Expert: Alex Wilding - 1/28/2009

Question
QUESTION: Dear Alex





My questions are directly related with  sati when i practice it in line with my daily activities



I do "rise and falling of abdomen" as a meditation ( as introduced by ven Mahasi saydow). When I  practice it while I am engaged in my daily life activities , I find following difficulties , if you can , please help me



(1)   while  I anchor on movements of my abdomen  , if I happen to hear something , I see it as "with the heard , there will be just the heard ", that is it !apparently  no further intake at all  ! and then if I don't have any other signal from sensory doors , I go back to pay attention on rise and falling of abdomen



so doing this way works very well for heaps activities with  all sensing doors as secondary objects to my meditation  , but with few activities I get lost   as follows





*** just suppose an important instructive topic to be listen from a speaker for about a hour from radio or something



While I am listening to this  topic , if I do like as above  i.e.( "with the heard , there will be just the heard "  or in another word  with  sati ) without any intake  and flow moment to moment in this way .End of the topic , I feel like I haven't got anything fruitful from the speaker  to my day to day life or even for the development of meditation ( even if that topic was all about my meditation development ). If I would have done normal listening to the talk  ,then obviously  I would be able to grab the essentials of the topic



(2)   when I speaking or sorting out day to day  encountered problem , I have to certainly recall related past things and analyze or some times imagine hypothetical situation in future to manifest "what if "  situations



I feel guilty that ,here  we go..!, I go past and future without stick to present moment even though I am aware of what I am engaged in the particular moment as  a whole ( ie as holistically rather than in an atomic manner)





if I try to do these things mindfully (with sati ) , I feel  like my mind becomes more inactive than normal, some times stuck all together.



Then I realize that this  failure in my mind and go away from this mindfulness exercise  and do all such work as a normal person does and  after finishing such a  more complicated or brain exercising functions than walking ,sitting etc , I engaged back in the meditation as normal.



Therefore I'm wandering how come I keep mindfulness( sati ) going all the way till I fall into sleep without any  interruption in middle of the course of the day as learnt from the book "practical Exersices in vipassana meditation –by Maheshi shedow" and I find this as  a loophole in my own practice







(3)   can we do two things mindfully  at same time ?

eg reading a news paper while I eat , if it is possible , how would I train my mind?







Pls advise me , if I got lost somewhere in understanding the mindfulness(sati) , pls tell where I then lost  (hopefully I reckon I don't know what mindfulness really is.. )





Mettha



Sirimevan


ANSWER: Hi Sirimevan
You probably realize that Mahasi Saydaw's system is quite different from the ones I practice, though I have read about them. To get full answers, you'd have to ask someone familiar with that system.

All I can say at this stage, is that in the systems I know, there is a difference between
a) specific practice sessions when we might be working on focussing on some particular thing (such as the breath), and
b) between-session times, which are perhaps even more important, but in a different way.
At between-session times we would hope in some way to remain mindful, in the sense of not getting totally distracted and wild, and we would hope in some way to continue cultivating. I could put my understanding like this:
When doing sitting practice - do sitting practice
When eating - eat
When listening to a lecture - listen and think

Does that help at all?


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi alex

As you said in your previous reply


The last point ” When listening to a lecture - listen and think”  is the main confusion where I  can remain mindfully

If I think about particular point of a  lecture while listening  , then I notice my thinking mind as thinking . that means I try to put my mind under constant surveillance in whatever my mind does.
Then what happens is that I would lose even more points from the lecture than that I would do it in open mind like everybody does
That is a problem I still have ……


There is a another question

Almost every teacher teaches thus  when you do the meditation, mindfulness of breathing (Ana pana sati), basically to keep attention anywhere  between nose tip and upper lip so that one would get sensation of inhalation and exhalation .

But in the Four foundation of mindfulness sutta(satara sati pattana sutta), under the section of mindfulness of body (kayanu passana) , Buddha disclosed  how to do “ana pana sati meditation” and he doesn’t mention any specific point that we got to pay our attention .And he simply tells us just be aware of whole breath (breath-body) sensation in holistic manner knowing long breadth and short breath so on rather than atomic manner  staying at one point lying in the breath –body .

Can you explain why this contradiction is for me ?


metta
siri


Answer
Hi Siri,
When you say "If I think about particular point of a lecture while listening, then I notice my thinking mind as thinking. That means I try to put my mind under constant surveillance in whatever my mind does," it seems to me that, in order to try to be mindful, you are adding an extra layer of complication. Instead of undistractedly thinking, you are distracting yourself by trying to tell yourself that you are thinking. It is a real problem, but I don't think that "being mindful" of something necessarily is the same as using words to talk to yourself about it. Of course, with breathing, we may well use words like "in", "out" to help keep attention, but if we try to watch our intellectual processes in that way, then it is like using a knife to cut itself. So when listening to a lecture, I think that being mindful of our thinking is more like the mindfulness we can have of breath when we *don't* use words to help keep our focus.

I believe the *specific* focus on that particular spot is a relatively late development. Well, it may well have existed for a long time, but I think the strong focus on that spot may even have gained popularity from Mahasi Sayadaw's teaching. As far as I know, older and more general Buddhist teaching on that method has not put quite so much emphasis on that spot.

I hope that helps a bit.