Welcome back to the Unified Mindfulness Pathways Practicum. This is the mini talk of Auto Move. And remember, some of this talk may include context that’s useful for you to know about but may not be necessary information for your students. Let’s begin.
Today, we're exploring the technique Auto Move. What does that mean—Auto Move? Maybe it sounds odd. To give you an idea, let’s explore it in real time. As you’re listening to me talk right now, you may find yourself shifting position, blinking, swallowing, scratching an itch. You may not give much thought to taking those actions—your body knows what to do and does it automatically. It’s like the movement just happens. Sometimes physical movements seem more intentional—like maybe you decide to stretch or open your eyes wide to overcome sleepiness. But other times movements seem to happen more automatically. In all kinds of ways, the body is acting without you needing to be intentional about directing the movement. Like, you’re not telling your eyes to blink.
And because there’s less of a sense that you’re controlling it, when you experience movement that happens automatically, you may find it easier to relate to the movement as spontaneous. And that ability to experience physical movement as spontaneous, or just happening, can be understood as a form of equanimity. You experience physical movement coming and going freely. You experience vitality in that effortlessness. Physical movement is appreciated for its own sake and less importance gets placed on needing the body to perform in a certain way. This exploration can actually yield higher performance because when we put too much pressure on our movements, like in a baseball game if you grip the bat too tight, that can backfire. So, discovering how motor expression just happens can help you find an optimal balance in your physical movement.
And if movement is challenging—maybe you have an injury or you live with a physical disability—you might choose to explore this technique as a way to develop greater equanimity with that physical challenge. So this technique is really for anyone who is interested. Because there are so many ways in daily life that without realizing it we may be exerting too much control over, feeling frustrated by, or unconsciously taking for granted the body’s physical movement. Finding a better balance through skillful awareness can increase your enjoyment of physical movement and help it happen more effortlessly. In other words, with less sensory friction—more equanimity. And that can have a ripple effect through your life.
[The following is not in the audio. This is a suggested place to make it personal.]
Show of hands—have you ever acted without thinking? Or maybe you were dancing to music and your body just seemed to move without you directing it?
[Or, share an anecdote about how contacting spontaneity has positively affected your life]
In my own life, I’ve found that...
[Back to the audio]
To practice Auto Move, you’re purposely paying attention to the way any physical movement just happens. You’re concentrating on and getting clear about that aspect of physical movement, and you’re doing your best not to be overly directive—you’re attempting to let physical movement just happen or catch it in the act of happening without your direction. Of course you’re keeping yourself physically safe as you do this. But that’s how you’re developing CC&E as you practice Auto Move. It can be subtle to detect at first, but once you catch on, it tends to get easier and even fun.
You might also start to notice spontaneous motor expression as you're practicing other techniques, like See Hear Feel. Let’s say you're doing See Hear Feel while walking down the street. Your attention may track the swing of your arms or the way your hips shift as you walk—you’re noticing motor expression as a sensory event. But whether it’s a sideshow or the main event depends on the instructions of the technique you’re practicing. With the See Hear Feel technique, when you notice physical movement just happening, you would label it Feel. It’s just another experience in that bucket called Feel.
The Auto Move technique teaches you to focus selectively on the way physical movement just happens. The natural spontaneity and effortlessness of physical expression is a hidden gem in our experience. And since it happens all throughout our day, honing in on automatic movement can create lots of interesting opportunities for practice. But because it’s easily overlooked, if we’re not pointed to that experience, we may miss the opportunity to work with it. Sensitizing ourselves to a very specific or subtle aspect of experience, as we do with Auto Move, can enrich our practice in unexpected ways, keeping us engaged. And it adds to your overall options, because different techniques work for different people at different times.
That’s why Unified Mindfulness offers so many techniques. The variety allows for personalization. Needs can differ from person to person, and on any given day, and over time. But with so much variety we need to organize the information, which is where the ULTRA Grid comes in. Take a look at your handout and you’ll see that Auto Move is part of the Express Quadrant. The ULTRA Grid organizes general meditation approaches into quadrants. In fact, all meditation approaches and techniques, worldwide, are included in these four quadrants. They fit into the ULTRA Grid in one way or another, but that’s a hidden feature we don’t have time to fully explore right now. What you see listed are the standard Unified Mindfulness techniques in each quadrant. Organizing them this way helps you see how they complement and contrast each other.
