Guided Nondual Meditation with Michael Taft
Meditation
Let’s begin, as at all times, by just tuning in to the query: What’s it wish to be me right away? So what’s it like? Feel your body, your emotions, notice your thoughts, whatever else is happening within the ecosystem. Checking it out. That is a vital point: whatever is occurring in there right away, just let that be okay right away. We’re going to let go of the elemental aggression toward ourselves, that continuously says we’d like to alter our internal state. As a substitute, simply let whatever is occurring in there occur, just the way in which it’s right away. Even when it will not be that nice, or it’s super nice and also you don’t want it to go away, ever. Only for now, for the length of the sit, let or not it’s nonetheless it’s. So let’s spend a couple of moments tuning in to the way it is to be you right away.
Now, just tune in—this is sort of a poem or a mood thing—just allow yourself to meditate as if you happen to are the sky. Let yourself be wide open, boundless, spacious, free; very vibrant and clear–wide awake. That’s at all times a part of our experience, so we are only tuning into that a part of our experience that’s already like that already sky-like, already wide awake, already wide open. So, even if you happen to only find just a little hint of that, tune into it. We usually are not tightening down or constricting, or attempting to make it different or make it big. Just notice the natural easy openness that’s already a part of our experience. From the wide awakeness that is an element of that openness, the intense, clear, crisp awakeness that’s already there, just allow awareness to tune into the rising and falling wave of the breath. It’s like this endless openness, this open sky is aware of the rising and falling wind of the breath. We usually are not specializing in it, or microscopically or phenomenologically deconstructing it, we are only noticing that the breath is rising and falling, that’s all. Quite simple.
Just allowing the breath to be the breath, and that that feels good, the body likes to breathe. So there’s a background hint of pleasantness, of joy, or with this sense of how nice it’s to breathe. The sunshine wind of the breath, rising and falling throughout the sky of awareness, wide open, wide awake, sky of awareness. Notice a extremely easy, natural sense of stillness that comes into the body after we allow ourselves to be wide awake and wide open; respiratory very easily. This will not be stillness from rigidity or discipline, this is just becoming relaxed enough that the body is having fun with stillness, really loose, open, relaxed stillness. Sometimes after we stay able to act or move, we now have a background tension. Here we’re releasing that, settling in, simply sitting.
Good. Now, if you happen to already know how one can do alternate nostril respiratory, go ahead and try this. If not, I’ll show. Put your right thumb in your right nostril, closing that nostril. Then breathe in through the left nostril. Then close the left nostril with the center and ring finger, and breathe out through the suitable. Then reverse, respiratory in the suitable nostril, closing the suitable, respiratory out the left. We’re going to do that for some time–about 5 minutes. You don’t must do it if you happen to don’t prefer it.
It is vitally good for balancing, opening, and getting the brightness of awareness quite a bit clearer. If you have got been practicing this for some time, be happy to do longer exhales or breath holds, or anything like that if you happen to are conversant with it. Otherwise, simply do that back-and-forth respiratory. It helps if you happen to sit up real straight, with the back really straight. We’re getting bilateral, bihemispheric stimulation doing this.
If you should mix this with a visualization, you may, on the in-breath see the breath going into the belly, see the breath and the belly lighting up. On the out-breath, see the third eye lighting up. If you should mix it with a mantra, on the in-breath, say so-hum; on the out-breath, say han saha. This can be a nondual mantra. The so-hum means “I’m he/she/it”; han saha is “That’s me.” We’re connecting with coming out of the sense of a limited identity into the much larger, groundless identity of empty awareness itself. So-hum on the in-breath; han saha on the out-breath. Feel also, besides the balancing, soothing quality of this, feel also the way you sense the energy body just a little bit. Minimally, tingling, but often, a greater sense of embodiment coming forward.
Now, we began with an in-breath within the left nostril, so keep going until you do an out-breath on the left nostril. Then allow yourself to complete the breath, and easily rest because the wide open sky of awareness. Feel, not only the breath rising and falling but additionally, the energized body and the wide, wide, wide awake awareness.
Again, on this very open manner, not focusing hard or constricting the eye, just be with the breath. Particularly the sensation of the movement of the breath, in order that energy quality. In the event you are sensitive to it, you may even feel the energy behind the breath, that sense of vibratory movement that is sort of the source of the breath. So, on this very relaxed, wide open, wide awake, very open manner, we are only following the breath, but now in a far more energized manner. Feeling the buzzy/tingling/vibratory quality, perhaps throughout plenty of the body, many areas of the body. Let’s just be with that for some time. Bringing vibrant clear awareness with none tightness in attention. See if you happen to can notice, just directly–this will not be a visualization, you usually are not imagining something–see if you happen to can notice how that feeling, that quality of energy within the body is definitely moving the respiratory, it’s behind the respiratory.
