Week 2
Meditation Talk Transcription
Welcome to Release Into Now, Week Two. This week, we’re going to focus on cultivating the witness mind and observing our thoughts.
Taking In Our Universe
The mind works like a radio. Our nervous system scans what’s happening outside of our body and takes in a continuous stream of information. The data our nervous system collects is what we define as our consciousness.
However, what we experience as consciousness is not a direct knowing of the objective world. It’s been filtered by programing of past experience, genetics, and relative cultural world view. We ‘tune in’ what’s happening outside of our bodies. We absorb a specific frequency and perspective that’s completely unique to us. We all experience a different flavor of reality because no two people are alike.
The frequency of our consciousness is always shifting in real time. It’s an ever unfolding process which occurs our entire life. The signal that we can tune in evolves as we continue to learn. As our consciousness expands and our perception increases, a deeper reality is revealed to us. When we grow – the world grows.
How Our Perception Colors Our Experience
I have a simple thought experiment I’d like to share that shows how our consciousness and perception of reality is subjective. Imagine that you’re comfortably lying in your bedroom. You feel rested and content. Your bed is soft and the light radiating through the window is casting a spectrum of beautiful shadows. The colors on your wall look vibrant and alive. You feel relaxed and at home in your bed.
Now, let’s say you go out to a bar that evening and have 10 or 15 drinks. Enough drinks to leave you feeling pretty rough in the morning. You wake up the next morning in your bed, but now, your head hurts. The bed feels lumpy. You’re blood is hot and you feel sweaty. Through a pinched eye you notice that there’s dirt on the floor. You notice the paint is worn on the wall in a few places. The morning light shining in the window hurts your eyes and makes your headache even worse. You notice a sour smell in the room that makes you nauseous. The entire world is working against your senses like an opposing magnetic force.
Now, let’s learn something important from that story. Your room hasn’t changed at all. That’s the same room you felt relaxed and content in. What has changed is you. The frequency of your consciousness has shifted. Your objective bedroom is the exact same as it was the previous day when you felt wonderful. It will always be the same in objectivity. The experience of your bedroom is different because your mind has changed.
Our perception of reality is relative only to us and is constantly changing. We quite literally tune in our perception of what’s happening in the world outside of our bodies.
Through meditation and mindfulness practice we can achieve an awareness of the frequency of consciousness that we’re experiencing. How is that helpful? We become more present when we develop an awareness of the thoughts flowing through our minds, how we’re feeling, and how we’re responding to our world. We can begin to interact with our perception as it arises. This is extraordinary helpful. For example, if you feel yourself going down a negative train of thought which would likely lead to negative expression, you can get in front of it. You can observe the transaction and reflexive programed response that’s about to occur and change it.
Creating Internal Space
The ability to observe our thoughts is a direct benefit of meditation. We want to cultivate internal space and presence of mind so we can reflect on our thoughts before responding to them. By developing a present awareness of our flow of consciousness we can interact with life with more patience, insight, and compassion.
Step Out The Ember
There’s a saying which urges us to ‘step out the ember before it turns into a blaze.’ The practice of cultivating awareness of our thoughts deals with the same fabric. In life, we all at one point or another feel anger, frustration, and judgement. We experience indulgences of the ego and respond in armored and aggressive ways towards ideas that challenge our worldview.
However, equipped with the mindfulness tool of self-awareness this scenario plays out differently. You take note of the ember. You’re able to track the seed of a negative feeling just as it begins to sprout.
Before it turns into a blaze of reactive toxicity that overwhelms your mind, you recognize what’s happening. You have space to take a step back, step out the ember and move forward with peace. It only takes a touch of presence to extinguish the ego’s desire for an internal fire.
Increasing Our Awareness
The breathing and sitting practices we’ll cover in this course will help you gain some of this awareness. This will give you greater command of your mind and bring you closer to the present. This awareness is not something you simply grasp. It’s something that you move towards. If you continue your practice, your awareness has potential to increase for the rest of your life. It’s an exponential process. You can become as aware of the world and your consciousness as you want to be. It’s simply a matter of your dedication and persistence to walking the path of mindfulness.
The Witness Mind And Flotation Tanks
I have a story I’d like to share which is helpful in understanding the witness mind. For years, I tried to convince my mom to experience a flotation tank. If you aren’t familiar with what a flotation tank is, allow me to briefly explain. In short, a float tank is an enclosed metal or plastic chamber, almost like a massive bath tub with walls and a ceiling. The tank has about 8 inches of warm water in the bottom which is kept at a constant temperature. The water is intended to be the temperature of your skin so that it’s a challenge to discern where the water line starts. There’s a large amount of dissolved Epsom salt in the water so that you’ll float when you lay down, release and relax. It’s often dark in floatation tanks so your visual field doesn’t register perception. The float tank provides immense physical benefit by decompressing the spine, joints and muscles. Internally, your cognition shifts because you’re free from the distraction of your physical senses. This environment enables an effortless and immediate path to begin observing your own mind.
