings are just one scheme – and mindfulness has a few – and in this scheme, we’re training in dana, or generosity, sila, or ethics, and bhavana, which is traditionally translated as “concentration.” If you’re interested in learning a little about dana and sila – in the context of lawyering – and you’re new to the Wake Up Call, you can find that on past Calls. Today I want to talk about bhavana.

So again, bhavana is usually translated as “concentration.” The idea is that to be a truly mindful person, and mindful lawyer, we want to train in generosity and ethics, and to become concentrated or focused.

Concentration is a whole path. Some of you may have heard of jhana practice, in which the practitioner is invited into ever-deeper levels of absorption. I have some basic familiarity with this practice but for most of purposes, unless we’re planning to train with the jhanas on long retreats and with a jhana teacher, bhavana is more about everyday concentration. Which is primarily about relaxing the mind. Jhana states are also about relaxing the mind, in ever greater degrees, but let’s play with the idea of bhavana as a practice of ordinary relaxation, in each moment.

So what does it mean to relax the mind? I’m going to start with, it’s not something we learned in law school. When I look at this mind of mine, this whole body/mind, or body/heart/mind, it’s the opposite: I was trained to keep things taught. In other words, to keep the body on the ready, to say “how high” if anyone even remotely nearby yelled, “Jump!” And the same with the cognitive mind: I was trained to be ready to assess, analyze, and respond – often with a counterpoint or argument, but always with the “right” answer – at any moment. And not only to do that at any moment but to be able to switch from whatever was on my mind at any given moment, whether that was a different case or matter, or a thought like, “I need to call mom,” or “I wonder how my daughter did on her French test.” And not only to switch, but to be able to switch back. And forth. And back, and forth. I have this recollection of so many times when a partner would poke their head into my office and say, “Got a sec?,” or a kid would appear, and I’d look up from some 50-page industrial lease with a completely unfocused, or confused, look, and it would take a minute before I could switch to “sure, have a seat,” or, “sure, have another piece of pizza, help yourself.”

In one way you could say that the mind that was focused on the lease was a concentrated mind. And that wouldn’t be completely wrong – it was: concentrated and focused on the lease. But it was also a very sharp-edged mind, reading for whether each provision was correct, good for my client or not, could be used against them in the future, could be dispensed with or better written or condensed, in line with the latest case law on the topic, etc. Everyone here understands. So, concentrated and focused, but not relaxed.

But that legal mind, on alert, analyzing, thinking, arguing – we trained that mind. We walked into law school with maybe some of that in place, but over those three years, or if you read for the bar, then over that time, we intentionally cultivated those qualities of mind, even if we never sat down and told ourselves that’s what we were doing. But we might have – some of that training comes under the rubric of “critical thinking,” for example, something we may have been explicitly taught, in law school or well before that.

Which is all to say that the mind that’s relaxed – that form of concentration – that takes time, too, or at least for me it has, and it continues to take time. You know I was just on a 9-day metta, or lovingkindness, retreat, and I had the privilege of doing some pretty intensive training in this kind of concentration, relaxed concentration – because metta practice is that kind of practice, and there are others – and now that I’m back, and especially after co-leading the Mindfulness in Law Society conference right after – that training is in there, but it’s not instantly available the way it was at the end of the retreat. I’m continuing to work with it “on the cushion,” in my formal practice, and also in portable practice, throughout the day.

But I’m just saying, relaxing the mind takes some training, and some time. So next week we’ll play around with metta and I’ll share a few things I learned at the retreat (and some of you heard some of this at the MILS conference). But for today, let’s just play around with a relaxation practice.