How To Establish And Deepen A Meditation Practice

In establishing a meditation practice, it's good to first recognize the wholesome desires that brought you here. It could be a desire for greater peace, an open heart, truth, or something else. Meditation opens the space for those desires to take root and grow. The practices discussed here can cultivate these qualities anywhere, both in sitting meditation and in daily life.

Transcript

Well, Why don't we begin with the meditation and as always I encourage you to find some way of sitting that's comfortable for you. You feel relaxed but you also feel alert and if you feel comfortable you can close your eyes or if not you can just focus on a neutral place and we'll take a moment to fully arrive. Start with the simplicity of what's right here beginning with the body, Relaxing into the feeling of your body right now. Relaxing out, Releasing any tension, Moving to the area around your eyes, Relaxing any tension there, Relaxing down your jaw, Dropping your tongue off the roof of your mouth, Relaxing down your neck. Relaxing down your shoulders, Allowing them to drop gently, Relaxing down your chest, Down to the belly where we can hold a lot of tension and see if you can receive the next breath into a relaxed belly and then this breath and then this breath, Relaxing down your arms, Wherever your hands are resting, Relaxing any tension there and pausing to be aware of the aliveness in the hands, The warmth, The tingling, Energy, Relaxing down your legs, Relaxing your toes, Feeling the pressure of the feet against the floor, Now relaxing down through the whole body, Sweeping through the body and just welcoming all of the sensations there, The kind and open awareness and then pausing to ask this question, What do you most hope for in this meditation, What's your desire? It could be a greater sense of peace to enlarge the heart, To release from some suffering you're experiencing, Some healing or to expand the mind, To awaken to the truth of things or who you really are. What is that deep desire or longing within your heart right now? Maybe it's hard to put into words but simply open to it, Be able to recognize, Affirm it, Feel that it's real, Feel where it rests in your body, Maybe a sense of warmth, Ease or comfort, Love, Just allow it and sense how good it feels, This desire within you. When you're ready in your own time, You can gently open your eyes. Gandhi said that your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values and your values become your destiny but it all begins really with these wholesome desires that we all have and it's so good to pause and recognize and affirm them. That's the reason that we meditate, It can be different for each of us and it certainly can change over time. And one thing that you learn in meditation is this recognition that the thing that you most desire is actually already here, That there's no need to wait for it, That these deep desires are really a guide to what is already here and so the question of meditation is not so much to create some kind of experience but to naturally allow these desires to become our words and our actions and our habits. We speak of meditation practices and in some way the practice is just simply to practice this truth of what is right here to start to act upon these wholesome desires and when we do it becomes this virtuous cycle where the more you can act upon them then the more you can strengthen them and the more they become our habit, Our default, The way that we can rewire our brain to strengthen those neural pathways of wholesomeness within us, What we truly want like this spaciousness or this calm or this kindness which is really our true nature. I'm going to offer two ways to do this today. One is the one I think that's most familiar to us, The practices that we often do together, These doorways that are always open and you can easily step through them at any time and it's really just about paying attention. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Meditation teacher, Defined mindfulness as awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally and I'll say once more mindfulness is the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally. So, Non-judgmental open awareness, It's the transformational quality that meditators have experienced I was going to say for thousands of years but I think basically forever. How to begin? Our starting place is often these neutral objects, Sometimes we call them the anchors for meditation. It can be the breath, That's probably the one that's best known. They can also be your body sensations, It can also be the sounds around you and the amount of time is not that important. If 15 minutes seems like a lot, Which it may be, Then it could be five minutes or it could be ten minutes, But the most important thing is can you make it a part of your day? You could even think of an experiment, Let's say if you don't have a daily meditation practice of saying from now until the end of the year try it out, See if once a day you can try this out. It does require a certain intention or intentionality to set aside the time. I find it really good to plan ahead, To know for that day when I will or to try to set the same time every day. Many people find it first thing in the morning or early in the morning when the mind is not so active and definitely find a quiet place, But consistency I think is the thing that can really help establish this. For myself, I developed my meditation practice on the metro, When we used to take the metro, And so I started every morning when I would get on saying I'm not going to do work, Which is what I otherwise do. I'm going to meditate on the metro and took the same amount of time every day more or less to get to work, And I knew that that was the time reserved. That's what I was going to do. Usually I got a receipt, I could close my eyes. Sometimes I miss my stop, Not often, But sometimes I would miss my stop. That for me established this consistency. That's really important. What do we do with these anchors? It's really just a way to open the space. They have these virtues that they're all naturally occurring, The breath, Body sensations, Ambient sounds, However soft or gentle. We don't have to do anything to create them. They're always