Contacting the tangible
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 11 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘Buddhist Practice’ and it explores a physical warm-up for meditation followed by a grounding meditation. Link to led meditation on video. Grounding meditation When a Zen monk dressed in black robes walks slowly down a gravel path, he is practising walking meditation. He feels the contour of the rock pressing though his sandals; the sensations of his robes fluttering about him in the breeze, deliberately sensing everything tangible in his experience. Moving slowly helps him limit the amount of information coming in, thus he can pay close attention to the details of his experience, sink deeply into what he is experiencing and come into an intimate relationship with the world around him.[1] Grounded in our present moment experience in this way, life tends to be pleasurable; of course, the monk spends long hours sitting in zazen[2] without moving, which requires great discipline. In most secular mindfulness eight-week courses,[3] body awareness is central. The idea of mindfulness is introduced as coming into more intimate contact with our experience; in week one people practise the ‘raisin exercise’, spending five minutes or so investigating every aspect of the experience of a raisin; putting it into their mouth, sensing its texture; its smell; its taste; savouring how it feels in their mouth, and so on. The theory is that our western lives are so driven, we are so obsessed with ‘doing’, that much of the time we run on ‘automatic pilot’, ceasing to notice just what we are experiencing, and missing a large part of our lives. We might imagine that we are getting things done and this may sometimes be the case, but certainly on automatic pilot we abandon a level of colour and richness to our lives. The eight-week course encourages us to wake up from automatic pilot and purposefully bringing awareness to our present moment experience, while holding back from making judgements about it, thus experiencing the ‘being’ mode, where our life is grounded in lived experience. In this way mindfulness gets our mind back on our side. In this way Buddhist and secular mindfulness practice begin with an attempt to ground ourselves in our experience; that is, in the experience of sensation. A feeling of grounded-ness is the effect of being in touch with the tangible, leading to an increasing feeling of confidence. Meditation is the most efficient way of working on the four foundations. In meditation we cease doing our normal activities, retiring to a quiet place where we won’t be disturbed, in order to look carefully into our...
Mindfulness and Conditionality: mind
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 16 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘The Undiscovered Foundations’ and it explores the way in which Mind conditions the other Foundations of Mindfulness, including the poorly understood concept of worldly and spiritual feeling: which can be roughly correlated with conscience or lack of it. This excerpt follows on directly from Mindfulness and Conditionality: feeling. vii Mindfulness of mind conditioning happiness / Awakening Mind When we are trying to transform our mind to be sources of happiness, we need to bear in mind that it will always affect the other foundations. When the condition of mind is in place—as it always is, it will always affect body, feeling and views, contributing towards Awakening or suffering in the future, through the processes of manifestation, ethical feeling and reflection. Body and feeling come in the category of experience; we are presented with them as experience in each moment, and as such in that moment there is nothing we can do about them, but experience them. Mind and views, on the other hand, are not experience as such, because we can choose to develop one mental state (or view) instead of another, as we do when we meditate (or reflect). Mind and views are responses to experience. We saw in the previous section how an appropriate response to ethical feeling depended on correctly identifying worldly and spiritual feeling. This could only be achieved once we had correctly identified the skilful and unskilful mental states that fostered them. Once a worldly feeling has been identified the mental state which opposes its progenitor needs to be developed; the pain of seeing our enemy is caused by the mental state of aversion, hence the mental state of loving kindness needs to be developed to counteract it, and thus alleviate the pain. Likewise, if we identify a worldly feeling of bliss as originating in a mental state of unawareness, we need to cultivate mindfulness until our unawareness becomes painful to us. By being aware of the effect of our body, feelings and views have on our mental states (as a source of happiness and well-being for ourselves and others) we aim maintain these in the best state we can. These are the conditions for happiness and suffering concerning mind. MANIFESTATION Firstly, there is manifestation. Mind and Body are interconnected, and so our mental and emotional states will manifest[1] tangibly within the body, and the world (through the operation of karma). Mental and emotional states —–Manifest—–> Body / World An angry state of mind will be apprehended as tension in...
Kindness As Constructive Imagination
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 10 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘The Evidence Bases in Religion, Science and Politics,’ in which I explore how kindness is developed through paying attention to what living beings truly are: a process Tse-Fu Kuan calls ‘Constructive Imagination.’ Feeling and emotion Metta—Universal Loving Kindness–is one way that we redirect our emotions along the most wholesome pathway; it is, however, very important first to be clear about the difference between feeling (vedana) and emotion–as an aspect of ‘mind’ or citta. Sangharakshita: ‘When Buddhist psychology refers to developing mindfulness of feelings, however, something rather different is meant from the “getting in touch with one’s feelings” with which psychotherapy is concerned–something less complex, perhaps more useful. Indeed, being able to identify feelings (in the sense of vedana as defined by the Buddhist tradition) is what makes it possible for us to follow the Buddhist path. The Pali term vedana refers to feeling not in the sense of the emotions, but in terms of sensation. Vedana is whatever pleasantness or unpleasantness we might experience in our contact with any physical or mental stimulus. ‘To understand what we would call emotion, Buddhism looks at the way in which that pleasant or painful feeling is interwoven with our reactions and responses to it.’[1] Feeling as vedana, then, is just experience: specifically the experience of pleasure, pain or neither. On the other hand, the etymology[2] of the word ‘emotion’ is connected with ‘moving out,’ in the sense of ‘responding.’ Emotion, then, is that aspect of the mind or psyche (Pali: citta) which ‘moves in relation to experience.’ Citta encompasses the sum total of how the psyche moves in response to experience: it therefore includes thinking, emotion and the distribution of attention: It is useful to consider the above diagram. In the teaching of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (satipatthanas,) the Buddha says we need to bring mindfulness to four areas, if we are to bring happiness into the world, avoid suffering and ultimately attain Nirvana.[3] These foundations are body (kaya,) feeling (vedana,) mind (citta) and views (dhammas) and they all condition each other. Usually that conditioning, when taken between feeling and emotion, involves moving towards pleasurable experiences that are desired and away from painful experiences that are undesired—and maybe not responding at all to neutral experiences. Emotion then is most of the time an unconscious and reactive response to feeling; while feeling and the emotion feel to be one thing, they are actually distinct. Feeling is just what is presented to us in the moment: thus, it is something we...
Super Relaxation Week
Three principles behind relaxation Following on from the YouTube sessions on stimulation which I taught six months into the pandemic and which featured the ideas of Wim Hof, I taught three sessions on relaxation. I called these ‘Super Relaxation Week.’ The sessions are available below: Day 1 This session contains a led semi-supine relaxation from the Alexander Technique. Day 2 In this session Nishpara, a yoga and meditation teacher who has worked with me at the Manchester Buddhist Centre, leads a very detailed body relaxation and breath meditation. Day 3 In this session I review three principles behind relaxation and introduce the Super Relaxation Week worksheet. Download it...
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