How to meditate. Part 4 of 4.
As soon as you feel comfortable following your breath, you can expand your awareness during meditation to include all of the sensations inside and outside your body: what you feel, what you smell, what you hear, and what you see. Up until now, you've only been paying attention to your breath. Now, you can take a small step back and focus on the field of sensations around your breath. If it's hard for you to increase your awareness all at once, you can start by noticing when a feeling calls your attention to itself. For instance, you might be paying attention to your breath when a pain in your back screams for your attention. Instead of keeping your attention on your breath, as you did before, you can now focus on the pain and fully experience it until it no longer dominates your field of experience. Then focus on your breath until you are called away again. You can also try to be more aware of one type of sensation, such as how your body feels or how sounds make you feel. For example, you can spend an entire meditation just listening to the sounds around you without focusing on any one sound in particular. So, you can find a balance between the very focused awareness you need to follow your breath and the more open, all-encompassing awareness you need to feel a wide range of sensations. Mindfulness is based on this mix of paying attention and being open to new ideas. As you get better at meditating with sensations, you can try expanding your awareness to include the sensory field which is hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, and tasting.
Start by paying attention to your breathing, open your lens wide and let feelings come and go in your awareness. Meditation isn't about finding cool ways to spend your free time. Instead, it's about making the simple but important shift from doing to being. Don't make the mistake of doing your meditation practice another thing that needs to be done immediately. Use it as a welcome break from doing things, a chance to just be without a plan or goal. In other words, don't complicate things. Try out a few techniques to find the one that works best for you, and then stick with that one. It doesn't matter which method you use; they all bring you back to the present.
When you get used to including sensations in your meditation practice, you can open your awareness wide and welcome any experience, even thoughts and feelings, without judgement or resistance. Thoughts and feelings go in your mind like clouds in the sky, but they don't throw you off balance. If you lose your balance, just come back to open, non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. No matter how many clouds are in the sky, they don't change or make it smaller. In the same way, the experiences that come and don't change this wide-open awareness. At first, you might find that your mind is like a flashlight, going from one thing to another. But just keep returning to this open awareness that feels like the sky.
As an alternative to mindfulness meditation, you could try just sitting, a Zen practice that usually consists of two steps: just breathing and sitting. You can practise becoming your breath when you're good at following your breath. This means that you completely merge with the flow of your inhalations and exhalations until you, as a separate observer, disappear, and only your breath is left. Now, your breath is breathing you instead of you breathing it. This practice, called just breathing, is as simple as welcoming whatever comes up. However, it requires a quality of focused and relaxed awareness. The next step, just sitting, is expanding to include all of your senses. But instead of being aware or mindful of your experience, you "disappear," leaving only what you see, smell, hear, feel, sense, and think. In the end, this practice gets you to the same place as mindfulness. It's just the Zen version of mindfulness.
Getting Your Mind to Stop Wandering Like a lost puppy
Your mind wants to do good. It has its mind and a lot of annoying habits to break. You wouldn't hit a puppy for peeing on the carpet, but you would keep carrying it patiently back to its little pile of papers. In the same way, you must keep carrying your mind back to where it needs to be, without anger, violence, or judgement. After all, you want your mind to like you and treat you like a friend, not be afraid of you. Your mind needs even more patience than a puppy because it has been poorly trained all its life and tends to fantasise, worry, and obsess. As you practise being kind and patient with your mind, you naturally soften and relax into the present moment, which is what meditation is all about. On the other hand, if you force your mind to focus like a drill sergeant pushing his squad, you'll feel tense and uncomfortable, and you probably won't want to meditate again.
Previously I talked about how learning to meditate is a lot like learning to play an instrument. First, you need to learn some basic skills, and then you can keep practising the same scales. Playing scales can be very boring, like counting your breaths, but week by week, you get better and better until one day you can play simple tunes. The more you practise, the more subtle things you'll notice; even simple things like playing scales or watching your breath will become more interesting.
If you're stressed, you might want to start by relaxing deeply. If you're sleepy or confused, you might need to sit up straight, pay attention, and focus on your concentration. As you gently bring your mind back, again and again, you start to notice the themes and stories that keep pulling your attention away. Maybe you keep thinking about worries about your job, fights with your partner or spouse, sexual fantasies, or songs that are popular at the moment. After a few weeks or months of regular practice, you learn more about how your mind works and causes stress and pain. And, just like you like hit songs at first but get tired of hearing them after a while, the same old stories start to lose their power to upset you, and you start to feel more calm and peaceful.
Returning to your breath
Set your watch or clock to let you know when each hour starts. When the alarm goes off, stop what you're doing and pay full attention to your breath for one minute. If you can't stop doing something, like driving in traffic or talking to your boss, pay as much attention as you can to your breath while you're doing it.
Be well.
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