Namo tassa bhagavato, arahato sammasambuddhasa, Namo tassa bhagavato, arahato, sammasambuddhasa, Namo tassa bhagavato, arahato sammasambuddhasa.
whenever I teach during the rainy season retreat, I always prefer to give the first six or seven talks about the practice of meditation, rather than the practice or rather the understanding of the dhamma, not that the two are separate, you always want to make sure that as the Buddha taught the dhamma,
that is the way that we practice the meditation. If one understands the way the Buddha taught the dhamma and understands it well, there should be no problem to be able to practice the meditation as a Buddha taught. The two are not separate. The two just support each other.
It's almost like the dhamma you understand, just like the dhamma we just heard and the anatta lakhana sutta. That dhamma is not to be disregarded when we're practicing meditation.
And so many of you heard and I hope you understand the meaning of those verses, that all these five khandas, whether it's a body, whether it's fade in a perception, sankhara, things like will,
the consciousnesses, six different types of consciousnesses, you can't tell them what to do. They're not yours, they're not under your control. So then people think, my goodness, we're those things are under our control. And how can we meditate? We can't do anything.
And there's something which is an important realization. I take this just from some of the science which you read about the nature of the will. It is true, you cannot say this free will. It's much more accurate to say this free won't. In other words, you can say no.
You can renounce. You can refuse to follow your defilements. You can say no to the hindrances. You can restrain the mind. And for a lot of times, I'm not sure about yourself, but certainly when I was young, that was one of the questions which kept on backing me about the suttas, about the teachings of the Buddha. And a lot of times the reason why I was bugged by those was nothing wrong with what the Buddha taught, but very much wrong with the translations which we had.
And especially, as you all know, some are vayama, right efforts. Because I knew as my own meditation experience, when I put effort in, effort to do something, to control something, to make something happen,
even good things happen, it always tended to make the meditation go pear-shaped. You're trying to stop the defilements, trying to get the mind to be peaceful, trying to get these beautiful, delicious awareness of the breath or awareness of nimittas coming up.
But then it was always troublesome. It wasn't easy. Something was wrong somewhere. And the Buddha did say no right efforts, did he? And of course he never said right efforts. He said, samma vayama..
So often it is because of inaccurate translations, or misunderstanding what the Buddha actually said causes these problems. Even just the classic mistranslation which I made so much about in my life as a monk, Samma samadhi, was being right concentration, no way.
And I don't mind just what do they used to do when I did the Christians who didn't follow what other people said to do. They said in the Spanish Inquisition, I don't mind if the Thai Inquisition or the Sri Lankan Inquisition comes to test me out. But that, there's no such things obviously.
But nevertheless the idea of that Samma samadhi, being concentration is something which, you know, I'm not staked in my life, but I'm very firm on. If you have ideas like that, you're never going to get close to nimittas, to jhanas, and to the enlightenment which relies on those experiences.
The stillness is not there. Stillness, not concentration is the right translation of Samma samadhi. So to a few of those translations now cause problems. Even like the translation of vinnana as consciousness. Yeah, you can say that that's valid, but it's much more meaningful. Not as valid, but meaningful. Takes you deeper into understanding what these things are to call it consciousnesses.
Six different types. Cause you see six different types of consciousnesses, then you get more of an idea of what the path of meditation is for. It's to isolate one of those forms of consciousnesses, the mind consciousness, and allow the other five of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching to subside.
To be so subdued, they disappear for a long time. And I often mention that it's a strange thing, but you can only know what a thing is, when it vanishes. You only know what water is, when there's none of it around. You only know what air is when the air runs out. You only know what light is when there's perfect darkness.
Many of these things to understand things fully, you have to go past them. So they're not there anymore. And that's one of the reasons why the path of meditation of stillness is to keep this mind under five senses so still that they vanish. So you just got this mind left, the sixth sense consciousness. And how do we actually do that if you try effort? It's counterproductive.
You can't make stillness happen. Making and doing and controlling and having all these skillful means. Well, you think a skillful means of doing something and think, okay, when it's all settled, then I can stop. You find you can't do that. You build up the momentum of striving. And because that momentum of striving is there, the mind just will not become still.
You can't just suddenly just hold it and think it's going to be still. You have to let it be still. I've been saying this the last few days to quite a few people about the Ajahn Cha simile, why do the leaves on the trees and the bushes keep moving? They only keep moving because it's a wind. It could be an earthquake because one of the monks got enlightened.
