Learn new techniques and explore your meditation practice

Techniques 1.

For some, [the] task of coming back a thousand or ten thousand times in meditation may seem boring or even of questionable importance. But how many times have we gone away from the reality of our life?perhaps a million or ten million times! If we wish to awaken, we have to find our way back here with our full being, our full attention.

In this way, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, Stay. Does the puppy listen? It gets up and runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. Stay. And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over ad pees in the corner or makes some other mess. Our minds are much the same as the puppy, only they create even bigger messes. In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again.

Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart

Techniques 2.

Let the mind unite in a single point and let that composed mind dwell with the breath. Let the breath be its sole object of knowledge. Concentrate until the mind becomes increasingly subtle, until feelings are insignificant and there is great inner clarity and wakefulness. Then when painful sensations arise they will gradually cease of their own accord. Finally you'll look on the breath as if it was a relative come to visit you. When a relative leaves, we follow him out and see him off. We watch until he's walked or driven out of sight, and then we go back indoors.

We watch the breath in the same way. If the breath is coarse, we know that it's coarse; if it's subtle, we know that it's subtle. As it becomes increasingly fine, we keep following it, while simultaneously awakening the mind. Eventually the breath disappears altogether and all that remains is the feeling of wakefulness. This is called meeting the Buddha.

Ajahn Chah, in Samuel Bercholzs Entering the Stream

Techniques 3.

When people start to mediate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, the often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It's a bit like saying, "If I jog, I'll be a much better person." "If I could only get a nicer house, I'd be a better person." If I could meditate and calm down, I'd be a better person."...

But loving-kindness--maitri--toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness

Techniques 4.

The practice of mindfulness-awareness meditation does not take place in a vacuum. It happens within a certain context and point of view. In the Buddhist tradition, meditation is often presented in the context of view, meditation, and action. View is like the eyes, which provide vision and perspective; meditation is like the mind, with its openness and clarity; and action is like the limbs that enable us to move about in the world.

Each of these three is essential, as a system of checks and balances. So we cultivate all three of them together in order to overcome the prejudice and narrow-mindedness of our visions, the restlessness of our minds and the ineffectiveness of our actions.

Judy Lief

Techniques 5.

Sitting quietly, feel what sits there. Explore the body you sit in. Observe the scintillating field of sensation we call the body. Notice sensation's wordless quality. Its sense of simply being humming through the body.

Go within sensation to that subtle presence by which the sensation is known. Feel the sensation within sensation. Settle into that sense of being, of aliveness vibrating in each cell. Rest in being. Just sit quietly and know. Let awareness sink into yourself. Know what knows.

Experience directly that sense by which you imagine you exist. Enter it wholeheartedly. Sit in the center of that hum. Does it have a beginning? Does it have an ending? Or is there just a sense of endless being, unborn and undying? Don't ask the mind, which always limits itself with definitions, ask the heart, which cannot name it but always is it. Rest in being.

Stephen Levine

Techniques 6.

When you live with this awareness, there's no fretting about making this or that happen or go away. Take, for example, sitting up in bed in the morning, putting on socks, and applying the same awareness to putting on socks as you give to following your breath on your [meditation] cushion. There's just your arm moving, the feel of the sock pulling up over your foot, the arch of your neck as you bend over. Thinking of nothing at all, putting every bit of yourself into simply pulling on that sock. Suddenly the world opens up.

There's an enormous rush of joy for no reason at all. Everything outside you and inside you is swallowed up by that sock going over your toes. It all happens so fast, you can't even say how long the moment lasts. There's not even any sense of you pulling on the sock. It could just as easily be the sock pulling you on.

You and your sock and your foot and your elbow and your neck have somehow all vanished into the act itself. It's not that you physically disappear or go into some altered state; it's just that you've dropped into the pure joy of closing the gap between yourself and the moment of pulling on your sock.

Manfred B. Steger and Perle Besserman

Techniques 7.

People often confuse meditation with prayer, devotion, or vision. They are not the same. Meditation as a practice does not address itself to a deity or present itself as an opportunity for revelation. This is not to say that people who are meditating do not occasionally think they have received a revelation or experienced visions. They do. But to those for whom meditation is their central practice, a vision or a revelation is seen as just another phenomenon of consciousness and as such is not to be taken as exceptional.

The meditator simply experiences the ground of consciousness, and in doing so avoids excluding or excessively elevating any thought or feeling. To do this one must release all sense of the "I" as experiencer, even the "I" that might think it is privileged to communicate with the divine.

Gary Snyder

Techniques 8.

Sitting is essentially a simplified space. Our daily life is in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it's very difficult to sense that we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance--which is absolutely the most valuable thing there is--to face ourselves.

Meditation is not about some state, but about the meditator. It's not about some activity or about fixing something. It's about ourselves. If we don't simplify the situation the chance of taking a good look at ourselves is very small--because what we tend to look at isn't ourselves but everything else. If something goes wrong, what do we look at? We look at what's going wrong. We're looking out there all the time, and not at ourselves.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Techniques 9.

When we meditate, we're creating a situation in which there's a lot of space. That sounds good but actually it can be unnerving, because when there's a lot of space you can see very clearly: you've removed your veils, your shields, your armor, your dark glasses, your earplugs, your layers of mittens, your heavy boots. Finally you're standing, touching the earth, feeling the sun on your body, feeling its brightness, hearing all the noises without anything to dull the sound.

You take off your nose plug, and maybe you're going to smell lovely fresh air or maybe you're in the middle of a garbage dump. Since meditation has this quality of bringing you very close to yourself and your experience, you tend to come up against your edge faster. It's not an edge that wasn't there before, but because things are so simplified and clear, you see it, and you see it vividly and clearly.

Pema Chodron

Techniques 10.

[W]hen we realize that we are forced to change positions because of pain, we should question further to find out if there are other reasons. If the answer is that we change because we want to be comfortable, this is incorrect. It is incorrect because it is a distortion of happiness. The correct answer is that we change in order to "cure" the pain. We do not change to acquire happiness. The wrong answer comes from misunderstanding, and if we do not have the right comprehension when we change positions, defilements can and will spring up.

Changing positions to "cure" pain indicates that we have to remedy the situation at all times. We should not misjudge and think that the reason is to attain happiness, since the curing of pain all the time is the same as having to take medicines constantly. It is like nursing a continuous sickness. Thus, we should not look upon nursing sickness and curing pain as being happiness at all.

--Achaan Naeb

Techniques 11.

The purpose of meditation is not to concentrate on the breath without intetrruption, forever. That by itself would be a useless goal. The purpose of meditation is not to achieve a perfectly still and serene mind. Although a lovely state, it doesn't lead to liberation by itself.

The purpose of meditation is to achieve uninterrupted mindfulness. Mindfulness, and only mindfulness, produces Enlightenment. Distractions come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors. Buddhist philosophy has organized them into categories. One of them is the category of hindrances. They are called hindrances because they block your development of both components of meditation, mindfulness and concentration.

A bit of caution on this term: The word "hindrances" carries a negative connotation and indeed these are states of mind we want to eradicate. . . That does not mean, however, that they are to be repressed, avoided or condemned. L

et's use greed as an example. We wish to avoid prolonging any state of greed that arises, because a continuation of that state leads to bondage and sorrow. That does not mean to toss the thought out of the mind when it appears. We simply refuse to encourage it to stay. We let it come, and we let go.

Henepola Gunaratana