How to Meditate (12 page)

There’s no good or bad in this. Just relax and open and listen. If thoughts take you away, realize that—then just come back to listening.

Listen to the sound of the silence, which might be punctuated by a sound in the distance or something moving near you. Listen to the sound of your heartbeat.

Sound doesn’t have to be an interruption; it can be the object of your meditation. You can include it, and you can welcome it.

At the end of this practice, just relax. Take whatever restful posture feels right for your body.

Sound is very interesting as the object of meditation. Somehow the feeling of freshness, of big space and complete relaxation, comes through. There is something very expansive about listening to sound. Allow sound in as the support, as your best friend on this path of uncovering the natural awareness of your mind.

SIGHT AS THE OBJECT OF MEDITATION

Working with sight is a little harder to stay with, and for that reason you should practice with it. I recommend that you work with three different eye gazes: really close down, a few feet in front of you on the floor, and straight in front of you.

Normally, I instruct that the eyes are open, but the whole of your attention doesn’t always have to be on the specific object that you’re seeing. You can simply take in the sensation of what you see—the space, the air, the wholeness of the field of vision in front of you. You can also practice with the three different eye gazes, and the object of meditation can be on whatever your eyes fall on. You should stay with each gaze for just a couple of minutes.

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SIGHT AS THE OBJECT

For the first eye gaze, the gaze can be close down. When your eyes fall downward, what do you see? Let that become your object of meditation. Keep looking at it. When the mind wanders off, just come back.

For the next gaze, use your typical eye gaze, which is about four to six feet in front of you. Again, the object of meditation is whatever your eyes see.

Finally, look straight ahead, and it’s the same—you’ll just look out and maybe you take one aspect of what you see and you just let that be the object of your meditation. You are using something visual as a shamatha object.

For each gaze, just look. Not saying good or bad, right or wrong, pretty or ugly. Just look.

If your eyes do funny things, look at that and don’t get distracted. Or if you do get distracted, come back to looking at whatever’s happening there. When you use the visual consciousness, you often do have visual illusions, like seeing light and squiggles and little flashes of things. That’s fine. It’s not good or bad; you can just include that. And if nothing happens, that’s fine, too.

If your attention wanders, just notice that—thinking—very gentle. Just let it go, let it dissolve, and come back to looking. If something you see starts a chain reaction of thought, when you realize that, just touch it lightly: “thinking … thinking.” Come back to just looking. Let it be very light, relaxed, and nonjudgmental.

When you’ve come to the end of this meditation, let yourself relax.

SENSATION AS THE OBJECT OF MEDITATION

It is always quite enlivening to meditate on sensation or feeling consciousness, or what I sometimes call touch consciousness. When you first sit down, begin by going over your posture, tuning in to where you’re at in terms of your body and your mood and your state of mind. We are training ourselves to do this without a judgmental attitude. Really bring as much of that spaciousness and relaxation—lightness, gentleness, kindness, and sense of delight—into this as you can. Just notice that you go off with sheer delight. And come back with sheer delight.

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SENSATION AS THE OBJECT

First, experience the sensation of your bottom touching the cushion. Let that feeling, that sensation, be the object of your meditation. You don’t even have to say “painful,” or “relaxed,” or anything at all. Just see if you can feel it; have a direct experience of the sensation of your bottom touching the cushion. Try not to think about your bottom touching the floor, just feel the sensation—a direct experience of the sensation; a direct, nonverbal experiencing of the sensation.

Next, feel your hands—the sensation of your hands touching your legs. Feel whatever your hands are touching—a direct sensation of that; a direct, felt experience; an experiencing of the sensation of your hands touching.

If you have trouble feeling that sensation, you can move the hands ever so slightly. Or you can just move one finger so you have an experience of sensation, a direct awareness of sensation.

If you haven’t already done so, take your hands and place them on your thighs palms down. Can you feel the pulse in your hands, or any tingling in your hands? Put your full attention on your hands. See if you can feel the pulse or a tingling in your hands—a direct, nonverbal experience.

Can you feel anything in your arms? Can you feel the pulse in your arms, or a tingling or any sensation at all in your arms? Feel your hands and your arms.

Can you feel the pulse or tingling or any sensation at all in your stomach or in your chest? What is the sensation there?

What’s it like feeling the energy in your body? In your hands, your arms, your stomach, and your chest? Can you feel something there, some sensation inside the body?

People often tense in their belly. Right now see if there’s a sensation of holding or tightness in the belly, and if there is, relax that and feel that sensation of tightening and relaxing. If it’s tight, just see if you can relax it and just feel that sensation of relaxing the lower belly—soft belly. Can you feel the belly or the abdomen rising and falling as you breathe? Not watching it or thinking about it, but feeling it. Feel the sensation of the breath moving in and out. Sometimes the breath will be deep, and sometimes the breath will be shallow. Whatever it is, just experience that. Just experience the breath as it is right now, moving in and out of your body, through your nose, through your mouth. Just experience the breath moving in and out of your body.

The breath going in and out is your usual object of meditation; see if you can have a direct experience of this. It’s not concentration, it’s not grasping, it’s not forcing. It’s very natural, open awareness to experiencing the breath going in and out; it’s being with the breath going in and out. Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, “Be with the breath. Be one with the breath going in and out.”

Stay very relaxed, and if you have been following after the momentum of the thoughts, just kindly note that as “thinking.” Then come back again to the breath going in and out; experience being with the breath, allowing the breath as it goes in and out.

You can direct your attention to any pain, tightness, or discomfort in the body. If there’s any pain, discomfort, or tightness, let that be the object of your meditation. Just feeling, experiencing, giving your light but fully compassionate attention to that spot of pain, discomfort, or tightness. Let that be the object of your meditation. Not thinking about it, just feeling the sensation of what we call pain, tightness, or discomfort. Place your attention directly on that spot or that area, and experience the sensation … not “my pain,” or “me in pain,” but just the sensation.

I have a friend who discovered the most helpful thing. She absolutely found it impossible to use the breath as the object of her meditation, and generally when you’re given meditation instruction, that’s the most common suggestion: to place your light awareness on the breath. So, someone introduced her to using sense perceptions as support, and she found that so much more helpful. To actually feel, for example, her hands, her hands on her knees, her thighs and knees, her feet on the floor, or her buttocks sitting on the cushion, allowed her to really open to what was actually meant by using an object as the support for meditation. Somehow her battles with bad asthma made it very hard for her to focus on her breath, but when she started working with touch, she was really able to drop in to her meditation practice. This was her entrance into being able to use any object as support for her meditation.

TASTE AS THE OBJECT OF MEDITATION

Taste, or eating, is always wonderful to use as an ally for awakening. Often in retreats people will start with an eating exercise. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this, as do other spiritual teachers. For example, he will encourage you to try eating a section of an orange with your full attention on the taste and texture. When people do this, one of the interesting points they note is how tricky it can be to distinguish between really tasting—having a direct experience of the taste—and thinking about taste.

Chocolate is a fantastic example of this. We have so many thoughts around chocolate! Perhaps you consider it to be something forbidden that you rarely let yourself eat because you’ve been trying to lose weight, and someone very malicious gave you a beautiful, little box with three truffles in it. Or maybe you hold this concept of the pleasure it’s going to give you. And maybe the first bite is a really direct experience because you haven’t tasted chocolate for a long time and you love it. Then you get to truffle number two, and the spiral of everything you impute or invest chocolate with begins. At this point, you’ve lost the direct experience.