Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Sanghy Khandro opens this 82-minute session by inviting participants to answer: why meditate? She then addresses a crucial misconception — that meditation aims at extraordinary experiences or powers — and clarifies the Buddhist purpose: overcoming the three mental poisons (anger, attachment, and ignorance) and cultivating positive qualities like compassion and wisdom. She grounds this in Buddha nature, our innate clear, pure mind. She then walks through breath-focused concentration in practical detail: proper posture (straight back, relaxed body, slightly open eyes), how to follow the breath at the nostrils or abdomen, counting techniques, and solutions for the two primary obstacles (sleepiness and mental distraction). She emphasizes throughout that a scattered mind is normal and meditation is learning through patient, consistent practice. Suited to newcomers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 2005 02 12 MW.mp3
UUID: cc9bf29f-8232-4ed8-a329-d7555f7d89f2
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: How to Meditate Weekend (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 2005-02-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 82.9 minutes
Words: ~9,762
Good morning. So this weekend, today and tomorrow, we’re going to be doing a workshop, or you could call it a retreat, a course, on meditation. Just out of curiosity, are are there any of you here who’ve never done any meditation before? Couple. Okay.
So looks like the majority of you have done meditation before. So what what we’re going to be doing, I’m gonna be giving some talks and sharing information. And we’ll be doing meditation together, different kinds of meditations. In Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, I believe, there are lots of different kinds of meditations, and they can be used for different purposes. And so I thought to explain to you, and we’ll do together some different kinds of meditation so that you can get an idea of the variety of meditations that are available.
I hope that’s not gonna be confusing for any of you. Some people may have the idea that there’s only one way to meditate and everybody has to do that and there’s nothing else. And for some people that may be quite comfortable, you know, to just have one particular method of meditation. But, the downside of that is if there’s only one way to meditate, that may work for some people, but for other people they may not relate to that method very well. And so I think it’s good that there are different ways of meditating, different methods, different kinds of practices so that everybody will hopefully find at least one kind of practice that works for them that they can relate to.
So so first of all, I think it’s important to have some understanding of, why we practice meditation. What is the reason or purpose for doing meditation? So I’d like to hear from you. What do you think is the reason for doing why why do we meditate? What’s the reason for doing it?
To calm the mind. Okay. To make the mind calm. That’s probably a pretty common idea. Any other ideas about why we do meditation?
To increase our clarity and awareness. To increase clarity and awareness. Okay. That sounds good. Yeah?
To know one’s mind. To know the mind. Yeah? That’s really important, to know our mind. Any other ideas about why we meditate?
You can say anything. Don’t worry about being right, coming up with the right answer. Just what what do you think? What about to help heal heal yourself, like, you’re sick? Mhmm.
Healing? Healing yourself for sickness. Yeah. Finding yourself. Yeah.
Getting yeah. I think that sounds like getting to know yourself. Yes. Yeah. Any other ideas?
To understand reality. Reality. To understand reality? Right. What is this?
Is it purification too? Don’t think it’s the right word, but if you’re just focusing on one thing and not focusing on negativity, so Mhmm. You can stop the mind going up in negative ways. Mhmm. Right.
Purification or clearing up the mind. Yeah. Clearing up negative things in the mind. Yeah. To ground or to center yourself.
Grounding yourself, centering yourself. Yourself. Right? To help other beings. Help others.
Good. How do how does that work? Well, if I’m if I’m calmer and more centered and know my mind and then that’s going to naturally affect how I am with all other beings. And, also, if I dedicate that meditation each time I do it, that’s a help to other beings as well each time. Right.
Okay. So bringing in the idea of helping others, not just helping ourselves. So right. Anyone else? I think sometimes to sit in quiet to to realize how crazy the mind is and how it wants to trigger sometimes to have that awareness.
But for me, you know, when those thoughts come even though they sort of try to disturb you sometimes. So just getting to know the mind better. You’ll just know that it’s there, and it’s it’s not really how you you want to to act out something. Rather than just going along with whatever thoughts, whatever is going on in the mind. Right.
K. The reason that I meditate really is to access my Buddha nature. So that is also, you know, the ultimate idea is that through will just be automatically accessed. And that’s yeah. I mean, that’s a long way off for me.
But I can imagine I can get to that point at some stage. So you you’ve you’ve learned something about Buddha nature. Think, generally, people aren’t aware of that. So we need to first find out that we have that Buddha nature, that pure nature, and then learn how to access it. But, yeah, that’s the ultimate reason or the ultimate purpose of doing meditation in Buddhism.
Okay. So thank you for those comments. I think everyone had very good things to say, and I really agree with with all those things. And like I said, I think it is important that we that we do have a sense of sense of of why we’re meditating, what what’s the reason and purpose for meditating. And I think that sometimes people have ideas about meditation that are not realistic and also even incorrect.
So it’s important to to clear that up. Sometimes people have the idea that the reason or purpose for doing meditation is to get some fantastic experiences, you know, like from the media, movies or or reading books or articles in magazines. We may come across stories of people who meditate and then have these really amazing experiences. And so I think sometimes people feel attracted to that and have the idea, oh, if I meditate, I can have these fantastic experiences also. So that’s something to be careful of in case anybody has that idea.
