Expanding the visual field in the primary practice

Jeff: So, as I sat in the corner, listening to what a lot of you had to say in interviews yesterday, I thought it might be good to point out that the approach to primary practice we went over the other morning, it’s just one approach. We mentioned another approach. It might be an approach that a lot of you have done. When we talked about it yesterday, we started with the field and then moved in to focusing on things that came up in the field. You can also start by focusing on an object and then expanding to include the field. For instance, if we’re talking about your visual field, you might choose something to look at. Like that. Or just something in front of you. Just pick something you can focus on, and just let your gaze rest on, on some object. And you’re not trying to stare it down. You’re just letting your attention rest on that object. And then you expand and include say, three feet around that object. So you’ve seen everything within that three foot diameter, for instance.

Ken: That was more than three feet.

Jeff: Yeah, that was 40 inches. Sorry. [Laughter] He was right: it was 40 inches. He can’t do arithmetic though. So …

Ken: That’s a professional problem for mathematicians, arithmetic.

Jeff: That’s what I’ve learned. So expand it out to five or six feet, just whatever you can bring it out to. So you get the idea. You keep including more and more in your gaze until eventually you’re including everything in your whole visual field. Okay.

Just try that right now. So you start with that object. Can you slowly expand what you’re attending to, in your visual? And as you do that, you notice, you might notice that you get tight in your solar plexus, or you might notice your breathing slows down. So that can be a guide to how fast to move. Until eventually you’re resting on everything that’s in your visual field, is in your attention. And then you add into that, the space that all those objects rest in, arise in. So you’re seeing the objects and you’re seeing the space. Okay. Let that go. Questions, Alex.

Questions about the primary practice

Alex: The objects in the space, in Ken’s lingo, they’re part of shared reality, they’re not part of direct experience, right? [Laughter]

Jeff: Say more.

Alex: The space and the objects are immortal. They’re not actually part of your visual field.

Jeff: They’re part of your visual experience.

Alex: Okay. Fair enough.

Ken: Would you be thinking too much?

Alex: There’s definitely a different flavor to the experience of the space then to the experience of the visual field.

Ken: You can do it either way.

Jeff: The visual field—the field—is utterly abstract, a space that’s more or less abstract unless you work with it a lot, experiencing it. These things remain abstract until you’ve experienced them. So if you have a different flavor, that’s great—okay. But in this case, let field and space be interchangeable. Use what works for you.

Alex: So, do you mean something different by space than the space between the objects?

Jeff: I mean the space between the objects. And by visual field, we could be talking about what’s contained within the limits of your vision. Okay. Where does your vision, where does your visual field stop is basically a circle more or less, right? It goes down, it goes up, it goes out to the sides.

Ken: I figure it’s elliptical actually …

Jeff: It’s elliptical. Depending upon, I mean, most people, because most people look down most of the time. So, they’ve got a flattened out.

Ken: Just in response to Alex’s comment. You can do it either way. If you’re in the world of shared experience there are objects, there’s space, and you see everything without looking at any thing, okay. If you’re doing it in the world of individual experience, then there are all of the different colors, shapes, and everything that arises in your visual experience. And you’re just open to all of it. Okay.

Jeff: The reason I started teaching it—the other direction, starting with space—was, one: here’s a lot of people, we all have different tendencies. A lot of us tend to pinpoint our focus habitually. A lot of us tend to take in a more global focus, habitually. So for the people who tend to be more global, starting with the pinpoint, they couldn’t expand. They couldn’t get that to expand to include everything. So starting with space works for some people better.

The other reason was space, silence, stillness. They can move you towards the last step. When you look at what experiences, not the same thing, but they can move you towards space. If you notice space, there is no distance in space. Distance is created by objects in space. Space just keeps going, but also it doesn’t go anywhere. You can’t go from here to there in space. You can go from here to there with the objects: the distance between me and Kelly is defined by where Kelly is and where I am. The space is just there. It keeps going out the window. It’s in between every cell, atom, electron in our bodies, it keeps going.

Ken: Because there’s nothing to it.

Jeff: There’s nothing to it. So, same thing, starting with focus with auditory, you could listen to the sound of the clock, expand to include all other sounds that are in your awareness. And then you can shift to when the tick stops. And in that time before the next tick, where did the tick go? Silence. Okay. The tick came again. Okay. Yes, Michelle.

Gender differences?

Michelle: I have a curiosity question about this framework. Is there a gender difference? And the reason I ask is that we know that men’s brains are hardwired to chase saber tooth tigers and to block out all other inputs.

Jeff: Constantly doing that.