It does happen, you know. It was an earthquake apparently. I know that Nicholas said there was an earthquake when he was here. We felt one in the morning, only one morning. What was that day? That was the day of the entry to the rains, was it? Two Saturdays ago. So which month was it?
No. But anyway, the usual reason why the leaves on the tree moves is because of the wind. Something makes it move. Something outside of itself. And the job of, if you want to see what that leaf is like, when it's perfectly still, you don't hold it still. You don't threaten that bush or that tree. If you move once again, I'll send those monks from Kusala in and we'll cut you up.
Then we're just cutting up a tree a couple of days ago. Is that correct? What do you do? Okay, very good. Okay. So I'm not making it up.
So the only way you can get a tree leaves to be perfectly still is to guard it, protect it. It's not effort. It's like a protection, a guarding, a letting go, and not doing a free woe.
So there's no cause for those leaves on the tree or the bush to move. And when there's no cause for them to move, they just move less and less and less and less until out of friction they become perfectly still.
They don't have to hold them still. It's not that type of effort. It's the effort of restraint. Restraining the causes which make that movement, which destroys Samadhi. Restraining, protecting, saying no by guarding this mind from any type of doing.
And of course, I've known you for a long time. Most of you and talk with you, give interviews, discuss things with you.
You know how hard that sometimes is to protect the spine from all this moving. And the reason is because it's habitual tendencies.
Sometimes when I'm teaching a retreat and when there's lights on me and people can see me at the back, sometimes I do that similarly with a cup. You know, the cup of water only moves because I'm holding it and I put it down. And then I add that extra, similarly, extra metaphor, which is what I want to focus on next, was that you look at that cup, is it still yet?
You pick it up, no it's not still. And you test it out again, no it's not still. This is what one of those problems we have with our meditation. Impatients. And that's one of the reasons why I said to one of the Jhana Groove, he's only just come for the first day and I told him, I said, how's it going?
He said he's settling in and I said, please don't get enlightened on the first day.
He said, why not? And the answer was because you'll have nothing to do for the rest of your stay here. Okay, that's just a little bit of a jokey language, but still it's encouraging people to be patient.
That is very, very important, but it's not just patience like you know, you keep on trying and trying, hasn't happened today. I try, try, see how much tomorrow it means full on patience, 100% being in this moment and totally abandoning perceptions of the next moments.
And that's one of the reasons why, you know, and Ajahn Brahmali talking about the death contemplations and the best death contemplation is not, I might die any time. You say, I might die right now on the next breath, the next in-breath, the next out-breath. Even that is a bit slack.
Not the next in-breath, but right this moment. And that's type of what's happening right now and don't even try and send your perception off to anything other than this instant of this moment. I found that very powerful in meditation just to settle the mind down in this moment and just, it's so comfortable and free and fear free in this moment.
Right now, I'm here, I'm alive, I'm not being tortured right now. So what's the problem? The problem is, you know, what might happen in the next moment and they're on. It's amazing just how free it can feel when you settle yourself perfectly in this present moment when you're meditating.
So there's no perception of the next out-breath or the next in-breath or the next part of this breath. There's no perception of whether nim with precision as if you're making effort. It's just a natural settling down into this moment. It's a peaceful place to be.
This is one of the reasons why if a ball rolls downhill, it only stops in a place which is stable, a little ledge somewhere. If it's not stable, then it will keep on moving, keep on rolling. It's one of the reasons why in the meditation you do have this moments of stability when you don't have to do anything.
And you allow these moments to extend for such a long period of time. You don't have to move, so you don't move. You don't ever think what's going to happen next. You don't ever have these preferences. Yeah, I can experience this breath. It's quite nice, but I should be in jhanas by now.
I should be somewhere else by now. Please take away all of those theories. That is not just how this process works. I'm only remembering some of the suttas from a long time ago. I never just got into this and just checked it out a few moments ago.
But I do remember just, I think it was Ananda, venerable Ananda, was teaching just how we have the escapes from these different forms of suffering. And first of all, when he started talking like that, I kind of inside him, he said, sadhu, sadhu, sadhu.
Because even that word escape. Many times people look up monks and nuns, and say, you're just escaping from this world. When anyone says that to me, I said, yes, sadhu, sadhu, sadhu, sadhu, correct. Would you like to come with me?