It is possible through practicing meditation to have some very unusual experiences that people don’t normally have, and there are also certain kind of powers that can occur as a result of practicing meditation. So so these stories are not necessarily just like fairy tales and, like, just totally untrue. It can happen and it does happen that doing meditation can lead to wonderful experiences and and also powers, being able to have certain powers, like being able to read other people’s minds and communicating with beings in other realms and so on. So these things can happen. But from the Buddhist point of view, that’s not the reason for doing meditation.
We shouldn’t be meditating in order to have those fantastic experiences or powers or whatever. For one thing, if we if we are meditating for that reason, then there’s there’s a kind of grasping, a kind of attachment involved, and that’s probably motivated by the ego. It’s probably the ego in there saying, oh, other people are having these fantastic experiences. I wanna have them too. I wanna be somebody special or or just this this sort of grasping at at experience, you know, like people like to climb mountains or jump out of airplanes or, you know, do all these amazing things just to have the thrill of it.
Just to have the, you know, some new experience you’ve never had before. So there’s probably a lot of ego involved in in grasping for those kind of experiences. Like, I wanna be able to experience something and then tell everybody about it and write a book about it and, you know, feel that you’re somehow superior to other people. So there’s there could be some ego and some attachments and grasping involved in seeking such experiences. And and that and that’s that’s just going totally against the whole idea of meditation in Buddhism.
The the the purpose or reason for practicing meditation in Buddhism is to overcome our ego and overcome our attachment. These these kind of unhealthy attitudes that we have, which according to Buddhism are the cause of problems, the cause of suffering both for ourselves and others. So they mess up our mind, they mess up our life, and they can lead to some very ugly and very destructive kinds of behavior as well. And so so that’s not the reason. That’s not the purpose for practicing meditation is to have, you know, wonderful experiences or or to gain powers.
And and if they do happen, then, you know, if you do get some kind of power, do have some wonderful experience, then it should only be used in a beneficial way. It should only be used to benefit yourself and others to help bring about more happiness and peace and to decrease problems and suffering and not to to show off or not to, you know, impress others or put yourself in a higher position than others or whatever. So so from the Buddhist point of view, the real purpose of practicing meditation is, as was mentioned here, getting to know our mind, getting to know what’s going on in our mind. And as I mentioned last night, those of you who came to the talk last night, working on our mind to bring about a positive transformation of the mind, making our mind more positive and less negative, having more positive kinds of thoughts like love and compassion and patience and wisdom, equanimity, these good qualities, these qualities in our mind which are beneficial for ourselves, which make us more peaceful and happy, and also can be beneficial for other people when we can bring them into our relationships, into our encounters, interactions with other people.
So these are the qualities that are in the mind that that bring about good experiences, the experiences that everybody wants, that everyone’s looking for, peace and happiness. So we we work on our mind to increase those positive qualities of the mind and decrease the negative ones, like anger, hatred, greed, selfishness, ego, confusion, anxiety, stress. So those are the aspects of the mind or qualities of the mind that we usually call negative or disturbing or deluded. And those are the things that mess up our mind, that make our mind unpeaceful and unclear. And also, if we if we have those in our in our relationships, in our interactions with other people, which is such a big part of our life, react interacting with other people.
So if we bring negative energy, negative qualities into our interactions with other people, then it becomes harmful to them as well. Yeah. Even if we don’t have the intention to do so, but we say things and we do things that that hurt other people and that, you know, create problems for them as well, which is what they don’t want and also what we don’t want really. We check deep down in our heart. We don’t wanna make other people unhappy.
We wanna make them happy. But if we have these negative qualities or negative energies in ourselves, then then this is what happens. You know, we we make other people unhappy as well. So it becomes just very problematic. So so the real purpose of meditation then is working on our mind to decrease and eventually eliminate the negative aspects of the mind, the things that that cause problems, that cause unhappiness for ourselves and others, and to increase and perfect the positive qualities, positive aspects of the mind, the the things that bring happiness and peace, and all good things both for ourselves and others.
And this is definitely possible. According to Buddhism, our mind has amazing potential as you mentioned, what we call Buddha nature, Buddha potential. What the what that means is that, you know, the nature of our mind is clear and pure and positive, and we have the ability, the potential, the capacity to make our mind totally free from everything that is negative, all the anger, all the negative thoughts and emotions, and to make our mind totally positive, having nothing but love and compassion and other positive qualities. So so that’s what we call Buddha nature. So that exists in our mind.
That is part of our mind. It’s there all the time, twenty four hours a day. It’s it’s always been part of our mind. We don’t have to bring it into us from outside. We don’t have to pray for it.
It’s already there. It’s it’s our nature. It’s our kind of our right, our rightful way of being. And and so through meditation, we can get in touch with that and and develop that, increase that so that it becomes more and more part of our natural way of being. So so then as far as other things that were mentioned, meditating to be more relaxed or meditating to to heal ourselves of sickness and problems.
It’s okay to meditate in order to be more relaxed, in order to be more healthy, in order to deal with sickness and so on. But from the Buddhist point of view, meditation should be more than that. It should be more than just something to relax or something to to be more healthy because it I mean, it can happen that through practicing meditation, we can more relaxed and also deal with sickness and be more healthy. But the underlying causes of stress and sickness are aspects of our mind, are things within our mind, disturbing negative aspects of our mind like anger, hatred, and so on, these these negative attitudes in our mind. And and so if we don’t use meditation to work on our mind, to look at our mind, get to know our mind, learn to recognize these negative or disturbing aspects of the mind and work with them, then they’ll still be there.
