This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Samadhi Review Day 1 Guided Meditation & Dharmette. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Unknown at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello everyone and welcome to this broadcast on YouTube from IMC, 7 a.m. in the morning. We call it YouTube. This week, I’m away teaching an eco-chaplaincy retreat and so could not be here. The other teachers that substitute for me are also not available, so we’re doing a replay, a rerun of the third week in the samadhi1 series that is a precursor for this series we’re doing now on insight. It might be nice to go back to near the beginning of samadhi, at the basics of practicing with breathing, as a reminder that we always want to come back to the beginning and get established, and not be in a hurry to have insight.
So I hope you enjoy a repeat of this week. For those of you who have heard it before, and for those of you who are new to this section on insight, it might be nice also to come back to something more foundational to create a better context for these teachings on insight. I’ll be back on July 28th, so next week. And I hope you enjoy these days returning to the beginning of samadhi. Thank you.
So hello and good Monday to all of you. Hello to this beginning of the week. There is an art in dharma practice to appreciate beginnings, to appreciate that in some way every moment is a beginning. Every moment we come to a fork where we can choose a healthy, wholesome, good way of being present that supports us, that nourishes us, or we can maybe go down another fork where we get denourished.
So here we are at beginnings. Every moment is an ending and a beginning. And the glory of dharma practice is to really appreciate the newness of these beginnings. There’s a wonderful art, a wonderful way, at least in meditation, to put aside the past. You don’t have to forget it forever. Put aside the future. There’s lots of time in the future to think about the future. To be here and allow every moment to be a new beginning where we step into it with attention, with awareness, and with samadhi practice.
That stepping into this moment over and over again, to this newness of now, is stepping into a simplicity of being. Sometimes I think of the definition of samadhi. I have different definitions that I like to play with, and I’ll probably offer different ones as we go along here. But the one that I would like to emphasize today is that samadhi is simplicity. A radical simplicity, a simple way of being with one thing. And what we’re going to be with here, what I recommend, is the experience of breathing, and to enter into that experience of breathing. So that we are simply aware of breathing. We’re simply becoming breathing. We’re simply giving ourselves over, giving attention over to experience breathing fully.
But the language we use, like “awareness,” “being aware of it fully,” “concentrating on the breath,” it’s all too easy for that to engage a tension or a tightness in the focus. That kind of getting serious and buckling down. The simplicity of samadhi is without tension, just here in a simple way.
So I’ll offer a few things today for practicing with breathing. But one of the key practices, techniques that supports a simplicity of being with something, the simplicity of being with the breath, is counting the breath. It’s an ancient concentration technique. There are different ways of doing it, and the idea is to keep this very simple. I recommend that for today, you count the breathings somewhere up to one or up to three. And if you lose count, just start again at one. Sometimes just counting up to one is enough, and then do it again and again.
The count is at this point less important than how the count allows your thinking mind something very simple to do that’s directed towards the experience of breathing. And so the thinking mind is engaged in this process of being simply with the breathing. And being simply with the breathing kind of brings together our experience so we can, over time, experience the different aspects of breathing, all for the purpose of shepherding awareness into a simple, relaxed attending to this moment here with the breathing. And it can become very pleasant, pleasurable, very satisfying if we can become very simple with the breathing, with no pull to other things, no judgments about it or anything else, just breathing.
To count, one way to do this is on the inhale, count one, and on the exhale, count two, inhale three, and then let the exhale go without a count. Just follow it peacefully and then begin again. One, two, three. There are many ways of counting. If you prefer, just do one on the inhale, one on the exhale, just over and over again. That’s okay. The idea is for the count to be very gentle. It’s like 2% of what the attention is doing. Very light. The lightest possible count. And don’t do the checklist, checking-it-off kind of approach, “one,” and then you’re done your job. But rather, in your silent thinking mind, you can say the word “one” through the length of the inhale and “two” through the length of the exhale. So it would be “one…” or you might say the count a couple of times gently, softly, “one… one… one…” however long the inhale is, and then “two… two…” So you’re really there.