We’d consider our bodies as being full of pumps and hoses and electrical wiring, and pulleys & levers–all of the metaphors about how the body works, based on our machinery and equipment–but this sense of vibratory energy is how the body feels about itself after we tune into the energy behind the respiratory. The body starts to feel really good, to loosen up and open. That is its native language, so to talk. So, it’s less of us impinging and colonizing it with our ideas of how we expect of it, and reasonably feeling the way it feels about itself. Very natural, very relaxed. The body starts to open to this manner of seeing. In the event you are sensitive to this in any respect, you’ll feel this energy all throughout your body, limbs, face, torso. And as you tune into it, not specializing in it, just relaxing into the open awareness of it, it is going to begin to turn into more obvious and even grow and expand. After we notice it much more clearly, much more deeply, we see that, to place it on this funny way of talking, the energy is behind the breath, and behind the energy is groundless openness. Just absolute spacious openness that has no bottom, no ground. It’s just wide open. Right contained in the energy is boundless space.
In the event you are superb at noticing this, you might have the opportunity to follow how space bubbles forth with energy, and the energy becomes the in-breath, and the in-breath collapses back into energy, collapses back into space because the outbreath. Not as a visualization, but a direct perception. You might even begin to feel how the complete body, not only the emotions of the breath, but all the emotions of the body, are only wide open, boundless space, exuberantly dancing, so to talk. Every sensation is just the colourful expression of this groundless openness. Very nice to note that.
In the event you work with this for some time, you’ll notice that it affects the mind, the pondering process. Identical to the emotions within the body may be noticed as energy and vibration, if we try this enough, we begin to experience thoughts that way. Not as cognitive information, they may begin to feel like vibratory energy flows, similar to the body feels. It’s going to begin to affect how pondering is perceived. Arising thoughts, as an alternative of being strings of cognitive information, will feel like a wave of buzzy, tingly flowing energy. Still pondering, but in a really different mode. And really obviously coming from the identical source because the breath, the identical emptiness that’s vibrating and dancing its way into being the breath, can be exuberantly expressing itself as flows of thought, which are simply movement, energy, change. We usually are not analyzing them as linguistic or cognitive content.
If that’s too hard, just stick with the body and the breath. But if you happen to can notice that thoughts are simply flows of energy as well, as a direct experience, not a visualization or imagination, just tune into that. Give up into that, and see how that changes the openness of awareness to much more unrestricted, uncontained, very awake place.
In the event you end up getting sleepy, sit up, but keep going. This will not be a sleepy time, but a really wide awake time. Just a special mode of being wide awake.
Notice how tuning into the vibratory quality of thought, the flow of constantly changing thought energy will are inclined to dissolve the more crystalline, rigid, controlled, and defined elements of the mind, and begin to open up the playfulness, openness, non-linearity, wide open, wide awake and easily spontaneously flowing.
If any a part of the body starts clamping down or tightening up, just notice how the breath energy lets that open right up. Not in a fighting or struggling way, just simply relaxing and opening. Similarly, if the mind starts clamping down, attempting to make sense, interpret, frame, control, just notice that the flow of thought energy moving and changing, transmogrifying constantly just melts those attempts, dissolves the control frame, and lets a way of ease, spaciousness and spontaneity come into the mind. Very natural sense of wide openness. No need to manage.
Groundless space itself is pondering. Bottomless openness with none boundary is respiratory. Whatever that looks like, if that’s there, feel the energy behind that. The sensation of being someone doing anything in any respect, especially respiratory, pondering, or doing a meditation, has some body sensation components, some emotional body sensation components, thought components, all of that are already experienced as flows of energy which are then coming out of groundless wide openness. So see if you happen to can notice that the sense of “I’m someone doing something” has a vibratory energetic quality behind it. You may break it down into thought and feeling, but additionally it is available just directly. There’s the sensation of me being someone doing something. Feel the vibratory change, the energy flow behind that. It could be easily available, or it could be beyond your ability right away. If that’s the case, that’s okay, just come back to something that is simple to contact.
