How to practice mindfulness meditation
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Ch'an [Zen] was not a religious project: it was an empirically based spiritual/philosophical one. At the center of Taoist-Ch'an practice was meditation, which is essentially observational science turned inward. Meditation reveals the basic contours of wild mind, and cultivates a return to wild mind belonging to wild earth. – David Hinton , Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction
The following is a brief guide on Mindfulness Meditation from meditation teacher David Nichtern's book 'Awakening from the Daydream', along with some quotes from the book. For your meditation practice, I highly recommend using the guidelines provided below as a starting point. Of course, if you already have a presence/stillness/meditation practice, I hope you find these guidelines supportive for your ongoing journey.
"Mindfulness is a great starting point for meditation practice and is the core foundation for many other practices you might undertake. It is also a complete practice in itself with significant and tangible benefits."
Mindfulness Meditation Guidelines
- Take Your Seat – Begin by taking your meditation seat, usually in a stable, cross-legged position on a cushion on the floor. You'll want to get into a comfortable posture with a good firm connection between your butt and the cushion. You should feel grounded and stable. Then you can just rest your hands on your thighs or your knees.
- Your torso, head, and shoulders should be upright but relaxed. Gently tuck your chin in a bit so your head does not jut forward. The posture should feel dignified and upright, but not stiff or tense. The general guideline is "not too tight and not too loose," and that is good advice throughout.
- If you have trouble sitting cross-legged for whatever reason, you can take a kneeling posture or just sit upright on a chair. Use any kind of support you need (cushions, etc.) to be comfortable. But whatever position you assume, your back should be as straight as possible and not supported by a wall or the back of a chair, unless it's absolutely necessary.
- A good stable posture produces a feeling of containment and reduces our sphere of activity. Make sure your jaw is relaxed and slightly open. Your eyes should be open with a soft downward gaze, resting about four to six feet on the floor in front of you. Do not shut down your awareness of the space around you, but do relax your visual focus.
- If you grow uncomfortable or need to move to restore circulation, bring your legs up in front of your chest and continue your practice. Once your legs feel comfortable and circulation has been restored, just resettle yourself into your posture and begin again.
- Place your Attention on the Breath – Having settled your body in this way, begin to pay attention to your breath as it moves in and out. You can place your attention on the breath, at the tip of the nose, on the feeling of the stomach rising and falling, or just feel the entire flow of breath in and out of your body. Do not attempt to manipulate your breath; just breathe normally. As you pay attention, your awareness will naturally become connected to your breath. This doesn't require intensive focus. Simply maintain a relaxed attentiveness to the breath as it goes in and out of your body.
- Sometimes you will notice that your awareness has drifted. You may end up thinking about your relationship, your work week coming up, or your next meal.. Regardless of your thoughts, when you find your focus has drifted away from the breath, gently bring your attention back to your breath without any kind of comment or evaluation. Just bring it back.
- Label Thoughts as 'Thinking' – When you notice that you're thinking, just say to yourself, "thinking." Just label it with that one word, and then gently bring your attention back to your breath. Before, maybe your thoughts were all over the place and were taking you with them, but now your body is settled and your mental activity will gradually settle down as well.
- It is also helpful to recognize that, in some sense, all of our thoughts are equal. Do not favor some thoughts or freak out about others. Very simply when you notice you are thinking and have drifted away from awareness of the breath, just label any and all thoughts "thinking" and bring your attention back to the breath. You are neither repressing your thoughts, nor are you following them. You are simply letting them be as they are, noticing them, and returning your attention to your breath.
A few things I will add in addition to the guidelines above for your core meditation practice:
- Set a timer – If you haven't meditated before start with 7 minutes for your first week or two (if you are finding that this is too much to start, begin with 3-minute sessions. Set the timer and try to avoid looking at it periodically throughout your meditation. Trust that it will go off in 7 minutes. When you're done, you're done. Eventually you can increase the amount of time you meditate (more on the meaning of this later), but I feel that amount of time is less important in the beginning than simply just showing up to your practice each day. Meditating 7 days a week for 3-minutes a day is way better start than meditating for one hour once a week.
- No added noise or sounds... most of us live in the city so there will already be plenty of noise to go around. You might consider using a white noise machine or ambient music to help you meditate, but honestly, the point is not to drown out your surroundings, but rather to be fully present within them. Don't get me wrong, I love ambient music, and Brian Eno is one of my main musical heroes, but I see closing my eyes and listening to Eno's Music for Airports front to back as a distinct activity from mindfulness meditation.
- Where possible, be seated, and avoid laying down. – laying down is great, but yields a different form of slowing down – of course, if you have mobility restrictions where sitting is inaccessible to you, feel free to lay down.
- Try to express the slightest smile throughout, nearly imperceptible (no need to take yourself too seriously right?)
- Sitting flat on the floor can be very challenging and impede the flow of energy in your body if you're not used to it. I use a small pillow under my butt if sitting on the floor which greatly reduces any potential cramping or discomfort in my lower back or legs.
- Take a break from any position that is causing more than slight discomfort, while maintaining a meditative state.
- Sit with dignity, for you are quite literally sitting before and with the ongoing unfolding of the entire universe.
"Meditating is an excellent use of our time as human beings here on planet Earth. It is like coming home to who we truly are. It is a beautiful, powerful, and rewarding expression of our human nature. With meditation practice there are various benefits, but none of them can be realized if you don't make the time to actually practice."
Another book I highly recommend for getting started and understanding what you might expect in beginning your meditation practice is Pema Chödrön's How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind. This book is great in that it acknowledges that meditation is not always 'calm' or 'relaxing' especially not at the beginning. She gives you powerful tips on how to stay present in meditation, even when intrusive thoughts arise in the process.
Importantly this is a practice that will require, but also facilitate your ability to suspend your desire to understand.
Suspending your desire to understand...
The most developmental and generative rituals we engage in throughout our lives require us to suspend our desire to understand. Our desire to understand encourages us to reach past the discomfort of not knowing, effectively filtering our experience of the present moment through what we think we already 'know'.
Another way of saying this is that what you know is based entirely on the past. New knowledge and wisdom comes from being fully open to the experience of the present, which, in its fullness, is inherently unknown.
While suspending your desire to understand may be difficult at first, your ongoing devotion to practices such as meditation and nightwork will support you in developing your ability to suspend your desire to understand.
It is about practicing 'don't know mind', which is essentially allowing yourself to be comfortable 'not getting it' right away. 'It' referring to the myriad possibilities of experience the present moment offers.
In this way, the experience of the present moment unfolding in nightwork or meditation is allowed to bypass the ego affecting change on a much deeper level. You might say it bypasses the 'head' to affect the 'heart'.
With practice, we eventually learn to approach life in general in 'don't know mind' allowing for a much fuller experience of the present oriented in the much wider perspective of the heart.
With time and practice, this practice will get easier, and eventually, presence will begin to permeate your entire life, not just the moments of intentional meditation you engage in.
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