Befriend Your Mind

But at the moment, I'm particularly interested in exploring qualities of Samadhi.

Samadhi, the, the qualities here, uh, bring to life a coming together, a bringing together, a gathering, you could say, of energy.

Positive, enriching, um, energies coming together.

The, a common or usual way of translating Samadhi is concentration.

I'm gonna avoid that word 'cause it has, I think, unhelp- can have unhelpful connesa- connotations of straining or making the mind narrow.

So if we can just put that to aside for the moment and, uh, explore Samadhi more along the lines of this bringing together of body, mind, and the present moment.

Sangharakshita has, um, the Buddhist teacher of the Triratna Movement, yeah, the founding teacher, has a, a, a pithy, um, description of Samadhi.

Being where you are fully, kindly, and mindfully.

So kind of, in a way, he's bringing Samadhi and Vipassana together here.

Being where you are fully, kindly, and mindfully.

And this will take us or invite a kind of calm, peaceful, abiding in experience.

So it's also we're making peace with whatever is going on.

And in an embodied way.

It's not just about what's the head.

Meditation is not happening in the head.

Yeah? It's an embodied awareness.

It's embodying mindful- uh, embodying metta.

You know, the practice we've just, we've just done.

Goodwill, kindness, benevolence.

So really living these qualities and not just trying to, uh, impose them onto ourselves.

So gathering, a gathering of energies without strain in a quite a natural way.

There's another Buddhist teacher that I'm, uh, have a lot of respect for, Bhikkhu Analayo, and his description of Samadhi is, "It's as if the whole of our experience is held in a gentle and loving embrace so that all of its usual fragmentation vanishes." Yeah? Unified, collected, composed.

And I think this usual fragmentation, I'm sure we're all familiar with this [laughs].

We're tossed about by life.

You know, can't decide or p- pushed and pulled.