There are so many techniques in the field of meditation, like MBSR’s body scan, Wim Hoff’s breathing, or TM's mantra practice. It’s easy to notice the differences between them. But it
can be hard to know how to make sense of those differences and also to understand what they all share in common—what unifies them. One thing they share in common is that, one way or another, meditation techniques all develop concentration, clarity, and equanimity—even if an approach doesn't use those specific words. To explore more relationships for a moment, let’s use the Auto Move technique.
The Unified Mindfulness techniques we’ve practiced so far in this series are selected from three of the four quadrants on the ULTRA Grid—Appreciate, Transcend, and Nurture. Auto Move belongs to the fourth and final quadrant of techniques called Express. The Express Quadrant got its name, in part, because Unified Mindfulness likes to contrast Perception and Expression. To understand this contrast, maybe you’ll relate to the idea that the mind receives sensory signals or input, which can result in an action or output. Basically we’re calling input “perception” and output “expression.” The type of sensory experience you focus on when you practice Auto Move maps onto expression, or output.
The other techniques you’ve practiced mainly center around perception, or input. As you know, Unified Mindfulness divides perceptual experience into what you see, hear, and feel. And in one way or another, we've explored the inner, outer, active, and restful aspects of these through the See Hear Feel, Feel Rest, Feel Flow, and Feel Good techniques. But there can be overlap and hybrid techniques that incorporate more than one quadrant. So, the lines aren’t rigidly drawn.
A good example is Feel Good. To nurture positivity, Feel Good can involve generating positive emotions, which can be thought of as a kind of output. So Feel Good can include expression as well as perception. When we generate emotional positivity while practicing Feel Good, that taps into our expressive ability. But, the Feel Good instructions don’t ask us to focus on the way emotional positivity just happens. Instead, we’re asked to focus on the perception of positive emotional states once emotional positivity has been generated or discovered. So, instead of focusing on the output—the way an expression of emotional positivity effortlessly comes into being—you’re focusing on the input—the sensory signals recognized as emotional positivity.
On the other hand, detecting effortless physical movement is the whole focus of the Auto Move technique, and that’s very much centered around the activity of output. With Auto Move, you’re noticing how motor expression effortlessly happens. And clarifying the relationship between Feel Good and Auto Move can help you understand each of those techniques a bit better. That’s the value of the ULTRA Grid. Compared to Feel Good, Auto Move focuses more exclusively on expression and when expression combines with equanimity you get a quality of effortlessness or spontaneity. And one of the best ways to develop equanimity is to detect when it’s already happening naturally. That’s one reason we use automatic movements to explore the theme.
This theme of Auto also includes any form of expression. As I described with Feel Good, it isn’t limited to physical movement. And there’s an entire quadrant devoted to it because
expressing output with heightened CC&E is as central to becoming happier as perceiving input with heightened CC&E. The standard Unified Mindfulness techniques in the Express Quadrant include Auto Move, Auto Speak, Auto Think, and Auto Focus. We need to break the sensory habits that lead to ineffective thought, speech, movement, and focus.
To help clarify Auto more, let’s consider a couple of other techniques in the Express Quadrant. We’ll start with Auto Think. When people talk about creative expression, they often describe being a channel. They weren't intentionally trying to think of a song lyric or that billion dollar idea. It just happened. It popped into their mind from who knows where. If you detect the spontaneous appearance of an idea in your mind, that can be considered an automatic form of thinking. The thought is a kind of sensory output, and you’re noticing how you aren’t making it happen—it just happens. Another example is Auto Focus. When you practice Auto Focus, you’re letting your attention move freely—releasing control instead of trying to direct it. We also call that the Do Nothing technique.
