The four noble truths

Ken: Today is entering the village. And as I was saying last night, this retreat is primarily about how to explore your own experience. The aim in Buddhism—just to review this very briefly—the first formulation Buddha gave is known as the four noble truths. First noble truth is there is suffering, the truth of suffering. Second is what’s usually translated as the origin of suffering. But I’ve lately been toying with the translation as the genesis of suffering. The third is the cessation of suffering. And the fourth is the path.

The first noble truth invites us to become curious about this condition. Here we are, and things don’t go exactly as planned, and it seems more difficult than it should be. As we recognize that there’s something going on, then the curiosity becomes a little more. Where does this come from? How does it come about this way? The third noble truth is cessation. That’s something to understand. And the fourth one, path, is something to practice.

You could say that the four noble truths elicit the following four responses: recognition, curiosity, understanding, and practice. That’s a pretty good framework for our work in this retreat. First thing is to recognize what’s going on. And that’s what we’re going to focus on today: how to recognize what’s going on. And this goes to the point we made last night also, about observation versus assessment. Gail.

Recognizing what is going on when you sit: attention vs. assessment

Gail: Take a moment, set your books to the side, and come into the posture that you normally sit in. I’d like you to notice what you go about doing in order to arrive at what you call your sitting posture. What do you leave out? What do you pay attention to in order to arrive at a place where you say, “Yes, now I am in my sitting posture.” What do you experience? What do you pay attention to in your body? What do you experience in your body in order to get to the posture?

So release, relax. Go back to being relaxed, writing notes, and whatever that posture is. You’re going to pay attention to what you do to get into your posture. You might be able to notice that there’s something habitual that you do, especially right at the very end of adjusting before you decide you’re there. Does anybody notice anything?

Ken: Let’s hear from a few people.

Student: The last thing to settle into the posture is straightening my spine and letting it settle in. Let my whole body settle in, and there’s a relaxation that feels wonderful when I do that.

Gail: Anybody else?

Student: Opening of the hips, feeling my knees move and slide forward.

Gail: Slide forward. Okay, great.

Student: Let me just get back into it here [laughs]. The last thing I do is get higher. That seems to make my body relax more.

Gail: And you mean get higher by raising yourself up onto a cushion?

Student: Yes, with my usual cushion, it’s that stuff that moves around. So, I just make it higher. The last thing I do is I just agree with myself that I can stop sucking in my stomach, [laughter] which is something I probably do all day long. So I’ll sit. And I’ll just exhale, and let my lower belly go soft. I’ll check it. I’ll make an agreement that I can suck it back in after I’m finished meditating. And then I get to it. It’s really spiritual.

Gail: It is! Okay, great. Go ahead and relax if you haven’t already. And ask yourself, “What’s the difference between my sitting posture and when I decide that I’m relaxed?” Alternate for a moment if you can. Get into what you would call a sitting posture, then decide what relaxed is and get into relaxed. And I’d like to know if you notice any difference. And if you do, what it is. Justin?

Justin: For me, it’s the spine. When I’m sitting, it’s up. When I’m relaxed, I don’t want to force myself to do anything because I am relaxed. So I just let it do its own thing.

Gail: Okay, interesting.

Student: When I’m sitting, I’m very aware of where my hands are. And when I relax I immediately pull them closer to my body. For me, what’s almost ironic is that in the normal state I feel more sloppy. I’m not thinking about it. Whereas when I’m ready to study or to practice, even though it’s more conscious, it’s more relaxing.

Gail: I have a question for you. Is your sitting posture how you would like to be sitting for your sitting posture? Or, is it a form that you’ve taken on to try to sit within? [Laughter] Another way to put that would be, are you sitting in a way that your body would like to sit for meditation? O,r are you perhaps, hanging onto a form, or using a form, to place your body in to sit, trying on a form and sitting in it?

Ken: Put it another way. Are you sitting the way you want to sit or are you sitting the way you think you’ve been told to sit?

Justin: The way you phrased it, I believe there is a proper way to sit and then there is a way to sit. There are, of course, reasonings to the proper seating, but I think there is a difference from your normal sitting stance, if that’s a thing, and your proper sitting stance.

