The Basic Elements of Meditation: Meditation As Exercise

Meditation is simple.

Not easy, but simple in the same way exercise is. You do reps, with proper technique (bad technique can injure you or make the meditation unsuccessful).

Over time these reps teach your mind to operate in different and hopefully better ways.

To meditate all you need is a simple algo. Concentration meditation:

Pick an object of meditation. Your breath, a mantra, the center of your forehead, a flame, pretty much anything., Put  your attention on it. When you notice you’re not paying attention, congratulate yourself for noticing and put your attention back on the object.

That’s it. It really is that simple, though as you advance there are various tricks and so on which can help. But you could go all the way just with that.

Vipissana (one type)

Notice something in your consciousness. Place your attention on it for a few seconds, then dismiss it gently (with love if you can), move to another object, do the same thing again. If you notice you’ve stopped this sequence, congratulate yourself for noticing and go back to it.

Not exactly rocket science, is it? It’s just that we are never trained how to use our minds or control our attention or awareness. There are plenty of different variations, but at their heart, almost all of them are like this.

Any type of meditation of this sort of also trains meta attention, which is just knowing what you’re paying attention to at any time. If you’ve ever intended to do something and realized you’ve been doing something else for a few minutes, or longer, then your meta-attention failed. For most people, this is frequent. You can’t control your attention if you don’t know if what it’s doing is what you intended. This is probably the most important meditative capacity, and it’s useful in life as well.

There are two types of meditative accomplishments.

The first are like exercising to stay in shape. If you stop doing cardio your resting heart rate goes back up and you can’t run for very long without losing your breath., If you stop lifting weights the muscles slowly go away. Concentration meditation and the altered states it can get you into (which are VERY nice) is like this. If you want this capacity you’ll first have to get into mental, probably at a retreat, then you need to maintain the ability, which is about two hours a day.

The second type is like learning how to throw a ball or ride a bike. If you keep meditating/exercising, you’ll be a better, but if you stop you don’t forget. These sorts of accomplishments include things like being less reactive and more relaxed, various psychological improvements and various attainments that are sometimes considered enlightened such as viewing the world as yourself, having no self (interpretative difference), lack of suffering on automatic as opposed to requiring meditative tricks and so on.

The second type are often called insights. They aren’t like intellectual insights (though intellect can be used to help gain them), they are changes in how you view the world at a subconscious level. Sometimes this can go back, there’s a whole group of shrinks treating meditators who drove themselves crazy with depersonalization or derealization. Both “I am not a person” and “I am not real” are insights, but if you can’t handle them, they go from good to bad.

So the general rule of meditation is that if starts getting really scary, stop. Consult a teacher you trust, but take a break. Now this doesn’t mean stopping at any unpleasantness because as soon as you make actual progress there will be unpleasantness. Your mind starts to calm, the chatter grows less, and all the garbage and trauma and fears and desires that have been suppressed start bubbling up.

It’s ugly. The more screwed up you are (and you may be more screwed up than you think) the more it sucks. Over time, if you stick it out, you learn to let all this crap go, or most of it and you feel a lot better. But the process isn’t fun.

Anyway. Meditation is just learning how to control your own mind, or learning about the mind in general, since you sure can’t control a lot of it. It’s pretty simple, the complications all come from what happens when you begin to realize you aren’t who or what you thought you were. That can be ugly.

Find a meditation you like, do the reps. Always be sure to include some lpving kindness or concentration meditation, never do just insight meditation except under the instruction of a teacher you trust who is monitoring your progress.

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