This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Contemplative Reflection; Freeing the Thinking Mind (4/5) Reflective Thinking. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ines Freedman at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning everyone. Good day, good evening. It’s lovely to see all your warm greetings and little loving emojis.
This morning I’m going to talk a little bit about reflective thinking, and in our meditation, we’ll do a contemplative reflection. Contemplative reflection is a complementary practice to the mindfulness practice we do, where we pay attention to the present moment just as it is. It uses the thinking mind to consider something specific—a dharma aspect or something in our personal lives. Of course, in meditation, we’ll do something more related to our spiritual life. But to direct the thinking with a meditative mind is different than just thinking about it. It’s allowing the responses to the contemplation to arise from a deeper part of ourselves.
In this meditation, I’ll offer a contemplative reflection. We’ll begin with getting settled, spend a little time in silence, and then I’ll drop in a couple of questions, more silence, and then another question. We’ll see how you respond to that, what comes out of that. I hope that it’s fruitful for you.
Take a comfortable but alert posture, finding your seat, gently closing the eyes. You might take a moment to consciously put aside any thoughts or concerns. Set them aside for later. Put them on a shelf.
Taking a few deep breaths. And with each exhale, relaxing a little bit more deeply. Relaxing into your cushion or chair, into the earth that supports you.
And now allowing the breath to return to normal. Getting a sense of the whole body, and allowing the attention to travel freely throughout the body, relaxing any obvious tensions. Anything that can be relaxed. If anything doesn’t relax easily, just soften around it. It’s okay.
And now finding the breath within your body, allowing your attention to rest on the breathing. Breathing in and breathing out, like waves in the ocean surging and receding. Breathing in, breathing out. Resting in this body, in this breath.
Now allow for a reflection. As you consider it, allow a response to arise. You might just feel or sense, or you might think a response. Allow it to arise however it is.
Where does your spirituality live inside of you? Where does your spirituality live inside of you?
Maybe an area that feels more connected, more intimate, more enlivened. You might imagine that you’re breathing through that area.
Whenever you’re ready, feel free to return to mindfulness of breathing. Okay.
Now I’ll offer a contemplative question here. With the question, you don’t have to think of an answer. It doesn’t have to be a verbal answer, but it might be allowing something inside to respond or be evoked, eventually coming up with a sentence.
The question is, what is your deepest intention? What’s the intention that you most want to base your life on?
You may have various intentions that feel deep or important to you, but which are you gravitating to the most right now at this moment? What is your deepest intention? The intention that you most want to base your life on.
If the attention has drifted, just gently escort it back to the breath, to this body. Welcome home.
We’ll end with a quote. Allow it to resonate in you.
“Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching has one taste, the taste of liberation.”
I’ll talk a little bit about reflective thinking. In my own practice, at different times, maybe once to twice a year, I’ve taken a formal time to reflect on my deepest intentions and inspirations in practice. At different times, I’d ask myself, what was the edge of my practice? What felt the most challenging or what felt the most nourishing, an area of growth? It helped keep the practice at the center of my life.
The method I was taught was I’d go for a long walk or just sit somewhere peaceful and reflect. I’d take a little time for the mind to settle, and then I’d ask the question, “What is my deepest intention?” I’d allow my mind to answer freely. And then after a while, after all the superficial answers that showed up kind of died down a little bit, I’d ask it again. By the third or fourth time I asked, it began to be a little deeper and arise from deep within.
For myself, I chose not to do it on my meditation cushion because I wanted to keep it separate. I was concerned that it might make me begin to think more in my sittings, and then it just became the way that I did it. After I did that, I would keep that intention close to me. I would make it a point to connect with it daily, and often many, many times a day.
My deepest intention was usually some version of wanting to be free of suffering. But at different times it would point to different aspects of freeing the heart. For instance, at one point I connected with the intention to develop unconditional love. At another time, to prioritize equanimity in my life. So I’d come up with a one-sentence way of phrasing it. Then I’d reflect at some point during my days, what is it like to have my deepest intention at the forefront of every communication I had—every conversation, every email, every phone call? What’s it like to wash dishes with equanimity without rushing forward trying to finish them? What’s it like to sit in gridlock with the intention to incline towards unconditional love?
