The 16 Breath Meditation

Today I want to talk about what is known as 16 breath meditation. Buddha taught this meditation in his early days and they say if you follow it, that has all the ingredients to be liberated. It is also known as Full Awareness of Breathing meditation. It allows one to generate mindfulness and develop awakening.

Here is how we practice this:

The First Breath: Breathing in a long breath, I know I am breathing in a long breath, breathing out, I know I am breathing out a long breath.

The Second Breath: Breathing in a short breath, I know I am breathing in a short breath, breathing out, I know I am breathing out a short breath.

Explanation: These two breaths remove forgetfulness and unnecessary thinking. This generates mindfulness and allows us to be in the present moment.

The Third Breath: Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I am aware of my whole body.

Explanation: This breath puts us in touch with our body making us aware of every part of our body.

The Fourth Breath: I am breathing in and making my whole body calm and at peace. I am breathing out and making my whole body calm and at peace.

Explanation: This breath allows us to realize the calmness and peace in the body and puts body and mind in harmony.

The Fifth Breath: I am breathing in and feeling joyful. I am breathing out and feeling joyful.

The Sixth Breath: I am breathing in and feeling happy. I am breathing out and feeling happy.

Explanation: These two breaths create joy and peace that nourishes body and mind. Happiness and joy arise naturally within you. By being mindful, you are able to transform neutral feelings into joyful feelings.

The Seventh Breath: I am breathing in and am aware of the activities of my mind. I am breathing out and am aware of the activities of my mind.

The Eighth Breath: I am breathing in and making the activities of my mind calm and peaceful. I am breathing out and making the activities of my mind calm and peaceful.

Explanation: These two breaths allow you to look at all the feelings that arise within you whether pleasant, neutral or unpleasant. They enable you to look at these feelings deeply into their roots and nature and make your feelings calm and at peace.

The Ninth Breath: I am breathing in and am aware of my mind. I am breathing out and am aware of my mind.

The Tenth Breath: I am breathing in and making my mind happy and at peace. I am breathing out and making my mind happy and at peace.

The Eleventh Breath: I am breathing in and concentrating my mind. I am breathing out and concentrating my mind.

The Twelfth Breath: I am breathing in and liberating my mind. I am breathing out and liberating my mind.

Explanation: With these four breaths, you recognize all states of the mind—perceptions, thinking, discrimination, happiness, sadness, and doubt. It allows you to observe the activities of the mind and release obstacles of the mind.

The Thirteenth Breath: I am breathing in and observing the impermanent nature of all phenomena. I am breathing out and observing the impermanent nature of all phenomena.

The Fourteenth Breath: I am breathing in and observing the fading nature of all phenomena. I am breathing out and observing the fading nature of all phenomena.

The Fifteenth Breath: I am breathing in and concentrating on liberation. I am breathing out and concentrating on liberation.

The Sixteenth Breath: I am breathing in and focusing on letting go. I am breathing out and focusing on letting go.

Explanation: With these four breaths, we observe true nature of Dharma. First with observation of impermanent nature of phenomena, then with observation of fading nature of phenomena, then contemplating liberation and finally contemplating letting go. Hope this all makes sense and as we develop your practice, you are able to perfect this over time.

Karma & Dharma

We have been talking about Karma for more than a month now. One thing that keeps coming up is what happens if you do something as part of your job. Does it have a negative effect associated with it? In general, the answer is yes with a few caveats.

Let’s talk about the exceptions first. If there is an imminent danger to living beings and doing harm to one person protects many lives, then there is no negative effect of Karma. There are examples of these in spiritual texts. One example is of Buddha. In his previous life, Buddha was traveling on a boat full of merchants. Through his clairvoyance, he saw that one of the passengers was about to kill the rest of the merchants. To save all of those lives and to save that one passenger from getting negative karma for killing all of those people, Buddha killed the one passenger.

In today’s world, it would be equivalent to knowing an imminent terror threat and neutralizing the terrorists before they could attack. But barring an imminent threat to many lives, there is no justification for negative actions that I could find in the textbooks.

