If you’re familiar with my approach to teaching meditation, you’ll know that I’ve long emphasized the importance of having “soft eyes.” This concept involves three key aspects: relaxing the muscles around your eyes, allowing your eyes to maintain a soft focus, and being openly receptive to everything in your visual field.
When you practice soft eyes, your mind tends to quiet down, your body starts to relax, and your breathing slows and deepens, moving more into your belly. Turning your attention inward, you then become aware of sensations from all over your body. You can feel the breathing’s ever-changing movements throughout your body, making the experience rich and calming, helping your mind stay quiet longer.
This technique simplifies deepening your meditation practice. Instead of fighting through distractions to achieve brief moments of calm, you find that you can attain a serene state almost instantly. This usually works well for me, but there are times when it doesn’t, especially when I’m chronically tired. For instance, having a new puppy that needs to go out at night has been cutting into my sleep lately.
So, what can you do when feeling persistently tired? I find it helpful to use specific phrases to keep my mind focused. Distracted thinking pulls us away from our immediate bodily experience and into imagination, while intentional thinking redirects our attention back to the present moment.
The timing of these phrases is crucial and can vary from person to person. Repeating a phrase before every breath may feel overwhelming and make your mind busier. It’s essential to connect with your experience by observing the sensations of breathing without constantly talking to yourself. After saying phrases like “body alive” and “meeting everything with tenderness,” try observing your breath silently for two to three breaths or more.
Adjust the spacing of these phrases depending on your level of distraction. If your mind starts to wander, tighten the spacing, but if you’re focused, you can space them out more. If you find yourself staying present without distractions, consider using only “eyes soft” and “eyes kind” with silent breaths in between.
Avoid falling into a routine of mechanically repeating phrases, as it leads to unmindfulness and distraction. Keep changing the frequency and order of the phrases to stay alert and focused. For example, I sometimes say:
– “Body alive”
– “Eyes soft”
– “Meeting everything with tenderness”
– “Eyes kind”
I also play with the number of silent breaths between these phrases to find what keeps my mind the quietest.
This practice is something I’ve integrated into my jhana teaching and practice. For those unfamiliar, jhana involves meditative absorption. In the initial level of jhana, some thinking can occur, and this type of intentional thinking is conducive to deepening the experience of the body.
Feel free to experiment with these tools and let me know how they work for you. Thank you for exploring this with me.
(Note: Excluded the subscriber messages and personal responses for coherence)