This world is worth escaping from.
As long as you know exactly what you're doing, you're not escaping from one thing to another thing. You actually really are escaping. He said the escape. I don't remember the pali word was okasa, like an opening, an aperture. And we said the escape from the world of the world.
You know, just this world of having to sit down and give talks and figure out how to deal with a number of anagarikas wanting to come and stay in our monasteries, how to figure out how we're going to run retreats, and what we're going to do tomorrow with food, and all these other worldy things which keep on banging away at your outside.
You're trying to find a way in. And then sometimes you find a release from that. And of course the way you find a release from that is to me anyway, this present moment awareness. Whatever's going to happen tomorrow with the interviews which I have to do, phone calls which I would have to make, arrangements which I have to do for somebody else, all of those sorts of things.
You know, that's off in the future. And right now, if I do get myself into this personal moment, at least I've learned because of necessity. The only way I can have an escape from one of this is going inside. When we had a visiting monk here come a couple of days ago, I was, he was from the northeast.
And I just asked him if he had ever gone to Tom St. Pet's monastery. There was one of Ajahn Cha’s monasteries in the northeast in Ampermung Samsep. And just off one of the roads down there. And it was actually, there was a hill, like a mountain, not really a mountain, but it was a big rock which had risen up.
Most of the northeast was all just sand planes, paddy fields. This was a real rock.
And in that rock they had lots of caves. And I remember just seeing, actually being shown by Ajahn Cha, one of the caves he used to stay in. And he said he liked that particular cave because it had two entrances, basically a front door and a back door.
And a tiny window in the middle. And if when he was meditating trying to be peaceful he saw anybody coming out to the front entrance. You know, he checked them out. If it was someone he wanted to speak to, if it was somebody who didn't want to speak to, even monk, then he'd go out the back door.
And everything in the place was, there's nobody living in there. And I like the way he said that, because, you know, I've got a front door in my cave. I haven't got a back door.
But I think I can just stay inside no matter what anyway. But I kind of like that idea of like having this escape. You know, escape from the world of the five senses. First of all, escape from what it's doing by being in this present moment.
It escapes from fear and anxiety by being right in this moment.
And then when you disappear, it's like you lose part of yourself. The lose part of myself, which I don't know, you're a great organizer, a great administrator, a great planner or whatever it is. That part of you gets lost when you get into this present moment.
You get into this deeper place of silence. My goodness, I just adore silence. And when people say, oh, I don't know, I'm wrong. Yeah, you escape from the world and you're attached to silence. And of course, you know, my answer is yes. I admit it. I'm guilty.
I love silence. I really love it. Give me half a chance and I'll shut up inside. So this is how the Buddha taught. You know that Quotar often gives the Pasada, Pasada, Krsuta. If you get attached to these deep meditations, then you can be either streaming or once-returning, non return, or arahat.
That's what happens. It's only four possibilities. So anyway, being attached to silence. Because it's not, you say attached to silence. It's just something wrong there. You're attaching to something. It's actually not attachment. If you look at it the correct way, it's a letting go. It's a saying no.
It's a renouncing, relinquishing, abandoning. This tendency we have to try and define everything with words, inner words, with thoughts. The feeling that we can be safe when we have all those descriptions of words is some maps out the territory. It's really weird when Westerners, I say especially Westerns, Chinese were the same. Indians probably too.
When they came to sort of new territory, they would make maps of it. It's thinking that when you make a map of something, you have control over it. You know where you're going. You know what to do. But that's like making maps, thoughts, ideas, concepts. Especially in science.
In physics, sometimes we try to make these maps of concepts and ideas and theories and forces and fundamental particles. Or thinking that the more names we can have, the more control we can have over these things. You know that's one of those statements by Francis Bacon.
He was the founder of the Royal Society of Physics in UK. Brilliant scientist. And he was actually setting down the philosophical principles of science. And one of the things he said was the only way we can truly rely on is the way of negativity.
What I would say is the way of nature.
I'm going to make that connection in a moment. Negativity, and nature. Because the way of negativity, he said, was the only way you can really prove anything with a sense of reliability. It's to prove it doesn't exist or prove it's wrong. Theories should never ever attempt to prove a theory.
