Metta As Mental Fitness

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone to the Mindfulness Exercises podcast. I'm Sean Fargo. Today I have the pleasure and honor of speaking with my friend Liam McClintock, who is the founder of FitMind, which you can find at fitmind.org. And he just released a new book called Fitmind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss. Neuroscience and Meditation for Daily Life. Liam has been providing mental fitness programs for corporations like Uber. He completed a Master of Science degree in applied neuroscience at King's College in London with a dissertation on the neural correlates of advanced non-dual meditation. As I said, you were a monk in a tradition that I highly respect with a teacher who I highly respect, who I think has recently passed away, unfortunately. You've been a contributor to our mindfulness meditation teacher certification program, providing a lot of great insights for our community about craving. So it's just a delight to see how your journey has unfolded. And it's an honor to be your friend on the path. So welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2 · 1:13Thanks so much, Sean. It's an honor to be on the podcast with

Speaker 2 · 1:16you.

Speaker 1 · 1:16We had one of your mentors or friends or practitioners on the path, Delson Armstrong, as a guest teacher for our certification program as well. And he shared a practice around combining meta or loving kindness practice with concentration practice. Where the emphasis of the experience is on the felt quality of the heart, the felt quality of love, the felt quality of care. And you would stay with that felt quality all the way to the jhanas of these, say, altered states of experience that I think people may not know about because they're not really spoken much about. But he would use this practice of sensing into the heart and the sensing into this felt quality of care as his concentration object. So I'm wondering like how much of your practice or the teachings of your teachers combined metta practice with, say, like mindful breathing? I believe one of your teachers taught sensing into the space between the skull and the brain to sense into whether there was craving or not. But I'm just curious, like how much of a hybrid of meta practice and say other classical forms of meditation, like mindful breathing, body scan, etc., did you practice?

Speaker 2 · 3:00This is the main practice that I talk about in my book. It's the most powerful practice that I've come across. There's essentially three techniques that I talk about, and this is the main one, and it's still, I consider it the foundation of my practice and has been for these last few years. And this is basically meta meditation. So loving kindness is the main vehicle or object, if you like, of meditation, and that brings you progressively into these deeper, altered states of consciousness that you mentioned called jhanas. Jhana, as I define it in the book, is a blissful state of stable meta-awareness. Meta awareness is this ability for the mind to observe itself, and through loving kindness, your mind becomes increasingly unified so that it's no longer distracted by outer sounds, by sensations in your body, by thoughts, by smells, by anything else that would grab your attention. Your mind is just collected around this feeling of love. And in the traditional Buddhist texts, the Buddha said metta or loving kindness could take you all the way to the fourth jhana. There's four kind of deeper states within the fourth jhana, but this is like a very deep state of equanimity where your mind is completely stable and you are starting to see very small movements of your mind and starting to notice how craving arises, how the sense of self arises, and you can start to have some deep insights into the nature of suffering and the cessation of suffering. And I think this isn't commonly taught. It's often much more common to use the breath as an object of meditation. But as I mentioned, um Bhante Vimlaramsi found it to be faster for a lot of students, especially Westerners, to use metta because it has this inherent joyful quality to it. And that joy brings us into the present moment and it becomes the fuel for jhana. So it's an important jhana factor for this state of consciousness. I should mention for maybe some of your listeners have heard jhana in a different context, and it is a controversial term in Buddhist circles, and it's often associated with a very deep state of concentration where you're narrowing in on one very specific set of sensations, like the sensations of breathing at your nostrils. And that type of jhana, or what people are calling jhana in that case, is quite different. It's more about concentration and focus, and it can require weeks of extended retreat to get into that deep state. That's not what Bhante Vimlaramsi taught as jhana. His interpretation of the Buddha's teachings and of jhana based on his experience was something that's more of an open heart. It's more of relaxing and releasing tension, and that relaxation leads to a mind that's free from craving, free from these what I call unfit states or what are traditionally called hindrances. This is actually accessible not only on meditation retreat, but in daily life. In my book, I recommend if people want to start experiencing these states that they start having a sitting practice of at least 30 minutes. But over time, and especially if you start to go on retreat and get a sense for what jhana is, you can even experience it in daily life. So it's more of I compare it to a flow state, even though it's it has some important differences from flow states in a peak psychology sense. But it's similarly something that where you're in the present moment, your mind it feels very good, it's inherently rewarding, and it has other side benefits, like for example, you're not distracted. So obviously there's a lot of benefits to just having stable attention, but the deeper benefits of jhana are these kind of deep insights into the nature of the mind and the nature of self and eventually can lead to nirvana or nibbana, which is the quote unquote goal of the meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition. So jhana is important and I think it's not talked about enough, and metta is certainly an incredible vehicle for experiencing it. It's not something that's inaccessible at all. I think that your listeners, if they're interested, could experience it within a reasonable amount of time. There was actually a study I referenced in the book where they took complete beginners, taught them this kind of metta meditation, and they were reporting the characteristics of jhana, I think, within six weeks or so. And they were also showing the biological markers of jhana in terms of heart rate variability, although it wasn't pronounced as the more advanced meditators. So it's something that is accessible to everyone. It doesn't require any kind of special talent or extreme skills or effort.