Ken: I just don’t feel like I’m getting it today. There aren’t any saber tooth tigers.

Michelle: And as we know, women are wired to take many more inputs into account simultaneously.

Jeff: I think you might be stepping beyond … science is finally admitting that hard-wiring is a rather limited view and that things aren’t actually that way. Okay.

Ken: Yeah. It’s actually pretty, almost everything that has been published on brain research in the last 30 years is bullshit.

Jeff: Yeah. The whole localization of parts of your brain has been proved to be bullshit. It actually comes from Gurdjieff.

Ken: In the present context its the technical and scientific term. It’s quite frightening actually because all of the PET scans, all the brain tomography, etc., are based on comparisons with standard data sets. There are only two standard data sets. One is a woman in Montreal and another is a highly suspect group of 100 people that was used and all the research and all of these nice colored things are based on comparisons with that data set. And so, nobody knows what’s actually being measured.

Michelle: Okay. But for those of us who’ve met other human beings in our lives, men tend to be much better at pursuing a singular focus and women tend to be better at cooking while talking on the telephone and keeping a baby on their hips.

Ken: Well, I would put it that—and I think there is a fair amount of empirical evidence. Women are spatially oriented and men are temporally oriented. But this is very obvious, you know? Yeah. You have an office group playing softball and strike one, strike two, strike three. What do all the men say? You’re out? What do all the women’s say? Give him another chance. That’s it right there. Back to you, Jeff.

Jeff: Is this utterly clear now? Just one moment, please. So doing primary practice as you’ll be doing shortly again, you might find that visually it works better for you to go from pinpointed focus and expand. You might find that with a sound, it works better to find the silence and then add the sounds. You might find with kinesthetic, it goes the other way. So you make a choice. You use what works for you. As we’ve been talking about, you use the feedback from what you’ve done to influence how you proceed. Okay. If you keep opening the door, and as you walk through, smack your shoulder on the jamb—move. Don’t just keep smacking your shoulder on the jamb. Okay, I’ve spent years in meditation during that, “Oh, this ought to work. I’ll just keep doing it this way.”

Ken: If you are rowing in the wrong direction, rowing harder doesn’t work.

Jeff: Indeed. So, there was a question …

Freedom to experiment

Student: Well, you told us yesterday to experiment a little bit and to focus on the sensory inputs and so forth. And I’m wondering, should I be, should I stay there or is there some “there” that we’re supposed to get to? You talk about opening. You talk about opening the heart. Should we be trying to get the sensory inputs there and then focus on moving to the opening of the heart part? Or is it okay to stay in, play games with seeing things in different ways and hearing things in different ways and trying to hold it all in concentration? Does that make sense?

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Above all, you should do it right.

Student: Which I know is wrong.

Jeff: But your question is a good one. No, make a choice what you’re going to do for this meditation session and do it that way. Okay. Otherwise, it’s really easy just to get distracted.

Student: Right. Cause I wasn’t sure when I was just amusing myself …

Jeff: Make a choice, try it and try it several times. So you get feedback. Yeah.

Student: This is kind of a follow-up on what she’s saying. I get confused when I go from the sensory of feeling that visual and taking in, you know, the silence, hearing it, hearing the sounds. And then when I go into my body, I don’t know how to feel the presence in my body. You know, I can feel like my heart beating or I feel my breath, but then I think what else? So, I don’t know what presence is in the body.

Jeff: Okay. So we’re not talking about presence quite yet and you don’t need to use that term. It’s “What is your experience?” And you said heartbeat, breathing. Well, how do you feel your heartbeat? Is it just a thump right there? Or do you feel it resonate? Do you feel a pulse in your neck? How do you feel your breathing? Do your ribs move? Does it relax into your belly? Do you feel the pressure of how you’re sitting change with your inhale and exhale, noticing your actual proprioceptive or kinesthetic experience? Don’t worry about being present or not.

Opening the heart

Student: You know, I think I’m getting mixed up with that term of opening the heart. Somehow I keep thinking this door’s going to swing open. And I’m just curious, like when people were doing that walkthrough yesterday, people were saying that their heart was opened. What is that though?

Ken: Anybody you care about in your life? Open your heart. Okay. Now see that clock there. Open your heart to the clock. Okay. You have all of this experience in the room. Open your heart to this. Okay.

Jeff: Wonderful question. And the point is when you open your heart to people you care about, and then you open your heart to the clock, again its not to get it right. It’s to notice what happens in experience that when you open your heart to everyone in the room, what happens? There’s not a right way to do it. It’s what happens when you do it. That’s what matters. Okay. Any other questions relating to the primary practice? Did you have a question?