there. They're part of the flow of life, The never-ending flow of life. It gives the mind something to do. The mind always needs something to do. It gives it a task to focus, Come back again and again to the breath, The body, The sounds. It's like developing a muscle, Or sometimes it's analogized. If you've ever had a puppy and you want to try to train it, Let's say train it to sit, And you push its little bottom down, And then it stays there for a second and then pops up. Then you try it again, Push the little bottom down. Works for about a second, Then it pops up again. There's a story of an abbot who gathered all of these young monks who wanted to join the order, And he asked them all the same questions. How long can you focus the awareness on the breath without the mind interrupting? And then the first young monk said, I can usually focus for about an hour before the mind interrupts. And then the second monk said, Well, I normally can focus really for most of the morning when I sit to meditate before the mind starts to disturb. And then the third said, I usually get through one breath and then the mind interrupts, And the abbot said, Well, I believe you, Meaning the last one, And I'm not sure about the rest. So this is the universal experience for anyone who tries these practices, The mind will continue to interrupt. And the most important thing is to have an attitude of friendliness. You can look upon it in two ways. One is realizing that you've been lost in thought and feeling like it's not working out for you, This meditation thing. It's not really what you expected. You don't seem to be that good at it. Or you can look upon it as you've come back from whatever that trance or that dream of thought is. You've come back like something inside of you has woken you up and called you back to the meditation. And what a wonderful thing, Right? So it's the attitude which is so, So important. And also the notion that you can't do it wrong. I was listening to a meditation talk recently, And the teacher said, In response to a whole series of questions from people reporting different things in meditation and saying what do you think of this and what do you think of this, The meditation teacher finally said I'm going to let you in on a secret, Which is regardless of almost anything you could tell me about your experience in meditation, I'm going to tell you that it's okay and that it's normal. Because normal is different for everybody. And the suggestions that I'll share with you provide some information about apps. People find these very helpful, Whether it's Calm or it's Headspace or many other good apps out there. Or I'll also just provide just instructions, Whatever works for you. But it's just a daily gift that you can give to yourself. And as one teacher said, The important thing is to start to head in the right direction and to keep going. That's all you need. I'm going to offer a second suggestion, Second practice as well, Which is the practice of simply noting what's going on during the day. If you have a strong reaction to something, Don't try to do anything about it necessarily, But just note what's happened. Maybe add a word to describe it. Worry or anger or disappointment or excitement or surprise. This is a simple act of mindfulness. It's a special kind of attention that you can pay to your experience. Just noting without judgment what's happening. Or sometimes I just breathe one breath into what's happening as I note it. Don't press hard. You can do it very lightly. I know when I first tried this, I had heard that you're supposed to try to be mindful throughout your whole day. So I would try anything that would happen, I would apply mindfulness to it. I think with the thought that I would kind of change the experience. If I were mindful enough, If this stuff really worked, Then I could improve on the experience in some way by making it a mindful moment of anger or disappointment or what have you. And this didn't work. This didn't work for me. I found myself frustrated. I'm not really able to be that mindful because I'm not really changing anything. I came to realize that that's not the point, That the mindfulness is this gentle attention that recognizes what's happening. That like, Oh, There's some anxiety or oh, There's a good feeling. Whatever it is, You just simply bring it into awareness. The famous psychologist, Carl Rogers said that the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, Then I change. So try this. Try this simple non-judgmental recognition of what's here because that is mindfulness. I'll also just close with a thought that the ultimate objective here is to really find out for each of us what will feed your soul and what allows you to open to this greater sense of spaciousness or possibility to a sense of stillness or quiet or just the wow of life. And there are many ways to do this along with meditation. It could be yoga or journaling or walking in nature or exercise or music or there's so and so many. But for me, I think of all of these as contemplative practices. So what will be your contemplative practice is the question. And how is it that you can open to this vastness, This spaciousness? Maybe I'll close with a poem. This poem is called Peace by Dorothy Hunt. Do you think peace requires an end to war or tigers eating only vegetables? Does peace require an absence from your boss, Your spouse, Yourself? Do you think peace will come some other place than here, Some other time than now, In some other heart than yours? Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all, This moment in the heart space where everything that is, Is welcome. Peace is this moment without thinking that it should be some other way, That you should feel some other way, That your life should unfold according to your plans. Peace is this moment without judgment, This moment in the heart space where everything that is, Is welcome. So maybe we can just take another moment now, And if you feel comfortable, You can close your eyes. Just for a moment, Sense back into the body. You can just drop all the words and feel this moment without judgment, Where everything is welcome. And in your own time, You can gently come back, Welcome the sights and the sounds of the room. If you feel comfortable, You can put your camera on for a second.