In this passage Ken explains how to build the capacity to rest in being awake—to stay present with whatever arises rather than trying to smooth it out. When he tells the story of The Princess and the Pea, he gives it a depth I’d never encountered before.
Hans Christian Andersen’s tale was a gentle satire, written by an outsider mocking the pretensions of the aristocracy that had once excluded him. Yet when I first heard it, I didn’t think of that at all. I saw myself in the princess—so sensitive, feeling everything so deeply. Ken’s teaching turned that sensitivity inside out: when you truly rest, you start to feel everything that keeps you from resting more deeply. Like the princess, you “get black and blue.” The discomfort isn’t a problem; it’s a gateway to awareness itself.
From Pointing Out Instructions
What has become clear to me over the years is that mahamudra, and all of the direct awareness practices, consist of making lots of relatively subtle effort to bring the mind—or attention, or you, whatever you want to say—into some form of presence and then resting. And the actual power of practice comes through resting, and the more completely you’re able to rest, the deeper and the more powerful your practice becomes. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m setting up a relatively unstructured schedule so that each of you can find, explore your own way of resting deeply. Now this resting doesn’t mean going to sleep. It means being able to rest and be awake but really rest in being awake.
Now how many of you know the story of The Princess and the Pea? Okay, anybody not familiar with that story? Well, it’s a fairy tale, I can’t remember all the details but a prince is looking for a princess to marry, and he’s told by a wise old woman that the only way to find out who a proper princess is, is to put a pea under a hundred mattresses. And so he invites one woman over after another and they sleep on this bed. Eventually one woman says, “I couldn’t sleep at all last night, just black and blue. That was the lumpiest bed I’ve ever had.” And so, this is the true princess because she can feel a pea under a hundred mattresses.
Now there are additional elements to that story but the main point here that I bring it up, is that when you actually rest then you feel all the stuff that prevents you from resting more deeply. And it just brings you right into connection with it. This is often not comfortable. You’re like the princess. You get black and blue.
The mahamudra practice and the direct awareness practice, in general, consists primarily of learning how to rest deeply at first with, and eventually in, one’s internal material. And this is found also in the Theravadan tradition in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness and particularly in the Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra in which the breath is used as a way of coming to that deep resting. But one has to be awake in this. That’s very very important. If the mind is drowsy, or dull, or unclear then you’re just sitting in a dull state, and that’s not helpful at all.
So, for this reason often when people are starting this kind of practice they’re encouraged to practice for relatively short periods so that the mind is constantly being woken up, it is fresh and awake. So even if you’re practicing in a group you may start doing this, just resting completely for like literally a minute or two and then relaxing and then resting again for a minute or two [unclear] so that constantly fresh and awake mind and learning how to rest in that. And you may find that it works better for you to practice for half an hour and then go for a walk for 10 or 15 minutes, come back and practice again for half an hour.
This is what I want you to explore. But the quality that I want you to keep exploring is this quality of resting. When you begin to find that quality of resting in sitting meditation, I want you to take that quality of resting into simple activities such as walking. How can you rest in the same way when walking or eating? We won’t have to worry about conversation but eventually you take it into that. And you actually learn to do everything in this clear awake resting mind. And that provides a very, very good basis for the looking quality, which is also what we’re going into with mahamudra.
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