REPLAY: Introduction to Mindfulness - Mindfulness of the Breath

Originally published on January 16th, 2023, this is the first in a series of four mindfulness talks by Don Thompson. The talks will be re-published in the same order as in 2023, so you can follow along week by week for the next few weeks. 

This series of talks is a transformative excursion designed to uncover the serene wisdom of mindfulness meditation. Imagine the bliss of being grounded in the now, unshackled from the relentless grip of past regrets and future anxieties. In the sacred footsteps of Shakyamuni Buddha, we journey through the four pillars—breath, body, emotions, and thoughts—and discover the ancient tool of RAIN: Recognition, Acceptance, Investigation, and Nurturing. Together, we'll foster a sanctuary within, where clarity and creativity bloom amidst life's chaos. Through personal anecdotes and guided practices, I'll reveal how this path has illuminated my world with newfound effectiveness and peace.

This series is more than a meditation guide—it's a beacon of change for the individual and society alike. As we weave through the tapestry of RAIN, we'll learn to embrace each moment with kindness and non-judgment, planting seeds of compassion in the fertile soil of awareness. The art of nurturing self-compassion unfurls before us, offering the promise of self-acceptance and an unshakable sense of wholeness within. Join me in this heart-opening voyage where, together, we'll cultivate the tranquil power of mindfulness, creating a ripple effect that can gently transform our lives and the world we inhabit.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hi, this is Don Thompson and I'm happy to have you here in this Intro to Meditation class, intro to Mindfulness Meditation class. We're going to be spending four weeks diving into mindfulness in the various aspects of mindfulness, at least from an introductory perspective. The four areas that we'll be looking at related to mindfulness are mindfulness of the breath and going over what's called the rain practice, and we'll get into that in a little bit in the guided meditation. In addition, we'll be discussing mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of emotions and mindfulness of thoughts. So these are really foundational areas within Buddhism or within the mindfulness community that are addressed in terms of looking into mindfulness.

Speaker 1: 1:06

Just a little bit of information about, well, what is mindfulness? So mindfulness comes out of the teachings of the Buddha, shakyamuni Buddha, who lived about 2,500 years ago in India. So Shakyamuni Buddha was, when he was alive, somewhat of a controversial figure. As a matter of fact, buddhism at one point was really driven out of India and into Tibet, and it also evolved in China and Japan, and the Theravada school, the old school, is really the type of Buddhism that we see prevalent in Southeast Asia. So this particular flavor of mindfulness will more or less be keying off of that, as is taught by mindfulness teachers through the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, jack Cornfield and Tara Brock through their programs. Mindfulness, in a nutshell, really has to do with being aware and awake. Now, of course, we all want to be aware and awake, at least, hopefully, most of us do. But this is a particular approach to being aware and awake which is, you might say, unique to Buddhism, and what we want to try and do is get a little bit of a perspective on life through being mindful, through, you know, you might say, detaching ourselves from our lives a little bit, stepping back and observing life, you might say as a witness or as an observer, looking at life mindfully, looking at aspects of life mindfully, including the emotions and including the thoughts and including the body. So if you do that, what happens is that you find that these particular elements of your life are not really you per se. I mean, they are aspects of your personality, they are aspects of your life, you might say.

Speaker 1: 3:12

But what we're trying to do is center ourselves in really the present moment and in a sense of presence, existing in the moment, outside of, or not being affected by, the future or the past, the future being non-existent, it doesn't really exist yet and the past is already gone. So what we're trying to do with mindfulness is focus really on the present moment and the sense of presence, of being in the present moment and what that means. So what it can mean really is to have a sense of freedom from elements of our lives that can be, you might say, triggering. They might be triggering us into negative emotions or they might be causing stress. They might be doing things that we don't want. So with mindfulness, what we do is we train the mind to be able to take a pause, as I mentioned in the preview video, to take a pause for a moment and just to step back, take a pause before we react, and then our reaction becomes a mindful reaction, a reaction of choice, rather than a reaction of being triggered by a particular negative emotion or negative situation or negative thought. So just a little bit about the RAIN practice, what that means. Rain is an acronym that stands for recognition, allowing investigation and nurturing. It could also mean non-identification and we'll get into that a little bit as well. But for the purposes of this course, for the most part what we mean by the end of RAIN is nurturing. So nurturing is really having self-compassion, bringing a love and kindness and loving attention to whatever you're doing and to yourself, to have self-compassion. And we'll be going over the RAIN practice in the guided meditation and follow this talk.

Speaker 1: 5:22

Let's talk a little bit about the breath and what that means to mindfulness. Now, the breath is really one anchor that you can use for your mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness does really fall into two major areas, you might say. One is your life I mean being mindful in your daily life and the other is being mindful when you meditate. So when you meditate mindfully, what we do is we try to establish an anchor, and what an anchor does is it allows you to return back to the anchor. Should there be the mind wander away from the anchor or away from the meditation, you want to bring your mind back to the meditation and you want to bring it back to your mindfulness practice. So what the anchor does? It allows you to come back to it. So we use the breath or another chosen anchor as a way to come back mindfully to your anchor and really use it mindfully. So the breath really you focus on the breath, you use it as an anchor, you come back to it mindfully or you have another chosen anchor that you use to do that.

