Meditation Class 3: Get Calm and Carry On

Meditation is, as you have started to discover, very much a mind/body experience. So it's useful to know there is a particular physical posture that benefits the mental effort, a posture people 2,600 years ago, without see-through machinery, devised to channel the energy and emotions of the body. It starts with being seated. Optimally this is on a cushion on the floor, but if you can't manage that, use a very comfortable straight back chair. 

It's critical for circulation that your hips remain higher than your knees. It's also critical that the back is ramrod straight, not slouched or slumped to block energy flow. We want our front, chest and gut, to be fearlessly open to the world and whatever it may offer. We are warriors, not wimps. 

The head should rest comfortably erect above the shoulders, straight in line with the back, not cocked or slumped. It helps to spread the shoulders like an eagle ready to swoop, and to tuck in the chin just a little. Don't seal or pinch your lips: open them just enough to let air in. Everything should be as relaxed as possible.

At some point somewhere, you've likely seen an image of someone meditating on a cushion with legs folded like a pretzel. Maybe the soles of their feet were upturned on their thighs. Maybe you found this contortion frightening and don't want to go there.  Well, you don't have to go that far. Since the idea is to keep the body relaxed to get the mind calm, torture is not an option. Still, if you are on a cushion, you  need a stable base to keep you straight, and no shape offers more stability than a triangle. So you need to try at least to cross your legs, then lower them so your left foot is under or touching your right knee and vice versa. This is also a bit of mental trickery meant to erase the distinction between right and left so there's only straight up and straight ahead. If you are sitting in a chair, try to at least cross your ankles.

The finishing touches on this posture are to rest your hands palms down on your thighs or your knees, whichever reach is most comfortable, and to rest your open eyes on a point about 1 foot in front of you-- on the floor is okay. Don't look for something to look at and think about. Just gaze forward.



So the practice is to sit like this, count your breathing cycles and discover what happens. You can try for five or even ten minutes a day. As we learned earlier, you're going to tune into a torrent of thoughts, an endless news channel. That's okay. It's always been there and now at last you're noticing. 

Meditation is about discovering how that stream of thoughts has controlled us and how we can control it. This reversal is not going to happen in a day or even a month.  How could it? You've been creating that news channel for lifetimes, so it's going to take some time to get it off the air. Every time you sit and meditate for five minutes or more definitely gets you closer to that achievement. It gets you more and more familiar with how you operate.

Now if you are going to try this, it's useful to know there are actually two kinds of genuine Buddhist meditation and they are necessarily sequential. The first is called "shamatha", which means calm--perfectly calm, and it's the key to the second, "vipashyana", clearly seeing or in a word, insight.  There's no point trying to jump ahead to that more fun stuff because we can't get insight into what makes us tick until we calm our mind enough to make it a steady searchlight. 

The traditional image for describing this situation is the ocean. Our mind is indeed a vast ocean of consciousness. Can you understand that? Well some times, the ocean can be very stormy, tormented by white caps, thundering rollers, even just a constant chop that means danger for many boats and swimmers. Traditionally thoughts are viewed as waves stirring up the ocean of your mind. They are part and parcel of your consciousness--they are coming up from the depths, yet they are passing over and through it, energetically churning it up until it's tough to be out on it. Everything is way too stirred up to see where the reefs and shoals are. 

Sometimes, in contrast, when there is no wind, the ocean lies flat, calmly reflecting the sun or moon, even the landscape at its edge. It reveals what's hiding underneath. It's not a scary, unknowable expanse.

So to see into our mind, we need to calm it down. Just noticing your thoughts can do that. Just seeing them pricks them so they burst like a bubble or balloon-- when you remember to see them that is. And that's the trick here. So this is the basic starter practice: sit in that prescribed posture for at least five minutes a day and try to monitor your mind. That means: try not to get carried away on a train of thought. You will. Trust me, you will again and again. We all do even after years of practicing this. But you will get better and faster at realizing you've been thoughtnapped. Soon, at some moment of your life, you're going to be doing something or talking to someone and suddenly realize your not there: you've gone off on a train of thought. You're missing out, not seeing what's really happening.

And that should encourage you to keep making this effort. The teaching is very simple: as soon as you realize you've been carried away, take a deep breath to signal a fresh start and begin again to notice you are breathing. Notice, like that elevator sign says, you are here, on a chair or cushion or wherever you may physically be. Keep coming back to that. This is fitness training.

Basic points to remember when you attempt this: it doesn't matter what you are thinking. Treat all thoughts with equal opportunity and let them go bye bye as best you can. As soon as you recognize you are thinking, the thought will vanish all by itself. Don't worry when another comes along. Inevitably it will. We never stop thinking, we will never stop thoughts from flowing like the current of the ocean. But we can stop from getting carried away by them. That's the goal here.  To stay calm so we can carry on without making a mess of things.


Please remember to share this with anyone who might be curious about meditation.
And please ask questions by posting a comment. I'll do my best to respond asap.

By this merit may all beings be freed of suffering.




~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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