Student: My experience of the practices when I’m working with a visual field and start opening up more, there’s a point where it’s not just the visual field. All the other sensory information comes in. I hear things, feel, smell. So the expansion happens. At a certain point everything is included. Is the work to stay focused on the visual field, or at a certain point where everything gets included?

Jeff: Include everything, but still be attending to the visual field.

Student: So primarily visual?

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, these are pretty arbitrary distinctions. I mean, a lot of us feel the visual, some of us hear sounds and have a feeling or we feel, it seemed like we see the sound as well. So they’re arbitrary distinctions. So include all those others. But for now, at least to stay with the steps of the practice, see what you discover there.

Student: Okay. Thank you,

Molly: Does opening your heart have something to do with what we’re talking about with the sword yesterday?

Jeff: Does it? What’s your experience?

Molly: Well, I feel like they’re related somehow. I’m just not sure how. There’s an opening with the wound that I experienced. That’s very deep and caring. Somehow inwardly focused, opening your heart to me feels like that.

Jeff: Could you be wounded if you’re not open?

Molly: What?

Jeff: Can you be wounded if your heart’s not open?

Molly: No.

Jeff: You’re good on that primary practice?

The intention of the primary practice

Ken: I’m going to add a little bit to what Jeff said. There’s an intention in the primary practice. It’s to experience the totality of your life. So we start with sensory experience. Include emotional and cognitive experience. Include opening the heart. And opening to the experience of awareness, which we’ll be discussing a bit tomorrow. That’s life. That’s actually what our life consists of. Most of the time, you only experience a very small piece of that. And there are a lot of reasons why. We’ll go into some of those a little bit later. But if we only experience a small piece, then our actions will only be appropriate within that very limited context. However, everything else doesn’t stop. Everything else continues to go on. So by learning and training to experience the totality of your life in each and every moment, then the totality of life informs every action. This can make a difference.

We can explore this right now. So everybody stand up. And more of our weird exercises. This is this one. Okay. Balance on one foot, left or right. Doesn’t matter. Don’t have to raise it way off the ground. Just one foot. Okay. So everybody’s able to do that except me. No it’s because I was doing it for a bit longer. Okay. No. So just rest for a moment. Now, how did you know how to do that? I just said do this. Everybody did it. How did you know how to do that?

Okay. I want you to try it a different way. I want you to try balancing, focusing all your attention on the foot you’re balancing on. All your attention. Just on that one foot. Is that easier or more difficult?

Students: More difficult. More difficult.

Ken: Okay. That’s what I mean. Okay. Now start from there. Start focusing your attention on the one foot on which your balancing and then explore how to make it easier. What happens to your attention? What happens to other parts of your body? Okay. Now you noticed that most people raised their arms, some raised it up like this, like Karate Kid, and others just raised it a bit. How did you know how to do that? You feel something. Okay. There’s just a natural knowing. This is basically where the primary practice comes in. That if you open to the totality of your experience, the totality of your being begins to engage and things happen completely naturally. So that you end up in balance. You actually aren’t thinking about it.

We’ll try it once more. I want you to balance, but I want you to think about correcting the balance in every moment, deciding exactly what you’re going to do and then do it. It’s moved away from doing it. So yeah, you started off doing it. That’s when you reached out to grab Dave. Okay. How does that work?

Dave: Not at all.

Ken: Why is that?

Dave: Movement is faster than thinking.

Ken: Yes. And this is the way life is, life is much faster. The thinking process is extremely slow. So how many of you tried to think your way through meditation? How does it work? Very, very badly. Okay. Have a seat. Anything you want to point out there? How did that happen?

Jeff: You can look at this idea of knowing, natural knowing, at least a couple of ways. One will be a mystical way of just knowing. Another would be as Ken was pointing to by getting to know by going through our lives. And as you just discovered, if you open to, just be present with your intention to balance on one foot, you can access that knowing. Either one. But if you try to control what you do, that’s going to be based on both current conscious intentions and all those intentions that run underneath that you’re frequently not aware of. Those are also part of our knowing. Oh, sorry. Sorry. So that was secret knowing.

Ken: So, say the same thing again.

Jeff: Maybe I can say it better.

Ken: One never knows.

