Guided Nondual Meditation with Michael Taft
Welcome, all you guys. I’m Michael Taft, as always—at least as intermittently, and this is Deconstructing Yourself, and we’ll do an hour of meditation followed by a bunch of other stuff. Most of you’ve heard me say it all before. So, I’ll just say we’re going to sit. Okay, let’s do the thing. So, let’s do our alternate thing that we did last week again, right? Instead of stretching and yawning and we’re going to just do physical stuff, you do whatever you want physically. Your body is your body. Do what works for you.
[guided movement]
Okay. So, let’s start out by just sitting there, and ask yourself the question, what’s it like to be me right now? And then instead of answering from thinking, actually assume you don’t know what it’s like to be you right now, and check in. What’s it like to be you right now? What’s it like to be me right now? You might want to feel your physical body to see how that’s doing. And again, it’s not like the answer is good or bad. Just check it out. What’s it feel like? There might be some emotional stuff going on. So we can check into our emotional bodies, so to speak, just what’s going on emotionally? And again, that’s not about ideas. That’s about feelings in our body. What emotions are we feeling in our body? The body includes your head.
So we’re checking into our physical body. We’re checking into our emotional body, checking into your mental body. How’s your brain doing? How’s your mind doing? Again, it’s not like—oh, it’s doing terrible, or it’s doing good. It’s like, check it out. And the trick here is, however any of this is doing, however your body is doing, however your mind is doing, however your emotions are doing, just let it be that way. Let’s just have a moment where we don’t try to change it. We don’t try to control it. We don’t try to judge it. We don’t try to improve it. We don’t try to max it in any particular way. We just let it be what it is.
And then from there, let’s set aside our thinking minds. So, we’re just not going to engage with thought. Thoughts are still happening—probably thoughts are still chugging along. They’re doing the things they do, but we’re just setting it aside and not getting caught up in it. And so I like to do this actual gesture like you take your thoughts—like it’s a shoe box, or more like a radio, an old time radio—and you just set them over here.
Okay. Just literally, physically, no one’s following me here. Take your hands like this and move. Take your box of thoughts over here and set it down. Good. And now we’re back here. The thoughts are over there thinking—fine. Okay. Don’t have to mess with it. Don’t have to mess with it.
Now, with the rest of experience, simply come into presence—easy to do if you’re not messing around with the box of thoughts. And so, if you come out of presence, you start getting involved in thinking again, just set them aside, and come back to simple, natural, easy presence. Even a child can do it. Even a cat or dog can do it. Just come into presence. And so let’s just do this together for a few minutes.
Simply returning to presence over and over. It’s simple. It’s natural. It’s easy. That’s not a big meditation technique. We’re just not engaging with the thinking mind and coming back to simply sitting here. Not trying to get anywhere, not trying to do anything, not trying to get all concentrated, not trying to transcend, not trying to clean. Just being awake and present without engaging with thought. Let’s do that together.
Notice that you might get caught up again in the box of thoughts that we set aside. It’s pretty normal, pretty natural. Don’t worry about it. Just set them aside again. Come back to just being present. If you really, really, really need something to focus on, you can notice your breath in a very relaxed way because that will help you be present. But really, all of experience helps you be present. You can feel your butt on the cushion. You can feel your hands on your thighs or wherever they’re at. You can feel the slight movement of the air on your flesh. You can hear the room around you. You can see the sound, the sights and lights of the room around you. You can feel your heartbeat. You can feel the aliveness in your body. All these things and many, many, many others.
But it’s not like you have to make it into a task—doesn’t have to be a lot of work. We’re just hanging out in presence. If you find that your thoughts are extra clingy, extra velcro-y, or sticky, you might find yourself getting in kind of a battle with them. Don’t do that. In the most relaxed way, just set them aside. Come back to being present. No judgment, no problem. Just set them aside. Come back to being present. We’re not trying to slow thinking down, or stop thinking, or do anything at all with thinking—except ignore it.
