Tips for New Meditators
Most people, if they're not used to meditation, struggle to keep quiet for a full hour. Therefore, if you start the first time, you may wanna try something like 20 minutes, or even better, maybe half an hour. Once you can manage a session of about half an hour every day, then usually you can make good progress. If you sit every day, for about half an hour, or maybe at least five times a week, half an hour, that is consistent enough that there can be longterm progress.
But whether you sit 20 minutes or half an hour, I would suggest it's most important to enjoy the meditation. It's better to sit 15 minutes and to really enjoy it, than to sit one hour and to hate it. Because, if you sit for one hour by forcing yourself, and you really hate it, most likely, after some time you will give it up. Meditation should be fun. If you compare it to school, meditation is more like the recess, the break. It schouldn't be like the lessons which you don't enjoy, perhaps math, where you have to go whether you like it or not. So I would suggest to have a fun-approach. Because meditation can be some of the best fun. Actually in the end, it can be the most satisfying and most rapturous and blissful experiences that are available in the whole universe, quite frankly.
Next one is the posture. The cross-legged posture, which you see on our own Buddha statue here, is called the full lotus position. That's because our statue is based on an ancient Indian statue. And in India, they usually have their statues in the full lotus posture. Sometimes you also see the Buddha statues in the half-lotus position, which requires a little less flexibility. However, both postures tend to be difficult for people who grow up in a modern society. In traditional Indian society, where one sits on the floor all the time, from early childhood, it's actually not difficult to sit like that. It's meant to be a really stable and at the same time comfortable posture. Naturally, for most people, that is not the case nowadays.
Therefore, if for you the full lotus or half lotus posture, or any cross-legged position is too much of a struggle, it's better to sit on a chair, or to sit on a stool or something like that, rather than trying to sit crosslegged when you can't really do it. In my own case, I started sitting really regularly once I began living in the monastery, getting ready to ordain. At that time I was about 27 or 28 years old, still relatively young. And even so, it took me a few years of daily stretching exercises to get into the posture comfortably. Daily sitting, plus doing special stretching exercises every day to really get into the posture at ease. If you don't have the time to do years of excercise, then sitting on a stool or chair may be a much better approach.
And of course, another option is doing walking meditation. For instance, when we had our meditation session earlier, which one did you like better? The sitting meditation or the walking meditation? The walking, yes?
Yeah. I'm not surprised, particularly with the young men. Young men in particular often have a very strong restless energy. When you think of it, many of the old Thai ladies in the Isan (northeast area of Thailand, where Ajahn Mun, Ajahn Chah and many other famous Ajahns were born and established their monasteries), they can sit all night. In fact, the monks often can't keep up, especially the Western monks. These old ladies, they just sit like a rock through these all-night-sessions on the moon days. They're just sitting there all night, but the young Western monks can't take it, and they have to get up regularly and do walking meditation.
So if you find it easier, you can simply do walking meditation. Typically, you find a stretch of maybe 15 or 20 meters, and then you just walk up and down, to and fro, from one end of that path to the other end. You start walking on the one end, and when you reach the other end after 15 or 20 meters, you turn around and walk back. Each time you reach the end of your little path, you turn around gently and walk back again. Like that, you can continue walking for a whole hour, even in a small place, as long as you can find a straight stretch of at least 15 m length or so. I highly recommend doing walking meditation. Especially for young males, they often struggle, as they're usually not very flexible in the hips. Often women seem to be more flexible in the hips compared to men, which makes sitting cross-legged a bit easier for them.
But everyone, even those who are very flexible, still have to deal with mental restlessness. If we feel fidgety, if it seems too difficult to sit completely still for longer periods, walking meditation will be much easier. And it's a perfectly valid meditation. In some ways, I would say it's maybe the most Buddhist meditation.
Of course, the Buddha himself attained supreme awakening under the Bodhi Tree in the cross-legged poster. But other monks attained profound insights, even full release, enlightenment, while walking. The Buddha himself would regularly cultivate walking meditation, too. In fact, even nowadays there's still this kind of long shrine outside the Maha Bodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya in India, the location where the Buddha attained enlightenment. This long shrine actually marks the meditation path of the Buddha. It stretches exactly east to west, confirming the direction for walking meditation as Ajahn Mun recommended it. Shortly after attaining supreme awakening while sitting under the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha was actually walking meditation where this shrine is still located today. Basically walking all night and contemplating Dependent Origination. He contemplated Paṭicca Samuppada while walking all night. And then he would sit down again for seven days straight in one session, enjoying the bliss of release. And then he would walk again, alternating sitting and walking meditation.