Jeff: Maybe it’s best left unsaid. Knowing comes in a lot of ways. Okay. So there is that developmental knowing that we gathered by learning, the knowing of our nervous system, we could say. And there is that knowing that seems to come from, we don’t know where. You can access both by being right in your experience. And then that lets you know what to do. I’m frequently in the situation of trying to help people learn how to walk in a way that doesn’t cause their brand new hip to go the way of their previous hip. And what people want to know is how I should move so that I can control it and move the right way. Well you can’t walk and control how you move. You just can’t. It’s way too complex. There has to be another developmental learning process to retrain your nervous system, to create new neural networks, to replace the networks that didn’t really work very well. So knowing is gathered by action and by paying attention to the actions you take, and what’s the response. What happens when I do this? How should I change it? Keep bringing attention to what you do and the feedback you get from what happens. Okay. Back to you.

The principle of balance in the primary practice

Ken: To learn something, to learn to move or be differently—the ancient Chinese saying, do it 10,000 times. So this is why I’m never terribly concerned when people say, “I can’t do this.” They’ve usually done it maybe 10, 15, 20, max 100 times. Of course not. It’s not there yet. So what I want to do now is take that simple principle of balance and take a look at meditation practice and the primary practice we’ve been talking about. So I’m just going to say three words. And I want you to see what happens in your body when you hear these three words, Oh, I didn’t even have to say three words. What happened there? So there is some movement immediately. Get curious about that. What happened? Microphone, please.

Student: There are some postures where it’s easier to listen.

Ken: But did you decide to move into that posture?

Student: I was already in that posture. I’d done what other people were doing.

Ken: Yeah. So those of you who started to move, did you decide to move? Really? Didn’t feel that way here. Thought as soon as I opened my mouth, then things started to happen.

Student: I actually think I decided after I moved.

Ken: Yes. The experience of decision comes about 500 milliseconds after you start. That’s well established. Minimum 250 milliseconds. So something’s already started to move in the body and the whole system. One of the things you need to understand about the self. Everybody’s trying to get rid of the self. You know, we have this little thing in Buddhism called non-self. Can you get rid of something that doesn’t exist? Can you wake up a person who is pretending to sleep? This is very important. What the self, or one way of looking at the self, it is a fiction that arises as a way to give the appearance of continuity and rationality to what is actually a long series of random events.

Jeff: I would differ with random.

Ken: What would you say? You’re quite right? Random is not quite the right word.

Jeff: They’re a response to the environment.

Ken: Yeah.

Jeff: Okay. Predictable.

Ken: Not always. Well anyway, the point is there isn’t something which is deciding to do this now. This now, that now, something comes up, there’s a response. There something comes up, there’s a response. There’s something, there’s a response there. And after the fact we say, well, I did it because of this. And I did it because of this. I did it because of this and it becomes a nice coherent narrative. It’s not actually how things work. That’s a very simple test for this. How many of you are at the point in your lives you expected to be 20 years ago? Everybody’s gone “No”. Yeah. Okay. Guy, you have a question?

Guy: I have a question about the role of intention in relation to what you’re saying, but we don’t have to address it now.

Ken: Well, we are going to address it now in a certain way. So, back to my three words which I never got out of my mouth yet. Okay. Sit in attention. What happened?

Guy: An opening.

Ken: What happened in your body? Okay. Anybody notice, anything happened in the body? Jill? What happened?

Jill: Alignment.

Ken: Did you decide to do that?

Jill: No. It moved me.

Ken: So, there was just a movement. Okay. What does this tell us? Something in us, I’m going to leave that very undefined, knows what to do. Quite naturally. How good are you at trusting that? Jane, please say a bit more.

Jane: I laugh because not very.

Ken: Why is that?

Jane: I guess out of a desire to feel like there’s something conscious in control of my life.

Ken: Well, there’s those covert agendas that Jeff was referring to. Anybody else have an example of a covert agenda that operates here. Steve?

Steve: [Unclear]

Ken: Kim?

Kim: For me, it decays very rapidly because I’m looking for something else to happen. And so I looked for that.

Ken: Okay. How many are looking for something else to happen? So as one of my students used to say, waiting for the blue light. Okay. So sit in attention. Now notice when I said those three words, there was all this movement. So what’s the first thing you become aware of when I say sit in attention? Your body. Exactly. And there’s an immediate knowing that, as Alex said a few moments ago, if I’m going to sit in attention, then the body naturally wants to sit a certain way. It just moves like that. So sit here right now, and approach sitting in attention exactly the same way that you approached balancing on one foot. When you were balancing on one foot, how still were you? What was happening? Were you absolutely still, or where was it going? There’s a lot of movement, right? Feedback and adjustment. So sit in attention in exactly the same way. When you do it this way, you may notice that there’s actually quite a bit of movement in the body. There’s all the movement associated with the breathing. And then there are all of the adjustments connected with that, and all the adjustments connected with that. And somehow it just takes place.