Assuming a meditation posture and gently closing your eyes. Taking some now, some gently but longer inhales and exhales as a way of familiarizing yourself to the body’s experience of breathing. And then as you exhale, relaxing your body. As you exhale, relaxing the breath body, the part of the body that does the breathing.
And letting the breathing return to normal. For a few breaths, perhaps relaxing as you exhale and gently putting the awareness on top of the physical experience of breathing, like you’d put a leaf on the top of a flowing creek. And then the leaf will gently flow down with the creek. So put the awareness on the flow of breathing, and with that very light touch of awareness, flow along all the way to the end of the exhale, to that settling point deep in your body that you can touch at the end of exhaling.
And then on the inhale, feeling how it arises from that settling point, supported by it, expanding through the body. Awareness is lifted by the rising tide of the water.
And then gently, softly, to stay with the flow of in-breath and out-breath, let there be a soft count that keeps you there floating on the breath. So you’re not fixating attention, straining attention. It’s almost like peripheral awareness is resting on the experience of breathing. And the count helps you to settle, helps you to be simple, helps you let go of your thoughts. Counting the inhales and exhales. And if you lose count, without any commentary or judgment, start again.
With each count being like a dial that quiets the mind, quiets the thinking mind in favor of a simple, soft attention resting on inhale and exhale.
As we come to the end of this sitting, see if you can find in your mind the quietest, whispery place to have thoughts. As if you’re in a very quiet location and you’re whispering to someone, whispering to yourself.
Here, in this body and mind, with care, with love. Here, in this body and mind, with care and kindness. Here, in this body and mind, with appreciation and joy.
And here in this world, with care and love for the world. Here in this world, with care and kindness for others. Here in this world, with appreciation and joy for others.
And may it be that what radiates from us, what spreads from us, may it be that our contribution, our small contribution to this world, is a spreading of goodwill out from us.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may that be what we contribute to this world today. May we benefit the world through living today.
Thank you.
So, welcome to this 11th talk on samadhi. The main point I’d like to make is that there’s almost an equivalence with samadhi and simplicity. Samadhi is simplicity.
One of the things that we can do when we practice samadhi is to notice how we are not simple. And that’s very important, to see the complexity in which we live, how we get pulled into thoughts and feelings, ideas, plans, and appreciate that this is what the mind does. It’s not a crime.
There’s a homecoming that we can do. There’s a way in which too much thought keeps us alienated, keeps us separate from ourselves, unless we think who we are is our thinking. But we are so much more than that, something deeper. And so, a homecoming into this simplicity. The more simple we can be with breathing, the more there’s something marvelous that can begin to appear. And part of that marvelousness is that it can feel very settled, very sweet, very simple just to be alive here with the breathing. It’s almost like we’re entering into a deep place of home, so that we can turn ourselves inside out to allow some deep capacity for peace and settledness to animate how we live our life.
There are many ways in which people develop samadhi, but one of the ancient techniques is counting the breath. The breath isn’t suitable as an object for everybody, so there are other ways of developing samadhi. In our tradition, one of the common alternative suggestions is to develop samadhi with saying the phrases of loving-kindness, and just to find a way of saying that that’s settling, that’s simplifying, that gets us absorbed in the activity of offering goodwill.
But the reference point I’ll be using is breathing, counting the breath. And that’ll also be the focus for this week. You can certainly stop counting if you don’t want to, but if you’ve never done much counting, or even if you have, there’s something to be learned about spending a week doing it that might be invaluable. Not a few people, certainly me, have thought I was getting settled and concentrated, but really I was drifting off in thought in a very pleasant way, perhaps. It was only when I started to count that I saw, “Oh, I’m more involved in my thoughts.” I didn’t realize how strong the pull of thoughts was because I only got to the count of one, or half a count. There have been times where I’ve intended to count and never got around to it because the thinking mind was so strong.
