In response to James suggestion, and with his encouragement and advice on the meditation program …
on the first Sunday of each month, any of us who… whilst bodily separated … would like to come together as we are – like a flock of birds, settling into sitting practice… can meet for some sustained mediation practice together on-line.
At 9.45 UK time, a brief introductory explanation/revision is followed by five meditation sessions between 10am and 4pm:
Introduction … 9.45 -10.00
Session 1 … 10 ~ 10.35
Session 2 … 10.55 ~ 11.40
Session 3 … 12.05 ~ 1.00
Session 4 … 2.00 ~ 2.45
Session 5 … 3.05 ~ 4.05
Each session starts with about 3 minutes practice of the Guru yoga of the white ‘A’, followed by shamatha meditation…
There is no bell to indicate the end of the three minutes…the suggestion is to get a sense of how it feels to practice this for just 3mins on your own …before joining the Sunday meditation…
As soon as you notice fusion with thoughts has occurred, just relax and…on the out-breath… return to openness…
Try this once…or twice…then shift to the shamatha meditation for the rest of the session … with eyes open, inclusive of the panoramic field of experience, but lightly resting your attention on the sensations accompanying the flow of the breath up and down the groove connecting the base of the nose with the upper lip.
As soon as ‘loss’ is noted… simply return to this light focus again and again …without comment…or judgment
Continue with this practice for the rest of the session…
If your situation is such that these sensations seem too ephemeral for you to maintain attention… then shifting the focus to staying with the flow of breath … from the infinite – into the body– and back into the infinite – is a valuable alternative.
Rather than wasting time in a session fruitlessly struggling to regain any initial openness…just start afresh with the 3 ‘A’s in the next session…
The sessions length increases (except for the sleepy after lunch shift!) throughout the day… until the final sit is for an hour.
The intention is to maintain the energetic connection of the group throughout the day if possible…but people are free to join and leave as they need…so people in different time zones are welcome to join in when they can…
You will hear some noises from my end, as part of your experiential field, but the feedback from different microphones is of another order! So if you can remember to join with your microphone off – and ideally at the beginning of a session so that the 3 A’s are in synch – that would be a kindness to participants…
Also, if you’re new to this and the time seems too long …maybe just have a go…and see how it is…
You can always leave when you need and build up gradually… struggling isn’t helpful…but stretching might be …and relaxing into it, out of limiting thoughts certainly will be !
There is an invitation, if you find this beneficial, to consider how you can weave more of this into daily life.
If you’d like to join us … or have particular questions before or afterwards …just send me a message via ‘Contact Me’ … top right on the home page…
Happy meditating… Sunday…and everyday!
~ *~
When I heard James say, back in 2003, that many people didn’t know themselves very well…
I was thinking of brain damage…memory loss after car accidents… and also wondering about being ‘more myself’ – what might that look like?
‘You belong in awareness…’ ‘Your mother is awareness….’
Oh…my goodness!!!
Realising that the mother that I think of as ‘mine’ in this life, is also considered to be ‘my mother’ by each of my siblings … and that we all see her differently…
That how we see her is not ‘the truth’ of her, for herself…and that all of these ‘mothers’ were constructs of our selective attentions, was a step in the right direction…
But the givenness of our relationship to awareness… as the mother of all phenomena – the mother we’ve forgotten in our shaky ego’s ungrounded efforts to stabilise the unstabilisable, in our grasping at the vanishing – was much more than one step beyond that…!
Yet although all this was astonishing and incomprehensible to me at the time, it was somehow comforting to hear.
I think that encountering news with truth at it’s heart, is a very rare and wonderful surprise … however strange it may seem…
and in sensing that’s the case, the journey out of confusion begins…
There’s a vast amount of teachings now freely available to read/listen to/ explore.. to help us put our habitual views and actions into question…and relax out of identifying with transient arisings as if these movements were the main event.
In meditation, as we relax out of continuous involvement with arising thoughts feelings and sensations … we start to become more at ease…at home with being settled as presence with awareness as our abiding continuity…
Gradually the movements that we’d habitually grasp at seem less tasty… as more of ‘how it is’…of how we actually are, is revealed.
The previous post the Open door of Emptiness Ch.3 part (ii) is a gesture towards that exploration… (iii) and (iv) continue it…