Get to know your inner mental attitude so that you can feel at home in your body and mind no matter what thoughts come and go
This combination of guided contemplation with instructional talk will connect you with your inner mental attitude and teach you the fast track to resting in life just as it is.
And it may be one of the simplest, fastest, and most powerful things you ever learn here at Meditation Forest!
So you want to be sure to do two things at least:
1. Get a good look at what is meant by the term “inner mental attitude” and confirm that in your experience.
2. Establish a habit of looking into it again and again, so that mindfulness of it becomes something more prominent in your life.
So first we can start with something very tangible and accessible, which is bodily tensions. For instance, in the face.
You may notice that when you start meditating there is some left-over tensions in the face that had to do with being social or active, or just a default level of tension that creeps in the face. When you start meditating, instantly you can see that these tensions are now obsolete. They don’t belong in the activity of meditation, and we can easily relax some portion of that (once we are aware of it).
When you do that, a more subtle sense of ease results, a sense of rest and ease.
The key points are: one, you become aware of the built-up tension in the face. two, you can deliberately tweak that in a more pleasant direction.
Now we are going to apply these same key points to the “inner mental attitude.”
The first thing is becoming aware of the state of the inner mental attitude.
When you know what to look for, you just look. Simple, just like becoming aware of tensions in the face.
So what we want to establish is an ability to look. So it’s actually a good idea to start with the tensions in the physical face, because when we relax them we also tend to get this feeling of relief.
It’s almost as though our “inner facial expression” has changed. THAT is where we can start looking to an inner mental attitude.
It’s where we are kind of taking things in and relating to things from. That can be an inner feeling of striving, straining, often it can be kind of bracing against something, as if to cope with it, or it can be relaxed and at ease. And what you find is that you can tweak that too, just like muscles. You can relax your attitude to be more spacious, open, inviting, at ease.
We can also consciously adopt a particular inner mental attitude in order to become more familiar with that level of things. So you might try taking an inner facial expression of smiling on the inside, or slightly amused, but not move your face much or any bit at all, in order to become clearer about that level of things.
When we can see the relation between relaxing muscles and the inner mental attitude, and adopting an inner face and the inner mental attitude, we have pretty much all we need to start practicing mindfulness with it.
You can start to look into what your inner mental attitude is at any given time.
And you can play with that attitude to see if there is a better way to be relating to things which you would actually prefer.
Often, our inner attitude takes on a default role that it reverts to often. And often that is not the one that is serving us best.
So here we take the inner mental attitude as our meditation object.
You look into what it is like, and what happens when you adjust it.
You interrupt its default mode by becoming aware of it.
And then explore how deeply you can take it in a direction you would prefer to go.
In this way, you are changing your whole life.
Change your attitude, change your life.
Now it must be mentioned that however excited we might get about the possibility of constantly monitoring our attitude,
Constant monitoring is not possible.
You can’t always keep you finger on it.
What you CAN do is keep initiating your attention to your inner mental attitude
It is not somewhere it habitually roams
But if you initiate it more and more, it will start to become accustomed to looking there more and more.
It will start to notice when things are starting to get “screwy” more often, and sooner!
You’ll have more chances to take things in another direction.
Your practice is simply to become accustomed to checking
To become intimate with your inner mental attitude.
It’s also one of the clearest examples of the power that lies in simply knowing something!
Finally, a relaxed, spacious, open inner mental attitude makes it quite possible to look even deeper, beyond our inner mental attitude that we might play with.
There is already a fundamental sense of rightness, ok-ness, that is here, in you. There is no effort being made to maintain it or to make it so. It just is so.
This is the deeper level to this practice which is an opening to letting this already-here okay-ness, rightness, wellness start to shine through.
You can feel our way into this. The practice of inner mental attitude is a true path, in itself!
