This is an extract from the first session back after the summer break in 2024, where I was discussing the differences and similarities between Beingfulness, the practice I teach on Mondays, and the Abdhidharma teaching that Mingyur Rinpoche gave this summer.
Exploring Abhidharma and Beingfulness
I was doing this practice retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche, and he was teaching what's known as the Abhidharma, which is a very old form of Buddhism - analytical Buddhism, - where you're taking apart the constituent elements of our self-experience. You bring awareness to form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. These are known as the five skandhas.
So there's a very venerable and long, history of Abhidhamma study, particularly in the Theravadan school, which is the first school that I studied in, and as he was teaching it, in his inimitable, very easy-to-understand way, I was suddenly struck by the fact, "oh, he's teaching Beingfulness!", which is not surprising because Beingfulness grew out of my Theravadan studies.
Cutting up the messy pie of Being
Both use the same technique: taking a cognitive scalpel to the bits and pieces of what it's like to be you. This is the question we always ask at the beginning of Beingfulness, what is it like being you? What's the experience like?
And in practice, the experience is often a big mess. It's a big fleshy, thought-filled mess. Many things all at once. Feelings in the body, emotions from our past, lots of thoughts, lots of sense perceptions coming in through the sense gates. So it's a great big carousel or kaleidoscope to use the language of Beingfulness.
Abhidhamma slices it up slightly differently. It doesn't have B E S T, it has different categories. But essentially it's doing the same thing. And it was very interesting the way that Mingyur Rinpoche was teaching it.
Counting the breath is not the devil's work after all!
He contextualised the whole practice as a way of stopping our suffering. By understanding how the bits and pieces interact we can recognize what it is that makes us suffer. Predictably, the final emphasis in Abhidharma is to look at who is looking at all these pieces. That's the ultimate culprit for suffering in Buddhism, the false sense of self. But in Beingfulness there is also a lot of insight to be gained from simply seeing all the bits that make up our messy reality. That, in itself, can lessen the suffering.
So what do we use to get into this? Rinpoche uses the breath and as I mentioned, I had always had a bit of an allergy to using the breath and particularly counting the breath, which I found infuriating. But somehow coming back to it 15 years later I found that working with the breath worked. Rather than focusing on the breath in this "oh I've got to get it right" way, I just relaxed: my eyes were open and everything else was still happening but there was this simple counting thing going on. And as I followed this I saw that counting is a mental formation, and breathing is a bodily formation, and so immediately I had a vivid example of mind and body happening right in front of my eyes.
Have fun with the numbers...
I had an anchor into the experience. And that was that was a bit of a revelation to me. Counting the breath is not an evil task thought up by some terrible meditation monster, but it's quite useful.
And it's important to play around with it. Some of us are more visual, some of us are more aural, different brains. So you can visualise the numbers as you count - big papier mache numbers floating all around, on the kind of edge of my awareness. And being interested in the different colours as each number appears in your mind. It's probably a kinesthetic thing that the number three is a different colour from the number four, for example.
Or maybe imagine a vast choir singing the numbers as you go through the cycle of 1 to 10. Being playful with it is important. not being too serious is the key to all meditation. we can get terribly po-faced about it.
Counting the breath is a classic meditation thing, but I usually never teach it in Mindsprings. How do you find it? Do add a comment below...
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