So even if we overcome one sickness or we overcome one problem that’s causing us to be stressed, but if the underlying causes of stress and sickness are still there in our mind and haven’t been touched, haven’t been dealt with, then they’ll just produce more problems. So we’ll have more sickness or more stress later on. So, ideally, when we practice meditation, the idea is to go beyond just being relaxed and just being healthy. But going into the mind, getting to know the mind, and rec learning to recognize those aspects of the mind that are the cause of problems, that that lead to problems such as sickness and stress, unhappiness, and so on. Go to the very root.
This is what the Buddha did in his life, in his experience. He went into his mind, and he found the very root cause of unhappiness and all the other kinds of problems we have in life such as sickness. So he found the very root cause which are these negative attitudes. Mainly, there’s many different negative attitudes but the three main ones are anger or hatred, very, very negative feelings towards other people or towards ourselves. We can also have anger and hatred towards ourselves.
So that’s one of them. The second one is, we call it attachment or greed, craving, grasping. And so that’s where we see something out there, someone or something that we want, and we become kind of obsessed with wanting it and feel, oh, I have to have this, and I don’t wanna ever lose it or let it go. So, you know, grasping at it, being attached to it, and also wanting more and more, wanting better and better all the time, never being satisfied with what we have. So that’s another of the disturbing negative attitudes that lead to problems.
And the third one is ignorance, which means not knowing reality, not knowing the true nature of things, being confused about the way that things really are, seeing things in a mistaken way, in a in a a way other than how they really are. And that’s said to be the the main problem, the very root of all our other problems. It’s from there that arise anger and attachment and all the other negative and disturbing attitudes in the mind. So that’s the main thing that we have to deal with, but it’s it’s difficult to deal with that one. It’s very, very deep and very subtle.
But but, anyway, those are the three those are said to be the three main causes of problems, unhappiness, sickness, stress, all the various problems we experience in life and also in the world. We can see in the world around us whenever there’s some kind of problem like a war or a crime or social problems like drug abuse, alcoholism, and so on. And if we ask, well, where where do these problems come from? What are the causes for these problems? What are the reasons these problems exist?
Then we can trace them to one or more of these three attitudes, these three negative states of mind. War, for example, mainly comes from hatred hatred and anger, but also greed, you know, wanting somebody else’s country, wanting power, wanting to control other people, and so forth. And then drug abuse or alcoholism or other kinds of addictions that people have. That’s mainly involved with attachment, but also underlying that would be ignorance, just not knowing the reality of things, not knowing what really brings happiness and what really brings suffering and problems. So thinking that, you know, taking drugs or drinking alcohol or gambling or whatever is gonna bring happiness, not seeing that it actually brings problems and getting then getting completely stuck into that situation and then very difficult to get out of it.
So so when it so both for our own personal problems, the individual problems we have in our life, and also looking in the world around us at the various problems that are happening in the world. If we analyze and try to understand where where do these problems come from, then we can trace them to these attitudes in the minds of ourselves and others, greed, hatred, ignorance. And there are other delusions as well, like jealousy and pride and selfishness. But those are the three main ones. The three main they’re called poisons traditionally in Buddhism.
Three poisons or to use a more current term, we could call them toxins, mental toxins. The three main mental toxins that poison our mind and our life, our relationships, our health, and so on. So so ideally, we practice meditation to look at our mind and understand how our mind works and recognize these these toxins in our mind and and see how they how they lead to unhappiness and problems. And then the good news, the good side of things is that we these are not permanent things in the mind. These are not things which are fixed and concrete and permanent in our mind, but we can work on our mind and gradually decrease them and eventually overcome them altogether, make our mind completely free of them.
And then once we don’t have those negative attitudes in the mind anymore, then we don’t have problems and pain and suffering and confusion anymore. So that’s the ultimate reason or ultimate purpose for doing meditation. But, for some people, that may sound like a really big order, something quite big and hard to do. And so, like, for short term, doing meditation in order to just get to know ourselves better, to get more relaxed, more calm, more clear, dealing with health problems, which, you know, it’s a big problem when we have sickness or other kinds of physical pain or disabilities. Learning how to deal better with those or even free ourselves from those is it’s it’s okay to meditate for those reasons, but it’s best if we can realize that, you know, the real purpose of meditation is to is to go beyond just being more relaxed and more calm and and more healthy, but really going into the mind, getting to know the mind, and working on the mind.
Okay. So as I said, we’ll be doing different kinds of meditations in this weekend. And I thought to start this morning with a very basic but also very important kind of meditation, which is for the purpose of developing a more focused or concentrated state of mind, which we all need to do. Whatever kind of meditation we wanna practice, whatever sort of spiritual path we wanna follow, it’s very important for us to learn how to focus our mind, how to concentrate our mind because normally our mind is not very focused. It’s very busy, very out of control.