Now it is debatable whether simply working somewhere generates negative action or not. For example, let’s say someone works as a bookkeeper at a slaughterhouse. I am not sure that they generate negative action of killing just by working at the slaughterhouse. Because for negative actions to occur four conditions have to be present as we discussed last week.

So let’s talk about another exception which is what if something is part of your job. The so-called “dharma” we keep talking about. In ancient times, a soldier on a battlefield who followed certain rules and only fought with someone of their equivalency was an exception. This soldier was not affected by his actions. However, in today’s world, modern warfare is such that there are hardly any rules. Everyone is killing everyone else without discrimination and that is certainly not considered an exception. Also, if someone is following an order but knows that the order is morally wrong, then we have a duty not to follow that order otherwise negative actions are attached. Also, continuing killing after someone is no longer a threat has negative actions attached to it. Another thing I want to point out is that a soldier has a duty to avoid collateral damage. If trying to kill one bad person ends up killing 10 innocent people, then there is a negative action attached to it. Again, I refer back to the four conditions we discussed last week.

Now let’s come back to real life. For those of us who are not soldiers, if our job makes us compromise our moral standards, in my opinion, if possible, we should find another job. Let’s take the example of the bookkeeper in a slaughterhouse. Even if they are not collecting any negative karma, the fact that it is against their moral standards would keep bothering them. It would become stressful at times. And it makes sense in that case to go find a different place to work. If for nothing else then for our own sanity.

Buddha said that ” … a lay follower should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison.”

So those five professions one should avoid for sure. Beyond that, a lot of this comes down to our own moral compass and what we are comfortable with. For example, as a rule, I have stayed away from investing in properties where tenants sell alcohol or marijuana. This is a personal rule with the logic being that if I don’t want to consume something then I should avoid making money out of the consumption of those substances.

While doing research on this topic, I came across Laxmi Tantra (one of the five panch tantras). According to Laxmi Tantra, one should avoid making a livelihood through

1. Living off other people (begging for example)

2. Loan sharking

3. Bribery

4. Living by a profession or industry which directly or indirectly causes suffering to other beings such as the meat and leather industries, munitions industries, or brewing and selling of alcohol or drugs.

5. Superintending mines and factories is also forbidden because it can lead to corruption, harshness, and exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It also leads to the depredation of the environment through deforestation and pollution which are considered sinful activities by the Shastras.

The seven legitimate ways for a spiritual aspirant to make a living are:

1. daya — inheritance

2. labha — profit from honest commerce and trade.

3. kraya — purchase of land and assets for the purpose of speculation.

4. jaya — winning prizes or money in a competition

5. prayoga — through the application of learning and skills to benefit others – through counseling, advising, teaching, etc.

6. karma yoga — through a profession or a vocational job serving others.

7. satpratigraha — the lawful acceptance of gifts — that is, unsolicited donations.

So I hope this clears up a lot of confusion around the issue and hopefully, I have not made the matter worse!

Freedom from Self Consciousness

We all tend to get self-conscious every now and then. So today, I thought we will discuss how to free ourselves from being self-conscious. Let’s begin with why do we get self-conscious?  In general, we get self-conscious because we feel people may be judging us or we are worried about how we will be perceived or we worry about upsetting others.

Self-consciousness is a mental state where we are pre-occupied with our self-image. That’s it. There is nothing more mysterious than that. Excessive self-consciousness causes us to be not present in the moment. Because we are thinking about what the other person is thinking of us or if they are judging us. So rather than being fully present in the conversation or the event, we are not participating. We are there but we are not there if you will. Our uncontrolled thoughts have taken over and we are in some distant place.

These uncontrolled thoughts are what Buddha calls delusions. A delusion is a state of mind that arises from inappropriate attention making our mind uncontrolled.

Everywhere we look, our mind is polluted by this surface of self-concern. It just alters everything we see. You know, we can’t actually see what’s going on because we’re so obsessed with ourselves. And that’s just reflected in our mind. So why is it? Why is it that we regard ourselves as so precious, but not others? I am just one person others are countless? Why are we so obsessed with it? Me? Me, me?

