Teacher Norman Fischer proposes a two-week trial run to get your
meditation practice started and looks at how to deal with some of the obstacles you may encounter.
Thousands of people over the
years have asked me for advice about how to establish a daily
meditation practice at home. Although there are thousands of Buddhist
meditation centers around the country, most meditators do some or all
of their practice at home on their own. In many cases, this is a
practical matter. Most people don’t live close enough to a Buddhist
center to meditate there regularly. Or, for one reason or another,
they don’t feel comfortable with any of the local centers available
to them. Or they feel that for them meditation is a private and
personal matter, not a communal religious practice. Anyway, most
meditators, for a variety of reasons, meditate at home. I do myself.
It wasn’t that way when I
began Zen practice. The conventional wisdom then was that you could
never practice on your own. You needed to practice with others—that
was the way it was done. You needed instructions from a teacher. You
needed support—maintaining the disciple to sit on your own would be
too difficult. Besides, meditating alone could be dangerous.
Conventional wisdom has
changed. These days many people find that it is entirely possible to
meditate on their own. Not that lack of discipline is unknown—keeping
up with regular practice remains a struggle for some. But many go
beyond struggle to find enjoyment and ease in their daily practice.
When people ask me how to
get a home meditation practice started, here is what I tell them: the
practice begins the night before. Before you go to sleep, set the
alarm for half an hour earlier than usual, and say to yourself:
“Tomorrow morning I am going to get up to sit. I want to do this,
and it is going to be pleasant and helpful.” Hold that thought in
your mind. Then, as you are falling asleep, say this: “Am I
actually going to wake up early and meditate?” And answer yourself:
“Yes, I am.” And then question yourself again: “Really?” Take
this seriously. Think a little more and answer yourself honestly. If
the answer is, “Yes, really,” then you will get up. You are
serious about it. But if the answer is, “No, I have to admit that I
am probably going to reset the alarm and turn over to get that
delicious extra half hour of sleep,” then save yourself the
trouble. Reset the alarm now and don’t even try to get up.
This little exercise may
sound silly but it is very important. It addresses the main
difficulty we have with self discipline: we are ambivalent. We both
do and don’t want to do what we think we want to do in our own best
interests. We find it difficult to take our good intentions
seriously, especially when it comes to our spiritual lives. We have
confusion at our core about whether we are capable of confronting
ourselves at the deepest possible human level—maybe if we do we
will find ourselves to be unworthy, trivial people. Since we imagine
that meditation promises a self-confrontation at this level, we are
deeply ambivalent.
Most of this convoluted
thinking is not conscious. This is why the before-bed self-dialog is
important. It provides a simple way of confronting the issue.
“Really?” It’s a way to surface what we really feel and,
gently and honestly, deal with it. Otherwise our long habit of sneaky
self-deception will likely prevail. We will not do what we’re not
really clear we want to do, which will give us further evidence that
we can’t do it.
Assuming you do get out of
bed in the morning, splash cold water on your face, rinse out your
mouth, put on some comfortable clothes (or stay in your sleeping
clothes if you want), and immediately sit on your cushion. Do this
before you have coffee, before you turn on the computer, before you
activate your day and realize you don’t have time for this. Burn a
stick of incense to time yourself, or use a clock or one of the many
excellent meditation timers now on the market (which will prevent
clock-watching). Decide in advance to sit for twenty to thirty
minutes. A bit more is good if you can do it.
Try this for two weeks,
taking a day or so off each week. If you miss a day, that’s OK.
Don’t fall into the unconscious trap that “Since I missed a day I
guess I can’t do this, so I might as well not even try, or try less
hard tomorrow because this missed day has weakened me.” This is the
way we think! So anticipate this and don’t fall for it. Be gentle
with yourself, but firm. Imagine that you are training a child, or a
puppy—a cute little creature who means well but definitely needs
adult guidance.
Decide in advance that you
will meditate for two weeks. It is much easier to commit to
meditating almost every day for two weeks than committing yourself to
meditate every day for the rest of your life. After two weeks, stop
and ask yourself, “How was that? Was it pleasant or unpleasant?
What impact did it have on my morning, on the rest of my day, on my
week?” Usually positive results are apparent, and, seeing that the
practice has been beneficial, you develop a stronger intention to
return to it. So then, after a hiatus, commit again to practice,
maybe now for a month, with the same break built in for evaluation.
In this way, little by little. you can become a regular meditator.
Taking breaks from time to time doesn’t change that.
