Get into a comfortable position. Close your eyes softly. Feel the ground or chair you are on supporting your body.
Focus on breathing. Take notice of what follows: your mind commences to label, inhale, exhale, deep, shallow, slow, fast. These labels are so natural that we hardly pay attention to them.
Now, in the next two minutes, just watch: what are these labels? Are they in the breath, or are they in your mind?
Now attempt to meet your breath without any description whatsoever. A mere feeling. See how hard this is: the mind desires to classify all.
Look closely. Is there anything concerning the breath which is not based on your own knowledge and ideas?
You will start to notice: the breath is simply occurring. It doesn't call itself slow or calm. Those are our additions.
When these additions fall away, perceive the change: there is something spacious in the mind. The breath is merely an appearance, which lives a time, and then passes into the next.
Allow yourself to expand your focus to sound. The mind names them immediately: traffic, voices, humming fan. Then, in the same moment, it judges: good, bad, distracting.
Take one sound and ask: can I find “annoying” in the sound itself, not in my interpretation?
When the label drops, what's left? Just tones in the air, coming and going.
Think of pizza. The mind leaps about with associations: tasty, too greasy, comfort food. However, none of this is in the pizza itself; it is merely an object that exists and evolves.
Think of traffic. It is merely a case of slow moving cars. But our thoughts make tales: This is a waste of time. I'm going to be late.
When you remember telling a friend about it later, the story you tell is full of those tales, not the naked reality of cars and movement.
Bring to mind someone close to you. Observe how soon the mind is filled with judgments: kind, difficult, supportive, critical.
Now, can you look at them, just a moment, without this accretion of knowledge? What remains? A living creature, that lives through time, that changes with every moment.
Look the same way at yourself. All that labelling, successful, not good enough, awkward, confident: are they really in you, or are they just in your mind?
Without the labels, you too are nothing but a creature, evolving and moving through time.
When are you most alive? It is often when the mind is clear, when you are walking in the woods, present, without naming the trees and stones.
Think of living your day that way: living each moment anew, without the cumbersome burden of past narratives.
We gain a great freedom when we clearly see that our judgments are not in reality, but in the mind. We are able to react to life according to what is present on the ground, rather than the reverberation of the past.
This practice is one of seventeen in the book.
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