Day 1: Awakening & the Path

Let's spend some time together thinking about what it means to lead a good life. The verses I just invoked are from the Buddhist tradition, and Buddhism has something to say about this, but there's something really interesting about the context of Buddhism and what we might call the good life. There's actually no word for it in Buddhism. Just recently I was spending some time with a friend, Kempo Kunga is his name, I was actually translating for him for a meditation retreat. And we were chatting about this and we realized, unlike some other traditions, actually the Buddhist tradition doesn't have a word for this.

So in the ancient Greek tradition, the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy, there's a well-known term that some of you may have heard, a term called eudemonia. It's a sense in which it's a life filled with meaning perhaps, a life that is fulfilling, a life that might even be happy perhaps. But there's no term like this actually in the Buddhist world. In some ways perhaps the reason for that is that the way in which the notion of what it means to lead a good life, a life of what we might call flourishing, which is one way that that ancient Greek term is translated, a life that is in some sense the one that we seek to live, the one that we wish we could live sometimes, that this whole idea is actually bundled together in the very notion of awakening or enlightenment itself. And this brings us to a key term that we could perhaps start with.

So you should know by the way that I'm sort of fond of languages and I rather like the Sanskrit language in particular, so we'll be spending a little time now and then talking about Sanskrit. It's a beautiful language, it's a language that Buddhists started to use around 500 years after the time of the Buddha. Actually the Buddha himself spoke in a language that is now lost, a language that is called Magadhi. It's sort of like street Sanskrit you could say, a sort of simplified form of Sanskrit. But many of the terms that I'll be using now we also find in the very few fragments we have of Magadhi, this ancient language, but also some of you may be familiar with another language called Pali, that's a language of another living Buddhist tradition.

But I'm going to be using Sanskrit because I'm focusing especially here on the tradition that emerges from what we call the Buddhism of the great vehicle, the Mahayana, which especially is the style of Buddhism that goes to Tibet. And I'll sometimes be talking about the Tibetan language too. Let's begin though by looking at a particular Sanskrit word that we find across all of these various traditions. This is a word that you probably know, it's the word Buddha. What does this word actually mean?

Well it comes from a verb that has to do with something that we can call Bodhi, another term you may have heard. Bodhi actually translates in two different ways and when the Tibetans translated this term they chose two different words to translate it, Sang and Ye. What is Sang Ming? It means to in some sense become purified, but also to wake up. So one meaning of the term Bodhi is actually that one is a sense waking up.

Waking up from what? One way we think about this is that we're waking up out of our confusion, waking up out of the dream or maybe even the nightmare of our unhappy lives, if you like. The other aspect of this term is that Bodhi also means blossoming, in fact it's probably etymologically related to our English word for budding, like a budding flower. So that one is not just waking up out of something, but one is blossoming into something. One is awakening into the full realization in a sense of our own potential.

We are not just waking up, but opening up, blossoming into the full realization that is Buddhahood or awakening. So you might say well for Buddhists the end point of the path is this, is the achievement of that awakening, of that Buddhahood, and therefore maybe that's what we mean really by living the good life. That could be true in some sense, the problem with it however is that well we're not Buddhas yet are we? At least I'm not, maybe some of you who are watching now are, but I certainly am not an awakened, fully awakened being. I have my kleshas as we call them, another great Sanskrit word that we'll be exploring, my negative mental states, my sticky parts of my mind, it's a really interesting word, the sticky mind so to speak.

I also have my grasping, my graha, the Tibetan word zimpa is one that especially kind of resonates for me, the way in which I fixate on things, that I grasp to things. I'm there, it's all happening for me, maybe it's happening for you too. So I'm not yet a Buddha, if leading the good life requires me to be a Buddha, well it looks like I'm not leading a good life then. Does that mean it's not possible to lead a life of flourishing, lead a life of some kind of happiness, some kind of fulfillment without actually already being an awakened being? Well here we need a little caveat, something that's kind of interesting to think about in the context of Buddhism, especially for the style of practice and philosophy that we'll be focusing on here for this course, for the next few times when we get together.

There's an idea of Buddhahood that is not something distant, it's not something that in a sense you have to achieve or get or obtain. In a way we could say your own full awakening is already present within your own mind, within your own body even, that in some sense you are already a Buddha. So it's not a matter of becoming a Buddha, of making yourself into a Buddha, but it's in a sense becoming aware of your own awakened nature. So that modifies things a little bit already, doesn't it? It's not about achieving some goals, getting something that we don't already have.

