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MEDITATION
What is True Mindfulness?
This space between outbreaths is sometimes called the gap. It points toward some gap in the internal chatter,
some experience of spaciousness. It may take quite a long time for the beginning meditator to have an experience of
that gap or space, and that's okay. That is why the other part of our meditation instruction is to label any thoughts
we have as thinking and just let go of them and come back to the outbreath. That instruction encourages us to
interrupt the constant barrage of talking to ourselves. And even if we do that only once there is already some kind
of gap which underlies remembering to come back to the sense of the outbreath going out. We may not be aware of it as gap, but it is already there as the basis of the process of remembering to label thoughts thinking and come back home to the present moment.
Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, "The technique leads us towards opening and doesn't have any hang-ups of something we have to undo later."With this technique you can't get attached to having something to hold on to all the time. You could say it's sort of a death there —the breath goes out, and then what? Then the breath goes out and out and out and then what? Sometimes people will panic when their breath goes out because of the fact that there's nothing to hold on to. We don't want to encourage panic, but when that happens I always know that the person has actually connected with what it's all about.
This open state which we connect with is the true nature of mind and is often described as like the big sky. It is
described this way in both the Mahamudra and Dzogchen traditions and is similarly described in the Zen tradition. The
true nature of our being is not really so much this embodiment, this corporeal form which is transient and is always
in a a state of changing and decaying. From the moment of birth to the moment of death it's going through a process
of wearing out. But what is always accessible to us in any moment as our birthright is actually the completely open
and vast nature of our mind. And what we call ego is narrowing it down and grasping on to small parts, which is our
personal experience saying, "I want this and I don't want that," "I like this and I don't like that." We are
grasping onto our limited thinking instead of staying with what's really possible for us.
I think it's helpful to know the history of the technique because it clearly points to the true nature of mind,
which is unobstructed and really vast. And that is the true nature of all reality. But we have a very strong habit of
always wanting to hold on to things, even if we label it mindfulness. We want ground under our feet.
This technique is weaning us from that towards a much more liberated and vast way of living and being. It also isn't
getting rid of thoughts so much as letting thoughts play in the vast space of which we are a part, if we could only
realize it.
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