Once you’re not involved, being present is easy and natural—and it’s what you get for free. Your awareness is on—and here it is. Just keep returning to simply being present. Right? It’s very, very easy. It’s very relaxed. Notice how open it is. Very open, very spacious. We’re not stuck down inside the little theater of the mind. We’re present in space.
Good. Now, let’s remain uninvolved with thought. Remain simply present—and without adding anything extra, see if we can release some voluntary tension. So, release any tension in your scalp and your face, your eyebrows, your cheeks, your lips, your jaw. Right? It doesn’t mean stretch it. We’re not getting into stretching here. Just, if there’s any tension in your face, just let it go. Allow your upper and lower teeth to not touch. So your jaw is not clenched.
Let’s do the eyelid thing. The eyelid thing is—even if you normally meditate with your eyes open, just close them for a minute, and let your eyelids be so relaxed—all the little tiny muscles all around your eyes so relaxed that you can’t possibly open your eyes, because to open them you’d have to tense them up. So let your eyelids be so relaxed and all the little muscles are so relaxed that you can’t open them because you’d have to tense them. And then try as hard as you can to open them without tensing anything. And then just feel that sense a little added sense of ease and peace and relaxation in your face and head. Right? Just there was some kind of tension that we weren’t noticing that we just released.
And then let’s do the same thing in our neck and throat and shoulders. If there’s any tension there that’s voluntary, that you can, just by willing it—not stretching, not trying to move—just by willing it, relax. Just let it relax. Just staying present. But, staying present particularly in relaxed sensations in the body.
And then notice relaxation coming into your arms and hands. Feeling your arms and hands and fingers, just releasing and relaxing and letting go. Becoming like wet rags. Zero tension. You might even feel your fingers and palms heating up, because as you relax the tension, there’s more blood flow. And just feel how good it feels to have this added tension released, to have this extra tightness and constriction let go, so that there’s more openness, more ease, more fluidity, more space.
And just like we did with our eyelids—by the way, if you want to meditate with your eyes open, it’s okay to reopen your eyes. Just like we did with the eyelids, let’s do the same thing with our arms and hands. So, we make our arms and hands as relaxed as they are when we’re asleep. They’re just literally totally limp. Just limp. And once you get them super limp without tightening any muscle, even slightly in your arms and hands, try as hard as you can to move them. Really try to move them without any tension. And then just let that go, and feel that extra little bit of relaxation, and peace, and ease, coming into the body. A real deep stillness that is not tense but rather stillness through relaxation.
Good. And then to whatever extent possible, let go of any voluntary tension in your torso, in your chest, or in your back, in your diaphragm. And of course, most of us keep our belly real tight. So to whatever extent possible, just let your belly be loose and open and just flop out. So, we’re not keeping that tight. And feel how good that feels to have the whole body from the head all the way down to the belly just nicely relaxed and open and at rest.
Again, continuing to remain uninvolved with thought. We’re just present in body sensation. And then from here, let your hips release and relax and let go—and your thighs and your knees and your calves and your ankles and your feet and your toes. So that your legs and feet are utterly at rest, utterly at ease, utterly at peace.
Now again let’s do the whole thing with our whole body. We’ve got our body so relaxed—our arms, our legs, our face. The whole thing is so relaxed that we—without tensing any muscles at all—try to move your body without tensing any muscle at all. Try to move your body. Don’t move your hands at all. Don’t move your feet. Don’t wiggle. No tension. Try to move as hard as you can.
Good. And then just let go of that, and tune in again to the overall sensation of the body. How does that feel? Be present with that, outside of thought. Tuning into this ease and openness and peace and rest in the body. Feeling the wave of the breath coming and going. The wave of the breath rising and falling. And in a very open, relaxed, easy way, just stay present in the body. Feeling the breath wave moving in the body. Feeling whatever else you feel. Maybe you can feel places that are hot and cold. Maybe you feel your heartbeat. Maybe you feel various gurgling in your belly, various movements in your guts, tingling or twitching here and there. Maybe some things feel really nice. Maybe some things are painful or uncomfortable. Just stay present with all these sensations as a Gestalt—just one field of sensation arising within presence.
