Hello my lovey bunnies!
My friend Jordan was asking me how to do emptiness meditation the other night, and I thought, hmm. I wonder if there is a good video about that. There prob is but I couldn’t find one I’d recommend with a Gemini search, so I made one for yas!
I would start first with the inner child guide, then loving-kindness meditation, then you can go for nibbana. My full mindset guide has all the updated steps.
Below I’ll give you the written-up and polished version of this video if you’re more of a bookworm type:
Emptiness Is Not Emptying Your Mind
A simple meditation for feeling words, pain, and even anger dissolve back into flow
Most people hear “emptiness meditation” and assume it means emptying the mind: clearing away thoughts, letting them go, or trying to reach some blank state.
That can be nice, but it isn’t what emptiness means here.
Emptiness—shunyata—means that nothing has a fixed essence inside it. Things exist and function, but when you look closely, you can’t find the solid, independent thing you thought was there.
Take a car.
What exactly makes it a car? Is it still a car without wheels? Without an engine? Without seats? How many pieces can you remove before it becomes something else?
There isn’t one little nugget of “car” hiding inside it. A car is more like an algorithm the mind uses to recognize and describe a changing collection of parts and functions.
The same is true of everything—including you.
The sense of being one solid self is constructed from many streams of sensations, thoughts, memories, emotions, and perceptions referencing one another and being woven into a unified experience.
The meditation is learning to feel that weaving loosen.
Start with one ridiculous little word
Say the word the slowly.
The.
Say it again.
The.
And again.
The.
At some point it starts to sound completely ridiculous. Is that really a word? Is that really the sound we use constantly?
Slow it down until the meaning begins to fall away and you’re just hearing the sound.
That’s the first opening.
The word seemed like one solid unit carrying its meaning inside it. But now it has dissolved into vowels, consonants, vibration, rhythm, and silence.
It becomes beautiful sound.
Try it with another word:
Speech.
Stuff.
Your own name.
Don’t hurry to rebuild the meaning. Feel the sound before the mind encloses it again.
Now listen to everything that way
Listen to whatever is around you.
Rain. Traffic. Chanting. Birds. A fan. Someone talking.
Before you name it, feel it as sensation.
A sound doesn’t remain still for even a moment. It arises, changes, flows, and disappears. There is nothing inherent inside it that you can grab.
It’s just flowing.
And that flowing is incredibly releasing. Blissful, even.
You don’t have to manufacture bliss. The bliss is in no longer having to hold everything together as a solid thing.
Listen to the beautiful processes that make up the stuff we think is stuff.
Children understand this better than adults
Children are often much closer to this kind of perception.
They can become amazed that a word is a word. They can repeat a sound until it becomes hilarious. They can look at an ordinary object as though they’ve never seen one before.
Then adults train them out of it.
“You play too much.”
“Stop being silly.”
“Be serious.”
And then we wonder why everything feels so heavy and solid.
My parents apparently enjoyed my silliness, because I don’t remember them trying very hard to remove it. I’m grateful for that.
Silliness isn’t the opposite of spiritual insight. Sometimes it’s what cracks the consensus-reality overlay enough for you to see what’s actually there.
You can do the same thing with pain
Obviously, first fix what can be fixed.
If your posture is bad, move. If something might be injured, investigate it. Emptiness is not pretending that a signal doesn’t matter.
But once you’ve done what practically needs doing, look directly at the pain.
Normally, we turn it into one static object:
This pain.
Instead, let it fluctuate.
Feel the exact sensations. Pressure, heat, pulsing, tightness, movement, tingling, sharpness.
Notice what changes when you breathe in.
Notice what changes when you breathe out.
Breathing moves the lungs, muscles, circulation, pressure, and the structures around the painful area. The sensation is never as static as the word pain makes it seem.
Feel the flow of the change instead of holding it as one solid pain.
That can become surprisingly pleasant.
The pain may not instantly vanish, but the frozen thing you were fighting begins to dissolve into moving sensations.
Let anger pass through instead of lodging inside you
I discovered this once while my second wife and love of my life, Bee, was yelling at me.
I was sitting there thinking, “This is painful. She’s throwing all this anger at me.”
Then I realized I could use it as a meditation.
Instead of blocking the anger and turning it into a thing I had to defend against, I imagined my body becoming transparent.
The anger passed through me like air.
It became amazingly blissful. I was completely sober, and I was so surprised that I started smiling—which, admittedly, did not improve the argument. She was understandably wondering why I was smiling while she was yelling.
So perhaps keep the visible smile under control.
But internally, it was beautiful.
This doesn’t mean tolerating abuse, staying in danger, or refusing to set a boundary. Leave what you need to leave. Stop what you need to stop.
It means you don’t have to build the other person’s emotional force into a permanent object inside your own body.
Let it pass through.
Love can also break the structure of anger
When I was a child, I once told my mother, “I hate you. I hope you die.”
I think I wanted to go to a friend’s house and she told me it was bedtime.
She just said, “Oh, but I love you.”
It completely broke my brain.
How could I hate someone who loved me? The whole structure of the anger stopped making sense.
It threw me into a meditation.
Love can do that. It doesn’t fight the construction. It makes the construction impossible to maintain in the same form.
A preliminary practice before the nibbana meditation
This emptiness practice is also a useful preparation for the deeper nibbana meditation.
One version begins by feeling the sensations at the top of your head and the sensations at the bottoms of your feet at the same time.
Then stop automatically filling in the middle.
Let the head sensations exist on their own.
Let the foot sensations exist on their own.
Allow the apparent unified body between them to disappear.
You’re not imagining that your body has physically vanished. You’re allowing separate sensations to remain separate instead of automatically weaving them into one continuous object with one central observer inside it.
That unweaving is the doorway into the nibbana meditation.
The Buddha’s most direct instructions on this were given to Bahiya:
“In the seen, let there be only the seen. In the heard, let there be only the heard. In the cognized, let there be only the cognized. When there is no you in the seen, no you in the heard, no you in the cognized, nor you anywhere in between, that is the end of suffering.”
You can read the full teaching here:
https://suttacentral.net/ud1.10/en/sujato
In the heard, only the heard.
Not “me hearing the sound.”
Just the flowing sound.
In the pain, only the changing sensations.
Not “my solid pain.”
In the anger, only the energy passing through.
Not “this thing being done to me and stored inside me.”
That’s the meditation.
You’re not destroying reality. You’re listening to the processes that make up the stuff you thought was solid.
And when the solidity evaporates, what remains can be incredibly beautiful.