Sometimes in the traditions that I'm most closely involved in, and these are the non-dual traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, sometimes it's even said to be something so obvious that we just miss it altogether. It's like a beggar who finds a beautiful gem, but since it's covered, it's covered in garbage, the beggar just throws it out, doesn't even realize that it's there. We already have, even in a sense, moment by moment, this awakened mind. But of course again, that may be true. I may have what is called Buddha nature, tathag, tagarbha, even translated as the womb of the transcendent one, that in some sense my own mind is already giving birth every moment to awakening, and yet I don't know that, I don't experience my life that way.

I'm grasping, I'm fixated, I experience suffering. So even though in some sense, yes, we're not trying to achieve some kind of a goal, there's still what seems to be the fact of our own experience, something that you could say at a certain level the way in which we lead our lives may be in contradiction to the way things actually are, but it's still the way we're leading our lives. This is why we have the practice of the path, what we call the marga in Sanskrit, the path of awakening. And in particular, we're going to be examining a particular style of practice, that's a style of practice that emerges later in Buddhism, and we'll explore some of this history. But this style of practice is the path of what's called the bodhisattva.

So here again, we hear that word bodhi, the word awakening. And now this is the bodhisattva is the being who is engaged in the practices for awakening. In some ways, the being who is just allowing their own awakening to manifest. The bodhisattva is one who cultivates what we call bodhicitta, the mind of awakening. So when we are on that path, are we trying to achieve some kind of a goal?

Yes. But is the story of that path all about the achievement of a goal? One of the things that we can find when Buddhism has come to the West is, you might say, maybe a little fixation on the goal itself, a way in which we might think that the whole point of the path is not to be on the path itself, but actually to somehow achieve that Buddhahood. Already, you could maybe see, especially in this style of practice, that doesn't make entirely good sense. Because it's true, yes, my own experience is not an awakened experience, but the claim here is that essentially there is something awakened about my own mind itself, about this embodiment, about this organism.

There's something there that in some sense is already awakened. So if I'm trying to get something, I'm again, I'm like the beggar I'm looking for. Where is it? You know, where is that Buddhahood? I got to go find it.

It's already here in some way. So there's that contradiction. But still again, we respond. Well, you know, I'm not awakened. I need to achieve something.

I need to at least eliminate whatever are the obscurations that are preventing this awakening from manifesting in my own mind. There's something I need to do. And so when Buddhism has come to the West, maybe somewhat ironically, it has emphasized even more strongly this notion of achieving the goal. In traditional Buddhism, in traditional societies, what we often find actually is something that's maybe almost kind of the opposite. I've spoken with a number of different Tibetan teachers about this where sometimes they really enjoy teaching Westerners because Westerners take it seriously.

And also in a way they think that, yeah, maybe I can actually make some progress on the path. I'm really going to try to make some progress. I'm kind of going to try to get there, try to achieve something, become a Buddha even. And let's say the Tibetan world, for example, many people just feel like, well, I'm just an ordinary person and I'll try to get a little bit better in this life, but I'm not going to achieve Buddhahood. That's just not, I'm not just not good enough for that in some sense.

So it's an odd kind of interesting kind of cultural dualism you can see there. What happens, however, sometimes in Western Buddhism is that we fixate so much on this idea of the goal that we forget that we're going to be on the path for a long time. The path in a sense is the goal for us. It's the practice that really counts. So if there is a flourishing life in the practice of Buddhism, if the path of the bodhisattva, of the awakening being in some ways can be a path of a good life, a flourishing life, it can't be about achieving that Buddhahood or allowing it to become manifest.

It's about being on the path right now. Sometimes we can even see in Western Buddhism, there are those who will claim that they've achieved awakening or they've achieved some high state on the path or there are what we call an arhat or whatever it might be. Well, that might be true. Maybe that is. Maybe some people have achieved those states.

But again, this is a manifestation of this emphasis on the achievement of the goal instead of the practice of the path. So what then does it mean to practice the path? How do we understand the practice of the path? How do we actually get to this point of full awakening? Again, we're not getting something we don't have.

In some sense, it's already present. But still, we might ask, well, what do we got to do? Do we just sit here and do nothing? One way of thinking about this is to start looking at some very traditional ways of thinking about the structure of the path. And one aspect of this structure is a triad of terms.

