This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Samadhi Review Day 4 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. At 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 who 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 practice, 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 heard it before, and those of you who are new to this section on insight, it might be nice also to come back to a more foundational beginning 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, we start again, welcoming you all here. The meditation journey is a lot easier if you understand it as a journey that’s leading to a profound capacity to be in the world in a new way. It’s a journey that takes us inward in a certain way, deep inward, almost like we could imagine, to the source. And there, in a sense, we turn ourselves inside out, and then we can return to the world in a new way.
One way we return is as if the world begins with ourselves, begins in our hearts, begins deep inside. And how we are as we come out of our depths shapes the world—certainly the world that we see, but in a certain profound way, it shapes the world around us. We want to have that shaping, that remaking of the world, come from a place of profound goodness, profound health, profound love or care—a care for everyone, no one left out of our hearts. But to do this, we have to know that that’s the journey, and then be able to put aside for the time being the preoccupations we have about the world, the future, the past, what’s happening now—not to ignore it or abandon it, but to be able to come back in a better way.
And so, a willingness to suspend the usual preoccupations of the mind for a better cause, for a really good thing. On Monday, I said samadhi is simplicity. Then samadhi is subtleness. Then samadhi is steadiness. Today, I’d like to contribute to this list that samadhi is spaciousness. We’re going inward in a sense, and for those of you following along here, to use the breathing as the primary anchor or settling movement that settles us inside to the settling place.
As we do that, at the same time, we’re opening up to a spaciousness that’s the context, that’s the atmosphere that surrounds the experience of breathing. This opening to a spaciousness, it’s almost like the peripheral awareness is aware of the space, and the primary focus is aware of this settled place within with the breathing. It is being involved in two things at once, but we do this often in our life. We go through a space that’s either crowded or a space that’s very open, and we’re primarily doing our task, walking perhaps, but we’re very aware that it’s crowded with people or very aware that there’s space to walk in. Either one affects us, and we might not be doing it so consciously, focusing on the people or the space, but it sets the mood, it sets a condition for how we’re going to follow our way.
So in meditation also, we can be attuned to the spaciousness around the breathing, and that contributes to a sense, eventually, that the mind doesn’t move when we meditate. When there’s a lot of thinking going on and a lot of concerns and preoccupations, it’s very reasonable for people to say the mind moves, “I lost my mind,” “it wandered away,” “it got distracted,” “it got caught up in something,” and then we bring it back. But as the mind gets more and more settled, the idea of bringing the mind back, the idea that the mind goes anywhere, is just a metaphor. The mind never goes anywhere. And as we settle and feel the spaciousness, it gives us a kind of relief. Oh, the mind doesn’t have to work so much. The awareness seems to be arising out of the spaciousness or in the spaciousness itself, having qualities of spaciousness: light, open, almost insubstantial.
Assume a meditation posture. Gently close your eyes and settle into here. You might begin by taking some long, slow, deep breaths, relaxing the body as you exhale, relaxing in a settling way. So you’re settling your body and letting the breathing return to normal.
Continue for a few breaths to feel your body on your inhale and relax the body on the exhale, maybe relaxing different parts of the body in different breaths.
And similarly, as you exhale, just soften the thinking mind. If you can feel the sensations associated with the thinking mind—some pressure, tightness, weight, contraction, or some agitation, activation of some part of your head as you think—gently, softly soften the thinking mind, as if you are allowing the waves on a lake to settle and quiet down. Or if you drop a pebble into a lake, waves ripple out, but the further they go, the smaller they become until they disappear. Letting the waves of the mind ripple out and quiet.
And then to settle in to your breathing. If you have found a settling place deep in the experience of breathing, at the end of the exhale where the inhale begins, the place from which the in-breath arises and expands, and where the sensations of breathing end at the end of the exhale. Not searching for that or feeling for that from the control tower. Almost like having your mind deep in your torso, where awareness arises together with the inhale, together with the exhale.
Settling, and then having a steadiness through the inhale, a steady companionship for the whole length of the inhale, and a continuous attending to the exhale from beginning to end. Here’s where you might steady your mind, steady your attention, so you can continuously follow one inhale, one exhale.
As you follow the inhale, notice how it arises, it appears, it begins, grows, and comes to its end. And the exhale begins, continues, and comes to an end. As the exhale comes to an end, allow your thinking to become quiet. And into whatever quiet there is, allow the inhale to arise. A gentle steadiness with the breathing.