Student: I know I don’t want to sit the way I sit normally. I know when I’m driving, when I become conscious of my body, I realize that my shoulders are up around my ears or I’m slumping. I know I don’t want to sit that way. I prefer to sit the way I sit when I sit. [Laughter]

Gail: Let’s talk a little bit about the proper way of sitting. I’m going to go through it, perhaps, a little differently than you might’ve heard. I brought a pelvis with me on the airplane. In case you’ve never seen a pelvis, this is a man’s pelvis, about 5’7″. When you’re actually sitting, your bones that are touching essentially the ground are these two bones here at the bottom. These are the sitting bones as they’re often called.

If you notice, if I set the pelvis on the sitting bones, the tailbone is not touching the ground. Kind of an interesting thing. You can notice for yourself right now—you can do this very easily—you can tip so your tailbone goes a little more towards the ground. And then you can tip so the front of your pelvis goes a little more towards the ground.

You can make this very small, it doesn’t have to be a huge action, but this is perhaps a little point of balance between the forward and the back that you can be aware of. All of us will have our most comfortable place. It might be a little more forward for some people, it might be a little more back for some people.

The other thing is this is an ideal pelvis. All of our pelvises are not shaped exactly like this. And both of these sitting bones happen to be the exact same on either side because they’re made from a mold. But you can also—as you’re sitting—tip so your weight’s towards one sitting bone, and tip so your weight shifts more towards the other sitting bone. And you can do that by tipping your head off center and your whole spine as if it’s one long piece that can go with you. So you can find those two extremes.

You can also do it in another way which requires you to keep your head in the center and have a little bit of a side bend. So one sitting bone goes down and then the other sitting bone goes down. And this too is a point of balance.

These four points: the tailbone, the front of the pubic symphysis, and the two sitting bones form sort of a diamond you might say, in your mind. It’s the base of the pelvis, and this is what we call the pelvic floor. There’s a whole bunch of muscles that go across there, and each of us have a different orientation to that diamond.

Each time you sit, you might be aware of how you are oriented. For a moment you could rock one way or the other. It doesn’t have to be grand and huge, it can be quite small, until you find what your comfortable center is. That might be your proper place to start sitting.

The other thing you hear a lot is the straightness of the body, which actually led me to pulling out our skeleton from the closet and looking at all the bones. And there really are no straight bones in the body. There are straight-ish bones, but generally all the bones are a little bit curved.

This idea of straightness is a nice idea, but if you have ever looked at a spine, the lumbar spine curves in, the upper spine curves out, and then it curves back into your neck. So straight is something that you might be able to experience, the word straight, or maybe the word aligned.

When I rock my pelvis, what happens in my spine? What is the relationship of my pelvis to my head? How does moving the base of my spine affect my head and jaw? And can I find a place that feels aligned without adding an extra kind of binding anywhere? This might be a way to find a proper way to sit without holding too strongly to that idea of straightness.

Yes, you’re aligned and yes, you are relatively straight when you’re sitting, but really all the bones in the body are curved, purposefully. One other point. I brought a leg, a left leg. That’s kind of interesting—

Ken: I’m surprised they let you through the airport.

Gail: I put it underneath. And usually when they open up your suitcase, they put that thing in there, and they didn’t. So, I guess you can have legs in your suitcase and nobody minds.

This is a left leg, and this is the head of the femur. And if you might notice, if you’ve never seen it, it’s rounded. Look at it, the leg bone is actually curved though we think of the thigh bone as being straight. It has a lot of curve to it.

This inserts into the pelvis, which has this very deep bowl-like place, like that. When I’m sitting here, I’m sitting on my sitting bones, and my leg is straight, it’s really pretty deep in the hip there that goes in. I’m going to leave these around here in case you want to play around with them.

Now if I sit in a rotated position, here’s what happens. This gets even deeper to sit with the leg in front. This little activity at the hip, it goes down, it rotates deeply in the hip. That’s where the rotation is happening, right in here.

It’s really easy to try to do that rotation from your knee. If you notice, the knee actually doesn’t have a lot of rotational ability, right? It’s the hip that rotates. It’s wise when you come down to a sitting position to just notice that. You can try that on yourself.

Go ahead and extend one or both of your legs forward. You can put your hands wherever they’re supported, maybe put your hand in the crease of your hip there. Then draw your heel and feel how much your thigh rotates out to the side. Your knee just bends, it’s your thigh that rotates.