The body is here. The body sensations are present in awareness. So let the body be the presence, remaining unengaged with thought, and the body sensation being present. Just remain clear and bright and awake. Remember there’s nothing to do. You just remain clear and bright and awake. Naturally present. Naturally conscious. And you may start to feel a little more deeply, a little more globally. Notice how your body isn’t just a front, it’s a back. Feel that your body isn’t just a front and a back. It has a right side and a left side. Feel that. Your body isn’t just four sides. There’s upper surfaces and lower surfaces, like a top and a bottom. Feel that. And it’s not just surfaces. It’s that volume has thickness. So feel the inside of the body. Just tune into all this body-level sensation. while remaining uninvolved with thought. Remaining bright. Remaining clear. Remaining present. Present in the room. Present in the body. Present in awakeness. Uninvolved with thought.
Good. Now, you may begin to notice with all this presence in the body, that even though we’re very still in one sense, the body is never actually still. There’s micro adjustments of your spine. There’s little movements here and there of your face or your limbs. There’s the heartbeat. There’s the guts doing their thing. There’s the diaphragm going up and down. There’s always motion—you are alive. But it goes even further than that. You may feel quite a bit of tingling or buzziness or wave-like feelings of aliveness in the body particularly the mouth, the hands, the feet. There can be a lot of energy type sensations.
Also, the felt sense of the contour of the body is shifting, shifting, shifting. And the more we tune in, the more it seems to swell here and contract there and bulge another place and cave in another place—kind of like in these amoeba-like movements, where the whole shape of the body feels like it’s continuously shifting and moving and changing. And that the contour of the body becomes much harder to find in a stable way. It’s continuously changing. It’s continuously shifting. It may grow bigger or smaller. And especially if there’s a lot of buzziness and tingliness, the contour of the body will start to feel permeable—like whole areas of the body are permeable—wide open.
And all along, I’ve said remain uninvolved with thought. And most people take that to mean verbal thought. But I also want you now to remain uninvolved with visual thought, so that all the pictures you have in your head, of your body, or your posture, or the arrangement of your limbs—any mental pictures at all about the body. They can still be there, but you’re just not engaging. And stay present in the body without engaging those mental pictures. They can still be there, but you’re just not engaging. Not engaging.
Most of us think those pictures are the body, but they’re mental constructions. They’re imaginary images of the body. And when we disengage from those, you’ll notice that the openness, and changeability, and variability, and buzziness, and movement quality of the body really starts to shine, because often we use those images to kind of fixate the body. But when we disengage from those images, the body becomes unfixated. The body becomes not an object. The body becomes a bunch of flowing sensation and awakeness that’s not being stuffed into mental boxes.
Each time you find yourself putting yourself back in a mental box, just relax and drop out of the box. Come back to just simple presence where the body is like a flowing cloud of little buzzy tingly sensations in a vast open sky of awakeness. Never congealing into anything in particular. Never crystallizing into some kind of lump, but rather moving, vibrating, flowing, tingling, buzzing, expanding, contracting, continuously changing, continuously wide open, continuously shining in awakeness.
The awakeness isn’t coming from the body. The body is a flow of sensation arising within awakeness—a flow of sensation just moving through vast open awakeness. The awakeness is what’s stable. The awakeness—this vast openness—is what is clear. That’s where we’re coming from. The awakeness. The body is a beautiful flag in the breeze within that sky of awakeness. It’s simply an appearance that doesn’t confine us or define us in any way. It’s just a beautiful expression of the awakeness, continuously fresh—absolutely, primordially pure, and new in every moment.