Then become aware with your peripheral awareness of any sense of spaciousness, any sense of, just beyond the edges of breathing, the edges of how you experience breathing, is the beginning of a kind of space or openness, or maybe a kind of quiet or a kind of stillness. To whatever degree you can be aware of spaciousness, stillness, while you’re with your breathing, it’s almost as if the weather is spaciousness through which breathing travels.
Whatever feeling of spaciousness you have around the sensations of breathing will support you to not fixate on the breathing, but have a softness, an openness that more like allows yourself to be aware, breathing in and breathing out.
If you sense space around the breathing, around you, if thoughts arise, don’t be troubled by them or involved in them. Let them drift away into the space, and you settled on breathing that’s in the middle of all things.
Perhaps rather than trying to be aware, you’re more like not trying and allowing. There’s an art to not trying that brings forth a deep awareness, a spacious awareness, almost as if it’s always there waiting for you, and that breathing is at the center of it.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, any idea of beginning and end exists in the midst of a wide field of spaciousness, openness, beyond the edges of the word “end,” beyond the edges of any word, any idea. In the space, in the quiet, between one sentence in the mind and the next, between one image and the next, there can be a silence, a stillness, a spaciousness that can exist together with the noise in the mind, the activities of the mind.
And perhaps to sense and feel the breathing room that spaciousness provides. Breathing room for all things can be left alone just to be. And as we end this sitting, perhaps we can do that for other people, give them space. Give them breathing room so they can just be as they are without our judgments and desires, wants, expectations. The gift of allowing people space to be themselves. Maybe so they can see it more clearly. Maybe so there can be a different way of responding.
May it be that this practice that we do helps us to contribute a respectful space, attention, awareness for all the people we see in our lives, a spaciousness.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.
And may our holding people in a spaciousness support that possibility.
Hello and welcome to this next talk on samadhi. One of the things to appreciate is that samadhi is not a practice per se; it’s a state. The practices we do of steadying the mind, focusing the mind, being attentive to breathing, letting go of thoughts—there’s a lot of things we might be doing, but that’s not the samadhi. That’s the practice to enter into samadhi. And samadhi is a state. It’s actually a variety of different kinds of states of mind, of heart, of body, of a wholeness that we can experience.
It’s important to appreciate that the instructions for meditation can be state-specific. There’s a strong orientation for people to use as their reference point “me, myself, and mine.” “How I am now,” “how this is benefiting me,” “how is this good for me,” “if I like this or not,” or “this works for me or not.” There is a value in that to some degree, but we can get stuck in that kind of orientation as well. Meditation practice is meant to be something that helps us step out of that excessive self-orientation, self-referencing.
One way to do that is to appreciate that when we practice meditation, we have to adjust our practice according to the state that we’re in. As we go through these teachings about samadhi, and as we get further and further along, I’ll be talking about things that probably are not immediately relevant for many of you. It’s appropriate for you, if you’re aware of yourself, to practice in an earlier phase of the instructions here. Often, the right place to be is as a beginner, or you have your own practice of how to get settled and get started in meditation. You’re welcome to go back and use that as well.
It’s kind of like a pyramid as we practice. We spend a lot of time creating the foundation, and even very experienced meditators start at the beginning, laying down the foundation. Then slowly over time, the building of that pyramid maybe goes faster and faster, but we don’t spend a lot of time in the higher states of samadhi. So just be aware that you have to adapt yourself to how I’m teaching here, but also to participate with your imagination if it’s not directly what you’re experiencing. Maybe it’s evocative enough for you to imagine, because what I’ll be offering are the landmarks that will become available as we keep practicing. You might be able to better see the landmarks in the distance having received these teachings. You’re familiar with what’s coming, ready to recognize what is useful to take in and where the path is, rather than just being in a big territory, not seeing the path, and just kind of wandering around, even though it might be beautiful terrain. You’re still maybe wandering in circles.
So today, I was offering opening up to something I think is very important for the deepening of samadhi or the expansion of samadhi, and that is spaciousness. We have an amazing capacity as human beings for spatial awareness. I’m sure that there’s a range of how much that capacity exists in different people. To some degree, it’s a capacity that can be developed, and some people haven’t spent much time developing it. But it’s possible, for example, to close one’s eyes when we’re in a room and then with the imagination, imagine the size of the room, imagine the distance to the walls. Or if you’re sitting outdoors, you can close your eyes and imagine how expansive the outdoors is. If you’re sitting on top of a hill or a mountain and close your eyes, you can still remember something about how expansive the whole vista is in the mind.
