Depth and Liberation Meditation Training with Adam Coutts

10/25/2024

Short blog post:
Do I Need To Stop Thinking When I Meditate?

One thing that I have often heard people say on the subject of meditation is something like, “I can’t meditate [or some variation like, ‘I find meditation painful’, ‘meditation is not for me’] because I’m not able to stop my thoughts.”

Obviously, I’m a meditation enthusiast, and I think that meditation is a great activity for all people to do. So, I invite you to take on the practice of meditation equally when your mind is busy and chattering as when it is calm and clear.

My main meditation teacher often says that there are two ways to make use of mindfulness meditation when it comes to any human experience – to intentionally turn away from it and ignore it, or to intentionally turn towards it and experience into the depth of it. Different meditation techniques work with thoughts using both of these strategies.

Some meditation techniques involve intentionally anchoring and settling awareness on some phenomena other than thoughts, for example on the breath, body sensations, or external sound. With techniques like this, the instruction is to ignore thoughts, to let them drop into the background, and to choose instead to spaciously and patiently fill attention with the chosen object of meditation. When people have the impression that to meditate they should “stop their thoughts”, they are talking about techniques like this.

It is understood, however, when doing techniques like this, that most modern people will still have days where their mind is filled with swirls of thought, and almost all days will involve some degree of thought. With enough effort and persistent practice, people can sometimes get their chattering minds to calm down and be still for periods of time. However, accomplishments like that are like running marathons – eventually possible for most people, but taking sustained, robust, and dedicated effort to get there. Wherever we are on our meditation journey, however, one part of the meditation instruction set is to be patient and accepting with thoughts as they arise even as we, when able, do our best to chose to spaciously return awareness to a different object that we are trying to concentrate on.

And there are also other techniques that involve having thoughts be the actual object that one is choosing to pay attention to during the meditation. An example of that is letting the attention wander anywhere and everywhere – including thoughts – and just noticing where it goes. An even more relevant example would be to meditate by specifically paying attention to the rising and passing away of thoughts. When meditating in this way, the arising and passing of thoughts is definitely no obstacle to the meditation, because it is the substance of the meditation.

Either way, my recommendation to you is, please feel free to meditate whatever high or low level of activation of thoughts you encounter. The journey of meditation travels through many different landscapes of the human experience, including those with lots of thoughts happening, and the invitation is to relax and open to all of it.

Byron Katie, in her book “Loving What Is”, said:

Do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, ‘I think I will not think today’? It’s too late: You’re already thinking! Thoughts just appear. How can you control your thinking? It’s thinking you. Thought appears. You either think or you do not. Thought either appears or it does not. Can you control the wind too? What about the ocean? Let us stop the waves. Not very likely. I do not let go of my thoughts – I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me. Thoughts are like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. They appear like that, and through inquiry we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop? Raindrops are not personal, and neither are thoughts.

I invite you to take on the practice of meditation equally when your mind is busy and chattering as when it is calm and clear.

10/11/2024

What Meditation Technique Should I Do Today (A Parable of a Flooded Room) - Essay for my corporation's monthly meditation newsletter

Imagine that you own a home someplace where it is constantly raining – this part of the world has a monsoon season all year round. And, your home has a room that is a few feet lower than the rest of the house, say down half a flight of stairs. There’s unfortunately a huge hole in the roof over this particular room, so, with all the rain, it regularly becomes flooded.

What would the ultimate solution to this problem be? It would be to fix the hole on the roof in that room, of course. But the roof over this room unfortunately cannot be accessed from the outside, only from the inside. To make matters worse, the room is constantly so flooded that it’s basically impossible to walk through to even to get a ladder to the area under the hole. So, your first step towards fixing the problem would be to pump some water out of the room so that it’s minimally passable. When the water reaches a low enough level that you can walk a ladder in, a little work on repairing the roof becomes possible.

But, since it is constantly raining, the next time you come back to work on fixed the roof a few days later, the room is flooded again. So, you bail it out as best you can, and when the room is passable, you fix a little bit more of the roof. This process goes on over months and years.

