Every musician plays scales. When you begin to study the
piano, that's the first thing you learn, and you never stop playing scales. The finest
concert pianists in the world still play scales. It's a basic skill that can't be allowed
to get rusty.
Every baseball player practices batting. It's the first
thing you learn in Little League, and you never stop practicing. Every World Series game
begins with batting practice. Basic skills must always remain sharp.
Seated meditation is the arena in which the meditator
practices his own fundamental skills. The game the meditator is playing is the experience
of his own life, and the instrument upon which he plays is his own sensory apparatus. Even
the most seasoned meditator continues to practice seated meditation, because it tunes and
sharpens the basic mental skills he needs for his particular game. We must never forget,
however, that seated meditation itself is not the game. It's the practice. The game in
which those basic skills are to be applied is the rest of one's experiential existence.
Meditation that is not applied to daily living is sterile and limited.
The purpose of Vipassana meditation is nothing less than
the radical and permanent transformation of your entire sensory and cognitive experience.
It is meant to revolutionize the whole of your life experience. Those periods of seated
practice are times set aside for instilling new mental habits. You learn new ways to
receive and understand sensation. You develop new methods of dealing with conscious
thought, and new modes of attending to the incessant rush of your own emotions. These new
mental behaviors must be made to carry over into the rest of your life.
Otherwise, meditation remains dry and fruitless, a
theoretical segment of your existence that is unconnected to all the rest. Some effort to
connect these two segments is essential. A certain amount of carry-over will take place
spontaneously, but the process will be slow and unreliable. You are very likely to be left
with the feeling that you are getting nowhere and to drop the process as unrewarding.
One of the most memorable events in your meditation career
is the moment when you first realize that you are meditation in the midst of some
perfectly ordinary activity. You are driving down the freeway or carrying out the trash
and it just turns on by itself. This unplanned outpouring of the skills you have been so
carefully fostering is a genuine joy. It gives you a tiny window on the future. You catch
a spontaneous glimpse of what the practice really means. The possibility strikes you that
this transformation of consciousness could actually become a permanent feature of your
experience. You realize that you could actually spend the rest of your days standing aside
from the debilitating clamoring of your own obsessions, no longer frantically hounded by
your own needs and greed. You get a tiny taste of what it is like to just stand aside and
watch it all flow past. It's a magic moment.
That vision is liable to remain unfulfilled, however,
unless you actively seek to promote the carry-over process. The most important moment in
meditation is the instant you leave the cushion. When your practice session is over, you
can jump up and drop the whole thing, or you can bring those skills with you into the rest
of your activities.
It is crucial for you to understand what meditation is. It
is not some special posture, and it's not just a set of mental exercises. Meditation is a
cultivation of mindfulness and the application of that mindfulness once cultivated. You do
not have to sit to meditate. You can meditate while washing the dishes. You can meditate
in the shower, or roller skating, or typing letters. Meditation is awareness, and it must
be applied to each and every activity of one's life. This isn't easy.
We specifically cultivate awareness through the seated
posture in a quiet place because that's the easiest situation in which to do so.
Meditation in motion is harder. Meditation in the midst of fast-paced noisy activity is
harder still. And meditation in the midst of intensely egoistic activities like romance or
arguments is the ultimate challenge. The beginner will have his hands full with less
stressful activities.
Yet the ultimate goal of practice remains: to build one's
concentration and awareness to a level of strength that will remain unwavering even in the
midst of the pressures of life in contemporary society. Life offers many challenges and
the serious meditator is very seldom bored.
Carrying your meditation into the events of your daily
life is not a simple process. Try it and you will see. That transition point between the
end of your meditation session and the beginning of 'real life' is a long jump. It's too
long for most of us. We find our calm and concentration evaporating within minutes,
leaving us apparently no better off than before. In order to bridge this gulf, Buddhists
over the centuries have devised an array of exercises aimed at smoothing the transition.
They take that jump and break it down into little steps. Each step can be practiced by
itself.
1. Walking Meditation
Our everyday existence is full of motion and activity.
Sitting utterly motionless for hours on end is nearly the opposite of normal experience.
Those states of clarity and tranquility we foster in the midst of absolute stillness tend
to dissolve as soon as we move. We need some transitional exercise that will teach us the
skill of remaining calm and aware in the midst of motion. Walking meditation helps us make
that transition from static repose to everyday life. It's meditation in motion, and it is
often used as an alternative to sitting. Walking is especially good for those times when
you are extremely restless. An hour of walking meditation will often get you through that
restless energy and still yield considerable quantities of clarity. You can then go on to
the seated meditation with greater profit.
