Learning What the Mind Does
Aprender lo que hace la mente
A framework for meditation practice as a progressive series of techniques, beginning with breath and body anchoring, moving through full-body awareness, and ultimately arriving at the direct inquiry into identification itself.
Learning What the Mind Does
A framework for meditation practice as a progressive series of techniques, beginning with breath and body anchoring, moving through full-body awareness, and ultimately arriving at the direct inquiry into identification itself.
The point of meditation is really to learn what the mind does: to see how we identify, and how the functioning of the mind affects the way we live. It is a process of seeing more and more of what the mind does, and in that seeing, we become disidentified. A separation opens up where the activity of the mind becomes part of the experience, part of the background.
When we are functioning normally, we are completely immersed in and identified with the mind, the narrative. There is a character in the mind, and we believe ourselves to be that character, that image of what we are. It is usually a very limited image. Some people who have never meditated don't even realize that a lot of what they think is reality is just thinking. The more we get into this, the more we start to see how deep our belief systems go.
A progression of techniques
What I want to share is a progression of techniques that build on each other. You can think of it as a muscle. As you strengthen that muscle, you can move to deeper forms of meditation. Ultimately, the deepest meditation is simply not doing anything. But if we try to not do anything without much practice, we are usually caught up in a great deal of inner activity, a lot of habitual doing.
Once we are able to be more in presence, there isn't much practice happening. There is just awareness, and seeing what the mind is doing becomes as easy as looking at a background of scenery or looking around a room. You see the activity of the mind, and it doesn't pull you in. For some people this has happened spontaneously, where this disidentification occurs all at once. But there are very tried and tested techniques to build that kind of separation.
Anchoring in the body
The first step is anchoring in the body. When we are very immersed in thinking, when we are identified with thinking, we lose awareness of body and body sensation just as much as we lose awareness of our surroundings. We operate instead with the image of the body, the image of the surroundings. That can be very subtle sometimes.
As we anchor in the body, it becomes a kind of mirror. You begin to see: I really cannot just pay attention to my breath. I am constantly being pulled into mind, mind, mind. It is hard at first to see, through that mirror, how much we are holding to thinking. But this practice of anchoring with the breath will strengthen over time. It is more important that you do it two minutes a day than twenty minutes every ten days. This is something you can do while you are waiting at the bank, or at any moment during the day. You can take even just one minute. The practice is simply to count the breath, counting only on the exhalation.
From breath to full-body sensation
Once you are more able to be aware of the body through the breath, the next step is to move away from the breath and into full-body sensation. This is a form of vipassana. The field of attention widens from a single point of focus to encompass the whole body.
Self-inquiry beyond concept
From there, we can move toward what is called self-inquiry: "Who am I?" At first, we want to create some distance from the mind so we can see what it does. Once we are able to see the mind more clearly, with that separation, and once we can anchor into body, sensation, and surroundings, then we can undertake a deeper inquiry. This inquiry into "Who am I?" is not a conceptual process. It is not about asking the question and then answering with a concept. That is precisely why we first want to create this distance from the mind, so that self-inquiry does not become just another mental process.