Again, we’re not imagining that, we’re noticing that. And as you notice the body like this—continuously changing, continuously moving appearance within awakeness. Awakeness, awareness—not coming from the body, but the body coming from awakeness. The body appearing within awakeness just like the room is appearing. The body sensations are appearing.
Begin to notice the room in there, the spaciousness. Notice directly—without imagination— the uncontained, unconstricted vastness of body sensation. It’s not a little sack that we’re stuck inside. It’s utterly open, unbounded. There’s as much room inside as outside. And just feel that tremendous openness without straining, without trying to imagine it. Just feel it. It’s right there. When we let go of mental pictures of the body, it’s vast, it’s boundaryless, it’s free.
Good. Now, hear the sounds of the room around you, and notice how they pass through the body without encountering any resistance. The body does not stop the sound in any way. The body is utterly transparent, wide open, uncontained, boundaryless. The sound passes right through it. The inner space and the outer space are one space, one open sky, one free expanse.
And if your eyes are open, just allow them to have a very soft gaze, and allow the edges of vision to be as clear as the center of vision, the edges of vision as important as the center of vision. So that you’re spreading awakeness in vision across the entire field at once. And just notice how outside space and the inside space are one space. There’s no boundary there outside and inside our one space somatically, auditorially, visually. One big space that’s wide awake. Absolutely clear and bright and luminous and lucid, with all kinds of sensations arising within it—sound sensations, light sensations, physical sensations. None of them landing anywhere, or getting stuck anywhere, or crystallizing anywhere, or clumping anywhere, or binding, or sticking—it’s just wide open. Nothing crystallizing —everything fluid and spacious and open.
Good. And then, notice how, with the room arising in the space of awareness and the body arising in the space of awareness as sensations, just as continuously arising and passing sensations in awakeness, that the idea of yourself is also just some sensations in the body, emotions in the body, thoughts pinging around, some mental images of location. But none of it is ever landing. None of it’s ever crystallizing, or lumping, or turning into anything. There is just awakeness and all the beautiful appearance that arises in awakeness. Awakeness gives birth to the body. Awakeness gives birth to the world and then absorbs it back into itself again. And awakeness in the body, and awakeness in the sense of self, and awakeness in the world, are never, ever, ever, separate.
Feel the clear, bright, spontaneous, joyous, awakeness of it all. Never congealing down into any particular thing, and yet continuously, joyously becoming everything. Never making a thing out of anything. Notice how there’s no floor. There’s no ground. There’s nowhere to land. It’s all just appearance in space. On the other hand, we are the space and the appearance. So there’s no possibility of harm—completely free, and yet utterly full. Never congealing into anything and yet becoming everything—shining bright and clear, natural and spontaneous. There’s zero effort. And notice how the vastness of awakeness is so much larger than the world. The vastness of awakeness is larger than the universe.
Good. Let’s just—remaining wide open, unfixated, uncrystallized—just allow the sound, “ah” to come out. We’ll chant the “ah” for a while together. We don’t need to think to do this. We don’t need to perform. You don’t need to worry at all. Stay outside the thinking mind. Allow the awakeness, the openness, the luminosity, the clarity, to just manifest a bright shining “ah”
[chanting]
Okay, let’s end that there.
Dharma Talk
Noticing that nothing actually changes. The awakeness is still awake. The spaciousness is still spacious. The freely flowing spontaneous appearance is still freely flowing and spontaneous. We’re not in some kind of special altered state. We’re just noticing the way things are. You can just stay present. We didn’t go into, you know, jhanic style absorption. We’re just present. We’re just noticing what’s here. So even though we ended the meditation, nothing really ends. We don’t snap out of our trance and try to deal, right? We’re still completely present. We’re just seeing things as they are. And what I want to invite you to do is, then, just keep doing that—because it’s not hard. It’s not like it takes a big effort. You just keep noticing. And then when you notice you’ve stopped noticing, come back to noticing. And every single time you notice that you stop noticing, just recognize that you’re noticing again now. And just keep doing that. And just keep doing that.