One major reason is we’re so familiar with thinking about ourselves, it’s a familiarity of habit.

Gesla says, Why because we’re so familiar with self-cherishing we’re very familiar with an attitude that puts ourselves first. We have been doing it since beginningless time in every life, which is why we’re still circling in suffering. Since beginningless, time we have grasped at a truly existent I this is the root of it. So a truly existent I is an I that exists from its own side.

We think there’s a real me or real I and we think everyone else is not me or either other or self or there are also other or them or you know, him or her or something like that.

Now, let’s talk about what we can do to reduce our self-consciousness in our day to day lives.

There are a number of things we can do. One of them is to stop comparing ourselves with others.

Often we find ourselves comparing ourselves with other people. Deep down all of us know that it is not worth it but we end up doing it anyway. As Teddy Roosevelt said, Comparison is the thief of joy.

To stop comparing ourselves with other people, what we need to realize is that when you are comparing yourself with someone else, you are comparing to their best version if you will. You don’t know what goes on in their life. You know what they have projected outwardly. Sometimes you only know what you see on their social media feed. Trust me, never believe what you see on social media.

If you have to compare, compare yourself to your past self. See where you were and how far you have come. This allows us to realize abundance in our life. It also allows you to realize your own strengths. This will hopefully, make you take actions that speak to your strength as opposed to someone else’s strengths.

Another way to stop yourself from comparing yourself to others is something we have talked about a lot here. We start every session with a gratitude attitude. If you are grateful for what you have and truly practice that, you will not feel the need to compare. Gratitude allows us to be joyful and joyful people tend not to compare themselves with other people.

One other way that helps in this situation is contentment. Again, we have talked about this a lot. If you are content with what you have then there is no reason for comparison. Also, remind yourself that money doesn’t buy happiness it never did and never will.

Another thing that helps with self-consciousness is developing a positive mindset.

Have you noticed that a lot of times when life gives us lemons, we tend to complain about the sourness of those lemons? A very few people are able to make lemonades out of those lemons that life throws at them.

Another helpful thing with self-consciousness is knowing that grass is not always greener on the other side.

What do I mean by that? Well, let’s look at our social media habits to begin with. We start looking at Facebook, Tik-Tok, LinkedIn and whatever else that we spend our time on half our waking hours.

People put exaggerated self of themselves on social media. I saw an interesting post on LinkedIn the other day. It says someone passed their driving test. Now, it is a simple thing and people go through that routinely in their lives. But they post it on LinkedIn something like, I want to thank my parents, my teachers, my friends, for helping me achieve this milestone in my life. I am humbled by the opportunity to perform at this exceptional level and all kind of nonsense like that. Now it is a little over the top but reality is not too far from it.

But that is reality. So don’t believe everything you see and hear. Don’t put people on pedestal based on their personas. You don’t know what goes on in people’s lives.

Another thing that helps with self-consciousness is the fact that we don’t identify with our delusions. In the book How To Transform Your Life, Gesla says that we need to stop identifying with our delusions. Gesla says delusions are distorted conceptual thoughts that arise within the mind like waves on the ocean, just as it is possible for waves to die down, so it is possible for our delusions to end.

Buddha compared our Buddha nature to a golden nugget in the dirt. No matter how disgusting a person’s delusions may be the real nature of them is undefiled like pure gold.

And it all starts with our relationship with ourselves. Our sense of self has to be based on an authentic experience. Our sense of self is based on an authentic understanding of who we are, which is based on this experience of a genuine feeling of peace, even if it’s only relative peace compared to our normal lack of peace. And on that basis, we can become a peaceful people with the potential to grow, the potential to get wiser and freer. I am not a person who hates other people, but I have empathy and love other people, delusions get in the way of me, but they’re not me. I’m a loving person. I’m a compassionate person.

Healing Relationships

We have talked about relationships quite a bit over the years. But today, I want to discuss how we heal our fractured relationships. We all have relationships that are not where they need to be and we must repair and heal these relationships.

