The essential point about meditation is this: to get anywhere in meditation you need to be able to steady the mind and be present in the present. That’s all there is to it and it is largely a question of just doing it.

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Today’s Meditation

When we describe the sitting posture, the word that feels the most appropriate is “dignity.” Sitting down to meditate, our posture talks to us. It makes its own statement. You might say the posture itself is the meditation. If we slump, it reflects low energy, passivity, a lack of clarity. If we sit ramrod-straight, we are tense, making too much of an effort, trying too hard. When I use the word “dignity” in teaching situations, as in “Sit in a way that embodies dignity,” everybody immediately adjusts their posture to sit up straighter. But they don’t stiffen. Faces relax, shoulders drop, head, neck, and back come into easy alignment. The spine rises out of the pelvis with energy. Sometimes people tend to sit forward, away from the backs of their chairs, more autonomously. Everybody seems to instantly know that inner feeling of dignity and how to embody it.

-Jon Kabbat-Zin

Bookshelf:

For Deeper Inquiry:

1. Take Stock of Your Skills
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Let's remind ourselves of the entry points into the spiral journey we are embarking on. As a task to go through these entry points and acknowledge their presence. How far are they developed in you? How confident are you about each? Acknowledge this in yourself and acknowledge more generally that such skills exist. Who in your life or as an inspirational figure embodies these qualities for you? Who would you like to emulate? In the spiral to freedom, we've named seven different entry points that correspond to different temperaments and are all the more inviting because any of us can do some of this. It's not all understanding that does the heavy lifting. It's inspiration, virtue, trust, sense restraint, mindfulness, situational awareness, examination—these do the heavy lifting and get us into the spiral. Then the spiral begins to work and, on the other side of the spiral, there is some degree of liberative understanding.

REFLECTING ON OUR FACILITY WITH THE ENTRY POINTS
Sense restraint	The capacity to hold back, to not be impulse driven—both impulses towards experiences and away from. Remember, it's not just greed, it's also aversion: retreating from experience and defending.
Trust / confidence	How easy is it, or how difficult is it, for you to trust—not just the Buddhist teachings but to actually trust someone or to know that you trust something?
Care, heedfulness, dedication	Can you dedicate yourself to something? Can you actually care for things and take up the care of something or someone? Not necessarily through sympathy, not necessarily liking it, but can you accept responsibility to care for something and then follow through on this?
Wise investigation	Can you investigate? Can you examine? Can you hold questions and come to learn something? Can you gain different access points and figure things out? Can you probe into things?
Mindfulness & situational awareness	The classic. The fullness of your mind's presence and your skill in situational awareness. Mindfulness creates relationship with experience. Can you contextualize that relationship in the bigger sphere of your own values, what's important, what's urgent, what's needed, what's happening right now, what's present?
Inspiration	Several of the spiral texts speak of inspiration. Something touches you and makes your heart widen, your ears prick up and you're willing to engage with something. Inspiration is that which calls for engagement. Can you be inspired or is your response to new things to be lukewarm?
Ethics / virtue	The capacity to live in your behavior, your actions, your speech in accordance with what you sense has value, in your heart. We all have a sphere of values and we're trying to bring congruency between our behavior, actions, and speech, and the sphere of values. Is this something you have skill in? Do you sense that certain actions are ethical or unethical, skillful or unskillful, needed or unneeded, wholesome or unwholesome? Do I have a good grasp of this or does it take a long time and you only find out afterwards when you're off the mark?

1. So, there is another way to approach this path, and that is by playing to our strengths. We're looking at our strengths psychologically, beginning to really understand where our virtues lie and to take this as a path of cultivation.
2. We still need to look at the kind of freedom that is on offer here. The path of the Buddha in general requires us to have a feeling for the kinds of freedom he is offering.

Science & Wisdom:

A Beginner’s Guide to Quantum Mechanics – Dr. John Realpe & Dr. Marco Colnaghi The uncertainty principle

• Describing quantum states • Schrödinger’s cat • Wave-particle duality & double-slit experiment • The measurement problem (Wigner’s paradox) • Non-locality and entanglement Lesson 2: What is Quantum Mechanics? • The Copenhagen interpretation • David Bohm’s implicate order • The Multiverse (many-worlds) • Carlo Rovelli’s relational interpretation • QBism • Other interpretations of QM