This metaphor is helpful towards understanding what meditation technique to choose to do during a certain sitting period. Symbolically, the hole in the roof stands for frictions and tangles of mind and soul that stop us from being a happy person. The rain is the difficult challenges that life throws at us. And the water inside the room is our suffering and distress, specifically agitation and instability of mind.

Draining the water out of the room is doing mechanical meditation techniques that help the mind to be more concentrated, focused, settled, stable, and simplified. And repairing the roof is doing so-called insight practice, meditations that take that concentrated mind and use it to explore the deep texture of reality exactly as it is, inside of a wider field of awareness.

So, the basic idea for choosing a meditation technique is: let’s fix the roof when we are able – let’s meditate by noticing reality’s exact shape, whenever we are able, since that is what helps us to be a free, clear, and untangled person – it is the long-term, stable, and thorough solution to our suffering. But, as we travel along this path, we’re probably regularly going to have to bail water and prepare the groundwork by using concentration techniques to develop a mind that is settled and stable enough to do our insight practices.

We can understand something about how to pick our meditation technique on a given day by imagining a parable of a flooded room.

09/27/2024

The monthly column that I wrote this month:
Keeping Our Chin Up As Part of Our Meditation Posture

I have been doing a lot of running races this Summer. What has gotten me through many of them, and also my long training runs, is that I have silently chanted positive affirmations/mantras to myself as I have gone along.

My number one go-to mantra when I’m running is “One step at a time, keep my chin up”. I have noticed that dropping my chin when I am running seems to correlate with discouraged thoughts and a loss of vitality. Conversely, the simple act of lifting my chin, rolling my shoulders down and back, widening and lifting my chest, and elongating and straightening my spine and neck – just that physical adjustment by itself – usually has brought renewed confidence, enthusiasm, and vitality.

This reminds me of a classic piece of advice when sitting meditation retreats: “Never drop your chin”. If a person is sitting meditating ten hours a day for seven days, it’s pretty inevitable that our mind and emotions will at times go to some difficult, painful, and challenging places. I’ve seen many people in such situations take an upright seated fetal position or otherwise drop their head down. While understandable, one could also say, when people do that, they are admitting defeat and letting their challenges overwhelm them.

So, a good habit for meditation practice is to never let our difficult emotions and other challenges overwhelm us, and to plant our flag in the assertion that our spacious mindful awareness is always stronger than whatever may be assailing and trying to compress us.

Again, a way that we can embody, affirm, and cultivate that intention is by keeping our chin parallel to the ground. We don’t want our chin rising up in anxiety or arrogance, and we don’t want it dropping in defeat, sleepiness, or shame – instead, we can choose to maintain the solid groundedness of a level chin.

The author Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in his 1984 book Shambala, wrote:

“In the practice of meditation, an upright posture is important. Having an upright back is natural to the human body. When you slouch and drop your chin, that is unusual. You can’t breathe properly when you slouch, and slouching also is a sign of giving in to neurosis, and bending down in submission. But when you sit erect with your chin lifted, you are proclaiming to yourself and to the rest of the world that you are going to be a brave spiritual warrior, and a fully deeply human being. Uprightness comes naturally from sitting simply but proudly on the ground on your meditation cushion. Then, because your back is upright, you feel dignity and comfortable in your skin, so you lift your head up. You realize that you are capable of sitting like a king or queen on a throne. The regalness of that situation shows you the dignity that comes from being still and simple. By simply sitting still on the spot, your life can become workable and even wonderful.”

Keeping our chin up when we meditate is a way to embody, affirm, and cultivate the intention that we will never let our difficult emotions and other challenges overwhelm us, and to plant our flag in the assertion that our spacious mindful awareness is always stronger than whatever may be assailing a...

06/13/2024

Meditation on sound is a classic and popular technique that can be useful towards developing such meditative attributes as concentration and a deeper richness of perception. In recent years, when I have guided mindful meditations on sound in classes, I have played recordings of ocean waves, rain, flowing creeks, wind chimes, and/or gongs and bells.

It was only when I intentionally looked for the ideal audio to play for classes that I came to realize why such sounds are often called “meditative”. I have chosen them not just because they are generally soothing and refreshing to listen to, but also because they generally 1. spark less thought and fewer mental associations than other sounds that we could listen to, and 2. have a rich and full field of auditory texture and detail to them, which makes them relatively easily engaging for our minds to investigate and soak into meditatively.

