How to Meditate (3 page)

This was one of the biggest teachings from my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche: no big deal. I remember one time going to him with what I thought was a very powerful experience from my practice. I was all excited, and as I was telling him about this experience, he had a
look.
It was a kind of indescribable look, a very open look. You couldn’t call it compassionate or judgmental or anything. And as I was telling him about this, he touched my hand and said, “No … big … deal.” He wasn’t saying “bad,” and he wasn’t saying “good.” He was saying that these things happen and they can transform your life, but at the same time don’t make too big a deal of them, because that leads to arrogance and pride, or a sense of specialness. On the other hand, making too big a deal about your difficulties takes you in the other direction; it takes you into poverty, self-denigration, and a low opinion of yourself. So meditation helps us cultivate this feeling of no big deal, not as a cynical statement, but as a statement of humor and flexibility. You’ve seen it all, and seeing it all allows you to love it all.

Part One

T
HE
T
ECHNIQUE OF
M
EDITATION

When you sit upright but relaxed in the posture of meditation, your heart is naked. Your entire being is exposed—to yourself, first of all, but to others as well. So, through the practice of sitting still and following your breath as it goes out and dissolves, you are connecting with your heart.

—
CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

1

PREPARING FOR PRACTICE AND MAKING THE COMMITMENT

T
here are very few things you need in order to begin a meditation practice. In fact, all you need is you. Sometimes people think they need to sign up for a retreat or buy tons of meditation-room supplies. But you can begin anywhere, in any room, at any time of day. You simply begin. You start where you are. You might feel that you are the single most stressed-out person on Planet Earth; you might be hopelessly in love; you might have six children and a full-time job; you might be going through a depression or a dark night of the soul. Wherever you are, you can begin there. You don’t need to change a thing in order to start a meditation practice.

When you decide to become a regular practitioner of meditation, it’s wise to settle on a schedule ahead of time. The fruits of meditation are manifold, and you really begin to see them and feel them when you practice regularly. So first and foremost, choose a schedule that is realistic for you—and then keep it. For example, decide what time of day you are going to practice. Perhaps it works best for you to practice in the early morning, before you have breakfast and get ready for work. Perhaps it works best for you to practice after your kids are in bed at night. Decide when you are going to get into a regular habit of meditation—and commit.

Next, consider how long you will practice. How long will you sit for? You can sit for twenty minutes or two hours; this is up to you. But set yourself up for success. When you commit to a meditation practice, you don’t want to put yourself in a position where you will easily feel defeated. For beginning meditators, I suggest starting with twenty minutes. Then after a month or several months of practice, you can lengthen your time by another twenty minutes. If you are a seasoned meditator or if you are returning to a meditation practice, you might commit to an hour a day.

Perhaps you have an hour for your meditation practice, but sitting for more than twenty minutes feels daunting to you. If this is the case, I suggest sitting for twenty minutes, then perhaps taking ten minutes to slowly walk in a quiet, contemplative fashion, or to practice slow yoga, or to simply stretch. Reenergize yourself and give yourself a break through movement. Shifting your focus to something body oriented might help you to sit again for another twenty minutes.

Ideally, the environment for meditation is as simple as possible. It is simple in the sense that it does not require a great deal of setup. As you will discover, meditation is about letting the world in and awakening to your life, which means you can even meditate on a bus! But for the purposes of creating a regular practice, find a space in your home that feels sacred or relaxing for you. You might decide to create a little altar, a display of reminders that you feel supports your practice. You might want to place a picture of a teacher whom you connect with on your altar, or a candle, or perhaps some incense.

Next, consider your meditation “seat.” As you will learn in the chapter on posture, you want to sit in a way that allows you to feel lifted—and this can be done on a cushion or a chair. Some choose to use what is called a
gomden,
which is a hard, square seat that lifts you up so your knees are below your sacrum. You can also use a
zafu,
a circular cushion, which is a bit softer and lower. Find the cushion or seat that works for you. If you have a bad back or a lot of knee pain, you can sit in a chair.

Last, find a timer. This can be a wristwatch, an alarm clock, or anything you can set that will alert you when the time you decided on is up. In meditation halls and on retreats, a gong (or bell) is often used, which is an extraordinarily gorgeous and peaceful sound.

You might practice alone, or you might decide to begin a meditation practice with a partner or a group. If you are a beginning meditator, I often recommend practicing with one or more people, because this will provide you with a great deal of support. You’ll find that if you go at it alone, it is much more difficult to keep the schedule. The time-honored way of doing meditation is very often to practice alone, and in that case the commitment and devotion to a schedule can be more difficult, but I’ve found it gets easier as time passes.

Once a college student who came to me asking for instruction on how to meditate said that he experienced a lot of anxiety. He also had ADD (attention deficit disorder). This young student was longing for relief from all the stress in his life. He was also concerned about how he was going to integrate meditation into his busy life, with all his studies and obligations. I suggested that he meditate just ten minutes a day first thing in the morning, before even getting out of bed. I told him he could sit up in bed or on the side of the bed, cross-legged or legs extended, however he felt comfortable.