The analogy that that is used sometimes is that our our mind is like a like a monkey. If you ever have a chance to watch monkeys, they’re very active, especially little ones, baby ones. They can’t they can’t sit still for more than a second. They’re just constantly doing something, looking around, picking things up, running around, playing, doing this. So our minds tend to be like that, very active, very busy, not peaceful, and not calm and not stable and steady.
And so with a with that kind of mind, with a monkey mind, restless, agitated, unsettled mind. It’s it’s very hard to do anything, not even not just talking about meditation, but just in our ordinary life, like in our work, or if you’re trying to study something or trying to focus on a football game on TV. If your mind is isn’t able to concentrate, then you can’t, you know, really keep up with what’s going on or accomplish the work that you’re doing and so on. So it’s very important for us to learn how to how to keep our mind more focused and steady and calm. And so a a common practice for developing a more focused mind is to use the breath, the breathing, as an object to focus the mind on.
So we have this meditation which is sometimes called breathing meditation, although that term is a little bit deceptive because it sounds like, you know, there’s something really important about the breath. But, actually, this kind of meditation could be done with a number of different objects, not just the breath. It could also you could also use a feeling or an experience such as love or loving kindness, or you could use a visualized image such as the Buddha, or you could use a mantra, a phrase that you repeat over and over again. So the idea is to have some sort of object that you focus on and bring the mind back to whenever it goes away, whenever it wanders away. And so in that way, we learn or we train ourselves in just staying focused, staying concentrated, staying calm.
So this practice then helps us to develop that, but it also helps us to become more aware, more mindful of what’s going on in our mind, seeing our mind better. Because when our mind is very busy and very agitated, it’s very hard to see what’s going on in the mind. What kind of thoughts, what kind of feelings, what kind of undercurrents, attitudes are there in our mind? It’s a bit like a pond or a lake, some sort of body of water. And maybe on the bottom of this pond, there’s some very beautiful things, very beautiful rocks or even jewels or money or some very interesting things on the bottom.
And if the pond the water in the pond is is very calm and very still, then you’re able to see right down to the bottom and see very clearly all the things that are on the bottom of the pond and all the fish that are swimming around in it. But if the water is agitated, if it’s being moved or if it’s murky, you know, if there’s a lot of dirt, a lot of sediment that’s that’s that’s stirred up in the water, then then the water becomes cloudy and we can’t see what’s in the water. We can’t see fish swimming around and the jewels down on the bottom of the pond. So it’s similar with our mind. If our mind is is is agitated, if it’s, you know, very busy, lots of things going on in it, and also if there’s lots of disturbing or negative thoughts and attitudes that are, you know, swimming around in our mind, then it’s very difficult to see our mind, to see what’s going on, and especially to see the really beautiful things that we have in our mind, the precious things like love and wisdom and compassion and so on.
So we do have these positive qualities in our mind, but when our mind is confused, agitated with other kinds of thoughts and attitudes, then we we can’t see them. We can’t see the positive things in our mind. And so it’s also important for us to to do this meditation so that we can get to know our mind, get to see what’s going on in our mind, to see what are the negative things we need to work on and what are the positive things we need to to develop, to cultivate, to increase. Okay. So so probably probably most of you, if not all of you, have done this kind of meditation before.
So this is more just a a reminder and a an another opportunity to practice it. First, I’ll talk a little bit about posture for those of you who are not experienced with meditation. So the way that we sit, the way that we arrange our body when we meditate has an effect on the quality of our meditation. And so it is important for us to try to sit in a way that is conducive for meditation, for having a good state of mind in meditation. So the most important thing about posture is to keep the back straight.
So whether you’re sitting cross legged on the floor or you’re sitting in a chair that’s the main thing to look out for, having a straight back. And just do your best with that. Some people may have back problems, injuries or just something about their back that makes it hard for them to be completely straight. So if it’s if it’s not possible for you to have a totally perfectly straight back, then just do the best you can. Have your back as straight as possible.
And other than the back being straight, the rest of the body ideally should be relaxed. So we should be we should relax all the muscles in our body and all the different parts of our body. Not have tension, in other words. Don’t don’t be tensing up any part of your body. So let it be relaxed.
And then for the cross leg position, it’s said that you can cross your legs in any way that’s comfortable for you. Some people may be able to sit in what’s called the full lotus position where you have your feet on the thigh of the opposite leg, but probably not many people can sit that way unless you’re a yoga practitioner. So if you can sit that way, that’s great. But if you can’t sit that way, then you can just put your legs in whatever way is comfortable. So one is the half lotus where you have one foot on the thigh of opposite leg and the other foot on the floor, or just have both feet on the floor.
And then the arms, In the Tibetan tradition, we’re advised to have our hands in our lap with the right hand on top of the left. And your right fingers are lined up on top of your left fingers, palms facing upwards, and then the two thumbs are touching, making a kind of a triangle or peak, you might say. So you have your hands in that position, and then they’re just resting in your lap in that position. And don’t press your arms against your sides. Leave some space between your arms and the sides of your body for the air to circulate.
They say otherwise, if we press our arms against our sides, then the heat can build up in our body. That can make us drowsy. And we want to stay awake and alert when we’re meditating, so we want to avoid drowsiness. And then let your shoulders relax. Let your shoulders drop and be relaxed.