Actually, we're going to talk about two triads of terms. In fact, we're probably going to end up talking about lists quite a lot. My old friend, George Dreyfus, a great Buddhist scholar who spent many years as a monk actually, and came up with this great quick, Christians love God and Buddhists love lists. So we're going to be engaging with lists a bit here and there. Hopefully they will be useful.

The idea is that they try to think of these as a kind of map to help you understand the practice that we're talking about, the way in which this practice can, in a sense, give one a flourishing life or allow one to embody a flourishing life. So the first of these is what we call in Tibetan. And this one especially seems to have been created by the Tibetans, Shi Lam Jai in Tibetan. This means the ground, the path, and the result. So the ground is just reality itself.

What exists? We could even use a sort of fancy philosophical term called ontology, like what is real? The path is what one practices. And the result, in this case, of course, is Buddhahood itself, full manifest Buddhahood. So when we look at that triad, we can talk about the nature of reality as having to do what are called, with what are called the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional.

Just place that in your mind for a moment, we'll come back to it. When we think about the path, the path is about two main features in the context of this style of Buddhism. They are wisdom and method. Sometimes we say method really just comes down to compassion. So the path is wisdom and compassion.

And then the result is Buddhahood itself, both from the standpoint of the mind and also embodied. So we can talk about sort of two aspects of the result, which are the result in terms of the Buddha mind and the results in terms of the Buddha body, if you like. So when we think about this kind of a triad, again, we can really kind of fixate on all of these, as it turns out. And I think I've done that in my own practice now and then. But two interesting fixations, I think, are ones that we want to set aside.

And then what we really want to get involved in here is the path. What does it mean to practice? The two that we can fixate on in a way is, first of all, in terms of the ground. We can really become obsessed with what's real. What is the nature of reality?

What is the metaphysics that describes what is real? In my own background, as someone who's done a lot of work in Buddhist philosophy, sometimes I can see this. I just want to give an account, a very precise account of the nature of reality. And we can spend lots of time doing that. But here's a kind of key endpoint for that, inquiring, where we're supposed to end up in this style of practice.

The real endpoint in a certain way is, from the ultimate perspective, there's nothing we can say that is going to be a perfect model of reality. There is no, in a sense, model that's the truth. Any attempt to come up with the absolute truth about the nature of reality will inevitably fail. Even in a sense, the attempt to say there is no attempt, there is no final description, no description can succeed. Even that itself is already failing.

One way of thinking about this is just the very notion of having to have a final metaphysics, a final version of the truth is part of the problem. So that, in a way, dispels the view. So we can also fixate, as we said, on the result, on Buddhahood itself. We can become obsessed with what's the nature of a Buddha. We can become obsessed with assessing our own progress.

Where am I on the path? Am I at this level or at that level? How close to Buddhahood am I? Even if we already, in some sense, have a sense that, yes, there is a kind of awakening fully present here already, we can start to inquire and maybe become a little fixated on, well, exactly where is it and is it in my heart or is it the same as my mind or different than my mind? Let's just say lots of opportunity for fixation are available in these contexts.

Instead, however, we can also, with Buddhahood, we can say that, in a sense, understanding Buddhahood itself is something that is, we might say, inaccessible to our ordinary ways of looking at the world. So again, in any attempt to fully understand it, even that term understanding, which implies a kind of description, a way of speaking, something conceptual, even that itself already points to the failure, the impossibility of really appreciating what our own awakening is. What it comes down to, in a way, then, is something that's experiential, not description, not analysis, not concepts, but experience. And that brings us really to the path. The path here is the key, and it's also, in a sense, in terms of our own lives, in practical terms, if there's going to be something flourishing about Buddhist practice, it's going to be on the path as we are right now.

So how should we think about the path? Well, here's another great list. So the path can be summarized in view, meditation, and a term that we sometimes translate as conduct, that we sometimes translate even as embodiment or engagement, but in a way you could say it's life, the way you lead your life, right? So the view, the meditation, and life. And here there are, again, three, two, more lists, lists within the list, and we're going to divide each of these into two.

This can actually be very helpful in a way for helping us to understand, in very practical terms, how the path is helping us to deal with our issues and lead a better life, if you like. So the first of these is view. It's going to come down to, again, something that we already heard earlier in the context of the ground, the nature of reality, which is the idea of there being two truths. So let's make this more practical, not an issue of what the different theories are and levels of analysis and what have you. In very practical terms, we can say simply this.