This is just a little piece of information. It might be useful to notice where you’re actually rotating. Each of us will have our own capability of rotating differently from one leg to the other. And perhaps a proper way to sit for you will be rotating one leg easily and the other leg maybe not quite as easily. And you’ll have to put a little support under there, so it doesn’t injure the knee.

So just a tiny bit, not trying to go into big anatomy lesson here, but looking at bones can be actually very informative about what’s actually inside of us. We’re all very similar. I’m going to leave these around for you to take a look at.

Ken: What Gail has been doing is to invite you to explore your body and the way you actually sit. We heard various comments from people: the proper way to sit, the way I’ve been taught to sit, and the way that I normally sit or hold my body. Some people feel one way about one and another way about the other.

We have very traditional instructions in Buddhism: sit in full lotus, hands are like this, your spine’s like that, your chin’s like this, and your tongue’s like that. As Justin said, there are actually very good reasons behind these. Yet I found in my own practice that what has been developed through the cumulative experience over literally a couple thousand years, may or may not work for me. For a very long time, longer than I care to admit, I struggled to get my body to fit with that accumulated experience. In retrospect, I realized I caused myself a great deal of pain. And since I didn’t always handle that pain very well, I can say I also caused myself a great deal of suffering.

In the next session of meditation, we’re sitting, some of you’re sitting in chairs, some sitting on zufus. And that’s something else to explore: what you are actually sitting on? Gail has given you a lot of information, I’m going to give you some information now about what to do with your mind. What we’re trying to do is to give you information and let you explore.

The question is, “What should I be looking for?” The first thing you should be looking for is information. What feels right, what doesn’t feel right? What feels out of balance? What feels imbalanced? What feels strained, what doesn’t feel strained? What feels restful?

I think Joe and John were making comments that when you’re sitting in a certain position, you actually feel more relaxed. But it’s not the position we’re ordinarily in when we’re going about our lives. Well, that’s kind of interesting. Why do we go around in a position which is less than relaxed? That’s another bit of information you can look for. So the first thing to be looking for is information.

Okay, how am I sitting? And Gail’s been describing how to gather some of that information through the body in a very subtle way just by adjusting the pelvic floor a little bit here and there. If you look at that, if you start making adjustments there, you’re going to feel everything else in your body, the whole torso. What Gail’s given you is a very simple principle about how to gather a great deal of information in your whole body right up through your neck and everything.

Exploring the breath

Ken: Now you can do the same thing breathing. Is the way you breathe in meditation the way you normally breathe? When I first came to Los Angeles, there was a yoga teacher who wanted to work with me, who’d done enough pranayama that he could no longer breathe naturally. I would say, “Just breathe naturally.” I could feel the tension in the breath because he was working it. He wasn’t doing it when he was just walking around. But whenever he was sitting, he always had that tension in the breath. He could not just let it come and go, he had to be working at something. There were a few control issues in this guy.

That’s something to explore. And in particular, what is the relationship between my body and my breath? I’ve noticed sometimes that I’ll be sitting and I’ll be experiencing this strange tension in my body, which is kind of subtle, but fairly pervasive. And then I’ll notice that when that tension comes, my breathing is forced in some kind of way.Then I’ll go, okay, so how does my body want to breathe? And immediately the breathing will change, the body will just breathe, and there’s a decrease of tension, struggle, etc. Often my mind will relax right at that point too.

The other morning, I had a very long drive and a very long meeting the previous day. So I got to bed quite late. When I got up for my morning meditation, I could just feel everything was tense. Rather than trying to relax things—I just started off right there—I noticed, as I was sitting, how the body, the breath, and the quality of attention gradually adjusted themselves. And so by the time I finished sitting, the body was more relaxed, the breath was much more even—it started off quite labored—and the mind had started to open up and just rest deeply.

What I’m suggesting here is that rather than trying to meditate a certain way, you explore by making little adjustments to how you meditate and how you are when you are sitting. What is in balance, what is not in balance? So it’s very much a process of exploration. That’s what we’re suggesting today.