When I breathe in my back straightened slightly. And when I breathe out, there’s a slight forward movement. My chin, and thus the whole head, moves in concert with that. As does the abdomen. So sitting in attention is like balancing all of these adjustments. They take place quite naturally. To show you how this works a little further, sit in attention and bring up an emotion. Anger, love, pride, whatever you want. Just bring up the emotion. Suppose it’s pride. The body may begin to move into a different posture. You’re in attention. How can you experience that completely? I just let all the adjustments happen. And the question simply is, how can I be in this emotion and in attention at the same time? That may be a different way of approaching things. Maybe that sets up some other tensions that you’re not used to, maybe something opens up that you’re not used to feeling and notice and just be in the experience of all the adjustments that ricochet throughout the whole system, physically, emotionally, maybe stories start up. But keep approaching it from the point of view of just balancing in that experience.

Remember—if you think about trying to balance, things got very difficult very quickly. So you have to let the balance just happen. Maybe that’s a little frightening. I’m not in control. Well, that was an illusion anyway. So explore, open to that experience of letting your whole system find its own balance. And you’re just along for the ride. Okay. Let’s hear from some of you about your experience. Michelle?

Michelle: As you know, all my analogies relate either to skiing or to dogs.

Ken: Let’s stick to the skiing ones. I don’t have that much experience with dogs.

Michelle: This feels like a perfect metaphor for learning to ski bumps in the sense that when you learn to ski bumps, you’re making constant small adjustments and it’s as those small adjustments get more automatic that you learn to ski better. And even the fear metaphor works because if you try to hold your body back towards the hill, your skis go out from under you and it’s over. You have to keep your weight, your head, and your shoulders forward. So it really felt internally like the same experience.

Ken: So that works for you.

Michelle: If you had told me that 10 years ago, I could have gone home.

Ken: Yeah. So you know, it’s really hard to find good teachers. It’s really hard. Dave?

Effort and ease

Dave: For the last year or so, I’ve been experiencing some things about posture where it seems like what happens is I become aware that I’m doing something, it’s basically habitual, but it feels like as my attention gets to it, that I’m doing it consciously. And I realized that it’s uncomfortable and I abandon it. And then my posture changes, which I experienced as being different from trying to sit properly, you know, straighten myself, more like abandoning efforts to sit wrong. And then when something would happen, that would be more comfortable for me.

Ken: When we were doing this how much effort we’re you expending? People are going, okay. How much effort do you usually expend when you meditate? Hmm. Other people’s experience? Sophie?

Sophie: When I’m with the awareness it feels like kind of a neutral open space, but when I brought up an emotion, like frustration, it was like darkness. And so in trying to balance it, I did feel like there was this trying to open around the frustration, but I kept feeling the darkness pushing, you know? And so I wasn’t sure how to work with that.

Ken: Well, first thing I suggest is, forget about working with them. You’re trying to do something. Right? So bring up the emotion, the frustration. What does your body want to do?

Sophie: I feel like I either want to withdraw or push back.

Ken: Okay. So now just experience both of those, wanting to withdraw, wanting to push back. Both of them, at the same time.

Sophie: I just feel like I’m shaking inside.

Ken: Okay. And this is exactly what happen. Now your attention is going more deeply into the system. If it feels frightening or difficult there, then just rest right there. And when you’re able to stay there in attention, then maybe start opening to the shaking and see what happens.

Sophie: Now I think I’m still getting caught up in the thinking though, I keep thinking that attention is like neutral, you know, that, it’s like clearer somehow. And you’re saying that the shakiness or darkness is attention.

Ken: No. What allowed you to experience the shakiness or the darkness is attention.

Sophie: Is it separate from it though?

Ken: That’s a deep question. I’m not going to go into that one. It’s not necessary to answer that. All you do is listen to your system and to help you listen to the system, you might ask the question: how can I experience this and be at ease at the same time? Okay. Be at ease at the same time. How can I experience this and be at ease at the same time. This goes right back to the balancing that I was talking about. But you had a question.

Difficulties with bringing an emotion into attention

Student: Yes. I’m sitting at attention. You said, bring in an emotion. I can’t bring in an emotion unless I start to think about an experience that that emotion had. I cannot bring that emotion into my thinking, unless I have this situation that I remember the emotion was triggered by. So as soon as I do that, I start thinking. And then as soon as I start thinking I’m out of attention.

Ken: Perhaps. Have you ever been to New York City? Okay. So you’re in this room here, right? Think of a place you visited in New York City and be in this room at the same time. Can you do that?