The mind has spatial awareness. We have a sense of what’s to the left, to the right, maybe even behind us a little bit. We can have a sense of distance between us and other people. Some of that is a deep functioning of the mind. If you’re going to toss a bean bag to a friend, some calculation goes on deep in the mind of how strongly to throw that bean bag, how high to throw it, how fast, the angle, the direction. All this incorporates a sense of the space and distance that goes into our spatial awareness.
Sometimes we can close our eyes and have a sense of some kind of spaciousness around us. In very deep meditation, sometimes people have the sense of infinite space, that the space they’re sitting in has no edges, has no limits, because edges are a concept the mind makes of this kind of thing of space. So you can sit and be aware of, with the eyes closed, imagining the room you’re in, and there’s a limit to that—the walls. But if you’re sitting on top of a mountain, the limit of it, maybe there is no limit going upwards out into space. That sense of limitlessness is sometimes breathtaking or inspiring, or it just kind of opens something up wide. If we’re in a claustrophobic space, it tends to support a kind of claustrophobic preoccupation with ourselves, our thoughts, our concerns.
In sitting meditation with the eyes closed, when we’re settled enough, when we’re still enough, when we’re steady enough, simple enough, there might be a time when we can start feeling the spaciousness in the mind, spaciousness in the body, a sense of, “there’s room for things.” Because the mind is not filled with thinking. Thinking and desires and aversion, according to the Buddha, is what creates the limitations and the smallness of the mind. The mind becomes expansive. The mind of awareness, without those limitations of thoughts and concerns and preoccupations, desires and aversions.
As we get more settled, we begin to become aware of the spaciousness that’s here, so that we’re not riding the breath, latching on or zeroing in with a tight laser focus. Rather, the awareness itself starts becoming integral to that spaciousness. The awareness itself feels as if it’s part of the spaciousness. And so as the breathing comes and goes, sensations of breathing come and go, it feels like they’re coming and going within the atmosphere, the weather, the context of spaciousness.
This kind of spacious awareness is not something you can fixate your mind on. If you look at the space in the room you’re in and try to really stare down the space, like really focus and zero in at the heart of it, to let the space know that you see it—that kind of one-pointed focus you might have for someone you’re angry with doesn’t work with the space around you. You’re better off not trying to look at the space as a point for the central focus of the eyes. It’s more like you have to relax. For some people, when they’re looking at the space in any place at all, the natural tendency of the mind is that the eyes roam, and in the gentle, soft movement of roaming, we have some kind of inner sense with peripheral awareness of the space in the room.
So rather than having a central focus, we have this peripheral awareness. Like eyesight, there’s a central focus and peripheral awareness. The peripheral awareness is always there, but it’s hard to focus on it in the way we can when we zero in on the central focus. The same thing happens as we sit and meditate. The center of attention could be the breathing, but at the same time, we’re aware of this peripheral space around it. Both are going on at the same time. There are two different, almost systems of awareness operating, and they both can be mutually supportive, operating at the same time. But in order to do this, the mind has to be quiet enough, still enough, settled enough.
That’s the work of developing the subtleness that allows the spaciousness to start to come. The Buddha sometimes called this an expansive mind, mahācittā2, because the mind itself feels like it’s starting to make lots of room, rather than the mind being caught and preoccupied by something. The mind that’s not caught opens up and relaxes and is expansive. This spacious, peripheral awareness, as we settle and steady on the breathing, makes possible the states of samadhi that are going to arise.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little bit about what begins to become possible with this settling and focus on breathing as we begin opening to this spaciousness. In the meantime, until tomorrow, I’d encourage you to look for occasions where you can settle back to appreciate the spaciousness, the wide space around you. It probably works better outdoors, but some places, like here at IMC, there’s a really high ceiling, and just looking up toward the space of your ceiling, that itself does something to the mind. See if you can appreciate, take time, have tea, look around, open to the spaciousness. If you’re lucky enough to live in a place where there’s wide open space, maybe a city park or a hilltop or something, spend the day specializing on becoming aware of open space all around you. That might help you to find that in meditation as well.
So, thank you very much. We’ll continue tomorrow, and tomorrow we’ll do the community meeting for our YouTube community on Zoom. I’ll keep the YouTube channel open so those of you who don’t want to go on Zoom can.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative consciousness or concentration. It is a state of deep stillness and collectedness of mind. ↩
Mahācittā: A Pali term meaning “great mind” or “expanded mind,” referring to a state of consciousness that is vast, open, and not limited by ordinary thinking. ↩