You Can Not Do It Wrong
I have had a question that often comes up in courses. I suspect it will come up for many of you.
Question: "I am trying to do meditation as you advise, but I can not get it right. I can observe my breathing, but thoughts keep arising. I keep going into the future and going into the past. I am trying very hard to do everything you have told us to do, but can not get it right."
What I need to say to you is very important: "You can not do it wrong!"
The most important skill you need to incorporate is self-kindness. We do not learn meditation the way we learn anything else. We learn by letting go, by accepting things as they are, and by just being nice to ourselves.
Think of coming to your formal practice and your practice of returning to the breath during the day as a simple kindness you do for yourself - a cool and refreshing drink of water for the mind.
Meditation is a personal exploration or investigation into our own experience. It is a discovery process, not a set of rules of how to use the mind. Please see my directions as suggestions or pointers. Try them out and see what happens. You are learning to work with mind and trust your ability to best know what to do for yourself.
Thoughts about past and future are very common, even with lots of experience. What is different is that with meditation practice we learn to see thoughts or sensations as they are happening! As they occur.
We can then intervene if we choose to. But we do not try to stop thought and we do not try to make anything happen. We don't follow or entertain thoughts. We do not try to get rid of anything.
At this time in your practice skillful intervention is to:
- Simply notice what is happening. Be aware of thoughts and experience sensations and stillness.
- Choose not to follow thoughts
- Choose not to push any experience away
- Practice returning to a simple balance that doesn't close out experience, that doesn't cling to experience
- Choose to gently return to the anchor in the breath over and over again - Every returning is a choice that develops your skill in kindly coming back again to just being with your breath, your body, and yourself in the moment, a "muscle training," an establishment of memory which eventually automatically comes back to the breath for a rest, for reprieve.
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