Standard Buddhist practice advocates frequent retreats to
complement your daily sitting practice. A retreat is a relatively long period of time
devoted exclusively to meditation. One or two day retreats are common for lay people.
Seasoned meditators in a monastic situation may spend months at a time doing nothing else.
Such practice is rigorous, and it makes sizable demands on both mind and body. Unless you
have been at it for several years, there is a limit to how long you can sit and profit.
Ten solid hours of the seated posture will produce in most beginners a state of agony that
far exceeds their concentration powers. A profitable retreat must therefore be conducted
with some change of posture and some movement. The usual pattern is to intersperse blocks
of sitting with blocks of walking meditation. An hour of each with short breaks between is
common.
To do the walking meditation, you need a private place
with enough space for at least five to ten paces in a straight line. You are going to be
walking back and forth very slowly, and to the eyes of most Westerners, you'll look
curious and disconnected from everyday life. This is not the sort of exercise you want to
perform on the front lawn where you'll attract unnecessary attention. Choose a private
place.
The physical directions are simple. Select an unobstructed
area and start at one end. Stand for a minute in an attentive position. Your arms can be
held in any way that is comfortable, in front, in back, or at your sides. Then while
breathing in, lift the heel of one foot. While breathing out, rest that foot on its toes.
Again while breathing in, lift that foot, carry it forward and while breathing out, bring
the foot down and touch the floor. Repeat this for the other foot. Walk very slowly to the
opposite end, stand for one minute, then turn around very slowly, and stand there for
another minute before you walk back. Then repeat the process. Keep you head up and you
neck relaxed. Keep your eyes open to maintain balance, but don't look at anything in
particular. Walk naturally. Maintain the slowest pace that is comfortable, and pay no
attention to your surroundings. Watch out for tensions building up in the body, and
release them as soon as you spot them. Don't make any particular attempt to be graceful.
Don't try to look pretty. This is not an athletic exercise, or a dance. It is an exercise
in awareness. Your objective is to attain total alertness, heightened sensitivity and a
full, unblocked experience of the motion of walking. Put all of your attention on the
sensations coming from the feet and legs. Try to register as much information as possible
about each foot as it moves. Dive into the pure sensation of walking, and notice every
subtle nuance of the movement. Feel each individual muscle as it moves. Experience every
tiny change in tactile sensation as the feet press against the floor and then lift again.
Notice the way these apparently smooth motions are
composed of complex series of tiny jerks. Try to miss nothing. In order to heighten your
sensitivity, you can break the movement down into distinct components. Each foot goes
through a lift, a swing; and then a down tread. Each of these components has a beginning,
middle, and end. In order to tune yourself in to this series of motions, you can start by
making explicit mental notes of each stage.
Make a mental note of "lifting, swinging, coming
down, touching floor, pressing" and so on. This is a training procedure to
familiarize you with the sequence of motions and to make sure that you don't miss any. As
you become more aware of the myriad subtle events going on, you won't have time for words.
You will find yourself immersed in a fluid, unbroken awareness of motion. The feet will
become your whole universe. If your mind wanders, note the distraction in the usual way,
then return your attention to walking. Don't look at your feet while you are doing all of
this, and don't walk back and forth watching a mental picture of your feet and legs. Don't
think, just feel. You don't need the concept of feet and you don't need pictures. Just
register the sensations as they flow. In the beginning, you will probably have some
difficulties with balance. You are using the leg muscles in a new way, and a learning
period is natural. If frustration arises, just note that and let it go.
The Vipassana walking technique is designed to flood your
consciousness with simple sensations, and to do it so thoroughly that all else is pushed
aside. There is no room for thought and no room for emotion. There is no time for
grasping, and none for freezing the activity into a series of concepts. There is no need
for a sense of self. There is only the sweep of tactile and kinesthetic sensation, an
endless and ever-changing flood of raw experience. We are learning here to escape into
reality, rather than from it. Whatever insights we gain are directly applicable to the
rest of our notion-filled lives.
2. Postures
The goal of our practice is to become fully aware of all
facets of our experience in an unbroken, moment-to-moment flow. Much of what we do and
experience is completely unconscious in the sense that we do it with little or no
attention. Our minds are on something else entirely. We spend most of our time running on
automatic pilot, lost in the fog of day-dreams and preoccupations.
