General Points on Meditation

You have to have some kind of intention to do the meditation practice. The intentionality you have is not necessarily ego-centred; it is part of the function of the mind to have a direction, a focus, a wish for something. So when you start the meditation, you have the intention of focusing on space, expanding and resting in the sense of space, and the intention of attending to the thoughts.You need a technique to practise meditation, but the words which are used to describe the technique can sometimes cause problems if they become part of the game of doing something. There might be the kind of gung-ho sense of, "I have got to be aware of my breath", "I must attend to my thoughts" and so forth, where the meditation becomes a big job of work. You can get various problems such as over fixating on the out-breath, changing the normal breath pattern, becoming over conscious of your body, and so on. If you notice anything like that, it is interesting to see that when you tell yourself, "Now I will stop meditating, and let my mind do what it likes", and just sit on your meditation cushion without particularly doing anything, you often find that those problems disappear. Then after a while when you say to yourself, "Now I will start meditating again", those problems suddenly return. If you play around with that dynamic a little, you should see that it is focusing on the technique too heavily which actually causes those disturbances in your mind.
It is important to practise regularly and specifically put aside some time each day to do the practice. There is no particular time of day which is recommended for doing the meditation, you have to work out something which suits your particular situation. It is good to do one hour of formless practice each day, and in the beginning you shouldn't do more than that. You can start off by doing twenty minutes or half an hour every day, to give yourself the chance to properly connect with the practice. It is much better to do some meditation every day, rather than a large amount at the weekend for example, although you could do a little more when you have some extra time. Tibetans value what they call stability, which is the idea of persistence. You might not feel you are a particularly good meditator, but if you are persistent and keep at it, you are already showing the signs of being a good practitioner. The most important thing about the practice is consistency, making a continual effort at a level which is suitable for you.

It might be helpful not to be too precise about the time period for the meditation, because if you get into the habit of meditating regularly for a specific period of time like half an hour, you might get used to half-an-hour-ness of meditation. Your mind can become a bit disturbed towards the end of the session when you start thinking, "Now it is time to finish meditating", which can be especially problematic if at some time you are called upon to meditate for longer than your usual period. It can be interesting to catch that moment, and then continue for a little longer - just a minute or so - to experience what it is like to have apparently made that decision and then not immediately go through with it. Then, you can go on and finish the meditation in the usual way.

Some people seem to have the idea that when you begin to meditate, by some kind of magic, right from the start you should be the perfect meditator. But that is really missing the point, because the whole of Buddhism is a path of practice, a path of training; it isn't a path of instantaneous accomplishment or success. It is like anything you learn. If you are learning a language like French with the attitude, "I will only speak French when I can do that perfectly", you will be a long time learning. Similarly in meditation, you start at the beginning and you are bound to make mistakes. In fact you need to make mistakes, because you can't learn anything without making mistakes. You are not expected to get it right, which might be quite comforting really. By practising and committing yourself to the practice, you are however gradually wearing away an old set of habits which are not actually very useful to yourself, to your understanding, or to the people around you.

One of the things that happens through this particular practice, which is perhaps the thing people notice first of all, is that their minds become more stable and less easily influenced by the ups and downs of emotions. You don't feel yourself so overwhelmed by your hopes and fears, you don't have to adopt your feelings and emotions and so on, as you did before. It can be somewhat heart-warming when that message begins to come through. There is a kind of delight in the fact that you can actually relate to your experience in a direct kind of way. For people who have been very closed for most of their lives, this can be a particularly wonderful feeling.
As you practise it might seem that you gradually begin to change into a better person in various ways. There can the idea of developing yourself through meditation, so there is a you who somehow remains the same, who at the same time is somehow developed by gathering add-ons which are positive. Having previously held onto the things that were negative and painful, at this point it is important not to simply move on and hug yourself in the same kind of way with your newly discovered so-called good qualities.
There is a problem about thinking of meditation solely in terms of developing certain positive qualities like tranquillity or stability, because it is associated with the idea of carrying a yardstick around with you all the time, judging whether you are meditating properly or not, working out whether you are getting the expected results or not. Maybe you have the idea that meditation is about being calm, and having judged yourself as not being calm you think, "I would like to be calmer". One part of the practice, is to notice how often that yardstick comes up, and then let go of it. We find it hard to believe we can exist without the lifeline of one yardstick or another.
You might also become some kind of meditative hypochondriac, continually comparing one state of meditation with another: "Am I more relaxed now, than when I meditated last time?" If you have friends who are also meditating, you might think, "Is my meditation going better than theirs?" Some people start to meditate with the idea, "I have to succeed in relaxing", and it is rather sad when that turns into a job of work and another stick to beat yourself with because you haven't been successful.

As you practise, you tend to notice more and more of these crazy ways of thinking, making comparisons, using measuring rods, being ambitious, competing with yourself, competing with other people, and so on. The fact is, you don't have to succeed in anything when you are meditating. The only purpose of meditation is to become aware, for the mind to become clearer, and you can't force that; it gradually happens by itself. Although it can be quite uncomfortable, it is good to be aware of all the mess in your mind because you can't let go of that until you actually see it is there.

With meditation there is never the idea of, "Now it is really working!", or "Now I have really made it!" It is a bit like doing the housework or gardening. When you have dusted the house, you don't think, "What a relief - I will never have to do the dusting again", or after weeding the garden, you don't think, "Now I can relax - those weeds are gone forever". You have to continually do those things. Similarly in meditation, it is important to have the attitude of just sitting down and doing it, developing a certain trust in doing the practice, without focusing too much on results. Trungpa Rinpoche said that the ego is gradually worn away by the process of meditating and practising like a pair of shoes are gradually worn away by the action of walking. You are wearing away ego by walking the path, by the simple act of practising, and there is no big deal about that.

Sometimes there is a problem of sitting down to meditate because you feel it is a special kind of activity, and there is a feeling of heaviness about not wanting to do it. If you notice that kind of resistance, you can play with it by suddenly switching into the meditation when you are sitting down during the day. You can get a flavour of relating to the breath, thoughts and so on, without particularly getting into the formalised posture. After a while you can let go of the technique and come back to your ordinary flow of experience. It is important to develop the ability to shift from one state to the other quite easily.

Fundamentally, there isn't any difference between your everyday life experience and meditation, except in the meditation you are practising a particular technique which gives your mind space to be aware in a way which is not usually possible during the day because there are so many distractions. As you practise, more and more of the flavour of the stability, openness, awake quality, understanding and so on, of the formal meditation sessions begins to overflow into your post-meditation or between-meditation experience. The feeling of space you are connecting to in the meditation moves into the environment around you, and gradually into the experience of going about your ordinary activities.

In the beginning it is good to have a formal division between meditation and everyday life, to prevent a kind of chaos developing, where the meditation slops into everyday life and everyday life slops into the meditation. It is not that the meditation shouldn't continue into everyday life, but it is important not to allow it to just slide away at the end of the session. When the meditation finishes, it is also important not to think a kind of guillotine comes down and cuts off the meditation, so that you suddenly switch over into an ordinary non-meditative mode as it were. The idea is that you can flash back to the experience of meditation as you are going about your ordinary activities. It can become a lifeline which connects you with an ability to deal with difficult everyday situations.

 

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Copyright - Rigdzin Shikpo 2007