Speaker 1: 6:41

Why do we want to do all this mindfulness stuff? I mean, what's the real point of it? The point of it is really to become more effective in your life. It's really to become clearer in terms of your thinking is to become, as I mentioned before, not so triggered in terms of negative emotions, negative thoughts and whatnot. You want to be able to have a sense of really reacting mindfully and reacting with responsibility towards your life and in doing so, you find yourself a lot less stressed out, a lot less triggered, a lot more effective, a lot more relaxed, and it really opens up an area of potential for you. That's really quite amazing I found in my own life In terms of the potential for creativity, for example, the potential for having new ideas really is incredible with mindfulness. It's really quite something.

Speaker 1: 7:41

For myself, for my own background, I've been meditating since I was in my 20s, so I'm not a novice to this at all. I've been studying mindfulness in the Tiruvannas sense of the term. More recently that I've been exposed to mindfulness teachings and training a variety of different meditative schools of thought, including the Vedic schools, including American Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, and also the Tiruvannas school. They all really point to the same place ultimately. In my mind, that's sort of the benefit of being able to be exposed to a lot of different schools of thought is that they really do show you that there's an underlying set of principles that are common, and the underlying set of principles that are common to mindfulness are being able to really step back and look at yourself mindfully and really recognize and allow or accept and investigate and come to a sense of self-compassion, come to a place of compassion for yourself and for others, and that's really key, in my mind, for creating a happier life through one, but also just helping to create a society that's more sustainable and something that we can all feel good about in terms of the society that we live in.

Speaker 1: 9:04

As we all know, there are many problems with society in terms of tolerance, in terms of people getting along with each other and so forth. So mindfulness practice is a way to address that. It's a way to address that within your own life, but then ultimately, you have an impact. You are a cause that has an effect. You have an effect on society, so you can become really just by being mindful. You don't have to proselytize, you don't have to teach anybody else. You don't have to do anything but just be mindful yourself. You can have quite an amazing effect on other people, and it's quite astounding.

Speaker 1: 9:45

So what we're going to do now is we're going to get into a mindfulness meditation practice related to, again, what's called the rain practice. So the interesting thing about the rain practice is and the reason I wanted to give the rain practice up front at first is that you'll notice as you go through this course that the rain practice becomes sort of a template for how you look at different areas and aspects of your life. Mindfully, we don't necessarily always call it rain practice, but there's always an element of recognizing, of allowing, of investigating and of nurturing and ultimately coming to a sense of non-identification with what you're looking at in your practice. And many different schools of thought within Eastern philosophy or even modern psychology will deal with areas that we would call mindfulness, and so this teaching, this particular series of lectures in this introductory class, is a secular approach to mindfulness. You don't have to be a Buddhist, you don't have to be religious, you don't have to be spiritual, or you could be religious from a different perspective. You could be a Christian or a Jewish or Muslim or whatever, and you could still take this course in mindfulness and get something out of it. It's really non-sectarian in approach. There's benefits that can be had regardless. So, with that said, let's go ahead and jump into the rain practice and get going with it, and then I'll look forward to working with you over these four weeks on various aspects of mindfulness, and I can't tell you how happy I am to be here with you. It's really exciting and I look forward to having this adventure in mindfulness with you, thank you.

Speaker 1: 11:59

So, for our first guided meditation, I'd like to step us through a meditative practice involving the breath, the self-compassion and the rain practice. So, to start off, just get yourself into a comfortable seated position, make sure you're seated in a way that's firmly grounded, that you feel alert yet relaxed. You might go ahead and close your eyes, and the first thing we're going to want to do is just take a breath in. You want to slowly inhale and slowly exhale one breath. So let's try that again. Let's go ahead and inhale slowly and exhale slowly. So now, as you do this, just feel free to let go. Let any tension or any stress just melt away. Just let it all go and just focus on the present moment, what's happening right here, right now. So let's go ahead and take three more breaths, breathing in slowly and exhaling slowly three times.

Speaker 1: 14:12

So the invitation here is just to really notice the breath, notice where you feel the breath in the body. You feel it in the throat or in the chest. Where is it that you feel the breath? So you just want to notice that. You might even want to take your hand and just rest it on your belly and notice the feeling of your hand on the belly as you're breathing in and breathing out. So the idea is really we want to become aware of the present moment. We want to see the future. In the past is really non-existent. What really exists is the present moment. It's right here. What's right here in front of us now, that's what's important. So realizing this can be quite liberating. You don't need to be fixated on the future or in the past. So I invite you to try to soften, let your body soften. You might bring a slight smile to your face. Just feel a softening of the belly as you hold your hand on the belly as you breathe in. Just feel the chest opening. So just feel a widening of your tension. So you feel the entire body breathing. So the idea is, you want to relax, you want to settle in with the breath.

