Holding on doesn’t provide you with the deep security of being held. That deeper security comes from trusting that something can carry you and you don’t have to do it. That’s what breathing does. Mindfulness of breathing sustains the right mode of attention – steady, not seeking anything, listening intently with no particular result. Relax into that and get the sense of freedom and love.
The signs and signals in the sense world very often take us out of our core presence. So we cultivate carefully honed, carefully placed signs that calm and steady us, returning us to our core presence. From this place of stability and comfort we’re able to disengage from the unskillful and meet the difficult so it can be cleared.
Explore how the body moves in space when there are no boundaries, no time pressures, no destination. Feel the swing of the pelvis and shoulders, moving through your environment with fluidity. Focused on your intimate environment, you’re not grabbed by the sense world. You can deal with the external environment more wholesomely and comfortably.
Practice is actually quite simple. It involves translating the complexities of your personal circumstances into simple emotional patterns. Breathing picks up the dominant emotional signal and transfers it through the system. We want to manage that signaling system, to stop afflicting ourselves with harmful signals and heal ourselves with affirmative signals, ones that make the body feel whole and settled. At 29:45 a simple exercise to generate healing signals.
00:12 Being at ease with suffering; 08:55 Time and space; 16:09 How to sit with constant pain; 20:23 Energy is blocked in the throat; 24:42 How to fully realize and penetrate suffering; 29:50 Hyper-tension; 36:44 Not taking things personally; 42:08 How to truly forgive; 44:31 Clearing ill-will; 46:10 Liberation through the deathless.
Practice stepping back from the complexities and coming into the embodied sense of being supported; widen the focus to include ground and space. The problematic stuff is still problematic, but there’s a possibility to step back and inquire, "How’s that?" The heart that is balanced and free from pressure naturally experiences compassion, goodwill, equanimity.
To get a handle on what we feel, we need to get past layers of "self" and into the process that establishes it. When the "self" stuff falls away the original emotional trigger can be understood and released properly. An embodied spacious presence can do that. Let the body feel an emotion, breathe it – there can be softening and a releasing, and a transformation of your emotional profile.
Emotion is a part of our intelligence. But we can become overwhelmed by emotions, triggering reactive tendencies that create our emotional profile – and that becomes ‘me’/’myself’. It’s possible to moderate this reflexive system and manage the emotions. Begin with establishing a stable base in the body and coming into presence.