Notice the energy behind someone doing anything in any respect. Then, as you have got probably already intuited, notice the space out of which that’s arising. The vast, boundless openness that has no ground in any respect, absolutely wide open, out of which the experience of “I’m someone doing something” is arising. It is basically interesting, after we know it, because, in fact, it will not be that there isn’t a experience of someone doing something. Identical to, obviously we’re respiratory, we will feel respiratory happening, however it is arising out of groundless openness, and clearly there are thoughts happening, but those, too, are arising out of groundless openness. They’re sort of there but not there. In the identical way, the sense of “I’m someone doing something” is an obvious experience that’s there, but can be flow, change, vibration, energy, arising out of groundless space; arising out of nothing, essentially. There, but not there. Wide open, wide awake. Continuous flow of experience.
You may say that awakeness itself, space itself, is respiratory; space itself is pondering; space itself is becoming someone who looks like they’re doing something. But never fixating there. Flowing back into energy, back into boundless open awakeness with none ground in any respect; nowhere to land, no box to place it in. You might notice an exuberance, a sort of background joy, a sort of deep pleasantness that comes with just letting this flow of experience flow without ever crystallizing into any particular thing. Repeatedly aware of the groundless openness on the core of it, and yet, the vivid and exuberant display of all experience.
Notice if anything does feel stuck, tight, contracted, dense, or crystallized, crimped, you may just find the energy quality behind it, the vibratory flow of continuous change behind and inside it. Not as a visualization, but as direct experience. Then follow that flow of continuous change into the vast space of wide-awake wide openness right inside it. In order that even the thing that’s appearing as super dense or tight, dense, problematic, is, at its core, just wide awake wide openness, flowing with energy and spontaneity into being what it’s expressing as. We don’t must change it. It doesn’t must be loose and open. It will possibly be as tight and bizarre and problematic because it wants, and be in total touch with the open, spacious, wide awake groundless wakefulness that’s its nature.
Even the room around you, the lights, colours, shapes, textures, colours, patterns, rhythms, you may notice as the continual field of change, vibration, flow. Notice that it, too, is arising moment by moment from a sort of exuberance of awake space with none ground in any respect. Never stuck, never crystallizing, never flattening. At all times fluid, spontaneous, playful, wide awake, wide open, flowing. It has no boundary and no center. Wide awake, wide openness. Never putting itself in a box or getting stuck, a continuous flow of spontaneity, of whatever is next.
Excellent. Let’s end the meditation there. Move and stretch; do what you might want to do.
Dharma Talk, Q&A
As I said, we usually are not trying to visualise or imagine energy. I’m using that word – energy – not in a physics way, but the sensation in your body. The thought is that by tuning into that and following it, it is going to pull you right into a clearer sense of what is definitely available, what is occurring in experience.
In the event you do the breath one, did anyone feel plenty of energy of their body while you did that? That may pull you right into a deep absorption. It starts to get stronger and stronger–but that’s not what we’re doing. We usually are not attempting to go into an altered state. As a substitute, we are attempting to see what is happening differently. We’re used to putting it right into a box and making it right into a thing and defining it in a certain way. After we try this, it will probably be useful for every kind of things, and that’s after we are visualizing, you’re experiencing more of your ideas of what’s happening reasonably than what is happening. The more that you simply begin to make a thing out of experience and choose what’s happening. You might be dreaming experience into what you think that it’s alleged to be.
We’re kinda doing anti-visualization. As a substitute of imagining what’s alleged to be there, we’re tuning into experience itself–not which you can ever have naked experience. But, just by working in such a way we see the continual changing quality, it brings in a special mode of experience. If that is well available, you may notice the groundlessness. It’s an experience, it’s not there, but you may’t discover a bottom to it. It’s not coming from anywhere. In a deep sense, it’s nebulous, indefinable, and that’s interesting. But, that’s not the one interesting thing. It’s not that we just need to go to the undefinable groundlessness and stay there, which numerous people selected to do, and that’s cool, but that’s not all of what I’m showing you. You may see how that completely groundless, nebulous, undefined–whatever–comes back into being all the pieces. And while you see it that way, all of the stuff that’s coming into experience is super awake, spontaneous, flowing. None of it’s stuck, it’s not in a box. It brings the primordial undefinedness back into being, and that’s tasty, really feels good, is gorgeous and fresh.