When I worked with one edge of my practice that was particularly impactful for me was when I was struggling with impatience. It seemed that I was impatient a lot, and the reflection inspired me to steep myself in Dharma teachings about impatience and to just generally attune myself to the many ways that impatience showed up in both my daily life and my meditation. For instance, the impatience I felt listening to someone at a meeting I thought was long-winded and boring, and how that impatience actually developed into strong aversion and dislike for the person. Or the impatience I felt when a friend was late for a planned lunch. And of course, the regular visitor I had in meditation: “How much longer?”
As I kept attuning my attention to this, I was just so surprised how often during the day I felt it—waiting for the shower water to warm up, waiting, waiting. And I slowly developed the habit of mindfulness of waiting, until waiting transformed for me into “great, more time to practice.”
So, a contemplative reflection is taking time to think on purpose about something specific, but to think about it from a deeper place than the discursive mind, from a place in us that feels connected. One of the ways that many teachings recommend is to do contemplative reflection to deepen our understanding of the dharma, of particular teachings. For instance, one might ask, “How do I understand karma at this time? How does this understanding affect my life personally?” Or at other times it’s been appropriate to reflect on impermanence or dukkha1 or not-self.
But we can also reflect about something mundane, something in our lives we want to clarify or a decision we need to make. With decisions, I’ve spent lots of time going over pros and cons, many, many lists, multiple times, and still getting stuck. The rational mind could not come up with a decision. So, I would go meditate for a while, get settled, and then I’d bring up the decision to be made, and I’d allow whatever came up to arise. It was open-ended though. I purposely didn’t insist on deciding that day, but just opening to making a decision from something deeper. And something would usually shift in me. And when I finally made the decision, the decision seemed to flow. There’s a sense of harmony to it.
Sometimes a simpler form of reflective thinking can be helpful during meditation. For instance, I was in a retreat once and even though my mind seemed relatively calm, I found myself bored and I kept wondering how much longer. I kept trying different methods. I’d distract myself with a body scan, which worked for a little while, some metta2 worked for a little while, but still bored.
And then finally a teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh3 came to my mind: “If we’re suffering, something is being left out of our attention.” And it finally dawned on me that boredom was unpleasant, that I did not want to be bored, and that aversion had shown up and I had not noticed because it looked so much different than all my other juicier aversions like anger and fear and sleepiness. I just didn’t recognize it. So I finally turned to the boredom itself. What is it I don’t want to feel? And so I explored the felt sense of the boredom, the flavor in the mind, the feelings in the body, the strong desire for my mind to be stimulated. I became interested in boredom for the first time.
My first introduction to the power of reflective practice, before I even had heard of insight meditation, was when somebody in a yoga class told me about this 3-day retreat that they took that was fantastic. So I went and sat a 3-day retreat, and the instructions were to live with the question “Who am I?” every waking moment, including when eating, walking, and sitting. At first, the mind would come up with all sorts of verbal responses, but the idea was to keep going, keeping the questions open-ended, challenging the conceptual answers that the conceptual mind gave. The mind would get quieter, new things would arise. And then at one point I saw myself, “I’m the observer.” But then I had the observer ask, “Who am I?” And it was a little bit like nesting dolls. Oh, the observer is observing the observer. And on and on and on until logic gave up. The conceptual mind stopped for a while and a deeper wordless insight arose.
Lastly, I want to tell you about someone who was an inspiration for me. Her name was Peace Pilgrim4. Some of you probably have heard of her, but she was a woman who in the early 50s became a renunciate. When she was 45, she gave up her name and possessions to do a walking pilgrimage for peace. And for 28 years, she walked across the US and Canada, living on handouts from strangers and spreading her message for peace. Her only possessions were a toothbrush, a comb, a pen, and small leaflets with her message of peace. If someone offered her a place to stay or food, she accepted. If not, she’d sleep on the ground somewhere.
Though she wasn’t a Buddhist, her message that people could find peace within themselves by cultivating love and compassion was universal. When she first became a renunciate, she spent 50 days fasting on water. And her goal during the fast was to see if she could keep her prayer to God constant. And her prayer was a prayer of gratitude. It wasn’t asking for anything. It was a prayer of gratitude.
So that’s what I had this morning. May your reflections deepen your connection with your own hearts. Thank you.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” ↩
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, goodwill, or benevolence. It is a form of meditation where one cultivates feelings of warmth and kindness towards oneself and others. ↩
Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022): A Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition. ↩
Peace Pilgrim (1908-1981): An American spiritual teacher and peace activist who walked across the United States for 28 years, speaking with people about peace. ↩