But that starts with improving our relationship with ourselves. We need to accept ourselves, feel good about ourselves, and not identify with our faults and limitations or delusions.

They did a study and asked people out of 10 thoughts they have, how many of those are uncontrolled or unwanted. To my surprise, people said 9 out of 10 of their thoughts were uncontrolled. These uncontrolled thoughts are what Buddha calls delusions. A delusion is a state of mind that arises from inappropriate attention making our mind uncontrolled.

We need to learn to develop happier relationships with ourselves. We need to learn to control our thoughts. We need to believe in our pure nature, our Buddha nature, that golden nugget we keep talking about every week.

So this is the foundation for our ability to make spiritual progress, or any ability to let go of our faults, limitations, and delusions, and any ability to see others as precious, and important, and cherish them. At the moment, if we keep thinking other people are inherently awful, faulty, nasty, and deluded. And that is their fault. And they’re to blame for everything that goes wrong.

It’s very hard to improve our relationships with others when we really can’t stand them. If we think they’re faulty and horrible and awful, it’s impossible to improve our relationship with them.

Improving our relationships with others comes from understanding that others are at heart just like us and that they suffer from delusions just as we do and they want to be happy just as we do. We need to understand when people harm others, they are controlled by their delusions.

Gesla says delusions are distorted conceptual thoughts that arise within the mind like waves on the ocean, just as it is possible for waves to die down, so it is possible for our delusions to end.

Buddha compared our nature to a golden nugget in the dirt. No matter how disgusting a person’s delusions may be the real nature of them is like pure gold.

In the heart of even the cruelest and most degenerate person exists, the potential for limitless love and compassion and wisdom unlike seeds of our delusions which can be destroyed, this potential is utterly indestructible. That is the pure essential nature of everything.

When we meet other people, rather than focus on the delusions, thinking you’re awful, you’re greedy, selfish, you’re this, you’re that. Rather than doing that, we focus on the goal of evolution, I see you, I see your potential, I see that you have a pure nature. So this will not only enable us to regard them as special and unique but also help us to bring out their good qualities.

Another way to improve our relationships with others is to change our perspective.

Geshe-la says to imagine someone whom we regard as especially precious, such as our child, partner, or mother. This person seems to have unique qualities that make him or her stand out from others. We treasure and want to take special care of this person who has good qualities like from their own side is just precious. And even when they’re acting out, even when they’re being horrible. We see past that because we know that they have these qualities. There was a decision that we made somewhere along the line, to love this person, you may be in any different number of factors including Karma that came into play. But at some point there was, you know, I’m just committed to viewing this person in this way.

And we can choose to see everyone as having special qualities as being worthy of love as being worthy of happiness. Alternatively, we see someone and we think they’re horrible and mean and messing with our plans, and unkind and manipulative and whatever however we’re seeing them, then it can be very helpful to think, Okay, I’m seeing them like that, they seem to be filled with horrible qualities. Right? There definitely in the way of my happiness, they are my problem, not my delusions, them. But we can actually look at them from a completely different angle. We can think, for example, other people are looking at this person. It seems someone really special and lovely. This person may have a husband or a wife or dog, who looks at them or their mom looks at them and thinks they’re just the most special, beautiful person in the world. And when they think that mother, for example, that husband looks at me looking at them thinking they’re awful, they’re like, they don’t get it. This person is not awful. This person is lovely. You’ve got it wrong. Whenever we shift our perspective, broaden our perspective. Then our thoughts change, and our whole attitude towards that person shifts naturally shifts.

If we start looking at people who we find have difficulties with through the eyes of someone who doesn’t have difficulties with them, something shifts in our mind. Something loosens up and space opens up in my mind because there is nothing inherently awful about them. If they’re behaving badly towards us, it’s their delusions making them do that. But they’re not inherently awful if they were inherently awful, everybody who looked at them would see the same awful person. But actually, there’s probably no one who sees them in exactly the same way we see them.