You put all your effort into disproving it. Because the proof, just proving it, is not good enough. You keep trying to disprove it, disprove it, disprove it. And if you try all your life to disprove it, you can't. It may be it is true. So this was actually learning how that's through thoughts.
When you see that theory is literature, it doesn't hold. Then you can actually accept it. It's not true. That's the only thing you can prove that things aren't true.
You can't prove they are true. It just means you haven't found the reason why it's negated yet. So that's what happens with the thinking.
How many of you, when you have some sort of idea, think you're right about something, you create more thoughts, more evidence, more justification. And it's amazing just even at the, I was talking about where I went to school and university I went to, even at Cambridge they had the Flat Earth Society.
Of course people mock that, they think, oh that's people, stupid scientists who believe in a Flat Earth. Of course it's nothing to do with that at all. It's just you have to just show about the weaknesses and proofs that you can give a decent proof about anything. You can even just prove that this Earth is flat.
And it's just like a misperception of the sight or the lines of sight, a bent by gravity or some other forces. And the Earth is really flat. It's just showing how you cannot rely that well on logical proofs. That's one of the things which I am grateful for that type of science, to create that legitimate, honest doubt in what I could see and deduce from my five senses.
Was that real or not? And then after a while you learn how silence is far more dependable because you're not using thoughts anymore. You're not using your logic and reducing things to these ideas which can be helpful, but they can't really get deep inside of something.
And when your silence, then your mind starts to get powerful. You get this beautiful energy coming up. And that always surprises me because right now I'm using words. But when actually these things actually happen, you realize just how so much thinking and talking and working things out misses a lot, misses way too much.
And it's also how easy it should be to be silence. I know sometimes people have criticized me because I just keep on saying, our meditation is easy. Of course it is.
What can be easier than sitting down there in this moment, not planning or doing anything, not thinking, just aware.
Beautifully aware. It's easy because it's a non-doing. It's a non-comparing, non-complaining, not asking, not wanting. Nothing can be more easy than that.
Except we have been conditioned out of that type of idea, out of that attitude.
A lot of times people think, we're just sitting there doing nothing.
You're lazy, good for nothing. I could have said lazy bump, but I decided not to say that. How many of you thought, yes, he did say that. You see, that's a problem. We're always criticizing, giving comments. So it's much nicer. Have you ever done that, allowed a talk to happen and just sat there and just listened?
I've not thought anything. Just allowed it to go in. Again, just talking to some visitors a few days ago. It's highly minding when I went to even primary school.
I had a quite silent mind. It was so silent, I remember just, I was always doing well at school. It's a primary school.
It was called a poor primary school. I had lots of migrants in there. When I was at that primary school, I remember just, I was smart. So eventually I had some good results from being smart. The teacher trusted me. That's always doing very well. So one day, this is just nothing to do with the talk.
It's a nice anecdote, so you don't think I'm getting too serious. The one day, my father had the afternoon of work and I used to go home for lunch. He was there at lunchtime. He said, I was such a shame you're going to school this afternoon because I have these two free tickets to Wembley.
There was a World Cup qualifying match between England and Poland. He had two tickets. It's a shame you have to go to school this afternoon. And then I said to my dad, well, I can always ask my teacher. And the teacher, Mr. Jones, his name was, I still remember his name, he was a disciplinarian of that school.
And so I had the nerve to go up to him and say, Mr. Jones, there's a football match this afternoon. My dad's got two tickets, he's waiting outside the playground of the school. I was only ten years age, or eight or eleven years of age at the time. Can I have the afternoon at school to go and watch the football match?
And Mr. Jones said, yeah, don't see why not. So I'd be after New York school and watch the football match with the teacher's permission. And I was closing and I was doing well. And probably because I also had the nerve to do that. Anyway, the reason I say stuff like that is because, yeah, I was kind of always getting top marks.
And I do remember once, it was a quiz when the question was, what's the name for a female, I think, duck or something? And I put my hand up, it's called a pen, B-E-N in English. I was only one who knew the answer. Leaving the teacher was surprised. And then I remembered even when he told me that a few months before.
My memory was always really good. And I know why my memory was good. Because when somebody was talking, I really was listening. My brain was silent. I wasn't thinking about how long I've got to enjoy this, what I'm going to do tomorrow, this is boring. Who cares what the female duck is called?
I was actually listening with a quiet mind. It's obvious that I've been meditating before somewhere because no other kid in the class was doing that. And he gave me this brilliant memory. And I realized that just that silence, when an adjunct child was giving a talk, even though some of it, I just didn't even understand the meaning of the language even.
