Meditation Techniques - Week 1

Introduction

Learning to meditate is a gradual process. Each week, this course will tweet new techniques and facilitates new insights. The techniques either address particular problems that may arise when you meditate, or provide progressively more advanced methods which deepen your experience. One advantage of this weekly meditation course is that it paces you. If you learn meditation from a book, you may be tempted to read it all in a week. You might rush through the early exercises in order to experiment with later ones. That is rather like leaping onto a 1000cc motorcycle and hoping to roar off into the sunset – before having learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels. You need substantial experience with each exercise to obtain the benefit it provides – and to prepare you for the next exercise. The earlier exercises are not mere preliminaries. They are central methods in their own right to which you will return repeatedly – no matter how advanced your practice becomes. To make the best use of this course, do not set this article aside, with the intention that you will get around to investigating the whole course later. Try to engage in each week’s exercises within the week that you receive the tweet.

To sign up for this course to be emailed to you weekly; click here Aro Meditation

A Meditation Notebook

It is useful to keep a meditation notebook in which to record your goals, experiences, and reflections. If you use a computer frequently, you might keep your records in a text file. Or, you may prefer to write in a paper notebook.
Either way, right now is the time to start. Create the file, or locate a pad of paper. Start with today’s date – and for your first entry, record your motivations for starting to meditate. Alternatively, if you have already been meditating for a while, write what has motivated you to start this course. If you re-read this entry in a few weeks or months, you may discover something surprising. You may find that your motivations for continuing to meditate have shifted from your reasons for starting. As your meditation practice develops, you are likely to find that it has rewards you cannot expect at this present moment in time.

Simplicity

Meditation is deceptively simple. In a sense, the complete instructions are: ‘Be here—now!’ That may seem nonsensical. You could reply: “I am here, now. How could I be otherwise?” The rest of this course is devoted to explaining how you may not be fully here, now – and ways of coming back to here and now. There is much to say about meditation – enough to fill many books. Meditation can seem complex – but that is only because the concepts we use to understand our minds are complex. During this course, you will learn how to strip away those concepts and to look at your mind directly. You will learn to experience the simplicity, clarity, and power of your own un-conceptualised mind. Each week, you will learn more about what it means to ‘be here—now’. This week’s meditation technique is a first experiential explanation of that phrase.

This Week's Meditation Technique

Sit somewhere quiet. Total silence is not necessary – but music, television noise, or people talking will be distracting. Some types of meditation can be undertaken whilst listening to music – but not this method. Sit comfortably. Sitting in a chair is fine. If you are used to sitting on a cushion on the floor—and can do so easily—that is another possibility. Sit reasonably upright, but do not strain to achieve any particular posture. Wear loose, comfortable clothes. Loosen your belt if it is tight. Close your eyes almost all the way, so that a little light enters but you cannot see anything clearly. When thoughts come – let them come. When thoughts go – let them go. If you find yourself involved in a stream of thoughts, let go of your involvement with them. Keep letting go of involvement. Remain uninvolved. Just let go. Whatever happens – let it be as it is. If you feel good – do not hold on to those positive thoughts. If you feel bad – do not reject those negative thoughts. Especially important: if you feel nothing in particular – do not drift into numbness and lack of presence. Remain alert. Try this for five minutes. If you feel ambitious, try ten minutes. See how it goes. When you have finished, write as much as you can remember about what your experience was like.

Follow-up

If you have not yet engaged in the exercise – please stop reading now. Come back here when you have tried the exercise. Reading what follows will colour your experience, and you will miss the opportunity to arrive at it with the freshness that is necessary.

* * *

You have made a good start. Whatever happened, whatever you felt, was your experience. You started to be here now. These are some of the things that you may have thought after the exercise:

• That was easier than I expected
• That was a complete and utter waste of time
• I enjoyed that
• I felt stupid
• I felt relaxed
• I did not really understand what I was supposed to be doing
• It was quite pleasant
• I did not see the point of it – it seemed a useless thing to be doing
• I fell asleep
• I felt quite agitated
• What am I supposed to make of this?

Whatever you thought or felt, it was useful. It provides you with valuable insights into how you see the world. For example:

• If the exercise was more or less difficult than you thought, you can ask yourself ‘What exactly did I expect – and on what did I base my expectations?’

• If you thought it was a waste of time, you can ask yourself: ‘What are my criteria for whether time is wasted?’ If just being seems a waste of time – that idea devalues the most fundamental aspect of what you are. You might consider seriously whether you want to accept that idea.

• If you enjoyed the exercise, what was it that you enjoyed? How do you define or recognise the sensation of enjoyment? (One thing you will discover—in time—is that meditation radically broadens what you are capable of enjoying. It changes your understanding of what enjoyment is – so this is important to investigate – here and now.)

• If you felt self-conscious, you could ask yourself: ‘What does that say about me? What image do I have of myself that jars with simply sitting and being?’

• If you did not understand what you were supposed to be doing, then you probably expected to be engaged in an exercise that accorded with certain guidelines. Those guidelines might be your personal criteria with respect to the exercise ‘making sense’. You could question those guidelines, and ask yourself where they came from and when you accepted them as authoritative.

Meditate Daily

This week’s exercise is the simplest meditation technique. It is also—in some ways—the most difficult, because of its lack of structure. It is not problematic if you find it frustrating: you will be in good company. Many millions of people have found this practice difficult at first. See if you can maintain it for a week. In each of the following weeks’ emails, you will learn additional techniques which address the various difficulties that arise. For meditation to be effective, you have to meditate every day – or at least, most days. Learning to meditate is in many ways similar to learning a musical instrument, or becoming physically fit through an exercise programme. You would not succeed with either if your commitment were no more than three hours every Sunday afternoon (and nothing during the week). If you exercise, practice guitar, or engage in meditation a little every day – you will see gradual improvement. Try this week’s exercise for five or ten minutes a day. Only meditate longer if you are confident you can maintain longer sessions for the entire week.

The Tibetan meditation tradition is full of colourful stories of meditation masters of the past and their pithy summaries of the essence of the meditative path. One was given by the great yogi Milarépa to his beloved student Gampopa. When they parted for the last time, Milarépa told Gampopa that he had taught him everything there was to learn about meditation—except one final secret that was too precious to just give away. There was a tearful goodbye before Gampopa set off. When he had gone a little way down a hill—over a stream—and had started up the hill on the other side, he heard his teacher’s voice again. Milarépa yelled that last, most profound teaching to Gampopa across the valley:
The important thing is to actually do it.
So – actually do it. Good luck – and see you in a week.

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