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Talk: 19911127-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-anapanasati_full_awareness_of_breath_series_tape_1-33804 Leandra Tejedor.json Start_time: 01:21:52 Display_question: What do you do when you get into yourself, which I do like regularly? Keyword_search: children, husband, balance, sampajanya, wisdom, mindfulness, IMS, flexibility, awareness, peace, Buddha, wide angle lens, eating meditation, family Question_content: Questioner: I have three young children and just trying to imagine a situation where, like, maybe I'm trying to cook dinner and it's burning and one is hitting another, another is like, hanging on me. You hate me, you never hug me. The phone is ringing. My husband walks in with an important message. I mean, it sounds like a funny joke, but its… Larry: No, I understand. Questioner: It’s like terrifying in a way situation because… Larry: Who makes terrifying? Questioner: Pardon? Larry: Who makes terrifying. Questioner: That something could go wrong, and very likely will, and so that somebody will get poked with a pencil or…. Larry: I see. Okay. Questioner: The dinner will burn. You know what I'm saying? Larry: I do now, I do. Questioner: Then from that point on, it's the cascading of tears until bedtime. Larry: Right. Questioner: And if I'm perfect, I can figure out the most important thing that's going on, and tackle that. In the meanwhile, I'm trying to think, are the right pajamas ready? Are the blankets all? Is the mattress on the floor? Larry: I understand, I hear you loud and clear. Questioner: Okay. Yeah. What do you do when you get into yourself, which I do like regularly? Larry: What's that song? Do you believe in magic? Yeah. It isn't magic, for either of your questions. The same question, in a way. The situation is, as you describe it, it's a complicated one where there are many demands on you, and you have to stay alert, and you have to balance a lot of things. I certainly am in that situation. When we run retreats, it's like a ten-ring circus sometimes. So, it's relative to the situation. That's why sitting is easy, right? It's a piece of cake. Your children are all asleep, everything is, and all you have to be… you're just accountable to yourself, your breath. Break_line: Now, that changes. Suddenly you've got… now, in our practice there's sati means mindfulness. There's another term called sampajanya, and often they use together sati sampajanya. That means it's sometimes translated as mindfulness with wisdom, or mindfulness with clear comprehension. That's that… it's not kind of zeroing in on something to the exclusion of everything, but it's more being awake, staying in touch from moment to moment, and more of a global sense of what's happening. That's wisdom, so that you know what to do, that you know what's appropriate. If you carried this narrow kind of attention, which is more appropriate in a retreat, and you just try to do that all the time, one thing at a time like that. It would be silly. Break_line: I'll give you just very ordinary examples. On retreat, sometimes we'll emphasize slow walking. But sometimes, like at IMS, we'll have a retreat, and there are 100 people on it. And in the old days, used to have to wash the dishes, and the pots. Now there's a machine, and we would talk about, slow down, et cetera. And then you'd find people who are going to wash their pots with this is their feet and they're like that, like that. And they're being mindful of what it feels like, lifting, moving, placing. Okay. There's no sampajania there because there's no wisdom. Because what they would see, is the total situation is that if I walk this slowly, and then wash the pot like this, there's a long line of yogis, way out into the dining room. So, it's a misuse of the practice. Break_line: So, the flexibility, the awareness helps you see that this is not a time for doing slow, but doing fast, and being as awake as you can, being fast, or you have to drive quickly to get someone to pick up a child. And if you don't get there, they'll get scared and so forth. The car may have to go fast. Can you learn to be for the driver to be at peace, in the midst of a fast-driving car? I think so. I think you can learn how to be at peace inside yourself, as you have to juggle all of these balls. And that comes from the practice of being mindful to what's happening. But it can't eliminate the fact that you have a lot of things that you have to do, and be concerned about health, and danger and so forth. This can't take that away, but what it can do is reduce the wear and tear on you. And that might help them. Questioner: Yes, it does. Larry: Okay. And what is being said by this sutra, what the Buddha is saying is that conscious breathing can help you stay composed, in the midst of even that situation. But if it's hard to do that, it's all right. Just be with what you can be with. But it's not necessarily zoom lens, which you can do on a retreat with nothing else, but it's more wide-angle lens. Yeah. So sometimes you have to do a few things at the same time, and you try to stay awake. If you do eating meditation on a retreat, you can be right like that. But I suppose you eat with your family, and you're doing the kind of what we teach on a retreat, you'd have a revolution going on in your household. So, then you have to eat and talk, eat and listen. But even there, relative to what's going on, mindful, you can be mindful all the time. When you are that busy. Just let's leave it at this. When you're that busy and it's that complicated, are you too busy to breathe? Questioner: No, I’m not. Larry: Okay, obviously, because you're alive, you're breathing. So then if you're not too busy to breathe, you're not too busy to be mindful of what's happening. But don't hold the standard of the quality of attention that you can have on a retreat, and have that judging you, over your shoulder that I'm not able to do it that way, with all the children, because you won't be able to do it that way. It won't have the detail and the precision usually. It won't. That's okay. Questioner: Yes, that’s helpful. Thank you. End_time: 01:26:22