On to the story. After many conversations, I finally convinced my mom to try a flotation tank. She’d never experienced anything like a float tank before, but was brave and booked a session.
She called me after her session and said she enjoyed the feeling of the tank but that her mind was racing and she couldn’t get it to calm down. She could never get into what she thought a meditative state was suppose to be. She continued to explain to me that she was overwhelmed by the fact her mind was full of thought fragments that were racing a million miles a minute with no relief in sight. In the end, she decided her mind was one of those minds that just couldn’t get into a mindful state.
I suggested that she stop and reflect on the story she had just told me. In the description of her float tank experience she said she was watching her mind race and saw all of the fragments flying by. So there it is. She was watching her mind without realizing it. It just happens that the first look at her mind was quite a bustling one. Often, it’s simply a different perspective that activates the first step in waking up to your own mind.
Cultivating the witness mind and learning to observe our thoughts is a slow process. That’s fine because there’s no hurry. A seed doesn’t rush to become a tree. It grows slowly and steadily for years and figures out the direction of growth along the way. Perhaps through listening to this, you’ve already become somewhat aware of the thoughts that are flowing through your mind. Maybe even seeing them from the outside a bit. Or maybe you’re beginning to notice the separation between thoughts and how they arise one after another.
The more you practice observing your thoughts the clearer your perception of them becomes. Once you develop a steady awareness of your consciousness it becomes second nature to keep your river clean. The river of your consciousness. The stream of thoughts that are flowing through your mind all of the time. With this awareness you can see the traffic jams in your mind and the things you’re holding on to. This ability to recognize your thoughts allows you to observe them and let them go.
Let Go To Become Who You Are
As humans, but in western culture specifically, we’re taught that we have to acquire things in order to achieve results. We must buy an expensive car to show our wealth. We must wear certain shoes to represent our social language. We must be able to hold it. Something has to be in our possession for it to be ours. We are of course then possessed by our possessions.
Meditation is the exact opposite. It’s about releasing, undoing and letting go. Unpacking. The more we can release what we’re holding on to the freer we are to exist in the flow. We all have old patterns of thinking that keep us stuck in the shapes of the past. By entering the flow of mindfulness we can accept fresher perceptions of who we are today. Over time this naturally becomes the dominant mindset. Through this practice you can become more of who you’d like to be as opposed to who you were.
Self-Awareness Is A Skill You Develop
Developing this mental technique is like any skill you learn in life. The more you practice, the more natural it becomes to you. It’s unique to develop an internal skill of the mind. We’re used to learning how to do something common like cook a new meal. The first time you make a new dish, it’s a bit rocky and you feel unsure. You take time to taste the flavors and get it just right. You feel excited after the new dish comes out well and it keeps getting easier each time. Maybe you begin to cook the dish without the recipe. After a while, you can go to the store and grab the ingredients without even checking your shopping list. Then, you can make that dish from intuition and have it taste beautiful and delicious. This is what bringing meditation into your daily life is like. The more you devote yourself to the practice the more it becomes a part of who you are.
A Sense Of Oneness
A sense of oneness often arises after a period of self observation. We begin to intuitively understand that we are not separate from our environment. People tend to feel separate from the world around them because they can move around. How could all be connected if we aren’t physically rooted to nature?
Duality is a distinction created by the human mind. We think that because we have a body that contains our identity that there’s a separation from what exists outside of us. The edge of our body is a mere fence which our ego applies an illusion to in order to retain a sense of “I”.
It makes sense that a person would feel as if they’re the center of the universe because their reality emanates from their brain. To each of us, it seems as if our self-aware mind is the Sun shining light through a dark solar system. In actuality, we are all individual parts of one system that’s completely connected. We are the pixels that create the image of our universe.
As it was eloquently articulated by the great Alan Watts: Look at your backyard. There’s your yard and your neighbor’s yard. Those two yards are defined by a fence. Yet, It’s the same piece of Earth. Someone just stuck a fence there to create the illusion of separation.
This is what we deal with as humans while falling prey to the illusion of duality.
In the upcoming guided meditation we’ll focus on cultivating the witness mind and observing our own thoughts. We’ll also focus on gaining a sense oneness, a connection with the natural world of which we are all an expression.