I am not a meditation teacher, and I will never position myself in such a role. Because I have little to say about meditation, even though I do it everyday for nearly two decades (plus one decade of occasional practices before that). I see it as a personal endeavor that everyone should find their own way to do it. Like bodily exercise, if done properly, meditation, beyond any dispute, has great benefits for our health and other aspects of our life. So, there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.
If we detach meditation from religious context, it will be easier to encourage people to meditate. But nowadays meditation is often associated with Buddhism, and it is often tinted with certain ideology. So, I feel obliged to write a simple but essential guide to meditation. This will be intendedly short. For unexplained technical terms, please consult other sources, such as WikiPedia.
Three crucial rules of meditation
Here are mandatory rules of the practice. Practitioners have to fulfill or master these first, before they play with various meditative techniques.
(alternative wording)
1. Meditate daily
2. Be mindful
3. Do away with expectations and beliefs
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1. Meditate everyday
This is the most important. Without meditating daily, you go nowhere. The techniques you use do not matter, but your commitment and resolution do. Doing it everyday is the key of success. Moreover, every time you meditate, you have to do it till the end of the session. Here are simple suggestions:
- Always use a timer.
- Start with a manageable duration, and gradually increase it.
- Always finish the session as planned.
- Do not overdo it, and decrease the duration if you cannot get through the session.
- The target is you are able to sit a 30-minute stretch without pain everyday. Also you are capable of sitting up to 1 hour when needed.
The most important thing here is resolution, not how long you can sit. You have to finish each session completely and cleanly. This is an overlooked aspect of good meditators.
For beginners, I suggest you start with 5 minutes per session, at least once a day. When you can manage it, add up the duration 5 minutes every month (or 1 minute per week). By this way, you can sit as long as 1 hour in one year. Then you can attend a meditation retreat, particularly a vipassanā course, if you like.
Once you know how to sit for a 1-hour stretch. You can decrease it if you have limited time in days, but the minimum is 30 minutes. In case you are really busy in a particular day, you are allowed to do a 15-minute session, but not in two successive days. So, once you start the practice, your everyday life will not go without meditation.
You may experiment with 2-hour or 3-hour sitting, if you can manage it. But it is unnecessary to do that long in one stretch. Sitting multiple short sessions in a day brings more benefits. To my experiences, the whole-night meditations, mostly on the last day of retreats, are just games played by egos. You will get little from meditation when you are really tried and sleepy. So, meditate when you are invigorated.
I have to stress again that meditating daily is the most important rule. Nothing else matters much. If you fail to fulfill this rule, you meditation will go fruitless, no matter how long you can sit.
2. Stay alert
This rule is simple. When you meditate, do it mindfully. This means you must have conscious awareness throughout the session, not falling asleep or getting into a trance in the middle. You have to observe everything happens to your body and mind attentively. It is like you see a movies. Just be a good audience and appreciate every shot of it.
Many things can happen in a meditation session, particularly a long one. The most common are thoughts, pains, drowsiness, visions, and rapture. Keep in mind that you cannot control these things to happen or not to happen. The best you can do is to see it attentively. That is meditation is all about.
3. Purge expectations and beliefs
Without this rule, your meditation can go awry, and you can miss the very result of it. Many people start meditate with some goal in mind. This seriously hampers the practice. So, you have to expect nothing from your meditation.
Also do not judge your meditative experiences from any of your beliefs, like “This must come from my bad karma” or “This must be the Buddha coming to me” or “This must be a sign of the stream-enterer.” Your beliefs will ruin your meditation’s result and drive you crazy.
It is better to believe in nothing, and just see your experiences as they are. In fact, the very goal of meditation, in my view, is to purge all your beliefs and replace them with live experiences. If a goal to be set at all to get motivated in doing, make it just for the meditation itself. You sit because you have to sit. That’s it.
Many meditators wish for winning a spiritual lottery. They think they can unexpectedly or abruptly get enlightened somehow. This is also a kind of expectation. You do not need to anticipate the result. When it comes it comes. And it is absolutely alright if nothing happens as long as you keep practicing.
So, make your meditation practice a lifelong journey. If you do it as I guide you, you will see the result in 10 years. Do not expect anything quicker than that. After you make meditation as your habit and do it for a decade, you can test yourself by looking back to the former you 10 years ago. You will find that you can control yourself better, less impulsive, less easy to get angry like before, having less desires on unnecessary things, having less irrational fears, having less obsession in things you hold dear, etc.