There's a way things are, and that you might call the ultimate reality, and then there's the way in which we kind of lead our lives in everyday ways, our ordinary assumptions, our ways of just kind of conveniently getting by, and those you could think of as conventional. So let me give you a very concrete example of the ultimate and the conventional, one very simple version of this. And as it turns out, there are going to be layers, and we're going to explore some of these layers, layers getting deeper and deeper and deeper into what we mean by the ultimate. But really simply, you're right now watching a video and listening to this voice, and it might seem like you're seeing a person and hearing a person's voice, right? I assume, right?

Maybe you're not listening, maybe you're distracted, or maybe you're just on your phone and just listening. Maybe you're not watching, you're just listening. But in any case, it sounds like a person is talking to you. Well, that's actually not true, is it? If you're looking at the video, this is just a bunch of pixels.

That's what you're actually seeing. You think it's a person, it's quite natural to say it's a person, but it's not actually a person's face, right? It's just a bunch of pixels. As you hear this sound, this sound is not the sound of a person's voice, it's also a bunch of digitally cut up bits that are being transmitted to you and that your auditory system is tricked into thinking as a continuous sound, right? This is not analog, it's digital.

So what you're really just hearing are a bunch of little bits of moments of sound, your auditory system is filling in the gaps, you're seeing a bunch of pixels, and again, your visual system is merging them together in a way that makes you think you're seeing a face and that makes you think you're hearing a sound of a person's voice, like a continuous sound. But neither of those are true, and actually, I'm sure you know that, don't you? It's not like this comes as a great revelation, like you do not think that whatever screen you're looking at, you know, oh, you mean there isn't a little guy inside of the iPhone? Wait, what? There isn't?

You're not in there? No, sorry, I'm not there, it's not me, right? I'm actually here somewhere in Santa Barbara, by the ocean on a beautiful stormy day, wish you were here. So you already know that, but we operate as if that we're not the case, right? So this is, in a very experiential, practical way, something that we can see in our own lives, which is that we already sometimes know what's actually going on, but we behave, maybe for matters of convenience, in another way.

Now why do we do that? Let's explore that later. Let's just say it has to do with our goals, but we'll explore it more later. But for the moment, we can just say this, sometimes it just makes things easier, right? It would certainly be a lot more difficult to be constantly watching this video while you're thinking, oh, my visual system is pulling together all of the different pixels, and then the auditory sounds and the gaps are being stuck together, and you're just trying to keep track of all that if you could, which probably you couldn't, because this is all cleverly designed to actually trick your visual and auditory system into thinking you're seeing something and hearing something continuous.

But it would also be extremely inconvenient and kind of a waste of time, too, maybe, right? At least in some contexts. So we know that. We know that there's a way things are, and then the way things actually are, a bunch of pixels, digital little bits of sound, and the way things we sort of act, the way we engage and behave. That's really, in an experiential way, that's the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional.

The issue here is, as we're going to be exploring this, is that that ultimate, so there's one version of the ultimate here, which is the pixels, so to speak, and then the face that we think we're seeing. But we could even dive down into the pixels, couldn't we? And we say, well, what's a pixel, really? What is that made out of? Is it made out of photons?

It's a photon. We can keep diving down, and we will do some of that. But some of that becomes that philosophical fixation that's not so useful in practical terms. What the important thing to remember here is simply this, that the accounts of the ultimate, as we think about the ultimate, the accounts of the ultimate are accounts that become deeper and deeper and deeper. And then there's the meditation, right?

So we have the view, which is the ultimate and the conventional. And we need both of those. If we try to operate always in terms of the ultimate, we're going to fail. And even if we somehow manage to succeed, we're probably going to waste a lot of time. If we try to watch this video as just a bunch of pixels, it could be useful for some things, but probably you're just going to be wasting time.

So sometimes, most of the time, we lead our lives in the conventional, but knowing that it's just conventional and not the way things really are is key. We'll come back to that. So then next is what? Meditation. And again, here we can divide meditation into two.

We can talk about what we, and this is a very useful distinction. You find this sometimes in the mindfulness community as a distinction between formal and informal practice. In the Tibetan world, we have this old term that we call nyam jai, and it's really two different terms, nyamsak and jetop. So nyamsak means being settled in a meditation, being in an actual meditation session. And jetop means what happens after the session, or if you like, between sessions.