One of the most frequently ignored aspects of our
existence is our body. The technicolor cartoon show inside our head is so alluring that we
tend to remove all of our attention from the kinesthetic and tactile senses. That
information is pouring up the nerves and into the brain every second, but we have largely
sealed it off from consciousness. It pours into the lower levels of the mind and it gets
no further. Buddhists have developed an exercise to open the floodgates and let this
material through to consciousness. It's another way of making the unconscious conscious.
Your body goes through all kinds of contortions in the
course of a single day. You sit and you stand. You walk and lie down. You bend, run,
crawl, and sprawl. Meditation teachers urge you to become aware of this constantly ongoing
dance. As you go through your day, spend a few seconds every few minutes to check your
posture. Don't do it in a judgmental way. This is not an exercise to correct your posture,
or to improve you appearance. Sweep your attention down through the body and feel how you
are holding it. Make a silent mental note of 'Walking' or 'Sitting' or 'Lying down' or
'Standing'. It all sounds absurdly simple, but don't slight this procedure. This is a
powerful exercise. If you do it thoroughly, if you really instil this mental habit deeply,
it can revolutionize your experience. It taps you into a whole new dimension of sensation,
and you feel like a blind man whose sight has been restored.
3. Slow-Motion Activity
Every action you perform is made up of separate
components. The simple action of tying your shoelaces is made up of a complex series of
subtle motions. Most of these details go unobserved. In order to promote the overall habit
of mindfulness, you can perform simple activities at very low speed--making an effort to
pay full attention to every nuance of the act.
Sitting at a table and drinking a cup of tea is one
example. There is much here to be experienced. View your posture as you are sitting and
feel the handle of the cup between your fingers. Smell the aroma of the tea, notice the
placement of the cup, the tea, your arm, and the table. Watch the intention to raise the
arm arise within your mind, feel the arm as it raises, feel the cup against your lips and
the liquid pouring into your mouth. Taste the tea, then watch the arising of the intention
to lower your arm. The entire process is fascinating and beautiful, if you attend to it
fully, paying detached attention to every sensation and to the flow of thought and
emotion.
This same tactic can be applied to many of your daily
activities. Intentionally slowing down your thoughts, words and movements allows you to
penetrate far more deeply into them than you otherwise could. What you find there is
utterly astonishing. In the beginning, it is very difficult to keep this deliberately slow
pace during most regular activities, but skill grows with time. Profound realizations
occur during sitting meditation, but even more profound revelations can take place when we
really examine our own inner workings in the midst of day-to-day activities. This is the
laboratory where we really start to see the mechanisms of our own emotions and the
operations of our passions. Here is where we can truly gauge the reliability of our
reasoning, and glimpse the difference between our true motives and the armor of pretense
that we wear to fool ourselves and others.
We will find a great deal of this information surprising,
much of it disturbing, but all of it useful. Bare attention brings order into the clutter
that collects in those untidy little hidden corners of the mind. As you achieve clear
comprehension in the midst of life's ordinary activities, you gain the ability to remain
rational and peaceful while you throw the penetrating light of mindfulness into those
irrational mental nooks and crannies. You start to see the extent to which you are
responsible for your own mental suffering. You see your own miseries, fears, and tensions
as self-generated. You see the way you cause your own suffering, weakness, and
limitations. And the more deeply you understand these mental processes, the less hold they
have on you.
4. Breath Coordination
In seated meditation, our primary focus is the breath.
Total concentration on the ever-changing breath brings us squarely into the present
moment. The same principle can be used in the midst of movement. You can coordinate the
activity in which you are involved with your breathing. This lends a flowing rhythm to
your movement, and it smooths out many of the abrupt transitions. Activity becomes easier
to focus on, and mindfulness is increased. Your awareness thus stays more easily in the
present. Ideally, meditation should be a 24 hour-a-day practice. This is a highly
practical suggestion.
A state of mindfulness is a state of mental readiness. The
mind is not burdened with preoccupations or bound in worries. Whatever comes up can be
dealt with instantly. When you are truly mindful, your nervous system has a freshness and
resiliency which fosters insight. A problem arises and you simply deal with it, quickly,
efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss. You don't stand there in a dither, and you don't
run off to a quiet corner so you can sit down and meditate about it. You simply deal with
it. And in those rare circumstances when no solution seems possible, you don't worry about
that. You just go on to the next thing that needs your attention. Your intuition becomes a
very practical faculty.
