Calm Abiding Meditation 4: Continuous Placement

Continuous placement, or establishing continuity, is the second stage of calm abiding meditation. When we practice calm-abiding or shamatha meditation, we’re gradually retraining our minds. In the second part of his teaching on beginning a meditation practice, Tulku Migmar reminds us that having placed our mind, we will probably find the crazy elephant that begins to wander off in unexpected directions. Here, Tulku teaches in Tibetan and we offer an English translation.

Transcript

Because in this way you can become columns within the body.

And when your body'sspirit is very path isilling,

Your body becomes verycker.

When you are in the room,

You are in the room,

You are in the room.

When you are in the room,

You are in the room.

You are in the room,

You are in the room.

As you are doing this,

As you are trying to place your mind on an object,

Then that crazy elephant might come back,

Right?

And just suddenly start out somewhere and your mind becomes all scattered again and you are just repeating here and there.

And at that point,

If you manage to not go after that crazy elephant,

But come back to the object and continue with the meditation,

Then this is the second state of continuous placement.

So this is just bringing back the mind,

Not following after the crazy elephant that keeps popping up again,

But just continuing on with the meditation.

And as you stay like this,

Trying to meditate maybe for three or four minutes or so,

Then you will start noticing that all sorts of thoughts pop up.

Thoughts of the past or emotional thoughts or some uneasy feelings.

So you start to have all these thoughts and feelings that come up and you start noticing this,

That all sorts of things come up in your mind.

And at that point,

Many people think,

Oh no,

Something is wrong,

I am meditating and yet I am getting worse,

I am getting even more thoughts than before.

But at this point,

You can comfort yourself or reassure yourself.

Actually,

There is nothing wrong with that,

That's perfectly normal.

It's not that you have more thoughts than before,

It's just that you are noticing the thoughts.

Because before you used to just go after all the thoughts,

You used to be completely under the sway of these thoughts,

So you are just looking out there and just following after every thought.

But now that you are trying to look in,

It's like a mirror in which suddenly everything appears and you just see all these thoughts very clearly,

That there are so many appearing in your mind.

This is actually a good sign,

Generally speaking,

Not a bad sign.

So,

You won't be able from the first to reduce those thoughts or eliminate all those thoughts.

So you need to reassure yourself,

You need to comfort yourself thinking,

This is completely normal,

I will slowly be able to reduce the thoughts,

But I need to create this habit,

I need to train in order to do so while I'm still on the early stages of my life.