Most of the meditation on sound that I have done in my life, however, I have done with naturalistic sound, no audio recordings, just listening to the sounds of the world around me. While doing this is often not as immediately engaging and textured as listening to say a recording of ocean waves, it has created a deeper and more nourishing intentionally mindful relationship with normal everyday life. It has helped me to discover a freshness and a newness to mundane sounds that I hadn’t discovered before. It can also be useful for us to cultivate mindfulness to have available during the many times in life when we may want to meditate, but an audio recording is not available.

The composer John Cage had a piece called “four minutes and 33 seconds”. And the score was just whole note rests after whole note rests, measure after measure – the orchestra doesn’t play anything. And one of the meanings of the piece seems to be that it invites the audience to listen to the ambiance sounds around them as the performance – people coughing or shuffling, the building creaking, the orchestra adjusting their instruments, whatever.

What I have found with naturalistic sound meditation is that it is often more interesting when I have done so outdoors, or when I have opened a window to let in the soundscape of the outside world. Also, steady sounds – a computer or refrigerator fan, the hum of freeway in distance – are often not as interesting and engaging as sounds that pop up at random times, like bird singing, wind arising and dying down, a train station, or traffic sounds that come and go.

Another option for an object of sound meditation is to play some of our favorite music, and to, for example, listening precisely to the rhythm of the bassline, the crispness of the snare drum, the rising and falling of the vocal melody, and the interplay of it all. Music can be a useful object in that it can make meditation more enjoyable and increase our motivation to do so. Also, it can pleasantly deepen our relationship with the music that we listen to, and have us find greater richness and vividness in it. The danger of using music as a meditative object, however, is that it often has such an emotional and narrative flow to it, and it sets off so many mental associations for us, that it can be difficult to actually meditate and not just slip back into our normal, default, and relatively unconscious way of perceiving.

Human conversation and language is usually even more difficult to detach from and to meditatively just hear as pure sound. This can be a useful practice, however, if we are able to do it, to help us create more spaciousness in our lives, and not be trapped in language’s meaning. Another possible chosen object for sound meditation would be to do “trigger practice” and see if we can just open our ears to the shrieking sound of industrial machinery or something else unpleasant as if it were the wind through the trees. And one could combine the two, and try to stay mindful while listening to a speech by a politician who gets a strong reaction out of us. All of these though are relatively advanced practices that a meditator probably would want to slowly build up to.

In general, as with so many other things in meditation, it is useful to experiment with different objects for sound meditation, and see what seems most productive to you.

Meditation on sound is a classic and popular technique that can be useful towards developing such meditative attributes as concentration and a deeper richness of perception. There are various objects that we can choose to focus our attention on when we do this practice - soothing audio recordings, n...

03/01/2024

Types of Body Sensations

Meditating on the body can help create a sense of groundedness, vitality, relaxation, and wisdom. There are various common ways to meditate on body sensations, such as:

1. letting one’s attention go to wherever in the body it is most drawn
2. doing a systematic scan and sweep of attention through the body
3. maintaining even coverage of awareness over the whole body
4. intentionally focus on the parts of the body that seem most relaxed or blank

Regardless of what technique we use, when we bring our attention to our body, we will notice that body sensations can emerge from various different sources.

As you read this list, I invite you to check in and do your best to have a deep and rich experience, feeling some of each type of body sensation:

—- The physical impact of points of contact with our environment – we feel our weight settling on to what we are sitting on, the touch of other points of contact with furniture or the ground, connection with clothes shoes jewelry watches and/or glasses, the feeling of hair against our neck and ears, different parts of our body pressed against each other, and experiencing the air around us. We might notice ourselves feeling hardness or softness, dryness and moisture, or different textures.

—- The sensations that go with moving our body – muscles exerting, and limbs moving through space

—- Internal, animal, physiological factors that go along with having a body – this especially includes the feeling of breathing that we can detect in our nose and mouth, upper chest and lungs, bellies, and even in the periphery of our bodies. Also, we can feel digestion (including a rumbling stomach, hunger, satiation/fullness), blood circulation, heartbeat and pulse, aches sores and pains, itches and tingles, a full bladder, nausea, pressure, cramps, and tiredness or freshness.