Apart from Buddhism, there's lots of other traditions in India. When you're in India and you go to the Jain temples, it's often not so easy to recognize on first sight whether it's Buddhist or Jain, because they have very similar figures, who are also sitting cross-legged and meditating. Similar with Hindu Yogis, they often sit in full lotus posture. So you can find the sitting meditation in other traditions.
But I'm actually not really aware of any other spiritual tradition other than the Buddha Dhamma where walking meditation is cultivated as a deliberate technique to that extent. Already in the Buddha's time, they had specially built walking meditation paths. Built according to instructions by the Buddha himself, including a raised platform with a roof, that one doesn't have to walk in the sun and rain, and a bit higher above the dirt and dust. And they even had 'Cankama-Sālās', real walking meditation halls, where the monks and nuns could walk inside, fully protected from the cold and wind and rain.
And in our monastery, here at Dhammagiri, all our five Kuṭis (meditation cabins) have actually a really nice walking meditation path made of timber. Wooden meditation paths are actually my favorite. They're really nice to walk on. Walking on wooden boards, it's a little bit easier on the knees when you walk barefoot. And it's not so cold; it's not so dirty. Timber walking paths are really great for walking meditation. And even here in our Dhamma Hall, we have two long verandahs on the front and back, with wooden floorboards, that are excellent for walking meditation. Our two female retreatants, who are currently staying on the other side of the Dhammahall: Did you make good use of our two verandahs, did you walk meditation on them diligently?
Once the day-visitors have left, the verandahs are actually very suitable for two female retreatants to use for walking meditation. You can both walk, even at the same time, one on the front verandah, and the other on the back, please make good use of that opportunity.
Could you focus, how long could you focus with your meditation? Struggling? Did you manage walking for a full hour?
Well, if it's difficult and the mind just doesn't want to settle down and continues racing around, we can always practise patient endurance. Just enduring patiently. Ajahn Chah recommended that. Even if there's no calm or peace or joy or samādhi developing yet, we don't give up, in that case we just develop patient endurance. You learn a lot with patient endurance.
One suggestion I had given is using Mettā (Loving Kindness) as your meditation object:
"In gladness and in safety, may all beings be at ease 😊
In gladness and in safety, may all beings be at ease 😊
In gladness and in safety, may all beings be at ease..." 😊
Just repeating that little sentence for one hour, like a mantra. You can say it out loud, or you can just repeat it in your mind. But could you consistently, without interruption, repeat that little sentence for one hour?
In a sense, I'm not surprised if you couldn't keep it going consistently for one full hour. But on the other hand, we have to ask ourselves: why is that so difficult? On the face of it, it sounds like it should be about the easiest thing in the world to do, just repeating this one little sentence.
It doesn't even have to be a whole sentence. You can make it still easier. Use just one single word and repeat that:
Buddho!
You simply repeat:
"Budd-ho, Budd-ho, Budd-ho..."
This is called 'Buddhānussati', 'Recollection of the Buddha', a meditation object recommended by the Buddha himself. So, if you find a whole sentence too difficult to remember, you can do 'Recollection of the Buddha' by simply repeating a single word: 'Buddho."
Many of the great Meditation Masters in our tradition used exactly that as their first meditation object, just repeating:
"Budd-ho, Budd-ho, Budd-ho...".
When people try to do that for one hour, they usually find it almost impossible to consistently think only that one word. However, that's already a great learning experience in itself: we observe in our own experience how much our mind is out of control.
Most people naively assume that they have control over their own mind. We believe that we can think whatever we like: "I can think whatever I want, my thoughts are free, for sure". And then it's quite a humbling experience to try thinking one single word repeatedly for one hour (or even just for 10 minutes), and to notice how unruly the mind is, that we can't even force it to do an apparently so easy task. And we realize how important it is to give some training to our mind.
Training the mind is quite different from training the body. If you want to make the body really strong and fit, what do you do? Perhaps just resting all day, sitting on the couch? Is that how you get the body fit and strong, by resting it, taking it easy and doing nothing? Does that make your body strong?
How do you really train your body, making it strong? Exercise! Exactly. We have to exercise the body to train it, we strengthen it by moving it, running, working out in the gym, and so on. You have to move the body to make it fit.
However, with the mind it's actually the opposite. The mind moves on its own, it loves to run and jump around all the time. We don't have to make any effort to keep the mind moving, the mind loves to constantly latch on from one thing to another in quick succession anyhow. The body likes it to be just at ease and relax, staying stil. And it takes effort to get the body really moving. But the mind is the opposite. The mind likes to wander about all the time. It's very difficult to ever break and stop this incessant process of thinking and imagining. Thoughts, images and fantasies; worries, emotions and feelings bubbling up all the time.