So if we understand that we are not our delusions, we can come to understand others are not their delusion. So that’s one way of shifting our perspective and getting on better with other people. Another way is to think that people were inherently awful and deluded everybody would see them that way. But they don’t. And actually, think how this person views them and actually try and maybe put ourselves in the position of their husband or their mother or whatever and look at them through those eyes, actually see what’s happening shift. Start seeing their redeeming qualities. Let the light in.

I Feel Lucky!

We often talk about how our delusions—anger, attachment, hatred, jealousy, and so forth are the root of our problems. We have discussed ways we can eliminate those from our lives and need to do so. Today, I thought we would flip the script on its head so to speak! How about we talk about how fortunate we are to be here and now?

Those of you from Colorado may have seen this advertisement on TV they used to run 20 or so years ago. They would show you beautiful mountain scenes and a voiceover appears saying some people come here for a vacation and you live here. Don’t you think you are lucky? Buy a lotto. And that pretty much sums up my feeling about where we are in life today.

Let me explain. We will begin with the simplest of points. We have this human life. Now if we believe in reincarnation then you know that a human life is not always guaranteed. Why is it advantageous to have a human life? Well, for one thing, we as humans can do something about our unhappiness or our suffering. We have the freedom to make choices that will affect our lives. I had a discussion about this once with a friend who runs an international charity on humane education. She said, given a choice she would rather come back as a dog in a rich family who cared for her. She thought that was better than a human life because she would not need to worry about anything. That’s because she and all of us for that matter don’t know what a dog is going through. He may be anxious all the time and we would not know it at all. He has no choice about his well-being. He is at the mercy of its owners if you will. So coming back to this human life, we have the ability to make decisions that not only affect our current situation but also our future.

Now granted most humans don’t realize how lucky they are to have this human life. I am going to go back to my lottery analogy. Statistics show that most people who win jackpots, lose it within five years. Think about it, within five years, they have lost it all! Some say they go back to their normal. But to me, it is worse than that. Now they are used to a certain lifestyle and they don’t have a way to provide for it. Before, at least they did not have the lifestyle to support it even though they did not have the money to support it. I hope this makes sense. So most people are in this situation. They don’t have a clue how lucky they are to have this human life and they are wasting away.

Let me put it another way. If you believe in karma, to get this human life, we are using a lot of good karma we must have created in the past. Now that karma is used up. If we don’t do anything about it, that would be such a waste. On the other hand, if we take advantage of this human life and create virtuous karma, it will help us in our future lives. So many causes and conditions have to come together for us to be where we are in life. We talked about having a human life. On top of that, we have been exposed to spirituality in our lives. That exposure to spirituality is not by accident either. Again, our karma played a huge role in that. I know so many of us take this exposure for granted. But think about it, out of 8 billion humans on this planet, not everyone is exposed to spirituality. Now let’s take a step further. Of those, who have been exposed, how many of them actually do something about it on a regular basis? Most people go about their day busy with stuff that in the end has no relevance. But at the time it feels so important so people plug it away.

So here you are, spending at least 40 minutes a week trying to advance your spiritual practice. Trying to find the peace within. Trying to make sure not to disturb others’ peace. Trying to help other people alleviate their suffering and so forth. That creates a lot of positive karma. That bank of virtuous actions is going to come in handy in the future. As you know, the thing with karma is that you never know when it will ripen but it will certainly ripen someday. So the fact that you are creating a bank of this good karma is like having a fat bank account, that will allow you to cash in someday.

When would be the right time someone asked? Well, I don’t know is the honest answer. However, I do know that when we die, depending upon our state of mind at the time of our death, specific karma ripens which decides what the next step is for our continuum. So if that is true, then I would rather have more of those positive karma banked sooner rather than later. Because at that point, it’s a game of probability. For example, if there are 100 total karmas to choose from at the time of death, the more positive karma we have, the better our chance of higher rebirth.

 So I come back to where we started. We have this human body, we are exposed to spirituality and we are practicing on a consistent basis. That is an incredibly fortunate position to be in. We must be thankful, for our great fortune.