My tie was not that good at first. I don't know, there's something strange when you're silent. You understand so much more. And you can record it afterwards.
It's sati mindfulness in the sense of having a very strong memory. So that silence is important in meditation.
It's important in the Dhamma. All those ideas and theories and concepts, five khandas and six sense bases and eightfold paths and four noble truths. That's the description. In the silence, you can actually experience a territory and get to those places. Feel them. Experience them. And of course, that is really, really powerful.
If it happens, what you experience is really contradictory to what the Buddha said, then you've got to do some checking out, is that really what the Buddha said? Is it a wrong translation? You check it out. These days, because of people like Ajahn Sujato and Ajahn Brahmali, they've got some pretty good translations around now.
So it shouldn't be that hard to check these things out. And when you do, often you find, actually, it's true. What you've experienced, you just know you're a bit confused on the words. And the silence, it's like in the silence you can see it. You can experience it, it's there. So it gives an extra level of certainty to your experiences.
And of course, that's going to really inspire you. Why? You're experiencing the Dhamma as the Buddha taught it. That doesn't just make your eyes boggle.
That's only a metaphor. And it's just one of the things which I keep saying. When you read, I was doing lots of meditation before, you read what these things are supposed to mean.
But then, later on when you realize, yeah, you've got to check out your meditation. And you've got to just fit with what the Buddha was saying. And then you start to read, I've heard me say this before, but I'm just indulging myself. What does it feel like in the first genre?
What are you aware of? And one of the descriptions of what you're aware of, Sambodhi sukha. And you've heard that again, that is goosebumps, even now. Sambodhi sukha, it means, and you've read enough of the suttas, you know what those words mean, enlightenment, happiness, the bliss of freedom, whatever you wish to call enlightenment.
And of course, you knew that this was not enlightenment, you know, in the first genre, but this is how it felt. And my goodness, you know, please excuse me, I can't remember, Marley, but one of the reasons I say this was because you were talking at a patimokkha last night, and even today, about pilgrimage is to India,
which is a wonderful thing to do.
But quite frankly, you know, going to see these places, or going to feel how the Buddha felt in one of those places, which one would you prefer? The physical view through the first of the senses, the sound, it didn't sound, when you go over there, how it sounds today is not like it's actually in the time of the Buddha smells, tastes and touches, but the mental experience.
That's why I say this is a real way of visiting the holy places of Buddhism. You can actually experience how the Buddha felt. Wow. And that's always through stillness, not just through stillness, but stillness, also not through stillness, sorry, I'm mixing up stillness and silence.
Silence has to start and get very strong. And after a while, just being in this moment, silent, I can't see how it can happen. That's why I say it's easy, it's automatic. And once you get the silence, so it's silence is delightful. Even the beginning of silence, it's not Sambodhi Sukha yet, but the beginning of silence is just almost like pure or wonderful.
It has a special taste and flavor to it. I always think of silence as one of the parts of holiness or holy place. And there's some worldly stories. I remember this, I was a Buddhist from a very early age, but whenever I was in London and you were doing some business or whatever, one of the places I loved to go to was Westminster Cathedral.
It wasn't a tourist, I suppose it was a tourist trap even then, but you didn't have to pay to go in. And it's just a vast number of chapels and little lobbies and places you can go to. And I would go in there just so I can sit quietly and just, I don't think I was crossing my legs and meditating, but just sitting on one of those wooden pews, closing my eyes and just regenerating energies after walking, doing some business or shopping.
And there was always quiet in there. In those days the Anglican religion was not that popular. It had a huge area which was quiet. That's why I loved it. I remember just going through London getting visas to get my, yeah, I was actually before this, visas to actually to go to the village.
To actually to go, that's right, on a trip to India. I thought I was a Buddhist, I should go to India and see the holding places and get all these visas first of all.
I remember when I did return from India, I thought, right, that's it, no more travel.
Next year I was off to Thailand to become a monk.
Nevertheless, getting so many visas and then get tired, so I used to go to Westminster Abbey, so not, I can't really call it cathedral. Westminster Abbey, just find a nice quiet place and sit there. And I've met, that was the last time I went in there because when I went in there, they had a PA system.
