If you’re familiar with the way I teach meditation, you’ll know that I’ve long emphasized the importance of having soft eyes. “Soft eyes” involves three things: relaxing the muscles around your eyes, allowing your gaze to be unfocused, and being open to everything in your visual field.
When you do these, your mind usually quiets down, your body relaxes, and your breathing becomes slower and deeper, moving more into your belly. When you then turn your focus inward, you can become aware of sensations throughout your body. You can experience the movements and changing sensations of breath all over, making the experience richer and calming your mind for longer.
This approach helps deepen your meditation practice easily without fighting distractions for moments of calm. You can achieve calmness almost instantly, and it usually works for me. But it doesn’t always, especially when I’m very tired, like I’ve been for the past month or two because our new puppy needs to pee at night, cutting into my sleep.
So, what can you do if this happens? I’ve found that using a few guiding phrases helps keep my mind on track. Distracted thinking pulls us away from the present moment and into imagination. The phrases help redirect our attention back to our immediate experience.
Timing these phrases is crucial and something you’ll need to experiment with. Repeating a phrase before every breath might feel stifling, so give yourself time to connect with your experience. After phrases like “body alive” and “meeting everything with tenderness,” stay with your breathing for two or three breaths before repeating them. Adjust the spacing based on your level of distraction.
If you’re not getting distracted, you might even try spacing the phrases out more or dropping them entirely, using just “eyes soft” and “eyes kind” with silent breaths in between. Avoid falling into a mechanical repetition, as it can lead to unmindfulness and distraction.
You can also change the order of the phrases to keep things fresh and see what works best for keeping your mind quiet. I’ve incorporated this practice into my jhana teaching. In the first level of jhana, thinking can be present, and this kind of thinking helps deepen the experience of the body.
Feel free to play around with these tools and see how they work for you.
Now, responding to Roderick’s inquiry, it’s unfortunate that I don’t know any jhana teachers in eastern Australia. Your shift from experiencing immense joy to having a more mechanical practice might not be about the teachers you’ve had. It’s likely about changes in your attitudes during meditation. If you initially experienced jhana spontaneously, you might now be grasping for it, which can hinder the experience.
I’ll suggest a few things to help:
1. Do less and notice more.
2. Be playful and less rigid in your approach.
I hope this helps rejuvenate your practice. The liveliness is already there, waiting to be seen. Likely, an attitude shift is suppressing your sense of delight, aliveness, and well-being.
I appreciate your follow-up, Roderick, and it’s good to hear that you’re considering deepening concentration while being more relaxed. It’s worth trying to balance structured practice with personal explorations to deepen samadhi.