Shamatha Vipassana Explained For Modern Minds

You can’t breathe in the past or the future, and you can’t switch off thinking on command. That’s where Susan Piver brings a refreshing kind of relief to meditation practice, especially if you’ve ever judged yourself for having a busy mind. We talk about Shamatha Vipassana, the mindfulness awareness approach she teaches, and why the real skill is not perfect focus but the simple act of noticing and returning.

We also get practical about what mindfulness is and what it is not. Mindfulness is the trainable part: placing attention where you choose and coming back when it wanders. Awareness is the wider field that opens over time, often on its own. Susan shares why insight lives in awareness, why deeper practice can make us feel more (sometimes unexpectedly), and why teachers should expect inner states to shift in ways that do not follow a tidy script.

Along the way, we touch on what science can measure like stress and cortisol, insomnia support, and reduced depression relapse when paired with other care, while also honoring the contemplative side that doesn’t fit neatly in a chart. If you teach mindfulness, support clients, or simply want a kinder relationship with your own mind, this conversation gives you a clear frame you can use immediately. Subscribe, share this with a friend who thinks they’re “bad at meditating,” and leave a review. What belief about meditation do you want to unlearn next?

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• Gentle reflections for anyone navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, grief, or change

If you’re interested in:

• Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
• Trauma-sensitive and compassion-based practices
• Teaching mindfulness in an authentic, non-performative way
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Transcript

Welcome And Susan Piver’s Background

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right, everyone. Welcome. I'm gonna go ahead and introduce Susan. Susan Piver is with us. She is the author of many books, but her latest is Inexplicable Joy on the Heart Sutra. She has been a student of Buddhism since 1993. She graduated from Buddhist Seminary in 2004 and in 2012 founded the Open Heart Project, which is the world's largest online only Dharma Center. She has an international reputation as a skillful meditation teacher and speaker. And we are super grateful to have her with us today here at Mindfulness Exercises. And I'm basically going to give it over to Susan to say more about herself if she wants to, and otherwise just lead us in practice and teaching today. So welcome, Susan.