Don’t have them tight. And also have them even. Don’t have one higher than the other. So your body should be straight and not sort of in a crooked position, not leaning one way or the other, but straight. And then your head ideally should be tilted downwards a little bit, your head and neck.
Mouth and jaw should be relaxed. And, don’t have your teeth clenched. Just let your, you know, mouth be natural. But it’s also recommended to have our tongue, the tongue touching the roof of the mouth behind the upper teeth. So doing that helps to reduce the need to swallow.
Swallowing can become a kind of distraction when we’re meditating. Then it’s also good to have the eyes left open a little bit in order to prevent sleepiness because if our eyes are closed, then it becomes easier to fall asleep, especially if you haven’t had enough sleep at night, you’re tired, or you’ve just eaten. So those kind of conditions can make it easier to be sleepy in meditation. I was just wondering if the noises that are might be helpful. Also, clock, maybe the clock could be taken down.
It’s just easier if we have as much quiet as possible when we’re meditating. So those are the points of the posture. If you can sit in that way, then that’s that’s really good. But if for any reason any of those points of the posture is difficult or uncomfortable for you, then you’re free to find a way of sitting that is comfortable for you, that is that does work for you because it’s very important to be comfortable. It’s very important that your body is not in a position that’s painful or uncomfortable because then that becomes a distraction, and it’s harder to concentrate, harder to meditate.
So, it’s important to be comfortable, but at the same time, alert. So that’s why it’s important to sit up straight, have the back straight, and also keep the eyes open a little bit to let some light in to prevent sleepiness. Okay. So then, the meditation we’re gonna be doing involves the breath, focusing on the breath, using the breath as a kind of anchor for our mind. Because, just as a ship, if it’s on the sea, it can float away.
It can be moved here and there by the wind and by the waves. And, so in order to, you know, keep the ship from floating away, we use an anchor to keep it in one place. So it’s similar with our mind. Our mind can easily get carried away by our thoughts and memories and emotions. And, ideally, we want to keep our mind calm and centered and focused and in in the present, right here, right now, rather than going to the past or going to the future, going to other places.
And so the breath is a good object to use to keep our mind focused or anchored to the present because our breath is in the present. Our breathing is not in the past or in the future, but it’s happening right now, here and now. And so by focusing on our breathing, observing our breath coming in and going out, that helps our mind to stay more focused in this in the present, more centered. And there’s different ways of focusing on the breath. One way that is probably the most common way used in Buddhist meditation is to be aware of the sensation around the nostrils, the place where the air is coming in and going out of the body.
So if you’re sensitive enough, you may be able to actually feel the sensation as the air, the breath is passing in and out of the nostrils. If you can’t actually feel that, don’t worry. Just focus your mind at that point and be aware as the breath is coming in and going out of your body with each breath. Another way of focusing on the breath is to focus on the movement of the abdomen. So there’s a subtle movement of our abdomen going in and out with each breath.
So that’s another place where you can focus your mind and be aware of the breath coming in and going out. So choose one of those two places. Or if you’ve already learned another way of focusing on the breath that you’re used to, you can use that. So it doesn’t really matter so much which way you use because the most important thing is to be aware of the breath coming in and going out and not let the mind get caught up in other thoughts, memories, emotions, or feelings in our body or sounds that we hear. So if any of these other kinds of experiences happen while we’re meditating, we shouldn’t deny them.
We shouldn’t pretend that they’re not happening. So acknowledge their existence. Be aware that they’re happening, that they’re there, but don’t get caught up in them. Don’t let your mind get carried away paying attention to or, you know, getting getting all caught up in a in a certain kind of thought and thinking it, giving it energy, and so on such that you lose your awareness of your breath. So ideally, when we notice another thought or an emotion or memory or another kind of experience, we just we can make a mental note of it.
You can just say to yourself thinking or hearing a sound or whatever. Just make a brief note in your mind about the nature of that experience and then let it go. Don’t continue to pay attention to it or be caught up in it. Go back to the breath, back to the awareness of the breath coming in and going out. And you may also find it helpful in order to have better concentration to count your breaths.
This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it can be helpful. So you count each inhalation and exhalation of the breath as one. And you if you want, you can verbalize the process. You can say to yourself, breathing in, breathing out, one. Breathing in, breathing out two, and so on.
If you’re a beginner, it might be good to just count up to five breaths and then go back to one. So you count in rounds of five breaths. If you’re more experienced, you can count up to ten breaths. And if on the way, when you’re counting, maybe you get up to six and then your mind goes off completely, gets caught up in thinking about something else, and you totally lose track of your breath. So then when you come back to the breath, start again at one.
So see how far you can go in your counting before your mind gets distracted. But again, it’s not necessary to do the counting. If you can keep your mind focused on your breathing without counting, that’s okay also. So remember that what you’re supposed to be doing is observing, watching the breath, coming in, going out, counting the breaths if you find that helpful, and not letting your mind wander away to other things, although that will probably happen because of habit. So we get caught up in thinking about things of the from the past or the future or whatever.
But when you notice that that’s happened, remind yourself, I’m supposed to be focusing on the breath and not thinking about other things. So then disengage your mind from this other experience, the thought or memory or whatever, and bring it back to the breath. And even if you have to do this again and again and again, don’t become impatient. It’s completely normal that that will happen. So we simply have to learn a new habit, a new way of doing things, and that is to keep bringing your mind back to the object of our meditation, in this case, the breath.