So if you're a practitioner, a serious practitioner, you're always in one of these. You're either doing a formal meditation, and that can just be a moment. You don't necessarily have to be sitting on a cushion. You don't have to be in any particular position. There are positions and cushions that are more or less useful for formal meditation practice, but can also just happen as you're walking down the street.

And then there's the jetop, the post meditation or between meditation, always. You're either in the meditation, or you're between meditations. A key here is that just as in the context of the ultimate and the conventional, we can become confused about the relationship between these two. And this is one of the key issues in terms of living the path, and having the path really enhance our lives, to manifest awakening eventually, but also in a sense to have a taste of awakening even now. It's very important to keep these two distinct.

What happens in the meditation session is not what happens between sessions. Eventually, they say, when you achieve Buddhahood, or when your own Buddhahood becomes manifest, the two become indistinguishable. There's no difference between being in a meditation and being between meditations. But again, I'm not there yet, and maybe you're not either. And until that point then, these are very distinct, and it's going to be very important for us to understand that there are things that we experience in meditation that do not apply between meditations.

But they change what happens between meditations. They alter us. So one way of thinking about this term, meditation, is that it means you could say it's like accessing a different level of reality, or maybe accessing reality differently, discovering something that we don't see without doing the practice. But also, another term, and this is the Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit word, bhavana. Bhavana just means to make it happen, make it so.

That's what it means. It's the causative of the verb to become or to be. So making it so, making it happen. One thing you could be making happen is seeing, recognizing, discerning. So that's where your kind of meditation is a process that enables you a process of discovery.

But another aspect of this is actually conditioning, habituation. You could say that in a way, and this is what the Tibetan translation points to, the Tibetan translation, gom, is very close to another word, kom, which they're really transitive and transitive forms of the same verb. It's like becoming habituated to something. So part of meditation as well is, in a sense, eliminating dysfunctional habits and establishing different habits through meditation that then affect the way we behave in our lives. So when we think of that distinction, then there's something else that's very useful, actually, here, that comes to that third facet of the path, life itself, the way we behave, the way we embody the path, our conduct.

So in life also, not really exactly a traditional way of talking about it, but we can kind of divide this phase as well into two key elements that emerge out of practice. And we're going to maybe take a little taste, try a little taste of them in a moment. And these are the distinctions between fixation and letting go. So what's fixation? That's something that we should explore, and we will explore.

The Tibetan term for this is zimba, the Sanskrit term that I mentioned previously is graha, which again, is probably etymologically related to our English term, Indo-European, you know, they have a common Indo-European root of grabbing, like grabbing, grab, right, zimba, grab. The grabbing is this, you could say, is the behavioral manifestation of the fundamental problems that cause dissatisfaction. This is kind of the behavioral, and I don't mean necessarily obvious behavior, I mean sometimes very subtle mental behavior of grasping. And again, layers, they can be very obvious levels of grasping and extremely subtle levels of grasping. There even is a kind of level of grasping that simply has to do with the sense of you being over there or me being over here, that sense of subject-object duality, that as you are beholding me it seems like there's a sense of subjectivity, someone is looking outside of your eyes, so to speak, and there's an over there that's being beheld by you in there.

Even that is a kind of grasping. But much of what we're dealing with is at a much grosser level, and we'll see that, we'll come to that. And then there's letting go. It's not, I'm not sure if this is true, but I get the impression that in our contemporary culture we've somehow taken grasping and turned it into a kind of style. This may account for the fact that, and this seems to be well established, that when we look at rates of depression and anxiety across the board, but especially in the younger generation, anxiety, and suicide, I'm sorry to say, these are all rising, some of them very dramatically.

I do a lot of work, my day job, so to speak, is to be a university professor, and we're engaged in a project on student flourishing where we've designed a course for freshmen working with colleagues at other universities, especially University of Virginia and Penn State University, and at the Center for Healthy Minds and the University of Wisconsin where I work, we've been developing this curriculum and working with freshmen in particular. Some of the statistics are really shocking. More than, by some accounts, over the last few years, last two to three years, rates of anxiety on college campuses have increased like 245%. So why is that? What's going on?

Well, we actually will explore a little bit of that. But some of it may be that grasping is a kind of cultural style. Grasping for what? For what we think will make us happy. And grasping, by the way, also has another aspect to it we'll be exploring, which is aversion, avoiding.

