The secret of meditation

My brother put me onto an interesting new teacher this week, Mingyu Rinpoche.  He has some charming introduction to meditation videos over at Tergar.org, the online community that has built around his teachings.

To teach what he calls "the secret of meditation" he leads students through a simple experiment.  First he asks them to spend a minute or so just listening to the sounds around them.  Next he asks them to spend a minute or so "meditating on the sounds around them."  The secret to meditation is that true meditation is really the listening.

One of the biggest blocks to meditation, and I'm still guilty of this, is the belief that meditation is an act of concentration.  We think that we're supposed to be concentrating on the breath.  And so we get frustrated with ourselves when we do it "wrong."

But meditation is really just awareness, and being conscious of the barest level of awareness.  Concentration is not only unecessary, it's not even the goal.  Concentration arises out of mediation. But the goal is really to engage in the simple act of being. In fact, in a certain sense it is to be without goal.

When we bring this way of awareness to the simple acts of life, then suddenly the act of living becomes much simpler.

Life becomes simpler, but it's a remarkably deep simplicity.

Getting my Practice back

This is hard. Harder than I thought it would be. So I'm going to start to re-build exactly the way I built this in the first place, five minutes at a time. It's actually part of the Zhan Zhuan discipline to start with baby steps. It's strongly discouraged to strike postures that your body might not be ready for, physically or neurologically. I second that. You can have some pretty intense experiences with this practice that you aren't physically or psychically. Take a challenging stance, like holding the balloon, and do that for five minutes the first week, ten minutes the next, building up to twenty.
Because I've built myself up to an hour before, and had all kinds of trippy peak experience, of course I want to start there. But I'm not. I'm going to pick a time, let's say 8:45, after I've dropped Ben off at the bus stop and do my five minutes this week. I'm going to add five minutes a week. In three months I'll be back to an hour.