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TomSKinney
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« on: June 30, 2009, 01:59:07 AM » |
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The first step when you sit down and close your eyes is to set the emotional tone. The past is done and over with, and if you have any regrets, you can give yourself temporary forgiveness. Just for the moment. One of the reasons why creating feelings of friendship is so valued is that it can help to overcome obstacles to meditation. It is the right feeling to create, briefly, before you put your mind on the object of your meditation.
At first the biggest obstacle will be being pulled away from the object. It helps to pick something that you enjoy. The goal is to bring your focus to a single point, though, so the simpler the object is the better. The breath sensations at the tip of the nose is a very common choice and it is superior to focusing on the breath sensations at the stomach (rising, falling) because it is a much smaller area. If you have a tendency toward headache, however, working at the stomach is preferable. You can also visualize a mandala, an image of Buddha or Jesus, or use a mantra. If you do visualize a Buddha or Jesus or Mary, or some other religious image, start with the eyes and the feeling that this Being is present in front of you. Other thoughts and feelings will tend to come along, and you may find yourself being caught up in the story-line. When you realize that you have been caught up, acknowledge it and just go back to your object. You will spend most of your time away from the object at first. It is the bringing yourself back that is the important thing. You may find that something interesting happens: you were caught up in a distraction, but at the same time you did not fully lose the object of your meditation. You will find that you gradually reach a point where you no longer lose the object of your meditation.
Concentration meditation is described in Yoga. The first step is pratyahara, the withdrawal from the senses. Your attention should not go out to objects of sight, sound, or smell. Touch and taste tend to be less of a problem. This includes mental representations of objects of the senses - memories of a favorite food, a favorite song, or even things and people you dislike. The first step is to deliberately turn away from all of that. Then focus on your object. When you succeed for 12 seconds, you have attained dharana: concentration. Make that x12, 2 minutes 24 seconds, and you have dhyana: meditation. Until you can hold on to your object for this long, without losing it, you haven't actually started meditating.
Practicing meditation is a process of letting go. Generally the objects are not particularly entertaining, especially because there tends to be so little change involved. Even with the breath sensations, as you go along the breath slows and the sensations grow harder to stay with. It becomes difficult to even know if you are breathing in or out. The mind loves motion and change. It resists holding still, and the body wants to move as much as the mind does. When you hold the mind still the body will be easier to keep still, and when you hold the body still it helps to hold the mind still. At the beginning of your meditation, you set your body in place and then you move your awareness on to the object - away from your body. You have to be able to trust that your bodily functions like your breathing and your heartbeat will go on. It is like going out of your house in the morning trusting that the door is locked and the stove is turned off. If something happens and your body needs you, it will get your attention, just like when you are sleeping. It is also like driving somewhere and finding that you got where you were going but you don't remember getting there. You know that if the car in front of you had come to a sudden stop, your body would have brought you right back to hit the brakes. Meditation can feel a lot like going to sleep, because your senses withdraw and your focus narrows and awareness of the body is dropped. It takes a lot of faith, really, whether you are going to sleep at night or sitting down to meditate. The important distinction is that when you meditate, you are becoming increasingly more aware rather than less. You really do stay awake, but it can be difficult to know which way you are going because all the cues are dropping away with your senses. It is possible to spend decades caught up in going the wrong direction.
When you meditate, you do not want to hold on to the object too tightly. If your mental grip is too tight, you will not be able to go deep enough into the process. If your grip is too loose, you run the risk of having the object and your awareness go out of focus and with it the ability to recognize that you are drifting. The object is not lost either way, but you have to keep going back and forth between too tight and too relaxed. Over time the fluctuations grow smaller. Eventually you catch even the tendency toward one direction or the other before they even happen. At this point you can sit down to meditate, and once you get the process started, you can maintain it easily. The problem is that you have been countering things for so long that your mind jumps on even the hint that a fix is going to be needed, and this is itself a distraction keeping you from going into the process more deeply. It is time to stop trying so hard. Some people try to jump directly to this instruction without going through the stages leading up to it ("the best relaxation is the best meditation") and it is important to keep in mind that there is a lot of contradicting advice to be given depending on where you are in the process. For most people, that advice can cause serious problems. It only applies at this last stage. After some time, the quality of the object suddenly changes. It becomes clearer, brighter, sharper, and better in every way. This can be so distracting as to cause your meditation to come to a sudden halt. When you work through it and your meditation stabilizes again, you have accomplished a stage called "access concentration". It is not the full level of absorption called jhana, but it is most of the way there.
If you practice an hour daily, you can reach full jhana in 6 months to 1 year. Ideally. For people living in the real world and dealing with family, job, bills, school, and other responsibilities there are often tastes of jhana, but it is gained and lost many, many times. Count on losing it.
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