4. Meditation 2

Follow your breath from beginning to end, and recognize the process of thinking.

Once again, take a seat, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion. It’s good to sit as comfortably as you can. And it’s usually best to be sitting as straight as you can. Now close your eyes and become aware of the sensations of sitting. Feel your arms at your sides and perhaps take a few deep breaths. Just allow gravity to settle you into your seat. Now as you did yesterday, become aware of the sensations of breathing. Notice where you feel the breath most clearly, either at the tip of the nose or in the rise and falling of your abdomen or chest. It doesn’t matter where you pay attention to the breath and you can change your focus from session to session if you like. But for the moment just pick one spot and focus there. There’s nothing especially significant about the breath, but it’s something you always have with you. And it’s as good as any other sense object as a basis for training your powers of attention. Eventually the practice will incorporate everything that arises in consciousness. Just feel the mere sensations of breathing from the beginning of the inhalation to the pause between breaths and follow the exhalation to the end. Try to cover the breath with your awareness. And once again there’s no need to control your breathing. Just let it come however it comes. What we’re doing here is sharpening the only tool you really have, your mind. This is what you take with you in any situation in life. This is what determines how you respond to emotional stress and physical pain and every other difficulty you encounter. This is the basis for every decision you make and every interaction you have with other people. And as you begin to observe it you will notice perhaps with growing amazement that your mind is totally out of control. And as you try to pay attention to the breath you’ll begin to notice that the primary obstacle to your pain attention is thinking. Thoughts continually arise and you forget that you’re even trying to meditate at all. And this happens over the course of mere seconds. Just try to count the next 10 breaths without getting distracted. You can silently in your mind count one on the inhalation and one again on the exhalation and then two. See if you can get to 10. Unless you have a lot of concentration you probably were unable to tell how precarious your awareness of the breath actually was. How your attention was being buffeted on all sides by discursive thought. Now the goal isn’t to stop your thoughts or to suppress any emotion that might arise along with them. It is rather to notice these mental events clearly and to experience them fully, more fully in fact. To recognize them as appearances and consciousness at the moment they arise. But that is generally a very difficult thing to do in the beginning. So for the time being the moment you discover that you’re thinking just observe it and come back to the breath. In this final minute of the meditation just start again. Just feel the next breath as it comes. Okay. Well just take a moment to take stock of how you’re feeling. Whether you’re tired or restless or calm. Whether your experience was pleasant or unpleasant isn’t really the point. What you’re learning here is a new skill. And unless you’re coming to this course already knowing how to meditate you can’t expect to be able to do it well in the beginning. And as the practice develops over the next days and weeks you’ll see that you do less not more than you normally do. You’re not adding an artifice to your experience in the present moment. Rather you’re simply becoming less distracted. The purpose of meditation is to discover what your mind is like when you’re no longer perpetually identified with the contents of your thoughts. And to make progress you simply need to be willing to begin again.