How to Meditate (6 page)

So it’s important to be clear about what maitri means and not to come away with a misunderstanding of maitri as some kind of indulgence, which actually weakens us and makes us less able to keep our heart and mind open to ourselves and the difficulties of our life. I often use this definition: maitri strengthens us. One of the qualities of maitri is steadfastness, and that’s developed through meditation. So through boredom, through aches, through indigestion, through all kinds of disturbing memories, to edgy energy, to peaceful meditation, to sleepiness, it’s steadfastness. You sit with yourself, you move closer to yourself, no matter what’s going on. You don’t try to get rid of anything—you can still be sad or frustrated or angry. You recognize your humanity and the wide gamut of emotions you might be feeling.

When we cultivate maitri toward ourselves, we are also generating equanimity. Equanimity means we are able to be with ourselves and our world without getting caught in “for” and “against,” without judging things as “right” or “wrong,” without getting caught up in opinions and beliefs and solidly held views about ourselves and our world. Unconditional friendliness is training in being able to settle down with ourselves, just as we are, without labeling our experience as “good” or “bad.” We don’t need to become too dramatic or despairing about what we see in ourselves.

If you could see clearly for one week, and then—boom!—all your bad habits were gone, meditation would be the best-selling thing on the planet. It would be better than any drug, any spa, any hammock on a gorgeous island. It would be
the optimum thing
if you could just see these habits, and just through one week or even one year of clear seeing and perseverance, then be entirely free of suffering. But we have been developing our habits for a very, very, very long time. However many years old you are, that’s how old those habits are. And if you have a belief in reincarnation, you are looking at many more years with these habits!

This is your chance. This little, short human life that you have is your opportunity. Don’t blow it. Think about how you want to use this time. Meditation is a patient process of knowing that gradually over time, these habits are dissolving. We don’t actually get rid of anything. We are just steadfast with ourselves, developing clearer awareness and becoming honest about who we are and what we do. In basic sitting practice, we befriend ourselves and we cultivate maitri toward ourselves. As the days, months, and years of our meditation practice pass, we also find that we’re feeling more and more lovingkindness toward others and the world as well. When I was a young student of meditation, I received a lot of encouragement from my teacher. He always referred to unconditional friendliness as “making friends with oneself.” This felt tricky for me, because I always saw and felt things within myself that I wanted to avoid, things that were embarrassing or painful. I felt like I was making enemies with myself, because so much of this difficult material would surface during my meditation. My teacher said that making friends with myself meant seeing everything inside me and not running away or turning my back on it. Because that’s what real friendship is. You don’t turn your back on yourself and abandon yourself, just the way you wouldn’t give up on a good friend when their darker sides began to show up. When I became friends with my body, my mind, and my transient emotions, and when I was able to comfortably settle into myself more and more (and remember, this takes time), then staying in the present moment, in all situations, became more possible for me to do. I was able in meditation to return to my breath and stop beating myself up.

I still have meditation sessions when I think or stress or deal with heavy emotion the whole time. It’s true. However, after all these years, I’m definitely a lot more settled, you’ll be glad to know. Unlike before, the thoughts and emotions don’t throw me. If I sit down and my mind is going wild or I’m worried about something, I can still touch in to a settledness that I feel with my mind and my body and my life. It’s not necessarily because things are going so great. Life, as you well know, is a continuous succession: it’s great, it’s lousy, it’s agreeable, it’s disagreeable; it’s joyous and blissful, and other times it’s sad. And being with that, being with this continual succession of agreeable and disagreeable with an open spirit, open heart, and open mind, that’s why I sit to meditate.

7

YOU ARE YOUR OWN MEDITATION INSTRUCTOR

I
n the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that I teach, we sometimes use what is called a
lojong
slogan, or a short pithy sentence, for reflection or instruction. Lojong is a contemplative practice in which we consider a slogan and contemplate its meaning for our life. These lojong slogans are like proverbs that help us look more closely at our mind and habits.

There is one lojong slogan that says: “Of the two witnesses, trust the principle one.” In other words, there are a lot of people who will give you good advice, and that can be extremely helpful, but basically you are the only one who knows what’s going on in your practice. I’ve presented you with the basic techniques of meditation—and only you can really know how you are doing with the suggestions and instructions. You are the principle witness to your life, and you have to begin to trust your own insight into your mind in order to determine what your practice might need at any given moment. In a sense, we become our own meditation instructors. The meditation instructor within is always with you, showing you exactly where you are at.

Though I suggest also working with a mentor, a teacher, or a spiritual friend of some kind, in any given meditation session—or at any time during the day—they can’t see completely inside your practice. They can’t necessarily see whether you’re spaced out or too tense, too harsh or wandering all over the place, too caught up in your emotions. You’re the only one who knows what mood you’re in. You’re the only one who knows how much spaciousness you feel, how much peacefulness you feel, how much settledness you feel—and in that sense you are wise enough to be your own meditation guide in this practice of meditation.

A teacher, for example, cannot point out to you when you’ve touched the present moment deeply or if your back is hurting too much and you should readjust. It is something that only you can feel inside. My teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, used to say, “OK, now we’re going to meditate,” and the meditation gong would sound. “Everyone take good posture. Be aware of your breath going out, coming in, going out. Just awareness, open awareness of your breath.” We’d do that for maybe twenty minutes, and the gong would sound again to end the meditation. Then he’d say, “The only real meditation you did in that whole period was when I hit the gong at the end.”

