By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+
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My first son is now 12 days old. I am profoundly sleep deprived and drawing on all of my meditation training to somehow function without sleep day to day. I’m feeling pretty good, and I’m happy to share an application of mindfulness practice that involves our own baby nature.
What do I mean by that?
Not everybody realizes that in a sense babies aren’t born the day they’re born. Babies leave the womb on the day we say they’re born conventionally. But psychologically, a baby doesn’t “hatch” into an identity separate from the environment until, some research has it, between four and nine months. So this technical term “hatching,” we could say the real birth of the human child, like when the baby, not differentiates from the mother physically coming out of the womb but when the baby differentiates from the cosmic flow of all of creation and realizes that he/she/they actually are somehow separate and unique from the environment.
This is really a profound moment. We could say it’s the beginning of the formation of an ego, ego in the healthy sense of just an “I,” a self with integrity and uniqueness. What’s interesting about this is that every one of us has logged thousands of hours on our first days and weeks and months of life. We logged thousands of hours just floating in an undifferentiated phenomenological continuum. No sense of having a mind, no sense of having a body. After we were born we were still waiting to be born. And in that in-between place, between worlds, there is a kind of timelessness where we’re completely one with and in participation with the flow of nature, of all things.
And what’s too bad is that four to nine months or so after we hatch, we tend to not recover this utterly valuable skill that we’re born with, namely the skill of flowing as a force of nature, with no sense of separation from anything. And yet we know developmentally that this is at the heart of who we all are.
So this meditation is a little bit longer than we usually do to let you drop in a little bit deeper. It’s in the spirit of recovering your baby consciousness, your infant’s nature or to put it a bit more poetically: it’s a return to innocence, the place where you spent the first season of your life, completely in the bosom of creation, no sense of separation. Let’s see how this feels, see what it does for our practice to exercise these different layers of our consciousness today.
I recommend you do this meditation with eyes closed, just to take your focus, your attention away from the appearance of a world outside yourself. Just find a place where you can relax, let go.
Meditation
As a little bit of a warm-up as we drop into this together, I want to exercise the opposite capacity that we’re working with. I want you to imagine the body, see the body in your mind’s eye. After all, as adults we’ve all spent many years forming and adding layers on top of a mental image of the body. And this mental image becomes so dominant that over time we lose more and more of our capacity to just be in the flow of physical sensation. When we ask somebody, when we ask an adult to feel sensation in the body, unconsciously they will picture different parts of their body in their mind, not realizing that that is a distinct act from being in sensation. So just notice that you’re able to call up an image of the body. Notice what the body looks like in your mind’s eye: its boundaries, its shape, its proportions. Every aspect of what the body looks like, you can feel, you can see and just let it go, let it be in the background of awareness.
And to open the meditation up a little bit more, I want you to use your imagination just a touch and imagine that you are just born, just emerging from the mother’s womb. You’re one second old, and you know absolutely nothing of a body. The word body, the image of a body, just meaningless abstractions. What you are in this moment when you’re just a nanosecond old is a formless field of awareness.
Sensations arise from nowhere and go back to nowhere. What you are aware of, just one second old, totally immersed in the flow of awesome nature, is intensity. You are aware of the magnitude of sensation. Just notice in this moment in the formless field of awareness cascading with sensation that some sensation is intense. And in this moment other aspects of sensation may be more subtle, quiet.
Notice where sensation is salient, where it naturally sticks out in awareness. And of course to call it sensation is just a convenience of using language as a newborn babe, one second old. You know nothing of sensation. There is only a kind of free-floating amorphous tingling vibration. It hangs about for a moment, makes its appearance, exhausts itself and disappears from whence it came. Just allow yourself to rest deeply in this formless field, full of tingling vibration rising and falling.
And sometimes tingling vibration arises and even at one second old, you have a basic sense of pleasant or unpleasant, pain and pleasure. Just notice moment to moment as the activity of sensation rising and passing; it brings with it a sense of pleasantness, unpleasantness. But take care to let go of any mental labels whatsoever. As adults we have so many layers of judgments, habituated responses to different experiences. But at one second old, it’s all learning, it’s all alive, intelligence, streaming through your still wet physicality, just born into the world, all vibratory activity is learning, is information, is intelligence: the sting of hunger in your belly, the comfort of being held, totally relaxing. Just notice what sensations rise and feel the part of you, namely this formless field of awareness that can just allow them to rise and pass.
And notice when you attach no meaning, no story to this tingling vibration, rising and passing. You naturally fall into a place of timelessness, in between sensations there is no time, nothing happens.
And now this moment, brand new, you know nothing of the thinking mind. You know nothing of the concept of a body, where you start, where you stop. There’s only the effortless coming and going, a tingling, vibratory flux through the field of awareness. It leaves no trace when it vanishes. There’s no grab or stick when it arises, no trace or residue when it passes. Sensory experience emerging from timelessness, falling back into timelessness, like waves falling back under the surface of the ocean.
With these last few moments, you can take a moment now to bring your adult mind online to integrate it into this practice by way of just feeling gratitude, gratitude for having a human birth, a human body so utterly sensitive, so intelligent. Feel the gift of every moment of sensation, the feel of temperature on your skin, the touch of your clothes, the pressure over your seat where you sit or lie down. Feel the warmth in your heart, in your body renewed with life with every breath. Every single one of us came into our personhood, our unique self in this very way, completely immersed in the flow of nature, sensation, enchanted by the blooming, buzzing arising of infinite worlds.
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