Two aspects of meditation…

Shamatha — stopping, calming, concentrating Vipassana — looking deeply, insight, understanding In practice…

Stopping — stop whatever we're doing and just breathe Calming — calm our emotions in five steps: Recognizing — recognize our emotion Accepting — accept that the emotion is there; don't suppress it Embracing — embrace the emotion as a good part of you Looking deeply — after calming, meditate on the situation Gaining insight — allow solution to come naturally, effortlessly Resting Healing

In meditation, there are two aspects. One is called Shamatha. And the other's Vipassana.

Shamatha means stopping, calming, concentrating. And Vipassana means looking deeply, insight, understanding. But we can't really jump to Vipassana until we develop some capacity of Shamatha — of calming, quieting, stilling, concentrating — because, most of the time, we try to find a solution to something and think about it with our rational, small intellectual mind. When in fact, what we need to do is just let go, come back to center, breathe, focus, meditate. And then the inner wisdom from the heart will… can well up naturally to give us insight into what to do.

So, you might want to outline it this way:

Stopping. First we just stop whatever we're doing. If we're having… suddenly having an argument or getting… we know that we're about to do something that's going to escalate our depression or something — we just stop. We take the time to stop. Stop the thoughts. Stop the noise. Stop the activity. Stop the situation. And breathe.

And we begin to automatically start to cultivate the second aspect of Shamatha, which is Calming. Calming the anger. Calming the sadness. Calming the fear. Calming the suffering. And we do that in five steps, which our teacher outlines:

One, first of all, recognizing that we are feeling angry. Recognizing that we are feeling sad. Recognizing that we are feeling afraid. Just recognizing that. But also recognizing that it's not just that. There's probably other layers. And so, recognize that anger is made of non-anger elements too. That there are some things going on. So just recognize that it's there, don't deny it.

And that, of course, ties into second part, which is accepting. You recognize it's there, and now you accept that it's there. It's there and you're not trying to suppress it. But you accept that you are having this feeling of anger. Because what happens most of the time is that we recognize that we're having anger, but we don't want it. We don't want to accept the fact that we're angry. But we can't get to the other steps without first accepting. Coming to a place of acceptance: that's part of Calming.

Then, embracing… Once we come to a calm place of recognizing and accepting, then we can begin to embrace the suffering or the negative emotion. Like a mother hearing her baby cry and holding the baby, embracing the baby, trying to just calm the baby by embracing. So instead of thinking of your feeling or your suffering as some enemy, which of course then just creates this internal mental war, you know, the good part of you versus the bad part of you — it only makes it worse — instead, think of it more like the mindful, wise, loving part of you is like the mother; and then this emotion is like the little baby that just needs your mindful attention and awareness to embrace it, breathing with it.

Then, once you have embraced it you can start doing some of the second aspect of meditation: Vipassana. Which are: deep looking (looking deeply), and gaining insight. So these two are the main components of Vipassana meditation. Of course you can't really dissect them in reality. They all blend of course. So, then we look deeply into our… "Why is my baby crying? Does the diaper need to be changed? Is it hungry? Did it hit its head or something?"

So you look deeply. Now that you're calm, you can actually look deeply, your mind isn't in this hurricane wind of thoughts and feelings. Now it's calm enough you can look, "OK… Why? What is this feeling? What is this suffering? What is this anger? What is this sadness? What is it made of?" Maybe it's really not just anger, but underneath that anger, there's a fear. A fear of rejection or a fear of being embarrassed in public. "Where does that come from? Maybe five years ago something similar happened… And, when I was a child my parents did this thing and it's triggering that…"

So, "looking deeply" meditation is to… after you've done your calming breathing meditation, if you want to do a second meditation, right after that, sometimes what's helpful is doing twenty minutes of just sitting meditation, just breathing — calming, concentrating on the breath only. Then you can do a little bit of walking meditation. And sit again for another twenty minutes. Then you can look deeply into the situation. And you'll be able to find much more insight from that when you come to it from that angle of calm.

And "insight…" this kind of insight doesn't… you don't have to try too hard for it. There have been so many times when I'm doing meditation that out of the blue a solution just pops into my mind effortlessly. I didn't even have to really struggle about the problem. But just because I was in a space of calm and receptivity, the answer within my heart which was always there, just naturally came up into my awareness. And, "Oh, OK… there it is…" effortlessly.

In fact, a lot of scientists have discovered a lot of scientific discoveries just by doing that. They worked really hard on these calculations. And they just gave up and so they took a nap or took a stroll outside. And boom, out of the blue, it hit them. There's one scientist who discovered how molecules bond with each other because he had this dream about it. And so, there's a lot of wisdom from our inner, deeper mind that we are ignoring because we are so obsessed with this small surface analytical mind.

OK, the rest of the components of our practice, number three and four are resting and healing.

Yes?

Audience member: "How do you do number one?"

OK, I'll get into that in just a second. How do you do the stopping? That's a good question. And I think some of it may be answered by what we're going to talk about with resting and healing. You know animals, when they get wounded, they instinctively stop what they're doing, go into a small little forested area, in a bush or something, and lay down and rest for a few days until their body heals. We humans, when we feel hurt by something, we just run around and keep doing other things and multitasking. We never give ourselves the rest we need. And it's like when we rest in meditation and mindfulness in activity throughout the day, it's like we allow that pebble to just float effortlessly down to the bottom of the lake. It's just… just let it … that's how we rest. We just ahh (big exhale). Just let go like a pebble falling down effortlessly to the bottom of the lake. And because of stopping and calming and resting, then healing naturally takes place. The transformation of the suffering naturally takes place.

So the stopping is what we've been doing today already. Mindful walking. Mindful breathing and sitting. Mindful listening. Anything done in mindfulness and concentration helps us to stop. When we allow ourselves the experience daily, getting in touch with that part of us, the true self… Or once a year, when we go to a long retreat really getting in touch with that… It gives us the confidence to continue in our practice because we know it's real… because we've experienced it and we've tasted it, and we know that it's possible. So that experience is glimpsing, touching, even if briefly, our true nature — touching Nirvana. And that is actually the greatest relief for our suffering. Of course we can do all of these other things to relieve our suffering — thinking positive thoughts when a negative thought comes, transforming a negative thought, cultivating the positive thoughts that are already there. These are all techniques. Doing loving… love meditation, kindness meditation. All of these are techniques we can use to relieve suffering.