Just keep bringing it back again and again and again with patience, with kindness towards yourself. Okay. So you can relax and change your position if you need to. So there are various obstacles to meditation or problems that can occur when we attempt to practice meditation. And and then there are solutions or remedies to these problems if they occur.
So I’ll be talking about some of these as we go through the weekend. So even though the practice itself, like the instructions, what what you’re supposed to be doing during the meditation time, it’s actually something quite simple. You know, just sit still, close your eyes, watch your breath, count your breath. I mean, it’s it’s nothing really difficult or complicated. Right?
And yet when we try to do it, we find out that it’s not so simple, not so easy. And different problems or different diff difficulties can occur. So one one common problem, some of you may have experienced it already, some of you may not have, but it could happen in the future. So it’s good to know what to do when it happens. That is sleepiness.
So first of all, there’s some things we can do to try to prevent it from happening in the first place. Like, make sure you get enough sleep at night so people, you know, stay up late, don’t have good sleeping habits, and then so you’re tired. And then when you sit down and close your eyes and relax and try to focus, this this need for sleep catches up with you, so you find yourself feeling very sleepy. So try to have good sleeping habits. And then it’s better not to meditate right after eating a meal, especially a big meal, because after eating, our energy is going into digesting our food.
So we don’t have you need a lot of energy to meditate. It seems like something very relaxing, but it’s actually quite hard work to focus the mind, concentrate the mind. And so if your energy is going into digesting your food, you’re not gonna have the energy to to focus the mind. It’s better to leave some time after eating, like maybe an hour after eating, especially a big meal, before you try meditating. And then temperature could also have an effect.
The warmer it is, the sleepier we are. Now we can’t always control the outside temperature, but you might be able to control the internal temperature. I’m not saying you should have, you know, freezing cold air conditioning on, but at least try to have some fresh air. But try not to be too warm if if you if you are able to have some control over that. Try to have some fresh, cool air coming in.
And then and then this thing about the eyes as well. If we close our eyes completely, it makes it a lot easier to become sleepy, to fall asleep. Because that’s what we do at night or if you take a nap during the day. You know? We close our eyes and that’s the signal for our mind to go to sleep.
So if you can, keep your eyes open a little bit. Now in the beginning, if we’re not used to doing that, it may it may feel uncomfortable, and we may find our eyelids fluttering, and and and it’s quite hard to keep them in that partially open position. But it’s just a a question of getting used to it. If you get used to doing it, after a while, you know, it it becomes quite easy, quite natural, and it isn’t distracting anymore. So keeping the eyes open a little bit helps to prevent sleepiness.
It’s not an absolutely necessary thing to do. It’s not like you have to do that, but it is there’s a reason for doing it. The reason is to prevent sleepiness. So if while you’re meditating, you find yourself feeling sleepy, then if you had your eyes closed, then open them a little bit. But it’s also possible that even with your eyes partially open, you might still feel sleepy.
You might still find yourself nodding off. So you can open them even more. And you can have them wide open, in fact. Just be don’t be looking around. Just choose, you know, a space on the floor, point on the floor to focus your your eyes on.
And then just try to keep your attention internally, not looking at what’s outside of you. Another thing with sleepiness is it’s just temporary. We may have the we may have the idea when we feel sleepy that, oh, I have to fall I have to go to sleep. I have to take a nap. There’s no way other way of dealing with it.
But, actually, that’s not true. My experience is that if you can just resist it, if you if you just don’t let yourself go into that state of sleep, just try to keep yourself awake as much as possible. Sitting up straight also helps. You may you may have gotten sort of slouched in your posture, so sit up straight. That helps to revive the energy.
So if you just try to stay awake, then after some time, the feeling of sleepiness passes. Yeah? It doesn’t get worse and worse and worse, and pretty soon you’re unconscious. It’s just a temporary thing. It comes and goes.
So if you just try to resist it after a while, it’ll go away and you’ll find yourself completely wide awake again. So those are the things to do about sleepiness. And then they also say, you know, if you’re if you try everything you can to stay awake and you’re still feeling really sleepy, you can take a short break from your meditation, Go and splash cold water on your face, have a drink of water, do some stretching, you know, have some cool air coming coming in. So just take a short break to sort of wake yourself up again, and then you can go back and try again. And then another common problem, probably the most common problem, is the mind being distracted.
Just not being able to keep the mind concentrated on what we’re supposed to be meditating on, whether it’s the breath or whatever object or subject is is the object that we’re supposed to be meditating on. So the mind wandering away from that, being distracted from that. Yeah. So one thing we need to understand, is completely normal. If this is happening to you, don’t feel bad.
Don’t feel there’s something wrong with you. Don’t feel, oh, I can’t do this. I can’t meditate, which is what some people think. Yeah.
One guy once said to me, I can’t meditate. I said, why not? He said, I just can’t keep my mind focused. It just keeps wandering away. I said, well, that’s normal.
Happens to everybody. And just trying to keep your mind focused, just trying to bring your mind back to the object of the meditation is meditation. So as long as you’re trying to do that, you are meditating. So he and probably other people as well have the idea that, oh, meditation means your mind never wanders away from the object. Your mind you’re able to put your mind on an object and just keep it there and it doesn’t go away.
