In the beginning of a meditation practice, we get some pretty big insights to the nature of the constantly thinking mind.
Four things you may immediately observe:
How many thoughts there are
How repetitive they are
How strong the pull is to take you into the full narrative of the thought
How the pull always takes you away from the present to the past or future
Meditation practice typically begins with some form of concentration practice to develop focused attention, or “one-pointedness.”
For a simple concentration practice, place your awareness on one thing, such as:
Something outside – candle flame, a mandala, a sound, a mantra
Something inside – mental image, mental mantra, sensation of breath
And then attempt to keep the awareness on that one thing.
“My sponsor told me to put my keys under the bed before going to sleep, and then in the morning when I’m down on my knees getting them to say a prayer to God to keep me away from a drink today.”
After hearing this story repeated numerous times in meetings, I began to wonder why I never seemed to hear more detailed stories of prayer in Step meetings or speaker or discussion meetings. “We shouldn’t be shy on this matter of prayer,” the Big Book says – but it seemed that perhaps we were.
You found your way to the shelf at the bookstore containing books on meditation. You hadn’t thought there would be so many! Picking a few interesting looking ones, you start thumbing through them and quickly realize they are not all saying the same thing. In fact, sometimes they seem to blatantly contradict each other. Now what?
If you continue with the books, you will come to realize that there are different forms or methods of meditation. The techniques and even the seeming goals may be different. In sorting through the books and teachings on meditation, I have found it helpful to get a larger perspective to provide a context for all the different practices.
All forms of meditation that I have studied seem to fall into three overall categories, based on what they are doing with thought in the mind. The forms are not so much inconsistent as they are just different. They are not lower or higher or better or worse. They are just different practices that all lead the practitioner from the normal outward focus of life to an inwardness of awareness.
NOTE: This is a visitor response to Gregg’s post, “I am powerless over people, places and things.”
It’s true I cannot control people that don’t want to change or listen and that I therefore become powerless over the way they choose to lead their lives at that moment in time. That it’s frustrating and possibly futile to repeatedly try and change these types. But, at the same time, small moments or simple comments can instantaneously create radical change after many years of failed attempts. Suddenly people can see things differently in moments of clarity, regimes change, institutions collapse, societies transform under persistent external influences.
Were it not for my sister’s long and emotionally torturous campaign to help me find sobriety I would almost certainly have been abandoned to a slow homeless death. I was incapable of helping myself, had no knowledge of AA, or alcoholism, and needed intervention of some sort, she was undoubtedly the catalyst that forced me to decided to seek change. A wealthy family gave up on a friend of mine, abandoned him to his fate, he had a stroke whilst homeless in downtown Los Angeles and has never recovered his full faculties. There’s a fine balance, but we’re certainly not always powerless over people, places and things.
You’ve been wanting to get a solid Eleventh Step prayer and meditation practice started for some time. You even bought and read the book on beginning to meditate. So finally, one morning, you assume a comfortable but erect seat, close your eyes, and begin to focus your attention on your breath, perhaps even beginning to count the breaths.
And what happens? Complete failure! Within moments, the awareness is off the breath and your mind is full of thoughts about anything other than the simple breath. A memory of a conversation yesterday and what you should have said, or planning a conversation for later today and what you will say, or making the list of things you need to do today at work, or the grocery list, or entertaining an old familiar worry or anxiety …. Perhaps you try again. And then you just give up, get up, and go on with your day, concluding that you can’t meditate.
You have just had your first encounter with what meditation teachers call the monkey mind or the puppy mind. It’s not that your mind just at that moment started thinking about all sorts of different things. It’s always like that! You just noticed how scattered it is because for the first time you asked it to focus completely on one thing to the exclusion of all other thoughts.
So the practice now is to keep bringing the mind back to the breath each time it wanders off into some thought – like bringing the puppy back on a leash. As one teacher says, “It doesn’t matter if the mind wanders from the breath a thousand times; what matters is that you come back to the breath a thousand and one times.” That’s the practice. It’s that continuing to wake up as the mind wanders, and gently but firmly bringing the awareness back to the breath that makes up the beginning of a meditation practice. This is meditation … you’re not failing at it … you’re doing it!
And each time you wake up and bring the mind back to the breath, you have the experience of separating yourself from your thoughts. You might even think of this as the definition of meditation – the experience of yourself as other than your thoughts. When you wake up, you interrupt the otherwise ceaseless chatter of the mind seamlessly moving from one thought to the next. Now, in your practice, there’s a break — as you bring the mind back to the breath — where there is, for the smallest of moments, no thought. Your meditation practice has begun.