—- Temperature – cold, cool, warm, and hot – both inside our bodies, on everything that we touch, and in the air

—- Emotions or moods – these include anger, fear, sadness, shame/embarrassment, guilt, disgust, joy, pride, love, excitement, and tranquility. Sometimes emotions can lead to observable changes in breathing, heart beating, energy in the limbs, and other physical sensations.

—- Physical reactions to information taken in through other sense gates – we can have body sensations triggered by something we see, hear, taste, or smell (hearing a dog barking behind us, people speaking, seeing a beautiful sunset), in reactions to thoughts that we have, or in reaction to other body sensations

—- Motivation – desires, urges, impulse, impatience, driven-ness, compulsion, tension, agitation, curiosity

—- Areas where we feel not much of anything, that feel deeply relaxed and/or blank

—- Relatively subtle “life force” energies, like areas that feel tight, contracted, dense, or pressured, and other areas that feel more loose, spacious, fluid, expansive, and released. We also may notice parts of the body that feel still and solid, and other parts where there’s movement, vibration, pulsation, and tingles.

Bringing mindful awareness to all of these different types of body sensations can help us to feel more spaciousness, ease, and clarity, and freedom as we go about our day.

When we bring our attention to our body, we will notice that body sensations can emerge from various different sources.

01/14/2024

If you are looking to make meditation be more of a part of your life in 2024, please consider yourself invited to my free Tuesday night 7p-8p Pacific Time meditation group. If interested, please contact me directly for Zoom link.

01/14/2024

New short blog post - The Usefulness of “Trigger Practice”

People who have been meditating for a while may find value in “trigger practice”. This is when we voluntarily expose ourselves to a stimulus that usually activates a strong emotional, addictive, or painful response in us so that we can focus and meditate on that reaction.

One way to work with triggered content is to practice intentionally ignoring it, by, say, meditatively grounding our full attention inside of our breathing instead. More common, however, is to choose to fully experience the emotional activation – for example, to deeply and openly feel the discomfort in our body and to notice the rising and falling of wild thoughts, while breathing deeply and generally remaining relaxed and spacious.

Some examples of what we might choose to have in front of us for trigger practice:

● A computer screen displaying a project that we are worried about, a full email inbox, or a long to-do list
● A messy garage or a pile of undone laundry
● Something that’s addictive, possibly a physical object, or something on a computer or phone screen
● Something that triggers emotions of grief after a loss
● A recording of a speech by a politician that we have strong disagreements with
● Just having the TV on, or a movie that brings out a reaction in us

Trigger practice runs a danger for inexperienced meditators of playing with fire and possibly kicking off an addictive episode or getting sucked into negative emotions. It is more helpful for people who have already been meditating for a while, and have skills to stay grounded and resist the pull of unconscious cravings, and to be able to clear and flow with intense bodily energy. And trigger practice might be most attractive for those who have been meditating for so long that they don’t have islands of mindfulness in an otherwise unconscious life, but the stuck places are the relatively little islands that they want to intentionally seek out to free up.

In general, trigger practice can be useful for lessening addictions, helping us to move through grief more rapidly, and helping any and all emotions to flow through us without getting stuck. It is an example of a meditative “accelerator”, similar to running up a hill instead of on the flat or lifting a heavier weight – the practice is more difficult, but we are making progress more rapidly.

Some might recognize that trigger practice is like “exposure therapy” in psychotherapy. This is where a therapist will intentionally have a client experience what they fear, while providing companionship and coaching on staying open to the experience.

In daily life, we sometimes are ambushed by situations that evoke strong emotional reactions, and that may lead to us taking actions and saying words that we later regret. Trigger practice is a way of training for such moments, like how a basketball team might scrimmage outside of game days. The hope is that if we can burn off some of our reactivity when the stakes are lower, then when an intense situation arises again in daily life, our body and mind will be able to stay more open, aware, relaxed, meditative, and free.

People who have been meditating for a while may find value in "trigger practice". This is when we voluntarily expose ourselves to a stimulus that usually activates a strong emotional, addictive, or painful response in us so that we can focus and meditate on that reaction.