You never have distractions. And that’s meditation. And if you can’t do that, you can’t meditate. So meditation is trying to keep the mind focused. Our mind, by nature, does not stay focused, does not stay concentrated on an object unless it’s something we’re really, really interested in.
Like, if you’re a football fan and there’s a football game on TV, you know, yeah, you just kind of forget about everything else and focus on that. Or if you like reading books and there’s some really, really, really interesting book that you’re reading, then, you know, we can stay. So we do have the ability. We do have times, the experiences of our mind being focused, being concentrated. You know?
And it so it is an ability that we have. When we’re when we’re really interested in something, then we can stay focused on it. But the problem is we’re not very interested in the breath. We don’t like that. You know, nothing’s so exciting about the breath.
It seems really boring. But we can learn to be interested. Actually, thing we really need to do if we want to be successful in meditation is to have a strong sense of purpose, a strong sense of the benefit of practicing meditation. You know, if we can see that this is a good thing for us, just like people who go jogging, for example, or who do aerobics or who go to the gym. Right?
There’s some people who do that every single day without fail, if they’re sick, even if the weather’s terrible. They do it because they have some sense of the benefit, that this is good for them. They may have even experienced the benefit, and they just feel this is really good for me, and I’m just going to do it every day. So if we could have that about meditation, if we could really become convinced that doing meditation is good for us, especially if we do start to get some taste, some experience of the benefit of doing meditation, yeah, then we get to that point where we we just know that this is something I need to do. And and we and we do it even if we don’t feel like doing it, even if we don’t feel well, even if there’s other things going on that might distract us or that might be more interesting for us to do, but we do it because we we see the benefit of it.
So it’s good to to do some study and to find out what are the benefits of doing meditation. What what can I get if I practice meditation? What sort of results will come from practicing meditation? So you can study that because you can expect, like, right right away from the beginning that you’re gonna get benefits from doing meditation. Some people think that, you know, as soon as they start meditating, they’re gonna start feeling really wonderful, calm and peaceful and happy and yeah.
But some people may experience that, but not everybody. And it’s better not to expect that because if you expect that and it doesn’t happen, then you may think, this isn’t working. This isn’t what I want. One lady said she started practicing meditation because she wanted to be more relaxed and calm and peaceful, and the the experience she had when she started doing meditation was just the opposite. And they actually say that in the teachings, in teachings on meditation, the text.
They say that initially, when you first try to focus your mind or concentrate your mind, it may seem as though your mind becomes more busy. You have more thoughts, more stuff going on in your mind than you do normally. So some of you may have had that experience. And the reason that happens it’s it’s actually not true. It’s not it’s not true that your mind becomes more busy when you try to meditate.
Your mind is busy all the time anyway. It’s just that we don’t notice it because we’re paying attention to other things. Yeah? So it’s a bit like let’s say let’s say you meet a friend at a cafe, a sidewalk cafe that’s along a busy road. And so you sit down at a table on the sidewalk and have tea or coffee and talk, and and so you’re really absorbed in your conversation with this person.
Yeah? And in the meantime, there’s lots of traffic going by, lots of cars going by, lots of people going by, lots of things happening around you, but you just don’t notice it because you’re completely caught up in your conversation with your friend and your cup of coffee and what you’re talking about and so on. Then if your friend gets up and leaves and you’re and you’re sitting there by yourself, then you might start to look around and, you know, see what’s happening and say, gosh, there’s so many cars going by, many people going by, so much going on. And it was happening all the time, but you just didn’t notice it because you were focused on something else. Have you ever had that experience before?
It’s like that with our mind. Our mind is always busy. There’s always a lot of stuff going on in our mind, but we’re not paying attention to it. Most of the time, we’re not paying attention to what’s happening inside of us because we’re paying attention to what’s happening outside of us. Other people, things, TV, radio, newspaper, things with Internet.
You know, there’s all this stuff out there that is just so so interesting, and we just have this habit. Our our habit, our tendency is to be focused on or pay attention to the stuff outside of us. We don’t have the habit. We don’t have the the the experience of just sitting and watching our own mind, what’s happening inside of us. But and when we do do that, yeah, like, we sit down, close our eyes, try to make it as quiet as possible around us, try to sit still, not move, and and then watch our breath.
And then we become aware of all this stuff going on inside. So it’s always like that. You just don’t notice it. Yeah? Does that make sense, what I’m saying?
I mean, maybe that’s not true for everybody. Maybe some people’s minds are not as busy as others. But I think in the West, in particular, because of our culture, our culture stirs up so much. I mean, it’s not like Tibetans or Mongolians. I just saw this film the other night, The Weeping Camel.
Yeah. Yeah? So just imagine what it would be like to live in a place like that. It’s just so empty. There’s no TV, no radio, no computer, no newspapers, just, you know, a few people, a few animals, lots of space, lots of sky.
So I think your mind probably wouldn’t be quite as busy. But you think about our world, our life, what we how we grow up. Yeah? Just so much information coming in all the time, more and more and more and more and stuff all the time. So so it’s completely understandable that our minds are busy.