Student: If I’m thinking about the place I am in New York City, I’m there in New York city.

Ken: Are you thinking about it right now?

Student: No. I’m thinking something else now.

Ken: So, think about this place in New York City. Tell me about it.

Student: It’s a Starbucks coffee shop and there …

Ken: This is extraordinary. How can you be talking to me and thinking about this at the same time?

Student: Well, I’m trying, you said, tell me about it. So, I’m trying to …

Ken: How is this possible that you can talk to me and be thinking about this at the same time?

Student: I’m explaining it to you, but I’m thinking about it and explaining it to you.

Ken: But you said you couldn’t experience any emotion and sit in attention at the same time.

Student: When I’m experiencing the emotion I have to think..

Ken: So. Do you have an emotion connected with this place? Starbucks?

Student: Yes.

Ken: Okay. Tell me about that emotion.

Student: Agitation, frustration.

Ken: Must’ve been quite traumatic for you. If you feel some of that frustration and agitation for talking?

Student: Yes.

Ken: How is that possible?

Student: Well …

Ken: So now instead of talking to me, just sit in attention and feel the emotion You did it. Okay. But you have this idea “I can’t,” but you actually just did it. Okay, good. Carolyn.

When stories capture attention

Carolyn: This is a question about being in attention when something in particular like a story is running and it was the question I wanted to pose last night in the interview but I thought it could more appropriate to bring up in the group. Has to do with when you have an intention in being present and a situation brings up old baggage and like this experience, like you don’t want to go where the baggage is or the story is. And I guess one of my challenges is trying to stay present. And sometimes those stories are so overwhelming and so dominant that I think my head would explode. I’m looking to really, I mean, one of my purposes being here is really going forward from this point in my life and really working towards not letting the story drive my intention or my presence. And it’s been quite a wrestling match.

Ken: How are you at chin-ups? So if you’re going to learn to do chin-ups, what would you do? There isn’t a magic bullet here, but by training, practicing in exactly the way we’re talking about here, we increase capacity and we gradually become able to experience some of the more powerful stories in us without getting lost in them. And you’re quite right. What happens time and time again. And it happens extraordinarily quickly sometimes, is that something in the environment resonates with the story inside and “kaboom.” Now that that story is running everything and we’re no longer present.

Carolyn: Would you recommend prior to say taking a meeting where I think this story is going to come up, use that in my meditation, say prior to having that experience and working with that energy coming up with it, but being present?

Ken: I think that can be very helpful. Yeah. Sonia, you had a question?

Sonia: Going back to the definition or one of the definitions of power, power is presence in action. And is power also finding balance within that situation?

Ken: Balance is the optimum condition for presence. If you’re out of balance, it’s going to be difficult to wield power appropriately.

Sonia: And from that presence we know how to.

Ken: Yeah. Okay, sure. Think it’s back to you now.

Jeff: Okay.

Student: In keeping in line with what you were saying, you once pointed out to me that, and this is very obvious I suppose, but that nothing undermines a story that’s running, like going to your body in the moment. So, it has been very useful to me, when I feel myself in that, to just check in with the body.

Ken: Yeah. And you’re quite right. When a story is running we realize we are lost in the story and if we realize that something’s coming up like that, just saying, okay, what am I experiencing physically? Or if you want to put it very simply, you know, feet on the floor and just experience your feet on the floor, that’ll pull you out of your head quite effectively. Yeah. I think you’ll probably find feet on the floor because they have to … it pulls the energy down a bit. Okay.

More on opening to experience

Jeff: Let’s look a little bit more at opening. You’ve been using that term. Let’s look a little more. The other day, yesterday, we tried the example of a fist. Do this with me, please, and then opening your fist. Okay. So that’s a nice example, but it also suggests that opening is about this. Okay. So now make the fist and open to the experience of the fist. And then slowly release the fist and open to the experience of releasing the fist. Okay. So opening is about everything you’re doing. There’s not a particular way. There’s not a particular thing to do in order to open. You open to your experience, that can be the experience you’re having in your body. It can be, as we’ve been doing, visual, auditory, there’s your intentions, opening to your intention in that particular moment, some of you are becoming or have been for years, very aware that there’s all sorts of intentions going on in every moment. The more you can be aware of that, the more informed your actions will be. So maybe another word you might try out, another phrase for opening, would be allowing the experience. So allow the experience of the fist, allow the experience of your hand unfurling. So you can be clenched. You can be all clenched and closed up in order to open. You don’t have to move to here. You can open right here to your experience. So try whatever posture you might sometimes find yourself in, where you’re not liking what’s going on. And you’ve closed up a little bit. Experience that experience. Open to that experience.