This is often so true. Everybody gets into position, earnestly trying to be there with their breath, and they struggle, struggle, struggle. Because the sounds, instead of being an object of meditation, distract them; the thoughts, instead of being an object of meditation, distract them. For many people, there’s the beginning of meditation when the timer or gong sounds, and this experience lasts for a little while—and then they’re gone. They’ve left their meditation. And then at the end of the session, when the gong or timer sounds again, they finally allow this deep, long exhale. So these moments when the gong sounds at the beginning and the end of the session are often the most poignant moments of meditation—and only you can feel and know that. Moments like this show us that when we get too caught up in technique and trying, we lose the point of meditation completely. As your own guide, you can catch these insights, these graces, when they show up in your practice.

When we try too hard to meditate, we can easily lose touch with the reason why we decided to meditate in the first place. So as I mentioned in the previous chapter, be a very kind teacher to yourself. You don’t need to beat yourself over the head about what comes up, or whether you are “doing it right,” or whether you’ve made your technique “just so.” The point is that you notice how these innumerable potential distractions move into your experience. Meditation is about leaving behind the idea that we are doing it perfectly.

So when you approach your meditation, you do want to consider the space, get settled into your body, check in with yourself. You do want to connect to the six points of posture and your breath. But I would also say that the key meditation instruction that you should give yourself, as your own teacher of meditation, is to simply relax into what is. We don’t need to
do
anything. We rest in the space between our thoughts and emotions, between our aches and pains and worries. There is incredible wisdom to this open, present space. We are opening to the wild display of surprising richness, the organic and unique display of the present moment. We aren’t trying, trying, trying. We aren’t controlling or attempting and efforting our way through it.

The ability to drop into the present is sometimes referred to as child-mind, because children, little ones, look at things that openly, from that degree of relaxation, from that degree of nowness. Can you remember what it was like as a kid, sitting under a bush and how that smelled, or what it was like going to your grandmother’s and how her house or garden smelled, how her perfume smelled? Think of a child going to a museum and not having a clue that what they are seeing is a Picasso or a Renoir. Not a clue at all. Children just look with this kind of open awareness. If they’re really little, they hardly even know what they’re looking at, but they’re open to the colors and shapes.

Meditation calls us to return to, or tune in to, this natural ability to be present and see and hear. To be conscious, really. You could call meditation a practice of being fully conscious, as opposed to being unconscious, lost in thought and wandering away, which is a pretty typical state. In this practice, we remain loyal to ourselves, just as we would want a teacher to be loyal to us when they guide us. Meditation accepts us just as we are—in both our tantrums and our bad habits, in our love and commitments and happiness. It allows us to have a more flexible identity because we learn to accept ourselves and all of our human experience with more tenderness and openness. We learn to accept the present moment with an open heart. Every moment is incredibly unique and fresh, and when we drop into the moment, as meditation allows us to do, we learn how to truly taste this tender and mysterious life that we share together.

Listen to more about how to be your own meditation instructor.

Part Two

W
ORKING WITH
T
HOUGHTS

The towns and countryside that the traveler sees through a train window do not slow down the train, nor does the train affect them. Neither disturbs the other. This is how you should see the thoughts that pass through your mind when you meditate.

—
DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

8

THE MONKEY MIND

T
he nature of mind is to think. It’s as natural for the mind to think as it is for the body to breathe, or for the heart to pump blood through the veins. The motivation behind meditation is not to get rid of thoughts, but to train the mind to reclaim its natural capacity to stay present. Mind can be placed on an object, or on an experience, and it can stay there.

In
Part One
, I suggested you begin your meditation practice with placing your mind on your breath. Usually when we try to do that for even a few seconds, the monkey mind, or the wild-horse mind, goes off and takes us to the other side of the world or to something that happened a decade ago. The reason we don’t just do meditation all the time is because we can’t, and that’s because our mind is all over the place. Our mind needs training. But we’re not training our mind to be better; we’re training to bring out the mind’s natural wakefulness. The way we do that traditionally, from the time of the Buddha onward, is to meditate. We come back to our breath, come back to our body, come back to our object of meditation.

I had an experience the other day—it was brief, and I was aware of it—where I totally lost contact with what I was doing for about four seconds. The moment I was in just disappeared, and I went on the ride of my wandering mind. I was thinking about something. I thought, “My gosh, what an amazing ability we have to just escape, to not be here. We’ve got
that one
down! We’ve got it down because we’ve been training in it for years. It seems automatic.”

And when I teach this to groups, there are always people—very intelligent people—who bring up some very good questions. They say, “You have to prove this to us because from our experience mind naturally is discursive, mind naturally wanders. Isn’t that how we are supposed to operate and think in order to live and create?”

The journey to answer this question is one of the things that attracted me to Buddhism. The Buddha said, “Don’t just take what I say as true because I say it. Really test it with your experience.” I found that this was true. It takes quite a while to see that you actually can be awake and present and live your life in a creative and engaged way without letting your mind wander all the time.

When you meditate and you notice that your mind has wandered away from the breath, away from the present moment, all you have to do is call yourself back by labeling all thoughts as “thinking.” You don’t push the thoughts away, exactly. Rather, you note them, and you return to the breath. As you meditate, simply acknowledge your awareness of thinking by saying to yourself, “thinking.” Then return to the breath. The instruction is that simple.

9

THE THREE LEVELS OF DISCURSIVE THOUGHT

M
any meditation texts talk about three levels of discursive thought. In the first level, we’re totally gone. Our thoughts take us far away from the present moment for a stretch of time. This is also referred to as fantasy. When you come back from these wandering thoughts, it’s like walking into the room after having left it for a while; you’ve been somewhere else. This is the most obvious kind of discursive thought; it can be a completely illusory—even delusionary—experience.