Once there was a young man who went to a master to learn meditation. He meditated as he was told for months but he was becoming increasingly frustrated with his inability to attain the proper state of mushin ("no mind") the master required. Then one day while meditating, he felt his body float up off the floor. He saw himself fly up into the clouds, where all the Gods were waiting for him. He sat there, calm and collected, while the gods served him tea and complimented him on his meditation ability. When his session was over, he ran to his master and excitedly told him of this wondrous experience.
"That is interesting," said the master, "and did you concentrate on your breathing the whole time?"
The moral of the story is that, at least initially, you have one and only one job while meditating - to concentrate on your breathing. Anything which gets in the way of this is a distraction to be avoided, however pleasant or important it may seem at that moment. It seems simple to just concentrate on your breathing, but it is always surprising to people when they begin to meditate just how hard this is to do. Of course, if distractions weren't seductive, they wouldn't distract us...:)
Everyone's first meditation session is a disaster: you spend most of your time trying to shut up the voices in your head and the periods when you are actually not thinking are very brief and far between (if you experience them at all). Typically, this makes you annoyed and then you have to try to suppress that irritation, which just makes it harder to focus, etc., etc. Remember: be patient with yourself - the more you meditate, the longer and more frequent these periods will become. Ultimately, you will be able to maintain some of the calm of your meditation sessions in your daily life, which will make you more relaxed, happier and better able to act with deliberation. But for now, the important thing is just not to give up.
As we discussed last week, your brain will try to distract you. Buddhists like to personify this aspect of your brain by calling it monkey mind. This is an interesting way to think about it and can be helpful - your goal is to quiet down the monkey in your mind. He's pretty stupid and easily bored, so he will jump up and down, make noise and try to get you to play with him. Your job is to prevent the monkey from distracting you. But how to do this? If you struggle with the monkey, it just make him even more agitated. So instead of fighting with him, you need to ignore him. If you can do that successfully for a while, he will eventually go to sleep. Then you will have peace.
I like the monkey analogy because it captures the frustration we all feel when we first try to meditate. However, it's misleading in some ways. Your brain's tendency to pay attention to every little thing can be helpful - that noise behind you might be a lion and, if it is, you had best pay attention! However, there is a time and place for being hyper alert and a time and place for being calm and focused. You can pay attention to all the little things that make monkey mind happy 95% of your day, but when you are sitting for meditation, you can afford to ignore him. You can think of this as a form of self control, which is a major concept in Buddhism. If you can't learn to control monkey mind, it will constantly screw things up for you, often in ways you don't even appreciate. Have you ever been on on vacation or some place really relaxing and thought, "Wow, this is just the perfect moment. I never noticed all the little details of this situation before." Buddhist monks experience this state all the time. The reason you don't is that you allow monkey mind to control your thoughts, which means you never really concentrate on any one thing for any length of time. Television producers actually take explicit advantage of this to get you to watch TV. There is something called the orientation response, which basically describes your brain's tendency to pay close attention to things which are changing at a certain specific rate. If things change too slowly, you tend to ignore them. If they change too rapidly, you tend to leave your response to reflex. But if they change at just the right rate, you are pushed to really focus on them. TV producers know this and pace their shows accordingly - so they are using your monkey mind to get you to watch their show without your ever being aware of that at all! So monkey mind has its place, but it should be under your conscious control.
When you are meditating and you encounter a distraction, it is very easy for this to serve as the seed for a whole thought process itself. "Dang, there's that itch again," you think, "I'm not supposed to be thinking about it, but I can't stop it!" and then, "I suck at this meditation thing!" One thought leads to another and the longer this goes on the harder it is to stop - your thoughts build up momentum like a car rolling down a hill. Remember: it doesn't matter what you're thinking about - if it's not breathing, it's not part of the meditation process. So when distractions or extraneous thoughts come, you need to do two things. First, you need to recognize that they are distractions. In the beginning, you will find it sometimes takes several seconds to realize what's happening - "Wait a minute, that's a distraction." We are so used to monkey mind that we don't usually notice when it is operating - that's how you can sometimes suddenly realize you have been daydreaming in calculus class - we were doing it for 10 minutes without really being aware of that. Practicing the sort of concentrative meditation that focuses on breathing will, over time, make you better and better at monitoring your thoughts. Once you learn to recognize that first moment when your mind begins to veer off course, you will have a much easier time directing it back on track. And this, of course, is the second task: to gently refocus your thinking on the assignment - in this case, your breathing. Don't force it, don't recriminate yourself, just think "Ah, I am thinking again - back to the breathing." It's very helpful to imagine smiling indulgently at yourself here rather than getting frustrated.
What you are trying to attain is very similar to the concept of flow from sports psychology. Here is a quotation from the wikipedia article on flow which is really very much like what experienced meditation practitioners say about their practice:
"...flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task."
Most of you have experienced a weak version of this when you were playing a video game or listening to your favorite music and completely lost track of everything else - the time, your mother talking to you, that test you failed this morning, etc. The world seems to fade away and nothing exists for you at that moment but the object of your concentration. So the next time your girlfriend says something like, "What, is that football game more important than I am?" you can say, "I am so sorry, dear, I was a victim of flow." :) In any event, in meditation we are trying to create a very strong kind of flow without any external stimulus at all. As I mentioned above, this kind of meditation is called concentrative meditation. You can focus on pretty much anything - a candle flame, aspects of your body like the breath, the wall in front of you, etc. We will do this kind of meditation (with small twists) for the first few weeks of class. Now, concentrative meditation is quite pleasant and relaxing, to be sure, and many people never learn anything else. But to serious meditators, it also serves a greater purpose. Once you learn how to observe your own mind in action and begin to learn how to discipline it in basic ways, you are in a position to learn more complex types of meditation that really put Buddhist ideas into practise. But that's for later on.
One thing I want you to think about for next time is this: How much of your life do you really notice? Appreciate?
Enough with theory. Today we are going to continue our introductory concentrative meditation with a twist. We will meditate again for 10 minutes, and begin by counting each breath at the beginning of the inhalation. But this time I will set the timer to go off in 5 minutes. When you hear the double chimes, take the opportunity to do a quick survey of your positioning - is your back straight, your fingers touching? Can you feel tension in your body? If there are problems, gently correct them. Then shift to counting each breath at the end of the exhalation rather than at the beginning of the inhalation. Some of you will find this surprisingly difficult even though it seems a trivial change. As before, count to 10, then start over. So we will do each kind of count for 5 minutes for a total of 10 minutes.