Gail: Also to be clear that it is a process of exploration. So you might adjust a tiny little bit and see what happens. But it’s not to change something. You’re looking, not to get it right or to decide that you’ve been sitting wrong all this time. Not to create a large change, but to explore. Really be curious about, what do I do sitting and can I be more aware of that? And what happens when I do this? Does that throw me completely off by shifting my weight slightly? That’s interesting, an interesting piece of information.

Susan: I injured a knee recently, so I think I’m not going to be able to sit with it bent in the usual way. So I think I’ll just start out that way and then make the little adjustments. And I didn’t discover that really until this retreat.

Ken: If there’s some obvious tension and discomfort, if you’re doing your body harm or if you’re doing yourself harm, that’s not a good way. The ridiculous story on this one is one about a Japanese man. Japanese can be very forceful about certain things. He decided he was going to emulate Buddha Shakyamuni. He went to forest, sat down under a tree, put himself into full lotus position, and vowed he would not move until he realized full enlightenment.

Three days later they picked him up and amputated both his legs because they were full of gangrene. So we’re not recommending that approach. If there’s something really forced and strained so your whole system is straining, explore that. What’s going on there?

Gail: Exploring in this way too can help you notice the subtle line between when it’s an okay place to sit and when it starts to be causing me harm. And so you won’t just get the full blown out gangrene legs. By exploring in this way you’ll definitely be able to see that earlier.

Student: One question though. If you’re in a session and you have planted yourself, you’ve made these minor adjustments and they’re still causing a distraction for you, is it best to end, make a gross adjustment, and then start again? Or just try to get through? What’s the best approach?

Gail: I am of the school of “trying to get through” is not a good idea. If you’ve made small adjustments, and you’re starting to experience some sort of pain, your alert signs are going off, definitely change your position. If I’m sitting cross-legged, and my knee is falling asleep, scooch to the front of the zendo and place your feet on the floor. Definitely change the position.

Ken: A principle I recommend is that when the discomfort or pain, which can be emotional or physical, has reached the point that it’s consuming all your attention, and you’re hardening against it, it’s no longer productive. If you still have free attention, and your mind is supple, that’s fine, then you can be experiencing it.

But when it’s grin and bear it, that, in my experience, isn’t so beneficial. When you say “large adjustment,” we’re sitting for a half hour period, you’re really not going to have to make more than one adjustment in that period of time. Unless you’ve got some kind of problem like a bum knee or what have you.

And the other point that you made—this business of starting over is very good. It’s a very good thing. One can look at Buddha Shakyamuni. He kept starting over. After he’d gone through his six, seven years of asceticism, he sat down and he started over once again. He actually went back to an experience he had when he was four years old. He said, “That felt good sitting under that tree when I was watching my father plowing, maybe I’ll just sit like that.” And everything just opened up.

Exploring your mind

Ken: You sit and you start over. In the dzogchen tradition, they’re always starting over. It’s a good way to approach it. That brings us to what to do with your mind. I’m going to invite you to explore that as well. What do you do with your mind? Kalu Rinpoche in one of his instructions said, “Mind’s very, very difficult. When you put it on something, it doesn’t want to stay. And if you try to send it away, it doesn’t go. Very difficult.”

So, what do you do? You might try focusing, see how that works. You could even try concentrating. What’s that like? You could do nothing. See what that’s like. You could open, see what that’s like.

What will be very interesting for you to do is in each of the ways that you work with your mind, how does it show up in the way that you sit? Are there subtle changes in the way that you hold your body? Or are there subtle changes in the way that you breathe depending on which way you decide to work with your mind?

You’re going to gather a lot of information. Maybe you’ll come away with nothing. But let’s presume you gather some information. In the meditation interviews—Gail’s going to be doing the first set of interviews— don’t try to cover all of the information because we simply don’t have time. We have about three to five minutes per person. So, these are very short interviews.

What I suggest you do in these interviews is give one piece of information that you’ve got. Knowing Gail, I’m sure that she will give you ways to further explore your experience based on that one piece of information. You can then use that to explore your experience more deeply. When we explore our experience deeply this way, that is where we begin to find things. And so today’s very much about exploring. We’re not going to talk about what you might find. We’ll save that for tomorrow. Okay. So, any questions?

Student: Would you just say a bit more about doing nothing?

Ken: There isn’t much to say about it. If I said anything, you’d probably try and do it, wouldn’t you? I’ll say this much, you’ve probably done this exercise in acting where you’ve had come on stage and do nothing?