So there are many ways to discover Auto. In fact, technically any form of sensory experience can be tracked as a kind of output that just effortlessly happens as opposed to an input that you’re perceiving. But it may be easier to detect that quality in certain forms of expression that are more centered around actual physical movement. This also points to the fact that it’s important for equanimity to come through in the actions you take—whether those actions are of high consequence or just ordinary.
You can discover spontaneity in all kinds of daily routines like exercise, cleaning, cooking, or any repetitive task. Contacting Auto in daily life can transform an ordinary chore into a fascinating activity. And sometimes, for fun, we call Auto Bounce—like how you have a bounce in your stride. Language can be tricky when you’re trying to describe subjective experience—especially if it’s subtle. So, we’ve now used five different terms to mean the same thing: Spontaneity, Auto, Bounce, Just Happening, Express. Sometimes, and for some people, one of those words may be more true to your personal experience. I’m mentioning all those words so I cover my bases and reach as many of you as possible. So, stick with whatever word or words ring true for you.
What matters is that if you choose, you can use the natural effortlessness of sensory output, or motor expression, to deepen your mindfulness skills. And for this technique, we’re focusing on physical movement. Lots of meditation approaches emphasize physical movement in one way or another, like martial arts, Zen training, yoga, or slow walking. The difference is that the Unified Mindfulness technique called Auto Move asks you to develop concentration, clarity, and equanimity with the way movement just happens. And unlike common meditative practices, like slow walking or yoga, you can focus on even a small movement, like swallowing or blinking, which makes Auto Move inclusive. Just about anyone who would like to can practice it. And you could also practice it while doing activities like walking or yoga. You would notice how the body just walks or just drops into the yoga postures.
Auto Move also gets at a deep theme underlying many meditative approaches, which is the ability to release self-identification with the body. Freeing yourself from feeling stuck in your body is an important theme in meditative practice. And discovering this positive quality of spontaneity can be a rewarding step in that direction. We’re loosening the grip of physical movement and finding the bounce—we’re discovering and reminding ourselves of what it’s like when movement is effortless.
Whether physical expression happens in a small way, like nodding your head in agreement, or a big way, like playing soccer—and whether it’s choreographed, like memorizing a dance routine, or improvised, like dancing on the spot—you can discover a quality of spontaneity that makes it Auto Move. Like, if your body responds to music, maybe you start tapping your foot or moving your head—your body knows what to do without your direction. But even when you learn the choreography to a dance, you’ll develop muscle memory so the body can execute the dance without you needing to be overly directive. Same thing happens with playing an instrument, like the piano. Because you’ve practiced, your fingers know what to do. The same is true for so many ordinary activities. We don't have to tell ourselves to “chew” as we chew our food. Chewing just happens. We don't have to expend effort directing the process. That's one way to understand what we're focusing on. Auto Move is happening all the time, in all kinds of ways, we just need to discover and appreciate it.
To practice Auto Move, you choose what type of physical movement you’re going to focus on, and then you have some strategy options you can try for detecting how that movement just happens. Strategies tend to fall into three main groups: (1) you could adjust your attitude—like try to get surprised or curious, (2) you could release unnecessary physical control so movement happens more freely, or (3) you could shift perspective, like by zooming attention out beyond the whole body and from that position, try to track the way the body moves. It can take a bit of exploring or guesswork to find a strategy that works for you. The aim is to discover an approach to your body movement that helps you catch it in the act of just happening.
So, what are the challenges that you might face with this technique? It can be subtle, and because it’s subtle, you may get easily distracted by other experience. Auto Move, like Feel Good, doesn’t involve using labels. But, if you find it helpful, you could always use the label Auto in your head to keep your attention on track. Just find a way to make the technique work for you. It’s also possible that Auto Move isn’t that interesting to you. I'm giving you a buffet of techniques so you can try them out and choose whether or not you want to incorporate them into your life, now or at all.
Now, let's get to the technique itself. To sensitize you, we’ll be doing a few minutes of seated practice and detecting movements—such as blinking, swallowing, shifts in the body, and breathing—from the perspective of how automatic they are. You don’t need to direct them; they just happen.
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