the work of not-working

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13


Ajahn Sucitto

Let’s get on with the practice. Since how you attend as well as what you attend to affect the heart – and that’s where our self-impression (and its kamma) arises – it’s important to begin right there. Recollections of the Triple Gem, and of one’s ethical standards and good kamma, steadily applied, dispel worry and distraction and encourage the heart, so that you approach your experience in a peaceful but decisive way.

For this, you have to exercise authority over thinking. Because the mind is geared to this verbal activity, it easily picks up and follows trains of thought that take you away from your bodily presence, and from a cool place where they could be witnessed. So, one of the skills of meditation is to lightly apply thoughtful attention – without thinking of anything. It’s as if you’re about to think, and then, feeling the energy of your thinking, you steady it so that you can use it to lightly label an experience. Walking, you simply notice ‘walking’; breathing, you notice ‘this is breathing in … this is breathing out.’ Then, as you place your attention on these simple themes, you’re receptive, as in: ‘How is this?’

Any kind of thinking operates through this two-fold process. Firstly, the rational mind scans for a sensory impression or a heart-impression and names it: ‘cow’, ‘bell’. This is ‘bringing to mind’ or ‘placing thoughtfulness’, vitakka. In tandem with that, there is a momentary review to check out if the concept really fits, or to evaluate what attention has been placed on, as in: ‘the cow is speckled, and seems agitated.’ This evaluation is the more receptive aspect of thinking, vicāra. Evaluation connects to the citta by listening deeply. In meditation, you use it to listen out for the felt sense of bodily experience, such as ‘this sensation feels sharp’ or ‘this breath feels long and fades gently.’ These felt senses aren’t simply feeling (= pleasant or painful), nor are they full-blown meanings – such as ‘I’m being stabbed’ or ‘my body is dissolving.’ Many felt senses are quite neutral and don’t evoke much, but they provide an ongoing reference to direct experience – and that is grounding. As with the body: ‘Right now my body is just a sense of warmth, of solidity and rhythmic energies.’ That’s a lot less stressful than ‘I look a mess. I’m too fat.’ So, in meditation, you use the simple felt senses of groundedness, spaciousness and natural rhythm to elicit the felt meaning ‘I am really here, there is no pressure around me, I feel safe.’  Just to be able to let a breath go all the way out, and have the time to wait and let the inhalation come in at its own rate and fill you, can give you an assurance that isn’t always there in social contact. When your heart gets that, you can think, speak and act from that safe and fully present place.

So, as you bring your heart and thought into line, turn them to whatever is the most stable pattern of physical sensations that occur as your body is sitting still: the pressure of your body against what it’s sitting on, the sense of the upright posture, etc. Learn to steady the body in the sitting position, and to set the body upright and relax what muscles aren’t needed (such as in the face or hands). That means applying thought and heart to find out how best to sit in order to maintain alertness without stress. It can take some time to find an even balance because of habitual bad posture or residual tension in the body.

Also practise finding that balance when you are standing and walking. Keep referring to two bases: the spine, and the space around it. So, try to sit, stand or walk in a way that brings the whole spine into alignment, from the top of the head to the tail, as if you were hanging upside down. Aim for a balance whereby the skeletal structure is carrying the majority of the weight, rather than the muscles: that lessens stress. Secondly, let your “body sense the openness around it. This helps to get the front of the body to relax.

Stay alert to nervous energy. A high-pressure, fast-paced lifestyle can turn the entire nervous system into a mass of jangling wires. These energy patterns can shift from relaxed to tense, or receptive to aroused with one sight, sound or thought.  And it takes a lot longer to calm down than it does to get stirred up. This sensitive, impulsive and receptive experience of body is the area of kāya-saṇkhāra. Referring to the body as a system of energies helps you to be aware of how the body is affected, how to guard this sensitivity against being triggered, and how to then turn its energies to good use. Because, if it is steadied, embodied energy can be strengthening and bright.