Speaker 1: 16:22

Now, as you feel this present moment, you might want to ponder what is the quality of this presence. Is it clarity? Is it just something that makes you feel spacious? Now, as you do this, you might feel or sense that there's really a silence behind this presence and a spaciousness. Now, as you do this, thoughts are going to arise. That's going to happen, but you don't want to fight your thoughts. Rather, let's work with them, let's befriend them, let's embrace them.

Speaker 1: 17:21

So the first thing I invite you to do is just to feel or sense these thoughts, and perhaps emotions come up. What is it that you're feeling related to your life? What is it that's really in your consciousness right now? Maybe it's something to do with self-judgment, maybe not, but oftentimes we're involved in a process of self-judgment, of criticism of ourselves, critiquing. So let's take a moment and just try to look at what is it that's triggering the self-judgment. So now, the idea here is I'm not suggesting we focus on any big trauma, but just something in your everyday life, like work or relationships, or health or something like that. Maybe it's a habit you have.

Speaker 1: 18:44

So just continue through this process and once you've landed on something that you want to work with, go ahead and bring it to mind, just on the situation, as if it's right in front of you right now. Go ahead and envision the situation, even with the people that might be involved in the situation, the room where it might occur or have occurred. Visualize it in your mind. So what we're trying to do is recognize or realize what it is that's triggering us, what it is. That's what the object of our attention is at the end of this moment. We want to work with this particular thing. We're going to recognize it first. We're going to recognize is the R of rain recognition. So we want to notice what's most predominant. So now you might, as I mentioned, you might be this inner critical voice that's running nonstop. It might be self-criticism, but it just might be numbness. You might just feel numb and that's what it is. That's what it is. You just want to be able to recognize it and you want to be allowing it to be there.

Speaker 1: 20:32

Part of the recognition process is to label. You want to label what it is you're feeling self-judgment, self-criticism, self-aversion, anger, fear, whatever it happens to be. Just go ahead and label it and just whisper it to yourself. What is this that I'm dealing with right now? So what we're really doing by doing this labeling is we're acknowledging or accepting it. This is the A of rain, the A we're not pushing it away, we're allowing it, we're accepting it. And you might even want to whisper to yourself okay, this belongs here now, this is appropriate, this is here and I accept it. I allow it to be. Now, once we've accepted, you know what we're dealing with.

Speaker 1: 21:29

In our meditation, in our rain practice, we go ahead and do a little investigation. That's the I. Part of that is just by wondering or pondering about what is it that I'm believing about this particular situation, about this particular pattern or situation or event? Am I believing that I'm a failure? Am I believing that I'll never change? Am I believing that nobody will respect me? You know, what is it that you're believing about this situation? That you're deficient, that you're flawed.

Speaker 1: 22:17

Now, as part of this process, just try to sense where you're feeling in your body. Where in your body are you feeling this most strongly? And be aware of that and go ahead and just put your hand on that place. And just put your hand on the place where you feel it most. So what we're really doing is we're just allowing this particular feeling, sensation to come forward into the body to express itself there. Now, if you're somewhat disassociated with your body, this might not be the easiest thing to do. So you can take a little different approach. Perhaps you just express it in your face with this feeling, or you change your posture a little bit just to express what you're feeling. And if you're having trouble with sensing or feeling or getting in touch with the emotion or sensation, just you might ask yourself well, what is it that I'm unwilling to feel? And you might just want to consider what is the worst part of this when I try to feel it in the body and breathe with it, breathe with it.

Speaker 1: 24:02

So the last part of investigation is to sense what does it feel like to look at this part of you that doesn't feel so great, that feels vulnerable, and ask yourself what does it need, this part of me? What does it need? What does it want? Does it want me to be with it? Does it want to be loved? Does it want to be cherished? Does it want to be forgiven? Does it want to be accepted? So this can move us into the end of the rain.

Speaker 1: 24:50

The last part, the nurturing, and what you want to do is just communicate a tenderness to yourself, self-compassion. You might even touch your heart. Just trust in yourself, trust in your own goodness. Just remind yourself that you know I'm here for myself now and I'm not leaving. I'm here, I'm offering self-compassion to myself. It's an important thing.

Speaker 1: 25:37

So now you might just be going through the motions, you know at first, and that's okay, just go through the motions. Just, if you're unable to feel the self-compassion, just go ahead and maybe reflect on some person or presence, a higher being, a higher force, whatever that you feel has this compassion for you, perhaps even your dog. So just imagine this loving presence. Is there for you? This feeling, this compassion? Yeah, for some it helps. You know, imagining this is a light or a warmth, love. So just let it in, let this love and warmth wash through your entire being.

Speaker 1: 27:10

So when you're going through this process, you want to notice the shift between where you were before and where you are now. What is the quality of presence now as compared to when you started this meditation? Is there more clarity? Is there less self-judgment? Is there more acceptance? So the bottom line is really you want to feel like as if there's really nothing wrong with you as you are. So I invite you to take a few moments and just simply rest in this spacious self-acceptance, this kinder awareness, this acceptance and love, and just feel and understand that this particular perception and awareness is the innermost truth of who you are. Thank you.