One in all the things we do is our yogic respiratory; the alternate nostril respiratory, Anuloma Viloma, an ancient technique that has many advantages. One is that it starts making the vibratory quality just a little clearer. One other is that it helps take you out of your rote patterns of thought, starts taking you out of the worn pathways of your mind and opens you as much as something different. It’s actually, surprisingly good at that, only for doing something that’s really mellow. It starts to make a few of these other experiences available. And what’s interesting is it’s taught in practically every Yoga class. In the event you go to yoga in any respect, they’ll show you how one can try this, but they never really. I don’t know. They’re just cool. That’s some energy, or like, that’s a very good thing, or it’s gonna clear your chakras, or whatever. However it’s very, very rare that they’ll show you what you may really do with something like that. Even something really easy like that. You may work with it loads. It’s very interesting. It’s very powerful. It comes from Tantrism or Vajrayana, which is an excellent powerful way of working, but plenty of the background of understanding has been left behind, and is now utilized in a far more pedestrian way, which doesn’t really provide you with the keys to opening it up. So just know that, though you may learn to do something like that each one over, learning to work with it is commonly not explained. We’re doing just a little little bit of that here.
Are there experiences or anything coming up from people on the market? Any questions, comments, intense critiques?
Questioner 1: It appears to be that in a single a part of the practice it is vitally energy-arousing, and one other part that is totally relaxing. I ponder how one can navigate between the 2; Do I just follow what feels nice? Is there something else I can search for? The way to balance it because they’re so opposite.
Michael: That is the core of what meditation is: a balance of getting really relaxed and getting real awake. Normally we now have these two modes of being–super relaxed but unconscious–being asleep–or being awake, but being very agitated and tense. Those are the default modes of human experience. What we’re doing is mixing the nice parts of each. You may imagine [sound went out]. So, on this meditative process, we’re getting more deeply relaxed while being more awake. More awake while being more relaxed, and getting deeper and deeper into that. In order that’s what you’re describing – the great place, the balance between dullness and agitation.
But we’re doing something more here, because that’s just shamatha. We’re doing more, which is the further step of: now have a look at the emptiness quality, the wide-openness, the spaciousness, nebulosity, undefinedness, groundlessness. But that’s only one direction in meditation that leads you–to Advaita, to this real transcendental place. And you may stay there, but don’t! That’s only halfway there so far as I’m concerned. That’s cool the way it is spacious, it’s nebulous and undefined. But there could be a strong habit to show that into this pure land of wide awake awareness, and this whole world of experience is someway polluting, or is a nonsense dream, and it’s just my groundless wide awake awareness that’s the only reality. To me, that’s just an actual dead end.
As a substitute, because that’s something so obvious, so disembodied; there’s something else that’s staring you within the face, and that’s that emptiness is exuberant, it’s spontaneous, it’s full of energy that wishes to return back into being. It’s making all the pieces occur every moment. You may ride that back out, which is different from leisure and awakeness. It’s emptiness and form, to make use of Buddhist terminology, or groundless wide openness and exuberant display. So, we at all times want to return back to that exuberant display also, that’s when it’s really the complete experience of being alive as an alternative of putting yourself into an emptiness hole.
Right? So we’re playing backwards and forwards, from just display, into the vibratory quality of the display, which takes you into the openness, but as an alternative of just hanging on the market, we feel how the openness has energy, and it brings you back into being, all the pieces is rendered suddenly, and that’s interesting.
Questioner 1: These two qualities of the emptiness part and the exuberant energy – to maneuver backwards and forwards? Or do you see it as from the emptiness comes the exuberance – a progression, reasonably than finding a balance?
Michael: Each are totally cool ways to experience things, but eventually it’s kinda just all happening. We will, for the sake of meditation/experiment/having fun, you may go into one or the opposite, or go backwards and forwards, or simply kinda rest. The excellence I’m making is that it’s all just happening at the identical time. So, we will just sit with all of it happening at the identical time. But, until you do the extremes backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, it’s hard to note it happening suddenly.
Questioner 1: Excellent
Michael: Thanks on your query. Other stuff?
Questioner 2: Just just a little preamble to my query. Working with energy, experiencing energy behind feelings has helped me loads with understanding equanimity. That’s been very interesting; like attachment and anger all have the same nature or value now. But one thing that’s difficult to work with is ennui; it’s kinda hard to explain what it’s.
Michael: You’re in a roomful of Americans, so let’s say “boredom.”
Questioner 2: Existential boredom, as I even have experienced it in my life, is as “so what”–the state of “so what-ness.” It’s more like a scarcity of value.
Michael: Are you describing what we would call depression?
Questioner 2: I don’t know the way it arises, it just randomly comes up. There’s probably some karmic storage, also all of the moments that I even have experienced throughout my whole life, at the same time as a child or teenager. So, when I would like to work with this in the shape of energy, first, I sought the energy behind it, however it is hard since it questions even the wide awake space, it questions all the pieces in type of value. And second, with thought, it felt just like the energy behind it was fear, like lack of value or meaning, but then I felt the sensation behind it was death, there was no energy in it. And so, the fear of death, of lack of meaning or energy, because there’s energy in all the pieces.