Student: It’s forever a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Ken: You’ve just gathered your first piece of information there, haven’t you? I am always doing something. You can take it from there.

About three years ago, I was doing a retreat with Kilung Rinpoche, who’s just a very straightforward teacher who works out of Seattle. Everybody at the retreat was pretty experienced. So he just said, “Go and do nothing.” That was our meditation instruction. Compared to my previous training, it was a relief. And it was very helpful.

But that was a three-week retreat. And I noticed that after about 14 days, I was beginning to get a little antsy. Up to that point, it was really cool. But after 14 days, I was beginning to get antsy. And then I started to think about Longchenpa, who’s one of the great Nyingma teachers. He lived in the 14th century. He had done nothing for 14 years, 12 years or something ridiculous.

I thought about my own teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, who would sit on the north face of the mountains in the winter of Tibet for months, years. He would have quite happily spent the rest of his life doing that. Except that his teacher made him come down, teach the three-year retreat in one of the big monasteries in Eastern Tibet.

The reflection that I went through is, “Boy, you really have to not care at all about being anybody or getting anything done if you’re going to do this.” That takes an extraordinary level of courage and clarity. Do you see what I mean? So that experience gave me a totally different appreciation and a different kind of understanding of the extraordinary qualities of these great teachers who weren’t concerned with being anything. Because let’s face it, that’s why we do things.

Two sufi stories

Ken: I’m going to give you a couple of my favorite Buddhist stories. This first one is about assessment as opposed to observation. At least that’s one possibility. Maybe there are other possibilities.

The philosophers, logicians and doctors of law were drawn up at Court to examine Nasrudin. This was a serious case, because he had admitted going from village to village saying: “The so-called wise men are ignorant, irresolute, and confused.” He was charged with undermining the security of the State.

“You may speak first,” said the King.

“Have paper and pens brought,” said Mullah Nasrudin. Paper and pens were brought.

“Give some to each of the first seven savants.” They were distributed.

“Have them separately write an answer to this question, ‘What is bread?'” This was done. The papers were handed to the King who read them.

“Bread is a food.”

“It is flour and water.”

“A gift of God.”

“Baked dough.”

“Changeable according to how you mean ‘bread.'”

“A nutritious substance.”

And the last said, “Nobody really knows.”

Then Nasrudin said, “When they decide what bread is, it’ll be possible for them to decide other things. For example, whether I am right or wrong. Can you entrust matters of assessment and judgment to people like this? Is it or is it not strange that they cannot agree about something which they eat each day, yet they’re unanimous that I’m a heretic?”

Nasrudin and the Wise Men, The Exploits of The Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by Idries Shah


This next one is about challenges you may experience in this practice.

Bedar, the Watchman, caught Nasrudin prising open the window of his own bedroom from the outside, in the middle of the night.

“What are you doing, Nasrudin? Are you locked out?”

“Hush! They say I walk in my sleep. I’m trying to surprise myself and find out.”

Creeping Up on Himself, The Exploits of The Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by Idries Shah


Student: What was the point of that one? [Laughter]

Ken: I have absolutely no idea. [Laughter] Okay, time for a few more comments and questions. Yes.

Student questions

Karen: In the meditation you suggested trying different things. Do you have a guideline or something for how often or not to do that? I think I’m in the habit of trying to stay with one thing for a while.

Gail: I would guess, Karen, that based on your experience, it’s easy for you to get into one thing of the body too. Is that true? You can explore and go, “Oh, knee.” So in your case, I would say to actually allow yourself to have a little more time to switch around. Maybe start with relationships. So if it’s noticing something physical in my knee, how does that relate to my left hip, and what’s coming up emotionally? And so try to start to see the relationships, which will get you off of the focusing in so deeply on one physical activity. Does that make sense?

Ken: A little caution here. This is noticing; it’s not thinking. It’s not analysis. That’s important. All analysis, all thinking are forms of assessment. We’re emphasizing observation here. It’s just noticing. You’re not labeling it in the vipashyana sense.

Student: How do you know to let yourself go from the point of observing to assessment? When do you know you’ve got enough information?

Ken: Tomorrow. It’s like Alice in Wonderland. Assessment yesterday. Assessment tomorrow. Assessment every other day, just never today. [Laughter]. Anything over here? Gary?

