How to do Mindfulness
Meditation
By
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. Just by sitting and doing nothing, we
are doing a tremendous amount.
In my last column I discussed why mindfulness is essential to spiritual
practice, for no matter what spiritual tradition we follow, we must have
a mind that is able to stay in the present moment if our understanding
and experience is to deepen. Now I would like to talk about some
aspects of the actual mindfulness practice.
In mindfulness, or shamatha, meditation, we are trying to achieve a
mind that is stable and calm. What we begin to discover is that this
calmness or harmony is a natural aspect of the mind. Through
mindfulness practice we are just developing and strengthening it, and
eventually we are able to remain peacefully in our mind without
struggling. Our mind naturally feels content.
An important point is that when we are in a mindful state, there is still
intelligence. Its not as if we blank out. Sometimes people think that a
person who is in deep meditation doesnt know whats going onthat
its like being asleep. In fact, there are meditative states where you
deny sense perceptions their function, but this is not the
accomplishment of shamatha practice.
Creating a Favorable Environment
There are certain conditions that are helpful for the practice of
mindfulness. When we create the right environment its easier to
practice.
It is good if the place where you meditate, even if its only a small
space in your apartment, has a feeling of upliftedness and sacredness.
It is also said that you should meditate in a place that is not too noisy
or disturbing, and you should not be in a situation where your mind is
going to be easily provoked into anger or jealousy or other emotions. If
you are disturbed or irritated, then your practice is going to be
affected.
Beginning the Practice
I encourage people to meditate frequently but for short periods of time
ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes. If you force it too much the practice
can take on too much of a personality, and training the mind should be
very, very simple. So you could meditate for ten minutes in the
morning and ten minutes in the evening, and during that time you are
really working with the mind. Then you just stop, get up, and go.
Often we just plop ourselves down to meditate and just let the mind
take us wherever it may. We have to create a personal sense of
discipline. When we sit down, we can remind ourselves: Im here to
work on my mind. Im here to train my mind. Its okay to say that to
yourself when you sit down, literally. We need that kind of inspiration
as we begin to practice.
Posture
The Buddhist approach is that the mind and body are connected. The
energy flows better when the body is erect, and when its bent, the
flow is changed and that directly affects your thought process. So there
is a yoga of how to work with this. Were not sitting up straight because
were trying to be good schoolchildren; our posture actually affects the
mind.
People who need to use a chair for meditation should sit upright with
their feet touching the ground. Those using a meditation cushion such
as a zafu or gomden should find a comfortable position with legs
crossed and hands resting palm-down on your thighs. The hips are
neither rotated forward too much, which creates tension, nor tilted
back so you start slouching. You should have a feeling of stability and
strength.
When we sit down the first thing we need to do is to really inhabit our
bodyreally have a sense of our body. Often we sort of prop ourselves
up and pretend were practicing, but we cant even feel our body; we
cant even feel where it is. Instead, we need to be right here. So when
you begin a meditation session, you can spend some initial time
settling into your posture. You can feel that your spine is being pulled
up from the top of your head so your posture is elongated, and then
settle.
The basic principle is to keep an upright, erect posture. You are in a
solid situation: your shoulders are level, your hips are level, your spine
is stacked up. You can visualize putting your bones in the right order
and letting your flesh hang off that structure. We use this posture in
order to remain relaxed and awake. The practice were doing is very
precise: you should be very much awake even though you are calm. If
you find yourself getting dull or hazy or falling asleep, you should
check your posture.
Gaze
For strict mindfulness practice, the gaze should be downward focusing
a couple of inches in front of your nose. The eyes are open but not
staring; your gaze is soft. We are trying to reduce sensory input as
much as we can. People say, Shouldnt we have a sense of the
environment? but thats not our concern in this practice. Were just
trying to work with the mind and the more we raise our gaze, the more
distracted were going to be. Its as if you had an overhead light
shining over the whole room, and all of a sudden you focus it down
right in front of you. You are purposefully ignoring what is going on
around you. You are putting the horse of mind in a smaller corral.
Breath
When we do shamatha practice, we become more and more familiar
with our mind, and in particular we learn to recognize the movement of
the mind, which we experience as thoughts. We do this by using an
object of meditation to provide a contrast or counterpoint to whats
happening in our mind. As soon as we go off and start thinking about
something, awareness of the object of meditation will bring us back.
We could put a rock in front of us and use it to focus our mind, but
using the breath as the object of meditation is particularly helpful
because it relaxes us.
As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense
of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The
whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be
forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in
and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.
Thoughts
No matter what kind of thought comes up, you should say to yourself,
That may be a really important issue in my life, but right now is not
the time to think about it. Now Im practicing meditation. It gets down
to how honest we are, how true we can be to ourselves, during each
session.
Everyone gets lost in thought sometimes. You might think, I cant
believe I got so absorbed in something like that, but try not to make it
too personal. Just try to be as unbiased as possible. Mind will be wild
and we have to recognize that. We cant push ourselves. If were trying
to be completely concept-free, with no discursiveness at all, its just
not going to happen.
So through the labeling process, we simply see our discursiveness. We
notice that we have been lost in thought, we mentally label it
thinkinggently and without judgmentand we come back to the
breath. When we have a thoughtno matter how wild or bizarre it may
bewe just let it go and come back to the breath, come back to the
situation here.
Each meditation session is a journey of discovery to understand the
basic truth of who we are. In the beginning the most important lesson
of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind. But the meditation
tradition says that mind doesnt have to be this way: it just hasnt been
worked with.
What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is
simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the
mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing,
we are doing a tremendous amount.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is holder of the Buddhist and Shambhala
lineages of Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He has received teachings
from many of the great Buddhist masters of this century, including
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Penor Rinpoche and his father Trungpa
Rinpoche. In 1995 he was recognized as the incarnation of the great
nineteenth-century Buddhist teacher Mipham Rinpoche.