Mindfulness Versus Awareness In Practice

How To Teach Meditation Simply

The Myth That You Must Stop Thinking

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Thank you. Thank you very much for that introduction. And yes, the Open Heart Project, My Online Community, is the largest in the world, but it's also the only one. So it's also the smallest. Thank you so much for taking time to show up for this. It's my favorite subject, basically, the practice of meditation. And I want to share some things that I have found personally very helpful. And I also train people to teach meditation. Training always starts with the things that I'm going to say to you. So I hope you'll find them helpful. I also want to say a few things, and then I'd like to guide us in a short practice, if you don't mind. And then there will be time for conversation as you wish. I'm so happy to know you all. And this may sound sappy, but I'm happy to be your friend in this endeavor, because anyone who's attempting this is automatically my friend, whether you want to be or not. So as uh Sarah May mentioned, I have been a practitioner since 1993. I'm a Buddhist practitioner, and that what I teach is connected to the Buddhist tradition. And I took the refuge vow, which is the vow by which one formally becomes a Buddhist, about a year and a half after I started practicing in 1995. I've been a practitioner ever since, so definitely my adult life, a Buddhist. And I say that because part of my wish as a meditation teacher, and by the way, I did not become a meditation teacher until like 2006 or seven, close to 20 years of practice before I even became an instructor. And I was trained to be a teacher in my particular lineage. And the reason I guess I want to say that up front is because I know that you are training to be mindfulness teachers. That's great. And this whole endeavor is called mindfulness exercises, and you will be certified to teach mindfulness, and that's really wonderful. In the tradition that I was trained in, that is great. And it's 50% of the story. And I'll tell you from the Buddhist point of view what the other 50% is. So the practice that I do and that I teach and that we'll do together is called Shamatha Vipassana. Maybe you've heard the word vipassana, I'm sure you have. Same root, but different part of the world just pronounces it vipassana. Shamatha means the practice of calm abiding. Oh, who doesn't want that? And what that means is you have some agency over your mind so that you are able to place your attention where you would like it to go. An increasingly rare skill. And then when it strays, because guess what it does like a million times, oh you see, you notice that. And then you're able to bring it back. And you find that the place of calm abiding is not only on the beach in Mexico, although that's a great place, but is here. And you don't have to change anything to discover that. You just have to be mindful. The Pashana means the practice of insight or clear seeing. And in this practice, it's translated as awareness. So it's mindfulness awareness meditation. And whether you know it or not, I believe you are teaching that mindfulness awareness, because mindfulness and awareness cannot be separated. So mindfulness means you place your mind where you want it to go. As mentioned, that's an increasingly rare skill. And then you see that it's departed and you come back. It's very focused, it's one-pointed. You're either aware or you're not. You can really work at that. And I'm sure you are. Now the other piece that happens in the practice, in addition to the cultivation of mindfulness, is the horizon of awareness. And I say arising because awareness can't be cultivated. It just happens. And you know this as practitioners, that as your practice progresses, whether it's a month or a decade, your awareness expands. You notice things you had not noticed before. Your sense perceptions become more vibrant, and your insights arise more readily. You see connections between things that had been there but you had not noticed. Is that not so? In addition, you feel more. Uh-oh, no one told us that. And we'll get to that more when we get to these various misconceptions as I call them, but you can call them whatever you want. So mindfulness, as mentioned, you can work at, and you are working at it. Awareness you cannot work at. It happens on its own, and it happens not in the space of effort, but in the space of receptivity. And as you practice mindfulness, the capacity for awareness expands. So the mindfulness, that's the part that science has studied. So it'll reduce the stress hormoncortisol and it will help with insomnia and it will lessen the chance of relapse into depression by 50% if it's combined with other therapeutic treatments. It increases activity in the left prefrontal cortex and decreases it on the right, or the opposite, whichever is a good one. Okay, that's awesome. Thank you, science. That's great. Now, this awareness piece, that's a different world. And that is where insight resides. Insight does not reside in mindfulness, it resides in awareness. Trauma resides in awareness. The feelings that increase as meditation deepens come from the awareness, not from the mindfulness. I mean, I'm making it a little binary. It's not quite that binary. But I think it's important to point out that as teachers, not only will your students or your patients or your clients or your colleagues be learning mindfulness, but their awareness will be expanding, and that is unpredictable. The inner state starts to change through the practice of meditation. So mindfulness awareness. Going forward, I want to share with you the three biggest misconceptions that I have witnessed over my many decades now as of practice. I notice them in myself and I notice them in others. And when I teach teachers, I want to be very sure to point these things out from the beginning. However, before I get to those three, I just remembered something else I wanted to say. The key aspect, if I may say, in teaching meditation is twofold. Simplicity has to be very, very simple. Not because anyone's dumb, but because people get in there and start to muck with the technique. Well, I'm going to do it this way, or I teach an eyes open practice, nobody has to do that. But people, well, I'll close my eyes. Well, okay, after you're Buddha, you can make those decisions. But until then, the tradition that you are being trained in, presumably, is ancient and time-tested and honed. And when we start mucking with it overly in early days, the complexity shuts the door to the magic. We want to at first just, okay, can I do it? Sometimes I teach classes where people show up and this is a Buddhist thingy, and they want to learn about so-called high practices. What is Dzogchen? What is Ati? What is Mahamudra? These very so-called, again, advanced practices from Tibetan Buddhism, because that's my the only thing I know anything about. I like to sort of say, well, let's first learn how to notice that we're breathing. Then let's go to the Dzogchens and the Mahamudras and so on. But let's first just can you breathe? Can you be aware of it? Because no matter how hard you try, and you too watching the recording, you cannot breathe in the past, you cannot breathe in the future. You can only breathe in the present. I think that's obvious, but yet we somehow don't then associate breath awareness practice as the practice of being present, which it is. And the practice of being present is the seed syllable, the door opening, the unlock icon for the whole progression of benefits. Don't take my word for that or anything. Investigate and see if that is consonant with your experience. That's very important. Simple. And then the instruction that I was given as a teacher that I try to reinforce at every turn to my own students and that I share with you for your consideration. Uh don't teach anyone anything. Help them to discover something. That's a very beautiful subtlety. Also, as I was trained, the only job of a meditation teacher is to help people come into the present and then get out of the way. Because their own wisdom is trustworthy. So here are the three biggest misconceptions I noticed with that big buildup. The first misconception about meditation that I've noticed, maybe this doesn't apply, but you'll have to tell me, is that in order to meditate, you have to stop thinking. What? In no place in my studies of the Buddha Dharma in my case, and the practice of meditation, did I ever come across the instruction that you should tell yourself to shut up. Only you would shut up. This would be awesome. That's not part of it. There's no off switch for thoughts. In the Buddhist view, again, I'm sure I'll say that phrase countless times. I just want to be clear, I'm not making this up. Thinking is considered a sense perception, like seeing and hearing and so on. And just like seeing and hearing and so on, there's no off switch. If you look out through your eyeballs right now, or hear through your ears, if you're visually impaired, try to not see anything. I mean it. Or try to not hear anything. That's how crazy it is to tell your brain to stop thinking or your mind or whatever it is. Just stop that. Not necessary, basically not possible, and useless. Because when you go out into your life, you don't want to have no thoughts. And you don't want to place your attention on your breath. You want to place your attention on your experience and your feelings and your world. So the breath is the stand-in for all of that, assuming that you are using breath awareness. So the idea is not to become great breath followers. Because the truth is that does not matter at all. Doesn't matter if you're good at meditating, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you practice with coming back so that when you go into your life, you can practice putting your attention on that. And the breath is just a stand and it's like scales on the piano. Your skill level increases not a pace. So the only thing you have to stop thinking is that you have to stop thinking. There's my funny little joke about not having to stop thinking. You don't have to clear the mind of thought. When I hear that I actually get angry because what that is a recipe for is self-aggression. You shut up. And contraindicated to the highest degree.