Ken: Now when you do this, you’ll probably notice much more how uncomfortable that posture is.

Jeff: And it leads you to, then you might then decide, well, it’s way better to not be there. This comes back to what Ken was guiding us through a moment ago with sitting here in attention. If we have a concept of what sitting in attention is, which I think for a lot of us might be Rinzai Zen, just, you know …

Ken: No, it’s not just Rinzai. Art and I were up at Green Gulch, which was Soto Zen. And everybody just sits so still. We felt like complete freaks there.

Jeff: And that’s a method and it’s a terrific method. It doesn’t necessarily equal attention. Okay. So there’s a piece of possibilities, as you might have noted, from time to time can be completely out of our awareness. So we were sitting in attention and then Ken asks us to bring up an emotion. And some of you noticed that something happened in your manner of sitting, but unless you’ve brought back possibilities, they might not be able to happen. For instance, neurologically, when we experience an intense emotion, the second cervical vertebra rotates, and then that ricochets down your spine. Okay? So you bring up an emotion. Chances are, there’s some sort of rotation and side bending gonna go on, but if you have taken rotation or side bending out of your repertoire, it’s not going to happen. And you’re going to sit there and that emotion is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger because you haven’t allowed yourself to be with it by allowing that rotation. Okay. So opening to what is, there’s also a certain amount of, what do you need to learn in order to open to what is. There’s know-how involved. So just for a moment, because I’d like you to try this out during the next sitting session, I’d like to just introduce some basic sort of primary movements that are possible, okay, using your spine.

And these are really simplified. They have, of course always happened in combinations, but just sit if you can, a little bit self-supported so those of you against the wall, just scooch out a tiny bit. Another way to look at this, the basic idea of being more or less self-supporting as you meditate, is to allow your body to respond to what’s going on internally. So just notice how you open to your experience of how you’re sitting right now and notice if it’s right or not, if that’s operating. And just try very gently, turn your head and let your shoulders turn one to one direction or the other as if you were going to look in one direction, just check that. And you’re only going as far as is easy, and then come back and try going the other way. And you might notice that at least for this moment, it’s a lot easier to twist to one side than the other. Chances are that that’s a twist that is something that happens a lot. So if you notice that you can go one way or the other. Some of you are just turning your heads. That’s certainly an option, but I’d like you to try letting your shoulders go. So your spine becomes involved. So this twisting motion is one thing that can happen when you open to your actual experience.

When you’re sitting in meditation, you’re not necessarily going to go “wang”. It might be more like just this subtle little twist. So an emotion comes up. You notice, oh, I’m twisting. Just let that be. Chances are then it comes back. Another basic movement is side-bending. Just try bending to one side. And then the other. Chances are you tend to bend more in one part of your spine than the rest, that’s fine. Just notice bending to the side is an option. You can even bend to the side and let your head stay in the center. Okay. So bending can happen without tilting your head. Bending can happen as you’re twisting. So you’re just re-introducing these possibilities to what is. Two more basic movements. One is rounding to the back. The other would be arching to the front. So some of you might recognize that arching to the front as part of what you’ve believed was the correct posture.

Actually, a really healthy spine has both. It goes to the front in your lower back. It comes back in your middle back it goes forward in your neck, it comes back in the back of your head. So we’ve heard “straightening the spine”. That’s an aberration. Lengthening the spine allows the curves. So when you open to “what is” in practice today, and during any of those pieces of, as Sonia mentioned, when you’re opening to visual, you might get all the rest of the sensory experiences might come in, but also emotions might come in. You don’t know why. Just let part of “what is” be responding to what comes up. Okay. So part of opening is, it’s pretty hard to separate opening from serving what’s true. They keep feeding back on each other. Part of opening is to go with what’s going on, responding. Any questions that come up from that little bit? David?

David: It brings to mind what I was experiencing about posture. For example, I do the thing that you talked about yesterday, the chest back, head forward, that’s pretty common. And one of the parts of meditation instruction that I’ve received is slight tucking of the chin and what I experienced over the last few months, more in meditation was, that in the head-forward posture awareness would come to it and it would feel like I was consciously doing it and that I was overdoing it. And then I would just abandon that. So that rather than consciously tucking my chin, I was abandoning consciously sticking my head forward. When at the time, when it became forward, I suppose you would also talk about exploring what it feels like to be consciously extended as well as just abandoning and letting whatever comes up next, come up because there might be feelings associated with this.