That’s the plan. Stay present, stay awake, and recognize what’s happening. That’s it. It’s not that we can’t go further than that, but to continuously come back again and again. Simply to remain noticing that you’re noticing, awake to your awakeness. Simply to do that—and to do it a lot—to come back over and over again. Each time you become lost, just come back. Each time you go down the rabbit hole, just come back. No matter how far down the rabbit hole you’ve gotten, coming back—it’s just right there. That’s the real mindfulness, right? Remembering that mindfulness really is a translation of a word that also means another thing, which is remembering. We just remember to recognize, each time we put our mind in a box, each time we put our body in a box, each time we put our partner in a box, each time we put the world in a box, just notice that you did that, and come back to recognizing. Come back to just being present and awake.
Every time you find yourself in a box—which, by the way, you’re the one putting yourself in the box. Each time you notice you did that, drop out of the box. And then just do that, and do that, and do that, and do that. And eventually, you don’t put yourself in a box anymore. And you’re just awake and present. It’s not complicated. It’s not easy, but it’s not complicated. And it’s not even really that hard. It just requires a little bit of perseverance, because the habit of going asleep is really strong. The habit of getting lost in the rabbit hole is really strong. But the minute you get used to what it feels like to be just a little bit present—it doesn’t have to be super present, some kind of deep total cosmic present—just present. As you get used to what that feels like, it’s easier and easier to just come back to it, and come back to it, and come back to it, and come back to it. Oh, are you present?
So, here’s my question. Are you present? And just check, cuz the checking makes you present, and then you’re done. And then, if you notice that you got unpresent again, now you’re present. And just keep doing that. Just keep doing that.
The biggest trap there is to imagine that you are still in a the regular box of the world, in the box of your body, in the box of your head, in the box of your mind, and that you’re coming back to like a little garrett in a kind of brick building that’s kind of dark and dismal and made of heavy stuff, right? So, there’s a way that you can use that sort of mindfulness that coming back is kind of like putting you in more boxes and just coming back to your vision of confinement. It’s completely imaginary, but it is a strong imagination. And so, instead, we’re coming back to recognizing that presence is outside any boxes. That this whole experience is arising in awakeness, and that the whole feeling of a body is arising in awakeness, not the other way around.
And so to come back is to open up, not to reawaken in your prison. There is no prison, you know, when just dropping the box drops the bars to the cell. So, keep coming back, keep coming back, keep coming back, keep coming back. And if you do that enough, you’ll start to notice something really weird, which is—you’re actually never not back. You just sort of got distracted from it, but you were always there. And that might seem obvious as a concept, but as an experience, it’s weird, because you realize that, even going down the rabbit hole, even getting lost, even getting sucked into what we think of as distraction, is happening in total awakeness. And so what’s going on there, when you start to recognize that—and this is not prescriptive, I’m not saying do this—I’m saying this will start to happen on its own, where you’re like, “oh, I’m never not there.” Then, what’s really occurred is you’ve switched out of imagining you’re the mind itself. You switched out of imagining that you are just a physical being. You switched out imagining that you are a robot on a rock, and instead you’ve started to recognize you’re actually awakeness itself in which all this is appearing, and that is, at least in part, coming to wisdom. Right? You’re starting to see things as they really are.
Okay. So, that’s what I’m going to say about that. Please feel free to share your experience or ask questions.
Q&A
Questioner 1: Hey.
MT: Hi, Were you having a hard time?
Q1: Oh, I’m always having a hard time.
MT: Okay. So, no.
Q1: Relatively speaking, but to the point of, let’s say, the conditioning to get lost, and let’s say if I want to condition in the other direction, do you have a thought about the utility of long sits like this, versus like many short sits?
MT: Do you know how to find yourself?
Q1: I would say not very well.
