Being mindful is not only about being aware of the present moment; there is a lot of merit in going deeper into our practice and drawing insight and wisdom from meaningfully inquiring into the experience we are observing.
This week, let us look into how we can easily over-identity with the sense of self and get attached to what we perceive as “I, me, and mine”.
This strong and perhaps stubborn sense of self can show up anywhere - my belief, my identity, my idea, my achievement, my child, my possession, my feelings, even my body… my breath…
Clinging to the sense of self can invite inner turmoil and unwholesome states of mind, especially when we meet with the fragility and ephemerality of what we are grasping at.
We want things to be stable and fixed (to our liking), yet they are more often than not unstable and constantly changing. We desire good feelings to stay, but they never do. We prefer to be in control of everything, and there is dismay with the realisation that we really can’t.
Over-identification with the sense of self comes with much tension, unnecessarily contracting our heart and limiting the mind.
In this Take A Pause session recorded on 25 August 2024, the TAP community practiced noticing the presence of the self during meditation, and letting go of this identification with the self through non-judgemental awareness and observation.
In particular, we invited curiosity to whether the self was clinging to how the breath and body should be, and seeing that the sense of self can be particularly strong in the headspace of thoughts.
We concluded the practice by mindfully listening to an excerpt about the self from Jack Kornfield’s The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology.
We then spent some time as a community discussing our thoughts about recognising the sense of self in meditation and daily life.
Meditation begins: 09:00
Reading begins: 28:20
Meditation duration: 19 minutes
Community discussion: 33:17
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