Nevertheless, it is possible to train the mind. What's really good for the mind is to be still. In fact, bringing the mind to a really still state is the best training we can give it. Samādhi, jhāna, is the only way for the mind to be really quiet and tranquil. Developing samādhi is the only way to stop the incessant moving of the mind. And the stillness the mind experiences in samādhi is incredibly regenerative, incredibly healthy, really, really good for the mind. So we train the body by moving it, but we train our mind by keeping it still.
How did you all go with the walking meditation? Could you stay with the feeling of walking? Just the expereince of taking step after step, feeling the whole body in the process of walking. That's another great thing about walking meditation, it's not a subtle meditation object, the sensations and the movement of walking can be felt clearly and prominently throughout our body. They are relatively strong and direct, much more so than merely thinking thoughts in our head, or trying to feel the breath which can be a very subtle sensation. Therefore, walking is easy to observe, it's easy to sustain attention on the experience of walking.
While walking meditation, I recommend you to focus on the feeling, the sensation of moving, experienced throughout the whole body. Once you get into the groove of that movement, so to speak, it can become a very pleasant sensation. Meditators sometimes report that they feel almost like walking on clouds. The whole body feels different, light and soft, and the movement is getting really smooth. And it's a real relief to walk without having to get anywhere. Usually we walk to get from location A to location B. And while we are walking from A to B, we're usually already thinking what we do once we arrive at B. But here, just walking in a circle, or if you walk up and down on the same straight stretch of ground, the point is obviously NOT to get anywhere. It's just walking for walking, walking simply for the sake of walking. That's what makes it so beautiful and calm and relaxing. Not having to get anywhere, just to walk for the sake of walking, and to enjoy that right here in the present moment.
These are all important aspects of meditation: Becoming aware of the body, being mindful of our body, bringing our awarenss back into the physical body. Most of us are so lost in thinking most of the time, we're in our heads, we've kind of lost contact with our own body. In particular, with all the screens we're staring at on our phones & computers, that are sucking our awareness into the whole world of virtual reality on the www. We have to bring awareness back into the body, pulling it out of the internet and out of social media, to actually experience this material foundation of our existence again, namely this very body made of flesh and bones and blood and organs and skin.
The Buddha called it 'Kāya-gatā-sati', 'Mindfulness Connected with the Body', and he emphasized the importance of developing mindfulness directed to the body a lot. Even swimming our laps in the pool or the ocean, or lifting weights or stepping on the stepper machine in the gym, we can start to cultivate body awareness. Feeling, experiencing our body doing its movements, in the present moment, here and now while we're doing our gym routine (just DON'T check your social media on the phone while working out on the stair climber 😉)
Another very important thing: Meditation is not just when we are sitting or walking in a formal 'meditation session'. The Buddha has a very holistic approach to meditation. In fact, what we call 'meditation' in English, the closest Pali equivalent would be 'bhāvanā'. Bhāvanā means development, cultivation, and what we have to develop and cultivate is the whole Noble Eightfold Path, all eight path factors. That's how the Buddha defined 'meditation': developing all eight factors of the Noble Eightfold path:
Right View
Right Intention
Right Communication
Right Action
Right Job
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration/Mental Unification (samādhi)
So throughout the day, we have to arouse mindfulness (right mindfulness), being aware of what we are doing (right action), knowing what we are saying (right communication), being conscious of what we are thinking (right intention), that is all included in bhāvanā.
Whenever we communicate, when you shoot out an email or a text message, or you upload a little video to TikTok, that's all part of 'right communication'. Avoiding lies, insults, malicious talebearing and useless bla-bla-bla; and instead communicating only what is true, beneficial & meaningful, in a polite and friendly form that engenders harmony and concord - this is bhāvanā/meditation.
The intentions, the thoughts in our mind, whenever we think and intend, we have to be mindful of it, and then abandon (right effort) thoughts and intentions of sensual desire, harming and hurting, and develop (right effort) thoughts and intentions of loving kindness, compassion, respect and gratitude instead. That's all bhāvanā/meditation. We develop right intention, right thought throughout the day, maintaining right effort and sustaining mindfulness as much as we can.
Bhāvanā/meditation is a very comprehensive exercise, it means living our lives as an exercise in mindfulness and right effort. Abandoning or at least restraining and weakening sensuality, desire, ill-will, harming, hurting and anger. Whenever these thoughts come up, we have to mindfully notice that these are the bad thoughts, and we have to exert right effort to overcome them with good thoughts of letting go, forgiveness, patience, loving kindness and compassion.