He came back after one week and said that this had really been helpful. He said that one morning he woke up really early, around 2:30 a.m., and he was having a panic attack because he had so much to do. His instinct was to jump out of bed and get to it, work on his huge list of to-dos. And then he remembered his commitment to start his day with ten minutes of meditation. So at 2:30 in the morning, he sat up and entered his meditation practice. In that experience, he said everything slowed down, and he was able to look at his wild, intense mind and his energized body. By being present with himself for those ten minutes, he had clarity about how to mindfully work through his list and see what needed to be done and in what order. The meditation allowed him to settle down and organize what he needed to do with clarity. It occurred to him that many of the things he felt he had to do actually didn’t need to be done that particular day—and this settledness allowed him to return to sleep and feel much more refreshed when he awoke again at a more reasonable hour.

So perhaps you only have ten minutes that you can commit to meditation. Just ten minutes can help you come to your senses or slow down enough that your natural intelligence, or what I call basic goodness—the part of you that knows what the right action at any given time might be—can click in.

In this book, we are practicing what is called
shamatha.
Shamatha is a Sanskrit term that means “calm abiding.” It is the practice of stabilizing the mind, training the mind to be present, settling the mind in the here and now, awakening to the world just as it is. In the following chapters, you will learn everything you need to know in order to start your shamatha practice: how to settle into your meditation space and enter your practice, how to sit and position your body, how to work with your breath, and how to work with the wild mind. As you know, a calm mind doesn’t happen very often! But when you have an object of meditation that you keep coming back to—and in this book I teach that you begin with the breath—you are taming and soothing your mind and changing the habitual patterns where you are totally run by your thoughts and emotions. Placing the mind on an object is the backbone of shamatha practice.

2

STABILIZING THE MIND

W
henever you sit down to meditate, the first thing you do is settle. Settling means that you come into the room where you intend to practice meditation and you allow yourself to be completely as you are. You check in with yourself. You have a sense of being here and knowing what you brought in with you. Perhaps on one particular day you have felt very quiet since breakfast; perhaps you were looking out at the ocean or at the trees outside your window, and you actually come to your meditation quite settled and still. Other times you may feel rushed: you gobbled your breakfast and ran up and down the stairs, and you arrive at your meditation feeling all wound up. Maybe something happened last night or after breakfast that has you worried and upset, and so you’re completely churned up. Maybe you’re really tired, so you feel like you’re hardly there. You might even feel dull or a sense of sinking.

One thing we can say for sure is that whenever you make time to sit down and practice meditation, you bring something along—you bring your thoughts and joys from the day with you, your disappointments and your concerns. The idea isn’t to just plunk down and start your timer and block out everything that you’ve brought with you. So first, have some sense of where you’re at. Ask yourself the questions: What am I feeling physically? What is my mood? What is the quality of my mind? So step one in getting settled is to check in with yourself.

The point is that there’s not a good way to come into meditation or a bad way to come into meditation. It might feel preferable to show up feeling calm and spacious, but really meditation is about being awake and present to whatever is going on. You can’t critique your meditation in terms of good and bad. The only thing you can measure your meditation against is the question: “Was I present or not?” And even then, to say to yourself that you weren’t present is a result of the fact that you’ve been meditating and you recognized that fact. There’s some sense of awareness about what is actually happening.

exercise

TOUCHING IN WITH THE PRESENT MOMENT

At the beginning of a meditation session, it can be helpful to check in with your mind before you begin. See where you’re at right now. To find yourself in the present moment, it can help if you run through a series of questions to help you contact your mind, to help you to become aware of what’s happening in this very moment.

So the first question is: What are you feeling?

Can you contact what you’re feeling? It could be your mood or your physical body, a quality of drowsiness or peacefulness, agitation or physical pain—anything. Can you contact that nonverbally and just get a sense of what you’re feeling?

To refine this question a little bit: Are there any emotions? Can you be present to them? Can you contact them?

We’re not talking about having to name anything or remembering the history of the emotion, or anything like that. Just be present to what you’re feeling right now.

Are you experiencing any physical sensations right now? Pain, tightness, relaxation?

What about your thoughts? What’s the quality of your thoughts right now? Is your mind very busy? Is it quite drowsy? Is it surprisingly still? Are your thoughts raging or peaceful or dull? Obsessive or calm?

If I were to ask you personally, right now, “What is the quality of your mind at this moment?” Whether it’s still or wild or dull, whatever it might be, what would you say?

Hopefully these questions will help you touch in and make deep contact with yourself. I suggest that you begin your meditation practice with these questions. With practice, you’ll find that you don’t need to run through a list of questions to bring yourself into the present moment on your cushion. It will become more automatic. Your intention is to simply locate your mind and stabilize the mind as you launch into your practice.