Is trying to get something that the energy of getting is, in some sense, just the flip side of the energy of avoiding, of pushing away, getting, pushing away, avoiding, getting, getting, avoiding. So what, then, in practice do we do? What's the aspect of life, you could say, that comes out of practice, that we learn in practice, a kind of different habit, a habit that's not about the style of getting, of grasping, of avoiding, that maybe is so powerful for us these days, but that humans have always faced. And that is a kind of letting go. So let me invite you now to maybe try that just for a moment.

Do a little bit of practice, just for the next maybe 10 minutes or so. Let's say a few things about this style of practice. So this is a style of practice that comes out of Tibetan Buddhism, and the particular lineage that I'm associated with is a lineage that emphasizes what we call non-dual awareness. We'll get to that, what that means later. Now, I've been very fortunate to receive teachings.

I'm not a special practitioner, and I am no great accomplished teacher, but I've been really lucky to receive teachings, and to be instructed in practice, and I'm hoping to pass that along to you in some kind of effective way. Especially I have a, my main teacher is a Lama by the name of Chiki Nima Rinpoche, and I've received a number of teachings from him, and really feel inspired by him. So hopefully I'm able to channel some of that. And this style of practice, one of the key elements in this style of practice is learning how to just allow the mind to settle naturally on its own. We have a term for this, which is Rangbab, which literally means self-settling or self-falling.

Not trying to make something happen, but just relaxing and letting go. We're going to come back to various versions of this practice, and we're going to do some other practices during this course. But let's just begin with this very simple version of it. We're going to use the breath initially for this. The full version of letting go is really going to be letting go.

There won't even be any focus on the breath. I mean, we'll do that for a moment at the end. But for now, let's just try to attend to the sensations of breathing. And I'm actually, I tend to take my glasses off when I do meditation practice, so I'm just going to do that. The first thing I'd like to recommend to you as we settle now is that you don't need to be overly concerned about posture.

Some traditions, posture is very important, and sometimes it is really critically important. But there is one aspect of posture that's very helpful. And that is that you want the body, in general, to be both relaxed and alert, simultaneously relaxed and alert. Now, how do we get there? Well, one of the ways of being relaxed, in a sense, is a sense of being safe, you might say, that things are safe.

And you can create that sense of safety, in part, by attending to the kind of space that you do your practice in, creating a sense of safety within that space. But also, in terms of your body, having a sense of stability, finding a posture that gives you a strong sense of stability. So you can see the way I'm sitting here now. This is not a, per se, traditionally Tibetan posture so much, it's actually sometimes called Burmese posture, which I've learned through Vipassana style of meditation. But this is a posture that I find very secure.

Some people do the full lotus position, you can find that if you feel comfortable in that, that's also very secure, it creates a sense of stability. So whatever posture you use, you can also sit in a chair. But if you're in a chair, having your feet flat on the floor is very helpful. So feet flat on the floor in a chair, some kind of a posture if you're sitting down where you really have this kind of stability, you can see my knees are down, really gives me a sense of a stable base. So you want to find a posture that will work for you that way.

The second element here of feeling a kind of safety has to do with that stability, then as well alertness can come mostly from having that sense that your spine is straight but flexible. Sometimes you can even imagine like a little string pulling up the top of your head and just sort of pulling up your spine and then letting it settle. And in this style of practice, we generally actually meditate with the eyes open. We'll talk more about why we might do that later, but for now, I invite you to try that. If you feel too distracting, you might close your eyes.

If you like, you can also direct your gaze downward. If your body's feeling a little tense, you can just move it about a little bit, but one easy exercise is just to lift the shoulders and rotate them back and then forward, back, forward, then lift up and let go. Breathing in, lift up, and you can see my hands are on my knees. If you prefer this posture, you can, but for this style, you may find it best to have the hands on the knees. So now settled, relaxed, but stable, flexible, strong, spine, and open front.

Just allow the mind to settle on the sensations of breathing. There's no need to fixate on the sensations. Just notice them. You can really notice them anywhere you like, but you may find the abdomen to be especially useful. Just let the breath be natural.

The mind wants an object, so just let it pay attention to the breath. Minds arise, sensations, just notice them, no need to evaluate them, and just invite the mind back to the breath. Just let the mind follow the breath as if it were riding on the breath. There's nothing else to do. There's nothing else to do.

And now, just for these last few moments, let go of the notion even of meditating. Let go of any need to do anything. See you next time.