Michael: Why would that be bad?
Questioner 2: Yeah, I don’t know. It feels bad. There isn’t any motivation to do anything, there’s just death. There isn’t any value.
Michael: Have you ever ever been in a position to not do anything?
Questioner 2: Umm…Type of.
Michael: But only sort of, right, you’re still respiratory, getting as much as go to the lavatory, you continue to find yourself sleeping. There may be actually quite plenty of doing in all of that “no reason to do anything.” And so it’s interesting.
Questioner 2: Yeah, I believe it will not be doing anything useful, in order that’s what the boredom is about. So, I used to be wondering if anyone else experiences this?
Michael: Numerous people experience it. It’s powerful. It’s just a little bit deeper of a spot, right, while you start noticing that? The secret’s that if it is basically so dead and all of that, why would that even matter? If it was really dead, it wouldn’t matter to you that it felt that way. But there continues to be fear, there’s still “you don’t want it,” so there’s tons of meaning wrapped up in it. As soon as you notice that there’s valence there, then you definitely are out of it, or a minimum of potentially out of it. So there’s that route, just noticing: why does a few of this get to matter? If it really didn’t matter, you wouldn’t care. So there’s some mattering there, and that’s one option to work with it.
One other way is to search out that fear. That is a few really, big, energy–not some small energy–that is basically interesting, and see the identical thing: it’s got all that spontaneity, intensity, flowingnes, after which that’s already beginning to have the aliveness in it. Let yourself feel the fear. We do death sangha in here, which is coming up here on the weekend of Halloween. A giant a part of that’s feeling the aliveness of that super fear, right? And disgust, shame, hatred, all that. So we usually are not attempting to suppress that, deny it, make it go away or control it, but reasonably, feel the energy of it, after which notice that that energy is wide open groundless space, too, and super awake. Then we will ride back even into the ennui and the flatness, and see that it has a recent quality. It’s not likely recent, but we will notice the standard, that it is definitely very alive. In order that’s the energy way in. That’s a pair of how of working with it.
Questioner 2: Yeah, that is smart. There are all varieties of peripheral energies and I can work with them. Thanks.
Questioner 3: Feeling like I even have a very good sense of touching into emptiness and coming back after we are working with energy behind the body, behind a way of self. I notice when I even have open eyes within the room sometimes I get a touch around temporality and fiddling with that a bit. Visual phenomena are interesting. I can notice the flow of change inside it, but I don’t have the sense of going right into a voidness and effulgently coming back out of it. A part of me is seeing that there’s an expectation that there must be blinking of phenomena or some perceptual distortion.
Michael: Do you have got any perceptual distortion in your visual field?
Questioner 2: Sometimes I get just a little fuzzy, intensity of colours, the brightness can fluctuate.
Michael: For everybody, different sense gates are easier to note these things in than others. For numerous people, external visual sight is the one which is probably the most concrete. This is just a way of seeing, a way of perceiving. Notice it in the opposite senses as strongly as you may, after which work with the visual field. Over time, it is going to start to disclose its openness. In the event you’ve done way too many experiments with funny molecules, like a lot of us have, it’s normally pretty fucking obvious. It’s just continuously doing that. So, it just depends. For some people, the sound is harder, for some, the body sensations, but, work with those which are easy first. That opens that way of seeing, after which it starts to kinda infect the opposite sense gates.
One last query
Questioner 3: When I believe in regards to the infinite potential of awareness, there must be an infinite variety of possibilities that might come out of it. Once I sense my reality, it’s at all times the identical type of set of things. There may be a pattern to being myself. So, what’s it that from all of the infinite space of infinite possibilities is funneling it towards a particular set of outcomes, which is my experience?
Michael: Sure. The reply is “I don’t fucking know.” It just does that. Let’s imagine habits, or samskaras, or your set of priors–I could provide you with a bunch of explanations, but, it’s all just sewage coming out of my mouth in comparison with “that’s your experience.” Then notice that as you begin to tune into the fluctuation and alter that’s there, it is going to start to return back in other ways. Sometimes minor, sometimes major. It won’t be as stuck.
Questioner 3: So you may sense how the infinite potentiality is merging into one experience.
Michael: That’s not what I said. What I’m saying is that if you happen to start noticing your personal experience, that potential increasingly often, what comes forward might be less rote, less habitual. Whereas, whether it is constantly out of sight, you’re kinda stuck within the habitual. I hope that’s helpful. I could give a bunch of explanations, but you possibly can read those anywhere, and I don’t think it helps that much, truthfully.
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