Class 11 – Practice Strategy Options

Practice Strategy Options Talk1

Welcome back to Pathways. Today's sample lesson is Practice Strategy Options.

Today we're going to talk about your strategy options. What do we mean by strategy options? Well, you've learned several different techniques over the course of this training, and you can begin to make choices about how you address your experience with the techniques you've learned. This lesson is going to give you an opportunity to explore just how adaptable the Unified Mindfulness system is to meet your needs at any given time.

Let's start with what we're calling windows and walls. So, Unified Mindfulness recognizes a few different opportunities and obstacles in practice. In other words, your experience presents windows and walls. We're going to focus on one main one today.

That is, as you're practicing meditation you may have pleasant experience or you may have unpleasant experience.

Pleasant experience: You may, for example, notice a pleasant flow of energy in your body, or maybe you feel a sense of emotional well-being.

Unpleasant experience: Maybe you're struggling with chatter in your mind or the experience of anxiety.

When either of these presents themselves, you have focus options, and we're going to explore your focus options using the techniques that you have become acquainted with over the course of this training.

Let's start out with your options around unpleasant experience, and let's use the example of anxiety. Your first option for how to address anxiety would be to anchor your attention out, or anchor your attention away from the anxiety. You could choose just to focus on what you're seeing in your environment (you could have an eyes-open practice), what you're hearing in the environment, or you could focus on physical sensation that is not the anxiety—anything that is not the anxiety.

So, that's one way to focus: As you anchor your attention away, you would just be fully allowing the anxiety to run its course, to freely come and go with background equanimity. You're not paying attention to the anxiety directly, but you're also not doing anything to try to suppress or fight with it in any way. The benefit to that is when you anchor your

Note: Some terms used in the recording have been changed in this text to reflect the more current terminology. Opportunities and obstacles are now windows and walls; trigger practice is now response challenge; situation practice is now situation challenge; and duration training is now duration challenge.

attention away from an intense experience like anxiety, that can sometimes have the effect of cooling it out.

You could also choose to have a “cool down” strategy. A cool down strategy might look like focusing on Rest. So, you could focus on the parts of your body where you don't detect anxiety, or you could intentionally relax your muscles and focus on that. You could also find neutral places in the body.

Something to bear in mind if you choose this strategy is that because you're dropping resistance, that wave of anxiety may spread. However, it will also dissipate, and that can move you deeper into restfulness. So, you're anchoring your attention away from the anxiety, and you are freeing the anxiety to move. Because you're focusing on restfulness, that allows the anxiety to spread. But, now it moves through you and dissipates and moves you deeper into rest.

One more possibility is the Feel Good technique—working with positivity. Sometimes you're able to override negative thoughts and feelings with positive ones. If you're able to do that, then that's great. You can shift your internal state and override the anxiety. Focus on positivity, really experience that positivity, and that can dissipate the anxiety. Maybe you focus on gratitude, for example, and you are able to really contact gratitude. As you do that, that helps to break up the anxiety. It helps to make the anxiety less gripping as an experience, less convincing.

Another possibility is that you go with the flow. You might detect flow in other aspects of your experience besides the anxiety—maybe the movement of the breath. If you're someone who finds the breath soothing to focus on, you could focus on the movement of the breath and that might help soothe your system altogether. Flow is generally pleasant, so if you're able to focus on it at all, you may find relief from anxiety through the pleasant reward state of flow. For example, you may notice the pleasant flow of energy in the body, in parts of the body where the anxiety is not detected. Focusing on flow can help release energy, generally, and that may bring about some relief around the anxiety.

So, those are ways that you can anchor your attention away, or turn away from the anxiety.

Here are some ways you can open up and turn toward the anxiety.

So, the first strategy option is turn away, and we gave some examples of that. The second strategy option is open up and turn toward. That means that you're deconstructing the experience to make it more manageable for yourself, and you're working with the individual parts. So, maybe you turn directly toward the anxiety and explore it in terms of sensory clarity. How much anxiety is there? Where is it located? When do you notice it? What does it feel like? Is it changing and if so, in what ways? Is it interacting with other experiences and if so, in what ways?

You turn toward the anxiety and you develop a curiosity toward it. You track and explore it with your attention. Maybe the anxiety is located mainly in the solar plexus; it's at a level seven out of ten and it comes in bursts. You realize the anxiety is a combination of emotions, maybe fear and helplessness. You get granular in the detail of it and by doing that you make it a more manageable experience for yourself. You help it lose its grip through becoming clear about the nature of the experience and being able to concentrate on it—opening up to it and noticing details about it.