MT: Then do lots of short ones. I mean, here we’re doing more than that. I’m getting you into it so that it becomes easier. But, if, on your own, that’s hard, I don’t recommend sitting there hour after hour kind of not getting it. It’s better to say, “oh, this is what it is to be present.” Do that for a few minutes, and then do something else, and then do it again, and then do something else, and do it again. So, it still adds up to an hour, but you’re not spending 57 minutes mentally rearranging your playing cards or something.
Q1: Okay, thanks
MT: Other stuff? Again, it doesn’t have to be a question. You can just talk.
Q2: So if everything is just happening in this awakeness, is there such a thing? And if yes, what is its role? Such as a free will. Is there a free will?
MT: It’s an interesting question. I mean, the question of free will is a Christian thing, that comes from what you can be judged on. And so, there’s this whole Christian concept that we’re coming from, actually, when we ask about free will. Just like the whole idea of the materialistic universe, in a certain sense, is the idea of God’s creation that’s just sitting there. We’re still—in the West—stuck in a whole Christian mindset. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we need to recognize it. So the question is already coming from religion really. And so I just want to recognize that, and move out of that for a second, and say, who is it that has this free will? And if you mean the sock puppet entity, it probably doesn’t have that kind of freedom, but that’s just an appearance anyway. Whereas the thing we actually are, the awakeness in which the whole universe arises, is utterly spontaneous, utterly free, utterly making everything happen. Can you call that free will? I mean, kind of not. So, I would just say, don’t look for it in the usual way we mean that word.
Q2: I guess in a nondual world, individual free will is kind of—doesn’t make much of a place.
MT: Well, but even there all individuality is the spontaneous expression of the whole of the universe, and if the whole of the universe is free, even all that individual expression is free, but not individually. So, that’s what I mean. Okay. Now, do I know this for a fact from my own experience? Not as a fact. But, that’s how it is usually taught. But I will say the deeper you work with this, the more time you spend in recognition, it becomes kind of apparent that the way we even think about who it is that’s having whatever we’re having is very odd, and that something utterly different than that is going on. And it’s totally spontaneous, and totally free, and yet, not in the normal way we would imagine it. Okay?
Q3: Hi. So awareness is kind of easy to grasp.
MT: Is it? Good.
Q3: More or less, because it’s just kind of passive, so it’s just like perceiving like seeing, but more than seeing like observing or like watching, but what is the mechanism of action?
MT: Well, you made a big assumption there by saying awareness is passive.
Q3: Kind of, isn’t the definition of awareness like perceiving, like knowing.
MT: I mean, it just depends on who’s defining it. So, I’m going to say knowing. As I mentioned a whole bunch of times, all of this is the expression of the awakeness. I never said, Oh, the awareness is just perceiving all this. It’s making this. It is gestating this and giving birth to this continuously. It could not be more active. That whole idea that it’s simply some kind of like placid observer, is just wrong as far as I’m concerned. That’s how—it’s tremendously energized. It’s tremendously creative. It’s excited. It’s joyous. It’s spontaneous. It’s free. Right? And so, even though you can find stillness there, and you can find peace, and all that, that’s just one quality. There’s all these other qualities. Okay, does that make sense to you? You don’t have to believe me or bow. I mean—you asked my opinion.
Q3: Okay. Yeah.
MT: There’s a lot of energy, enough energy to make a universe.
Q3: Yeah.
Q4: Just a related comment. You were saying that it’s all just appearance, but appearance is doing a lot of work, because it’s whose appearance, right?
MT: Yeah. Right No, it’s true. And part of it is just trying to describe, and yeah.
Very good. Okay. Thank you everybody. Thanks for your questions and comments. Let’s meditate just a little bit more, remembering that all we’re doing is just coming back into natural presence over and over again. No need to think about anything. No need to make anything up. No need to imagine anything. No need to go into some kind of absorption. Just return to wakefulness.
[silent sitting]
Okay, thanks everybody. Bye-bye.
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