5. Stolen Moments
The concept of wasted time does not exist for a serious
meditator. Little dead spaces during your day can be turned to profit. Every spare moment
can be used for meditation. Sitting anxiously in the dentist's office, meditate on your
anxiety. Feeling irritated while standing in a line at the bank, meditate on irritation.
Bored, twiddling you thumbs at the bus stop, meditate on boredom. Try to stay alert and
aware throughout the day. Be mindful of exactly what is taking place right now, even if it
is tedious drudgery. Take advantage of moments when you are alone. Take advantage of
activities that are largely mechanical. Use every spare second to be mindful. Use all the
moments you can.
6. Concentration On All
Activities
You should try to maintain mindfulness of every activity
and perception through the day, starting with the first perception when you awake, and
ending with the last thought before you fall asleep. This is an incredibly tall goal to
shoot for. Don't expect to be able to achieve this work soon. Just take it slowly and let
you abilities grow over time. The most feasible way to go about the task is to divide your
day up into chunks. Dedicate a certain interval to mindfulness of posture, then extend
this mindfulness to other simple activities: eating, washing, dressing, and so forth. Some
time during the day, you can set aside 15 minutes or so to practice the observation of
specific types of mental states: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings, for instance;
or the hindrances, or thoughts. The specific routine is up to you. The idea is to get
practice at spotting the various items, and to preserve your state of mindfulness as fully
as you can throughout the day.
Try to achieve a daily routine in which there is as little
difference as possible between seated meditation and the rest of your experience. Let the
one slide naturally into the other. Your body is almost never still. There is always
motion to observe. At the very least, there is breathing. Your mind never stops
chattering, except in the very deepest states of concentration. There is always something
coming up to observe. If you seriously apply your meditation, you will never be at a loss
for something worthy of your attention.
Your practice must be made to apply to your everyday
living situation. That is your laboratory. It provides the trials and challenges you need
to make your practice deep and genuine. It's the fire that purifies your practice of
deception and error, the acid test that shows you when you are getting somewhere and when
you are fooling yourself. If your meditation isn't helping you to cope with everyday
conflicts and struggles, then it is shallow. If your day-to-day emotional reactions are
not becoming clearer and easier to manage, then you are wasting your time. And you never
know how you are doing until you actually make that test.
The practice of mindfulness is supposed to be a universal
practice. You don't do it sometimes and drop it the rest of the time. You do it all the
time. Meditation that is successful only when you are withdrawn in some soundproof ivory
tower is still undeveloped. Insight meditation is the practice of moment-to-moment
mindfulness. The meditator learns to pay bare attention to the birth, growth, and decay of
all the phenomena of the mind. He turns from none of it, and he lets none of it escape.
Thoughts and emotions, activities and desires, the whole show. He watches it all and he
watches it continuously. It matters not whether it is lovely or horrid, beautiful or
shameful. He sees the way it is and the way it changes. No aspect of experience is
excluded or avoided. It is a very thoroughgoing procedure.
If you are moving through your daily activities and you
find yourself in a state of boredom, then meditate on your boredom. Find out how it feels,
how it works, and what it is composed of. If you are angry, meditate on the anger. Explore
the mechanics of anger. Don't run from it. If you find yourself sitting in the grip of a
dark depression, meditate on the depression. Investigate depression in a detached and
inquiring way. Don't flee from it blindly. Explore the maze and chart its pathways. That
way you will be better able to cope with the next depression that comes along.
Meditating your way through the ups and downs of daily
life is the whole point of Vipassana. This kind of practice is extremely rigorous and
demanding, but it engenders a state of mental flexibility that is beyond comparison. A
meditator keeps his mind open every second. He is constantly investigating life,
inspecting his own experience, viewing existence in a detached and inquisitive way. Thus
he is constantly open to truth in any form, from any source, and at any time. This is the
state of mind you need for Liberation.
It is said that one may attain enlightenment at any moment
if the mind is kept in a state of meditative readiness. The tiniest, most ordinary
perception can be the stimulus: a view of the moon, the cry of a bird, the sound of the
wind in the trees. it's not so important what is perceived as the way in which you attend
to that perception. The state of open readiness is essential. It could happen to you right
now if you are ready. The tactile sensation of this book in your fingers could be the cue.
The sound of these words in your head might be enough. You could attain enlightenment
right now, if you are ready.