And these results will be better in the next decade to come. This is the nonsense-free Buddhist meditation in a nutshell.
Minor concerns
- Breath is the best object of attention we all have. Even if you do not in a meditation session, say, in a waiting room, paying attention to your breath whenever you can will speed up your journey considerably.
- Breathing rightly, deep and effective, may need some practice and experiment. Once you can feel that your breath is sweet, you get it right.
- It is worth practicing the cross-legged sitting. Yoga asanas and stretching can help. The half-lotus posture, either the right or the left on top, is the best one. It helps us keep our spine upright and sit for a long period of time. Another helper is cushion. Making your bottom higher than your knees can help you sit straight easier (but too high bottom position can cause leg pains instead). When you sit properly, you can breathe easily, and you can ‘fight’ any pain in meditation with this straight back (This is my secret).
- Body movements can also be objects of attention. A well-known example is walking meditation. To do it effectively you may need someone to guide you. The basic idea is if you can discern every bit of your bodily changes, your meditative power will increase and linger substantially. This is a marked characteristic of Mahāsī system of vipassanā meditation training.
- Labeling (a technique from vipassanā meditation) can strengthen you concentration. For example, when you breathe in, say to yourself silently “breathing in,” and do the same with breathing out. Make sure you get the correspondence right, otherwise it is just a mantra. This technique can make you tired because it is highly attention-consuming.
- Thoughts happen inevitably. You will see many of them. Do not try to suppress thoughts. You cannot do it. They naturally come and go. They may look like gadflies to beginners. Only thing you can do is observing them. When your mindfulness power increases, you will see how a certain thought happens. For example, it may arise from a recent sensation you have. If you are familiar with the coming and going of thoughts, they will subside eventually.
- Pains happen anyway in meditation, particularly in sessions longer than 30–40 minutes. Do not avoid them, because you cannot. Just kindly observe them. Pains in meditation do no harm. They just play with you. No matter how painful your sitting is, do not break your session. If you are familiar with the pains enough, at one point you can separate the pains and the knower. You know the pains, but you just feel fine. However, do not expect this to happen too.
- Rapture can also happen in meditation, but less often than pains for beginners. When you are able to sit up to 1 hour or more, if your concentration is good, rapture happen eventually. Do not give too high value to it. Just see it as a kind of experience. It comes and goes like other phenomena. But it is a good sign of progress.
- You may attend a meditation retreat once a year. At retreats, the environment can help you in a significant way. You will have less distractions. And you can get help from teachers.
- Be careful with advice from meditation teachers. The advice can go in a variety of ways, even opposing to what I guide you here. A criterion to assess teachers’ advice I often use is whether the advice makes you stuck with certain beliefs or not. If so, it is a sign of danger. Moreover, if you meet teachers who tell you that they can use psychic power to speed up your practice or to assess your progress, run away quickly.
- Be careful with vipassanā retreats, particularly in the Mahāsī system. Mostly this kind of retreat has helpful environment and it is normally free of charge in Buddhist countries. In this system, you have to be interviewed daily. The interview will keep you from going astray (not conforming with the system). Most of the time, you will be asked whether you feel something unusual in your experiences. I find that this asking can press the practitioners to make up the seeing by themselves (possibly from their former reading), often unconsciously (Maybe the asking implies that you have to feel or see something otherwise you fail). Moreover, many retreats in Buddhist countries incessantly inculcate Buddhist ideology into the mind of meditators. I also see this as a sign of danger. However, it is advisable to have this kind of retreat at least once in your life. You can learn many things from it, such as an effective way to do walking meditation.
- A suggested, additional reading on the subject is Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (1970). Excluding its Soto Zen ideology, the simple approach in the book is close to mine. As Dōgen teaches his students, “We all have the Buddha-nature, hence each of us is already enlightened, so we sit.” This is the source of just sitting approach. You sit, not for being an enlightened one or someone other than you, but instead you are already that being, so you sit. You can subtract the belief in the Buddha-nature and other things from the teaching, and just enjoy the practical guidelines. Still, you have to follow the three rules above strictly, otherwise you fail.
Notes