You can also separate all the See, Hear, Feel facets of your experience of anxiety. Maybe you notice how anxiety affects your thinking. What kind of visual thoughts does anxiety trigger in the mind? Maybe you're worried about a deadline, and you're envisioning yourself missing the deadline. Or you’re envisioning yourself trying to get the task done very late at night. What kind of mental talk does it trigger? Maybe you're saying to yourself, “Why do I always do this? Why do I always wait till the last minute?” That kind of thing. So, you can explore the whole See, Hear, Feel inner experience of the anxiety, and you can focus on that and work with that.

You can also use going with the flow to turn toward the anxiety. See if you can detect flow in the feeling of anxiety itself and then go for the ride of anxiety. What is anxiety? For a lot of us it's a burst of adrenaline somewhere around the solar plexus. Can you ride the experience of that burst of adrenaline with your attention? Sometimes, if we're able to do that, when we're able to contact flow and go for the ride of the experience, it's less problematic. It can lead to greater peace. Again, you can ride it like a surfer rides a wave, and it becomes interesting. You're able to not get so caught in the experience.

Those are a few ways that you can open up. You can deconstruct by working just with the experience of anxiety in the body. You can separate out all the See, Hear, Feel components of the anxiety experience. You could also go with the flow of the anxiety experience.

So, we've explored how you can turn away from the experience and we've explored how you can open up to the experience. If you want, you could alternate those strategies; work with it by opening up for a while and work with it by anchoring away for a while.

Let's talk a bit now about what it looks like to turn away or open up to the experience if it's pleasant. Maybe you're wondering why you would ever want to turn away from a pleasant experience. We'll consider that.

Let's take the example of flow in the body. (And remember we're talking about our inner experience here, not situations.) Let's suppose that during the See Hear Feel technique you notice a very pleasant flow of energy in the body. One way to address that is to open up and turn toward it. You could intentionally view the flow of energy in the body at that moment as a window of opportunity. It's a reward state, and reward states can be deeply motivating for us. They can also point us toward deeper experience.

So, you can change your technique to intentionally feel flow. Now you've switched techniques from the See Hear Feel technique to the Feel Flow technique. You are investigating the flow in your body more completely, with Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity. Once again, you notice where it's located, how intense it is, and what the quality of flow is like. For example, is it tingling, or wavy, or bubbly? Does it change? In what ways is it changing? Is it interacting with other experiences? In what ways? So there are all of these ways to investigate it more completely, to bring our full concentration to it and open up to the experience.

That's how you would open up and turn toward the experience of flow in that case. You could also decide that you want to anchor away from the flow. In that case you would have background equanimity with the flow. Just as a reminder, background equanimity is having equanimity with anything outside your focus range. Foreground equanimity is equanimity with what you're choosing to focus on; background equanimity is equanimity with everything else.

So, you might choose to let the flow experience be in the background as you're focusing on something else. Let's say you decide, “You know, even though this pleasant flow is going on, I'm going to continue doing the See Hear Feel technique. I may include the flow experience but I'm not going to emphasize it.” You may be noticing it in the background while focusing, for example, on something you're hearing in the environment, or something you're seeing on the mental screen.

A more common time for you to choose to anchor your attention away from the pleasant (having background equanimity with it while you focus on something else) would be in daily life. For example, maybe you're having a conversation and it’s inappropriate to turn your attention toward flow. Or perhaps there's a deeply pleasant experience of flow that you'd like to explore, but you need to get things done at work to meet a deadline.

We've discussed how sometimes the experience of flow may feel overwhelming. Let’s say you're at work and this feeling comes up that seems to be pulling at your attention very strongly. You could do something like grounding yourself. You could place your hands on your desk or notice your feet on the floor. Focusing your attention on those grounding experiences can help you if you want to manage a flow state when it comes up. If you feel like it's not the right time or place to focus on it, you always have that option.

So, those are ways that you can use the techniques that we've explored over this course to either take advantage of windows (such as pleasant flow of energy in the body) or manage walls (such as anxiety). You can either turn toward the experience or you can turn away from the experience.

Let's discuss another practice strategy option that has to do with accelerating your growth in practice. By now, you've had some experience and you understand the value of practice. So you may be excited to find ways to deepen your practice. I want to highlight that over

the course of this class series, you've actually been exposed to three out of four of the strategies that Unified Mindfulness calls accelerators.

One type of accelerator is called Motion Challenge. Let's suppose you are able to experience a very deep state or high skills with your eyes closed, sitting in stillness. You can challenge yourself by opening your eyes. You can challenge yourself by seeing if you can maintain a deep state or a technique while doing a simple movement, like walking around. And you could work up to more complex movements, like cooking a meal. That's one way to accelerate your growth in practice.