There’s just lots going on in there. And like I say, it’s it’s like that most of the time. Most of the time, our mind is very active, very busy, a lot going on, but we just don’t see it because we’re paying attention to things outside of ourselves. So if you do have that impression when you try to meditate that your mind seems to become more busy, more agitated, or like that lady said, you know, she she felt like she got more stressed when she tried to meditate. I think that’s probably because she expected she had this expectation that if she learned meditation, she would sit down, close her eyes, and suddenly she would be peaceful, just like that.
And and it’s not like that. I mean, we can learn to be more peaceful and more relaxed through the practice of meditation, but that’s something we have to learn how to do. It’s not something that’s just gonna happen automatically. Yeah? Like like meditation, it’s just some magic potion, some magic method that suddenly makes us peaceful.
We have to learn to be peaceful. And then in order to learn to be peaceful, we have to learn to deal with our mind. We can’t just shut off our mind. Our mind, you know, is something that’s just continuously going twenty four hours a day. Even when we’re asleep, our mind is still doing stuff.
And and and we can’t just stop that. We can learn to deal with it. We can learn to not be so affected by what’s going on in our mind and learn to deal with the different kinds of thoughts and emotions and other experiences that are happening in our mind so that we’re not bothered by them. But that’s something we we learn to do, we develop. It’s not something that we know how to do already.
It’s it’s not something that’s just gonna automatically happen. So through the practice of meditation, we learn to deal with our mind. We learn to be more relaxed and peaceful and calm. So, anyway, if and when we have this experience when we’re trying to meditate that our mind doesn’t stay focused on the breath or whatever we’re meditating on and it goes off instead, first we have to understand that that’s completely normal. That’s normal that that would happen.
And it’s it’s normal because that’s our normal tendency. What normally happens in our mind is all these different thoughts, all these different memories, images, feelings, perceptions, like hearing sounds, and so on. So this is going on continuously. And most of the time, we just let our mind be distracted by all these things. Like the monkey, you know, just jumping around distracted by all this other stuff.
So that’s the normal state of our mind. When we’re not meditating, that’s what’s happening in our mind. And and so when we sit down to meditate, our mind is wanna will want to continue doing that, can continue doing what it normally does. So what we need to do is to learn to stop doing that, to to retrain or reprogram our mind so that instead of just jumping all over the place, we stay on one thing. We keep bringing our mind back to that one thing whenever it wanders away.
We do have some experience in that. Like I was saying, when when when there’s something we’re really interested in, something on TV or a book we’re reading or when we’re students. We all have the experience of being students. And if you have an exam tomorrow, right, this is your last day to study for your exam. So we know how to do that.
We know how to put put everything else aside and just focus our mind on the books we have to read, the material we have to learn, the things we have to study. Yeah? So we do have the ability to do that. We’ve done that before. And so that’s what we we we need to bring that ability in when we’re practicing meditation.
Just decide. Make a decision. Okay. I’m gonna meditate now for the next ten minutes or fifteen minutes. I’m gonna focus on my breathing or whatever you choose to meditate on, and I’m not going let my mind be distracted by anything else.
That’s what I’m going to be doing for the next ten or fifteen minutes. You just have to decide to do that, and then just keep doing it, keep working at it, developing a new habit. So there’s really no magical solution to the problem of distraction, the mind being distracted. What we need to do is to just keep bringing the mind back to what we’re supposed to be meditating on whenever it goes away. Jack Kornfield, the American teacher of, Vipassana or Insight Meditation, uses the analogy of of training a puppy.
Some of you may have had that experience of training a little puppy. So, you know, a puppy’s like a little monkey, right? Very active, wanting to play, wanting to go here and do that and sniff that and chew that and yeah, so very so you’re trying to train the puppy. You want to train the puppy to sit. Right?
That’s probably the first thing we train dogs to do, isn’t it? Sit. So we say sit and we want the dog to sit. Well, puppy doesn’t want to sit. The puppy doesn’t want to stay still, right?
And so if you want to train the puppy, you have to be very patient and you have to be consistent and just keep saying it. Sit. And the puppy will sit for one second and then it will be up again. And then you have to bring the puppy back. Sit.
Right? So you have to keep doing that, and eventually the dog gets it. So it’s similar with our mind. We have to say to our mind, watch the breath. And for one or two seconds, the mind will be watching the breath, and then it will go off somewhere else.
So we have to bring it back. Watch the breath. So we have to keep doing it over and over and over again. And and also do it with patience. That’s really important too.
Sometimes we we may get very frustrated with ourselves and, ugh, you know, angry at ourselves, and that’s not gonna work. Just like being angry at the dog, you know, isn’t gonna isn’t gonna work. We have to be firm but not angry. We still have to have an attitude of kindness and compassion and patience. And so we need that with ourselves as well.
We need to be very patient with ourselves and and not get frustrated. Because once we get frustrated and angry and feel, oh, I just can’t do this, you know, and I wanna give up, that’s not gonna work, is it? If we don’t keep trying, we’re never gonna get there. So you have to stay patient and just keep trying, keep working at it. I’ll talk about some more methods a bit later, but maybe we could take a break now.
Is there, like, tea, coffee? Yeah. Refresh yourself. Okay. So let’s start again about eleven.