Gary: I once took a movement class, and there was an image that has stayed with me for maybe 15 years now. It’s a relaxation technique. In the year and a half I’ve practiced it, it’s helped: my head’s a helium balloon and my spine is a string. There’s something organic about the way that that allows the rest of my body to settle.

Ken: So, it’s using an image. Thank you. Have you all got a clear idea how to work in practice? Speak now or your going to have two hours wondering, what am I meant to be doing?

Student: One point is that I don’t usually have problems with my body. I just sit and I feel quiet with it. What I have problems with is the mind. Mind just goes wild wherever she wants to. I don’t know what I have to do with my body about it.

Ken: You may or may not have to do anything with your body. Have you tried reigning your mind in? Have you tried tying it up and staking it down?

Student: I tried it all. I tried to tie it up. And I say, “Okay, fine, just go ahead.” And then there’s the stuff that comes up. There’s a moment in which it’s blank. I’m completely in a lost place where I notice something, I notice what she’s doing, and just before I start judging it, there’s a moment of emptiness. And I feel very scared in that moment. I don’t know if this makes sense. This is my mind.

Ken: Are you aware of what is happening in your body at that moment?

Student: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The body is set, it’s just there. Sometimes I have tension, so I go around in it and work with it. My face tenses up. I try to relax it. It’s as if if I do something intentionally, it’s not right. Everything in my life happens when I’m distracted.

Ken: That’s usually the case.

Student: When I have no intention in any way, things happen. And then I don’t know how to reproduce them anymore. And obviously I obsess trying to reproduce.

Ken: Where is your breath in all of this?

Student: I look at it, it goes in and out, and then waves of thoughts go in, and I go back to the breath. It’s very hard to let it happen naturally. In the sense that when I look at it, I’m very analytical. I don’t do it intentionally. It’s just so natural in my wellbeing that it’s hard to switch that off.

Ken: Okay. Gail and I are not going to tell you what to do with this. What are the possibilities?

Student: It’s just that I feel very lost if I leave my judgment. I start crying about it if I don’t have any. And it seems like I’m nobody if I don’t have that. So I leave it. Sometimes I just don’t judge. I try not to. And I feel lost; I stay lost. And then it goes away, comes back, goes away. But I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know if I have a place to go or not.

Ken: And what do you experience in your body at this point?

Student: I don’t feel my body is an issue. It’s a good companion usually. It’s a good friend.

Ken: So just in the short discussion, look at what you’ve come up with. My body’s quiet. It’s a good companion.

Student: The body sustains. It’s just the mind that wants to undermine it all the time. I’m calm in the body, but the mind just goes wild. And it doesn’t touch the body. It’s very stiff.

Ken: Well, here’s one possibility. What does your body have to tell your mind?

Student: I don’t know.

Ken: You might explore that. Okay?

Student: Okay. Thank you.

Ken: Romy?

Romy: So, we’re going to be observing the body, the mind—

Ken: And the breath. The usual. [Laughter]

Romy: The usual suspects. My thought is that for me, I’m going to be observing a lot of things. Tension here, a little hip, just kind of touching it, not really thinking about it. At the end of this, I may have a hundred different things at any point in time. How do you almost remember, catalog it to use tomorrow?

Ken: That’s yours. This is equal opportunity.

Gail: How do you normally categorize hundreds of things that you have to do in your day?

Romy: I write them down. I feel that you need to really think about it so it stays with you. I think that’s the issue here. I think if you just touch it, I feel like you’re going to forget about it.

Gail: We’re not talking about thinking about it. How might you, in experiencing it, be able to know that you’ve experienced a hundred things in, perhaps, a half an hour?

Romy: I think there’s just a knowing that you’ve experienced multiple things. I think my question is, how specific can you be? You remember that you’ve had lunch the past 30 days, but do you remember what you had at each lunch? And maybe something that I’ll remember will be the important things, but certain things I think will slip. So how do you prioritize almost?

Ken: You are already moving into assessment, aren’t you?

Romy: Yes.

Ken: No. [Laughs]

Gail: Tomorrow. Today you’re like a detective. You’re walking into a room and you’re observing what you see, but you don’t know which piece of information is going to be important later.

Ken: This is, I hope, totally unhelpful. Good.