Many people ask, “Is it
necessary to do this in the morning? Is there some magic to the
morning? I am not a morning person.” Yes, I think there is magic to
the morning. Monastic schedules the world over include early morning
practice. Practice seems most beneficial at that time of day, when
your psyche is in a liminal state and the world around you has not
quite awakened. Also, you are more likely to do it in the morning,
before your day gets engaged and you remember all the things you need
to do. In the middle of the day it is harder to rein yourself in, and
at the end of the day you may be too tired or wound up. You may feel
more like a glass of wine than meditation practice, which will likely
feel pretty uncomfortable as your body notices all the aches and
strains and kinks of the day. Actually, practice at the end of the
day is very good for just this reason—while often uncomfortable, it
does help you process all your stress and feel calmer afterward. But
if you are trying to establish a fledgling practice, thinking you
will sit restfully at the end of the day is probably not going to
work as well as catching yourself at your weakest (which is to say
your strongest): in the morning, when you are both more and less
yourself, before you have fully assumed the armored, heroic
personality with which you feel you must approach the world of work
and family. (I must note here the obvious fact that all of this might
not be true for you: we differ enormously as individuals, and in
these intimate matters one size does not fit all. I am describing
what I have found to be true for myself, and for many other
meditators).
There are many approaches to
meditation. In my tradition, the Soto Zen tradition, meditation is
not considered a skill that we are supposed to master. It is a
practice that we devote ourselves to. So if you are meditating in the
morning feeling half asleep, with dream-snatches passing by, and your
mind not crispy focused precisely on the breath, the way you think it
is supposed to be... this is perfectly all right. It is considered
normal and possibly even beneficial. The biggest obstacle to
establishing a meditation practice is the erroneous idea (firmly held
by most people who want to establish a meditation practice) that
meditation should calm and focus the mind. Therefore, if your mind is
not calm and focused, you are certainly doing it wrong. Struggling
with something that you are consistently doing wrong, and in your
frustration can’t seem to get right, does not inspire you to
continue (unless you are a masochist, and there are more than a few
meditating masochists).
Better to assume the Soto
Zen attitude that meditation is what you do when you meditate. There
is no doing it wrong or right. That is not to say that there is no
effort, no calm, no focus. Of course there is. The point is to avoid
falling into the trap of defining meditation too narrowly, and then
judging yourself based on that definition, and so sabotaging
yourself. You evaluate your practice on a much wider and more
generous calculus. Not: Is my mind concentrated while I am sitting?
But: How is my attention during the day? Not: Am I peaceful and still
as I sit? But: Is my habit of flying off the handle reducing
somewhat? In other words, the test of meditation isn’t meditation.
It’s your life.
Dealing with the various
practical obstacles to regular meditation is easy compared with the
deeper self-deception issues I have been talking about. Once you get
a handle on these, the practical problems are easy. Kids get up
early? Then get up half an hour earlier than they do. But that’s
not enough sleep? Well, that half hour of sitting will be much more
important for your rest and well-being than the lost half hour of
sleep. Or you can just go to bed half an hour earlier.
No place to meditate? There
is always somewhere—all you need is the space for a cushion on the
floor. But better to have a clean and well-cared-for spot, even if
only in a corner of an otherwise busy messy room. Keeping that corner
neat and clear is a preliminary to the meditation practice itself.
Your spouse doesn’t want
to meditate and resents that you sneaking out of bed to sit?
Patiently explain to your spouse that the main reason you are
meditating is to become a more loving and helpful person. You are
sneaking out of bed not to assert your independence but for the
opposite reason: to be more loving. Have that conversation (lovingly)
with your spouse. Ask them to help you do this two-week experiment
and evaluate the results: have you been more loving, have you helped
around the house, with the kids, etc., more than usual, with more
willingness, more cheerfulness? (Of course, having had this
conversation, you now have to do these things.)
In short, if you want to
meditate there is virtually no excuse not to. But human confusion is
very clever, so it is still possible to talk yourself out of it. If
so, be my guest. Sometimes that’s the way to finally begin serious
meditation practice: by not doing it for ten or twenty years, until
finally there is no choice.
As the world speeds up and
history’s trajectory becomes more drastic, more people are feeling
the need to do something to promote well-being and foster a
sustainable attitude. It is difficult to remain cheerful if you are
under stress, difficult to believe in goodness and happiness if the
world you live in doesn’t offer much support for them. Gentle and
realistic, meditation practice can provide the powerful attitudinal
boost we need. It doesn’t require pre-existing faith or excessive
effort; simply sitting in silence, returning to the present moment of
body and breath, will naturally bring you closer to gratitude, closer
to kindness. And as you commit yourself to these virtues you will
begin to notice, to your surprise, that many people in your life are
also doing this, so there is plenty of companionship along the way.
Thousands of people over the
years have asked me for advice about how to establish a daily
meditation practice at home. Although there are thousands of Buddhist
meditation centers around the country, most meditators do some or all
of their practice at home on their own. In many cases, this is a
practical matter. Most people don’t live close enough to a Buddhist
center to meditate there regularly. Or, for one reason or another,
they don’t feel comfortable with any of the local centers available
to them. Or they feel that for them meditation is a private and
personal matter, not a communal religious practice. Anyway, most
meditators, for a variety of reasons, meditate at home. I do myself.
.