So, if you get agitated or feel uncomfortable, or get lost in thought, keep coming back to these two reference points. The training is to keep your thinking minimal. This channels its energy and thereby brings around a more balanced state. This is necessary because although the verbal program is powered by an impulse to define and plan, it acquires distortions when out of anxiety we get lost in planning. So, thinking can carry an emotional bias, and can hastily prejudge an experience – ‘seeing’ the cow as threatening because we are nervous around cows.
[Continued next week: 26 September 2024]

13 thoughts on “the work of not-working”

    • I’m glad you dropped in, like this. I’ve been meaning to reply to an earlier message from you, it’s just so difficult to write; painstakingly slow: key in a word, make correction and key in the next word, spelling error again the MSW app automatically highlights. Attend to that now? Or leave it till later… and in an instant I forget what it is I’m intending to say. Can’t have written notes, can’t write with a pen, it comes out in an illegible jumble. So, I have to keep it in my head, remember the gist of it. There’ll come a time when I don’t have the energy and that’ll be the end of it.
      Here is an old post you may remember, almost exactly 10 years ago. It’s about walking meditation which is relevant to the discussion here but it also carries a fluency which is so hard to arrive at these days.
      https://dhammafootsteps.com/2014/09/13/grounded/

      Reply

      • OH, please, dear Tiramit, don’t worry about any reply to me. Please… I am just happy you are posting and I will read your link. I thank you profusely and absolutely need NO apologies. I will write. Thank you ever so much for all you do. Much friendly affection, Ellen

      • I read the link. Tom and I count laps in the hall of our apartment. Tom looks at my paintings and photos. He is more meditative. Nice to know you do the same and make it a meditation. Maybe I should do my chanting sotto voce. Thank you again!!🦶🏻🙏🏽

  2. Something I came across in one of Ajahn Chah’s books (which I found through the links to Amaravati site, from your blog- Thanks to you!), is about meditation in different postures. He said (I am paraphrasing), that while sitting meditation is easier, due to people being tuned in to it as a practice, when we are done with a sitting meditation session, we should not see it as ‘we are done’ but we should see it as only a ‘changing of posture’ while continuing the meditation, and resume that meditative state that we touched upon during sitting, throughout the day.
    Easier for monks who may be living a life-style designed to maintain meditativeness, and very challenging for ordinary folk! Nevertheless, I found it very helpful to think / remind myself of this, at random moments during the day, and I find that what I am doing on surface continues with or without an undercurrent of the meditative state (although very closely affected by it).

    Reply

    • The first meditation retreat I joined was in Wat Pah Nanachat in 1985. And because it was an international group mostly, sitting and walking meditation would alternate; every 45 minutes the bell rings: “ding!” and we’d change. However, I didn’t manage to see the ‘undercurrent of the meditative state,’ in ordinary day-to-day activities, you mention – not until very much later. Then in 2015, my headache condition arrived and things were in disarray for a couple of years. Looking back on it, now that it has stabilized, I see all that remains is this undercurrent of the meditative state, a continuity that links body postures, physical positions and mindfulness.
      I particularly like the way Ajahn Sucitto uses language to highlight a moment of understanding and my favourite in this section is this: “one of the skills of meditation is to lightly apply thoughtful attention – without thinking of anything. It’s as if you’re about to think, and then, feeling the energy of your thinking, you steady it so that you can use it to lightly label an experience…” and he goes on to discuss vitakka and vicāra. I find that it’s just this description of the fleeting delay in thinking that’s enough to trigger the meditative state in my mind.

      Reply

      • Thank you, Yes I see what you mean!
        Yes, attention without thinking is the key, Ajahn Sucitto has given a powerful technique. As a practice, if we can remain alert consciously, intentionally, in that fleeting moment before thinking takes shape, we develop a knack of frequently noticing it- the click to switch attention flowing back inward 🙂 Because the whole problem is we forget to catch that fleeting moment before the thought arises (or the gap between two thoughts) and we are carried away with thoughts. If we manage to remain attentive and alert to notice that, it is the click to shift attention from outgoing thinking to awareness of ‘being’ (including mindfulness of whatever is happening). Very helpful, Thank you!

      • Thanks for this. I’d like to add that when you catch the fleeting moment, there’s a timeless pause… and in that instant you see what’s going on without thinking it first.

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