So if you can get to 10, then that’s pretty good. If you can’t get to 10, if you only get to one and then you get pulled into thought, then you know thinking is really strong. If you get to seven, then maybe the thinking mind is not that strong, and that’s kind of nice to know. So you get to see something about what’s going on with you.
The counting is also a way of including the thinking mind in the gathering, the unification, the bringing together of all of who we are into the simplicity of this moment with the breathing. Rather than having a thinking mind be idle—an idle mind gets in trouble—you’re actually giving the thinking mind something to do that is supportive of the effort being done. Sometimes the thinking mind is really happy to have a task, happy to be included, happy to be supportive of something that is so incredibly profound and useful as developing samadhi. It has a purpose, it has a meaning for the thinking mind. And sometimes that’s what it wants. If you don’t give it that, then it goes off and looks for something else. To offer the thinking mind the simple thing to do that might just involve one syllable—the count of one, two, three.
When I was taught this, I was taught to count to 10 and then start over again, or if you lost count, to start over again. The way I did it, I only counted the exhale and I filled the exhale with a count. I’ve since then learned that it can be valuable to count both the inhale and the exhale. What I’m offering today is to keep it really simple, and that is to choose to count somewhere between one and three, and to count both the inhale and the exhale.
I don’t want to confuse you with too many options, but maybe you can land on one that just seems intuitively right for you rather than struggling around it. Some people find it helpful to give the same count for the inhale as the exhale. So, “one, one,” “two, two,” “three, three,” and then start over again at one. Some people find it helpful to just count the inhale “one” and the exhale gets “two,” and then “three.” When I’ve done this up to three, counting both the inhale and exhale, I find it really helpful to not count four, but to breathe in “one,” breathe out “two,” breathe in “three,” and then let it be quiet in the mind. Just ride the exhale in the quiet mind and then start again.
One of the things that does is it stops the counting from going on automatic pilot. It also allows for something quieter to stay there. So you’re referencing quiet settledness for how you’re going to say the count. I’ve sometimes counted harshly and hard, staccato-like. The idea is to do it gently, softly, with just enough effort to count that the mind makes that thought. Sometimes what I’ve done to make it really light for myself is to imagine I’m counting. And somehow when I do this exercise of imagining I’m counting, it becomes almost wispy or silent. There’s almost no effort going into it, no physical energy, no strain, no pushing, it just kind of floats up.
You don’t want to make the count the primary thing you do. You want the primary thing to be a kind of resting, settling, entering into the world of breathing. The count is a little bit like a pointer, like a reminder: “Oh, stay there, stay there.” The focus is not a laser focus on the breathing. One metaphor that I’ve liked for myself is someone I trust and care for coming from behind and gently putting their hand on my back, just letting me know they’re there with me. Just a reminder, “I’m here. I’m here to support you.” And so it’s kind of that way we approach the body breathing, and the count is gently here: “I’m here with you. I’m supporting you. I’m being here with you.”
In doing so, the surface mind of a lot of agitated thoughts and concerns hopefully can understand it’s okay, it’s safe to become quiet. You don’t have to actively get rid of that thinking mind. But as the energy of attention goes into breathing, into counting, something begins to soften and relax in the body and the mind that decreases the tension or pressure that perpetuates agitated thinking. So that pressure quiets.
So, to count your breathing, and I’ll talk more about it this week, but this was an introduction to this topic. What I’d like to suggest this week is that if you’re able to in your life, if you have the capacity and hopefully the interest, meditate a second time today. You’ve done it now with us here. Do it again. Maybe 20 minutes is enough, in order to continue the momentum of this kind of practice. I do talk a lot in the guided meditations because of trying to teach this here, and ideally, you would then practice it on your own so you can do this in silence and develop a momentum behind it. So if you can manage to sit another 20 minutes each day, I think that will support this amazing process of samadhi that we’re going to go through slowly.
Thank you very, very much. And may your ability to be simple and present and attentive enable you to enter the world with goodwill. May this practice support the spreading of goodwill wherever you go. Thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word that refers to a state of meditative concentration or absorption. It is a key component of the Buddhist path, leading to tranquility and insight. ↩