And there's constant announcements and sermons and, please don't forget to give a donation when you leave, all that sort of stuff. And that was almost like sacrilege. So actually to turn a place of quiet and peace into a place like that, it destroyed, I never went in there again in my whole life since.
But nevertheless, that idea of silence and all your thoughts stop. And you are in this moment, aware. And to this day, when people ask me, I jump around, what is your definition of mindfulness? That's my definition, present moment awareness, silence. In real silence, not just every few moments saying something, but it's in the background somehow, I'm in real silence.
Nothing moves in the mind. So how can you go and watch your breathing then?
The breathing comes to you. You're just sitting there watching this silence. You can't have any will because silence, you do need that sort of information to get much of a will going. You do silence and then you do aware of your breath.
You don't tell the breath what to do. You don't tell the only thing inside, because the silence is gone. It is perfectly empty of words, instructions, orders, commands.
It can be a bit scary at first because it is like something of you has been taken away. As you think yourself are, all your knowledge, all of your training.
You don't have to worry about knowledge because what's underneath that knowledge, all that learning you've had, it's what's underneath that, that stays.
I say it stays because it's that inclination of the mind. Not put into words and ideas and concepts, but it's the inclinations. It's like the slope is there and you can't resist, but just skiing down that slope. That's for Ajahn mali.Brahmali.
Skiing down that slope, you don't do any effort at all, you're always upright. That means that you're going in the correct direction. It's totally silence. You don't give any orders. It's beautiful thing like the breath just happens. It is delightfully, it just happens. You're silent all the time. If you haven't got that silence strong enough, then what happened?
You get the delightful breath. Yeah, the delightful breath. It all falls apart. Then you get nimittas light. It doesn't matter what type of light. Something happens.
You're silent. You don't describe it. You don't sort of try. I've got to remember this. I've got to tell somebody about this afterwards.
I've actually got a nimitta. Yeah, I've got a nimitta. You don't say anything. You're totally still silent. So you shouldn't have said still. The total stillness is a bit further down the track. You're silent. Then afterwards, when you come out from these stages, how come you're trying to put into words what you experienced in silence?
There's a kind of, you shouldn't be able to do this. People always want these descriptions rather than the experiences. Sometimes the descriptions are what hinders the experiences. They're expecting something. They say, oh, this is the right thing. Just let the mind become silent and from that silence, let it become still. Be patient just in this moment, not looking at the future at all.
Stay right here. That becomes this whole in time. So you're not in the future, in the past anymore. You just go into this present moment when it's into the silence.
You can experience the breath of the air, sure. You can experience nimittas, yes, sure. You keep going inwards, into these holes.
And then right in the center, metaphorically, don't look for centers of the nimitta.
You find these genres. One after another. Second one is this hole in the middle of the first genre, metaphorically. And you go through all these genres and then you escape from samsara. So stillness is important. You ever will that?
Of course you don't. The will is suffering. You're escaping from suffering. Any form of suffering doesn't belong in those states. In those states, it's like suffering disappearing. It's suffering being anicca. Notice rising and passing and rising again and passing away.
Carking that becomes so endless. It rises and it passes. It doesn't rise again.
For hours. That's more interesting. And once you come out afterwards, just like remembering the name of a female duck, pen. You never tried to, I've got to remember that. I've got to remember that. I've got to remember that. It's just there for you.
Just when you come out afterwards and there's no hindrances at all. With the no hindrances is also a lack of ego as well. A lack of sense of ownership of anything.
A lack of, you know, one of the reasons why people have a sense of ownership is, you know, the fear of other people criticizing them. You're stupid, you're wrong. You're just confused.
Worring what other people say about you. When all of that is gone, you don't care what other people think of you. They call you an idiot. Just a fundamentalist Buddhist. Just somebody who's just too into the suttas. You know, the things that change in the time of the Buddha, we've got the second turning of the wheel and the third turning of the wheel.
Oh, good. I've had it somebody with laughing. Oh, no, thank you. Because only it's tall, so it's nice to have sound effects. So, only all these things, it's a letting go happens. You're peaceful, you're silent. And while you can be in this moment and silence, and throughout the day, the easier it is to do when it's your meditation time.
We do talk too much, each one of us, me included. See on this retreat if you can learn how to talk less. And be silent more. But don't just mean with your mouth.
We know thinking mind. Just pause. And to me that silence is just so gorgeous.
Thank you for listening.