Jeff: Yes, those are two very good points. The first one I want to really emphasize is don’t try to force yourself to return to correctness. Notice what’s going on. Just notice it. You might not need to go to the step of abandoning it. That might be something to try. But then the second piece that David pointed to is, you know, that head advancing forward is probably really tied in with whatever’s coming up internally. Okay. So you bring attention to it. You just notice it. If it becomes uncomfortable, correct it in some way so that you don’t hurt yourself, but you’re not trying to keep consciously making yourself come back to the right place that tucking the chin, from my view, is potentially dangerous. It’s confusing intention with method, the intention being a straight spine. A good method is not to just make yourself be there from my view. It’s to notice what you’re doing, bring awareness to it, allow yourself to change.

Student: I’ve been finding that my posture has been just changing from a kind of slump to more forward. And in particular, when emotions have been happening, there’s been sparks happening in my spine that have been bringing me forward. I don’t know quite, I mean, this is hard to describe. And what you’re saying about this need for rotation may help me because I think I’ve been trying to stay still. And the sparks may be telling me that maybe I need more movement. I don’t know if you have anything to help me with there.

Jeff: Yes, definitely. With allowing yourself to move as your body responds will help with the experience of stillness. Staying still won’t. Okay. That’s great. Good awareness.

Ken: We should close here. Okay. We’re going to close here. It’s 20 past.

The White Bird: part 4

Jeff: A​ story.

Ken: Oh, yes. Story please. We need to, I think I just went off.

Jeff: So do you want to skip it and just do two episodes? Okay. Story.

We left the prince after he had been in one of those situations that you might’ve run into where you know what to do. And then some story comes up and you follow the story. You pick the golden apple and then all hell breaks loose. Well, the prince managed to get out of that alive. And now he’s on his horse. Off on a new quest, a new piece of the quest. Now he has to find the bright sword that shines in the darkness and cuts through whatever it’s turned against. So he galloped and galloped. And this time it was far, far further than he’d gone before. Eventually the horse slowed. Down below he saw a huge black castle, literally black, flat black. It was just sort of like a hole. And he looked down and he noticed two huge dragons in front of the gates. Smoke coming out of their nostrils. Looked like armor all over their skin, but the dragons were asleep. He looked inside the walls, inside the gates, and he saw many soldiers with all sorts of weapons, clubs, maces and swords, bows, and arrows, torches they could light and throw. And they were asleep, which was very peculiar. He looked down and everything was asleep in this huge ominous castle. So he took out his book of wisdom and opened the page. And the book said to him: fear not the dragons, nor the soldiers, for they will not awaken, but only take the leather scabbard. That is the one for you. He thought, yes. Okay. I’ll trust this. Closed the book, got off his horse, tucked the straw behind his ear and walked down the hill and walked past these huge sleeping dragons. Ferocious beasts. He walked through the gates into this black castle. It was all black. The ground was black. The walls were black, soldiers all around. Rough-looking people asleep. They’re all snoring. This gets stranger and stranger for him, he’s walking in, everybody’s asleep. He walks in the door and he steps into this big room. Black.

He sees an old man sitting behind a table and this old shriveled man in rich clothing, but he’s just sitting there utterly still, only his eyes are moving. He’s got red eyes and they follow the prince wherever he moves. In front of them on the table is this beautiful sword. The prince steps in and thinks this is maybe a little too easy. There’s the sword and everybody’s asleep and just an old man. But the book said it was okay. So he steps up and he takes the sword. Everything is still still, but it needs a scabbard. And he looks up on the wall; there’s a beautiful gold scabbard, beautiful gold. And a beautiful silver scabbard, and this crappy old leather scabbard that looked like they just hauled it out of the trash to fool him.

He thought I’ve learned a thing or two. That gold scabbard is not for me, but that leather scabbard. I mean, that’s not fit for this sword. That’s not fit to take back to the king. He reaches up and takes the silver scabbard. Shrieking, the old man is yelling help, help, help, help everybody jumps up. The dragon’s heads are coming in the doors, snorting and breathing fire. The soldiers are running in. Arrows are ricocheting all around. He did it again. And again. He’s begging and praying. And the old man says, okay, we’ll make a deal. If you bring us the white bird from the black mountain, we’ll not only spare your life, we will give you the bright sword. Well, here’s the new situation. He agrees. He’s able to walk back out, looming soldiers ready to strike, dragons, huge teeth, back up the hill. Now he’s got to go someplace else. Pulls out the barley straw, mounts his horse. Off he goes. All right.

Ken: Okay. So, we’re a little bit late.