Speaker 1 · 7:48And when you're practicing meta and entering this form of say genetic experience, what are you doing? Are you wishing others well, wishing yourself well with phrases, or are you sensing into a quality of sensation in the heart of well-being? What does the practice look like for you?

Speaker 2 · 8:13To summarize what's happening, and if someone wants to learn this, I suggest a guided meditation on the Fit My Nap or maybe elsewhere, because I'm just going to describe the steps. I'm not going to actually guide because that would take a lot of time. But basically, what happens is you spark the feeling of meta by, for example, calling up a happy memory or something that makes you feel loving, like a memory of petting a cute animal, the face of a baby. You tend to get a sense for over time something that will bring up this loving feeling and eventually become something you can call up on command. Like if I asked you to remember what does vanilla ice cream taste like, and you could just go into that flavor a little bit.

Speaker 1 · 8:54I love vanilla ice cream.

Speaker 2 · 8:57Yeah. So once you have the feeling, it's often recommended to send it to yourself to start because it's like on an airplane where they'll ask you to secure your own oxygen mask before helping other passengers. You can feel more meta for others once you really feel it for yourself. So you'll send the meta towards yourself, and people do that in different ways, whether they're visualizing themselves as a child or just with a phrase like, may I be happy? May I be well. So that lasts for maybe five minutes or so just to get the meta feeling stronger. And then the next step is to send it out to a friend. There's different ways to do it, but you can start to send it out to other people and eventually to all beings everywhere. So it's like a very open, expansive feeling. It's a definite experience. It could start with a phrase or a visual of seeing people smiling or with an intention, like, may all beings be happy. But in order to enter jhana, you eventually want to let go of these thoughts and verbalizations and images because one of the things that happens in the second jhana, there's no thoughts anymore. There's no kind of intentional thinking. There can be some kind of background thoughts, but you're no longer using the thought. It's faded into the background a bit. So once you have the feeling of metta, that becomes the vehicle and it takes you through the jhanas naturally, and you just relax into it, you allow it to be open. The most important part of the practice, and what Ponte really emphasized, was how to let go of distractions in a way that brings you into jhana and progressively

Speaker 2 · 10:32deeper into the jhanas. He called these the six R's. And in my book, I've simplified it into four R's, which are recognize, release, relish, and remain. So recognize is when your mind is suddenly off thinking about that email that you have to answer after your meditation session that happens spontaneously, that you're taken away by those thoughts. And the moment you recognize this, essentially you've started to meditate again. What you do next is very important because there's a tendency to want to push the distraction away or get mad at ourselves forgetting to meditate. In that moment, there's a skillful way of letting go of the craving that caused our mind to go in this other direction, and that is to release it by accepting the distraction and also releasing any tension in our body, especially in the forehead area, there tends to be a kind of contraction. The next step is to relish. This is the third R, and that means coming back to this feeling of loving-kindness or whatever the object of meditation is, and to really enjoy it because joy is what's going to keep the mind centered in the present moment. And then remain is the fourth R, which is to stay with that feeling, to just have the intention to lightly keep it in awareness. I don't want to use the word focus either, because I think you're right, it tends to give this sense of really bearing down with our heads instead of just enjoying it and remaining with it, but having this intention of this is what I'm interested in, this is what I'm doing now. So if you repeatedly use these four R's, your mind starts to become more and more unified and it becomes easier and kind of effortless to stay in this state until you're no longer using much effort at all. Your mind is just resting with the feeling of love and deepening and through the jhanas on its own.

Speaker 1 · 12:17That's beautiful. So you simplified your teacher's six R's into your four Rs. Would it be too much to then oversimplify it to two R's or even one combo R of relishing release?

Speaker 2 · 12:33Yeah, those are the most important steps to remember because once you recognize the distraction, that happens almost automatically. So you could say the most important part to remember is to skillfully release that distraction, almost like your attention is a fist that is clenched around it, and you want to just relax that fist and reopen your awareness in your heart. And the relish is, yeah, the sense of bringing back up the joy. If you've lost the loving kindness, actually bringing it back up, a big part of the practice is actually to even smile a little bit, which really helps the mind be uplifted. And that's the most important part, although I think it helps to have these other Rs because it's easy to just forget to recognize it all. But over time it becomes a fluid mental motion. So you're not thinking like what's the next R. You start to train your mind and eventually you have this movement down and how to do it, and it feels natural and it feels right. But I think you're right, it doesn't have to be really complicated and it's not about memorizing the Rs, but it's really about getting a feel for what does it feel like when I let go of the craving and I come back into this feeling of love.

Speaker 1 · 13:40I think that was just me craving a shortcut or something. But yeah, I think that all makes sense and it's a very beautiful pathway.

Speaker 1 · 13:51Well, Liam McClintalk, thank you so much for chatting about this with me today. It's great to catch up with you. When you reached out, I just felt a lot of gladness to hear from you. I'm so happy for you that you published your book, FitMind. I highly recommend to everyone listening or watching to check out the book, which includes practical teachings and exercises to create this fit mind, this loving awareness.

Speaker 2 · 14:25Thanks again, Sean. This has been really awesome.

Speaker 1 · 14:27Beautiful, thank you.