Another accelerator is called a Response Challenge. You can use media, whether it's the news or music, to create inner responses. (You'll remember we used music.) Whether those responses are pleasant or unpleasant, you can work with the experience. Working with these reactions will accelerate your growth. We used music because it's fun, but the fact that it's fun doesn't mean it's frivolous. Music can help you clarify your emotional life—where it's located, for example—and it can help you work through challenging emotions, such as sadness. When we're clearer about our emotional life, then we have greater choice around how we react and respond to our emotions. That can translate into more effective behavior in the world.

Response Challenges are done in a controlled environment. You can control the length of time you do it for, the type of media you use, and whether you’re dealing with pleasant or unpleasant reactions. That can prepare you for situations that come up in the world.

The last accelerator that we've explored over the course of this training is a Situation Challenge. We talked about microhits, background practice, and formal practice in daily life. Practicing in daily life is more challenging than sitting in stillness, so Situation Challenges are a great way to accelerate your growth.

The fourth accelerator (one we haven't discussed yet) is called a Duration Challenge. That simply means that you are moving less than you normally do for longer periods of time. As you practice, whether seated or even lying down, you're attempting to move less than usual. Traditionally, people have tried not to move at all, and you could work up to that. That will get unpleasant over time. The body wants to move around. But you can work with that discomfort. You can open up and turn toward the discomfort, or you can anchor away from it. In any case, the unpleasantness comes up and you work through that with whatever strategies you can as you remain in stillness for longer periods of time.

These accelerators are all optional. They're just practice strategy options to consider as you move forward and take your Unified Mindfulness practice deeper.

The Unified Mindfulness system is designed to be flexible, so you can use it in ways that are specifically meaningful for you. You can explore situations in daily life. You can explore

windows and walls that come up internally during practice. You can intentionally use strategies to accelerate your growth through practice.

It's also modular. You've learned through practicing the See Hear Feel technique that any experience can be focused on to develop Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity. You've explored some of those ways in class.

You've explored Feel Rest, Feel Flow, Auto Move, and Feel Good. You can continue to explore different focus objects now that you understand how to do so. You could narrow your focus range to anything you choose. For example, you could spend ten minutes focusing on an itch if you wanted to.

You could also have a broad focus range. You can anchor your attention to outer experience—what you see in the environment, what you hear in the environment, and what you feel physically. Or you can anchor your attention to your inner experience—what you see on the mental screen, what you hear in your mind, and your emotions.

Don't let all this choice overwhelm you. One easy way to prevent overwhelm is to have a go-to strategy. This is a strategy or technique that you’ve decided to use when you’re unsure what to do. You just pick that technique and stick with it. I personally like the See Hear Feel technique. Just pick one that works for you. As long as you're developing Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity, it's all good.

The general message here is to become the author of your meditation experience. Maybe you're sitting in a meeting. In this case, you might use Feel Rest as background practice. You can apply techniques to windows and walls. The key is to bring intention, so you're not just jumping around from technique to technique. You're making choices to address your interests, your opportunities, or your needs.

Just be sure to make a clear choice when windows and walls come up. Let’s say you're practicing the Feel Good technique and suddenly your body gets very restful. You can turn toward it and open up to the experience, focusing on the restful feelings. Or you can choose to continue to practice Feel Good and have background equanimity with the restful feelings.

Let's use an unpleasant example. If you're trying to do the See Hear Feel technique but you're in physical pain, you can turn toward the pain and work just with that. You can open up to it and deconstruct your See, Hear, Feel reactions to it. You could also let the pain be in the background, allowing your attention to freely float between all the other experiences.

OK, I've covered a lot of ground. We've done a lot of reviewing. Any questions?

Notes 1. Per Shinzen, reassure students not to make a big deal about what technique they choose; it’s all good.

Remember to insert personal examples.

For the Guided Practice Part of Class At the beginning of the practice period, have students choose one of the techniques they have learned, based on interest. Explain to them that they are going to be prompted at some point to explore decision making based on windows or walls. So, during the practice period they’ll be free to switch techniques, or if they are happy with the technique they’re doing, they can stick with it.

Begin a period of silent practice. Your cues for the guidance will be only generic cues such as:

1. A prompt about sleepiness

A prompt about skills (notice details, be open to, etc.)
An encouragement (For example, if this practice session is challenging you are building strength; if you’re finding it easy, enjoy that.)
A reminder to bring their attention back to their chosen technique if their attention has wandered

Midway through the guidance, include a prompt about trying a different technique, such as:

“If you are noticing any pleasant experience in the body that you’d like to explore more fully or if you’d like to address a challenge, try switching techniques. If not, continue on with the technique you’ve selected.”