This has to go on through the whole day, throughout our whole life, actually. Our life and our meditation are not two seperate things, they have to become one integrated whole. And if you find that 80% of the time during the day, your thoughts are rather on the side of desire and passion and anger and irritation, and there's only very few good thoughts, and then you sit down and try to meditate, you may find meditation very difficult. On the other hand, imagine if you manage to keep most of your thoughts really wholesome; you cultivate compassion, loving kindness and letting go throughout the day. Imagine all your communication with others is friendly, polite, reasonable, truthful, genuine, connected with the Dhamma, encouraging others, uplifting them, and so on. Then when you sit down, it's so much easier to meditate.
At the minimum, even though we may not yet be that successful in keeping the mind wholesome throughout the day, at the minimum we have to keep the 5 precepts. That's a really important one, the precepts. Even if the mind still has unwholesome thoughts, we don't allow it to manifest in unwholesome actions by body or speech. Do you all know the five precepts?
Not to kill
Not to steal
Not to commit adultery/sensual misconduct
Not to lie
Not to consume alcohol or other intoxicants
The first one is not to intentionally kill any living beings, including mozzies and midgees. Actually, I think I had a midgee biting me during our sitting meditation. Before that, he buzzed around the mic, did you hear his buzzing sound coming through the loudspeakers? Shy him away, and he will come back to try again to bite you. So better to just let him bite you undisturbed in the first place. Just invite him in to take some of your blood, or otherwise, he will continue buzzing around and trying until he finally gets his little drop of blood anyhow. So, you would never kill intentionally, not even an ant or mozzie, much less a large animal or a human.
Second, not to steal, not to take what is not given: no shoplifting or things like that. If the cool handbag or the cute shoes, or the latest iphone is too expensive for us to afford, we just do without, we can't just pinch them.
The third is to be committed to one's spouse or partner. Once you're married and then someone else turns up who's much more charming, or looks more attractive, more handsome, tough luck - too late. Now you're committed. You have to remain committed and loyal to your spouse.
Number four, that's truthfulness, not lying. Whatever we say, whatever we communicate, has to be true. And nowadays, communication is done a lot not via speech, but online and through gadgets. Whether it's tweets or YouTube videos, whether you are updating your Insta profile or upload some photo, video, whatever, that should all be truthful. So much fake stuff and propaganda out there already on the internet; we shouldn't contribute to that.
The last one, number five, not to take alcohol or any other intoxicants, or anything that causes carelessness and intoxication. It can be a tough one to keep nowadays, but doing so can also make you popular, because you're the only one who can still drive the car.
These precepts are not only important to prevent you from harming yourself or others, and to shield you from accumulating bad karma. They are also crucial for making progress in your formal meditation, for your samādhi. Because if you don't keep these five precepts, that has a real big impact on the mind. If you break them and then you try to meditate, it usually doesn't really work. Whereas if you keep the precepts very pure, then you will find that when you sit down, you are at ease. You don't expereince regret and remorse. You have a clear conscience. They say it's easy to sleep with a clear conscience, but it's even more easy to meditate.
One last thing that goes a long way to support your meditation is simply puñña, good karma. We can't have too much good karma. Just like with money, it's always better to have some more, even if you've got a bit of money already. Or have you ever heard anyone complaining that they have too much money? However, having heaps of money actually is not necessarily as good as it sounds. Just look at some of the really rich billionaires, they're not necessarily really happy, and it can go to your head, and then it's easy to make bad karma from conceipt and getting onto a power trip with so much wealth. But not so with puñña, good karma. You really can't have too much, no bad side effects from good karma whatsoever, just good all around.
Additionally, when you sit down and you focus internally, you will encounter your store of good karma as internal brightness and happiness. Quietly sitting and looking inside is a little bit like checking your karmic balance sheet. Someone who has made lots of bad karma, and only very little good karma, when they focus internally, it can be quite agitating. It's not nice what you encounter inside your mind if there's a lot of bad karma, it may manifest as a heart that's dark, unsettled, unhappy. On the other hand, a person who has made lots and lots of good karma, and very little bad karma, when they sit down and focus internally, they'll usually encounter brightness and happiness. The mind is bright, happy, joyful, at ease, relaxed, calm, tranquil, glad, because good karma and happiness are synonyms, according to the Buddha.
These are two fundamental factors to improve our meditation, in particular to deepen our samadhi:
1. Keeping the 5 precepts.
2. Generating heaps of good karma through generosity and other acts of goodness. Making our heart bright and happy with the accumulated puñña.
